KOCHI: Then you be the rain and I be the breeze
You be the sky and I will the earth be
When my air drifts to merge in you,
Let your rain to flow into me
Thus when the woods finally flower,
Let us listen to the sea and its whispers
This was an Instagram post on a Malayalam poem that went viral, asking followers to headline it. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of a small book of poems by a poet Nanditha, who died young.
The Insta post was not the only one on her poems; there were several on Facebook as well dedicated to her book, with flashes from her poems being sent as daily snippets themed on love and despair.
Beneath each of her poems are ardent comments by followers, most of them youngsters, asking for her details so that they could follow her more.
The book, ‘Nandithayude Kavithakal’, has just about 105 pages. The poems were found in Nanditha’s diaries after the 27-year-old took her own life in 1999. They were published as a book in 2002.
Those were the days when social media had not begun its rampage. Yet, Nanditha’s book went ‘viral’ among youngsters. Her works celebrated love, its longing, and despair. Some fans eulogised her and visited her grave at her home in Wayanad.
Twenty-five years hence and the social-media age firmly established, Nanditha’s fervour is still high. The book has entered its eighth edition, with Amazon customer reviews rating it with 4.6 stars, and Goodreads 4.1.
Nanditha’s poems may be just as good as several others who write on love and longing. However, her popularity, and its longevity, have almost created a frenzy, a la Sylvia Plath.
No one wonders how and why she became such a long trend; it’s apparent that melancholy has the power to move the young or maybe that it has a long-standing market value.
A quick glance at the evolution of arts shows the interest in the melancholy of the young at heart has gone viral in the virtual space. Termed ‘Academia’ in Net parlance, it presents itself as ‘Light’, ‘Dark’, ‘Grunge’, etc., based on how an individual interprets the art.
With dedicated web pages and sites, the topics up for indulgence include Kafka and Dostoevsky, Da Vinci and Ravi Varma. Paintings with hushed, soft tones and of vacant spaces with dusky ambience, movies with grim templates, songs with sobs, and poetry and verses dipped in melancholy….
The trend, which began in the West in 2017, entered Kerala in 2020. It was a time when youngsters were cocooned in virtual spaces, thanks to Covid.
Chatrooms, search boxes, and blog posts were created, where the young got together posing as readers, writers, students of arts, and discussed works threadbare. “A large chunk of the youngsters who take to Academia are Malayalis,” says Soham Krishna, a Class 11 student.
“The Gen Z internet fervour is more about aesthetics, of which Academia is the intellectual offshoot. Academia can come in varying intensities, of which Dark Academia is the most intense. Here, movies like ‘Dead Poets Society’ and the Harry Potter series, and anything forlorn is prized. For all those solitude-seekers who look for a creative high, ‘Dark Academia’ is dopamine.”
In those forums, what strikes the face is the devotion to artworks that have bold streaks of lows, such as the 1785 painting ‘La Mélancolie’ by Louis Jean François Lagrenée. The image of a woman with a blank stare and posture reflecting choked thoughts is often tagged for its ability to “pierce hearts”.
Though not to this proportion, paintings by Indian artists, too, tug at the heartstrings. Some such are Raja Ravi Varma’s ‘The Milkmaid’ and ‘Heartbroken’ and ‘Despair’ by Amrita Shergill. They are shared and celebrated for the “portrayal of unadulterated feelings”.
“People feel the world created in the paintings is a doorway into their minds,” says Shalini B Menon, a freelance artist, who finds “solace in melancholic art”.
In love with the blues
The blues have been a rage in the past, its popularity helping the launch of different kinds of music. In Kerala, the majority of evergreen songs, for instance, are the ones drenched in romantic melancholy.
‘Anagha sankalpa gayike’, ‘Kanneer poovinte kavilil thalodi’, ‘Himasaila saikatha’, ‘Kaliveedurangiyallo’.... These tracks have ample shades of blues, and, hence, have been lapped up by the Academia trend to be translated into snippets worthy of shares and forwards.
The craze for blues in the virtual space is probably a chip off the block from the past, when film screens too banked on the melancholy magic.
“Filmmakers have used sadness well to create movies and songs. I used to feel a lack of honesty in them. Grief is as natural as any emotion and like love, it smoothly transitions itself to a beautiful memory,” says popular lyricist Kaithapram Damodaran Nampoothiri, whose songs have held generations of Keralites in sway.
Though Malayalam films have, of late, dabbled in positive themes, the swing of the youth towards films on hard truths and sobre themes is strong, if one goes by the internet talk.
Shruthi M, a college student, finds comfort in such films. “I connect with them a lot,” she says. Another student, Devika M R, enjoys films such as ‘Requiem for a Dream’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ for “their ability to evoke deep emotions that offer glimpses of today’s reality”.
‘Dark Academia’ is an example of how subtle, dark feelings can hold the young in their grip and present those who follow the aesthetic of the internet subculture as people who romanticise melancholy, death, and love.
Yet, it is just a virtual trend embraced by the youth to project themselves as “literarily and aesthetically high-bred”, some writers feel.
“They enjoy romanticising stuff such as grief and darkness. Some do so for the ‘cool and updated’ tag. They may love the emotions, but won’t be ready to carry the emotional baggage,” says writer Rahul Sankalpa.
Psychologists believe the trend’s positives and negatives are yet to unfold, though there is always a lingering threat of the blues overtaking individual lives. To ground their view, they cite George Gerbner’s ‘Cultivation Theory’, which speaks of how the audience gets influenced by the emotions it is most exposed to.
“When an individual remains in gloom for long, they may feel it is okay to feel low. Worse, they may create situations that lead them to the blues,” says psychologist Jamila Warrier. “It is necessary to be careful of how these themes can reflect on one’s mental well-being.”
Meanwhile, to many like Kaithapram, the current craving for melancholy could be a passing phase. “Times have their own emotional characters. When I was young, the overriding emotion was that of anger at the system. Writings of M T Vasudevan Nair have ample glimpses of it. So every period has a rasa (dominant emotion) of its own,” he says.
To Shalini, however, ‘Dark Academia’ may have positive overtones, which, in due course, “could lead to appreciation of beauty in sobriety”. Also, in all chances, this could be a passing phase “that could add value to the depth of art appreciation”.
Ramadas Rajan, editor of DC publications, finds the ‘Academia’ trend different from the “very organic” attraction that people feel for emotions expressed in works of art.
He finds the internet space – once taken by self-help, ikigai, mindfulness, and resilience material – now slowly giving room to “heartfelt feelings”. “This could be why N Mohanan’s short novel ‘Orikkal’, on the passionate love the writer had for a woman when young, is trending now. That said, internet subcultures with dark shades need deeper social engagement and analysis.”
(Some names have been changed)