I like Kdramas. I no longer ask myself why
It’s 12.45 am, and there are voices in my head. One of them asks me to stretch it a few hours more (tomorrow is Saturday. No one would want breakfast before 9. You can sleep in!). The other voice, getting fainter by the second, is the judgemental type — asking me to pack it in (Why on earth are you addicted to this?)
I make myself a mug of hot chocolate and stretch it out till 4. Yoon Seri and Capt Ri have been spotted at the hotel in Pyongyang by his fiancee, and things aren’t looking well. Plus, there is that intense, will they, won’t they romance simmering. What’s sleep compared to that!
The next day I doomwalk through the hours aided by strong black coffee. I have a deadline on Monday and need to work during the weekend. The house looks like everything decided to come out of its place and settle elsewhere. The cushions are on the floor, the nailcutter on the kitchen platform and the fridge is begging me for a cleanup. This is in the middle of lockdown 2020 so there is no maid on the horizon. I yell out instructions to everyone else to sort out things, let out a long sigh and start cooking. We are a six-member household including two ailing elderly people with specific food requirements and no help. And while everyone tries their best to avoid being a nuisance, crowned or uncrowned, I’m the head of planning everything from groceries to meals and medicines. It is draining. More than anything, mentally. “Told you not to watch till 4,” the judgy voice goes again. I shut it down as fast as it comes.
Because it has been ages since I have been immersed in something to this extent . Yes, I binge-watched Broadchurch and Unbelievable and usually forget the world when reading JK Rowling (except Casual Vacancy). I speed-read The Dutch House recently and Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation made me go deep into Partition history, Googling and Podcasts included. I was a Marvellous Mrs Maisel addict.
But now I’m falling down a bottomless pit. A vortex of toe-curling, intense romance and back hugs that are sexier than sex; impossible situations that involve everything from war zones to warped time travel. I can’t have enough of it. I can’t stop judging myself either. The prevailing lockdown buzzword of ‘using the time to improve yourself’ has surely messed with my head. An irrational, expectation-heavy part of me says I’m wasting my time watching this, like the voice that whispers I’m not the epitome of a good-mom-perfect-homemaker if I haven’t introduced my locked in family to global-nutritionally balanced meals and homemade bread.
Was I setting up unrealistic expectations of myself even onscreen as I scrolled through perfect foodgrammed feeds and heard from yet another neighbour how many squats they had done during the at-home fitness challenge they had signed up for or the creative courses they had taken?
I call it a phase, as I spend another weekend afternoon discovering Lee Min Ho and even risking laptop viruses by going down the shady alleys of Dramacool and Kissasian. The self-judgement takes me by surprise, making me wonder why we label certain watches and reads as lowbrow or high art. Why do we have the term ‘guilty-pleasure’ at all? Pleasure has to be a good thing right? Period.
I also wonder why is our perception of indulgence coloured by the choices of others even if we may refuse to admit it? Why did I need an explanation or apology for liking something?
Then one day, as I watch an onscreen Omma who hasn’t seen her son for 24 years make side dishes to feed him to her heart’s fill, I finally shut down the judgy voice in my head and tell myself to give in to joy. The Omma reminds me of my naani. She too would load the dining table with my favourite foods in tiny little bowls, so that I got a taste of everything I liked whenever we met. I end up crying, missing her with sudden intensity and thinking that anything that connects us to our deepest emotions had to be a good thing. It could be escapist, it could be everyday. Didn’t matter.
The judgement lifts like pieces of a puzzle finding shape and my sudden addiction to Korean dramas start fitting in without even trying.
In a year that saw most of us confined to our homes, often at odds with families we were now spending time with 24/7, a year with no travel on the horizon, they became my perfect escape route.
They gave me a peek into lives and culture from another world, very often through food. Ommas packed side dishes to show their love, friends bonded over soju and Rameyon. Characters and scenarios written by amazing women scriptwriters had empathy, affection, insight and an everydayness that was universal. Yes, the premise was often fantasy, the romance too unreal to believe, but it helped make blursdays into better ones.
More than anything my unexpected descent into this world helped me realised how judgemental I was towards some of my own choices — on screen, in the kitchen and at work. And my own hesitation in giving in to something making me happy at the moment.
The daily dal chawal was enough for now I told myself. There will be times when I will feel the need to bake or cook up a storm; there will be times when I will feel the need to dust every inch of the bookshelf and even re-read some classics in it; there will be times when I will want to shut out the world and watch something that helps me bunk real life. And all those choices were fine.
And so the story goes. I have crash-landed into a world of my own within the merry-go-round that is daily life and run to it often — sometimes to escape the grim news coming in, sometimes to relax at the end of a workday and sometimes just because I want to. There’s no need for a reason.
