Hey rockstars,

Wow, I’ve been blogging so much. Should I officially add “content creator” to my resume and LinkedIn? Maybe just certified yapper.

I stand by the fact that American music was at its peak in 2010, and Bollywood music was at a high (maybe not a peak) in 2010-2016 (aka when I was in high school to college). I mean, in terms of movie releases we had a set of bangers. And I, with my windows rolled down in Sahleen’s car, was a regular noise-polluting criminal. The amount of Bollywood music we blasted through the UMD campus should have been illegal, but you know what, life was full, free, and fearless. Sahleen had dreams of doing marketing; I had dreams of doing journalism (neither of us do either of these things as our full-time careers now), and nothing could stop us. We were two best friends against the world.

So in thinking fondly of that time, I remembered a song that I absolutely adored from that time: Raat Bhar from the 2014 Bollywood movie Heropanti. There is a moment at approximately 2:10 in that song when it suddenly seems to become even freer.

The loose translation is something like this: suddenly, the night feels new. It tells me to change myself: to taste the moon, drink the stars, and live a little. So let’s go. We’ll fall, get back up, and fly, and let our whole lives pass in this one night.

I love this song.

Not simply because it is catchy, although it is. There are songs I love because they are beautiful, songs I love because they remind me of particular people or places, and songs I love because they make an otherwise ordinary drive approximately 40 percent more dramatic. Raat Bhar belongs to another category entirely: it makes me want to participate in my own life as enthusiastically as possible.

The song feels like happiness, love, and being completely, ridiculously alive. It feels like dancing on a rooftop, driving with the windows down on a warm summer night, and lip-syncing alone in your bedroom with the commitment of someone performing for a sold-out stadium. It feels like the best friend you can tell absolutely anything to because nothing you say needs to be edited first and it feels like being loved by someone who puts in the effort so consistently that you never have to wonder whether he wants to be there.

Mostly, it feels like freedom. More than anything, a girl wants freedom: the freedom to live; to love and be loved; to laugh too loudly and care too much; to be ridiculous, ambitious, affectionate, and curious; to make a mistake, think well, I know better now, and carry on without turning it into something bigger than it needs to be; to trust the people she loves; to trust herself; and ultimately, the freedom to be her.

A few days ago, around 6 p.m., I was driving to go on a walk with my friend Michael. On a deserted road, I looked up and saw the moon. It was a perfect gibbous moon, so clear that it almost looked painted on the sky. I could see every crater, every shadow, and every shift in light across her surface. She was practically glittery white.

I love seeing the moon before it gets dark. I love the slight surprise of finding her hanging in an otherwise blue sky, like it’s my lucky day and she’s blessing us with her presence early. While driving, I looked up every so often, until I got to a red light and I was hypnotized (so much so that the car behind me did a gentle “beep beep.” Oops).

But one thought kept coming back to me: I think seeing the moon during the day is so fun because maybe she wants to see the world too.

She sees people taking long walks by the water when nobody particularly wants to go home yet; she sees friends spilling out of bars, laughing about something that probably won’t be nearly as funny when they try to explain it tomorrow; she sees outdoor movies and rooftop conversations; she sees the person driving home with the windows down because the air is exactly the right temperature and the song is exactly the right song; she sees couples walking nowhere in particular and friends sitting around talking long after dinner has ended because somebody said, Wait, one more thing.

The moon gets to see us when we linger, and I imagine she loves us that way. But maybe every once in a while, she wants to see what the sun sees.

The morning coffees, the afternoon drives, the friend sending an absurd text in the middle of the workday just because she knows exactly who will find it funny, the person hearing good news and immediately reaching for her phone to tell the person she loves most, the “quick lunch” that accidentally becomes two hours because the conversation is too good to leave, someone singing quietly to herself while she gets ready, someone buying herself flowers on a completely unremarkable Tuesday, someone laughing in the middle of a conversation so hard that she temporarily loses the ability to finish the sentence.

Maybe she wants to see the ordinary happiness too.

Whenever I think about grand celestial things, I am filled with gratitude and grace. Something about looking up at something so much bigger than me makes everything else feel a little lighter. It reminds me that life does not require quite as much gripping as we sometimes think it does. It makes me think that when I make a mistake, I can respond with grace toward myself: Okay, that’s fine, I’ll know next time.

For a long time, I thought freedom mostly meant the ability to do what you wanted. To go somewhere, leave somewhere, choose something, say no, say yes. And of course there is freedom in going where you want, when you want, and choosing to say yes or no. These are freedoms many people in the world (especially women) are not afforded. But I think there is another kind of freedom too: the freedom simply to be.

There is freedom in not needing every interaction to confirm that you are loved, freedom in not having to explain every version of yourself, freedom in knowing that a mistake is simply a mistake and not a character assessment, freedom in believing someone when they show you that they care about you instead of searching their behavior for the tiny piece of evidence that proves otherwise, freedom in realizing that not every uncertainty requires an answer immediately, and freedom in being able to be a little foolish.

I love that last one. You cannot dance freely while simultaneously wondering how you look dancing or tell your best friend the ridiculous, unedited version of the story if some part of you is busy calculating how it will make you appear. You can’t roll the windows down in the UMD parking lot and blast the newest Bollywood bop with your best friend, if you’re too busy observing yourself living.

At some point, you have to stop watching yourself have a life and just have one.

That is Raat Bhar to me. It is a song that rather unreasonably tells us to taste the moon and drink the stars, but when you’re free and happy and fully inside your own life, that is exactly what it feels like. It feels like more dancing, laughing, love, possibilities, and life.

It feels like: I love this. Can I have a little more?

And maybe that’s why I love the daytime moon so much. She isn’t tired of the night at all, she loves shining there. But she loves the world enough to want a little more of it.

She wants to see what the sun sees and wants the freedom to see it all.

Why should a girl feel differently?

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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