How Jim Sarbh's resplendent voiceover helps add perspective to Netflix's Eternally Confused and Eager for Love

It begins with the narrator’s retort, _Eternally Confused and Eager For Love_ – Jim Sarbh agitatedly voicing over the frustrations at the football pitch as our protagonist, the confidently nervous Ray, looks on.

Thirty seconds into the show, Ray asks the voice in-his-head, the narrator, to “stop being so negative.” “I’m just being realistic,” flings the repartee, summing more or less the relationship between our lovelorn protagonist and his inner drumming: the latter is only an uncut, unabridged version of the former’s exposed self. It does not have to vacillate between the binaries of positive and negative as Ray does on the outside, but can speak out — quite literally — their mind.

This inner voice, comprising thoughts frivolous and wasteful, outlandish and outrageous, is the recycle bin of a mind’s processing machine.

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It can both delete and restore, depending on the state of our protagonist’s being. It dissects the present, but carries the weight of the past, imagines future possibilities, and decides every time. That Sarbh’s part-heavy-part-shrill but ever resplendent voice does all this is a treat — a beat rather that reigns over the show.

An overarching consciousness 

At a rendezvous arranged by his best friend Ria, Ray finds her date a tad different from his imaginations, having not met or seen her beforehand. Just when he finds himself spiralling into a demeaning spree, the voice within reprimands him, blurting “how it’s not about others perceive you, but how you perceive yourself.” Ray rises, rejigs, and returns to the table in the next moment.

The question of self-perception, albeit unresolved, is at the core of Ray’s demeanour. He constantly concerns himself with his image, and in turn, an imagined reality, where even before anyone can see him, he portends a picture of them seeing him, reacts — mostly knee-jerk — and fritters apart. In other words, Ray is too conscious of himself, sometimes to the point of being self-extinguishing, like the one instance when he runs away before meeting someone his parents ask him to, presuming she would only be displeased upon seeing him. His self-image then is just a reflection of how others may view him – a tinted reality.

Ray’s dilemmas, even as they surface only in their present forms, hint at a deeper and an older malaise, which has either recurred or remained unnoticed for so long. It is only once in the show that he cites an incident of the past that may have had some bearing on his predicament, when he says how he was the only one to not get a single vote in the competition back in school to select the most attractive boy. A scar from childhood that never healed.

Similar incidents perhaps lead him to develop the self-deprecating tendencies, where ultimately his ever-reticent conscious took over, made him too wary of recognizing, taking, making the chances as life flew by. This is also where the show does not deliver as impeccably, in that it does not lend any depth whatsoever to the present state of Ray. Why is Ray the way he is at best uncertain, and at worst, anybody’s guess.

Is Ray the only one who understands it? 

There is an almost exquisite contrast in the way the show conceives Ray and his fellow folks. The latter are freewheeling, outgoing, and exemplary even of the you-only-live-once phenomenon. Markedly so, for Ray’s inner voice is made more apparent by this contrast. His closest of friends — Ria and Varun — at least seemingly, go with the flow, while he grapples with the world inside his cavernous head. His voice is a check others either lack or do not invoke enough. He, on the other hand, uses it too often, every now and then rather. Ray is an outlier in an extroverted world. An introvert. The inner voice a manifestation of his gut, speaking in greater volumes than Ray does in the show, akin to an introvert’s case — in conversation with themselves more than the outer world. A portrait, in fact, of Ray as an introvert without the inner voice in full stead would have marred the depiction of his character, made it too sparse and vacuous.  

The emphatics of Ray’s inner voice, or conversely, its absence in others around him, lays the ground for a more millennia inquiry, one that the show encircles but never delves into. “Am I the only one in the generation who understands it?” Ray quips after an untowardly encounter, hinting at what he finds missing in the present zeitgeist. Everyone around him is different but same — less conscious, less self-aware, less self-reflective. Ray, to his mind, is all that everyone lacks.  

There are other moments too in the show when Ray’s inner echo inches towards making similar sweeps. Like the one time when it questions how come Ray sent a text without a safety net of emojis — hinting at emojis being a result of the evolution of artificial human expression — or the other time when it says how Ray and the voice are inseparable. The point is made and impressed as Jim Sarbh unleashes the crests and troughs of his voice box: a voice, howsoever constraining, exists within Ray. It is there in others’ too, waiting only, to be reckoned. If Ray needs to listen to it less, others need to pay more heed to it. To that voice-in-their-head.

Eternally Confused and Eager for Love is streaming on Netflix India.

Raunaq Saraswat is a freelance writer and a final year undergraduate at IIT Delhi. He writes mostly about culture, books, and cinema.

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