As you may have gleaned from my columns, my partner is truly supportive of me, rarely hesitating to do whatever is within his power to enhance the quality of life, my solitude, and my capacity for intellectual thought. I try my best to respond to his generosity. Sometimes this takes the form of indulgences. I indulge his interests as he indulges mine. It’s often rewarding because doing so exposes me to experiences I may otherwise not have had myself. One of the things I often struggle with, however, is indulging his desire for Indian content on streaming services. I encourage it because it comes from him wanting to learn more about a place he was beginning to get to know better by virtue of spending time there with me, until we had to abruptly move. My struggle has to do with the frequent regressiveness of most mainstream content, the enormously exaggerated length of many films, and the frequent dumbing down of issues in order to make them palatable for passive viewing.

Most attempts at progressive or well-intentioned cinema, in my opinion, manifest what I call a ‘one-step-forward-five-steps-backward’ kind of approach. Article 15, for example, which explores an investigation into the disappearance of three lower-caste girls from a small village, ends up perpetuating a Brahmin saviour complex. Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, which was perhaps conceived to visibilise trans women, ends up catering so exclusively to a cis-het-Brahminical-male gaze and has distinctly transphobic, misogynist undertones. At some point some months ago I had recommended to my partner that we attempt watching Sacred Games, and while we were both initially hooked to the drama, mid-way through, we both admitted that we were only continuing with it in the hope of arriving at 
sense of closure. When season 1 ended the way it did, we both decided we’d had enough. Neither of us had the stomach for a season 2, and the lack of any compelling female characters already alienated me from the series as a viewer. Gehraiyaan, which was sold to me as a film about how trauma influences our tendencies towards intimacy, felt like a film so removed from my own social realities, I could hardly relate.