The End of Superstition

Anyone with more than a fleeting exposure to Indian culture knows of the prominent role that superstition plays in our lives. There are so many gems: the notion that drinking milk after eating fish causes food poisoning; that an itchy left palm is the harbinger of a cash windfall; that a person’s birth star and moon signal certain “auspicious days” on which things will go their way. The pages of many books could be filled with all the do’s and don’ts. And these beliefs, perhaps surprisingly to the uninitiated, are by no means directly related to the religiosity or education level of their upholders. Even in my own secular, bookish family, I was taught from an early age never to cut my hair or clip my nails on Tuesdays. In case you didn’t know: barbers in India are closed on Tuesdays.

While growing up — whether by cultural influence or my own peculiar volition — I gradually let superstition settle into my psychology. If it didn’t quite take over my life, it was certainly lodged at the back of my mind, a pesky itch that needed to be scratched every now and then. The itch spread after I started playing basketball. If I didn’t wear a white T-shirt under my jersey or a certain headband or a specific color of socks, I was convinced that I’d have a bad game. Superstition is especially seductive when it comes to matters of chance: probability — will the shot go in or won’t it? — is after all a mysterious, unpredictable thing. Sometimes the answer to a mystery is something we can easily make sense of: if we do this, then this will happen. Cause and effect; the oldest story in the universe. The story of the universe. What we avoid thinking about, for the sake of mental convenience, is that cause can be just as unknowable as effect.

Variously throughout my adolescence and early adult life, I’ve believed that I can’t speak of anything that I want to happen before it actually happens, that I shouldn’t change anything about my appearance soon before a job interview, that talking about my problems to my friends and family will only make said problems worse, that Liverpool Football Club tends to perform poorly when I watch a game either in public or with my mother. Each fallacy has been disproven thrice as many times as it’s been supported. And yet for years and years these delusions have persisted, edging me towards paranoia and doubt, chipping away at the basic enjoyability of experience. Although they thankfully never became a clinical compulsion, they were always just stubbornly there. Maybe superstition really is part of my Indian blood.

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Three-and-a-half years ago, I made the move from New York — where I had a steady job and a bit of momentum towards my dream of writing and directing for film and television — to Los Angeles. I’d made the decision several months earlier, one winter morning on a stalled train to work in Times Square. I sat there, thinking about the eye-opening experience I’d had the previous fall in the Sundance Episodic Lab, remembering how many of the mentors had told me that now was the time for someone like me, a young writer of color, to move to Los Angeles to work in television. I wondered if I might prefer waiting in traffic to waiting on a faulty underground train car with a hundred angry New Yorkers. I thought about how much more sustainable my ultimate pursuit — to consistently make small, intimate feature films — would be if supported by cushy writers’ room gigs in the era of “Peak TV.” After spending five years in New York, three as a student and two as a mid-level employee with an entry-level salary, I decided then and there, on that inoperative subway, that now was the time. Now.

“Now,” in this context, was a tricky word. “Now” not only described a specific time, but also suggested that it was a better time than others to get my start, a time of heretofore unseen opportunity for traditionally marginalized talent. Three-and-a-half years on the ground in Los Angeles — the arrival of a global pandemic notwithstanding — have told me that the truth is much more complicated.

I spent most of 2019 doing the “water bottle tour” of studios and production companies, going to big glass buildings for meetings with development executives who breathlessly told me that my voice was exactly what they needed, what they’d been searching for. The patronizing air of many of these conversations rather expertly made me feel that a job was right around the corner. I didn’t have any close friends who were going through the same process, so I had nothing against which to weigh my experience. After each meeting, I diligently sent notes to my reps, emphasizing each project that sounded like a good fit. Working from home as a video editor for my former New York employer, I took meeting after meeting, waiting for the one that would finally open the door.

Simultaneously, something happened that profoundly affected the writing business at the time. The Writers Guild of America had long been threatening to boycott the big talent agencies over the ever-increasing tyranny of packaging (I won’t waste time on the gory details; read more about it here), and just as staffing season was ramping up in spring 2019, the Guild ratified a contract that most of the agencies refused to sign. As a result, union writers fired their agents en masse, taking alternative routes to their next jobs: managers, long-lasting relationships, and direct-to-showrunner submissions enabled by the WGA for its members. Being new to town, I only had one of those options — and given the chaos of the situation, my manager was spread thin. I’d been dependent on the agency system to get me in, a system temporarily compromised with no clear timeline in sight. (To be clear: since I wasn’t a Guild member at the time, I didn’t have to fire my agent; in my case it was simply an unreliable time to be relying on agents.) So I stuck to my job, taking those general meetings, and writing something new. The following winter, just as the industry climate was starting to improve, I had my long-awaited first interview to write for a show. Days after I found out that I didn’t get the job, Covid-19 arrived in the United States.

I understood fully that these were external forces that had nothing to do with me. But other than cold hard math, we never really have a way out of our own subjectivity — and so, naturally, my superstitious itch flared up. That little shit-for-brains voice wondered: had I done something to bring this terrible luck into my life? Did I need to change something about my appearance, my diet, my way of talking to people? Each setback was proof to the part of my mind that I dreaded most — that dark corner of irrationality, self-doubt, self-loathing, and above all narcissism — that these things were somehow my fault, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was cursed. Although my rational, self-effacing side usually wins out in the end, gradual damage was being done in that dark corner, damage that later crystalized when I was at my most vulnerable.

At last a great bit of news came in March 2020, significantly buoying my initial experience of the pandemic: a major studio wanted to option, develop, and eventually sell the new piece of writing I’d been working on. Simultaneously, I got laid off from my editing job. So I returned to my parents’ house in Wisconsin for an indefinite period, cashing those sweet CARES unemployment checks and looking forward to a future that seemed increasingly promising. I even got another job interview for a writers’ room — but like the first one, it didn’t pan out. No matter: if no one was going to hire me, I now had the chance to potentially create something of my own. Wasn’t “now” supposed to be the time of opportunity?

After about a year-and-a-half of developing the project under the guidance of a senior-level writer and a group of incredibly supportive executives, we took it to market in mid-2021. The others’ excitement was palpable, even infectious, but I tried not to get carried away by that feeling. Life and superstition had taught me to be overly cautious. But then I reminded myself of how much experience the people I was working with had. If they were this confident, surely I could have faith that things would come good?

After a couple weeks, the passes started coming in. For one potential buyer, the project wasn’t enough of a “thrill ride”; for another, it showed too much of the “dark side of humanity”; for a third, the audience would be “too young.” We only ended up getting two opportunities to pitch, an outcome that felt distinctly at odds with the belief that had been building around the project. At one state-of-things Zoom meeting with my studio execs, I remember feeling like they were disappointed in me — not in the process, not in the volatility of these unprecedented times, not in the inherent challenge of trying to sell a drama not based on pre-existing intellectual property — but in me, because thinking that was a serious problem I had. One usually associates narcissism with people who are self-regarding, greedy, and attention-seeking; I don’t believe that anyone who really knows me would ever describe me in those terms. But there’s another, more mysterious, more slippery kind of narcissism: the notion that when things don’t go your way, it’s entirely your fault, even when it’s absolutely nowhere close to your fault. The notion that you, and you alone, are the cause of all effects.

To top things off, both pitches we did deliver resulted in passes, too. The morning I got that news will forever live in my memory, as will the couple of weeks that followed. Not only did it feel like the end of the road for the project — I also interpreted it as a sign that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. That’s a ridiculous thing to think barely three years after entering the business, after my very first round of pitches for my very first show, during an extraordinarily difficult time in the world. But the news came after two more writers’ room interviews that didn’t lead to jobs, in a situation where I hadn’t had any income for half a year and was running on fumes when it came to money, options, and willpower. That dark corner of my mind was thriving. Even the good news that one of the potential buyers would keep the door open if we addressed their notes couldn’t stop the irrationality from taking over. I welcomed the dejection and disappointment with open arms; I let the imposter syndrome seep into my veins and congeal in my bones. For two weeks I felt the way I’d only felt twice in my life before, in the aftermath of genuine heartbreak.

But hear me out for a moment, because this is how the story looked from where I was sitting. Boy moves to Los Angeles to chase his dreams. Within months, boy’s corner of the industry enters a conflict that significantly alters the process upon which he’s relying for a job. Boy writes new material to keep the train moving. Covid-19 hits, boy is laid off from day job, new material is optioned. Boy enters a development process that mostly goes exceedingly well. Boy feels a huge amount of confidence and support from those around him — a feeling that’s then turned inside-out by passes from nearly every network in town. Boy later hears that the month during which he happened to pitch was the toughest pitching month in recent Hollywood history, and that if he and his collaborators had just known to wait a bit, things could’ve gone differently. Concurrently throughout this whole process, boy interviews with a total of four TV shows, none of which decides to hire him.

Even in an industry famed for its fickleness and volatility, that’s a really bad run of luck. Re-enter my dear old friend, superstition. What could be the cause of all this? How could I center the blame on myself? I took a look at my reflection in the mirror, and my eyes wandered down to my right hand. On it was a ring that my beloved late grandmother left me, which I’d started wearing in late 2018 soon after she passed away. I wondered about the confluence of the ring’s arrival in my life with all these setbacks, ignoring, almost as a matter of principle, all the good things that had also happened. So right before I went home for the holidays in November 2021, I took off the ring that I’d been wearing since December 2018.

I didn’t think of it as a betrayal of my dear Nani. The way that the dark corner contorted to explain things was this: I hadn’t yet been worthy of the ring when I first put it on. I’d put it on before I’d earned the right to wear it — so naturally it had brought a cycle of misfortune and joblessness into my life. I could only put it back on once I’d conquered these things. So I stashed the ring in a drawer in my room in Los Angeles just before heading back to the Midwest. Less than a week later, the potential buyer that had left the door open reached out to set a re-pitch for the new year. This was something I knew was going to happen — my team and I had already been re-working the project for the past couple months — but the temptation to attribute it to my shedding of the ring was irresistible.

At home, I had a wonderful and restful time with my family. Everyone thankfully managed to stay healthy — this was winter 2021, when everyone who hadn’t yet gotten Covid seemed to get Covid all at once — and I finally had the time to cut two years’ worth of footage of my nephews into a little tone poem. I convinced myself that my very existence felt lighter without the ring, that things would turn around one by one in its absence. I returned to Los Angeles with a new resolve days before the re-pitch, delivered it confidently, and then waited.

And waited, and waited. Traditional Hollywood wisdom advises you to mentally move on if you don’t hear back within two to three weeks. Even though it was January and things always move slowly in January, even though people kept reassuring me that we were very much still in the mix — familiar feelings returned. I started to fear the worst; the dark corner beckoned. Taking off the ring now seemed childish, which, well, it always was to begin with. How could I ever have thought that would change anything? I made a resolution to re-enter the “normal” job market with maximum force, because I didn’t have the time or money to wait for Hollywood anymore. I also started reflecting deeply about everything contained in these paragraphs, returning again and again to the question of opportunity in the American film industry and the nature of “now.” If “now” was so full of opportunity for fresh faces and new ideas, then why had a project that was arguably the first of its kind — a dark drama about an Indian family with an Indian writer and a Pakistani-American female director — been met with such a tepid response? Why was I consistently not making it past the interview phase for jobs where I’d be writing for other people?

The complicated truth is that opportunity is indeed better today, but there are two vital nuances: that better than it used to be still isn’t nearly good enough; and that regardless of your age, race, gender identity, sexual identity, class identity, or level of talent — not to mention the corporate warfare and global pandemics against which you’re totally powerless — this shit takes fucking time. I had misinterpreted the meaning of “now.” “Now” may have been the time to move to Los Angeles, but it was never going to be the time it took to gain a foothold and build recognition. Never let anyone tell you that fame isn’t a factor in this town, because it always, always is. I’m not talking about fame in the sense that Brad Pitt is famous. I’m talking about fame within the industry when it comes to writers, directors, and others on the creative end. When you’re perceived as an up-and-comer in these fields, people are more likely to want to invest in your material when they have the sense that everyone’s talking about you. They like the feeling that they’re getting to you before the others do. This is more likely to happen if your parents are famous, if you’ve done successful work in another country first, or if you’ve struck gold with a buzzy indie feature, web series, viral internet presence, or good-old-fashioned stage play. I don’t have that kind of currency, so time is what I must pay upfront.

Maybe, in my case, things really would have been different in a Covid-less alternate universe. But those far wiser and more experienced than myself have repeatedly told me: in this industry, there’s never a right or wrong time, because there’s always some bullshit going down. Sure, the bullshit may have been magnified tenfold when I entered the fray — but the magnification of something implies that it was always there to begin with.

As the weeks continued to pass and I applied for job after job, I made a resolution one Friday morning to try and leave superstition behind. I’d been cutting things out of my life that led to unwanted stress, and superstition had been nothing but a source of anxiety and warped thinking from its beginnings on the basketball court. Next, I decided that I’d take myself to see The Worst Person in the World in Los Feliz that afternoon. But before I left, I opened the drawer of my desk and looked down at the ring, the beautiful gold ring with the amber stone that had always received such warm compliments from friends and lovers. What was the use in continuing to resist something that I liked wearing? So I put it back on and left. Barely twenty minutes after I got back home, I got the phone call that told me we’d sold our series.

In the heat and thrill of that moment, the dark corner was tempted to wonder: did this happen because I had finally let go of superstition and put the ring back on, or was it the return of the ring that actually did the trick? But I resisted, deciding instead that it was neither, that even thinking like that was a form of superstition in itself. Because life is life, and things either happen or they don’t. And the good things, the best things? Those take time.

Sachin DharwadkerApril 12, 20221 Comment