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

I could've been a different person

It had been a few hectic weeks of moving about and here I was, finally, drinking fennel chai to feel better. It struck me that I was sitting facing a balcony door and all around me was quiet. It was really really pleasant. The kind of quiet and pleasant that heals you. There was space around me and emptiness. But there were chairs to sit on and a table to put my cup on. There was a cute dining table where I could sit and have dinner. I was still sitting facing the balcony door and now the only difference was that the balcony door was open and there was so much breeze. It made me even happier, like a Sims character that was suddenly discovering interactions with every object in the house and gaining happiness points for it. What might not be apparent to anyone reading is how my happiness is tinged in great part due to my own changed relationship with material objects over years of staying in hostel dorm rooms, shared rooms but especially in the past four years, when I've have had my own apartment so to speak for at least a few months at a stretch. The last four years have also marked intense periods of precarity, of living in hotel rooms for months and more recently, just not having a home at all. Of course, all of this is marked by the kindness of strangers and friends, their willingness to let me stay put an extra week even after the monthly rental dates have passed. It is against that kind of a wash, a sea of constant change washing over me that I found myself sitting facing the balcony, more amused with every passing second at the incoming breeze, the affordance of all this breeze and nowhere to go. I casually gazed around in disbelief and relief. And my gaze rested on the dusty ukelele under the table. It's hard to really start describing where these self-imposed beliefs materialized and just settled as if they were mine, as if I cultivated them as my own personality traits or beliefs. But a person like me would not know what to do with the ukelele. Almost suddenly out of a half instinct of someone who has never touched, nay, who has never dared touch a ukelele, not in the market in Hawai'i, not in a music shop, not been in the house of someone who casually has a ukelele or a piano or a guitar lying around, with the half instinct and the full baggage of a persona whose habitus has never had access to a ukelele, I grabbed it. I knew what I was going to do, I was going to cluelessly strum it. I had, in the past, cluelessly strummed at a guitar somewhere and pretend-played a piano in a harmless setting somewhere. Almost immediately I had realized that I was not one of those who would live to tell the story of how they were meant to be playing music. The second that followed was the stark reminder of my painful days with the harmonium. I fucking hated it. I had no idea what it would take to start instinctively playing a tune. Who was going to ever teach me how to just play any tune that you want to? And if it could not be taught then was my first encounter also supposed to be the simultaneous painful realization that I had just met an object, nay, a world, that I do not belong to? I am being slightly dramatic but in the moment that I grabbed and strummed at the ukelele in an empty house, I was reminded of something else.
I was reminded of the times when I had heard young parents of young children talk at length about cultivating habits. They said habits but you might as well say habitus. Crudely summed, habitus is a concept that French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has written at length about, and it refers to a kind of second nature, the kind of practice, a way of being in the world, one's preferences of food, clothes, brands and just living that are actually very complex sedimentations of one's upbringing in a certain class, gender, caste, region  -- environment really. The kinds where for some, a guitar of an uncle or a set of oil crayons as birthday gifts or a well-stocked library - these make for entire future possibilities of who people turn out to be. Isn't it amazing? I could've been an entirely different person had my mother forced me to continue with the karate classes or, had my father been obsessed with collecting music cassettes. But this isn't an account of regret. On the contrary, I laughed self-mockingly because after a few minutes of strumming, my nagging instinct took over. I needed to write about it (haha!) and I had notebooks. I knew where to find my notebook and arrange for a pen but I finally settled on just typing it out on the computer. And voila, I was back to my habitus. I literally grew up with a computer. But this isn't even a post about my upbringing.
This whole little episode is about materials, that I have been looking at and thinking a little more deliberately about in the past few weeks at least. I have always been very inspired by those who write about material cultures and objects - wires and tables and mugs and cables. And my little journey from the room to the ukelele to the notebook was really about that. I had once very adamantly and defensively asserted to someone that I don't buy books. I genuinely couldn't afford to buy books then and nothing in my upbringing had made me an insider to the lettered world. I have come a long way, I feel at ease with books now and references aren't lost in me. But that has entirely been my own journey and for a young person who will grow around me, I will be that person who gives them a library to grow with. I oscillated for a while between the books and the ukelele, I had just yesterday read on someone's dating profile, a musician's dating profile. I had also often spoken of the world of possibilities that one must feel when one can play an instrument. You can play it anywhere, it's not a book. It doesn't get over. You can always do more and new and you don't need anyone. I guess by the time I am done writing this, one could argue that being able to write isn't finite either. I just wrote this whole thing up :) 

Self check-in flights

Travel is most certainly a privilege. Given my life choices and circumstances, travel has become more than a hobby or even an obligation but rather a lifestyle, an independent factor that shapes almost everything in my life right now. It determines what I can do and how I feel to such an extent that it repulses me to hear that someone else likes travel or thinks of themselves as a "world traveler". If you travel a lot, too much, then you either do it in economy (cheap flights, trains, buses, shared rooms, cheap food, heavy bags on your own back) or you are even more burdensome to the world than you need to be (fancy hotels, comfort in long flights, all that plastic and money spent). Regardless, traveling alone or as a single person is the worst, it is everything - wasteful, expensive, uncomfortable, scary. I travel so much that I cannot even afford to have friends or a relationship because I don't live in one place. None of this is really of my choosing but in the beginning, I was really excited about international travel. A tad scared about visas but generally acquired the confidence, taste and attitude of someone who is very comfortable navigating airports around the world. I even have stored wi-fi passwords for some cafe in a Moscow airport because at some point, all my cheap Europe flights had long layovers in Moscow and it is a really cold place (even inside the airport) and having internet really helps when you have to be there for eleven hours. My longest layover so far has been 17 hours and I have managed to entertain myself to live through it. But I hadn't cried at an airport, like sobbed, until yesterday. 

It was at the Toronto airport at midnight. My mother has a habit of second-hand anxiety, having conversations with me about topics that already are on my mind, making me anxious. Worrying with me, talking about it, perhaps because it makes her less anxious or more, if she didn't talk about it. With help, I have learned to turn her (mother) away from these topics in my life, different tactics every time. But she still does it, to the extent that I don't pick up her phone calls during such phases when I know she is going to bring up the exact thing I am already worrying about. I started last month in the UK attending a conference, changing a thousand (three) flights, skimping on hotel stays and meals. The goal of the trip was to enter the US after that, pack up my entire house in Irvine, sell bits off, sell furniture, donate belongings, account for every post-it, pen and spoon and empty it out of a beautiful apartment that my roommate had already gradually been turning to her taste without checking with me. Could I have complained since I barely stayed there? Should she at least have asked before hiding, pushing every bit of me and mine into storage? Does it matter at this point now that I have left? This, what you are reading, is emotional exhaust. What remains and cannot be stored or succinctly conveyed after I have diligently packed, vacated and moved. Who would even want every detail of this story? I dare not tell my mother or father. Dad has second-hand fatigue unlike mum. His face turns a certain expression of discomfort as if to ask me if all of this was necessary, if I could not have just spent some more money or asked some friends to help. As if. 

Anyway, as per plan, after Irvine I moved on to my last stop, Michigan, collecting some more exhausting by way of weird flights, scheduling tension, then 2.5 days of intense academic conversations and constant emotional availability. I was done and then awaited 40 hours of flying with three stop-overs, emails in-between. Except, this was my first ever attempt at self check-in flights - where it isn't a single itinerary. You have to clear immigration at each stop, then wait and re-check-in, like every flight is its own thing. If you miss a connection then the tumbling chain breaks and you could risk being stranded, unaccounted for, stuck at one of the airports. 

My very first connection from Detroit to Toronto got cancelled. I was bound to miss my Toronto-London flight and then London-Colombo-Bangalore. It was okay, I wasn't gonna panic. I called the booking website and asked them to help. They gave me a rescheduling guarantee, told me I would have my next ticket before I reached Toronto. If I reached Toronto without a ticket, I would have no cell coverage, wi-fi (maybe) and be stranded in Canada without any hotel or food or plan. It happened. I reached Toronto, still no ticket in hand after 5 calls to the website. I sat down on the floor of the Toronto arrivals, near the bag belt, opened my laptop, still in control, connected to the wi-fi, used my skype credit to call the website again. My skype credit was low, I didn't know how long this would last. As the phone rang, it hit me. Someone answered, another new operator asking me what happened. And I sobbed. I started sobbing to her, told her I was panicking and I was going to have a breakdown because I had no way to get home. Home seemed so far away and I knew there was no bed at home. I just cried to her for a few seconds. And I lost wi-fi signal. I called again, still sobbing. I spoke to a guy named Paul. Told him everything. He told me he was going to take care of me and make sure everything would be alright. My throat is choking up as I write this from the Hong Kong airport, much closer to home but in a much better place. But Paul came through, he booked me my new flights: Toronto-Hong Kong-Bangalore. It would take me another 25 hours of flying but I would be home and he would get me refunds for meals and hotels. I was still sobbing, some man and his wife stood beside me as I cried still sitting on the floor. I told them I was okay. I spent the next ten hours in the airport, with a wool cap covering my eyes, checking and reorienting myself to Indian time to avoid jetlag when I finally get home. Today has been better, I have a paper that got accepted, new meetings, new emails, the usual emptiness that sets in my eyes when I travel - the kind that focuses on avoiding dark circles, staying hydrated, avoiding acne and window shopping while I wait for my final cheap flight to Bangalore. Imagine if I had to explain all this to someone, how much of this as circumstance and constraints and how much of it my own choosing. It would be exhausting. I can't wait to not travel again. For now, I am focusing on: finishing reading a book, thinking about hugging a cat when I get home, eating dosa when I get home, taking a bath, getting my legs waxed and when I get to the new house and find a bed, I will cry some more. Not induced crying but the kind that I could not stop at the Toronto airport. 

Self check-in flights are cheap but very stressful and not advisable unless the next available option is 500 dollars more. In which case you will not have a choice and you must be prepared for all of this. 

Open Water Certified!

Finally, Open Water Certified!

My forearms burn, like they have rashes and now I know what sunburn means. The end, having completed my OWD requirements and now waiting for certification, feels anticlimactic. So, it had to be said a couple of times in the form of ‘congratulations!’ to let it sink in (haha). I’d been saying it in half serious words that I wanted to get OWD ever since my first dive in 2014. So, it took some real courage, manifested in relatively simple actions - booking a train to go, withdrawing money to pay, sitting with myself poring through the manual, encountering the examination-me emerge from forgotten depths (must get full marks). None of the puns in this post are intended, mostly because so much of talk on land and life is seeped in the metaphors of the sea and navigation. Point is, there was a lot of pressure, mostly internal, much like how the body feels when under water. The liquids inside decompress well but the air cavities need equalizing to release pressure. For those who haven’t dived before, equalizing is a thing you do every few meters as you descend into the water, pop your ears by gulping. The metaphors of pressure are literal in water.
I always liked how the sea or ocean is a force way mightier than any man, so in swimming or diving, the golden rule is to respect your limits and never go beyond them. In a guided recreational dive where they pack and suit you up and as long as you breathe alright, you’ll quickly forget the force of water. Heck, you won’t know what to make of the seriousness of an 18 meter descent or how nitrogen bubbles can fuck you up. Like a child who doesn’t know what fire means. OWD is different, the fishies become secondary. The precise marvel of the silence and, the paradigmatic shift that undersea offers to creatures of land habits and territorial transactions - there’s not so much of that. It’s business. In fact our dives happened in really low visibility and we hardly saw any fish or corals :)
Before I wrap up my emotional “debrief” (:P), partly as a way of appreciating my own recreational choices, I was wondering if any and all sport that requires deep engagement, understanding and respect of natural forces, also makes its practitioner better people - more mindful, considerate and humble🤷🏽‍♀
I’m sure there are awful people who make for great divers technically but the whole concept of buddy-work, the constant awareness of your limits underwater, the amount of backups that a diving system involves - the values designed into diving, I’m full of grateful and kind vibes that make me smile while the certificate is on its way :)
My amazing teacher Mr Praveen BK is wholly responsible for how positive and confident my experience was. I’m so glad I was his first student! If you ever decide to dive or get certified, find him at West Coast Adventures in Kaup, Karnataka!