The Art of the Unfinished: Against Productivity Culture

The easel still stands in the corner of Priya's one-BHK in Andheri. She bought it in the summer of 2020, when the city had gone quiet and the only sound from the street was the occasional stray dog and a distant pressure cooker. Painting felt like the right response to all that stillness. It felt, more honestly, like the right thing to post about.

She laughs when she says that now.

"I think I wanted to feel like I was using the time well," she says, scrolling absently through her phone. "Everyone was learning something. Baking, guitar, a new language. I chose painting."

She was good at it, too, in that early, effortful way. She watched YouTube tutorials at midnight, bought a set of acrylics from a shop in Lokhandwala, stretched her first canvas on a Sunday afternoon with the focus of someone defusing something. The paintings were small and a little clumsy and completely hers. For a while, the corner of her apartment smelled of linseed oil and something like possibility.

Then the office reopened. Then the commute came back. Then life, with all its familiar weight, returned to fill every hour she had carefully kept empty.

The easel is still there. The brushes have gone stiff in their jar. There is a half-finished painting of a monsoon street, the rain only partly rendered, the figures faceless and waiting. She hasn't touched it in over a year.

"I don't even feel guilty anymore," Priya says. "That's the strange part. I just feel like that was a different person."

Maybe it was. Lockdown handed us a particular kind of quiet that doesn't exist in ordinary life, and we filled it with versions of ourselves we'd always meant to become. Some of those versions stayed. Most didn't. Priya still works in tech, still takes the same crowded Western line every morning, still eats dinner too late and sleeps too little. The painting corner is just a corner now, smaller than she remembers, holding all that evidence of who she briefly was.

She doesn't want to dismantle it, though. Not yet.

"It reminds me I can want things," she says. "Even if I don't always finish them."

There's a word for that kind of space, probably. A record of curiosity, of restlessness, of being alive enough to reach for something even when you weren't sure what you were reaching for. In a city like Mumbai, where time is a thing you fight for every single day, that reaching counts for something.

Even when the painting stays unfinished. Even when the rain in it never arrives.