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How a miniseries on a catastrophic disaster touched heartstrings through the simple elements of storytelling

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How Chernobyl won the hearts of the viewers, boils down to the basic fact in storytelling: Show, don’t tell. The series starts with a scene leading to the suicide of Valery Legasov played by Jared Harris. Legasov ponders over some poignant questions, states certain cryptic facts, stacks up his recorded cassettes, hoard them and leaves a plate of food for his cat. While the camera centres on the cat licking away his plate of food, the creaking noises hint the viewers of something ominous happening in the background. The fallen spectacles and the shining leather shoes hanging midair is all that’s shown in the preceding scene. But the viewers already know. The series is stitched together with scenes of minimal yet well-scripted dialogues, intense background music and brilliant direction. The masterminds behind the series opted for a different way of storytelling. Unlike in most tv series where the suspense is build up in a linear direction, Chernobyl started at the
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Chaos of the unseen frontier

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(With quotes from Fathima Ashgar ’s “ If they come for us”) Remember those thick chunky social science textbooks we used to study? The history textbooks taught us about Indian history, sacrifices, massacres, the  non-violence  movements. However, there was a less taught topic, an anticlimax to Nehru’s dream of Unified India, the Partition.    I checked with my friends to  see if I alone was oblivious to the monstrosity of this mass migration. And truth be told , they too had only a little knowledge about this.    I  realized  the grotesqueness of this massacre especially when I read these lines from Fatima   Ashgar ’s  poem, “If they come for us”   1947: The cannons sound during    Ramzan and everyone hold their breath   To find who survived.  Laylat   Al  Qadar   Births two nations.   No one knows the boundaries   Bodies spoon like commas,  waiting, linking , waiting.”   India’s partition was an inevitable climax to the 200-year-old B
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The Instagram Project:Regrets In Love

"Why did you start writing?" I asked him. Judging by his intriguingly detailed write ups I have always adored, I was expecting some deep reflections on how it fulfilled him. "To impress a girl." He replied rather coyly. I laughed at his unexpected answer. For a moment there I glimpsed the young boyish persona hidden beneath the facade of a formidable college student. "And did she get impressed?" I enquired "I don't know." He shrugged. He remained silent for a few minutes "You know, I have to prize words out of your mouth. I thought for someone who wrote a lot you would talk as much." I replied as the silence prolonged. He laughed. "She liked my writings. She kept asking me when the next write ups would be due." "So it kept you motivated to write more?" "Yeah. Sort of. I wanted to build up that image of a writer for her. To impress her. I wrote because of her. I wouldn't claim myself to be a wr
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The Instagram Project: Lens and Piston

Lens And Piston( @lensandpiston ) One of the early memories Fayaz recalls from his childhood is of him crawling under a Maruti Gypsy. He viewed the underbody of the Gypsy with as much fascination as someone seeing the stars in Milky Way for the first time. “It runs in the family,” Fayaz said “the love for automobiles.” With time the toddler’s fascination grew. He identified cars by its bumpers before he could count numbers. Fast forward a few years, the teenage Fayaz pined after bikes his father couldn’t afford. Undeterred, he saved up for his first bike, doing odd jobs. He bought his first bike, a Yamaha YBX 125 in his second year of Engineering. The depth of love and pride he felt for his hard-earned bike knew no bounds. If he could cuddle it in his sleep, he would have. But in his final year of college, the trend of owning a Royal Enfield Classic gripped Fayaz, just like everyone else. Everywhere he turned the exhaustive sound of the Bullet bikes followed him like a gh
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The Prophet Scribbler

Millions of people throng the Delhi metro. Everyday glum faces commute between work and home. Their eyes glued to their mobile phones, the blue light of the screens casting an enchanting aura around them, drowning out from the mundanity that surrounds them. Commuting in the metro, I came to realise, is a grim affair. You rarely get to see anything bright. Rarer is finding someone with a book. But today as I was people watching around the not so crowded Magenta Line Metro, a well dressed smart young man came and sat opposite me. His handsome face with combed hair, faded jeans and a yellow kurta caught my inquisitive eye. He sat down and scanned around him catching my eye. A perplexed though seemed to have crossed his mind for it foreshadowed his pleasant demeanour. He then scanned the rest of the coach and with a visible sigh opened the book he was carrying. I have the unusual habit of craning my neck like an owl to see what others might be reading. I vaguely made out the title.
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Book Review: The Little Prince

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For quite sometime now I have been at sea at writing my next post. What can I write about? I don't have bundles of wisdom to share or exotic travelogues to put across(lately). But when I glanced across my room, I saw the copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that I had just completed. Why not a book review then? The Little Prince at first glance might seem like a children’s book. But as the saying goes never judge a book by its cover. The story is narrated by the unknown narrator who meets a prince in the Sahara desert where he had crashed his plane. The prince explains to him about his little planet with three volcanoes and his beloved rose. He leaves his planet to explore the nearby ones. The story then moves forward with the characters he meets upon each of the other tiny planets and finally on earth. The book made me realise the importance of preserving the perspectives we held as a child, the innocent creative ways our minds would wander. As we grow up
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The kites of Jamia Milia

Every evening  I made my way past the Jamia Milia Islamia University in the magenta line metro, towards my hostel in Jasola Vihar. Once the beautiful white domes and minarets of the university are passed the metro line divides the underlying community into two sides. On my left side there are shabby apartments with daunting black water tanks on their roofs, with many other wider assortments of building stacked too close together leaving no space to breathe, each building in various states of deterioration; paints peeling down or coated with the undulating Delhi pollution, a visual testament of the clear disregard for aesthetics of the Delhites. On the right side lives the upper class with their state of art air conditioners sputtering to cleanse out the air, sunroofs marred by exotic green plants, well-lit apartments with their beige coloured paints intact. The first time, I sat facing the right side window, I whizzed past the mostly deserted balconies of plush apartments occasion
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