Tiny, small decisionsRecently, I saw a series that reminded me of how much bad exists in the world. It made me eerily aware that we are co-living in the same world as the evil, using the same resources, public spaces and sometimes sharing the same friends and acquaintances.
Raakh - a crime series that is loosely inspired from a true incident from the Delhi of 1970s is a very uncomfortable, but, and i rarely say this, a very important watch. It will make your day feel very heavy, stay with you for hours even after its over, and painfully tug the hidden grief, rage and fear in you, all at once.
It is, no doubt, a very well directed, acted and edited series, but this is not a series review post.
This post is about the nuances of the human emotion that stayed with me long after I completed the series.
Raakh followed a very unconventional storytelling arc, especially for a crime series. Unlike most, it reveals a lot in the first episode itself: introduction of the victims, the perpetrators, how they meet, where the crime takes place and so on.
The rest of the 7 episodes is about the investigative arc and about the layered emotions that unpack themselves in the aftermath of an incident like this - Emotions of the family, of the investigation team, and of the city at large. You know these are heavy emotions which may weigh you down, yet you find yourself watching the rest of the episodes with equal grit compared to that of a cliff hanger series. You go through the discomfort of it all, often pausing and questioning on why are you doing so, but there is an unknown force in the storytelling that keeps you going further. And then in the end, the director rewards you for staying. In the last 2 minutes, just before the ending credits roll.
The ending of Raakh is the most thoughtful ending a gutting crime series could have had. After the series gives you all closures - the backstory, the how, the chase, the capture and the conviction, it takes a step ahead to give you a bit more. Its almost like it knows that you have had a heavy day watching this, and that today, you will need a bit more than just conviction for the criminals. So it just abruptly jump cuts you to an alternate universe, where it re-creates the evening of the crime with an alternate ending, and a beautiful one. The kind that can make you weep and put you in denial that the actual crime ever took place.
How this alternate ending made me feel explained why this series felt so eery all the time. It shows the exact same people at the exact same place, and then depicts how perfectly normal it would have been for them to just go the other way and not meet the perpetrators at all. One split second worthy thought and a seemingly small no-stakes decision at the time could have changed the course of their and their family's lives forever. And then it scaringly dawned on me - we take so many such decisions, Everyday.
While watching this ending sequence, I also found myself loudly sighing and wishing that the victims had made this alternate choice instead. And then I couldn't help but wonder how many times the families of the victims of any such incident would play these various alternate realities in their minds, hoping that they had done just one thing differently that day to evade what happened. Just one, tiny, thing.
Anyway, the spiralling aside, this sequence at the end felt like a warm hug from the makers of the series, trying to tell you that it is okay, that we are all okay. That yes evil is co-living with us in this same world, but they are always atleast a small, tiny decision away. Tiny, small decisionsRecently, I saw a series that reminded me of how much bad exists in the world. It made me eerily aware that we are co-living in the same world as the evil, using the same resources, public spaces and sometimes sharing the same friends and acquaintances.
Raakh - a crime series that is loosely inspired from a true incident from the Delhi of 1970s is a very uncomfortable, but, and i rarely say this, a very important watch. It will make your day feel very heavy, stay with you for hours even after its over, and painfully tug the hidden grief, rage and fear in you, all at once.
It is, no doubt, a very well directed, acted and edited series, but this is not a series review post.
This post is about the nuances of the human emotion that stayed with me long after I completed the series.
Raakh followed a very unconventional storytelling arc, especially for a crime series. Unlike most, it reveals a lot in the first episode itself: introduction of the victims, the perpetrators, how they meet, where the crime takes place and so on.
The rest of the 7 episodes is about the investigative arc and about the layered emotions that unpack themselves in the aftermath of an incident like this - Emotions of the family, of the investigation team, and of the city at large. You know these are heavy emotions which may weigh you down, yet you find yourself watching the rest of the episodes with equal grit compared to that of a cliff hanger series. You go through the discomfort of it all, often pausing and questioning on why are you doing so, but there is an unknown force in the storytelling that keeps you going further. And then in the end, the director rewards you for staying. In the last 2 minutes, just before the ending credits roll.
The ending of Raakh is the most thoughtful ending a gutting crime series could have had. After the series gives you all closures - the backstory, the how, the chase, the capture and the conviction, it takes a step ahead to give you a bit more. Its almost like it knows that you have had a heavy day watching this, and that today, you will need a bit more than just conviction for the criminals. So it just abruptly jump cuts you to an alternate universe, where it re-creates the evening of the crime with an alternate ending, and a beautiful one. The kind that can make you weep and put you in denial that the actual crime ever took place.
How this alternate ending made me feel explained why this series felt so eery all the time. It shows the exact same people at the exact same place, and then depicts how perfectly normal it would have been for them to just go the other way and not meet the perpetrators at all. One split second worthy thought and a seemingly small no-stakes decision at the time could have changed the course of their and their family's lives forever. And then it scaringly dawned on me - we take so many such decisions, Everyday.
While watching this ending sequence, I also found myself loudly sighing and wishing that the victims had made this alternate choice instead. And then I couldn't help but wonder how many times the families of the victims of any such incident would play these various alternate realities in their minds, hoping that they had done just one thing differently that day to evade what happened. Just one, tiny, thing.
Anyway, the spiralling aside, this sequence at the end felt like a warm hug from the makers of the series, trying to tell you that it is okay, that we are all okay. That yes evil is co-living with us in this same world, but they are always atleast a small, tiny decision away. The renewed trust in intuitionI have always thought of myself as an intuitive person, someone who is in close touch with what she and others around her are feeling. Long ago, in 2016, I used to publish tiny pieces on a micro-blogging app, and one of the quotes the 25 year old me wrote was called 'The one line life story', in which i described myself as a 'Sum total of choices, each made after hours of contemplation and comparison, followed by seconds of connecting with my gut'. I repeat, the 25 year old me wrote this, while processing some very atypical choices i had made in the tiny but intentional life i had designed up until then.
But somewhere along the way, i stopped letting my intuition be my primary guiding force, and my left brain happily took over and started enjoying the field day it had been waiting for.
Were all my decisions completely against my intuition? No, they weren't. But i had stopped consciously paying attention to what it was trying to tell me, and instead started articulating perfectly smart sounding reasons wrapped in logic and bow-tied with analysis for me to go against what i was 'feeling' like.
The word feeling is where all the problem is. Feelings are temporary, short-lived. To give you an analogy, Feeling is the current weather, right now, and intuition is the accumulated forecast built from every storm you have been through. And because feelings change so frequently, I started discarding it while taking decisions. But feeling also happens to be the primary language through which our intuition speaks to us, so by ignoring my feelings, I was quietly ignoring my intuition too.
Over the last few months, though, intuition has decided to jolt back into life. Until couple of months back, I was in a job that i had been planning to leave for a year, and my reason to leave was something very non-analytical - non-alignment with my inner self. My left brain and my intuition were in a tense war for over a year which finally ended when my current role got eliminated in layoffs. For me, this was the loudest way of Universe telling me: you were right, this is not for you. And since you are not trusting your decision enough, let me take the decision for you, along with a freebie of monetary runway to go find yourself again.
And more recently, my partner and me almost booked a trip that we would have had to rush back from, in a day - an impromptu Nepal trip which we were very convinced we needed. We were planning this from Delhi, so we were anyway halfway there. But something was not feeling right about the trip's timing - we reached the payment page twice but did not proceed. There was no real reason stopping us, so we were contemplating and articulating reasons that we normally discard. We were both dejected and surprised in the moment, almost like we were letting ourselves down. But we let that feeling pass and looked forward for tomorrow to be a fresh day. 2 days later, while we were returning back home in Bangalore, a family situation emerged that required us to be back home, almost immediately. And everything suddenly made sense now. The undefined, unknown force that was pulling us away from the decision was nothing but our intuition. No, i am not saying that our intuition can forecast future, it cannot. But when you are unable to move ahead with a decision, its usually one of the three things
a) anxiety - who is anxious about a mini-holiday? b) Ordinary Indecision - up until we sat to book our tickets, going was the only decision in front of us. There wasn't a competing choice we were even thinking about c) Lucky avoidance - Had our flights been booked and then cancelled, i would term it as lucky avoidance, but this felt more deliberate in nature.
That left us to conclude that it was our intuition telling us that the timing for an impromptu international trip wasn't right for us, or that we were trying to be more ad-hoc than what our personalities could accommodate. Some may call this self-serving and mystical, but for us this was our intuition recalibrating us back to our most natural way of operating.
Either ways, i am now system-resetting my decision arc to its default state: Hours of contemplation and comparison followed by consciously connecting with my gut :) The renewed trust in intuitionI have always thought of myself as an intuitive person, someone who is in close touch with what she and others around her are feeling. Long ago, in 2016, I used to publish tiny pieces on a micro-blogging app, and one of the quotes the 25 year old me wrote was called 'The one line life story', in which i described myself as a 'Sum total of choices, each made after hours of contemplation and comparison, followed by seconds of connecting with my gut'. I repeat, the 25 year old me wrote this, while processing some very atypical choices i had made in the tiny but intentional life i had designed up until then.
But somewhere along the way, i stopped letting my intuition be my primary guiding force, and my left brain happily took over and started enjoying the field day it had been waiting for.
Were all my decisions completely against my intuition? No, they weren't. But i had stopped consciously paying attention to what it was trying to tell me, and instead started articulating perfectly smart sounding reasons wrapped in logic and bow-tied with analysis for me to go against what i was 'feeling' like.
The word feeling is where all the problem is. Feelings are temporary, short-lived. To give you an analogy, Feeling is the current weather, right now, and intuition is the accumulated forecast built from every storm you have been through. And because feelings change so frequently, I started discarding it while taking decisions. But feeling also happens to be the primary language through which our intuition speaks to us, so by ignoring my feelings, I was quietly ignoring my intuition too.
Over the last few months, though, intuition has decided to jolt back into life. Until couple of months back, I was in a job that i had been planning to leave for a year, and my reason to leave was something very non-analytical - non-alignment with my inner self. My left brain and my intuition were in a tense war for over a year which finally ended when my current role got eliminated in layoffs. For me, this was the loudest way of Universe telling me: you were right, this is not for you. And since you are not trusting your decision enough, let me take the decision for you, along with a freebie of monetary runway to go find yourself again.
And more recently, my partner and me almost booked a trip that we would have had to rush back from, in a day - an impromptu Nepal trip which we were very convinced we needed. We were planning this from Delhi, so we were anyway halfway there. But something was not feeling right about the trip's timing - we reached the payment page twice but did not proceed. There was no real reason stopping us, so we were contemplating and articulating reasons that we normally discard. We were both dejected and surprised in the moment, almost like we were letting ourselves down. But we let that feeling pass and looked forward for tomorrow to be a fresh day. 2 days later, while we were returning back home in Bangalore, a family situation emerged that required us to be back home, almost immediately. And everything suddenly made sense now. The undefined, unknown force that was pulling us away from the decision was nothing but our intuition. No, i am not saying that our intuition can forecast future, it cannot. But when you are unable to move ahead with a decision, its usually one of the three things
a) anxiety - who is anxious about a mini-holiday? b) Ordinary Indecision - up until we sat to book our tickets, going was the only decision in front of us. There wasn't a competing choice we were even thinking about c) Lucky avoidance - Had our flights been booked and then cancelled, i would term it as lucky avoidance, but this felt more deliberate in nature.
That left us to conclude that it was our intuition telling us that the timing for an impromptu international trip wasn't right for us, or that we were trying to be more ad-hoc than what our personalities could accommodate. Some may call this self-serving and mystical, but for us this was our intuition recalibrating us back to our most natural way of operating.
Either ways, i am now system-resetting my decision arc to its default state: Hours of contemplation and comparison followed by consciously connecting with my gut :)