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! 

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

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. 

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/

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.

Making money profane

At some point in life, we all start getting money. And, at some point we become comfortable with spending bits of it without being too afraid. This post is a partly inspired thought experiment after I read the post on Suspended Coffees (Read: 'Suspended coffee' helps those in need) that went viral probably a month or two ago. The idea is that you pay for an extra coffee in a restaurant and that can be given for free to anyone else who might not have the money to buy one. In a time when trust is really a rare commodity in our interactions in public, this phenomenon inspired and moved me a great deal. I was determined to try it out in my own locality (somewhere in India) to see how people react. However, there is another question I have been battling in the past year: how do I make spending money more fulfilling?
So, let me tell you of the three instances where I tweaked this "suspension" experiment and the different things I felt.
Part 1:
First, of course, was a straight replication of this suspension idea. I was visiting a friend in Bombay and told him about suspended coffees. He was also excited. So, while we are at the beach and this kid badgered us to buy a rose, we thought of trying it out there. The way I saw it, was simple. Buying a rose for someone we like at the beach seems so cliched and corny. But, wouldn't it be really amusing if we randomly got a rose that we never paid for (or realize we have an admirer whom we may never meet)? So, we paid for a rose and the kid gave it to a boy clicking pictures of himself at the beach. From what we could make out, the boy was not only astonished but also a little intrigued. He was visibly happy and I'd like to think it made his day.

Part 2:
While I was really happy with the rose incident, I kept asking as to what really happened there which was disruptive. Some possible causes to describe this: unexpected, good faith, personal gesture. So, I wondered if I could buy other things in the same vein but increase the utility part. And, the most obvious things I could think of were: food, travel and education expenses. So, again while in Bombay I found a taxi driver and gave him a hundred rupees. I roughly explained my idea to him - told him to take people where they want and in the end deduct hundred rupees. He seemed baffled but he could see the twinkle in my eyes. (This may already seem a bit hipster to you) I am assuming he actually executed my plan because he nodded in satisfaction, just like the rose boy earlier.

Part 3:
This I did in Delhi. For a year now I have been not-so-broke and I can't recall the days when I used to be down to a hundred bucks for the last week of the month. And then, something came up for photocopying or printing. So, I went and gave three hundred rupees to Sonu, my university's photocopier and told him to use this for a day and offer free copies. My university has a very high moral ground and such so I knew Sonu would do it. I went back to him the next day and he told me that people spread this "offer" and used it wholeheartedly, to copy anything and everything!

I am sure a lot of you already do some form of charity. My mum also feeds X number of needy people on special occasions. But, the purpose of my experiment/exploration was different. I wasn't interested in generosity or personal happiness or equality so much. And, I realized that was my kick was in disrupting routines, seeing if I can momentarily change how we are used to feeling about the world around us. When we don't have the money for that taxi ride or photocopy or tattoo or movie or gift, money seems like a really big deal. When we do have money, many of those things don't seem so special anymore for several reasons.
Can I make money absolutely nothing by inserting it in places where people expect to struggle for it? Money and struggle, the relationship is routine and obvious - one that you can't escape. But, in this routine living is where the jadedness seeps in and thinking for oneself (instrumental reason) sets in. That is why deeds of kindness, honesty, loyalty etc which are the given foundations of our society seem to take us by surprise. At times using money against its own logic can give the maximum satisfaction, at least to me.

Date a girl who isn't afraid

**In case you don't know the format of "date a girl who...", Google it. It has some stellar (and corny) posts that went viral. I am writing this because I live in Delhi, India and am at a loss to articulate how I feel as a woman about safety.**

Date a girl who isn't afraid. Date a girl who isn't afraid of you, her parents, her entire extended family, teachers, the police, politicians, others' opinions and of embarrassing herself. She will probably be like a pot of boiling, molten substances. You might see her everywhere, all the time, more than any other girl you know. Her opinions maybe ridiculous and her bravado may seem foolish at times. Admit to yourself she is trouble.

Find a girl who doesn't seem to be afraid. Go closer and smile at her understandingly to tell her that you have a hint about how many people she makes unhappy as she steps out waving her bag and flailing her arms, walking with a careless hop in the most unsuspecting of places, at a time when no one seems to be around, doing nothing at all. Follow her as she loiters endlessly. If you are taller, match your steps silently and watch what a world takes away from her within an hour of joyful loitering.

Keep watching out for a girl who isn't afraid because there is a daily possibility that someone will want to squeeze her, pinch her and undress her in the middle of the crowded market. Step back as she continues to walk and ends up being slapped on the bottom. Her cheeks will turn a bright crimson and the molten substances may spill out from within. Look up at the sky of densely impossible clouds. You may see them form familiar faces who have no confidence in her ability to walk by herself and be left to her devices. That is when you should walk up to her.
Face the tearing girl who is on the verge of being afraid and don't offer her your critique of the society. Shake her hand and take a minute to admire her. Not her face, not her body, but the warm, stubborn extension of her wherever she walks. It's like her walk builds a little garden of not-so-afraid wherever she goes.

Propose to be around her, express your earnest desire to know her and in the same breath, admit your terror at the risks she chooses to take. In her enthusiasm, she might topple her bag full of books and biscuits and flowers and a knife, maybe. Avoid the urge to start sermonizing on self defense, Swiss knives and pepper sprays. Her mouth might be half open with no words coming out. You might get an inkling that she's been through this before. At least twenty times. If she hesitates, don't chase her until she relents.

It's painful to date a girl who isn't afraid. What can you offer? How much will she accept of your genuine, non-chauvinistic support? But, you should know it is an immense pang of relief for her when you say that rape isn't about the loss of dignity. She will be your statement to the world, your illustration of balanced feminisms and of honest changes by walking through the world day and night.

Plan long walks, to lanes, gardens, slums and the beach. Make sure you've seen them all with her in the morning, afternoon, evening and the winter night. Kiss her in public view, nibble at her ear to tell her you are equally unafraid of how you feel, where you are and what you do. Don't forget to sing. And whistle.

Find a girl who isn't afraid and soon enough you will know what scares her. Be with her and make sure, that a few years later you both know more girls who aren't afraid.

Paradigm shift

I was wandering in CP, looking for the next metro exit when I saw a gathering of people. The moment my eyes lifted from their feet up to their shoulders, the Starbucks logo in green, surrounded by more green lights left me in a state of surprise and mischief. I almost pied-piperly scurried towards the sign and stood there, not understanding much. In front of me, some guy was announcing how truly Indian this Starbucks shop was going to be. Behind in the crowd, a drunk beggar was mimicking him to our delight. A layer behind, hawkers had set shop, selling balloons and cheap coffee.
All of us were just standing there, mocking for a second, wanting to go inside another - what they call a spectacle. I couldn't decide how to feel about the inauguration of a coffee shop. I wanted to laugh but I wanted to go in. I felt guilty, foolish, elated and the sense of having arrived. To draw a Rushdie analogy, I knew no child born after this moment was going to escape Starbucks in her language. Imaginary crackers lit up the sky in my head after having experienced a moment of collective history making. I know, dramatic.

This reminded me of my mother. One day I found her box of old toys; wooden blocks, wooden train set, tops and Vicks puzzle pieces. Yes, the Vicks medication brand. Each puzzle piece had four 'cough' demon faces. The evil creature that is supposed to represent phlegm in red, blue, green and yellow. I was so amused and dead sure that no one else would have this puzzle set. Mother said she got it from Santa Claus as a kid. She told me how, back in her days Santa Claus gave actual gifts in toy stores. She also got a Coke top. I couldn't fully imagine everything but in that moment I knew that this moment defined her as a person. That was her time.
Volker Schlondorff made a short film for the omnibus "10 minutes older". It was called Enlightenment. The film really changed the way I thought of time and also fed into what I believed as personal time. Basically, it seems to me, that in the act of living and in the things we consume we inhabit a time. Though we keep changing all the time, at some point we get fixed in time. We stubbornly use X over Y (also known as nostalgia) and sometimes we celebrate A over B (a function of our modern time over the past time that someone older than us inhabits). My Starbucks moment was this precise encounter with my moment, rather the end of it. It was like reaching the horizons of my time or a break. Some day, years from now I will be telling a baby that there were no Starbucks in this city and that people gathered to see the first one open. Much like how electricity, telephone, the first car, mall and so many more landmark moments just like my mother's Santa Claus and Vicks puzzle.
I am really struggling to pen this but I hope you get what I am saying.

Analogy

Long distance affairs are like a song with a beautiful, steady melody. There is a song because there is obvious melody, something consistently sweet in there. Peaking in little bumps time and again, week days are for silence, heightening the melody's haunting, soothing effect on you. And, at times it feels like the song is about to reach a crescendo, culminate. That is when you will know whether it is a song of victory or despair. But, instead, it just softly climbs down and continues to haunt you. You could choose to leave the room, in which case the melody is over for you. Or,  you could choose to stay and be tortured in sweet agony for an indefinite period. You could wait.

Post depression post

Edit: I am not emo. This is more like 'Hero' by Regina Spektor mood.

"Power to the people, we don't want it, we want pleasure 
And the TV's try to rape us and I guess that they're succeeding
And we're going to these meetings but we're not doing any meeting  
And we're trying to be faithful but we're cheating, cheating, cheating" 

Edit #2: This post was supposed to start this way: Like a rolling stone, for all wrong things known, like a bum without a home. An academic forlorn. Like a mossy mossy rolling stone. That's to show you I am tired of rootlessness and fluidity already. This is the prelude to my anti-globalization rants. Read on.

It's been a few days since I started my journal writings titled twenty days to apocalypse. Actually, since the beginning of this year I've been waiting for one. Don't ask me why. No, it's obviously not because I am depressed or superstitious or have nothing to do or had a few rough days. I don't even know what depression means anymore really. Everything around is mildly depressing in a grainy, white noise sort of a way. I am sure the time has come to coin a new word of this state of being. I am writing this on a rainy December evening in Delhi. You can imagine how that pushes the apocalyptic feel just an extra bit. It's probably also about December that I start craving clean slate.
You can take this as a dedication to all those who had predictable careers and snugly stuck in a regular desk job. Most of those who know me, complain that I am rarely seen or encountered in meat space, that I am around but never really and to get me to be somewhere means accepting I will join in only halfway. I've often even complained about time-turners not being invented just as yet. I've also complained about the absolutely illusory notion of good luck and always being on the wrong side of it. It's like there are five dates in every calendar month where everyone is free or wants to do an event or discuss something important. I can obviously not be at all, except I am no celebrity and hence my absence translates from callousness to snobbery to simple inability to contribute to "useful discourses of the ever changing world". Sometimes I hate you, Foucault. I hate the fact that these 'discursive interventions' were so powerful that everyone from marketing analysts to socialites lapped the vocabulary up and then throw their money at you only if you can present to them exciting observations of societal change.
I'll tell you why I think you are safe if you chose a conventional career. I am sure it's a grass-is-greener scenario but hear my side out. Have you ever felt existential crises as a regular breathing exercise? Ever imagined a Gutenberg world, of relentless publishing machines? Felt like you cannot take the next breath without justifying it first to yourself and then humbly (in apologetic parentheses with aptly referenced sources) to the whole society that seems to have suddenly discovered its potential political-ness? Every position is political and has disruptive potential. Yeah, you didn't even know that earlier and now that you know you are a stakeholder in cultural, economic, social, ethical and falafel way. So, I have to take your smelly shit and examine it to every thread. No, if you are an engineer reading this, you'll think I am talking about social media type statements. I am not. I am talking hardcore academic and worse, my recent experiences with art practices.
So, basically what happens is that you become the mother of jaded with two permanently grey hairs and even before you see an art show you hate the artist's guts. You can only think about how he fooled someone to get their money and trust me, an entire graphic novel of his "playing the field" floats past my eyes. Obviously, it's so uncouth to bitch about the world's exploding potential. That's why I am not writing a research paper on this. If you ever spoke to me on a day when I am more awake than asleep, I'd make the most disgusting faces at your every sentence. There's no way you could talk to me without upsetting me. Obviously, it's a part of your postnational, coerced global, techno-euphoric and all such portmanteau being. Even your being born and fully blossomed into an offensive individual professionally excites me. That's where I get my fodder.
If I go to America, they smirk. If I have a heterosexual boyfriend, they pitifully smile. New addition: if I buy a lomo camera I am a hipster. Worst, if I leave my text left or right aligned, it inspires terrible political jokes. That's why saying I am depressed will immediately throw me in your lot - the non observers.
What does this world look like then? I'll give you my own version of the Brave New World. While learning psychology I'd learned about the different stages of coping with stress. This is a world in its burnt out, lower level functioning phase. Being happy is naive, having a problem is not enough, having a bizarre problem that seems to dangle on the threshold of paradigm changes is the best bet. It's a post gay, post queer, post depressed, post Che Guevara t-shirt, post national, post digital world.  I can hardly utter that I see nothing new. I am waiting for the day someone says nothing is new and just proclaims a worldly TIME OUT with a T sign. Does this all let you breathe? Maybe you haven't even come across such acute anxieties because you've always aspired to actually reach America and get a house and have a baby. I really wish there were more of you.
So, before you all can jump on me and say this is all pervasive and nothing new, I am just going to say it's my quarter life crises moment where I cannot decide between desirable and undesirable. But, I cannot stop, I must continue investigating the undesirable because that's what a career in academics means. Btw, we call this feelings stuff 'affect', just in case some of you are cornered in a social science debate, this should save you.

"It's alright, it's alright, it's alright" ('Hero - Regina Spektor)

Post-it conspiracies feed on golden dust

Black dog and I, separated by tens of meters of uneven grassy patches were both sniffing the headiest drug of a midsummer evening today - petrichor. It was an evening of accomplishment - six rounds of jogging then running then flailing, panting, drinking, stretching, gawking, running and resting in that succession of action with the mise en scene of black dog sniffing wet mud from far away places changing to nearing drizzles and bodily fluid sweat meet atmospheric fluid rain as trees sway hips in joyous undulating motions. Of course, the dirty shade of blue black (dirty like Old Monk) sky was still busy delivering foreign people from unknown lands in incessant plane drones above. That's the background score to life in South Delhi I suppose.
The day had its moments. Apparently, the British character in 'Girls' is an ENFP. Basically, she is cool, tall, pretty and has the license to be mean. It's supposed to be some kind of an irrevocable truth that us ENFJs just have to live with. Then, the whole schedule thing. Everyone's applauding me for reaching deadlines and waking up early and sleeping on time and eating no carbs and not having hit a single dog in the past few months. It's like gradually discovering the entire rulebook that the world actually is. In our shared heads (me and these sane freaks) hippies are no longer cool. I don't even know if I should go back to thinking they were or just make really wry jokes about hippies, sexually transmitted diseases and World Wars. And worse, being nice to people because they are watching all the time. No, don't throw the you-don't-have-to-care-about-others crap. If I didn't have to, none of us would have bothered getting a job or studying or even procuring food. We'd just be gnawing at each others' skin and muscles, in turn growing fat and being food for others to feast on (like a symbiotic cannibal fest). All these are not like isolated rules or something. Once you start waking up on time, you take a bath regularly, then you want to wear neutral tones and you stop yelling at douche bags who keep pinging you forever with Youtube links (because apparently it's okay for people to forget that you have a 256 kbps Internet connection).
Then, there are also those who tell you the world doesn't revolve around you. Oh really? Then, how come the ENFPs get by with oh-my-life rants like it's a new one everyday? There's nothing like negativity or positivity. That's the problem with labels, post-its, notes and schedules. Also, progress, the mother of all trouble. Most people don't realize that profundity is basically a matter of striking a chord with those who listen to your kind of stuff and read your kind of books. So, you could be extremely profound without being retweeted or shared or liked a hundred times simply because most people's attention spans and vocabularies are one millionth of yours. Does moderation means not being obsessed about the right punctuations and taking a bath only twice a day? But, what happened to all your schedules and rules?
Also, annoyingly, most of these science turned arts lovers/converts reductively shake their heads vigorously when you point out the trouble with progress. They think they get it, but I doubt anyone's ever had a course in epistemology. Someone should prescribe that for nursery class. So, what happens when people tell you that you are an ENFJ or that your thighs are fat or that you might have missed the bus or should take a test to get into a program or move into a house ceaselessly? It tells you about overarching labels, echoes ticking clocks, piles up unfinished scholarship applications and constantly feels like jiggling body parts.

Scenario 1: Sans progress need

Hey, your thighs are fat and that's what makes you as a person when someone looks at you. Wonderful, continue to grow like you can't control anything! That's how your photographs won't have held breaths or shit ass contemporary hair styles!

Scenario 2: Progress need activated

Hey, your thighs are fat and there's always a solution! Basically, because there's a solution in life, everything is a problem including your fat thighs, occasional drunk calls, your needs for love or just simply that you like kicking dogs. It's all a big problem until you spend your entire lifetime trying to find solutions for everything that ever existed!

Yeah, this rant goes all over the place. I think this is how a push over rants. Somewhere I am beginning to remember the days when I was terribly brusque and as Victorians put it, "the wind would barely touch my sublime, supple bosom". I feel a lot saner now and maybe even less magical. There's always that hoard of men wanting things. Most used to think I was immodest, now most think I want to be unattainable. I guess I could start with going away to places every month and being more unresponsive in general. I need to switch off and stop being so understanding about everything.

50mm startups

Divided we live, united we bicker

Once upon a time in the whirlwind of love, cemented in the heart of the very evil frowning society, then a few years into blue tint photos by the sea, a couple of months with the newly born daughter and a few arid years past, someone took the trouble to drag it in our bitter chance dialogs over fried eggs and orange juice. You spelled it, I signed, we sealed the pending hunch, it wasn't meant to be. For the daughter who now knows, who can spell it as well as us, it is called s-e-p-a-r-a-t-i-o-n. Divorces have an epistemology. Let me locate it for you.
They exist in films, imagination, they form a characteristic salient feature of the bad houses with dim lights that balance the diabetic good of our neighborhood, they are placed in drunken adulthood, abusive childhood, impulsive youth and a couple of 'changed-man/woman' experiences later, they finish with a big dramatic bang. Do you see? They define bad houses, bad parents, bad kids, bad homework, fear of intimacy, stigma, burden, baggage and a debris of flooding photos and clothes out of the attic. Do you see, you two? You brought them conclusively to the finer side of delightful household disagreements. You pin pointed the finely carved hollows of all our tree-houses. Such confusion, such dreadful thoughts come to me, if mine will end up like you. After all, I was one of the kids in the blue sea photos.
Why mustn't you be quiet and live like others do, half your life is already gone, the half promises to be a cycle of retrospective mourning followed by epiphanies of the metamorphosed life, discourses on change, on making colder harder selves, and a few vengeful afternoons later, the wrinkles will wash all this confidence away. For lovers to commit and publicize, for married and betrothed people to eulogize, for panegyric romeo tales, and for us unwilling to enter into the holy familial bonds, you must stay. Fight within the room and sleep over it, be doomed over that one hasty wink and stolen kisses. Make believe.

Sariska and the travel birthday:Fish, tigers and age

I sat again, fretting at the edge of the epic twentieth birthday, it will JUST be another birthday of 178 facebook wishes and 20 twitter mentions, 10 calls and millions of handshakes and hugs. It is me, my birthday! How could it possibly not be big, fun etc? And, enter Chandan Gomes and his prized silver Santro car. *drum rolls*
Sariska, the tiger reserve in Rajasthan happened, a drive, yes. Exhausting, yes. But, exciting-typical-Noopur birthday? Yes!
The night started with baked cheese cake and other chocolate cake and ended in... McDonalds! I realize over years, McDonalds has stood for me, many things. It stands for the face of consumerism, the shiny place of eternal advertisement poster happiness that I never participated in my childhood in. It stands for all the Barbies I never had, all the remote cars I watched from afar and all the Super Marios I played only at a chance relative house visit. My romanticizing of McDonalds must irk you, make you laugh too maybe.
The morning too began with the same. We did not spot tigers, I doubt there are any, but we pretended to be very interested in clicking pictures of Peacocks and monkeys, all other tourist followed us, making the most of their trip :) Come le dejeuener, hunger growled like a tiger from the depths of our stomachs and we landed at this haven of food, not only food for body,but food for thought! The picture do the job, though I'd allow myself some space to describe "The Quest" cafe in the middle of Sariska town/village, its walls etched in "Free Tibet" slogans and wind chimes, surreal!
The walls dripped of poems, painted with fish, wouldn't you think this is some dreamy destiny moment, for me to encounter wall full of fish and sweet word nothings and Buddha mentions on the wall! This is what birthdays should be, a moment of crazy crazy delight. I couldn't get over it the entire day, of course. Hence, the fish eye pictures too! :)
Thanks much to all the cats, fishes, Pablo Nerudas, friends, frenemies and unknowing, unsuspecting display picture admirers, birthdays like these ease the anxiety of turning 20 (or 47, as many would agree). To celebrate the larger travel of life, by the metaphor of the car travel, it was a literary moment of joy!

Picture, lens curtsey: Chandan Gomes

Bah-bye Taiwan- Day III and return

Anecdote one:
Perched at the edge of the Shi'lin market road, as she munched harmlessly onto some veggies, a taxi driver harkened in the background, collecting all his English words with great effort, an unmatched prowess to convey: "Eu... Eu...ahr a rabbit!" Huh, what! And,then came the aha moment, well yeah, I was munching on a carrot. He wasn't the only one, almost every third passerby was slightly amused at a carrot muncher, so was the shop keeper who broke into genuine hundred percent laughter. Of course, even you would, if 95 shops in your market sold every variety of meat possible, and the other 5 had fruits (rose apples that leak and burst in your mouth!). This was the story of every lunch and dinner in Taiwan, the vegetarian grumbling and fussing drones in the air, "NOT meat, not chicken, not beef, not pork, not fish, not salmon, not eggs...ve-jee-tay-rean". This baffled most people there, there remains little to eat, though you can always resort to rice cakes, tofu and bean pastes!

Anecdote two: KFC is home
So, after a satisfying shopping spree for 2.5 hours, hunger screamed from the deepest corners of my stomach. This is how I thought of food in Taiwan: Hunger-food-daal-rice-not-vegetables-fruits-mcdonalds-all non veg-despair-hunger-apples-sigh. But, I thought to take my chances, to go to KFC to eat vegetarian, yes, something a normal Indian vegetarian would never do. Of course I found nothing, but I desperately bought a beverage. As I sipped on it, the familiar taste, of at least something tasting the same made me feel so good! For people who scream hoarse at these capitalist food chains, there are certain experiences that only KFC and McDonalds reproduce anywhere you go. Thank God for that.

Story of the city, workshop and scrubbed clean solitude:
The workshop to begin with, was good, very vague but, a lot of food for thought. The people I met, never had imagined meeting someone from Kyrgyztan or Moldova, but I did and loved it! The city, yes, how American! All clean, large 'freeways', less people, the modern buildings, typical urban imagination, tall and shiny. Maybe its just a scared little girl's first time in the foreign lands, but it was so different than where I live. Not only do cows and dogs stay out of the picture, but also the personal space seemed larger. The freeways to me, seemed hopelessly alone, or maybe I am just very uncomfortable with halogen lamps and buzzing cars. These are the fleeting impressions of Taipei, though something remarkable to leave you all with: the way the people thank and welcome anybody at all. Shie shie, for all the warmth.
Bah-bye (head tilted at 45 and hand shows peace sign) :)

How theatres are organic and AVATAR sucked almost...

I went to watch AVATAR premier show, bought tickets so enthusiastically, landed in the line seated in theatre, newly upgraded to 3d. The show starts and with or without the spectacles, the screen is blurry and split. The show goes on for almost ten minutes. Gradually, slowly people realize that something's wrong and its actually not 3d! Lol, low grunting ensues from different corners and then finally, the courageous 'somus' (the most popular name shouted around) got up from their seats to 'ghero' the projection room. We watched in mixed anticipation, thrill and a little panic, wondering what would happen next. The screening stops and then a trial of reprojection starts. Sometimes the sound went off, the other times the screen showed three different colored images etc. Lots of people start shouting 'cheating' and people around me vacate to eat some popcorn and get drinks. Suddenly, the film starts again, this time working well. All start shouting, 'rewind kar, rewind!' All don their glasses again, whistles and hooting. Funny how faces would change to mass childish euphoria at some 3d effect. The film sucked. I went expecting some super realism through three dimensions and amazing music and a relatively simple story newly told. But, as the mediocre simplistic colonial story unfolded I felt my enthusiasm and joy recede by every minute. All of us staring blankly at the screen and chorus 'ooh's' and 'aah's'. What amazed me was that when the 3d wasn't working, the way we as a crowd were reacting was something like you see in films. Hooting, clapping, protests, interacting with this new setup where they've come to experience something that they aren't yet aware of yet know roughly what to expect. Also, subjectivity of visual experiences and how it takes us sometime to realize and shout out that "it's not only me who can't see this 3d! The 3d is actually not working!" Lol. Very Magritte like, do you see the picture that I see?
Ps. Do not watch Avatar in any other theatre but IMAX. Trust me, I feel I missed out something, it can't be that bad.

Dosa and soap

Yeah, well you won't understand. It's complicated. You don't have the privilege of access to our chats and messages. Yeah, well we are friends, not really. A little different. I mean, we are a little crazy. We stop and think and talk and stop and hate and like then love then fight then write then click and delete and tear and eat and jump and shake and wiggle and smile 'cos we are like that only. You see, it's complicated.
We are sometimes like Dosa and soap. Slime and base and eyes and lick and tickle and pinch and poke. You can't eat Dosa without soap because once you eat and then layers will form of oil and then you will want to put those flying strands of hair behind your ear because nowadays girls cut hair to make it fly so hair will fly and oil will touch hair and hair will stick and moisturizer plus shampoo will become useless and dust will stick. I will run to you, on the steel wash basin and see you are not there but I knew you wouldn't be but I still see a phenyl bottle and in desperate hope for good measure I open and put some hoping it is you, soap. No rescue because you throw my beautiful exciting tales in my face like flying polythene bags shoved under the trash can right when I start ranting and have no remedy to make oil less viscous.
I have taken many a long breath of my lives because it is good to breathe long. Long and short, long makes proud of life more delayed and short makes guilt of stacking huddled life. Long means healthy and short means hurried curry. But only you understand and the other find oh-so-enigmatic and only you catch conceits but the other oh-so-debate. Layers of us, Dosa and soap.
Ps. You take the foul words too.

Certainly deciding what I don't want

They all blend in together and seem to rush in together, brick, orange and rain. While I walk on extremely tangible gray stones seen through coffee mixed with bitter orange juice in perfectly melody synched deserted towns and tying a gold amulet around my neck I can feel the mad, lingering, biting, plaguing powerful feeling of wanting to lay affect like rubbing round circles on the back of your palm and toeing the first hair on your leg. That gleam makes me surge like a sandy wave filter through my porous clothes leaving a tanned sinful good feeling about my body. The dead, the nude and the fillers in the frame seem to urge me to go on because sunset is not the place to keep feeling this. Till then, colorful little washed out jaded purple cloth pieces and rusty salty iron bangles keep me busy. Buy some paper and scratch flowery curves, paper thick yellow cloth and fold it quietly into the big cloth straw bag, brown and deep red. By night time freckles and red spots make me comfortable with the skin I wear and the balmy evening's oily nudging and the book under the armpit are both in rhyme with how I may feel the best about me. It is then and only there that you may access what I want to see, show. We all three should witness the spectacle together.

Let's fast forward it!

Yeah, long time.

Couple of days ago, we all came together. She said 'let's watch!' We all exclaimed 'film!' Now, you know whose Saari we are pulling :) So, she belted out one 'clean' film. The film was really interesting and she didn't quite mind the profanities in the dialogs. Then, suddenly, the hero and the heroine come together to do something that humankind aspires to achieve in every action: lurrv. The usual Hollywood style, passionate making out that lasts up to 33 seconds in 'clean' films. And then, as we didn't realize, a divine voice harked, " Please, fast forward it!" To all us reservoir dogs whose sixty percent public conversations rely upon sexual puns, innuendos and obscure dirty jokes varying in degrees of murkiness, this was 'clearly' the funniest eye brow raiser of the day! She can't take mass embarrassment, you see... Later of course, we "fast forwarded" thrice.
[Inside joke ( I'm prone to dirty thinking):
Dear husband to miss: I say, tonight is good! What you say?
Miss: (shy) hehehe
dear husband advances hand to the waist
Miss: Uh-huh. Let's fast forward it, shall we?]

This bears no resemblance to living characters around who in any case love taking offense.

{Fast forward to a few days later}
A certain girl-happy-in-love-my-guy-is-divine goes to watch an obviously 'romantic' film. Haw! It's in English and we all know how these white people start doing things in public theaters. My-guy-is-divine gets so angry, I tell you! He wants to get up and go. But, girl-happy... stops him and he sits through it. Mind you, only for her! Now he is so upset he won't talk to her for few days. Gosh these white people, they can break relationships! Fast forward, I say!
lawl, guffaw

The French connection

This is about the trip that is just over. A trip to Pondicherry (Puducherry). All those streets and those houses that were yellow and gray and blue. All streets named in French. So many people who spoke french. I was bummed. I cannot and am too exhausted to romanticize about the place but there is a beach between auroville and Pondy where I went at night. It was a fantasy, like some ancient African dance to beckon the moon hiding behind the clouds and the waves roaring, invading the land slight by slight. There are not many pictures of the place because it was birthday party scene and most pictures are of people. Still, I have just put some visual memory for color. It was a beautiful trip because I could still confidently speak french and connect to the french way of thinking and gasping about typical frivolities.
Je me disais que c'etait fini, que c'etait l'histoire. Mais les sentiments sont bien preserves, meme aujourd'hui. C'est comme un grand sac dans lequel il ya des mots pour la meme image mais dont la description la rend completement differente.