Berlin, and the Art of Wanting to Live

 

Two weeks in Bangalore now. Two weeks, and the city still feels like a borrowed jacket — right size on paper, but it just refuses to sit on my shoulders the way Mumbai did. The traffic doesn't make sense, the roads loop into themselves, and every evening the same thought rings in my head — yaar, yeh apni jagah nahi hai. People keep telling me it grows on you. Maybe. For now it just sits on me, heavy, like an unwanted guest who has decided to stay for dinner.

So I did what I always do when a place refuses to feel like home. I went back to something that does. I opened Money Heist again.

Funny thing about watching anything a second time. The first time, you are a slave to the suspense — racing ahead, eyes glued to what happens next, who lives, who dies, which mask falls when. You swallow the story whole and miss half of it. But the second time, the suspense is gone, and suddenly you have eyes for everything you blew past. The plot stops mattering and the details start screaming. A glance held a second too long. A line that meant nothing then and means everything now. The characters stop being moves on a board and start becoming people you think about while brushing your teeth. Tokyo, all fire and impulse, the kind of person who burns the room down and then asks why it's so warm. The Professor, sitting three steps ahead of everyone, loving his team in that quiet, planning, terrified way. Nairobi — God, Nairobi — the heart of that whole gang, the woman who held the chaos together with her bare hands.

And then there's Berlin.

I wasn't supposed to like Berlin. That's the whole trick of him, isn't it? He's vain, he's cruel, he's the man you'd cross the road to avoid. And yet, episode after episode, I found myself waiting for him to walk into the frame. We do this, no? We define good and bad by our own little experiences, our societal rulebook — and then a character like Berlin comes along and quietly tears the rulebook in half. He's the Joker who wears a tailored suit. Difficult to categorise. Impossible to look away from.

And Berlin is made for a second watch. The first time, he's just the arrogant one. The second time, the small things start jumping out at you. That slight tremor in his hand you wrote off as nothing — it isn't nothing; the man is quietly dying of an illness he tells almost no one about, and once you know that, you start spotting the moments he braces himself against a wall, the pauses he disguises as drama. The way he sings Bella Ciao with the Professor in that cellar, shoulder to shoulder, grinning like a boy — it lands completely differently once you learn the two of them are brothers. That's not two colleagues celebrating; that's blood singing to blood. The odd tenderness he shows certain hostages while being monstrous to others. The way he touches things — savours a glass of wine, straightens a cuff, lingers a beat too long in a doorway. First watch, you see a villain chewing the scenery. Second watch, you see a man who has done the math on how few mornings he has left, and refuses to rush a single one of them.

But here's what hooked me this time around, what I never noticed when I first binged it — Berlin is, underneath all that ego, a hopeless romantic.

Not romantic like roses and Yash Chopra rain (though I do have a soft corner for that, my old readers know). Romantic in the way he treats life itself as a love affair. For the Professor, the heist is a mission. For Berlin, it's a performance, a spectacle, a stage on which he gets to be fully, dangerously alive. He doesn't want to merely survive the moment — he wants to romance it. To squeeze every last drop out of it. The thrill is the point. The consequences are someone else's problem.

He loved like he stole — completely, recklessly, no thought for the morning after. A man who knew his days were borrowed, and chose to spend them as gold, not coins. Cruel, yes. Vain, certainly. But never, not once, asleep at the wheel of his own life.

And that, sitting in my too-quiet Bangalore flat, is what got under my skin.

Because Berlin had every reason to play small. The man was dying. He knew it. And instead of shrinking, he expanded. He philosophised about love like a poet, married five times not because he didn't believe in it but because he believed in it too much, every single time. He treated discipline not as a cage but as the guiding light — zero tolerance for improvisation, calm in the eye of a storm that sent everyone else into panic. The most flawed man in the room, and somehow the most essential.

That's the cognitive dissonance, no? You sit there thinking — how can I admire someone this broken? But maybe that's exactly it. He was broken and he still showed up fully. He didn't wait to feel at home before deciding to live.

There's a balance the show plays with — Berlin's cold, calculating fire against Nairobi's warm, emotional steel. When he loses his way, when he becomes a danger, it's Nairobi who pulls him back to earth. Every Berlin needs a Nairobi. The ego needs a heart to answer to, or it runs off a cliff dressed in a three-piece suit.

And then, the final act. The question the show never quite answers and I love it for that — when Berlin makes his last stand, was it love or was it ego? A real sacrifice for his family and his team, or a beautiful escape from the shame of being seen as flawed? Because shame needs an audience. His mask had slipped, his self-image lay shattered on the floor — and maybe a man like that would rather die as a legend than live as a man who was found out.

I don't have the answer. I'm not sure Berlin did either.

But here's the thought I carried back from the screen to my unfamiliar little flat: I have been treating these two weeks like a waiting room. Sulking, comparing, month hi kharab chal raha hai saala energy. And here's a fictional dying con man teaching me that you don't get to wait for the place to feel like home before you start living in it. You romance the moment you're given. Even if the moment is a strange city and a borrowed jacket and a leaking tap somewhere.

And honestly? That's the part that breaks my brain about him. The man finds room for romance in the middle of an armed siege. Snipers outside, hostages inside, the whole country watching, and Berlin is busy falling in love, savouring wine, making the most catastrophic situation of his life feel like the best night out he's ever had. Put me in that room and I'd have gone completely crazy — biting my nails, jumping at every sound, counting exits. He treats it like a stage. I'd treat it like a heart attack. That gap between us is the whole point, no?

So I'm left sitting here with my chai going cold, asking myself the questions the show never quite answers:

Was Berlin brave, or just a man with nothing left to lose pretending it was a choice? Is "live every moment fully" actual wisdom, or only a luxury you can afford when you already know the clock is running out? Can you really romance a moment you didn't choose and don't even like — a strange city, a borrowed life — or is that just a pretty lie we tell ourselves to feel less stuck?

And the one that won't leave me alone: if I knew exactly how many mornings I had left, would I finally start living like Berlin… or would I just keep waiting, the way I'm waiting now, for somewhere to feel like home?

Berlin wouldn't have waited. Vain idiot.

…More on this city, and whether it ever feels like mine. Tune in for next.