A notebook.

Tag: writing

  • Next Sohee.

    Spoilers ahead.

    In my limited exposure to films, I don’t think I have seen a film capture this utter helplessness and mental isolation that comes with living in this digitized social and corporate slavery world as earnestly as Next Sohee did.

    A few months ago, I thought to myself that there’s a growing disconnect that every 20-something person I know is feeling, a sort of decay that no mainstream film is really capturing. We are still being sold the same rehashed tropes and ideas from decades ago, and we are all lapping them up.

    This growing disconnect is something some are able to express, but some aren’t. No one’s really talking to anyone, really. I’ve had conversations with people only to hear stock responses, to the point that I dread conversations sometimes because I know what I’m going to hear. I’ve had “heartfelt” conversations with people only for us to forget entirely about what we’ve said to each other an hour ago. Only to repeat these same talking points the next time we meet as if it’s the first time. I’ve literally been having the same conversations every day with my flatmates / friends from a decade ago, yet we are not moving on because we aren’t really listening to each other. I meet up with some other friends, and the usual response I always get is “Chal hi raha hain yaar.” Each conversation feels like nothing more than an attempt to mask the void of awkward silence with rehearsed kinship.

    No one’s at fault here. Everyone’s just lost and exhausted, too numb or too brainrotted to care about the person before them. You want to meet a friend? That means making time you don’t have, spending overpriced auto or cab fare, or riding through impatient traffic, terrible roads, potholes, spending money on ethanol-blended petrol. And when you finally meet, you’re scrolling your social media feed every 10 minutes into the conversation, you’re thinking about your journey back, about what you need to do next, about whether you’ll have enough energy to wake up, hit the gym, and log in by 9.

    On some level you know that all your friendships are just one move away from ending — maybe one of you stops reaching out, and neither cares enough to give a fuck, maybe a workplace transfer, maybe a marriage, maybe a breakup, maybe someone moving in with their partner.

    It’s hard to make dating work too. Both of you are stuck in terrible work atmospheres, and neither of you has the emotional bandwidth to be there for the other. When Park tells the detective, “I thought she was sulking as usual” and “I had to go to work,” it hit like a ton of bricks. If this weren’t an earnest film, you’d want to villainize him. But you see the way he changes from a happy-go-lucky person to a shell of himself, and you realize he’s helpless. Quitting isn’t easy. To take care of your health you need money, and to get the money you sacrifice your health. It’s a horrifying loop the lowest rung of workers live in. Those who sell a bit of their souls climb the ladder, and in return treat those below them with the same soullessness.

    Maybe the bleakest moment in the film is when a bereaved father calls customer care to cancel a subscription because his kid is dead, and Sohee has no option but to respond with that rehearsed, forced pleasantness. Because if she slips, she’ll be reprimanded, her team will turn on her, the whole structure will punish her. That scene is suffocating, and anyone who’s been in corporate knows exactly what that kind of mechanical “tact” feels like.

    Her zoned-out mother. Her tired father. Her alcoholic friend. Her friend who noticed something was off but didn’t know how to reach her. Each of them shows the same lethargy in the soul, the slow uncompromising decay of capitalism eating people alive.

    The second half of the film makes it obvious. Yoo-jin pieces together the systemic workings that broke Sohee, but the answers are already obvious to us. Middle management is wired to not think in terms of humanness but in terms of data. Fancy figures on a sheet can never capture the burden Sohee carried, the weight that made her end her life. For every Sohee who breaks, there are a hundred who don’t, who continue in the system. She’s replaceable. That’s why the system never feels responsible. The manager blaming the school, and then her suicide for their bad reputation, says it all. He can’t afford to think in human terms because if he does, his own boss will destroy him.

    When my friends and I got hired through campus placements in 2022, we cheered, we hollered, we were ecstatic. The energy was infectious. University was ending, the corporate world was opening, we thought life was beginning. That night we drank, we dreamed, we promised to stay in touch, to meet every month, to finally be independent, to marry our partners, to date, to do everything we wanted.

    Now the meetups are almost gone. Living is brutal. Those with partners broke up. Those single are still single, still struggling, because they don’t have the time, money, energy, or confidence to date. Honestly, it’s hilarious on some level.

    This capitalistic, corrupt world has eaten into everything. And as we look forward, with talk about work hours increasing, CEOs dismissing dwindling workplace morale as “Gen-Z entitlement” or “laziness,” friendships have become time consuming and heavy on the pocket, love, marriages reduced to transactions, news filled with suicides, “moment of passion” murders, spouses killing off their better halves in ingenious way, impatient road-ragers, scams at every turn, food quality deteriorating — what’s left? Even empathy, even community, the only comfort we could rely on from the soullesness of the corporate world has been swallowed up by the system too. The collective decrease in morale is clearly palpable.

    The film ends with Yoo-jin watching a single video Sohee left — her dancing in the studio, her one joy. She was the best dancer, she loved it. But she had to quit because work wouldn’t let her have the time.

    Perhaps if even one of the aspects in Sohee’s life weren’t this bad, maybe she wouldn’t have taken the step – maybe a deserving pay, maybe a less stressful work environment, maybe a good work-life balance, maybe if she had the time to go to the dance studio regularly, or maybe even if her friends and family living healthy lifestyles could help her deal with what she was going through. Who knows?

    Maybe this piece of writing is too disjointed, bleak and pointless, maybe things aren’t so bad, and maybe I am just being a whiny, privileged person, because some people have it way worse, and don’t even have a job. But Next Sohee hit on something raw and unacknowledged that I haven’t seen in any film, something that is paplable to so many, but is hardly spoken about. Much like the customary corporate dinner party celebration, all support systems, and ‘Take Care of Your Mental Health’ messages seem empty, because they fail to address their utter meaningless that comes from all the stress that people deal with as corporate employees – at the sacrifice of their own health.

  • The Cooing Seige

    One fine morning, I was jolted awake by a blaring cooing from way too close. The noise was so damn loud, I couldn’t ignore it.

    Still half-asleep, I stumbled to the bathroom. The place looked darker than usual, and as I peered up at the exhaust fan, I discovered a pigeon had decided to start buidling its nest right there. There was a tiny protrusion, like a slab, right in front of the part of the fan facing outwards, and the pigeon seemed to have decided it was a snuggly place to build its nest.

    With zero clue on how to handle the situation, I waved my hands to shoo it away, but the bird just glared back at me. I pounded on the wall below the fan, hoping to scare it off, but it remained unbothered.

    Half-asleep and pissed off, I realized there was no way to reach this feathery nuisance because the fan was in the way. I even screamed and stomped my foot, by now the pigeon just started observing me, probably wondering if I could come up with anything at all to scare it off.

    Defeated, I slumped back into bed and checked my phone.

    Only 4 minutes left before my alarm.

    I switched it off, hoping for a little extra sleep. Just as I was drifting off, the pigeon started cooing again. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t. I bolted to the bathroom, and the bird paused its cooing just to watch me. I stomped and screamed again, but it continued glaring at me, probably scoffing at my helplessness.

    In a last-ditch move, I turned on the tap, and right away the pigeon flapped its wings and flew off.

    Phew, finally!

    I wasn’t able to sleep for the rest of the day as I drowsily tried to focus at work.

    Could missing a few minutes of sleep really mess me up this bad?

    The next day, I woke up to cooing again. Peeking out the window, I saw the sun barely set. I stumbled to the bathroom and, once more, hit the tap. The pigeon flew off, so I returned to bed and managed to doze off—until it came back, AGAIN!

    Cooing like a broken record.

    I got up, hit the tap, and it flew off. I went back to sleep, only for it to return again. Again, I turned on the tap and,again it flew away.

    For the next few days, this became my miserable routine. I stopped setting alarms altogether because I knew this little shit would wake me up at some ungodly hour regardless. The sleep deprivation was taking its toll— I was zoning out at work, during conversations, and becoming increasingly forgetful. To avoid this, I tried to be hyper-aware, trying to force focus, but nothing was working.

    My work performance kept tanking. I told some friends about the pigeon menace, and they just laughed at the absurdity of it. Maybe it was just a laughable nuisance, and was not anything serious, or maybe my tendency to overthink the dumbest things was making me obsess over a stupid bird. I tried to ignore it, but my early mornings were still ruined. The pigeon got used to my tricks, and the tap trick stopped working. I even got accustomed to showering with this bird glaring at me in all my naked glory.

    Soon, the pigeon became so comfortable that it would stick around through the afternoons, cooing carelessly; and its nest just kept growing. Twigs and bits of metal would fall on my floor, and I had to clean up regularly.

    As I struggled to focus on work and life, I realized how much I truly hated this job. I always did, but I genuinely loathed the whole idea. Deep down, you need a knack for bullshit to survive in this field, and I seriously lacked that talent.

    My desperate attempts to focus on other parts of my life made me see how banal everything had become. No one really listens to anyone, and every conversation could amount to nothing more than just air flow through the mouth—the same repetitive drivel over and over and over and over again. Some days, when I was too drowsy, people’s words sounded like guttural noises, yet I could still make out what they were saying.

    The monotony at work became unbearable. I couldn’t care about the corporate practice of niceties, and small talk or the quality of my work, so I started taking random leaves just to do nothing all day. That damn pigeon just wouldn’t leave me alone—I couldn’t even take a proper nap!

    I would go to bed early just to get some sleep before its morning cooing kicked in.

    At 27, my life was completely hijacked by a fucking pigeon!

    Everyone around me was talking about mental health, stocks, relationships, careers, and future plans, but all I could think about was that fucking bird. One morning, the cooing was louder than ever. I checked and saw that the pigeon had found a partner and brought it along. That meant eggs in the nest and bird shit everywhere.

    Fuck it, I turned on the exhaust fan, convincing myself that if the nest got destroyed, they could always rebuild somewhere else. The fan blades sliced through some twigs and the pigeons flew off, though I could still hear their incessant cooing a bit further away. I left the fan on and finally slept with some peace—the first in weeks.

    That day, work didn’t seem as awful, and even conversations and chatter around me didn’t make me want to bang my head against a wall.

    But, true to form, the pigeon soon got used to the fan. In fact, it probably enjoyed the cool breeze while snuggling with its partner.

    Am I actually making it easier for these birds to mate?!

    A friend felt sorry for me and suggested installing an anti-pigeon device. I wondered if it was worth the hassle of removing the fan, destroying their nest, and setting up some pointy deterrent. Can’t these birds just be shooed away? Surely, they’ll get tired of me eventually.

    Dear reader, you’ve probably figured out I deserve this misery—convinced myself that the pigeons would vanish, even after a whole month of trying, and these little shits still wouldn’t leave me alone. I don’t blame you if you’re pissed off at me.

    I filled a mug with water and lobbed it at the fan, hoping a few sprinkles would scare the pigeons off—and guess what? It worked. That became my tactic for the next few days until one day water got into the fan and it stopped working.

    Wonderful.

    I kept up the water-sprinkling routine, and soon the pigeons learned to fly away whenever the bathroom door opened, expecting a watery assault. I decided it was time to replace the exhaust fan once these pigeons finally left me alone. Maybe I’d even install that anti-pigeon device, since the old fan had to go anyway. At this point, my sole mission was to wear these birds out so they’d never return.

    Every time I heard their cooing or wings fluttering, I’d dash to the door and they’d fly off—sometimes up to 30 times a day with gaps of less than a minute. I stopped giving a damn about sleep. During meetings, I could hear them cooing as if celebrating my absence, and as soon as a meeting ended, I’d storm to the bathroom to rid myself of that delusional noise.

    Why the fuck am I having ego battles with pigeons?!

    This whole ordeal left me fidgety, zoned out, and panicky all the time. Everything irritated me, and I stopped giving a fuck about anything. Nothing made sense anymore. Somehow, the pigeon ruining my sleep, and my desperate attempts to force focus -shifted my perspective and made me cynical.

    I stopped caring if I was rude or sloppy at work, if I ignored texts, calls, or pretended to listen. I started canceling plans, splurging money, drinking, skipping meals, eating only junk, and avoiding people. I locked myself in my room with the incessant pigeon cooing still echoing in my ears.

    I couldn’t even watch films anymore, realizing how many movies, especially Malayalam ones use pigeon cooing as ambience sounds. Just hearing it would ruin my mood, and make me more annoyed than I should be.

    I started questioning why I was stuck like this, rethinking all my life choices, cussing my shitty job, and bashing the dead repetitive culture around me. I even cursed myself for my extreme cynicism and the misery I’d brought on myself. How could I explain to anyone that a stupid bird had ruined my last few months and spiraled me into this mess?


    Isn’t this overreacting?

    But then again, maybe the birds aren’t the real problem. These months of under-sleeping and forced focus led me to a weird insight – the birds only made me more aware of the unhappiness I’d built and let fester around me.

    A few days later…I finally destroyed their nest.

    I had gotten used to waking up early no matter how little sleep I got. One Saturday morning, I noticed the pigeons weren’t there.

    I turned on the exhaust fan, even though it had no reason to believe it would work, because it hadn’t worked ever since it got out of order.

    Miraculously, it worked. This filled me with a newfound hope. I don’t know why a working exhaust fan made me so damn happy.

    I turned it off, grabbed a chair, and began removing all the twigs and metal strings near it. In minutes, their humble abode was gone. I stood on my toes to look higher and check if I missed anything, only to see two pigeons from the opposite building just staring as their home was demolished.

    They started cooing incessantly and pecking at their chests in unison. It looked surreal, and I felt very guilty. I left immediately.

    The rest of the day, the pigeons stayed away. But the morning after that, I was once again woken by their cooing. There was another nest in the making—this time built faster because the pigeon now had a partner. I brought in another chair, and the pigeons flew off. I ruthlessly demolished that nest too, not caring if they were watching. I heard them cooing from somwhere, but I refused to let it get to me.

    That day, they left me alone.

    I slept peacefully for the next two days, and I didn’t feel so cynical anymore.

    On the third day, I heard the pigeons again in the morning, but from afar—they weren’t loud enough to disturb me unless I was an ultra-light sleeper. I was finally free of this pigeon menace.

    But over these months, I still wonder—was it the sleep loss that sent me on this existential spiral, or is it the idea that a mere pigeon could manage to completely disrupt my mental state?

    Either way, this ordeal has left me feeling distant, and has made me stop caring or holding importance over a lot of things. After all, if a pigeon could disrupt someone’s life this way, it’s better to let go of the other metaphorical pigeons in your life before they start ruining your sleep.