Keeping the wonder alive is the key. Existence can become terrible, but there resides in you a magic that can keep your life bearable or even beautiful. I miss the warmth of Phantom’s tree house in midst of the dense jungle, or that of Batcave of the 70s and 80s Batman. I think it’s your job to keep the things you enjoy alive. If I like warm stories, that’s what I should do, write warm stories. But then I decided that first I must write the truth and once that is dealt with, I must get on to write warm stories. Writing warm stories in today’s time is tricky, because people’s imaginations are lacking and also because of the political climate of, not only this country, but the world and that’s what I have been working on, finding a right spot, a right balance of warmth and truth. I recently revisited a story by Anant Kushwaha, one of my childhood heroes and I realised that he had been doing what I have been thinking of doing throughout. He told the truth, preserved beauty and culture and provided warmth, and he did this to children. It didn’t really matter though because most of those children are now mindless automatons in the race of survival but what he infused would come to the fore when it must. The reality of this country, since I have seen it, is immensely ugly not because of people but because it is all centrally propogated and intentional, and people getting immensely selfish, corrupt and hypocritical is all by design, but then I personally have had a great childhood thanks to my family and all the books I have read. I got to imagine, which kids of today won’t get to do. What they’d get to do, however, is identify patterns as we see in the meme culture of today which is definitely not bad and I love memes, but imagination could have coexisted with pattern recognition which now doesn’t. I mean I won’t be wrong in saying that this country is fucked, and people are just being used as intelligence operatives and analysts against each other and of course as sex slaves for live broadcast of pornography for the elites, but that doesn’t really matter what matters is that they realise what truly matters in life. Money is essential, because it ensures physical survival but other than that it’s warmth and peace and one must try to have as much of it as possible in their lives. I hope that kids of today, other than earning money manage to identify the things that really matter. The trend of creating shortform videos in common folk will die down for the majority, but only after creating some monsters and taking some lives, the industry plants however will keep being influencers. This is not the West that allows breathing space, doing anything in India has social consequences by design and unfortunately the rot too is by design. The only difference between India of past and today is that the culture has eroded and now there is a lot of unrecyclable garbage and plastic pollution. Individuals who used to poison you in trains and take your money, now empty your bank accounts through the internet and the same intelligence and police agencies which can track an anonymous account for a political comment on social media can’t track them.
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