Side character energy FTW

Did they whoop like Fearless Nadia or toss off an insouciant Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron as the made the jailbreak? That’s left to our giggling imagination.

If Ram Leela performances indicate times to come we might just be on the brink of a new era: an era of side character energy.

This year, during Haridwar jail’s annual Ram Lila performance, two inmates, Rajkumar and Pankaj, playing members of the vanar sena, escaped while acting like they were searching for Sita. 

Did they whoop like Fearless Nadia or toss off an insouciant Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron as the made the jailbreak? That’s left to our giggling imagination.

This is in rambunctious contrast to Ram Leela developments in Agra circa 2010. That year, Raju, the actor playing Ravan enjoyed the limelight so much that he refused to die on cue. When people attempted to cajole him, he brandished his sword and made his way to the centre of the maidan. A member of the organising committee, on conditions of anonymity, told the press that Raju-Ravan did not like the constant pressure on him to get killed soon being exerted by Shyam Babu, owner of Kunjamal Tent House, organisers of Agra’s main Ram Lila for over a century. The police were called. But Raju resisted with determination or as its called on the internet: Main Character Energy.

Main Character Energy, the desire to be the centre of attention, yaniki, make everything about you was creeping up on us unawares in 2010. Then, social media was new and light-hearted, a place to play, not the place of anxiety and enslavement it has come to be. Now, like Raju-Ravan everyone wants to be the main character. The world, your friends, even funerals, are merely a selfie backdrop for #livingmybestlife. What has politics in the last decade and half been but aggressive Main Character Energy, where self-serving vainglory dominates over social good?

Even films don’t have that many side characters anymore. Once, they teemed with side characters that gave them life. While main characters were full of angst and duty and despair, side characters got takiya kalams, quirks, romances and cabarets. Think of Sholay—mausi, angrezon ke zaman je jailor and Surma Bhopali. Think of Johnny Walker, swaying with wit and grace down city streets offering maalish! tel maalish! Without him we would have been stuck with morose poets complaining yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai. Side characters make main characters bearable, like side dishes make Korean food delightful.

Being a main character has been sold to us as being the winner. Matlab others are losers. But side character are not loser, they’re looser. Being a main character can become a kind of prison. The main character is confined to their image, obsessed with keeping everyone’s eyes fixed on them, anxiously holding on to privilege. You think you are the protagonist in a warmly lit film, but it’s no thrilling adventure; it’s just a 90 second reel you have to inhabit on loop. Meanwhile side characters, because no one is looking can get up to all kinds of monkey business, like Pankaj and Rajkumar and break free towards who knows what new and exciting horizons, what transforming worlds?

If you are “just exhausted” all the time, it may not be self-care you need. It may be a little less Main Character Energy and a lot more Side Character Energy. I mean, why be a party of one, when you can be a party to fun?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at [email protected]

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