There was a time I’d instinctively look away when an ad came on. Who wants to be sold something in the middle of a story?
Now it’s the reverse. I lean in, sometimes even replay ads just to admire their storytelling. Meanwhile, it’s the shows that make me look away—their surplus garnishing of tropes served over every episode.
Commercials have always been miniatures: worlds carved into thirty seconds. That’s their job. What’s harder to explain is why half-hour episodes, with all the time in the world, so often feel emptier.
If an ad can sketch a character, spark emotion, and leave an aftertaste in half a minute, what excuse does a series have for bloating a corridor bump into ten minutes of recycled drama?
I’ve been watching shows and films the way some people cram for exams—skipping meals, skimming genres and languages, treating it as study. And when you binge like that, patterns glare back at you. Call them tropes if you like. I prefer “patterns.”
And I don’t mind them when they grow out of the story and the character. My grief is when they don’t. That’s when the story feels more repulsive than an ad.
Take the lift scene. In life, two strangers stuck between floors will check their phones, sigh, maybe complain about the building. On TV, it becomes an epic of destiny. Lovers discover each other. Enemies swear eternal hatred. Violins bleed in the background.
Or the bump scene. In offices, people collide, apologize, and keep walking. On screen, papers scatter like autumn leaves, accusations fly, and suddenly both characters are convinced the other plotted the ambush.
Then there’s the accidental touch. In reality, it’s barely registered, maybe an awkward withdrawal. On TV, thunder claps, time slows, eyes lock like gods just intervened.
These aren’t authentic emotions anymore—they’re emotional artifacts. Museum pieces of feelings that someone once had, now displayed behind glass, studied and reproduced but never lived.
When you write that “eyes lock across a crowded room” moment, whose eyes are you remembering? Yours, or Shah Rukh Khan’s?
Often, I wonder if writers have ever felt this way themselves. In their daily routine, they may have touched someone accidentally. Did it spark anything? Or did they just apologize and move on?
What are the writers expecting?
It may have worked during the 70s. The culture was different. Men and women were barely allowed to be in the same space. There was this scarcity of opportunity. There was the fantasy of love and the biting reality of veils and restrictions. All that would have naturally triggered an emotional spark when a man and woman accidentally touched.
But today, can writers honestly claim their audience will relate to the moment, or that the emotion will resonate?
I feel every writer worth their ink knows this isn’t true. Yet, as audience, we continue to get served the rehashed tropes.
Why does this happen? Because too many writers are writing from sets, not from streets. Their conversations are with other filmmakers, other scripts, other cinematic moments. It’s a self-feeding loop where the source material isn’t life, but a secondhand version of it.
This creates the “inherited emotion”—feelings borrowed from other films instead of discovered in life. When a writer has never witnessed the actual awkwardness of an accidental touch, they inherit the dramatic version from the last ten films they watched.
The result? Stories that feel like emotional hand-me-downs.
But this isn’t just the case with Indian storytellers, nor all Indian storytellers. Wherever the case applies, there are still storytellers who step outside the bubble.
Imtiaz Ali catches the broken rhythm of a real conversation. In Tamasha, when Ved tries to explain his corporate disillusionment to Tara, he doesn’t deliver a polished monologue about dreams versus reality. Instead, he stumbles, repeats himself, searches for words that won’t come—exactly how someone actually speaks when they’re trying to articulate something they’ve never said out loud.
Anurag Kashyap builds from the slang of a street corner. K in No Smoking doesn’t speak like a typical Bollywood protagonist delivering witty one-liners. His dialogue carries the cadence of real urban paranoia—fragmented thoughts, street-smart references, the way people actually talk when they’re losing their grip on reality but trying to sound normal.
Vishal Bharadwaj lets silence carry more tension than a monologue. In Omkara, Langda Tyagi doesn’t announce his jealousy through theatrical speeches. Saif’s performance is built on pauses, half-smiles, and what he doesn’t say—the way real manipulation works through suggestion and implication, not exposition.
Ram Gopal Varma, at his best, observed the underworld not through legend but through the way people actually talk, pause, threaten, and hesitate. Kallu Mama in Satya doesn’t swagger like a film gangster. He speaks in the measured, almost bureaucratic tone of someone who’s genuinely dangerous—no dramatic threats, just the quiet authority of real power.
They’re not allergic to patterns, but they let them grow from character and circumstance, not from the lazy muscle memory of the industry.
But what makes these storytellers different? They don’t just study other films—they study life itself. They roll up their sleeves, step into the crowd, and let the world seep in. They bring stories from society, from characters who, even if fictional, feel so real that you want to love them or kill them.
And isn’t that the whole purpose of storytelling? To make audiences feel genuine emotions for fictional characters.
I believe we storytellers have lost the plot. We aspired to be storytellers, but then got caught in the grind of making a career and started selling well-crafted lifeless prose as stories.
Somewhere along the way, many writers stopped being observers and became inheritors. Instead of discovering emotions in coffee shops and bus stops, they inherit them from the last ten films they watched. The result is storytelling that feels like wearing someone else’s clothes—technically functional, but never quite fitting right.
A writer who resists real-world experiences ends up like a frog circling a puddle, convinced it’s the ocean.
I believe writers who have chosen this path consciously and willingly must also acknowledge that every choice comes with a caveat. To be a writer, you don’t need to read books on screenwriting, or attend writing workshops, or debate with fellow filmmakers about what the scene meant.
What you need to do is step out of the bubble and face the world for whatever it has to offer. Most importantly, you need to be an empty vessel that can accumulate life experiences. If you are too full of yourself, then no matter where you go, whom you meet, there’s nothing you’re taking away from that experience or interaction. A writer who resists real-world experiences ends up like a frog circling a puddle, convinced it’s the ocean.
To be a writer, you need to be the one experiencing life. There’s no workaround for that. Stories don’t need more theory. They need more life.
Ask yourself: when did you last have a conversation that surprised you? When did real life last inform your fiction instead of your fiction informing your life? If you can’t answer that, you might be writing from the wrong room.
Once in a while, sit in a coffee shop for two hours. Don’t write. Just watch. Listen to how people actually apologize, argue, hesitate, laugh. Then come back and write that corridor bump scene again.
Maybe then you would have written a scene that moves you before the producer gives a nod or the audience gives a cheer.