Letters from Sydney: Episode 7

Hello All,

Here's letter 7.
And yes, its 7 days to go.
Have a rocking weekend!

Luv,
NM
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It was almost 1:30 am and it was raining quite hard; my hair and clothes wet, I was looking out of the window. “Sydney weather and life… are both equally unpredictable”, I said to myself, smiling, taking a sip of the hot chocolate I had made for myself after standing alone in the rain for almost 15 minutes. The unpredictability of Sydney weather was bang in front of my eyes, with the thunderstorm which came literally out of nowhere. The unpredictability of life had been in front of my eyes for the past 4 years, with life taking absolutely erratic twists with alarming regularity and spiraling me onto a puzzle of paths of confusion, anguish and conflict which ultimately ended in a pristine road of self-discovery.

My cell-phone rang. I didn’t even have to look at the screen to see who was calling. There are only three people who call me regularly from India, my mom, my dad and well… the person who was calling me just then.

“Guess what..!” she said, sounding tremendously excited, “It’s raining in Pune! And all of us have stepped out of the office and are enjoying! And we plan to go in and have a mug of hot chocolate… Ok… I’ll call you later… was just very happy so thought I would give you a call…”

The conversation was effectively a monologue, the kind of monologues I love hearing to. Raining in Pune and Sydney at the same time can pass off as coincidence. Standing in the rain and hot chocolate was a bit too much to be just, mere coincidence. Coincidences are what have ruled my life so far; whether it was making a conscious decision to join Pune University for engineering; whether it was feeling like writing a script; whether it was asking Pavan and Tejas on one obscure day that I wanted to make a film and both of them agreeing whole heartedly; whether it was finding a boy with a handy cam called Vijay J who I had never even seen and he agreeing to shoot BLACK; whether it was meeting DJ, Nikhil K, Niket, Parag, Amol and all of them working with me with full trust in my capabilities without once thinking that they hadn’t seen my work ever; whether it was my reaching Factory on the same day when Sonal was looking for a writer, whether it was meeting Shin-Shin on Orkut and we striking on this idea of Karma and Konfessions and Sarang jumping in soon after; whether it was looking up on Google for film school and IFSS being the first and last film school I browsed; whether it was me and her looking up each other on the Holy Cross community on Orkut on the same day; both of us deciding to go to Aurangabad on the same day… it was all ruled by coincidences. All the major events in my life had been coincidences. Or were they part of Destiny’s bigger plan, I don’t know. We decided to meet on a Monday, but again, co-incidentally I had to meet the producer of SSV in the morning and she had to go to work in the evening so we decided to meet up on that weekend.

I still remember the day we had first met. I was late as usual and I reached Mc Donalds almost running. There she was, standing, wearing pink and looking extremely pretty. She was typing an sms before she turned back to look at me, smiling. For that one moment, it seemed like time froze.

Freezing in time is one of the most commonly used tools by efficient screenwriters. When we realize that a character is becoming redundant and extremely predictable we know that he is going to kill the script in his own way; sooner or later we decide to freeze the character in time, i.e. we pack him off under mysterious circumstances. This way, the character cannot kill the script but he does make it much more effective. Thinking about this and coincidences, I started typing, Norwik.

“This is a brilliant script”, my professor looked at me and said, “Why are you calling it Norwik though?” he continued glancing across the ten pages of story that I had handed over exactly 22 hours after I had first thought of it.

“Because”, I said, “The lead character is called Norwik”.

He laughed heartily and said, “Yeah, but you can have a much more effective title, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think so, Sir…” I said, in my trademark finishing style and very much to my expectation, he chucked the topic.

“Do you think you should ‘waste’ this script as a film school project..?” he said, not even looking at me.

I didn’t know what to say.

“This is a once in a lifetime script… Develop it… Let’s see where it goes…” He said, judging my confusion.

I knew it all way long that it was once-in-a-lifetime script. What I needed was someone to tell me that it was that damn good.

After all, not every time I write a script with Johhny Depp in mind.
After all, not every time I think that what I am writing can be better than Aparajita.

TO BE CONTINUED.