For Sudhir Mishra, the pandemic has left an everlasting impact on his life, and not everything about it is good. The filmmaker says holding his ill father in his arms and running towards the ICU, and then watching him die has changed him, and he is still figuring out how.

"You know, (author) Manu Joseph once wrote an article about me and said that 'I'm the collector of frail men'. Now, I see myself as much more frail after the pandemic," Mishra told IANS, when asked about the projects he is working on.

"I'd like to relook at things that I've been working on. I am working on a film, I am working on a script, I am working on a couple of OTT long form things. There is a historical series that I am rewriting. So, there is a lot of work, but through these five or six months, some other story seems to be emerging and I am trying to get a grasp of it," added the filmmaker.

He continued: "I don't know this whole experience of the pandemic. I've lost a bit of my swag. When I saw myself terrified, holding my father in my arms and running towards an ICU, and then watching him die, that has done something. I don't know what exactly. It will show in my next (project)."

Mishra entered the showbiz as a director with "Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin" in 1987. He added strokes of diverse stories on the cinematic canvas, from "Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi", "Chameli", "Inkaar", "Khoya Khoya Chand", "Calcutta Mail", "Inkaar" to "Hostages".

His most recent project was "Serious Men", an adaptation of Manu Joseph's book of the same name. The Netflix Original film featured Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and narrated the story of a father who wants to create a bright future for his son.

After spending so many years in the industry, Mishra says he still gets amazed at how stories often decide their own course, and shape.

"The magic of storytelling is that sometimes you write a scene and when you shoot the scene, something happens. You don't know where it came from. You think 'How did I write this?', 'Where did it come from?' And that's the magic of storytelling, and then when it reaches people, people have different reactions to it," he said.

"The same book means one thing to one person, and another thing to another person. When people interact with a film or a book, they seem to be interacting with different things, because they are interacting with it from their own heads, backgrounds, mysteries of their own. It is fascinating to see that," he added.

(Sugandha Rawal can be contacted at sugandha.r@ians.in)