Perfect disconnection ya passionate kisses?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Some weeks ago, following a panel, a cluster of students in suits (MBA alert!) approached me for a selfie because "ma'am we are supposed to network and document the networking." I smiled for the selfie. Then, I went towards a martini, they towards other network selfies. It was a moment of perfect disconnection. No malice, no joy, no meaning.

They are being well-trained. I had encountered their grown-up versions just two days earlier. Five minutes into a zoom call with curators who had invited me to be on a panel, it became clear they knew nothing about my work. I was metadata and hearsay: #urbanlife #popularculture #feminism lady. They asked me to suggest questions for myself. The surreal pointlessness of it all was funny but in a disorienting way. When you proceed so indifferently, you do not make any difference. That's how you keep the status quo safe.

The musician TM Krishna described this phenomenon in a recent column about how literary festivals are now listless (yaniki too list-like), predictable and soulless, where "occasional moments of brilliance in the mundanities… are flashes of magic… accidents and surprises". From lit-fests to Koffee with Karan to dating, we inhabit a theatre of disconnection - "Only passionless kisses" as Eunice D'souza wrote - which systematically strips our capacity to imagination or recognise new possibilities.

Creative curation is a powerful political resource. It can charge us, change us and, most of all, help us connect in myriad ways. As it helps us see how seemingly disparate things relate to one another, ideas become sensual and propulsive. Our imagination, and so we ourselves, become open and hopeful. I was very lucky to end the year with such an experience.

Between 1991 and 1993 two fat, pathbreaking volumes were published: Women Writing in India from 600 B.C to the Present, edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha. This year marked their 30th anniversary. When I was invited to be a part of it, I said yes in a heartbeat. An excited heartbeat.

It was thrilling. Each panel was curated to evoke tantalising connections, which the curators saw between vastly different scholars and practitioners with intimate awareness of their work: the incandescent beauty of a lullaby for an intersex baby, the yearning for collectives, the bejewelled stories of the detective work, the xeroxing, the bus-rides, the arguments, the friendships that resulted in this remarkable record - or curation - of women's lives, intellect and creativity, little known or regarded until then.

Agreements and disagreements engaged with each other in a kind of exhilarating game of feminist antakshari. It was a sharbati baraf ka gola washing away the aftertaste of many cynical events. The age range in the room was 21 to 89. Students requested selfies because their teachers had taught them to love my work. I requested selfies because I was a fangirl of some writer or feminist. The word I heard most often those two days? Passion.

A young woman told me, "It had a home feeling, ma'am. Our teachers were there, and their teachers, and even their teachers! And maybe we will be the fourth generations of teachers to carry this on." It's not only about loving your family. The world can be bigger than that for us.

So, Merry Christmas, frenz. May Santa bring us a bag full of asli connections and passionate kisses (real ya metaphorical). Phir duniya badaltey hain.

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