It would be a lie to say I’ve not been leading a wallflower life for a while. For over a year now, I have been working on a documentary which is getting ready to pop out of the oven.  That sort of thing doesn’t leave much time for doing normal-life things (that’s my story anyway and I’m sticking to it).

One is supposed to complain about this and so, with the small part of me that thinks I would like to fit in, I too go through the motions of saying “Arre yaar, I have no life.” Us harum scarum working girls have a bad rep in the Age of Efficiency marketed as work-life balance. But the truth is, I lie. This torture, this relentlessness, this half-ironed clothes and no time to choose earrings life seems to be what I choose over and over. Even Pedro Pascal channeling Cary Grant in The Materialists, made me feel only a mild FOMO (which I pretended to others was severe). 

But all lovers get their comeuppance. So this week I have felt not FOMO but MOMO. Yaniki, the Misery of Missing Out —  on Umrao Jaan’s re-release. I wake up and I think morosely, ah I will miss it, then sigh and got to work. Text messages shimmy up on my phone like Mughal fountains, “came to see Umrao Jaan missing you soo much!” and I cast myself upon the wall wailing “yeh kya jagah hai doston, ye kaun sa daiyaar hai”. Why why why!