Bumblebee is not an option

No.
He wouldn't listen and rambled on about doing a short film.

No, I don't want to, but Sheridan Mahavera had conveniently left his ears elsewhere and chose to ignore my replies.

He said the Freedom Film Fest organisers would give grant and technical support to film a documentary. All we had to do, he rushed his words, was to send in a proposal.

And when is the deadline for this proposal?
May 17, he said.

WHAT? It was three weeks away.

And the subject will be?
You know, the temple in Section 19 (shah Alam) the one with the cow-head protest.

WHAT? I'm not doing a political documentary.

I stood up and walked away from our table. He was acting like a kid in a toy-filled megastore who is fixed on a Decepticon model. You either buy the toy or buy the toy. You can't reason with a kid like that. After some pacing, I return to our table and looked at him squarely. The only way to deal with this was to throw questions. Create doubt. Buy time.

It dawned on him the many aspects he did not factor in: storyline, concept, visual dynamics, research, and above all the acutely short time.

Collaborate, he said.

I threw more questions at him. I realised he had no inkling the kind of cliff he was leaping off from. Should I turn this writer away and watch him sink or swim? Delicious thought. But by then I saw something else painfully familiar to me: the burning desire to tell a story, it resonated in his voice and deeply etched on his face. From another point, he was offering me an adventure, to tell a story in another medium. I have written television dramas but this project would put journalistic writing to a non-linear medium. That too, was a delicious thought. Why not?

It was just a proposal, he said. I consented with a long list of conditions.

I felt I had just agreed to buy the kid the fancy toy. Problem was, I would prefer a Bumblebee.