There’s a scene in Whiplash where Andrew tells Nicole he wants to be great.
She asks, almost confused, “And you’re not?”
He clarifies his point. He doesn’t want to just be great. He wants to be one of the greats.
Same word. Two drastically different meanings to it.
For Andrew, greatness was a destination, something you arrive at and everyone notices you’ve arrived. For Nicole, it was simpler. Better than good. That’s it. No podium required.
I think about that exchange more than I’d like to admit, because I’ve spent the last few months living inside the gap between those two definitions.
I went off my phone for a while. Months, technically. Exams, entrances, the usual conveyor belt every Indian teenager gets put on at some point. I didn’t plan some dramatic detox. It happened the way most useful things happen to me, almost by accident, and only in hindsight did it look like a decision.
But I didn’t walk out the other side smarter in the way a syllabus makes you smarter. What it gave me was a strange, specific kind of attention. The one where the thought of doing anything else simply doesn’t show up. And I don’t mean those thoughts were suppressed. They were absent.
I used to think purpose was a big word. Borrowed from somewhere serious, handed down at assemblies and graduation speeches, always capitalised in my head. Purpose. The deeper I sat with it, the smaller and plainer it got. Purpose is just a goal you haven’t achieved yet. You wake up and there’s a direction already decided for you by yesterday’s version of you. That’s it. That’s the whole secret everyone dresses up.
Everyone claims to have a goal, so it isn’t a big deal. What’s rare is the serenity that comes with actually chasing it, instead of narrating the chase. Busy has become a performance most people put on for an audience that isn’t even watching. Posting the grind, captioning the late night, making sure the tiredness is visible. Four months of no audience till end of May for me was the kind of absence that let the work feel like work again instead of content.
Back to Andrew and Nicole for a second, because I think the scene says more if you sit with it longer than the runtime gives you.
Andrew isn’t wrong to want what he wants. But the way he wants it, the one of the greats version, needs other people in the frame. It needs a hierarchy, a ranking, someone slightly less great standing just behind him for contrast. Nicole’s version needs none of that. Better than good is a private measurement. You don’t need a panel to tell you you’ve improved. You just know, the way you know a dumbbell used to be heavier.
I spent these months somewhere closer to Nicole’s definition, even though I always chose to appreciate Andrew’s definition. There was no stage waiting at the end. No one clapping. After all, you can’t measure yourself against a stage that doesn’t exist yet. You can only measure against the version of you that existed before today.
I’m calling this blog Whiplashed because that’s closer to how the period felt than any neat list of lessons would.
Whiplash. The actual sensation. The kind where you don’t notice the speed until something forces your head to turn and you realise how far you’ve already travelled. I didn’t clock the shift in real time. I clocked it in the after, looking back at a version of myself from four months ago and feeling something close to secondhand embarrassment at how loud everything used to be.
I’m more capable now. I’ll say that plainly, even though plain claims like that usually invite an eye roll from eighteen-year-olds handing out gyan they haven’t earned. I’m not interested in handing out gyan. I don’t think four months entitles anyone to a TED talk. What I am interested in is being honest about what changed, without dressing it as wisdom.
What changed is small. I trust silence more now. I don’t reach for my phone the second a thought gets uncomfortable. I let things sit slightly longer before reacting to them, which sounds like nothing until you try it for a full season of your life.
Stillness, it turns out, doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up one day and you realise you can feel stillness even when you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be bored.
I don’t know if I’m chasing greatness or just chasing better than good. Some days it’s one, some days the other, and I’ve stopped feeling like I need to pick permanently.
But I know the difference now.
And knowing the difference, more than any rank or result from these months, might be the only lesson I’m willing to call a lesson.
While you’re here, do check out other stories and blogs I’ve written. Linked here.
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