Waiting in the age of immediacy

Illustration/Uday Mohite

I saw that Nicole Holofcener, whose films I really like, has a new film out which won't be available in India right away. In an age of immediacy, where many things happen right away, the idea of waiting felt quaint but also, not as sharp and sweet as it once did. There is so much that allows me to binge and move on, that I might even forget about the film, yaniki, it won't matter as much anymore.

What does it mean that we have forgotten to wait for things - wait to get to know people, wait for a relationship to reveal its meanings, wait for a friend to work out their anger or hurt with you, wait for a book to take you to its end, wait for the political meanings to evolve, not just bear results, wait for your ideas to cook?

Uncertainty colours waiting with an unbearable vulnerability. The vulnerability could be a sweetly sensual submission - like the Sona Mohapatra song which goes "abhi nahin aana sajna/ mohe thoda marne de, intezaar karne de" (Don't come just yet, beloved/ let me smoulder more in longing for you). Perhaps waiting can be enjoyable only when love and trust are acknowledged. Only if one can as easily say abhi na jao chhod ke ki dil abhi bhara nahin (don't leave just yet, I haven't had my fill as yet), is it fun to say abhi nahin aana.

Waiting can feel like terrible powerlessness. Being able to order things right away, stalking an ex to know what they are doing right now instead of being blindsided by the sudden discovery of their having found new love, knowing who is calling you instead of answering to an unexpected voice, feels like we can keep disappointment and rejection at bay. It is an illusion of control, where the other is made to matter less.

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Waiting is an unbearable intimacy - with oneself. In waiting we confront our worst fears, most craven insecurities, our pettiest resentments, our deepest wounds - yaniki our most lost selves and we are not all that sure we, or anyone else, want to find them. This era of immediacy is really also an era of power in its most brute and binary form. If you aren't a winner, you are a loser. The swipe culture we inhabit, generates an idea of control which is rooted in competition - you choose, you decide, right away. You dispense with before you are dispensed with. You call out, before you are called out. You split your political party if you don't get a post. That's why in the Karnataka elections, the fact that DK Shivakumar will postpone being a CM seems like a politically fertile moment. In waiting new meanings have time to take root and grow.

Roland Barthes famously wrote, "The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits." If such lovers become synonymous with losers in our time does it mean the further we are from waiting, the further we are from love? Well, life is not so mathematical. Perhaps I will watch an older film I've loved (Enough Said, if you must know), while I wait for the new one. Love's fruits sweeten on the vine in the sun of waiting, to be eaten and tasted, not merely consumed.

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