Epiphanies

Facebook memories is getting immense attention from me right now, because what else do I have to keep me occupied anyway. I open the notification in the hopes of being transported into those days of innocence and joyful abandon. Instead, I am constantly horrified and kinda resort to reading my posts through my hands covering my face. I was a terribly non-woke (asleep?) teen who said all cringey things possible. It got me thinking about things I've learned should never be said, perspectives that required to be changed and challenged, and things or people or activities I had to give up, because I realized that somewhere inside me there does lie some sort of a decent human being? So from 2010 to 2020, here are 10 things I learned, unlearned, stopped/started saying/doing/indulging in:

1) Learnt that calling something or someone gay is not a freaking insult! This should've been instinctive, but wasn't, and leads to me staring in horror at things I've said. 

2) Calling someone a retard is (a) not an insult, (b) not to be substituted for asking them politely why they couldn't comprehend something. Again, you'd think it was instinctive, but it wasn't. 

3) Slut, prostitute are not insults. One is a character judgment based on hypocrisy, and the other one is honest manual labour. Neither are terms that I should use to debase someone. Well nip the thought process in the bud if I consider insulting them via their choice of sexual partners or line of work, anyway. 

4) All of the above are terms that were frequent residents of my vocabulary due to years of conditioning, and the pop culture that I consumed. Here's the dilemma though - by 2010 I was already reading Rushdie, I thought saying sexy out loud was a crime, but didn't hesitate to call someone gay for taking something too seriously. I'm not about to breakdown the mess that would've been the thought process behind that. I'd rather chalk it up to being an idiot teenager. 

5) My knight in shining armour should not be stalking me, forcing me to respond to their affections, or getting into self-made tight spots that he later rescues me from. STOCKHOLM SYNDROME! That should be the freaking genre of all of our cutesy cheesy romantic Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam movies that I grew up on. If someone successfully argued in an actual court of law that he should not be found guilty of stalking because this is a part of his culture,  you know its time to restructure this bish. Also my knight can and should be a female (Dame), if that's what I'd like. 

6) Madonna and the whore trope. Your bitchy villainous female characters are all the ones that wear non-sanskaari clothes, will likely speak in good English, will sport characteristics that make them independent, and then also up and do the weirdest vilest things possible. A mark of a girl having softened is also the change in her sartorial choices, and when she becomes more adept at her native tongue. Dude c'mon! (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a cult classic, and I will forever love the movie no matter how much it sucks, don't fight me on this!)

7) The concept of family. A part of having a predominantly Asian upbringing is that we assume the presence of a father and a mother. We were never used to our friends talking about step-parents or step-siblings or having single parents (by choice or because a parent had passed away). I still put my foot in my mouth every now and then, when I absent-mindedly assume the presence of two alive and connected parents and make situations very very awkward for everyone involved. As someone who will definitely give out details of my dog when someone asks me about my kid, I should be better at handling this!

8) Crying in public is for kids/ Don't cause scenes! Most of us keep our emotions in check, depending on our surroundings. This is a necessary skill, true. This doesn't mean that the darkness of your room is the only place to express your emotions! Crying doesn't make you weak, crying doesn't make you hysterical, crying doesn't make your stand any less worthy, crying also doesn't absolve you of anything. It took a lot of unlearning and relearning to grasp this concept. To know that it is okay to cry, and to not cry. 

9) Not every argument needs to be fought. As a debater, and as someone with very loud opinions that I insisted be statistically and factually backed, I had, and still have, a hard time stopping myself from seeing every argument to the end. The emotional toll an argument has on someone goes unnoticed in my effort to get the facts right. I now know that my academic or general interest should not negate their lived experience or the trauma someone was dealt. Sometimes, I just have to be human. And be there. I'm working on it. 

10) Drumroll? Grey area. Not the BDSM kind, shutup!! Is it just me, or did you also grow up assuming that someone couldn't have attributes that are widely considered opposites of each other? For example, I wouldn't expect a soft spoken debater, a weight lifting chess champion, a shy drummer (don't ask!), very naive notions, in hindsight, yes. I have realized that everybody is a smorgasbord of 'opposites'. There's good and bad and loud and quiet and strong and weak and soft and brave and smart and stupid and dainty and clumsy and bored and enthusiastic and wordy and speechless and nerdy and street smart inside us. We are all a curious bundle that gets curiouser and curiouser, and I am learning to appreciate my journey down the rabbit hole with all of the ones I call my own. 

After procrastinating for over a week, I've managed to get to the end of this list of epiphanies which should've just been good sense! 

Here's sending you strength and virtual booze and air kisses to get you through! 

See you on the other side of 2020! 

insomnia induced rant (part 2/n)!

I really did want at least one post to not be marveling at the horrors that 2020 is unleashing on us. A friend texted me after a while the other day (not sure about measures of time anymore since I can't even be trusted to know which day of the week it is), and I suddenly remembered that he was stricken by an additional calamity, and honestly excused myself saying I can't keep track of what fresh horror is hitting whom anymore, its a miracle that we haven't exploded into dust, thanks to 2020. 

Well, you could chalk this post to yet another response to a brand new variation of a time-honored tradition. Once I took a break from playing ludo/scrolling through memes/crying and laughing at the same time about how my work shoes miss me, I was privy to a few unsavory memes about including a mongoose alongside someone's daughter's dowry and attempted to find out what that was all about. Well, I sure wish I hadn't. A guy killed his wife by exposing her to snake bites twice. This because she refused to give in to the demands of more dowry, I am led to believe. I am going to refrain from commenting because my heart and head will explode from the effort. I hope her parents find a way to come to terms with life. 

Discovering this event led to me reading a lot of comments that frankly made me want to throw up, but also brought back a million conversations I've had with imposing uncles and aunties, and the spectacular double standards with which some of us are treated. This might also have been triggered by the 'kulasthree' videos originating from the abomination called 'annie's kitchen'. 

Marriage is a sacred custom, a sacred space, a sacred tradition, a bond, a promise, a lifelong commitment, a companion, and everything. Agreed. In my very honest opinion, though, we as a society, put too much faith in the goodness of human beings, for marriages to truly be what it is expected to be. Like democracy, and communism. All the most wonderful concepts, but places too much faith in human beings. 

I am not about to get into just how much we know personally people mess up, when it comes to remaining faithful. Just how blurry the lines get, with circumstances and time, how 'forgiveness' becomes a very important concept, or how people remain tied up due to societal pressure, or for their kids, or because its an expensive affair, or because they've spent a good part of their lives with them, or because the love is still there or because staying in the marriage is easier, or because we do really need a companion to get through life, or just because.

I am not here to question anybody's decision to get married or stay in a marriage. I'm here to ask a few questions of those who make interesting assumptions about me when I refuse to get married. 

I have values and traditions that I hold closer than life, and will never break. The lack of faith I have in myself, makes me stray away from situations that might make me abandon these values, I hold them so close, I don't want to test my resolve. 

Lying in a relationship, cheating in a relationship, holding onto a person when the emotion runs out, making sacrifices and compromises I will later return to blame the person for, misandry, toxic anything, and pretending about a million things that stop me from being who I am, and from them being who they are - all things I won't accept. Don't @ me with when in love or you've to learn to adjust. I adjust, and I understand love. Hell I am still trying to convince my friend that in the Cartesian plane of emotions, love falls on the upper right quadrant. I also know that when the honeymoon phase is done,  I'll get bitch slapped by life. Before you run at me with you won't know unless you experience it, or there's nothing like having a companion, think about what I am saying. I wouldn't stick my neck out for marriage, because I don't want to be the one hurting the other person, I don't want to take something lovely, and slowly watch it turn ugly or run-of-the-mill. I don't want to lie or cheat or hide or not take a job in a far-off continent and watch them deal with the debris of our relationship. 

Now, for all those of you who have very colorful thoughts about my relationships, and, shall we say dalliances?, once you understand where I come from, even if you don't agree with me, I hope you'll understand that this means that I hold all those values you incorporate into marriage closer than you think I do. That I respect the people in the institution, their attempt at going through life, their success at it, and everything about it, more than most people. Not wanting to get married, doesn't take away a particular category of morality away from me. It doesn't mean that I don't respect families, or that family doesn't mean squat to me. I don't think this union should be a rite of passage. I won't do it because I'm expected to. And then stay in it because I'm expected to. I won't let you subject me to peer pressure from our ancestors. My values are what makes me hesitate, not my lack of them. Here's an easier way out - don't judge/hate/assume before you attempt to understand.

Capisce? 

Sedate in the knowledge that my parents and other near and dear ones are going to read this post, and, um, have things to say about it, here's me gearing up to respond to at least 20 concerned people saying, "ofcourse not! just trying to find a suitable guy! I was bored, so I turned to my blog, that's all!"

See you guys on the other side of 2020!

Soliloquy

For the longest time, I've attempted to write fiction, only to fail miserably. This has resulted in a number of terrible jokes in the life-is-stranger-than-fiction genre.

Let me try and break this down - 

I could imagine a storyline, characters in it, a narrative, a geographical or sociopolitical setting, a theme, and more. 

I begin writing, somewhere down the line, I am engulfed by the feeling that I am not doing complete justice to all the characters. Their reactions are not fleshed out, they are merely responding. People don't just respond, all their reactions are the end result of a myriad of factors. I can't get over the fact that I'm now attempting to speak for people I don't fully know. 

When you are done rolling your eyes at me, I haven't missed the irony. I created them, but then they got too real for me too quickly. 

I drop their story like a hot potato. 

This is the general timeline of me having a go at fiction. 

Not to use the term 'phobia' lightly, but commitment hasn't always been my strongest suit when it comes to people. I am shoddy at keeping in touch, I run out of people's personal matters the moment I spot an exit, I tend to not divulge too many details about myself, and I hit backspace about four times right now because I wasn't comfortable putting these details down on my blog. 

I am beginning to comprehend that this tendency may be what hinders me from being able to write fiction. 

Postgrad in English Studies, worked/works in the media, writes content and edits magazines for a living, have published in online and print magazines, you get the idea, writing is my line of work. 

Yet, my fear of getting too involved with human beings is so monumental, that I'm willing to give up on a necessary skill. Maybe I should attempt writing about dogs or cyborgs? 

Intimate terrorism

As the world allover we romanticize spending more time with our families, getting to truly know and understand each other, bonding through activities, etc., a massive section of society who do not have the luxury to count their homes as safe spaces are being placed under duress by the necessary and continuing lockdown. Globally, all helpline numbers, child protective services, women protective services, and all legal and social help centers have had the biggest surge in calls and cases in the recent past. 

Domestic abuse and child abuse are at an all-time high, defiantly eviscerating our collective tendency to idealize the concepts of family and home. 

In an almost dystopian situation where mankind is attempting to fight an unseen enemy by being made to stay indoors and away from fellow beings, there is a litany of frustrations that are crippling our psyche and our ability to function 'correctly' or 'normally'. 

There is a massive amount of burden on homemakers and working mothers to be high-functioning, because everybody at home constantly means constant attention, and duties to fulfill. Since domestic help is a risky route to take, traditional gender roles are putting a lot of stress on women to over-perform, while they themselves are undergoing the frustrations of a lockdown.

Redressal methods are hard to carry out since at this point the victim is pretty much stuck with their abuser 24/7 and fear extreme repercussions to reporting an already extreme situation. Stereotypical ideologies resurfacing along with bruised egos owing to the current work environment have resulted in a lot of men taking out their frustrations on their children and the women of the household. 

In a community where women are workhorses, sources of pleasure, and an outlet of all anguish rolled into one, these helpless women are stuck inside the four walls that were already the source of their nightmare, or have become so, right now. They are weighed down by the centuries-old expectation to be the one that placates that nurses that heals, and society's indoctrination that they are second in position to their husbands, and a lot of the times sheer physical inability to strike back. 

Before we began featuring in the latest version of apocalypse now, most cries for social and moral equality were direly overlooked or shutdown as overreactions because we as a community have become good at paying lip service to be liberal. I have always personally believed that our milieu plays a big role in defining who we are, as a person. When forcefully shut inside four walls, when everything is a big question mark, when I don't know what will happen to my savings, if I'll be employed when this is done, I need to understand that raising my hand against another person, or raising my voice against them because I have been granted the authority to do so, is not an option. It is not something I should merely refrain from doing, it is something I shouldn't factor in as even a dimly possible option. 

'Intimate terrorism' is a term I came across post lockdown, and the accounts of women and children and men are truly horrifying. With the concerned law and order having to deal with a worldwide pandemic, humanity is taking menacing steps backward in the progress we made at rote-learning that every human being deserves dignity of existence. 

While we joke about parents who pulled fire alarms in their buildings simply to get a glimpse of someone who is not their perceivably exhausting toddler, we must also be aware of the fact that a lot of others are taking that frustration out on the helpless. 

I peruse lockdown memes because it is some version of 'misery loves company', but I do that in the confines of the four walls that will always be my safe haven. I wish these reports of domestic and child abuse cases wouldn't be a part of our arguments whenever we next argue policy, but they will be, because in so many households, in strata of society, in communities, in mentalities, physical and mental abuse is still a part of life. 

Life in the time of corona?

The title is fairly clichéd more than 7 months into a pandemic, with meme kings and queens reigning supreme. 

Also, my previous post was in August 2016, so here's to partial lockdown for bringing me back?

Life is a big 'embrace yourself', 'learn something new', video call all the human beings you've ever known, cooking experiments, gardening, DIY everything, and dusting off all the tricks in your bag that you may have forgotten existed. 

I am more fortunate than most, right now. I live with and near my loved ones, nobody I know has tested positive yet, I can still move around to breathe a little bit, and thankfully the country I call home looks like they can handle this without too many casualties. Every day I spend a lot of time counting my lucky stars (no, not out of boredom!), that my biggest problem is that I don't have much to keep me occupied. 

Having had ample time to think long and hard about pretty much everything, I was particularly enamored by the idea of 'plans'. In the rat race that was life till about November 2019, people had, or were expected to have, their lives planned. Next step in education, in your career, in your personal life, in investments, in everything! Complex calculations predicted a certain level that you were expected to achieve, and further calculations ascertained the level your dreams should be at. As we leveled up or down on the neverending highway to certain death, society got to sit around and watch us break a sweat or breeze through, and annotate our lives with their helpful (?) comments. 

All of this might not have changed for a lot of people. Yet surely there is a big community of people who are presently looking into a blank void, attempting to comprehend the murkiness of what lay ahead of them. What will the world look like, if and when this is done? When do I go back to 'normalcy'? Is my job still going to be there at the end of this? How do I explain a suspicious lack of productivity on my college application? 

Though I'm yet to make a judgment call on whether this is amusing or bemusing, a vast majority of us are so ingrained to never letting up in life (out of necessity or habit or sheer force of will), that we are beginning to openly talk about mental health issues that are coming out of not having much to do! We are living during a time when Kim Jong Un (remember the other spoilt kid with nuclear codes?) is Schrodinger's Kim Jong Un (I don't think the moon landing was a hoax, but c'mon, botched heart surgery?)! And yet. Oh yeah, always that 'and yet'. In my head, like a constantly running program (broken radio, to be en pointe), there is a myriad of permutations and combinations attempting to rererererestructure 'life'? 

I have spent months together wishing that I could spend one more minute just sitting down quietly. Well, I got my wish, didn't I? I complained about a Netflix account that was going to waste because I simply didn't have the time to watch anything. I think I might have exhausted the cornucopia that is Netflix. I complained about not getting enough time to reorganize my room or take a long shower or take long walks or laze around or sleep in. Well, what do you know, all of those wishes have come true! 

In a month, I'll turn 27. I got a driving license four days ago, something I had given up after September 2018! All the various sources of corona news and news alerts parade a world that is spinning out of control, while some of us are sitting in our houses, trying to deal with unnecessary tribulations thrown at us, courtesy existential crises and nihilist tendencies brought about by the pandemic. Do people around me suddenly think getting married is a good idea, though I am sure all divorce attorneys around the globe are going to have sprawling beach houses at the end of this? Do they want me to rethink my child-rearing prospects and policies though with every alternate breath they count themselves blessed to not be locked in with kids? As the general human population is truly realizing that it may not be the best idea to spend too much time even with the people you love the most, are people still reminding me that I may have crossed the 'best before' date? Maybe. 

While basking in the nihilistic aura caused by a legion of philosophy and philosophy-adjacent classes, I did genuinely assume that if something life-changing occurred, our markers of success and achievement would change. Like life after the Industrial Revolution. Or the baby boomer culture. We are in the biggest worldwide crisis humanity has faced in recent times, with an end to it only in farsight, and we have still refused to let go of the parameters that needed to be met in order to achieve what is socially and morally accepted as the 'good life'. Or is this some warped manifestation of Sartre saying 'life begins on the other side of despair'? Is holding onto a false semblance of normalcy, is making plans for when we come out on the other side of this, the only way to keep hope alive? 

Well, then colour me hopeful too.

I'll see you on the other side of this pandemic, readers!