The creation myth

and the holy trifecta of faith

There is a holy trifecta, and much to the disappointment of the pope, it is not the father, the son and the holy spirit. It is practice, creation and consumption.

This is not written in a book. Not in a book I have read anyway. I suppose the pope has that over me. But it is written in experience. This realisation, born from the struggle of constantly creating in the digital age and yet being exposed to creating in not-the-digital-age, is something that has been on my mind for quite a while. This story begins with a secret blog of mine.

While my hormones were having a honeymoon and my self-esteem searched for paleolithic artefeacts under the ground, I ran a secret blog. I posted regularly from the summer I went to highschool till the year before last. This place was reserved for the eyes of only a few: myself, a few friends I trusted, a boy I wanted to impress, a boy that was impressed. After much sleeplessness I decided to make it public and this was probably the worst and best idea.

Don’t go looking for it. Step away from keyboard. It no longer exists.

What I wrote on the blog looked something like this:

Title: Pyaar Ek Dhoka Hai, July 2018

"Doctor Love I hope is your name?"

"Yes as of now that is what I proclaim.

Do you come to me for a problem of the heart?"

"Yes. They say you follow methods of Descartes."

"Well diving into dimensions is what I do.

But tell me, is there someone you are diving into?"

"Oh no no no! It's not like that. It's the quite opposite to say the least.

My love life is; how do you say it? Almost deceased?!?"

"Aah the lack of Oxytocin is making your mind go round.

Do you feel like what you want has been found?"

"Not really I don't think.

I'm just waiting for my 'missing link'."

"It seems you are the type that most writer's write about

Am I right?"

"The one's who wants love day and night?"

"Yes. Those are the ones that I mean.

You fall into the category of 'hopeless romantics'

But really those are just semantics.

Let's attack the problem at the root of it

Tell me everything, there's nothing you need to omit."

"Well I don't know what to say

My childhood had no foul play

Neither did my adult life

Although it was quite the strife.

I don't recall having done anything to deserve this

AM I JUST ONE THOSE WHO ARE SIMPLY REMISS?"

"Now now, there's no need to panic

Although love itself is kind of manic.

Have you murdered anyone in the past

For karma to come and bite your arse?"

"Murder! Why would I-"

"No no! Just asking

*smiles* Some patients have been rather taxing.

Umm anyway let's continue

Do you think the problem is within you?"

"OH YES! DEFINITELY SO

NO ONE WILL LOOK AT ME

NOT EVEN A JOHN DOE!"

"Ah now now girl. there's no need to wail.

Your love ship will soon sail."

"You really think so?"

"I know so.

But first some changes need to be made

Your view on love needs an upgrade.

Here are some pills for the need to die down

Because you won't find love if all you do is frown.

Take these pills and go buy yourself a dress

And for God's sake please comb that mess.

Take yourself for a date

No matter what your fate

Because this you'll have to stick with

Love story, no story or myth.

Give love a break

Love's tired too

Oh god girl how long have you been wearing that shoe!

Girl! Leave love alone

And make your heart less forlorn

Pick yourself up and dust yourself off

Actually no

Disinfect yourself; your smell's giving me a cough!

Then come back and we'll discuss the solution

Of your love's apparent destitution

Now, how does that sound?"

"EVEN YOU WON'T HELP MY LOVE TO BE FOUND!?"

"I will, I will. I promise you that

But first you have to stop being a doormat!"

"I'M WEEPING!"

"I know. Now my floor is leaking."

"ALRIGHT! Alright. I'll pull myself together

And stop all this unnecessary blether.

I just have one more question if you'll let me."

"Yes girl. Please speak free."

"Will you marry me?"

I made the blog public a year before I wrote this, and made it private again, a year after. The year that I made it public I was like a lone ranger in a patch of land full of elephant grass — hacking it down with every swipe. I was in art college and my creativity was being channelled into college projects and class assignments. I had also not had my rebellious early teenage years and so took it upon myself to rebel at the sprightly age of 19. My rebellion? My creative voice. I began with a YouTube channel (that you can look up. That still exists) and decided to open the lock to my secret.

I wrote 33 pieces in the year 2018, 43 in 2017 and a whopping 75 pieces in the year 2016. Granted, none of these pieces required intense research methodology nor were they historically accurate. But the sheer numbers are astonishing. There are two findings from the data of these three years: 1. the amount I wrote decreased over the years and 2. The quality of the writing increased. The first point is deduction you too can make, the second point, well, you will just have to trust me.

I vividly remember sitting on my bed, sleep in my eyes, typing out a semi-awful rhyming poem about my inability to feel joy. Rhymes is something I grew up on. Whether it was my grandmother reading me Sukumar Ray’s Bengali nonsense poetry i.e every Bengali child’s rite of passage or my father’s lullabys of Ogden Nash and Edward Lear. Nonsense poetry is how I fell in love with the English language. It is the very atom of my creative being.

And so, when life took me for a ride, I took the English language for one too.

What does this have to do with the pope and the holy trifecta of practice, creation and consumption?

Well, both the pope and the holy trifecta know of a single, altering power: resistance.

It is only natural that a person coming up with new ideas every day might get absolutely burnt out while doing it. Art college does that to you. And so when I would sit down to write or edit or create something new, I would pull blanks. And when I would pull blanks I would rely on the first principle of our trifecta: practice. Well that and warming up.

Before writing a piece I would write one of those semi-awful rhyming poems. It would act as a gateway drug to my creativity. Just the way one would warm up their body before a run, this semi-ridiculous jumbling of words would do that to my brain. It didn’t need to make sense. But it needed to rhyme. And by doing so two things happened: one, I was now primed to write whatever my teacher demanded of me and two, I got better at rhyming. When rhyming two things happen: one, you end up having to google a lot of rhyming words and so your vocabulary expands and two, you learn and practice pace and rhythm.

This brings me to the third principle, consumption. The internet is a wild, wonderful and semi-awful place to be. It opens up endless doors but demands that you walk into them. Initially, the response to the worldwide web led to knowledge expansion, now, we have become lazy internet surfers. We want a podcast, or a video or AI to do the learning for us. Which of course has its consequences.

In 2018, when I wrote the piece you read above, I was in my third year of college. By this point in time, my teachers had shown us Eisenstein’s famous Odessa Steps sequence over 19 times, we had watched Beauty and the Beast from 1945 (absolutely not required), we had watched wonderfully thrilling Spanish short films, we bawled our eyes out watching Rang De Basanti and of course, we had done what all Indian film students do, we watched and analysed Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara. This was the short list. The long list included a Soviet-Georgian comedy film, a Ghibli production, the Iranian greats and Satyajit Ray among others.

As you would’ve guessed, two things happened as a result: one, our taste for cinema, and art in general, widened and thus influenced our work and two, we got bored. If I could, I would try to tell you that Citizen Kane had a happy ending but I would be wrong. Sleep, sleep, wonderful sleep, was the only thing on our mind for 40% of the films we watched in class (maybe more but I am trying to make the impression that I was a good student). But that boredom was important. For it is from that boredom that our mind wandered to places otherwise unknown to us. We would come out of a film from the 60s absolutely zapped. We would begi to daydream and we would end with a script. The ability to be bored, to sit and stare, to empty the mind, is essential to being able to achieve our second principle: creation.

We go back to that night where sleep dragged my eyelids and I wrote a semi-awful poem about how I no longer felt joy. Not a lot of people read my blog at the time. But it didn’t matter. Not in the way in which you think. Not just that night, I pressed upload with no hesitation a multitude of times. I thought nothing of the people reading my blog, the traction on the pieces. I wrote because I was sad and now the world could read it. I told myself not to focus on the eyeballs but just on the upload button. It takes one click to put your creation out into the world. Not in a daunting way, in a don’t-think-this-is-difficult-it-takes-simple-motor-skills way. So why did I banish this so called creative baby of mine into the abyss of the internet? I realised that it wasn’t just my current writing that was available to the eyes of the world (99.9% of whom did not even know this existed), but my archives were. The first post I wrote in 2016 could now be read by my crush in 2016 and my crush in 2018 and possibly, if I kept it open, by my crush in 2025. That’s embarassing.

I went from being the let’s-make-creative-mistakes-in-public person to oh-no-no-no-I-spelt-embarrassing-wrong. But the result was, yes, two-fold: one, I got scared of what people might think but two, I worked really hard on the writing. The pieces I can write now, to a semi-large extent, I can control the quality of. It has allowed me to run, not one, but two newsletters. I was able to not let just pure emotion guide my cursor to the publish button, but an actual want and need to share my work with the world.

But that takes time.

Time, is the last and final guest at the table for our holy trifecta. Not the time on the clock, not the 24 hours in a day that everyone is offered. No, the time that runs in my head. The time that I own. Not the algorithm’s time, not the traction’s time, not what the grow-your-substack writers notion of time. The time on the clock of my creativity. The clock that wakes up after a long round of yoga, the clock that wakes up after a nap, the clock that wakes up not twice a week or twice a month, or when the algorithm needs it, but, sometimes, twice in a year. The clock of my creativity that well, begins after I write a semi-awful rhyming poem.

I have learnt that when one creates, one must not let anyone else in the room. Not physically but mentally. To listen, to really listen, to what I have to say, to what I want to make, is crucial. Art was never made to make audiences happy. It was made to make artists happy.

I stopped writing the poems. I now no longer want to make mistakes when I write. I want my written word to come out with innate flow and elegance — unrealistic expectations. Unless, I open my mind first to the possibilites in the world and in my imagination. Unless I rhyme solution with destitution and pope with hope.