I remember feeling a great sense of discomfort as I watched Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped in the theatre. It wasn’t so much the Animal-Planet-meets-Mumbai-real-estate horror special that Motwane had cooked up for an unremitting two hours. Or that sense of feeling tethered to your seat, unable to help as a harrowed Rajkumar Rao remained similarly tethered inside a Mumbai 1BHK. That sense of utter incapacitation was only Trapped’s greatest USP.
No, the greatest sense of discomfort came from the realisation that the movie – in all its claustrophobia – was reminding me of conversations.
How utterly bizarre.
Why the Admission of Loneliness Is a Hard Task
It brought to mind the voice of a friend who’d recently moved cities. Ironically, to Mumbai. “Things are alright,” she’s been repeating unconvincingly for a year now; “I just get lonely sometimes.”
The admission is often hastily stymied by gossip about common friends, each other’s work problems and relationship issues. You know, the works. But the idea of ‘loneliness’ that is floated ever-so-hesitantly into the universe of social niceties is quickly folded up and allowed to die an unnatural death. God forbid people know you’re lonely – is the thought drilled into our work-addled brains.
Loneliness is a reality, yes, but in big cities – particularly the Mumbai that Rao’s character inhabits – is a reality that needs to be rescinded lest it threaten the Facebook-friendly, selfie-taking, Saturday-night-dinner-hosting personas most millennials create for themselves. In most conversations where one does voice the angst of being alone, one is quickly told to “go out, have some fun!” to solve the problem. Quick band-aid. Quick fix.
But what if the loneliness is only further compounded by that quick fix? In an article for Psychology Today, author Sophia Dembling talks about something she refers to as ‘the loneliness loop’.
People would ask me out for dinner and I would say no, people would ask me out for drinks after work and I would say no. Social interactions began to make me anxious, and that was the case even though I desperately needed more sociability in my life... And when you’re lonely, you can start to feel as though you don’t have what you need to bring to social situations, you don’t feel safe in those situations. So you start to retreat and the more you do that, the lonelier you become, and it becomes this vicious circle that you can’t get out of.
The problem doesn’t arise from a lonely individual’s fear of people – the problem lies in finding validation in superficial connections (such as a social media platform or a set of strangers one doesn’t know at all). Dr Seema Hingorrany, clinical psychologist and trauma expert, suggests finding validation in yourself as the first stepping stone:
People who are lonely spend more and more time trying to socialise for the fear of being ‘left out’ – and lesser and lesser time on themselves. That can lead to them feeling emptier within. I ask them to just be. Meditate. Read. Whatever you like. Once you’ve begun to enjoy spending time with yourself, you will be able to stop worrying about others liking you – and the pressure will be off. You’ll be able to socialise with far greater ease.
‘Trapped’, in the Hopes of a ‘3 am Friend’
Trapped, in its bare essence, captures all of those trappings with almost deliberate perfunctoriness. There is little or no self-exploration that Rao indulges in as he rushes about getting a girlfriend, hurriedly promising to marry her, deciding to move out of a rented apartment where no one really cares about him anyway and renting the fated 1BHK where he ultimately faces his demons. Notice how the wooing happens over a period of cursory phone calls that parrot almost the same phrases, over and over again. Or the proposal, that flits out in a rush, because rushed-ness is the only acceptable state of being in an urban setting.
Which is why it is remarkable that the only times Rao’s character actually ‘shuts up’, stops trying to fit in and lives, is whilst he’s physically trapped – yet freed of all societal trappings. The woman he loves has obviously been wedded off in the three weeks that he’s caged, the world continues to flit by and no one cares. But finally, miraculously, Rao stops caring.
Reiterates Dr Hingorrany who talks about taking in “at least 50 to 60 percent more cases in the last three years than ever before” of loneliness, angst and depression.
A former work colleague who now lives in Bangalore talks about “going to parties and switching off”. “I like to watch football if someone’s got a TV. I usually camp out in a room watching whatever’s playing in case I feel like I won’t get along with the people at the party.” Why does he go at all, I often ask him? Wouldn’t he rather spend time by himself?
Everybody is figuratively trapped in a room of their own making. I have clients who complain about seeing ‘happy faces’ on Facebook and Instagram. These are people who go back to empty homes, who suffer one broken relationship after the other, desperately hope for for a ‘3 am friend’ – and yet have no one to open up to. They say ‘yes’ to parties and keep up with the niceties, but are completely locked within themselves.Dr Seema Hingorrany, Clinical Psychologist and Trauma Expert
“The incessant fear is always ‘what will people think about me?’ They never stop to wonder ‘what will I think of myself’?” says Dr Hingorrany.
Also Read: Loneliness: The Next Big Epidemic
I think of the friend in Mumbai who’s been lonely for a year and yet doesn’t bring it up. I ask Dr Hingorrany what she tells people who won’t admit they’re lonely.
“I ask them to put away the mask. I let them know that they can stop leading a dual life.”
Of course, for a cross-section of urban dwellers who survive on a steady diet of ‘happy Facebook pictures’ and ‘Instagram filters’, the act of putting away the mask is easier said than done. But ever so often, in the quietude that you must steal away for yourself, let yourself be.
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