There is a video clip that Arijit Singh once mentioned as his favourite. A group of guys on a boys trip, headbanger music playing. Someone puts on Arijit Singh despite the driver vehemently resisting. Within seconds, the driver takes his hands off the wheel and starts howling, remembering his lost love. Whatever he had been keeping in place, the music finds it instantly.
Same song. Same car. Five people. One undone.
This is not really about Arijit Singh, although his entire discography does seem specifically designed to locate whatever you have buried and bring it up without warning. It really is about what each of those men were carrying with themselves. The song didn’t create the emotion. It just tugged at it, arriving at exactly the wrong moment for one person and the right for everyone else.
And this happens more often than we realise.
My book club read Dear Life by Rachel Clarke last year. The others finished it and called it heartbreakingly beautiful. I put it down at the end of the first chapter and did not pick it up again. Aging parents, aging in-laws, mortality no longer abstract but something that sits just below the surface of ordinary moments. I could not receive it as a story. It was too close to something still happening. The others were moved. I was stopped. Same book. Same month. Same agegroup women. Yet, we had all read something completely different.
And then there is Chhota Bheem.
My daughter went through a phase where it was the only thing that mattered. We binged it for hours, watching the same structure repeat. Villain arrives. Bheem eats a laddoo. Bheem punches the villain. Truth is, she was watching Chhota Bheem. We were watching her watch it. Every time Bheem got that laddoo, she just lit up. She’d clap, jump up in excitement and yell, “Bheem” along with the soundtrack. That was the story we were actually in. Same screen. Child and Parents. Both watching different things.
She outgrew it, but watched it again with her younger sister, and man is she bummed. She could barely sit through one episode. The same person returns to the same story across years and meets something completely different.
You know the movie that defined romance in the 90s? I loved Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge as a teenager. Even as a young woman it still worked, the romance, the familiarity, the feeling of it. Now, in my 40s, as a mother of two girls, I watch the same film and notice completely different things. Not the big moments. The smaller ones. What is said. What is expected. What is allowed. What is overlooked. Scenes that once felt romantic now look like red flags. Massive ones. The film didn’t change. What I’m bringing into it did.
Actually, it happened to me with books too. I read the Shopaholic series in my 20s and loved them. Easy, funny, comforting. I picked them up again in my 30s expecting the same feeling. It didn’t even come close. Decisions that hadn’t registered before now felt careless. Patterns that had seemed funny now felt exhausting. Nothing in the books had changed. But I was no longer reading them the same way.
A colleague once told me she reads The Art of War every few years and takes away something new each time. At first that sounded like something people say about popular books. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Nothing in that book changes. The words are the same. The ideas are the same. And yet, what stands out each time shifts. One reading it feels strategic. Another time the same line feels like restraint. Another time like caution. The book may not have changed, but what feels relevant in it has, because she has.
This is what we don’t say when we talk about stories.
We talk about good writing and bad writing, about what a book meant or what a film was trying to do, as though the story is the fixed thing and we are simply receiving it. But there is no neutral receiving. A story lands inside whatever emotion you are in at the moment it arrives. Your grief, your hope, your exhaustion, the thing you have been avoiding thinking about for weeks. The story doesn’t know any of this. It just arrives. And the collision between what it carries and what you carry is what you actually experience.
Which is why the same story can be devastating and then completely flat. Beautiful and then unbearable. Funny and then, years later, quietly sad.
So when you go back to a story, you’re not really returning to the same thing. You’re meeting it again. And you’re not the same person it met the first time.
This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .
I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.
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