Scenes From a Situationship

Where I plug a film that's also more than a film for me

When you next have 87 minutes and 35 seconds to spare, I want you to go on YouTube and watch this excellent film called Scenes From a Situationship. I believe it will be worth your while – and also that it’s a landmark film in India for multiple reasons.

The film is close to my heart even though I had nothing to do with the making of it. Its lead actor and co-scriptwriter, Vaishnav Vyas, is a dear friend of mine. It was shot and edited by another dear friend Nomsita MS Haritashya – and she’s just 21 years old, though she was 19 when I met her and looked 12. Nommie and Vava, as I call them, were the crew of my YouTube show Everything is Everything, which wound up recently after 128 episodes. We have spent thousands of hours together, even outside of the shooting, and they’re basically like family for me now.

Every six weeks, the three of us would drive to Karjat together to shoot for our show, spend three days there, and then drive back. We’d be up late into the night on shoot days, eating bacon with sourdough bread or Maggi or whatever we found around. We’d talk about books and films and music, do writing exercises together, and I’d keep telling them, with these bitter decades of experience behind me, the failure that comes from not-doing-only-dreaming, that it wasn’t enough to dream about creating great work, that you actually had to build habits where you were always at work, always creating. You had to be doers, not watchers.

As a character in a Neil Simon play once said, “There are watchers in this world and there are doers. And the watchers sit around watching the doers do.”

I had paraphrased this once at a party when a friend asked us to complete the sentence, “there are two kinds of people in this world.” My two kinds were whiners and doers. And whining and doing can go beyond being behavioral patterns and become personality traits. That gives them path dependence in the following way.

The whiners get into a vicious cycle of whining about the world and how everything sucks. They post screenshots of others on Twitter, mock them, and are joined by other whiners in this. Passing judgement is always an act of ego: they feel more virtuous, more knowledgeable and more talented than those they mock, and the only way to preserve this illusion is not to step into the arena themselves. They whine and whine, and never do.

Doers, on the other hand, get into a virtuous cycle. They build habits, take small steps everyday instead of being paralysed by the audacity of big dreams, and the consequences of their good habits compound. They shut out the toxic whiners – all whiners are toxic – and are joined in their journey by other doers. Good things happen, and keep happening.

Nommie and Vava were super-talented in many areas, not boxed in yet by expectations or early success, and were gradually becoming doers. They wrote songs together – some in my car in our long drives together, with Nommie playing guitar in the back seat and Vaishnav singing while driving excruciatingly slowly, because hey, the brain can only do one thing at a time. (Cycles have overtaken us.) They put together a musical play and performed it in multiple cities. And eventually, they made an actual feature film!

And now about the film

Scenes from a Situationship is directed by Vaibhav Munjal, who runs Chalchitra Talks on YouTube, and we vaguely knew each other because I’d been a guest on one of his shows a couple of times. In mid-September 2023, he spotted me in the Starbucks at Versova and came over to say hello. It struck me that I might need a new crew for this YouTube show that I had just started, so I took his number. A week later, I messaged to ask if he could recommend an editor for my show, and he recommended Nomsita. While I haven’t actually hung out with him yet, and so can’t call him a friend, I am in eternal debt to him for this.

I loved everything I heard about Vaibhav from N and V. He seemed to me to embody the most important quality a creator should have: a bias for action. He wanted to start a YouTube channel, and he did it. He wanted to do an interview show on it talking about cinema, and he did it. He wanted to make a film, and he did it.

Wait, what? He wanted to make a film and he did it? How does that work?

A year ago, I remember how a conversation I had with a friend of mine, a conventional filmmaker, grew heated. I was sitting with him in the same Versova Starbucks, and excitedly babbling about how there was no longer an entry barrier to making movies – the only bottleneck was distribution. We had the means of production, and could make super-low-budget films without having to please gatekeepers at OTT platform or film production companies. With just the equipment I own, and a group of friends who were in it with me as a labour of love, I could make a film for practically free.

To my surprise, this made him angry. “Amit, this is nonsense,” he said. “You have no idea how the industry works. Arre, just ordering food for a full crew can cost many lakhs for a single schedule.” And on and on he went totting up costs, oblivious to my explanations of how he was thinking of an old paradigm, that to make an intimate film you didn’t need large crews or Arri Alexas or blah-blah-blah. In retrospect, I kind of understand his anger: the last film he made, which had a budget of a few crores, never released because his producer lost faith in the project and didn’t come up with marketing money, which would apparently also have to be in the crores. And he’s been bitter about this for years.

“You should just release it on YouTube,” I would tell him, and he would again get angry or laugh, as if I was a naive fool who knew nothing. But that whole model seemed broken to me. The old way of doing things.

So when Vava mentioned that he was co-writing some scenes with Vaibhav and they were just going to shoot them, I was overjoyed. I couldn’t think of someone more likely than Vaibhav to do something like this. He loves cinema, he is a doer, and he had found the perfect partners in this enterprise, these two insanely talented, wise-beyond-their-years buddies of mine.

I won’t say anything about the making of the film because it is not my story to tell. I will simply let you know that everyone who is a part of it did it as a labour of love, using equipment of the sort that the median YouTuber owns, so this is basically a zero-budget film. I mean okay, not really, because time has value and everyone’s time went into this, and I’m sure they ordered food during the shoots, and there would be other incidentals, but you get the drift. And then, Vaibhav had the self-belief to release it on YouTube straight away. No shopping it around to festivals or looking for OTT buyers or India distributors, none of that. Just get it out there and move on to the next project.

I love this, and I want all creators reading this to be inspired by it. Don’t look for reasons to not do something. If someone tells you why your idea is not worth following, cut them out of your life. Build habits, make things, put them out there, keep moving.

It is not only the bias for action that I am celebrating, though. The film itself is excellent. When I went to watch it at the premiere, I was super-nervous that parts of it might not be good, or might feel amateurish, and I so wanted that to not be the case, because I love these two people so much. To my delighted surprise, everything about the film was spot on. The film is well-written, Vava’s acting was flawless, Nommie did such a good job shooting it and editing it. The lead actress Shreya Sandilya, the only person in the team I haven’t met, is unbelievably good, so much in the skin of the character. But the film is more than the sum of its parts, and Vaibhav deserves the credit for that. It was his idea, his vision, and instead of just letting it marinate endlessly, he went out there and made the film.

This post is not meant to be a review — I enjoyed the film, and my minor quibbles are only for the makers’ ears. This is a plug. Free up 87 minutes and 35 seconds and watch this film. And remember every name involved with its making: this is their first film, and they will all make many, many more.

*****

And yes, I will be regular with the newsletter this year. This is my year of writing. The newsletter isn’t actually a part of my writing plans, but I intend to exercise that muscle so much that some of it will wind up here.