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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.
We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.
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Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow, Bībhatsam (बीभत्सं): Disgust, aversion. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: blue
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Archetype → Caregiver
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Sadness is a rainbow; Low blues to brown dreary places and champagne-pink melancholia; From frantic orange distress and kind yellow glows of compassion, to the positively mossy green wet states of drunk-sad and everyday miserableness; The beige slow death of grief; Anguish cutting red and pointedly-purple brief displeasures; Grays—somber and dour—towering over the unmoving black waters of clinical depression.
The Rasa theory from eastern performance arts studies is one of our most useful storytelling tools. It’s a great viewpoint into human emotions and their enormous breadth. Among the Rasa theory’s nine elemental emotions, or aesthetic flavours, one of the most poetic rasas is karunā—a rasa embodying a range of emotional states from empathy to sorrow. Although not exactly a pleasurable emotion, karunā is an aesthetic flavour that has a curious ability to create beauty through vulnerability. This month’s story portrays the breadth and diversity of this emotion and the kind of beauty that it inspires. We’ve brought light undertones of two other rasas to add more dimension to the story; Adbūtha (wonder) voted most popular by our subscribers and bhībhatsa (apprehension).
We used the caregiver archetype from Jungian psychology to construct Siri’s character and explored some of its shadows like guilt and feelings of inadequacy. parallel to its strengths like the immense capacity to nurture and care.
In the reading list below, you’ll find stories, art and incidents that inspired us; from Joe Abeywickrema’s award-winning performance as ‘Wannihami’ capturing a father’s long-drawn sorrow, to the psychological disease ‘Munchausen by proxy syndrome’—where a caregiver fearing loneliness imposes nonexistent sickness on an otherwise healthy dependent.
2021, Indigenous on ‘Performing the Goddess. The Chapal Bhaduri Story.’ by Naveen Kishore (1999)
2001, Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day. පුරහඳ කළුවර). Prasanna Vithanage, Gemini Studios.
2005, Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee. River Road Entertainment.
2007, Into the Wild. Sean Penn. Art Linson, Bill Pohlad. Paramount Vantage, River Road Entertainment, Square One C.I.H., Linson Film.
2018, Roma. Alfonso Cuarón. Gabriela Rodríguez, Nicolás Celis. Espectáculos Fílmicos El Coyúl, Pimienta Films.
2018. The neuroscience of sadness: A multidisciplinary synthesis and collaborative review.
2002, The Hours. Stephen Daldry. Scott Rudin, Robert Fox. Miramax Films, Scott Rudin Productions.
Streets of Philadelphia, True story, what happened today. Kimgary.
Factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), also called Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP)
“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening.” - (1912) The Book of Lies. Aleister Crowley.
1957, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung. Jolande Jacobi. Princeton University Press.
David Lynch listens to rain and reflects on art.
Pablo Bronstein, Hell in its Heyday.