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

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!

Year Five/28

A lot of inadequacy and year end fatigue being processed here. Some heartbreak too. I was watching a Katrina Kaif interview after the awful movie 'Zero' and when asked, at a high point in her career, what her biggest fear was, she said it was the fear of not being in a relationship...of not having a family and being married and love (before it's too late). She feared it at sixteen and she feared it at thirty and then it happened, she fell out of the relationship that she thought was 'it'. Of course she was referring to the strange celebrity creature that continues to roam untamed, roving past, ensnaring every woman who might seem on top of her game, leaving her with tattoo imprints and feelings of not enough. Of course, I also very personally wove these stories into my own, asking what or who could be enough for (some) men. Their stories and mine seem to indicate this is a futile quest. But as someone prone to approach things analytically, treat it as a problem, even with some degree of detachment, I find myself swinging between efforts to fix men (sometimes women) and then withdrawing. The withdrawal times have gotten longer, the paean to selfhood has gotten stronger. Sometimes I even offer my own karmic justifications for my bad feelings (hearts broken must be accounted for with equal number of heartbreaks, it's only fair). There are also Warsan Shire, Beyonce, Solange, Beth Gibbons - each accompanying a stage of grief, disappointment, realization and then return to the productive contentment of being self-contained and re-centered. It will happen in time but, to go back to the Kaifkaesque (hehe) heteronormative anxiety of 'family before it's too late', I can safely say that 28 and the year 5 of PhD is probably my year of Inversion, the year when queerness has seemed like so much effort and the year when I have resolutely, statistically fallen off statistical heteronormative charts (your friends are getting married, some have babies, where will you work and when does the phd end, who will wait for you, why have you cut your hair). Queerness doesn't just mean not being straight, a queerness of being, a path of life praxis that you are either put on by what you read and who teaches you, or your own realization that you couldn't fall in line (in time), like many others do. The accompanying warning you don't get is that it is incredibly hard to stand still in uncharted territory. You have to build and rebuild, develop tentative rules and rewards for what is going to feel normal within queer.

Unfortunately I don't have much new to offer by way of this post, if you gave me space I'd start writing about love, self, men, women all the time. I am slightly proud that I have had this blog for ten years now. It's okay, the earlier stuff may make me cringe now but that's okay. If someone asked me for my movie of the year, it would be Una Mujer Fantastica. For a brief teeny bit after I cut my hair I felt something like dysphoria - who you love gender wise is closely associated and sounded off of who you think you are gender wise (fluid or binary). This movie rarely ever lapses into self-doubt, takes the performance of gender (whatever it takes to feel a stable gender identity for the moment, to be alive, productive and to survive) so much as a matter of fact, and then it starts showing the world that  a well adjusted transwoman has to navigate despite her own adjustedness, despite having her priorities and tendencies to give love, draw boundaries, right. It's been a year of gender play and a year of being incredibly close to fantastic, inspiring strong people, including these wonderful online groups where hundreds of queers come together to build survival on a daily basis. I couldn't tell you the details even if I wanted to. But as always, I want to celebrate these things, these acts and individuals of endurance in a hope that I can overcome my own feelings of inadequacy. 

Hawai'i - Big Island when vegetarian and no car (1 week itinerary)

I recently went to Hawaii in the first week of January, to the Big Island (Hawai'i) and had a lovely time. I was on a budget and was traveling with my mom. We also did not rent a car and still had a good time. So I figured that a lot of you who might find yourselves broke, ambitious and vegetarian may find this useful!

Firstly, when you see pictures of gorgeous beaches in Hawaii, they are probably from the more popular islands of O'ahu, Maui or Kaua'i, from what I heard those are the touristy islands with beaches, resorts and definitely more hostels. In that sense, the Big Island is more like countryside. It might help to just read up on the Hawaiian Islands before you go, each island has a nickname and legends associated with it :) For instance, what happens on Niʻihau and why can't people go there?

Coming to the Big Island, it's well, the largest island in the United States and has five volcanoes on it and one that's dead in the ocean, of which three are sort of active and two are taller than Mount Everest (from the ocean floor) but you can also drive up to their peaks (so I did drive up to the peak of the tallest mountain in the world that is also a million years old and I didn't need any special gear). But that's not it, if you choose to see the entire island like we did (in a 12 hour circle tour of the island), you will come to appreciate how these volcanic mountains support drastically different climate and vegetation in different parts of the island. We saw sunny beaches, arid lava rock-scapes, turtles on black sand beaches, rain and fog, lush green valleys and horses and coffee plantations all in 12 hours. I highly recommend the Roberts Hawaii tour even if it's super touch-and-go (if you don't have a car but also, if you aren't self-motivated enough to drive around the island to see every bit of it). This isn't a sponsored recommendation.
Stay
So, where should you live on the island? Some might tell you that Hilo (East coast, more residential, greener) can be quieter and not fun. I didn't stay there but it looked really pretty in the daytime. There's also hostels and more affordable Airbnbs on that side. The West coast is Kona-Kailua (both Hilo and Kona have their own airports) and we chose to stay there because I had to go up and down the West coast for my conference (oh yeah I was there for work ha ha).

We stayed at the Kona Beach Hostel on Walua Road which is at a perfect location, a 7 minute walk from the touristy downtown and the main street - Ali'i Drive. Their website says that dorms are 45USD but I think there's a price difference if you call and land up (it's cheaper). It's quiet, clean, has excellent community support and places to eat nearby.

Eat
Food on the island is expensive because I am assuming it comes from outside. So, most of us in the hostel went shopping to the ABC store nearby and got bread, cheese, butter, fruits, yogurt. You can also get burritos, Indian food and Thai food on Ali'i Drive at walking distance from the hostel (remember, mainlander Vegetarian traveling with her mom). I ate fried pork rind by mistake because Hawaiian people are really generous and shit happens but that's a story for another day. Macadamia nuts are delicious. Macadamia Nut pancakes at Huggos were also delicious (to be shared by at least 2 people - huge portions). Kona coffee is delicious, drink it. There's Walmart and KMart, go there and stock up for the week or day.

See/Do/Get Around
I already mentioned the Island Tour. Since we had no car, we were going to rely on Ubering, buses and kind strangers. Ridesharing is still not very popular or reliable so plan in advance. The public buses are called Hele-On buses, they look old but are really cheap (2USD/ride) and take you really far. It takes some effort to find the bus stops and locals will tell you they aren't reliable. It's true but it's not so bad. Trick: Call the Hele-On customer support and they will give you updated information. Once we figured it out, we took the bus twice, all the way from Kona to Waikoloa Resorts in the North (1 hour by bus, 2 hours if you dare take a scooter - don't). Buses also go only once a day on some routes. Taxis are super expensive, obviously. Hitch-hiking is totally an option if you have time.

Snorkeling with Dolphins
First of all, it's really hard to swim with dolphins. They are fast, the sea is dense and it's really a matter of good luck if you find enough dolphins and good weather. We signed up to go with a company called Hang Loose and our experience wasn't that great unfortunately. I've been on snorkeling and dive excursions before and

Volcano Visit

Trolleys

Also, freshwater caves

Visions of Gideon

A lot of this year, my 2017, was in the company of people who played spoilsports and killjoys. To use Sara Ahmed's terms and words, it takes a lot of effort and courage to be a killjoy, to have a problem and to not take it lying down. Especially when those you have to oppose are your loved ones, colleagues, friends and people who are apparent allies, meaning that they come from and want to be in a position of consensus with you. They want to and have built bridges, they form very important parts of your memories and personhood. I am extrapolating from Ahmed but I think for a lot of us it was a year of being torn and learning to dissent. And, dissenting can be tiring, it feels bitter and violent. I mean who doesn't tire of someone who always has a problem, right? Why does she always have a problem? Why can't she let this go? Why do you have to overthink everything? I am still not sure if constant killjoying will change the world or whether there are more pleasant ways of being a killjoy or what might happen if those leading the way will change their minds. Several things happened that I think all coalesce at this fundamental tug.
My personal year started with such troubles when my parents visited and I have/had strong views on how I want labor to be divided, what I expect of my parents on vacation, how I am not okay with everyone being on auto pilot. It led to a fair amount of bitterness and my conclusion was that I should not forget that parents as people change too, what we otherwise call age but is a combination of patience, interest, wanting space etc. I also realized to some extent that bitterness can be fatal, chronic unhappiness, even if it is maintained as one's refusal to budge against the obstinate unfair world, is enacted in real time upon individuals or groups. Meaning that even if you are raging against the world's toxic masculinity, your first dialog is going to be with your father who in his own right is a complex person, way more than a patriarch. It is tough to gently rally then, without inducing fatal bitterness. So I stepped back and mended some bridges because after all, I am learning too.

I think everything suffers from such 'awkward scales'. You vs the world's macho men, returning to a home full of loved ones shaped by the same world. Not to mention, you, as a fickle, fallible bungler in the world. Reconciling with awkward scales of the university and academia and department and colleagues and family and friends and individual units, no theory could prepare us for what might be an appropriate response when things don't match. What to do?

As the year progressed, there were more strange moments, again a little bit of both, the context and the event. Both change each other. Overall, I realized that I am willing to let go of friends and lovers, with less drama but there are certain things that I just can't stomach. And, I kept holding on to them. My discomfort with ultimatums, my refusal to fall in line so that we could imagine a future. I am not even saying it is radical, I think one has to listen to the gut and then bear the consequences. I also briefly experienced strong feelings again and it was wonderful. Really hard to get over but also a part of me I had forgotten.

Keeping with the title of the post, my favorite film of the year was 'Call me by your name'. And this song by Sufijan Stevens, the way it is filmed, the father's speech in the film, it's all beautiful. It made me appreciate actors a bit more. I still don't understand how films as organizational work produce such brilliant emotive experiences. I guess as I write, I also have more respect for organizational work that makes events happen, anything organizational in the service of sensorial experiences is quite the feat. The film also felt nice because it aligned with my own bittersweet encounter.

I read more than I usually do, this year. I am very proud of it. I am patiently waiting for the reading to filter through me and make home in my words. I am personally grateful to the works of Sara Ahmed, Anna Tsing, Lauren Berlant, Kathi Weeks for their fantastic charged prose. Like it was written from the heart, written in conversation and it felt like I was in dialog too. :)

Meanwhile the later part of the year with its sexual harassment revelations, again in the industry, in the university, elsewhere. I hope we will look back at this year as the year when things crumbled. And for those who took them to heart, like me, for those who felt these stories personally, were reminded of their own stories, very little trust remains in people (but mostly men) and their ability to hold back and nor harm when they can (power). I let all those associations crumble too. Like I said, it was my year of killjoy, dissensus, just refusing to play along. And I can tell you that it shocked many good boys, the ones who said their anger came out of their own hurt, the ones who wanted me to tolerate a bad mood, also those who thought they could be careless with their words and take them back. I just let them go and things went. So much went away, there is so much space.

Couple of days ago I met a childhood friend, my mother was there too. The friend and I were molested together as children for the first time. As soon as she said "do you remember", I said "the man in the sand?" but then she went on to narrate the episode differently from what I remember. For a weird reason in my story, I was the one who rescued us. I trust her story but it was this personal, minor history moment where we proceeded to excavate and re-inscribe everyone we knew in our childhood. We collectively built new memories of these people, so many of them were abusers. We spoke of how the roads of our "safe city" had maps of harassers, going on which road at what time could make people follow you. Lastly, she said how her parents refused to give her a scooter till she was an adult. My parents took the same stand and they are so proud of it, till today. I guess it is a good thing. But then she told her parents how they don't know anything, how riding a cycle means inviting teasing and if they were okay with that, she would bear it. I think she got a scooter finally. My mum just listened in silence. I don't really know what she has to say about this.

So, that was my year. My 27. 

Third Year Ending

I don't have words of my own but only some words that I keep coming back to.

Atoms for Peace - The Eraser

Massive Attack - Paradise Circus

Portishead - Wandering Star

On my plate currently: writing to people who won't give me money, there's only so many ways in which I can beg and grovel, I've run out of them, two sets of revisions, one set of structuring editing revisions, a bunch of polite groveling for support letters and finally deep deep resentment that it's summer and I don't have an extra week to go to Ladakh, Burma, Arunachal or Kutch and I have to be back in time for some more politeness.

Onward to the fourth year.

So much good music around

Just for the fear that I will lose so much good music I've been skimming through, archiving some links and lists here.

Tumblr Adwait made
Never knew how splendid radio could be
I have come to love the Gentle Giants. Late much? I suppose, yes.
Just a quite fantastic mix recorded at the Bar Rumba club in London
A jazz sampling of Radiohead's Everything in its right place
Aline Morena's Canturia (Brazilian folk? instrumental)
Ananda Shankar (again so late to the party)
I think some more from the club

Will I finish writing the grant? Stay tuned.

I also write/wrote elsewhere: http://www.tarshi.net/blog/voices-casually-sexist-humour-and-the-reasonable-limits-of-feministing/

On woman and authority

It's heartbreaking to know that there are at least three people/places/groups in the world who, if approached by me right now, will launch a barrage of hate speech. Not like the serious legal hate speech with rape and murder threats but the kind that can definitely ruin a whole day. I had a panic attack again today, after months of not having one. I couldn't breathe, things inside me were sinking fast. I tend to feel pressure more than other people do. Sometimes it is even a strength, it keeps me going twenty four hours a day. Stress is my coffee. Sometimes stressful circumstances overlap with PMS. But, even despite being aware of my relatively fragile mental health (I actually do think I fare better than others in terms of absorbing negative stuff and hitting back even), this time I just can't take it. Warm tears are rolling down as I write.
I can't deal or understand or change people who irresponsibly say mean things, abusive things, flippant and callous things in general or to me specifically. When I signed up to lead a student organization on campus, the worst I anticipated was fundraising ( I am terrified of raising funds) and maybe people not turning up for our events. I also knew it would mean a lot of visibility among the desi crowd on campus. I guess I just wasn't prepared for a random batch mate commenting on my dress and appearance to a group of fellow drunk engineering students (probably this is my price for leaving Humanities?). I wasn't going to let it go. I gave it back, good. He seemed to realize he had fucked up. He kept quiet, basically he knew this could be more trouble. The good or bad thing about dealing with non-American passport holding assholes (especially engineers aspiring to go to Silicon Valley) is that the threat of deportation keeps them polite, civil, tame. It just does. All our interactions are marked by the passport we constantly carry in our pockets. Fast forward to another drunk guy batch mate requesting to use my bathroom and locking himself in. I actually dialled 911 for the first time and it wasn't scary. I couldn't sleep that night obviously. Not just these, other micro-aggressions are daily business. Some guy likes you but if you don't reciprocate, all his friends won't stop speculating. He won't even talk to you anymore. Some other colleague whom I have seen being careless and irresponsible for a long time, has a very different response to me and some others.
I guess I reached my breaking point today (at least serious enough to write this) because of some guy screaming "I am not your servant" through a facebook window. I don't care if he reads this. I've blocked him everywhere. I am physically and mentally scared of him only because his stance in every conversation is "I am not about to be walked all over by a girl". He once actually said "Don't anger me". Imagine me saying that to someone :)
A few days ago (a friend and) I got amply abused and chastised on a group we run. We contemplated shutting the group down except one would manually have to remove 90,000 people to shut it. People called me an NRI (as if it should be an insult), told me I had no clue what this group (that I thought of and built 4 years ago) meant and stood for. I could have totally donned the researcher hat and been like, oh how interesting, users don't even know who started this but look at their ownership. I am rambling. Look at the last blog post I wrote and the comments on it. I didn't aspire to be publicly visible through what I do. I do what I do because I like it. Another friend (who I thought was an ally) sobered me last week. He said "all men actually do talk shit about women, some just disguise it well". He seemed to imply it's a biological or systemic thing. "It's just the way we are" I was so shocked someone could hold that as a worldview I didn't know what to say because I know men who categorically walk away from such stuff.
The point is, every time I tell myself that being a leader, initiating something and being the face of it is going to invite negative attention, hate, criticism but also immense satisfaction of having done things; I feel more drained than happy. And, I am not even doing this on a scale that many other women and men do. What of course hurts is that as a woman, a lot of that stuff also becomes about how I look, where I live, my public photos, emails etc. I hope this post doesn't get read by many people because the comment section is open to all.
Probably I just meet a lot of shitty people. How do you cope with them? All suggestions are welcome.

India 2015 Summer: Swalpa adjust maadi

** Warning: This is a rant. It does not contextualize or essentialize India as one entity. It also does not seek to improve anyone. Also, this is the sixth draft that might see the light of the day.

So, I've returned to India after almost a year of being in the United States. Turns out living by yourself, making your own food, washing your clothes and doing research are good ways to keep away from blogging. I am back to where it all began in that sense. Even this blog. Bangalore. Interning at a corporate research lab with bright people, most of them about three years younger. Before we go further, apologies to my brother whose every act of growing up I have so critically called out. Turns out people older than him and younger than me can both be immensely stupid and exceptionally mature. Whowouldathunk I'd have to make business conversations with people born in 1993? Well, the year 25 is two months away. Who could have imagined what the 25 year old me would resemble? Not me for sure.
So yeah, turns out I've finally reached Marathahalli, the proverbial tech park district where tiny little worker ants scurry in and out of with heavy black laptop bags and access cards strung around their necks. Most of them have unshapely behinds (not making this up) because of sedentary debugging jobs. I can already feel mine grow bigger as I type. There are no roads. Most roads turn to dust on a daily basis as cars and trucks ply on them. It's an odd place to say the least. On which our little tempo traveller runs morning and evening.
It's also my first close encounter to people on the other side of JNU (IIT Delhi is actually light years away if you get the political, cultural and philosophical differences). But, yes, engineers. Also, most North Indians. And, local people in the area. Mostly South Indians. What puzzled me is that Bangalore has become so much more North Indianized than I had seen in 2010. Now you don't even have to try to make Hindi sound like KannaD (as many Amit friends call it). To some Amit friends, rather seriously, all of South India is one region and has one language. The one that Shahrukh invented in Chennai Express. Again, very different from my Bangalore of yonder that made me learn a little bit of all the four big languages and even some dialect words. As I spoke functional Kannada, one Amit squealed. "Aap toh genius ho." I asked if he wanted to learn some. But kyun? Bakwaas hoti hai. He said.
He is not a bad person and I know nothing of NLP (natural language processing or a cooler thing than big data analysis). But I'd imagine that knowing a little bit of Kannada would go farther than going abroad and defending India's cultural diversity in terms of keeping us together and making our collective lives as Indians better. Again now, as an aspirant to NRI category I can justifiably be accused of Solutionism. So, with due apologies to Morozov, I shrugged and started walking towards the hotel wondering what all these bright Amits would do in their lives. It's hard to justify two degrees in cinema studies, I thought to myself. Which is true, sort of. At least the social science and humanities circles (read JNU self indulgence) I indulged in, people barely explained or asked "so what". But on the whole, I realized, the cultural studies education and a journey through comparative literature and grappling with issues of translation made me (no claims for my classmates) a less classist, less casteist and a less intolerable person. You would be amazed, or at least I am, as to how in India being a blue collar worker really casts you into some feudal relationship with the people you serve. Why aren't we nicer to those who serve us? Or, just a smile? Or try and speak the other's language?
This isn't versus America. As someone rightly said, the exhilarating thrill and frustration of life's pace and movement brought her back home. I came this summer for that same pulsating, elbowing through the crowd feeling. Of course I've gotten a lot rustier at hustling. But, especially for those of us who have resources and the privilege to be nicer, you'd wonder why we can't "swalpa adjust"?

Rubik's cubing

It's a good time to be writing. That's pretty much what I have been doing for butter and varieties of bread for sometime now. To give a general update, the last thesis chapter is yet to be penned but I have received rare assurance that I will sail through. Also, I have been filling a thousand forms and learning about all kinds of exchange rates and money transferring as preparation for the near future. The next post will of course announce the big changes. For now some other thoughts.

On writing and being alone

Almost a year ago when I interviewed for a paid doctoral position at a university, after the academic questions, my interviewer gently asked, "L_ is a quaint town in a small country compared to yours. It will basically mean spending a lot of time alone and that can require a fair bit of adjustment since you come from a bustling city like D_ and are used to interacting with so many people. How do you feel about that?" In my head I was repeating my own Cartesian formulation - I never am, I can be everything. Basically, in order to get something or somewhere in life, I've accepted the accompanying painful periods of abrupt change and quick adjustment including shared apartments, rooms, beds, bathrooms, food and all that. I doubt it can get rougher than JNU. So, I promptly replied, "Oh, I am used to working on my own. In fact I prefer being left to my own devices." I wasn't entirely sure, even when I said it I felt a kind of sad, cold image of yet another still evening in my head. But, like I said, there's no option really. I didn't get the job. I was partly relieved.

A year later as I am figuratively and perhaps literally entering burnout stage again (in my head I've got bruises on my elbows and finger tips like little forest patches on fire) I have been asking myself to breathe deep. A year ago there were moments when I felt slow descent into madness. I wasn't going insane, I was just melting like I no longer knew if I was making sense to me or anyone else. That was a bad time but it's over. From there to this day, I've come a long way in being alone with myself - a given for academic life and travel. That is probably why even the recent breakup wasn't exactly painful. My sense of me although partially eroded and weathered over this writing period has remained. I've kept self preservation high on the list and it seems to have worked. Better (or worse), I diffuse matters before I start mulling over them and take them in my stride. The strides have gotten longer, so much has been taken in the strides. Not something I was used to doing. Even as I prepare for another move, the only thing keeping me afloat is the idea that being alone in a completely new place is a known feeling. Not alone as in wallowing in my room and crying under the covers but running to the bank alone, eating my food, paying my bills, watching a film, reading a book, maintaining discipline in writing. On the contrary, when I've been with someone special or friends, I often lose track of the schedule and that unnerves me now. (Note: This is also a preparatory post to the impending 24)

To justify the title, it has been today morning's realization that writing is more like Rubik's cubing than being pregnant. It can be as painful as a pregnancy but I've literally written six drafts of one article only to be able to open an argument from different angles. And, every time I wrote a new draft, the disappointment of the earlier first-paragraphs was fatal. Like playing a whole level of Candy Crush again because you couldn't get the last jelly.

On body and love

It hasn't exactly been a great season there. This isn't to criticize any single person but rather a general observation. For someone so terribly awkward and constantly at war with her body, being with another person who isn't completely accepting of who I am is a painful situation. It's probably a heterosexual predicament? I am always collaborating and having wonderful conversations with great women and sometimes men on how everyday sexism operates and how body shaming needs to stop. But, in practice, and love is in practice (that's the tragedy); things turn out quite differently. Attraction and ideology don't cohere. My problem isn't that though. Strangely I have always been with people thinner than me (horrifying realization because it made me suspect I was into thinner people or something) but where it gets problematic is that some of my friends and lovers have been obsessed with the idea of fitness. I think it's only their way of saying thin. Almost makes me want to make Foucault and Butler reading mandatory in high school. In any case, I've fought back when my love handles were poked at but then I've lost love and interest and respect. If the G_ds of OKCupid are listening, my potential partners are going to have to write a small essay on the notion of fitness.Worse, there are so many in the feminist-ish space leading the tirade against body shaming. But, guess what, they all look like size zero ramp walkers and their idea of activism is a photo album at the pride parade. Am I being snide and derisive? (Obviously yes) I don't know. This hasn't been resolved yet. It has not only affected me personally but I've seen many a sense of  self-worth being sacrificed at the altar of physical appearance. Even your educated, liberal men. What gives?

More later. Today has been a good day of writing.

On Morel and desire in writing

I recently read 'The Invention of Morel' by Alfredo Bioy Casares. I don't usually do responses. But, I also don't usually finish books. I think I should write this anyway because I am troubled by the book. As I write, four other friends are reading it.
To begin with (and a prologue one must go back to after finishing), Borges writes of the form of the adventure story and how many considered it "practically impossible" to derive any sort of pleasure from a formless, psychological novel, one that doesn't rely on plot and shows no overt objective. But, as Casares (and others) demonstrate (and as Borges states), the beauty and paradox in the adventure story is the very fact that things may happen the way we don't expect them to (at least in novels) - "a person may kill himself because he is so happy...lovers may separate forever as a consequence of love..."  The idea of unacceptable literary inventions is very comforting.
In most reviews I read, the book is described as a work of science fiction with a romantic plot at its core. Again, this is only my interpretation but I disagree. In fact, the novel is hardly about anyone else but the narrator/self. It's quite a treat for someone like me, who spends copious amounts of time with themselves. Why I don't take too seriously the label of romance is because the narrator very early in the story locates and describes, almost deifies an exotic buxom bodied gypsy woman with a red scarf. That's probably the first of the many "images" we begin to live with in this story. From then on and as we discover at the end, the narrator, for me, is already trapped in a loop of a moment-before-meeting. He hesitates, plots chance encounters, glances, reads gestures, gets disappointed and starts over (I almost beamed at his pattern, he is like me in love). What should one make of this tendency to locate an object of admiration and then circle it incessantly with the image in one's head? The distance between that, then making the leap beyond imaginary encounters and then disappointment of real people is for another day.
There is a lot to write about. For instance, it always struck me as odd that some ancient cultures thought photographs steal your soul. This story has to be, by far the most convincing explanation. But, I'll end with my favorite changing painting : Princes of the House of Timur, originally started by the gifted Safavid master-painter, Mir Sayyid Ali in 1549. (The link above gives a comprehensive history of the painting) The short story is that once commissioned by grandfather Humayun, this painting became symbolic of a legacy of Mughals as Timurids and subsequently, Jahangir got it altered to reflect his version of the family story. The painting is very interesting not only because it is a deliberate attempt to retell personal and royal history but it confirms (my) suspicion that stories are seldom about beginnings, ends or plots in themselves. On closer inspection, stories often betray an interwoven strand of desire. As Casares's hero meticulously placed himself just steps ahead of Faustine and Jahangir's sons looked upon him with reverence (or did they?), the buried hearts of those who made these stories peep out from within.

Letters of a reluctant mug (to young daughter)

Dear young daughter,

I started a journal in 2013 eagerly awaiting the Mayan apocalypse (as you may now affably remember). But, such was the anticlimax of ordinary life that continued ever so peacefully, the journal seems rather gleefully suicidal. I have decided to write you a fresh set of learnings from my (yet quite) young life. These letters are convenient for me for a reason that they are not burdened by historicity and may come to your rescue if you should unwittingly inherit my cynicism. You should consider this letter as the middle act of a film that will never end. In any case, I won't know the ending. Just as I unburden myself and pass it on to you, I apologize for so viscous blue a shade of confusion that you didn't sign up for and I must explain why - because my life as is unfolding against the backdrop of larger, intensely frustrating battles of trust, humanity, politics, bodies, religion and more is posing some of the toughest choices I've made so far. A few decades later, hopefully you can tell me if this is relevant to you, I may feel less lonely (and will write to Sylvia Plath that her premature death was unnecessary).

I am already exhausted and my troubles already seem petty but I must continue. As you know, I've chosen academia as my occupation. I lay in bed at night and close my eyes hoping I manage to reach all deadlines. Gradually, as I get drowsier, I feel a strange pressure at the roots of my hair, a feeling that they are greying. I wake up in the morning to check. I am surrounded by a lot of people who "matter", people fighting the right fights, some making art and others lobbying with governments to change laws. I am afraid I've gotten too close to the process of making change (blame it on the unprecedented media proliferation) and hence grown wary of the means they use. Just the other day I took up a rant with A, "are you all playing the gallery? Whose change is it anyway?" Let me explain, there is a deep eagerness to publish, congregate and say. I am not surrounded by academics at this point who would think thrice, dissect an opinion and lay bare their own complicity. I am not surrounded by fellow reluctant mugs, it's the time to say things confidently because there is little consequence and no sanctity. I am no purist, but anything goes - nothing scandalizes, nor are there any limits to how many times you can repeat an idea. I hope you inherit my hesitation and value silence as a virtue. Nothing says I love you more than listening to someone in rapt attention.


There is more, but right now I have work, studies, backache and a conference call.

[To be continued...]

Please call me a cloud

The business of disclaimers: Is a figment of imagination

Every time in my head, when I have imagined coming face to face with you, suddenly, dressed in patched, colorful, layered clothes against what I can see when I close my eyes every morning as blinking neon lights in the night, the mood is that of past betrayal and a fresh scab of longing. There is music, chaos, people are dancing, most are generally happy because they haven't worked so hard for a chance reunion. Things come easier to those who let go quicker. But, it's only you, or something about how the idea of you settled in a corner of my heart so comfortably that it refuses to leave me. Or maybe I like being haunted. I like repeating what you have said and what you would have said to myself often in the silent gaps between two happy days.  

Further in our chance encounter I also, almost always, imagine or actually feel in my imagination a sudden rush of guilt, want, need and sobriety - like something about me is so rickety it can break any moment, but it hasn't for the longest time, I've held it together such. My holding it together is what lends your eyes the cocky confidence in me and you, and lets you have your way. Maybe we decided in an impassioned moment to let you have your way for life. I secretly suspect it was done when we started exchanging books.

I have thus decided to change my name. Please call me a cloud. I feel like a ravenous cloud and my sound is rumbling. The only time that rumble changes is when I break into torrential rains. I am very hungry, my sounds deepening in dissent like the last note of Bhairav and you will only hear me weep in floods, drench you in some strange mix of anger and love. You, be the stone and enhance the pathos of our tragic tale.