My 2021
30th December
It was emotionally draining and irritating to read through my journal. Any journal is private and any attempt to showcase it risks self-indulgence. My intention to put excerpts from my journal and other artworks I have created here is to create something new which is personal, non-fictional, and helpful if not amusing. Hopefully, this glimpse of me will help you take a look at yourself too. I hope my vulnerability doesn’t translate to an overshare.
Around 1st January
My school English teacher once corrected a grammatical error in an assignment of mine by saying that it didn’t sound nice. I could never quite figure out what a correct sentence sounded like. What intrigues me now is that we use a sense word to describe something so abstract. Sound is usually associated with intuition.
…
I am a shell of my earlier self’s shell, I am like an accretive Russian doll of time and moments. I identify with one shell, a new one materialises. Which Russian doll are you looking for? The one you are finding may be buried a few shells too deep. The one I am is buried deeper.
…
I recently have been painfully made aware of my privilege. I hate myself for that.
…
Atlas’s punishment wasn’t to carry the burden of lifting, it was to know that he has to lift it perpetually.
23rd January
Image, sound and thought all met at a bar and had an orgy: Tarkovsky.
24th January
Growing up feels like someone has propelled you out of your mother’s womb and you are still flying.
25th January
Ego cries goodbye.
26th January
I have been feeling an increasing guilt towards me being me and not the child me. I look at myself from others’ eyes and see a person they want me to be and try to be that. It deflates and depletes me.
27th January
I have changed, I am changed.
31st January:
1st February
Recently I feel like a bad friend, a bad son, a bad filmmaker. I have invested too much into these identities of mine.
…
Accept. Be open, allow hurt, love and pain. Try to remove ego from your actions.
4th February
I can almost feel the grooves in my brain formed by habitual thinking.
…
English isn’t my native tongue and to write in a language without precisely knowing its rules and history is a difficult game.
…
I want honesty in my words, ideas, experience, writing. I want brutal unashamed honesty.
…
I will try to express this as compassionately as I can: My ego is still very much invested in the vestigial functions like pride, wanting to be better, comparing, validation and vanity. The goal is to invest my attention in more important things. To nurturing, kindness, empathy.
5th February
Be mindful of how you use your words. In which order and combination. Is it conditioning?
7th February
The tools made for communication are the ones that truly fail us.
9th February
The struggle to form a synthesis of sorts.
23rd March
We are so afraid of the new that we seek affirmation and try to apply other people’s experiences on our own, only to not feel alone in our experience which despite this we are. Utterly alone in our experience.
2nd April
Games provide the player with a faux ( yet real) social structure built in the game itself. One participates in this structure and accomplishes things according to the construction of the game. The more one wins the more one feels accomplished and is rewarded in this social structure potentially substituting the real one.
8th April
I seem to be in a place of constant desire. Desire to be humbler, smarter, wiser, better, stronger. It is a bad place to be. Constant wanting takes you far fucking away from the present.
9th April
Maybe I am just an idiot who thinks he is good because he works on it? Maybe hard work is our generation’s god, an answer to expel uncertainty. Hard work is perhaps a trap that gives you an illusion of control when things are so horribly out of your hand. These childish scribbles is a reminder of why it’ll take a long long while before I a commensurate to where I want to be.
15th April
The want to be great has returned. I don’t know why I still have them. I thought I was past this. It had recently been made clear to me by me that I am not where I think I am; my actions, speech, and thought fall into places that seem too primal.
…
Treat the place where you work as a temple. The only thing you can do is give it time without any expectation of a fruit or seed or anything. Commit long hours of doing nothing significant. Being alone in thought half-asleep to the real world in search of what is in you and the world.
18th April
Most of this journal is just me bitching and moaning.
1st May
Don’t let your intellect trump your intuition.
4th May
10th May
I have heard and read a lot of words but I have felt only a few. Rest I use in an unintentional carelessness.
11th May
Sometimes when I am talking to someone I can sense the world they live in. The ideas, influences, ambitions. I can feel it with no words.
3rd June
14th June
Blue as a sea’s blue,
Blue as the sky’s blue,
Blue as Blue.
17th June
Hold it loosely,
But tight enough to not lose grip.
Let loose when too tight,
Hold when it’s too loose.
5th July
Tomorrow I will be 21. Sounds crazy.
13th July
To not use something that is meant to be used because it holds an emotional value that usage may reduce is something a rational mind can’t understand or perhaps something that only a rational mind can understand.
25th July
How wonderful it would be to be able to stare into the eyes of hate, distrust, and hurt with love.
28th July
A film is a bunch of people channelling their attention to birth something.
27th September
Yesterday, while shooting, I couldn’t help but think why am I shooting? why do I like this? Do I even like this? One isn’t supposed to ask such questions after dedicating so much time to it. I do think I like it. It’s not all fun. It doesn’t supply you with instant gratification but with some sort of internal satisfaction that grows slowly. Filmmaking to me feels more and more like playing. Like children creating imaginary worlds to play in. Filmmaking feels like playing seriously.
3rd October
Focus on your joys and not your escapes.
4th October
When you have an object it comes with a responsibility to take care of it. The object uses you as much as you use it.
DECLUTTER. Take everything that is not of absolute necessity and throw it. Take it away from your life so fewer objects have control over you.
5th October
I CAN be this, I WANT to be THAT, somewhere in the middle I lie.
7th October
I am, as Jorge Luis Borges puts it,” irreparably young”. These two words together communicate so much. My horse shit painting sucks so bad that it hurts my eyes.
October 11
November 9
10th December
It is not my way to make more more frequently. Mine is to take time. It is to water a seed till it becomes a tree. The best I can do is avoid excess in the process.
…
The amount of effort I put in writing and other ventures feels like unrequited love letters.
