Even Pedro Pascal channeling Cary Grant in The Materialists, made me feel only a mild FOMO (which I pretended to others was severe).
Illustration/Uday Mohite
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!
I watched some interviews of Muzaffar Ali. This was frustrating as he appears to be a man who has sworn never to finish a sentence. But he came into fullness, of sentence and emotion, when asked who could play Umrao Jaan today, replying, “jo doobne ko taiyaar ho” (whosoever is willing to drown). I watched interviews with Khayyam, swinging between devotion and arrogance, describing second by second the creation of the Umrao Jaan voice along with Asha Bhonsle. The intensity, the insistence, the immersion of these creative journeys came as a great relief, in a time where passion, riven as it is with risk of failure, is unfashionable and unsupportable; it came as normal-life in a world of robotic calculation whether in love or work, where there are no journeys, only destinations. Alchemy, that idea of exploring connections between matter and spirit to end up with gold — unpredictable, unverifiable and unscalable — which laid the grounds for that colourful science, chemistry — has been outcasted by calculators.
The figure of Rekha-Umrao Jaan subsumed these many journeys of artists and lovers who know that one rises and falls at the same time, at all times, as does the breath of life. So, as a piece of work it continues to be alive and in turn make others feel alive. The greatness of its parts makes for the grandeur of the whole. Only then can one feel misery — rooted in yearning — over fear — rooted in conformity — of missing out.
Chalo, I will wait for the re-release.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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