Pitch, Poetry, and Parallel Times: What a Joka!📽️🍁✍🏼🗓️

कुछ कह दिया होता?

कूर्ग का टिकट करा ही लिया होता?

शायद सब बेहतर होता।

The “if theory” is the wisest of all for the pitch — even for skeptical humans.

Time traveling has always fascinated my mind, as it does for many of us. We often wish to leap into the future or alter the past.

Last July, I unexpectedly got a call from the city of Jhilmil and Barfi. I felt the emotions exactly as Satyajit Ray’s movies make us feel, with the metaphysical boundaries of dreams and reality, reminiscent of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry. Before my rotting thoughts could steal all the joy, as they did in the movie Lootera near lakes, I tried to reassemble my gratitude while being in sujood.

Literature expertise would lead to an institute talking about consultancy. Phew! I never thought God’s pitch worked like that. If 25-year-old Munazza hadn’t heard that, she wouldn’t have thought of this pun:

What a joka!

No wonder I’ve stopped writing. Ideas only come in dreams, in waves, often butchered with Gen Z slang and the jargon of a plastered world. It reminds me how life moves fast: weather changes early, sickness comes early, love arrives early, so does separation; fog arrives early, so does chilliness; fraud becomes a trend, so does honesty.

Dreams knock unexpectedly, often when we least want visitors — like 10:10 a.m. I talk endlessly about anything and everything. Perhaps that’s why the interview felt so right a month before. It’s all from God — a dream I never even imagined living. God knows exactly where to place us on the map of qadr (destiny). What a brilliant planner!

The months pass like time in Christopher Nolan’s movies, or like protons when observed using discharged tubes during Eugen Goldstein's experiment in 1886. The tightness in my chest was real when September arrived, yet I laughed while discussing Oedipus and Homer in Professor Nandita’s class in August 2025, just as I had in Professor Vaishali’s Delhi class in 2016 during my first dive into Classical European Literature. Nine years later, the cycle completed itself, surpassing the curtain of reality.

The past is mushy and chipchipi; reality is wet like rain: calm, and in control. Emotions hang like a fragile bridge between the two. Just as the distance between two colonized cities: Bombay and Calcutta which remains stark, so has my perspective shifted. Yet, the lingering ‘sone ki chidiya’ past still whispers. August ended with our students drenched in talent and the anxiety of the Managerial Communication-1 Public Speaking Examination, with Executive Ethics being observed under the watchful eye of an owl. If we deconstruct it the paragraph simply talks how memories and moments move in non-linear narratives.

I sit back and watch all the places that gave my sinus pain a pause while compiling videos, and it reminded me how much I would have missed my lover: if I ever had one. I imagined writing to him about these places while wrapping fresh candies and crafts from land where colonisers first landed.

While writing the next person’s reel appeared: my favorite letter from Richard Feynman being recited. Making me realise how most experiments end with one simple truth, 

it’s just you and your happy endingssss in the post real world (a whole of imagination)! 

We can’t capture people in reality (legally or metaphorically) without crushing them under our care, turning us into the character of Shahrukh from Darr, or, in alternative verse, bringing the dark edges of our psyche into play telling we are all psychopath in some ways. Life balances rationality and poetic justice with astonishing precision. Meaning, life just knows how to balance everything. 

I’m glad art exists! a space where we can breathe our pain, fear, and gratitude, and share the collective consciousness of being vulnerable as a human. A fragile human like me(and like all of us) may ache to the core, yet still sleeps each night with unshaken hope that tomorrow’s sunshine will bring their K... K... K... K... Kirannnnn...  not as a bullet tearing through skin, but as a quiet boat gliding toward Lake Como, where no Creative Associate or Elite Consultancy is needed to nudge them about “and they lived happily ever after”or “the profit kept on increasing till the death of time."

Perhaps the biggest irony of the ‘if-theory’ is that we only think of it afterwards. In the moment, God has already played the move, and we are just catching up exactly like subtitles appearing half a second late, yet still making sense of the film.

Closing curtains both of my imagination and windows making sure the bleak ends this series of confusing what ifs!