I don’t think any movie addresses the most fundamental question about being an artist as directly as Rockstar does – how to compensate for the absence of pain?
Heer’s performance in her college. Jordan sits in the crowd, zoned out, as his friends fantasise about Heer. He does not understand the hype around her, nor does he care. Not until one of his friends says,
Dil todne ki machine hai Heer
and Jordan’s head turns.
Heer now has his undivided attention, for how can you become an artist if you do not get your heart broken?
Pain
Jordan stares at a Led Zeppelin poster, and his little sister does not understand why he is blabbering things like,
Bahut dard saha hai inn sabne.
She does not understand when he says,
Kabhi koi bara accident nahi hua. Na koi jaanlewa bimaari. Shit!
Kuch nahi guzra mujh par!
She does not, but I do.
As an artist, I’ve wondered more times than not if my art is good enough. How do you answer that question? What makes art good enough? The number of people it reaches? The things it makes you feel? I don’t know. Art is subjective; therefore, there is no surety except one thing –
Jab tak dard na ho na, koi bada nahi banta.
Great art breeds in the depths of pain. Or so we have been told.
When I was in high school, I used to worship Linkin Park. I did not understand the lyrics, but I pretended to. I loved the feel of it. It felt antagonising and, therefore, powerful. I wanted to sing like him. I wanted to write like him. And I kept wondering if I could. Then, one morning, Chester’s suicide news casually slipped into my feed. Then, it spread across the internet like wildfire. He suffered from depression and drug addiction, it said. And I believed it.
And no, none of that ‘he had everything, how could he be depressed’ bullshit. I believed it because that’s what we have been told.
And there is some truth to that, isn’t it? So many great artists have lived tormented lives – oppression on the outside, depression on the inside, and so many things in between. Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, my idol Chester Bennington – the list is endless.
When there is so much precedence, how do you convince yourself that’s not the recipe?
The Recipe for Transcendental Art
Maine ye bhi socha hai aksar,
Tu bhi, main bhi, sabhi hain sheeshe,
Khudi ko hum sabhi mein dekhein,
Nahi hoon main, hoon main toh phir bhi
Sahi galat tumhara main
Mujhe paana, paana hai khud ko.
Why does pain make art so lucrative?
Maybe because the human obsession with pain is a story that spans the history of time.
Maybe because evolutionary history makes it pretty clear that the world has been about survival, and pain shall always be a byproduct of it.
Maybe because we find more common grounds in pain than in happiness.
Maybe because pain lasts longer than happiness ever will.
Maybe because pain lasts longer than the thing that caused it.
And so, humans found a way to make it last longer than the person who felt it. Those who could paint laced their paint brushes with it. Those who could sing tuned their songs to it. Those who could write found words for it. And those who could do none of those things collected other people’s work. They articulated through other people. If you think of it, much of the art that has survived is people fighting to leave trails of their stories in the history of time. Much of art is just proof that pain was felt and that people survived. Much of art is proof that whatever you’re feeling has been felt before.
But the human obsession with pain extends beyond finding solace in that.
We like to explore pain the same way we like to explore the oceans – in a submarine. As long as the water outside is not breaking the glass and seeping in, we like to go deeper and deeper. The deeper we go, the more intrigued we are. And the art pieces become our periscope, the looking window. I guess that should explain why people discuss the lives of these artists just as much as their art.
We are awed by art that stems from misery.
We build museums in celebration of such artistry.
Art is beautiful and makes us feel things. And although it is horrors we are imagining, imagination is a safe place. Just like a submarine in the depths of an ocean.
But why horrors? Why pain?
Maybe because the world is about survival. We are wired to believe that the more pain we endure, the better survivors we become. We are also creatures with egos – we want to be the best survivors. So, we like to explore the pain we have never felt. And we like to feign that we understand it.
Maybe that is why pain will always be lucrative, as long as it is beautifully told.
So, what do you do?
What do you do when you have not been blessed with pain in your circumstances?
As a writer and storyteller, I have spent countless hours pondering, but I do not have the answers yet. All I know is that it helps me say things I otherwise could not. And like anyone who has ever trodden this earth before me, anyone who will after, I want my story to stick. But how do you make your story stick when there are much graver things on the wall? How do you manufacture from imagination what other people have lived?
I do not have the answers, and the ones Rockstar presents scare me.
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