Let me take you back to a monsoon afternoon in Delhi, a time when the streets smelled of wet earth and the air dripped with potential romance. I was a college student, armed with an umbrella that barely worked and an overabundance of emotions. That’s when I saw him—leaning against a bookshop window in Khan Market, engrossed in a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. To call it love at first sight would be a stretch, but it was definitely a crush at first metaphor.
The thing about crushes is that they feel like secrets you’re keeping from yourself. They flutter into your life uninvited, like a song you can’t stop humming, but whose lyrics you barely know. You’re drawn to something inexplicable, and in that moment, you’re less a person and more a puzzle, trying to solve why this particular human has you spiraling into late-night poetry or, worse, their Instagram stories from three years ago.
Psychologists would tell you that crushes act as mirrors, reflecting back to us what we desire—or think we lack. Carl Jung, the brooding father of analytical psychology, had a term for this: anima/animus projection. According to Jung, we project our idealized traits onto others, not because they possess them, but because we want to see them in ourselves. Maybe I didn’t truly believe that boy at the bookshop had all the answers about life and art; I simply wanted to believe I was someone who could stand beside him in a gallery, nodding wisely at abstract paintings.
Bollywood, of course, takes this projection and amplifies it into an art form. How many of us have watched Shah Rukh Khan woo his leading lady, arms outstretched in a mustard field, and thought, Yes, this is what love is supposed to look like? Yet beneath the grandeur of Bollywood’s romances, there’s often a kernel of truth. Take Imtiaz Ali’s films, where the protagonists’ crushes inevitably lead them to discover something about themselves—a passion, a wound, a part of their identity they hadn’t yet owned.
Crushes also operate in a space between reality and imagination, much like cinema itself. The French filmmaker François Truffaut once said, “A film is like a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death… in one word, emotion.” Replace “film” with “crush,” and the description fits just as snugly. There’s a heightened intensity to it, a suspension of disbelief that allows you to see this person not as they are, but as you need them to be.
Think of it this way: a crush is like a poem—it’s more about what it evokes than what it explicitly says. I remember once scribbling lines in my notebook after a brief encounter with someone at a wedding:“Your laugh sounds like rain on corrugated roofs, / soft yet insistent, a comfort I cannot hold.”Of course, I barely knew him. He might have been an investment banker who thought T.S. Eliot was a brand of whiskey, but in that moment, he was my muse. A crush is rarely about the object of affection; it’s about the affliction itself.
In India, where love often comes wrapped in layers of societal expectations, a crush can feel deliciously subversive. There’s something inherently rebellious about falling for someone your parents wouldn’t approve of—an artist when they’re hoping for an engineer, or someone from a different caste, religion, or even city. This isn’t just rebellion for rebellion’s sake, though. It’s the thrill of stepping outside the lines drawn for you and realizing you exist as an individual beyond them.
At the same time, Indian literature and culture have long celebrated the bittersweet nature of longing. Take the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, where unrequited love is less a tragedy and more a philosophical state of being. In one of his most famous couplets, he writes:“Ishq par zor nahin, hai ye woh aatish Ghalib, / Jo lagaye na lage, aur bujhaye na bane.”(Love is not under control, Ghalib; it is a fire that neither ignites on command nor extinguishes by effort.)
Crushes, too, are fires that burn quietly but intensely, leaving behind a residue of self-awareness. Why did you fall for the quiet girl in the back of the classroom, the one who doodled galaxies in her notebook? Maybe she reminded you of a part of yourself you’ve forgotten—a curiosity, a dream, a desire for something more cosmic than earthly.
Years later, I sometimes wonder what became of my bookshop crush. Did he finish Rilke or abandon it halfway through, like so many of us do with self-improvement projects? It doesn’t matter. What mattered was the version of myself he awakened—the girl who walked home in the rain, imagining conversations about art and life, feeling alive in her solitude.
The beauty of a crush isn’t in the outcome but in the awakening. It reminds us that we are alive, feeling, wanting, and dreaming. So, the next time someone catches your eye—whether it’s a stranger on the metro or a character in a movie—pay attention. Not to them, but to yourself. What part of you are they reflecting? What secret are they revealing? And perhaps most importantly, what poem are they inspiring you to write?
