A small write-up/article I wrote for a youth page called "Soulstuff" about my journey as a filmmaker, writer and whatever it is that I am today.
It's always hard to tell where our story begins. We never know what our first chapter is and yet what scares us most is how our last chapter ends. So I tend to live in the ink. Like most storytellers, I find in it a place where we can escape our truths, live in the lies of the characters we create.
At a very young age, I knew that I was obsessed with telling stories. In English period I would find ways to read out my own poem in class instead of the one on Page 42; during Art period my drawing of a house would be of a family fixing their television antenna to watch their daily soap. I just found ways to tell stories never knowing that it would lead me down a road where I stand today as a young filmmaker, cartoonist, and writer.
It took me nineteen years of struggle to find out that I had to do something about my addiction towards storytelling. I found resolution in standing behind the camera, shooting films. I dropped out of IIT two years ago and made my way to Mumbai in the hope of getting a job. I got to work for several ad campaigns and films to prove to myself that weird stories and a weirder imagination had a place in this world. But the thirst to tell stories couldn’t stop itself during such a lockdown so I decided to start a webcomic series to keep smiles on a lot of sulking faces. The race is far from over but it feels good knowing that a twenty-one-year-old queer boy from Delhi can complete five short films which would be screened at several international film festivals and win awards there. All the films I write and direct tend to be about the LGBTQ community in one way or the other because I feel we still need to hear these stories in a desolate land like ours and know what our community really stands for. You don’t need a lot of colors to paint vivid stories, because it all starts with black ink.
