The hate around us is like the Amazon on fire. Instigated to scorch everything tender and infinitesimal. Random cruelties are as commonplace as laughter emojis and when genocides (silent as well as triumphantly boisterous), are taking place under our watch, it is hard to take the troubles of Modern Love seriously.
The anthology web series, based on a beloved weekly column in The New York Times is now streaming on Amazon Prime and at first glance offers nothing more than the usual American preoccupation with privileged, existential bubbles. So there is a tale of a tired marriage between two terribly boring individuals. An anxiety prone young man injured by a broken Martini glass. A young woman protesting against capitalism by being homeless by choice. And challenging general propriety by cooking ‘prawn bhuna’ messily in a home where she is a guest of her soon to be born baby’s adoptive parents.
There is the driven entrepreneur mourning the loss of his one true love.
As for the love that may be under siege amid the rubble of bombed and silenced cities, who can really chronicle the immensity of that tragedy?
But still, as you stay on for just a bit longer, Modern Love and its stories turn into little panic rooms you can escape into. To take a deep breath and to believe in the possibility of an everyday miracle no matter where you are. Maybe at the end of a super market aisle. Or in a hospital ward. Or in the familiarity of a weary love that won’t give up on itself even when it rains. A love that is like a good game of tennis (Rallying to Keep the Game Alive). Contentious but ultimately rewarding. Or like an epiphany that outruns death to celebrate what was and is and always will be (The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap).
Modern Love despite its obvious imperviousness to politics and the state of the world except for a passing reference to the Trump presidency (Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am), begins to feel personal. As in a Richard Curtis film, the human montage tells us to hold on, stay in hope and believe that we will be seen, known and loved just as we are.
It also brims with rare kindnesses and honesty. Of men who introspect. And listen. And women who bravely reveal their spirits, their anger, fears, flaws. And connect.
There is such beauty in the concluding scene of the fifth story (At the Hospital, an Interlude of Clarity). In the morning light, on a garden bench after a long night at the hospital, commences a little, intimate ritual of breakfast and silence between two strangers who are now creating a memory of a lifetime.
Davie Bowie, if you remember, wrote a song about the ambiguity of Modern Love. But as the series conveys with moving naivety, if you look beyond crossed wires, unfriended and ghosted shadows you once believed to be real, and the unclaimed territory between estrangement and connection, love actually is all around us. If we just looked hard enough. In that lobby while waiting to be interviewed. At an unexpected surprise on a rainswept afternoon outside a cafe.
Love not necessarily romantic. But affirmative because it brings with it the one thing every human-being needs. The acknowledgement of the uniqueness coded in each one of us. And enough space to hold pain, anger, forgiveness, death , disease, loss and grief and rebirth. This love can be just pure empathy and insight. The kind a watchful, protective doorman extends along with an umbrella to a tearful, lonely young woman when he reminds her that those who truly love her, will stand by her no matter how she deals with her latest crisis. What he does not say but she understands instantly is that those who won’t, don’t matter.
And this is what all the stories say at some level. That ‘connection’ and ‘family’ are words with many meanings. That sometimes a doorman can be the father, the guardian, the counsellor, the friend who can read pain better than those who were supposed to be there but are not.
The series occasionally reminded me of a Pakistani TV hit Dhoop Kinare from the eighties where a protagonist says to a woman drowning in her own pain, “Nobody is totally alone till they choose to be .”
The story of Anne Hathaway’s Lexi is a case in point. Living on the extreme ends of Bipolar Disorder, Lexi is at once Rita Hayworth dancing on a sunbeam and a chronic depressive who needs time away from people, from work, from life to disappear under a duvet for days. Her depression is a secret and so friends have fallen through the cracks and love has knocked and left. Till one day, when she decides to tell someone . We then see her navigating her life on a bike in a key moment. If not ecstatically happy, then in a state of equilibrium and hope.
Because some times, to save ourselves, we must love even the bits that don’t seem loveable and then trust that the universe will take the hint and reciprocate.
Sometimes love is just personal growth when we allow another to disrupt the harmony of a well-organised world view (Hers Was a World of One) . Sometimes it is just the courage to tell an intensely personal story to a stranger (When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist), or to reach out to an inconclusive story, as Sahir would say, and end it at a beautiful juncture.
The most moving is the final story. Of a love that comes to fruition in the last lap of life.
Modern Love is not a perfect project. Not just because it occasionally does some grandstanding with starry appearances. Ed Sheehan, really? Or when the still beautiful Andy Garcia turns up like a character from Serendipity and Before Sunset to claim one last conversation with an old love. Or Tina Fey obviously craving to do something more than what her character’s arc can allow. Still the warmth you feel in a corner of your heart when it is all over is proof that any love story, whether real or imagined, in the end is our story with a few edits.

**Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a  translator who recently interpreted  Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an  RJ  and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.