Chicken Tikka in England

I was agonizing over the mediocre Mexican mango I ate yesterday while watching the online Indian mango wars gain momentum. It's summer time and the only thing that comes before eating a mango is fighting about which mango is the best. I don't even love mango as much as my family does for instance. My dad sources mangoes, people perform favors in mango. Crates and boxes travel far and wide before they reach our house to then be safely tucked away under the bed covered in newspapers. They must be appropriately ripened under the bed, making the whole room smell of mangoes. Then he goes under and retrieves the choicest ones for post-dinner debauchery. A few always given to our domestic helps. After all, the joy of eating is communal. It is thoroughly communal and don't let anyone else convince you otherwise. There is more joy in watching someone eat your offering than there is in eating that same delicious mango. So mangoes are fed and eaten - haapus and kesar, the rest is all not fit for consumption only. The gujju mango snobbery entails that dasari, langda, tota must all be cooked with. The season of murabba and chhundo, aam papad and an ever flowing stock of aam panna in the fridge. If I romanticize anything about these summer rituals that I grew up with, I'd be pandering to the implicit Columbusian phoren Amreekan audiences. Other fellow mango-eaters in any part of India will surely have their own rituals. But I sat here agonizing, stuck in the times of a disease that at times doesn't feel real. As usual, home feels extra far. Home feels as far as the breadth of the pacific but then you buy a Mexican mango and eat it as a silent assertion of everything objectively better that lies on the other side of the pacific. I am equally grateful for the avocados on this side of it. I live local these days, trying to be less affected by any thievery of chickpea recipes. Stealing is the amreekan way of life and nothing can be done about it. But playing to the amreekan gallery or making a case for anything Indian is beneath, above and beyond me. Learning one recipe, one flavor, one dress won't establish anything, what I think of as tasteful is somewhere between the ingredients.
But the mango agony stems from elsewhere. A few months ago I encountered the second generation Indian creature in my own home. The version of the second gen creature that shoots its mouth off, amreekan confidence and cheetos power the mouthing off. She, of Punjabi immigrant parents, strove to convince our common white friend that (her exact words), "you have to go to the UK to eat the best Punjabi food". They moved on to rave about chicken tikka, a dish that does not exist. The zombie love child of some colonial encounter. I bit my words at the time, trying to take high moral ground. My face is still learning to react to such bounded idiocy. Surely it is idiocy but then last night I was thinking, if that does it for her, good for her. Who am I to prove her wrong and show her the spectrum of good Indian food? There's nothing like that, my mother makes excellent food and the aunty next door makes different excellent food too. I don't really have a point except that I am trying to rise above the desire to hate on and correct anyone who has anything to say about India. It's just a sort of reorientation where your legitimacy or even any satisfaction doesn't come from helping phoreners discover the true authentic Indian stuff. That in itself would be terribly problematic. But I like this Sarnath Banerjee article, his stance comforts me. He writes about and for his own (whoever that might be). I too am hoping to overcome the desire to shed light or set the record straight. A certain bounded, limited cosmopolitics is good, its comforting. There is no need to strive for universal cultural translation. The mexican mangoes still do suck but they are excellent for mango salsa. Onward to making mango salsa.

Family is Fraught

A still from Circus of Books with the mom and the son (picture credit: Rachel Mason) 

I think the metadiscursive move of queer theory is to start producing a counter/comparative standpoint from where we first start to see the world as not uniform. Gradually, the project of queerness, after having produced enough "not this but another way" reference points, allows for the questioning of that which was held to be normative in the first place. The switch flips on and a queer subject is the one who questions, who is ever so cautious and perhaps to a great extent always unsure. That fundamental loneliness of queerness if to feel unsure, to feel alone and to be able to not fully participate in ritual or scripted enactments of anything. To be queer is to remember one's constantly exceptional, excessive self, often with the realization that one has to live a little less to live sanely.
"Is this love?"
She answers, "It could be, who is to tell what the way to love is? And afterall, love is what love does. Is there a love outside of or opposed to its practice?"
We just saw 'Circus of Books', a Netflix documentary about a sort of underground adult media store in Los Angeles, run by two very straight people. They sort of fall into it because they need to earn a living. One a former journalist and the other, a less successful inventor and media technician. They run this store and they raise three kids. One of the kids makes this documentary as the store is shutting down because after the Internet, their only clientele is ageing (and dying) gay men for whom consuming pleasure and their sense of identity came from participating in the gay video cultures (VHS tapes, pornos, men who made a name for inventing genres of gay porn, people who survived the Reagan administration's morality crusades and the AIDS epidemic). Halfway through the film, the focus shifts to the coming out story of one of the couple's three kids. If the eye is well trained to the presentation and performative gestures of gay bodies, it is not hard to see from the start how this now fully grown, out-of-the-closet man is so gay. But the reveal happens in the later half. It centers more on the mother who was raised as a conservative Jewish girl, she reconciled her business and her (very pleasant) social interaction with her gay employees, customers and business partners as business - as the means to earn money and thus drew a mental line around family and business. Family is straight, family is normal. Business is simply what is needed to nourish the family. But then her son comes out and her first reaction is disappointment. Her less religious husband had less trouble accepting it.
As she says later in the film, "I wish I could take those words back but we all know that is impossible and I talk a lot so I have to remember all that I say." Her moral crisis and her inability to accept her son's full identity while staying true to her own theological cosmology is very raw and real. But what follows both surprised me, it almost seemed unreal and it made me sob a lot. She started doing soul searching, looking for readings, people who have tried to bridge religious tenets with homosexuality. She eventually joins a support group of parents and families that support lesbian and gay children/people. The film reaches an emotional crescendo when she and her husband lead a group parade at the LA pride, representing PFLAG (the organization). It's not the kind of moral arc where an overtly homophobic and antagonized parent has a change of heart. She had already never disowned her son which is the more common story we hear and see on screen. But her whole sequence is supported by an audio track of her speaking and her son speaking too.
He says (or she), "Parents are always supposed to be the ones leading the change and children are expected to just you know, go about their lives..." (heavily paraphrased but something like that)
That is the exact moment when I started to sob because I had already started substituting my own parents into the picture. The long and short of this could be that I wish my parents were capable of such emotional journeys. The truth is that my parents and their seemingly flat emotional arcs are at least symptomatic if not fully the product of the "Indian society" we grew in. In short, growing up, Indian parents' inability to emotionally express or be vulnerable was already a joking point, especially dads.
I like cinema because it allows for this third space between what is (at-large, normal) and what could be (or already is in very small proportions). Like when someone shows you a real example of a good school and it makes you want to believe that good schools exist, surely not where I grew up but they surely do somewhere. It's half desire realized and projected. And I told my partner who was also watching the film, "I wish my mom had such self reflexivity." The times I've brought up queer things with her, just things that are not to be discussed between parents and kids - sex, drugs, wayward desires...she literally blanks me out. She shifts the conversation to herself. She immediately says, "when have I stopped you from speaking your mind and you say what you want anyway"
I know that discomfort. I know she wants to get out of the specifics. It makes me at least momentarily desire the mom who might go join therapy or a support group or be the starter of a conversation around my general waywardness and how perhaps there are other ways of being in the world.
But my partner said something so astute, he said,"we like to pretend that it is us (Indian families) who are infused with love, warmth and care, we maintain our relationships...but we are so transactional, it is full of transactions" To the reader of this post, my purpose is not to be instructive, I am in the half desire space, I am merely exploring things that could be (better or worse). His words struck a chord with me because when my parents visited America, they were amazed to see that most people (in Orange County, San Fran and New York) were not obese, they saw a lot of happy caring families. They cultivated a hesitant appreciation for what they expected would be a wreckage. Afterall, for years we have had NRIs, cinema and newspapers tell us that Americans are facing a moral crisis, families are breaking up and divorce rates are peaking. To find that there are other people who happen to live in other ways and it does not lead to the end of the world is very destabilizing. From my limited perspective, the desi life principle of log kya kahenge (what will people say?) also works in reverse. It also implicates us as a social public into a kind of log/people that feel that constant need to live as if we are living better than others.
Cinema is not evidence in the strict social science way, it is also not anecdotal. The knowledge status of cinematic texts or their instructive value is up for debate. For some of you reading this, there are now countless serials that play on the stereotypes of Asian and Black and Hispanic family cultures in the US but also of SoBo family cultures and Delhi family cultures and Tambram families in India. As they become an easy way to entertain and relate to markets, it is harder to figure out what is organic and what is not (life imitating art?). But this is a documentary and some of my positive reception might have to do with the fact that I have been listening to podcasts on US constitutionalism. Without belaboring it, legal histories especially of landmark cases and autobiographies and documentaries about historic progressive events are very heartening. They just instil a deep appreciation of a land, its people, possibilities for empathy. And cinema is definitely a great vehicle at being able to produce that effect even with one single story, definitely more than my research papers :) I highly recommend 'Circus of Books' and also Pose (both produced by Ryan Murphy). Thanks to Anubha for the recommendation to watch! 

In the waiting room

It's a feeling that I verbalized when I was in an emotionally abusive relationship in 2019. The feeling that someone is constantly keeping you sitting outside in the living room, or in the waiting room of their mind. And what they think, what they feel is inside their private chamber. I thought if I knocked hard enough and often enough they would finally open up. I saw it as their fear of vulnerability. Only later did I realize they also drew power from holding back, from knowing and being reassured that I would constantly permanently sit in the waiting room outside. I hated that feeling and I am currently struggling to find how I overcame it. How I got over trying to guess and access someone's intentions, moods, feelings. It's exhausting. I've been told to write an email and say whatever I want to. And that dialog may not do good right now. I am vulnerable too you know. I can't emotionally labor for two people. I just hope I am not yet again sitting in the waiting room of someone's head. This time I know to protect myself better. Only time will tell. 

What did you do in 2019?

Due to a mix of jet lag and other emotional events in the day I woke up at 4 am again. I usually don't come to India in December but I happen to be there in December 2019. I am very far away from JNU and Delhi and Jamia. I still tell people with pride that I went to JNU because I wanted to be a political student. I wanted to do politics and I wanted to be involved. I did that when I was there. Fortunately or unfortunately it was a time of relative stability, the JNU government was still in exile and the biggest issue at hand was the Arab Spring. I left for Amreeka, things seemed like they were not going to change. Just when I left or slightly after Arvind Kejriwal would win massively, it would appear that there was going to be another populist alternative while the Congress continued to die. It was a different time to think of political viability, what was possible, what was going to happen and what the worst outcome could me. I admit it was a time when those predicting the rise of fascism seemed hyperbolic. Fascism or whatever word for total takeover by a majoritarian Hindutva party. After all it had been business as usual for a very long time. In hindsight despite having grown up in the riot state of Gujarat, it wasn't paradigm shifting. Maybe it helped that our interactions with Muslims were so controlled and cordoned off, there had never been any space to be challenged, to think or feel or be told that my own experience of fear as a Hindu was not the only experience. If that was then, today is now, that kind of impossibility has hardened into norm. I don't even know where to begin to challenge or talk or ask fellow Hindu neighbors, family, anyone what they think of recent political developments. There are still those reminding me that this too shall pass. The thing that I couldn't stop thinking about was how I didn't plan for any of this. None of us did. I left India because I was tired of JNU and this week so many must have planned weddings, flights, exams not anticipating protests and tear gas and the ongoing bulldozing over whatever is left of our democratic processes. I confronted dad today in the morning at 7 am as soon as he woke up. I said I want to go to Delhi. You are not doing anything about this so I have to. He probably knew I wasn't serious but I just wanted to see him say something. He said he has been reading up and that I am wrong to assume that he doesn't care or has a singular opinion. I just asked him what would happen if the delhi police locked me up and assaulted me. I just wanted to see him react and say something. All my life has been shaped by people who hold stoicism and durability over spontaneous emotional responses. Many a time I've felt it was a disingenuous tactic to ignore what is going on at the moment. I even asked him how we would save his Muslim friend if the police came looking for his documents and then destroyed his documents. Who is to stop them? He wanted to say something but I just did not want to hear it. I wanted to hear him agree with me and have a change of heart and become more vocal and do something. I even told him that he was going to die sooner than me and that he was going to leave me behind with this country that I don't want. 

I am writing this because I can't do much more. I don't even know how Ambedkar dealt with all these fuckers whose machinations have borne fruit today. Did someone tell him this was cyclical and this was going to pass? I don't know. Maybe if someone ever held me to it, I would be able to at least show them this piece of writing and say that I thought and cared. I don't know.

Memory Loss and Retro Watching

There is the thing and there is the folding. There is both here. In time I will explain. But how would someone who is losing memory write? What would be the affect, the stylistic choice and the preoccupation of an affected body and mind? There is a lot of hurry to hold onto things, a lot of repetition of words one is proud of, there is a lot of searching the mind for that thing, that song, the words, who said that thing, did we have the conversation? Then embarrassment because it is still early stages and it all comes back to you, it was that other person I said this to. It doesn't matter. I am calling it all stress. Apparently stress makes you forget and blank out. So this is the folding in this post, the larger concern behind wanting to pen otherwise sort of routine things. But the preoccupation with and awareness of memory loss makes one a kind of writer who quickly puts titles and makes blank sections for the self that is soon going to forget what the original aim was.
Moving on, as I was recently telling a colleague who thought I was angry or unhappy about some discussed research collaboration, I quickly clarified that it was literally because I was in a lot of bodily pain. And the diagnosis of fibromyalgia was on my mind when they asked me to mentor someone. That once someone had put a label on my chronic pain, it had become easier to visualize the geography of my pain, two circles behind the elbows, the desire to dig my thumbs into my scapular ridges - it all became a contained and mapped phenomenon. I was too busy thinking about it and being irritated and bloated with the medicine that the collaboration wasn't on my mind at all, even less the terms of it.
And as I've been saying to some of you who might read this, it is both well known and theorized how embodiment generates a certain sensibility and the sensible and often creates the path for a certain life philosophy or even politics. Disability studies and Queer studies have taken this formative ground of experience, non-normative experience and altered experiences as the beginning points for reimagining the world. There is also this paper on cochlear implants that has definitely stayed with me and then my colleague told me of someone's work on epileptic seizures and how it has created a differential understanding of space, spatiality, the dangerous potentiality of objects when and if one is about to have a seizure but also a keen and different ability to sense (sense-ability) if someone else might be about to have one. I am now reading Elaine Scarry's important book (The Body in Pain). An accidental loss of hearing or a prolonged loss of memory then become personality. Having PCOD turns into cysterhood and a new visibility that lets you identify others like you, the discomfort housed in innocuous ticks and gestures (why is she constantly adjusting her hair? Oh I know). I guess the newest addition to my sense-abilities is both, my pain but also the loss of my erstwhile near eidetic memory.
It was scary at first, I am not used to blanking out when I close my eyes to access my mind palace (for those who know me, know I do this). It was part of my superpower repertoire, alongside the abilities to hear when phones are charging and to be able to go into rooms and retrieve objects without switching the light on. Now I just forget things. It sucks. But it has made me better as a person I think. Having grown up as a convent school kid, being raised on punitive rewards - being on time and remembering things were in themselves the mark of good character. I think they are good things but like all other good things they have assumptions of neuro-typical and normative living. Hopefully I will be more generous henceforth with people who forget things. For now I frantically calendar to cope with my forgetting. But committing it to writing is also the folding, for when I might forget this too.

The other thoughts I want to commit to writing are my feelings about the latest and probably the last season of GLOW. For a few years now, there has been a solid return to the US 80s in pop culture. The first time I guess I noticed it was with the success of the movie Drive and its music and clothes. But now consuming retro or consuming a certain slice of the past is mainstream. We are yet to fully dress like that but it's as if living for the 80s nostalgia is very much a part of living in 2019 (at least to me). There is obviously Twin Peaks, Mad Men, Stranger Things, the various reboots of older shows but also more recently Pose, GLOW etc that made me think about something else. So while reading critical theory one is often cautioned against a 'presentist' mode of engagement, meaning that things must be historicized, they must not be read as if they are written in the present time or for us right now. [Aside: must-read on "how to read" texts: http://dumit.net/how-i-read/]

 Especially when texts like Lolita are criticized, people are reminded when pedophilia (or rather love for younger women) became problematic and outlawed. And so on it allows for a more generous or purposive reading of everything from Marx to Gandhi to whatever else. It also in some sense allows us to excavate radical potential - a Jean Rhys or an Ambedkar writing and saying things that once historicized appear so ahead of their times, it would take a historical mode to recognize that. Some of these underlying tensions have also informed why people including me, are frustrated with a certain feminist politics from older (aged) feminist women who called out #thelist (because it is a temporal move, against zeitgeist, it took us so long to temporally drag everyone here and here we have come far). Anyway, coming back to GLOW and Pose also, while watching Pose (also Paris is Burning), I was just constantly marveling at the audacity of queens to ask for treatment and rights, walk and wear things, just do things that felt very contemporary in 2019. Of course in Paris is Burning, there is this beautiful sequence where queens hold a downtown business fashion ball and ridiculously dress up as very serious business men in ill fitted suits and boring glasses. It was beautiful, to be able to reveal the absurdity of a cultural form in their own times (when these businessmen were truly taken seriously).
But it did not strike me until this recent season of GLOW where one of the lead characters who is dating a rancher is suddenly reminded that she is not his (business) partner but his girlfriend. And then she just pauses and her face changes expression for a while which gave me enough time to interrogate my desires for her ending. I started wondering if the directors would, like the recent spate of lazy social justice commentaries ("let's just make Bond a woman"), give this 80s woman a contrived ending and would she just say fuck you and walk out (like a 2019 woman) or would she fall back in her own time (which would also be sad and lost opportunity like in Mad Men). Not revealing what happens, I must say that I really enjoyed how they resolved her dilemma eventually. But importantly, I got so fascinated with the retro as a genre because it is indeed very tricky to animate the retro (use past time as canvas) to do anything - you could just tell an old story, induce nostalgia, rewrite stories, shift focus on minor characters. I am sure there is a lot of writing available on the retro as an aesthetic and as narrative form but I am still gathering my thoughts. I do think that GLOW found clever ways to use retro to speak to contemporary women's concerns perhaps by playing with time and empathy - times when one relegates actions to their time and times when actions were eternal, as if establishing ethic through action. This also reminds me of the time when I really got into sound studies and for anyone who might reach the end of this post, please do read this: https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag/falguni-pathak/
:D