Newsletter: Daydream Believer

Wow, I am behind hand on crossposting these newsletters to my blog! But here's a link to subscribe and stay current.

August 2nd, 2018

Darling potato cutlets, I went away last weekend to review a spa retreat/wellness centre in Sonepat for Conde Nast Traveler, and since it is a review for them, I will not be expanding on that any further. I'll pop a link in here when it's up and you can see all for yourselves. It ended a very heavy month though, and was my first time in one of those places, which was an interesting experience. I have returned finally having slept my fill for the first time in ages. I keep thinking about sleep because of this fantastic deep dive into the science of sleep I just read. It's all about how your brain reacts when you sleep--how you literally go mad during one stage of sleep which leads to the hallucinations we call dreams.

Speaking of mad, I have been rewatching Mad Men on Netflix for the last few months--each episode is as rich and long as I remember it, meaning that you can only binge watch up until a certain point, and then there's too much information happening. I missed the last two seasons when it first aired, and now I'm curious to see what happens to everyone since I'm almost all caught up with what I had already seen. It's such a gorgeous show, and it features one of my favourite man/woman non-romantic pairings in the history of television: Peggy Olson and Don Draper.

Other non-romantic man/woman pairings I've loved:

1) Joey and Phoebe on Friends. They never sleep together (even though he kisses her once) and it seems they are the only ones free of the sexual roundabout the other four put themselves on. Even Monica and Ross, they are so weird with each other, right? Mostly this is because of Phoebe, she refuses to get dragged in, and if it weren't for Lisa Kudrow's character, I think the show would have been much less charming. I like that Phoebe acknowledges Joey for being who he is: dumb but with a good heart and the soul of an innocent. (Joey doesn't begin this way though, his character just gets more stupid as the seasons go on.) And I like that Joey is also fully supportive of Phoebe, he doesn't get her, since she doesn't fall into the traditional Monica/Rachel genre of woman, but regardless, he is never patronising of her as the other men on the show tend to be.

2) Leslie and Ron on Parks and Recreation. This is a more Peggy/Don relationship, but unlike Peggy holding herself back and being awkward around praise, Leslie pushes herself and her friendship forward on Ron Swanson, making him be friends with her whether he wants to or not. There's this one episode where Ron is all like, "I know you plan a birthday party for everyone and I hate birthday parties" and she's all "but it's your birthday!" and you think she's going to have a big thing for him, which he also thinks so he avoids her all day, but in the end, his birthday "party" is just him locked in his office, no one disturbing him, a steak and a bottle of whiskey. Even as he's eating that steak, he's smiling to himself, and you're thinking, "Aw, she really knows him!"

Last week in food and drink: Went out with my mum to a new pizza place called Evoo which has just opened up in Shivalik. Actually, I say new but a lot of my friends have not only been, they were all raving about it, so I was damn excited. However, it seemed like the whole city's friends had been raving about it, because at 12.45 on a Wednesday afternoon, we had to wait for FORTY MINUTES for a table. It's a small place, they don't deliver, they don't have a bar, but MAN, is that pizza good. (They also gave us a free panna cotta for our waiting pains.)

Every time I say I went to Evoo to someone, they're going, "Oh yes, it's fantastic, and have you been to Leo's?" Which is in Vasant Kunj and ALSO meant to have insanely good pizza, so that's next on my list. We've only had pizza home-delivered and recently, I sort of lost my love for pizza in general, it just hasn't been what I want it to be. However, now the love has been kick-started once more, which is good! Pizza for everyone!

This week in Home Hacks Inspired by Queer Eye: I've gotta thank my friend Meghna for the first hack: when we were watching Queer Eye together in Goa, and I saw the way Bobby was putting these little boxes in drawers so the underwear, socks etc would stay separate, I said, "Oooh I should get some of those" because my drawers are a grab bag of chaos. It is only through memory that I know some stuff is in there so I rootle around like a truffle pig until I find what I'm looking for. Meghna suggested using Amazon delivery cardboard boxes, and I was struck by the simplicity of that idea. Sadly, not all Amazon boxes are created the same--some are just the wrong shape, but I have two of approximately the right shape and size right now which are holding my underwear and my socks respectively in my drawer, and they look so NEAT, I spent a while yesterday just looking down at my little panty nest like a proud mother hen. I need more boxes though! Going to use the cardboard to divide up my t-shirt and skirt drawer as well.

The second hack also has to do with my closet which is literally overflowing (and yet, I spent all of this morning on the Ajio app, going through their EOSS and finally, after two hours of work, my cart had two measly items in it which I haven't even bought. Online shopping is a real addiction.) Anyway, my handbags are all over the place, I do have a drawer for them, but it's a pain to put them back there when you're using a rotation of three anyway, so I bought this set of hooks attached to a long belt thing which hooks above and below your closet door, which means all my bags are neatly hidden from public view.


This week in stuff I wrote: A new mythology for the millennial column! This fortnight: bad mother figures and what that says about the ancient Indians.

Excerpt: But Krishna wasn’t in the clear yet. Putana, pretending to be a beautiful woman, fully planned to kill Krishna by rubbing poison all over her nipple and offering to feed him for a bit to his foster mother. Back in ancient India, I suspect that having a little feed swap, where other people suckled your child as you worked and vice versa was an an obvious solution to day care, though in this case it may also function as a little warning about disease control, rather than an argument for bottle over breast.

This week in stuff other people wrote which I found interesting:

Have you ever wondered why teens on American shows just look so much more... grown up than you did at their age or were you never as naive as I was? Either way, this is a fun read on casting adults as teens.

Excerpt: This long-standing Hollywood ruse of casting definitely-not-pubescent adults as teenagers is seemingly ubiquitous; if an alien were to learn about the human aging process by simply watching mainstream film and television, she would be bewildered to arrive upon Earth's surface and realize that adolescents are not all gorgeous adults, and that many have braces, acne, or both. The fact that adults play teenagers has become such a commonly recognized trope that the internet has named the phenomenon "Dawson Casting," in reference to the much-older-than high-school-aged cast of Dawson's Creek.

How your adult friendships are different from your younger ones.

Excerpt: As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, they make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships. Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating. The most flexible are the acquisitive—people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.

A beautiful essay on menopause. (Hmm, I was clearly thinking a lot about age this week as I clicked on links.)

Excerpt: No matter how attractive or unattractive you are, you have been used to having others look you over when you stood at the bus stop or at the chemist’s to buy tampons. They have looked you over to assess how attractive or unattractive you are, so no matter what the case, you were looked at. Those days are over; now others look straight through you, you are completely invisible to them, you have become a ghost.

Arundhati Roy on writing in English and the moral appropriateness of this.

Excerpt: Guilt in this case is an unhelpful sentiment. India as a country, a nation-state, was a British idea. So, the idea of English is as good or as bad as the idea of India itself. Writing or speaking in English is not a tribute to the British Empire, as the British imperial historian had tried to suggest to me, it is a practical solution to the circumstances created by it. Fundamentally, India is in many ways still an empire, its territories held together by its armed forces and administered from Delhi, which, for most of her subjects, is as distant as any foreign metropole. If India had broken up into language republics, like countries in Europe, then perhaps English could be done away with. But even still, not really, not any time soon. As things stand, English, although it is spoken by a small minority (which still numbers in the tens of millions), is the language of mobility, of opportunity, of the courts, of the national press, the legal fraternity, of science, engineering, and international communication. It is the language of privilege and exclusion.

Sorry folks, there's no way to live a completely ethical life.

Excerpt: In order to develop more moral behavior, it’s much more important to focus on the things we do right, and the good we can bring about—even if that’s just redress after making a wrong. The ethicist contends that there’s no need to get “snooty or grumpy” about morality. A truly ethical life is joyful, lived with a clear conscience, “knowing that we are doing the best we can, even if that means our behavior may be unsatisfactory at times,” she writes.

Baba Ramdev and his Ramdevishness continue to make excellent longform profiles.

Excerpt: In his own way, Ramdev is India’s answer to Donald Trump, and there is much speculation that he may run for prime minister himself. Like Trump, he heads a multibillion-dollar empire. And like Trump, he is a bombastic TV personality whose relationship with truth is elastic; he cannot resist a branding opportunity — his name and face are everywhere in India. In May, he announced plans to add swadeshi SIM cards to his ever-growing list of products: packaged noodles, herbal constipation remedies, floor cleaner made with cow urine. He has a gift for W.W.E.-style publicity stunts: Last year he “won” a televised bout with an Olympic wrestler from Ukraine.

Newsletter: Grey skies, happy heart

(This went out as my newsletter this week, sign up here for the latest one!)

I have a little clock which I have set on the bookshelf facing our bed, and I glance at it before I hop out of bed, to see whether I've slept in or I'm waking up early, you know, the usual time-things that take over your life from the moment you open your eyes. Beats having a cellphone next to me though, all that horrid light, all those people clamouring to be heard, no, it's better to deal with the world when you've gotten up and made your coffee and are sitting down at your laptop. (Not that this stops me having a quick look at my notifications after I get up though. I just want to make sure no one has died or the world hasn't ended while I was asleep.) Anyway this morning, I read the clock wrong, but the good news is I got an extra 45 minutes out of this day, which I am spending writing this newsletter to you. (It takes about an hour to two hours to put together this whole thing--I make notes during the week, directly on to TinyLetter's draft page, and I collect links and then the writing of it is where I join all the dots and tell you what's been happening. Fun! But a little mind-space consuming which is why programming has been slightly erratic, I'm trying to finish the edits of my book by the last weekend of this month, and it's a chore and a half, so in procrastinating and then doing, all my brain is occupied with thinking about that.)

Obviously I was doing something else the day they had the time management class in college, because I also, in addition to doing more edits, have to finish reading a very dense (but very good!) new non-fiction book for my books column this week, and once again, my week is fully booked every single evening, so it's a grand old life, but it is a busy one, not so much room to be all like, "Oh, I'll do it in a couple of hours."

This week in memories: I went to the market the other day. I don't go to the market, I prefer the market to come to me, via Grofers or Big Basket, but we were having friends over, and I suddenly started thinking about a big bowl of sliced cucumbers and carrots with a cool dip. It's the kind of snack your friends with full-time help put out all the time, and also, your friends who PLAN these things in ADVANCE, but as you know, I am neither of those groups, but our cook had just come in and we were planning to order in for dinner anyway, so I volunteered to go get that kheera-gajar (not mooli. NEVER mooli. Mooli is always the last thing on the plate after everyone has eaten around it, all the carrot-cucumber is gone, and there's the radish, left mocking you. Friends, if you want to bulk up your veggie selection and are a little short, do a batch of french fries, put out small tomatoes with olive oil and salt, roast some cauliflower, ANYTHING except the mooli which only belongs in a paratha or in a pickle. No, don't argue with me. You know I am correct.)

There are two veggie sellers in the market: the big Safal guy and the littler, more posh, private guy. It's not a big market, as far as colony markets go. There is no ATM for example, but there are two general stores and one chemist. No electrician but a dry cleaner. Two kinds of co-ops (Mother Dairy and Safal), one momo guy, one chaat guy (eh, he's okay, I find his stuff too sweet and I haven't yet dared to try his gol gappa.) One florist who is pretty good. One cigarette shop, which is useful to know. And when I went, one bhutta guy had just arrived, cart full of corn, fire not yet lit.

I asked him to make one while I finished my shopping and when I bit into that bhutta---I can't describe it. What is that nostalgia you taste with your tongue? What is the word for a familiar food that tastes exactly the same--so few things actually do--when you were six or eight or eighteen or now, at thirty six? I was all those Meenakshis at the same time, I was aware of them like Matryoshka dolls, stacked inside of me. Even Delhi, even this city, which I don't know whether I loathe or I love, probably a mixture of those two, even Delhi suddenly became filled with Context. In the monsoon season, we eat bhutta, in the winter, we eat sweet potato chaat, in the summer; well, I never really had a summer snack, so you'll have to tell me. Jamun, maybe? Mangoes? But those are not street foods, not the way that corn is, or the ridiculously tart amrak they serve with shakharkandi.

I skipped along home, eating my bhutta, devouring it, passing people who looked at me with hostility or consternation, I ate every last kernel. (I don't know why the default Delhi expression is set to "hate." Even when you go to a bar and you go to the loo and run into another woman, she'll give you this expression of pure loathing. Why? What do I remind you of?) (Except for the little girl underneath my mum's apartment yesterday. We were pulling into the parking space and she was standing there and we waited for her to move and she looked me straight in the eye and smiled. Just a smile. For a stranger. It was nice.)

This week in cool things friends are doing: Ameya is heading up Indian Express's audio division and it is A-MA-ZING. She's hosting a water podcast herself (monsoon, rivers etc) but there are other subjects too if water isn't your thing. Check it out, they're adding new shows all the time so keep an eye out! 

This week in Cool Stuff I Read On The Internet

 

I love all of this article on #MeToo and growing up in the '90s and how the latter sort of enabled the former.

 Men in that decade’s pop culture tended to be harmless – think the goofs of Seinfeld and Friends. One of the bestselling American books of the early 90s, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, reassured readers that resolving miscommunications between the sexes was actually easy, if we just understood how to do it. Solutions were big then. A couples therapist named Harville Hendrix sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a guide called Getting the Love You Want, which unravelled “the mystery of romantic attraction” and answered “humanity’s yearning” in just 384 pages.

Who makes those very, very specific T-shirts on the internet? (I keep seeing ones that say, "It's an LSR thing." (btw, you should subscribe to The Hustle newsletter, it's great.)

There’s a whole subreddit (r/TargetedShirts) with 29k users devoted to the weirdly specific t-shirts that show up in Facebook users’ feeds — shirts like “I love ANIME but JESUS always comes first,” or “I’m a VET who EATS BEEF and sings KARAOKE.”

The internet was a fine and dandy place until BLOGS came along and totally broke it. (I miss the old blogging days sometimes, but, WOW, design was so CLUNKY.)

The Internet at the time was largely populated by academics, professionals, and college students. Not everyone had the desire to publish their angsty poetry, sexcapades, or surfing habits on a daily basis; the other limiter on chrono-content was the sheer time and energy it required. Diarying was a helluva lot of work. First you had to have something to say, then write, edit it, format it, add clip art, edit your index.html, edit any prev/next links, check those links, and lastly, upload the files.

What it's like having a luxury wedding.

Celebrity performers were novel just a decade ago, but now they’re something of a norm. John Mayer, Katy Perry, and Chris Martin have all been hired to perform at private weddings. Earlier this year, both Mariah Carey and Elton John performed at the wedding of a Russian billionaire’s granddaughter, while Mark Ronson DJed. Sarah actually blames her Russian clients for the trend “because they are the people who started hiring them for everything: 18th birthday parties, 21st birthday parties, wedding anniversaries, not just weddings. They diluted the uniqueness of that. Now we have weddings where one headliner isn't enough; they need three or four. Then you hit problems as to what order do you put them on in.” Tell a big name that she’s not the headliner, and she’ll drop out.

And what it's like being a crime reporter in Mumbai. (Sidebar: No, I have not watched Sacred Games yet.)

A police officer in Dadar once told me that his biggest nightmare is the mangalsutra theft. No matter what the status of the complainant, a mangalsutra robbery is always reported. “Because the Indian Penal Code doesn’t record emotions and relationships, only crime. We then have to listen to the stories too,” he had said, of the many times he has had to comfort a crying adult, who believed the theft was a bad omen.

I normally don't link to friendship hacks because every relationship is unique and beautiful, but I loved this guide to showing up for other people so much I'm going to be borrowing from it for my own friendships.

If they tell you about a personal experience, avoid interrogating them or taking the devil’s advocate position. (The devil doesn’t need more advocates!!!) Become known as the friend who says, “I believe you.”

Newsletter: Goa, baby

 (A little behind on posting here, so this edition is two week's old. For the latest, subscribe!)

What can I say about Goa in the monsoon that you're not already picturing in your head? It's slow, slower than usual. There are fewer people on the road, and most faces are brown. I'm just eating and sleeping and working--a lot of deadlines this past weekend meant that this newsletter is a late one--but I feel more relaxed, just by being somewhere cool and rainy. It's funny how even as a modern day human, we're as affected by the weather as our caveman ancestors. Delhi is a boiling circle of hell, at least it was when I left it, and that definitely knocked on to my mood and my energy levels. Constantly an Irritable Sloth, basically.

It's not even raining that much yet, just a few showers to punctuate the day. Over the weekend, we've booked a hotel in Panjim, and we're going to spend a few days there, but for now, we're staying with friends, lounging about on their sofa, watching the World Cup.

Yes, I am watching football! I don't know why the World Cup is the only exception I make to watching a sport game match on television, because sports = boring, there's only two outcomes: you win or you lose. There's no middle ground with sports, no shades of grey. I find that very dull. But with the football world cup, I think I invent little stories about the teams, imbibe each time with qualities of the country, plus it's quite a quick game, so you can use it to while away an hour and a half, building camaraderie and all the things one builds when one is watching a team sport. I also have made it more fun for self by picking a team out of each group, and have an ALMOST perfect score (Germany let me down). (My picks are on Twitter!)

This week in my occasionally pish-posh life: The first week we were here (last Monday? Gosh, time really HAS slowed down) K's mum was here as well. My mother-in-law, that makes her, but that is such an adult relationship--a HUSBAND, a MOTHER-IN-LAW, holy shitballs, and me only nineteen years old! (I don't think I'll ever be old enough in my head to have actual children.)

She had booked out this amazing Airbnb called Villa Josephine, somewhere in Mapusa. And if you're familiar with Goa, you're going to be like, "Mapusa? Really?" but evidently the area has some quiet roads besides the teeming main market, and Villa Josephine is one of those homes. Part of it is an old house, renovated, the other part is new made to look like old, and there are four bedrooms, which include two ENORMOUS suites, and a palm leaf shaped pool outside, and it was all very pretty and delightful. (Zero internet though, so finish your deadlines and go.)  K's mum specifically picked it because it accepted pets, so began my Month of Dogs, with Lily The Rescue Spitz, who is now a pish-posh dog in her own right.

[The other two dogs are Meghna and Ralf's--Simba the Rottie-Doberman (Roberman? Doweiler?) and Jango the indie. We have all grown very fond of each other, although I am still *slightly* intimidated by Simba, she's just so powerful looking, and her face has this stoic expression that means you can't really tell how she's feeling. However, she does like to sit next to us when we work, and she does that dog thing of sticking her tongue out and then pulling it back into her mouth, which I always associate with great contentment.]

[How are the CATS amidst all this? Well, we have left them to Najma, our housekeeper, who loves them and is used to them, so she pops by once a day to see that everything's cool, no one's starving or dying from lack of water etc. I think they'll be fine, I left TC, my old ginger cat, alone by himself for two months while I went to England with just a maid popping in and occasional friends to see that he hadn't died or anything. He was fine too, and these three have each other, although Bruno and Squishy do fight, I hope our absence means there's less to fight over.]

This week in fish thaalis: Vinayak fish thaalis, though once beloved, have seriously gone down in quality. NOT very nice. I assume the rest of the food is still good, and we are planning on going there for lunch today and trying something else, so let us see. And hope. BUT! Thanks to a prior recommendation from friends Mrig and Akshay, I remembered that there was a place in Mapusa called Spice Goa that was meant to have amazing food. ("Like Goa's Swagath," was Mrig's description.) So we went, it was super busy, but the fish thaali was elaborate and large and delicious and introduced me to the delicate lady fish in a rawa fry which was delectable.

 Eldou's while pretty has also got a not great thaali, but Goan Spice (like Spice Goa but reversed!) continues to be amazing. We have not yet ventured to Catherine's Corner, it being too rainy to go very far--also we'd have to drive by our old house and I feel this pang of jealousy when I think of someone else living there, even though we broke up with it FIRST--but we did go to Mum's Kitchen in Panjim when K's mother was here, and that was really good food too.

Panjim, on the whole, has some interesting food options, and I look forward to exploring them all over the weekend, most especially a place called Pinto's, which has not one single vegetarian item.

This week in stuff I wrote: I was hoping that my new column (!) would be up by the time I wrote this, but alas, it is still not published. I'm doing a series called Mythology for the Millennial (or something along those lines) where I take ancient stories and look at them through a modern lens, but in a chatty, pop-culture sort of way. It will be out on Firstpost! So look out for it there and I'll share a link next week.

Also my review of Sumana Roy's Missing is out in Open magazine.

Excerpt: If it is possible to make someone vanish by just talking around them, that is what has been done to this character. The more the reader learns, the less, paradoxically, do we know. It is as if Kobita is being bricked up behind a wall of description. Who is this woman, why did she leave, will she ever return? We are as helpless as Nayan, waiting for news to be spoonfed to us.

This week in stuff other people wrote

Very tempted to become an Instagram Influencer but a) don't actually want to approach people with a "HEY PLEASE GIVE ME FREE SHIT" b) it's probably not as easy as just messaging people for free shit and c) it sounds like it's damn annoying. (Also hidden caveat d: you can never bitch about anything if it's been given to you for free.)

Excerpt: “Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I'm an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.

Good solid writing advice. I don't know why people get so pissed with advice articles. Just don't take the damn advice if it doesn't apply to you, no?

Excerpt: Many people are familiar with this kind of procrastination pattern — suddenly, the chores we’d typically die before doing become irresistible and urgent, because there’s one thing we’d rather do even less: work. I think people in most careers experience this, but writers tend to pathologize it, claiming “writer’s block” and, like, an absent “muse” or whatever.

The ugly Indian tourist. Much has been said about this phenomenon, but while much of the article is true, I think the onus of change lies with the Goa government and not with the tourists who are just coming to have a good time. Don't want people shitting everywhere? Put up free public toilets. Don't want dirty uncles on the beach? Put more cops on patrol. I mean OF COURSE the Indian tourist also has to change, but sometimes these changes have to be forced. There's no way a lot of these behaviours are going to change from within.

Excerpt: Many domestic visitors these days are what Sardesai calls ‘drive-in’ tourists. Arrivals in buses and jeeps are increasingly common for long weekend holidays. They eat food they cook themselves on stoves brought along, sleep in their vehicles or on the beach, and use the fields as toilets. “These people don’t contribute one bit to the economy,” says Sardesai, “They only clog up the beaches and streets and dirty everything. We have to stop this sort of tourist from coming in.”

Delhi's gold diggers. Um, not quite as glam as you're expecting.

Excerpt: “The gold dust gets mixed with the mud outside the workshops. We earn our living from the gold that was otherwise going to be wasted. It is quite similar to a barber’s shop. When the barber walks out of the saloon, he is bound to carry some hair on his body,” said Mohammad Salil, one of around 200 men engaged in the occupation.

A football player on being poor in his childhood. (It reveals how little I know about football by saying "a football player," he's probably really famous.)

Excerpt: I wanted to be the best footballer in Belgian history. That was my goal. Not good. Not great. The best. I played with so much anger, because of a lot of things … because of the rats running around in our apartment … because I couldn’t watch the Champions League … because of how the other parents used to look at me.

Newsletter: May the odds be ever in your favour

(Last week's newsletter. This week's just went out so you know what to do.)

Pop quiz #2: This week's newsletter title is an easy guess, but humour me anyway. (If you're curious "Some Pig" is from Charlotte's Web, which features my favourite literary rat character (even more than Rat in Wind In The Willows) a wisecracking every-creature-for-himself glutton called Templeton.)

This week in the Lives of People Who Are Dead Now: I am very late to the Nancy Mitford party, but I just began reading her very thinly veiled "novel" about two young girls in Britain living the U-life (U meaning upperclass, a thing that was being written about in Mitford's time, vs. of course, the Non-Us). There's a reference to the Us and non-Us in The Pursuit of Love as well, as the children belonging to this large extended family are all daughters of lords, so they get to have an "Hon." before their names, and so form a society: Hons vs Counter Hons. You don't have to be born an Hon to be an honourary Hon, a hon-Hon if you will, but Counter Hons say things like "notepaper" for writing paper and "dentures" for false teeth.

I looked up Nancy Mitford yesterday, and while she was quite fascinating, what I found most interesting was the life of her sister, Unity Mitford. Unity VALKYRIE Mitford, a first world yoga name if I've ever heard one. Here is a picture, she was quite lovely.

 
If you've watched The Crown on Netflix, you know that every old established rich British family has some Nazi lovers closer than you think. In the Mitford sisters' case, there were about three of them who were reasonably sympathetic, but Unity really took it to a new level. If she had been born today, she'd be dangling off Trump's arm, talking about white pride with gusto and poise on television, but since she was born in 1914, she took up a pro-Hitler stance, primarily just to get some attention from her family, being a middle child.

However, she traveled with a sister to Germany, and there she saw Hitler and decided to take her fandom to a completely different level. She basically found out all his hang out spots and went and sat at the same cafe as he had lunch at every single day. TEN MONTHS LATER, Hitler finally asked her to join him, so this was a pretty dedicated case of stalking. He was completely charmed by her, her Aryan good looks and her connection to Wagner, who Hitler loved. (Unity's grandfather was a close friend of the composer.) Anyway, Hitler was quite superstitious so he considered Unity a sort of "sent from heaven" reward or something, and also, was quite happy to play her off against Eva Braun, because it's not enough to be a monster, you must also be an asshole boyfriend.

She wanted very much for Hitler to reach some sort of deal with Britain and threatened to kill herself if a war ever happened. War did happen, and she shot herself with a pistol, only she survived the impact and the bullet stayed inside her skull, after which Hitler paid her hospital bills and arranged for her to go back to England. She was changed, apparently, a bit like she had had a stroke, incontinent, like a large child, but she still remembered being a Nazi, and said she wanted to have many children and name the eldest son Adolf. Eventually she died of meningitis because of the swelling of her brain around the bullet. She was 33.

Here's another interesting fact about Unity: she was conceived in a town called Swastika, Ontario. I wonder if she thought about that and about the Nazi party and decided that was the way her life was going to go since she was born to it.

(There is a biography of the Mitford sisters that looks quite good: The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell, which is on the Amazon store in India. Will get a copy and let you know how it is!)

This week in stuff I wrote: My review of Yashodhara Lal's How I Became a Farmer's Wife. "Was it really that good?" asked someone to me skeptically, and yes it was. I'm not polite at all in my reviews, if I don't like something, I will say it, as you will see in a review that should be out next week. I do sometimes try and find a redeeming thing though, and there usually is a redeeming thing.

Excerpt: Lal is, by her own description, a “romance” writer, and this book is meant to be a sequel of sorts to her first, which was similar fiction-ish, memoir-ish story of the first years of being married. Romance writers can definitely plot, even if they are somewhat condescended to by the greater literary establishment.

This week in television I recommend on Amazon Prime: I made this list for Twitter, but I'm finding my engagement on that platform is way down from even a few months ago. No retweets at all, and maybe one or two likes? It's odd, because nothing else has changed, not my tweets, not my follower count, so I'm just putting it down to faulty algorithms and not just that people aren't finding me interesting any more. (the horror!), So I thought, let me just migrate the things I would tweet about to this newsletter, and give up on Twitter for a little bit. Of all the social media I use (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) I'm getting the least interactions out of Twitter, so I think I might start to wind down there mostly. Are you having the same problem or is it just me?

1) Parks & Recreation: brilliant, government office mockumentary with one of the FINEST feminist protagonists you'll ever see on television, Leslie Knope. In the same vein, and inspired from, The Office (US) also on Prime and it is also amazing.

2) The Magicians is a subtle satire-y sci-fi show that just goes from strength to strength every season. There's pop culture, there's magic, there's humour, there's pathos, you'll love it.

3) Parenthood: If you liked Gilmore Girls or Brothers and Sisters or anything with a big messy family and their interactions, this is a MUST MUST WATCH show.

4) Friday Night Lights: It is about American football, yes, but I, an avowed sports hater ("so boring ya!") am still binge watching it like it is going out of style.

5) The Mindy Project: will take you two or three episodes to fully get into but after that it is just like candy. So funny and refreshing.

This week in stuff I read on the internet that was cool

I have a Dom character in my new Girls of the Mahabharata book, so this long read (and winner of a journalism award!) about a modern day Dom was truly fascinating.

Excerpt: Mithun spends hours performing the back-breaking work of sifting through mountains of ash to cull tiny pieces of melted gold and silver - remnants of jewellery the deceased were wearing - to later sell for a meagre sum of money. Out of respect for their dead, families leave the jewellery (often a necklace, a few bangles, a gold nose-ring, or a gold tooth) on their relative before performing the last rites. For the Doms, the competition to find these tiny, precious pieces is cut-throat. As soon as the ash from a burned out pyre is swept into the river, an army of men - with pants rolled halfway up - rush in, wading through the murky water. To reduce the competition, some throw in broken glass and razors to make the process more arduous for others.

My mum (whose birthday it is today, happy birthday!) has a copy of Cook and See which she procured with great difficulty, and I've always found it ridiculously charming. Here's a piece on learning from it.

Excerpt: Strangely I can hear my dad in this book, perhaps because “third rate” is a word he uses quite often. And also because the book reminds me of his particular brand of “strict reassurance” – this will annoy you but this is ultimately good for you. For instance, there was a time when my father would find me dreaming serenely on Sunday afternoons and attempt to break my reverie by asking me stuff like, “what is 167395 minus 578?” His is a lifelong mission to make me alert, either by shocking me with mental mathematics or dark warnings of potential accidents that would most certainly occur thanks to incessant day dreaming.

Gorgeous piece on a man who turned his entire house into a shrine and a work of art.

Excerpt: When visitors come, they often cry. Others are overwhelmed by inspiration, or a sudden feeling that everything makes sense and they know just what they need to do. By the end of their visit, they want to speak to, confide in, or be counseled by Wright. It feels like there is a magnetic air of wisdom around him that you can’t help but want to feel close to. Wright listens and hugs, he understands.

Since 40 is three years away, here's a fun piece on how to get there. (Note: I feel a midlife crisis coming on just at the thought of it.)

Excerpt: What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.

What would a world without Star Wars look like? I'm really not into the franchise, but it affected things that eventually brought me Netflix, SO yes.

Excerpt: At the end of the decade, Vice President Al Gore edges George W. Bush in one of the closest elections in American history. Observers credit his win to the positive influence exerted on his campaign and the election by CNN — which is the only major 24-hour news network. Rupert Murdoch watches from the United Kingdom; he’d failed to find a solid entry point into American media in the mid-’80s, Fox having collapsed years earlier, and his dreams of a conservative challenger to CNN remain unrealized.

When EB White wrote Stuart Little there was a librarian who basically RAN the children's book industry and she was not happy with him. This article should be made into a movie.

Excerpt: Today, children’s book publishing—an industry richly described in Leonard S. Marcus’s excellent new book, “Minders of Make-Believe”—is one of the most profitable parts of the book business. But that industry exists only because, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century middle class invented childhood as we know it, early-twentieth-century writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers—and, most of all, Anne Carroll Moore—invented children’s literature. It would be convenient if White and Moore stood on either side of a divide between antimodernist and modernist writing. But things don’t really sort out along those lines. A better way of thinking about it might be to say that Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy. “There are too many coy books full of talking animals, whimsical children, and condescending adults,” White complained.

I'd watch all these Sex and the City in 2018 plots.

Excerpt: Miranda arrives late to brunch because one of her favorite male colleagues was just fired, following #MeToo accusations. She’s conflicted because, despite her feminist convictions, she loved this guy and isn’t sure the accusations warranted his dismissal. Samantha says that she, too, is being sued by a former assistant for sexual harassment, which she doesn’t feel is warranted. Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda share their #MeToo stories, and Miranda is particularly horrified to recall several experiences she had as a teenager — the same age her son, Brady, is now. Miranda reconsiders how she’s raising her own son; when he tells her he’s taking a girl on a date, she insists on a sit-down with the two of them, during which she goes embarrassingly overboard and scares them out of their date.

And finally, Prayaag on football, his football-averse partner and the fact that their first child is due during the first week of the World Cup.

Excerpt: Perhaps fitting, given her deep distaste for the sport, that my wife is scheduled—if all goes well, please keep your fingers crossed—to give birth to our first child in the first week of this year’s World Cup. She’s happy because she believes this means I will not be able to watch any of the games. I’m happy because I believe this means I’ll be able to watch them all.

Newsletter: Two Year Anniversary Edition

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Can you believe it has been TWO years of this email in your inbox every week, give or take? CUR-AZEEE! That is 104 emails, which doesn't sound like a lot now that I look at it, but still, you know me one hundred times more than you normally would. Um. I'm hoping that's a bonus.

You, waiting for a new newsletter from me

Now, if I was an organised sort of person, I'd have tied up with some brands, gotten you some discounts, but alas, I am me, and I have nothing for you, except my Zomato Gold referral code? You get 20% off the total, I get an extra month, SO, win win for everyone, if you want Zomato Gold that is. I was resistant, but then I went with two friends to Arriba last night, and because two of us had Zomato Gold, we got four free drinks (2+2 on alcohol) which is pretty good. I calculated that for 800 rupees (which is how much it cost for a 3 month membership) I would be getting MORE value for money than if I just paid normally. The referral code is MEEN6056 anyway if you want to use it. (I was not paid by Zomato for this product placement, I promise.) (I wish!)

Arriba was really good though, they must have hired a new chef or improved upon the original, because while I remember the food being nice, it was never "oh my god let me put it all into my mouth immediately" which is what happened yesterday. Plus their margaritas! I regret them today as I am snoozy at 7 pm, but so worth it.

But happy anniversary to us, my darlings! Here is a link to last year's first anniversary edition and the very first newsletter I sent out. How we've evolved since then.

This week in self indulgences: I know, I know, cold brew coffee is a bit of a scam, especially when they sell it to you at fancy coffee shops and charge you like 250 bucks for it, and we fall for it every time! Because it just sounds so nice: coldddd brewwww. Decadent. Like something rich and caramel-y to roll around your mouth, and god, now I just want an Alpenliebe. (Huh. Just figured out why they called it an Alpenliebe as well. Love for the mountains! Because those weird caramel sweets were supposed to be from the Alps? Fun fact: the same company also makes Chupa Chups and Mentos. Fun fact two: The Mentos company also owns Babol gum.) What was I saying? Oh yes, cold brew. Now the science to cold brew is easy but time consuming: you put about five tablespoons of coffee in 750 ml of water and let it soak overnight, the next morning you strain into a bottle, pop into the fridge, and ta-dah, cold brew. I love it personally, but the measuring the coffee was just one extra thing I did not want to do, so I went ahead and bought cold brew bags, which are basically tea bags with coffee in them from Devan's. Devan's is fantastic for coffee by the way, and they home deliver.  I could, I could in theory just make my own cold brew WITHOUT a tea bag, but it's so much NICER the way Devan's has done it so yes, it's not cheap, but it's cheaper than a coffee shop.

I also bought myself a bulletin board for my study. I don't know what I was imagining: lists of words and invitations to parties and postcards from friends and other exciting things? But I have no paper things any more! And one can't very well pin a Whatsapp message to one's board, so I am left with: two cards from our wedding, both very beautiful, one postcard from the Reina Sofia (Picasso's The Three Dancers resonated with me more deeply than the Guernica, picture below) and an invitation to the book launch of You Are Here, August 22nd, 2008 back in the day when a book party was a Brand New Thing. (More on You Are Here in a future edition of this newsletter.)

This week in Delhi is essentially the beating heart of me: A friend is moving to a new house and we went out for lunch nearby and then sat in the empty apartment for a bit, the way you do before furniture moves in and it becomes a proper house again. That empty apartment feeling: even though we're all in our thirties and have done this for a decade or more, it still feels like you're getting away with something, you know? Like you have a clubhouse, away from the grown ups. It's a house before it becomes your home, but you're already feeling a little possessive about it, you're thinking, "This is where I'll put my coffee table and that's what colour the curtains will be" but everything is like a new page. I remember sitting in our current house just before it was broken down and renovated, just to check it out one last time, and we sat on the floor and planned what walls would come down, and talked about the neighbourhood, soon to be ours, but then still so alien. As much as I love coming home to a space that has fit so comfortably around us, I also like that new jeans feeling of a new house, particularly the first morning you wake up, the smell of new paint still in your nose, wondering where you are for a second before you realise, "Oh, I'm home."

And then driving home, I told my friend that I probably had memories littered all over Delhi. It's true, I could probably give you an association with most places. Here's where we drank test tube shots that one night and this guy came up to us and said hi, and would you believe he is still in our life almost twenty years later? Here's where we adopted Bruno and Olga, here's where I learned how to drive properly, here's where my car broke down that one time in the middle of traffic and this cop helped me push it to the side of the road and then waited with me till the mechanic came. Oh Delhi, you polluted, sentimental, tree lined BEAST.

This week in AND THEN THERE ARE THE DELHIITES: ARGH WHY ARE PEOPLE LIKE THIS ABOUT THEIR PARKING SPOTS? Is the world going to end, my good chap, if another car is in your spot for five minutes? Okay, I admit, I have drunk the Kool Aid, I too am all beating my chest and Hulk-like about protecting my parking space, but my reasons are more laziness than protectiveness beCAUSE if someone is in my spot and then I park in someone else's space then I will have to climb up and down four flights of stairs AGAIN to repark once whoever it is has gone. But if there's someone in our spot and then there's also a space next to it, I just go into that space. IT IS THAT SIMPLE, DELHI! Okay, all this because this friend came over to play Catan (expansion pack! Great fun and I also won which means it was even more great fun. The greatest) and he parked in the neighbour's spot and so the neighbours, instead of moving one down, as is a normal human reaction, decided to park in front of his car, so when this guy had to leave, he couldn't, so he had to call a cab and come back the next day and it was all very pointless.

New favourite gif

At least we are only passive aggressive in this area. Other parts of Delhi are worse, here are recent examples: 1) a WHOLE METRO LINE was held up because two people got into a fight over parking. 2) One brother refuses to move his Audi, everyone stabbed.

Let's just agree everyone is crazy especially about where they put their cars and move on.



This week in stuff I loved on the internet (only two links because slow news week):

Rag dolls are adorable cats, but SO INBRED. Adopt don't shop etc.

Excerpt: What makes the Ragdoll cat different from other cats is a matter of temperament. Stripped of a desire for hunting, the Ragdoll has a languid, friendly personality. It is large and less agile than other cats, and has a regal feline elegance: its fur is silky, and long; it has piercing, ocean-blue eyes; and its personality could be called dog-like. This is a cat that greets you at the door and follows you from room to room, providing something like unconditional love.

The best con story you'll read this year. I had linked to another story about Anna Delvey before, how she took this journalist for a ride, and here is a deep dive into the woman. Basically, if you distract people with enough hard cash, they won't look too closely at how you're paying for stuff.

Excerpt: Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

Newsletter: It's definitely Yanny

This is already an old reference but it wasn't earlier this week

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Hanging on the wall of my study is a calendar a friend gave me, It features several doctored photographs of cats--like they've all been put through a Snapchat filter, say. Cat with sunglasses, cat with a hat, cat with sjiny bokeh stars around their face. This same friend also gave me an excellent fridge magnet which says "show me your kitties" and still makes me laugh when I look at it. Anyway, the cat calendar is also great because all the boxes for each day of the month are nice and big, so I can fit in my plans without having to squinch my handwriting up. So I've taken to writing down my commitments and from where I sit at my desk, I can see what the week looks like without getting up. (I have to get up to see the specifics of the week though, it's too far away to read in detail.) I used to use Google's calendar app, still do sometimes, but something about the satisfaction of a flesh and blood calendar, and also why give the internet one more thing they know about you right? Already major companies know who my friends are, how I spend my time, what I think about and often, what I do, but they don't have to know where I'm going and who I'm meeting if I choose not to say.

I sometimes think if you're busy socially, you send out a frequency that your other friends can hear as well, and suddenly they start to think about you. "Oh, hmm," they think, "We haven't heard from her in a while, let's make that plan to hang out." And then your calendar is full, and you're dressing up every night, until the next week, when no one has thought of you at all, so you have a week sitting at home in your pajamas reading. Both are great, but this was the former week.

I've also been putting up a lot of photos of my outfits on Instagram (you can follow me here) which is very not-a-fashion-blogger style. I don't go on about where I got my outfits from, but I do go on about how they make me feel. I love clothes, and I love experimenting with style. There was a time when no one would take you seriously as a writer if you dressed up a lot, but those days are thankfully over. I see women at lit fests and parties and conferences wearing really nice things. I see "serious" people talking about lipstick shades and fabric. And I see that when someone says "You look nice" they say it admiringly, not condescendingly.

This week in restaurants: For a long time, Ameya, Niyati and I have been talking about going to Chateau de Pondicherry but the plan just never happened. It became sort of a running joke--a restaurant that was super close to us but one which we would never visit. Finally, we made it happen yesterday, and dudes, maybe we should have left it as a running joke. The cocktails were nice, the restaurant itself is beautiful and the woman serving us who might have also been the owner, was very warm and friendly, but the food, oh, it didn't have much to recommend. Almost everything was undersalted, and was very heavy on one spice or the other (too much pepper, too much basil). We ordered a lot and ate most of it, because we were hungry but it was an eating-because-we're-hungry thing, not a this-is-so-delicious thing.

This week in home comforts: I have rediscovered my love for the watermelon. It's summer time, and that means mango time, but often, we forget about the amazingness of watermelon. So sweet, so cold, like that poem goes. I read this great article on The Goya Journal on how to make watermelon shrub (I kept calling it watermelon FROSH for some reason, but shrub is not much better) and I'm excited to try it. For that, I'm going to get my melons from I Say Organic, which is still the best place in Delhi to buy organic fruits and vegetables. (I also have a great organic shop down the road from us called Roots, which I use frequently for organic sugar, lentils and once a really good pickle as well.)

This week in books: Had a really good haul delivered from Book Chor again recently. Here's a photo I took of it.

Of these, so far I have read:

1) Good In Bed which is hilarious, but then I got the sequel on my Kindle and it was terrible, so if you read it and are similarly tempted: DON'T.
2) The Broken Bridge which was nice, but I judge all of Pullman through His Dark Materials and this was not that.
3) Pretty Monsters which was AMAZING, one of the best books I have read all year, a fantasy-meets-horror-meets-humour collection of short stories. I am now on a mission to read all of Kelly Link's books.
4) A Dog So Small which was also very similar to the author Phillipa Pearce's other book Tom's Midnight Garden which is one of the best books I've read about being in a time slip, whether for adults or children. Similar as in, there's also a boy who yearns for something (in this case a dog) so much that he tunes out of his regular life completely, and so, worries his family.
5) Katherine of Aragon which I am currently reading. Have read all of Phillipa Gregory on the subject of Tudors and now I am branching out. Why does Henry VIII fascinate me so? Is it the wives? Is it the cruelty? I think it's both those things, he turns into a Bluebeard-esque character, ominous, laughing and handsome until he wasn't.

Stuff I read on the web this week

As someone who is interested in the Royal Wedding this weekend but also not THAT interested, here are two articles on the subject that made me go hmmm.
 

The incredible Margo Jefferson on Megan Markle and whether her arrival indicates a wind of change.

Excerpt: But is Markle automatically marrying up by marrying a prince? In the old school way, yes: any “commoner” who marries into any royal family is seen as marrying up. But Harry is marrying up too. He’s marrying up by marrying out – out of long-entwined bloodlines, out of entrenched rituals and hierarchies, out of a lineage as constricted as it is privileged. We always ascribe social ambitions to commoners, but aristocrats have their own longings for a world elsewhere. Harry is marrying into all the possibilities of postmodernity. It’s a world where – as Zora Neale Hurston said of black folktales and music – hierarchies, styles, sites of social and cultural change are being made and forgotten every day.
 

And if you're ever invited to a royal wedding, here are some dos and don'ts (which are disturbingly almost entirely aimed at women.)

Excerpt:     “Do not touch the Queen.

    Do not shake the Queen's hand unless she holds her hand out first to shake your hand.

    Do not speak to the Queen unless she speaks to you first.

    If the Queen addresses you first, answer her ending your first response with ‘Your Majesty.’ End your second response with ‘Ma'am’ to rhyme with ‘jam.’”
 

An oldie but a goodie: trying to find the end of an endless appetiser promo.

Excerpt: 1:30 p.m. I goddamn hate these fucking mozzarella sticks. The more of them I eat, the more I feel like I can taste every ingredient. Ingredients include: cardboard left in a hamster cage in the sun; acid.
 

A lovely essay which feels very relevant to me: on birds, cats and children. (Except: I like children unlike the author of this piece. My feelings are like that old saying about New York: a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.)

Excerpt: Dorian [the cat] and the songbird nestlings were both completely dependent on me for their survival, as a newborn infant would be. The overbearing affection I poured onto Dorian would have drowned or smothered a child, while the stoicism I cultivated with the birds was only appropriate for a mother who planned to die young, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Motherhood, not marriage, was the one “till death do us part” relationship among humans. A mother would have to navigate between the urge to protect and the need to respect her child’s autonomy even after the child had left home to study, work, or marry. I knew how to hold on and how to let go, but I couldn’t imagine having to do a little of both, in the right mixture for each occasion, day after day for the many decades that make up the average span of a mother-child relationship. And in order to love my own child in spite of my general dislike of children, I would have to think of him or her as an entirely different category of being: for example, a cat. That’s what I was trying to say when people refused to accept my decision not to have children. I could only become a mother if Dorian could be my child—that is to say, never.
 

On falling in love with a polyamorous man, which okay, has been done, but the author is from Mumbai which is why I found this piece interesting.

Excerpt: She has suggested the meeting. I have heard enough about her to know I’d like her. Cory says she feels the same. Well, maybe if we met in a slightly different situation though? I’m so nervous. We meet for xiao long bao – Shanghainese soup dumplings. Cory texts me when I’m on my way there to tell me I can sit on his side of the table. This is actually one among a few things I’ve been stressing about. I don’t want to end up on one side alone while they sit across from me, like it’s an interrogation. This text calms me down a bit. So does his hug when I meet him outside the restaurant door.

This one guy had done a terribly tone deaf piece on why women succeed in publishing. (I believe one of his arguments was: because they already know how to juggle children and in laws.) Urvashi Butalia is having NONE OF IT.

Excerpt: In feminist circles, and sometimes even out of them, when women talk together we often find ourselves saying, resignedly, that when speaking about women, even the best of men will at some point, reveal the deep biases they carry inside them. We recognise these with a sense of familiarity, we’ve met them all our lives, but every time we encounter them – as in Venkatachalapathy’s piece – there’s also a sense of disappointment, almost of despair. We’re in the 21st century and we still have to deal with this?

Newsletter: Making a cup of memory tea

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This week in mysteries: My staycation would be nothing without detective novels--no, it's true. I lie on the sofa in my study, which is not a very comfortable one for lying on, since it's too small and invariably gives me a kink in my neck, but it's there, you know? And these days, keeping me company is Deborah Crombie. I've mentioned her to you before, she does this series about two detectives called Duncan Kinkaid and Gemma James, but since the last time I wrote about her, I've read at least seven more books in the series and now I feel like I can talk about Crombie's oeuvre as it were, more efficiently.

So--these are very British books. Primarily set in London and nearby, the two detectives, Duncan (always referred to as Kinkaid) and Gemma (who gets a first name, in what I'm not sure is slightly sexist or because Crombie is fonder of her) work with Scotland Yard and the London Metropolitan Police respectively. Here's the odd thing: Crombie is actually American. Now, normally, when an American writer tries to Britishify themselves, you can tell with one giveaway or another, but she seems to have completely subdued her own Americanism to write EXTREMELY British scenes. (This is as far as I can tell, but maybe a true native would be able to nitpick further.) From the biog at the back of the books, we know that Crombie spends a lot of time in London, researching each book, and so, the central theme of each book is usually sprawling. For example, there's the mystery of the Olympic rower who was murdered and then there's pages of meticulous detail about belonging to a rowing club and what that means. There's stuff about the monks in Glastonbury and automatic writing and spiritualism, which is also amazing, and my own personal favourite, Dreaming of the Bones, where the murder of a famous poet back in the day leads to a more current murder, with lots of "excerpts" as it were, from the fake book.

But besides the research, what's truly addictive about Kinkaid/James is their own relationship. Soon enough, they start sleeping together, soon after, there's this big blended family, and watching the two solve their own mysteries while also connecting with each other in the end, it's a relief after all those stories about lonely fucked up detectives who "only work alone." It's soothing, like an Agatha Christie, but the scope is wider.

This week in thinking about old hobbies: Was reading this article about the Capital City Minstrels, a choir based in Delhi, who I used to sing with, back in school/college. I really did enjoy my time singing, this is before karaoke night became so ubiquitous, and I had been in a couple of school choirs before, so I was full of confidence in my singing abilities. In school I was an alto, taking the lower notes, but the director of the choir then, a man named Nowshad, took me through the scales, and we discovered I was a soprano after all. I hit notes I have never been able to hit since--blame smoking? And my moment of triumph was singing Ave Verum Corpus where the soprano section got to hold the note high and sweet and long while the rest chimed in.

I miss rehearsals, I think, whether for plays or choirs, I miss the camaraderie, the tea and snacks, the sense of accomplishment after a good session. For a while, Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal used to run a kids theatre camp every summer, where they put on musicals. Nayantara and I auditioned for Matilda, and we both got in to the chorus, which stood in the orchestra pit of Kamani auditorium. There was a boy....

But he was so much cooler and older and wiser than I was, he was seventeen, but he may as well have been twenty seven, and I was fourteen, but I looked around eleven, so there was no chance, NO CHANCE, but I still gazed at him every night, his beauty, his voice. And when the play finished, I wanted desperately to get in touch, but I wanted him to get in touch with me, not just the needy tagalong, but the girl he finally saw for her Inner Beauty as it were. I spent so many of my teen years yearning, which is a great hobby for your teen if you're looking for them to never get into any trouble at all, because all they are doing is daydreaming of that perfect evening, where he calls and then he takes your hand and he tells you how special you are.  I was heavily into the occult as this point, remind me to tell you someday about my brief brush with Wiccanism, so I used my homemade Ouija boards to ask for his phone number, and wrote it down, and never dialled it, and one afternoon, my dear patient friend and I called all the His Last Names in the phone book so we could ask for him.  By page two, it still wasn't his number, and we gave it up.

I wonder what it would have been like to come of age in today's world--Facebook and Instagram making it so easy to stalk someone, to tell them of your interest. Not so much fun, but I think if you offered it to me back then--here is a magic machine on which you can tell what your object of interest is doing AT ALL TIMES--I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

Thursday link list coming to you courtesy of a slow week:

 

Cardi B at the Met Gala, but also so much more.

 

Excerpt: “Okurrr!” added a few members of Cardi’s team, filling the room in the Carlyle Hotel with the sounds of an avian chorus. (“Okurrr,” with a trilled r, is one of Cardi’s signature exclamations. The association of Cardi with “okurrr” has become so strong that the hotel embroidered the interjection on one of her room’s pillowcases.)

This guy pretended to be a high schooler so he could take advantage of the American college system.

 

Excerpt: The things about him that raised questions—he wore suits and ties sometimes, he had an accent—were readily dismissed as the strangenesses of any new student. When someone would ask why he talked funny, Asher would tell them he grew up "in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood down by the river." When they asked where he'd been before ninth grade, he said he'd been homeschooled. When an instructor asked him why his name had changed to Asher Potts (he'd improbably started freshman year as Artur Samarin), Asher joked: "Because I'm a Russian spy." But for the most part, in the way of all high school students, the suspect details were mostly met with a shrug. American teenagers, to his great benefit, were naturally incurious. No oddity was worth paying attention to more than their own. And so he became one of them.

Why everyone should talk to their kids about rape, and maybe also take them to protests

Excerpt: Some parents travel with their children to foreign countries to expose them to different cultures. Others take them to libraries, book readings and panel discussions. I take my son to protests where he hears and sees strong women of all ages come out to talk fearlessly about violence, misogyny, poetry, anguish and love. He sees women laugh raucously, dress whimsically, and express their opinions unhesitatingly. As he grows up he will realise that it’s a world where he will be welcomed as an equal if he accords them the same respect.

The Juul has made smokers out of non smokers

 

Excerpt:  Juuling and scrolling through Instagram offer strikingly similar forms of contemporary pleasure. Both provide stimulus when you’re tired and fidgety, and both tend to become mindless tics that fit neatly into rapidly diminishing amounts of free time. (You can take two Juul hits and double-tap a bunch of pics in about ten seconds. You need an inefficient five minutes to burn a paper tube of tar and leaves into ash.) The omnipresence of Juul on social media has undoubtedly made kids overestimate the extent of teen Juuling—young people tend to think that their peers drink, smoke, and hook up more than they actually do. And it’s all beyond regulation: the F.D.A. can control the behavior of companies advertising nicotine for profit, but it can do nothing about teens advertising nicotine to one another for free.
 

Why take a round trip bus across Delhi? Because you cannnn.

 

Excerpt: In a city like Delhi, one can live 20 years, and still be perceived as an outsider. There are still locations and settings which are alien to you and where you stand out, even when you try to fit in. Great cities, I realised on that Mudrika, are like lovers— you know them intimately, but you will never know them entirely. You will be well-versed with certain terrains and landscapes, and one day, the unforeseen raises its head.
 

Newsletter: Staycation Edition

(This is last week's edition. This week's JUST went out to subscribers. Want to stay current? Sign up here.)

I made this joke on my Instagram story and v pleased with it

For the last two months, I was burning the candle at both ends. As an idiom, it makes so much sense to me right now: imagining my life as wax drippy, long wicks, placed horizontally, and there I was lighting the end that said "work" and when that bit burnt down, lighting the other side which said "social" and letting all my rest, my everything else, be reduced to just wax drippings on the floor.

But this past week, I have felt like doing nothing except sit indoors, and think and read, and watch movies, my great movie watching plan is going very well, and I have done that as well. So, I don't have that much to report, except that I'm enjoying my staycation. I sleep about ten hours every night, and wake up refreshed. It's nice, no I'm not bored, or getting cabin fever just yet. I think I needed this.

My week watching movies: K just discovered an app for my desktop (rhymes with Schmopcorn Mime). I had tried this same app ages ago on my best beloved long lamented Macbook (RIP) (stupid cats), but it didn't work on it, so I gave it up, but turns out, it's rather excellent on Windows. K also--and I must give him all credit here, because I moaned and cried about all the door handles he was removing, more on that in a moment--fixed up the perfect movie watching AREA in his study, which is the only room in the house which you can successfully darken even in the middle of the afternoon, and as a result, it is the best television room I have ever had in my entire life.

So basically, we have a projector--it's a pretty cheap one, but it works--and he set it up so that it projects against the white wall to wall cupboards he has in that room. In order to do that, he had to move the handles so that they wouldn't be in the way, so now the handles are a little lower, but it means that I can lie on the sofa, fully stretched out, as is my preferred position, and watch movies while he works at his desk (and occasionally chimes in with some commentary.) Thanks to the app I just mentioned, things have gotten really easy to watch and bookmark, so I'm regularly watching two movies a day. The funny thing about watching films as opposed to TV, you never feel that brain numbing OMG HOW MUCH HAVE I WATCHED feeling at the end of it. Instead, you feel slightly... triumphant even. Dare I say watching a good movie is like reading a good book? How my attitude has changed from last week when I was all like, "Ugh movies will never be as good as reading."

This is what I watched this week (a mix of what's available and what's on You Know Where). I realised that I sort of followed a theme, even if I wasn't aware of it at the moment.

The Little Mermaid day:

Wonder Woman: nice but FULL of anachronisms, at one point, the Scottish guy goes, "guys." Now, "guys" as a way of saying "everyone" wasn't a popular manner of speech till much later, and would not have been in England during WWI at any rate. I feel like if you're going to spend so much money on a movie with sets and costumes and what not, why not get an accurate historian to go through dialogue while you're at it?

Moana: Which was faaaaaar better than Frozen, I don't know why people like that movie so much. Still Disney, so a little animal sidekick, and lots of songs, but I loved Maui, the demigod who helps Moana because he was such a very realistic douchebag. Nice to see.

The why am I different day:

Wonder: the book, oh my god, the book. I loved it so much. I was fully prepared to be manipulated into tearjerker-y heartwarmingness of the film, and STILL my tears were jerked, my heart was warmed. Very sweet movie, I thought, and THENNN *ominous music* I read this article about how whitewashed the disability was. Sigh.

Get Out: was actually dark dark DARK comedy, and no spoilers, promise, but the end was quite something. I think I love oh look how pretty suburbia is but WAIT there is a SECRET lurking behind the gorgeous woods.

The let's save the day day:

Paddington 2: OKAY, but, a) Michael Bond is the same author who wrote Olga da Polga, who I named our CAT after, so you see, I love him and b) Paddington is one of my favourite bears--Winnie is a bit twee, Rupert is too good to be true, I did a whole article on bears and Michael Bond when he died, here's a link.  Paddington 2 is delightful, but not as delightful as the books. There, that's that.

The Incredibles: a rewatch, but SUCH an underrated Pixar classic. Part two is coming out soon, so I had a sudden URGE to watch the original.

The teen movie day:
The Edge of Seventeen was a REVELATION. Really good in that teen movie way I haven't seen happen since the early noughties. Very real angst as well, and though you feel like shaking some sense into the main character, you're also nodding along like yup, yup, I would have reacted in exactly the same way at that age, because sometimes you forget you weren't born extremely evolved and enlightened.

This week in stuff I wrote: My book recommendation column got lots of views last weekend mainly because of the first book, almost fan fiction about a certain dimple faced popular writer in India and the publishing industry.

Excerpt: Besides people-spotting behind the pseudonyms, there’s also fun to be had by finding real-life names (Hi, Nilanjana Roy and Janice Pariat!) as well as a whole description of partying at the Udaipur Literature Festival.

And this week in stuff other people wrote which I liked:

A ghostwriter might be talking to you on Tinder

Excerpt: “There’s no question about it,” reads one chapter, “women want to date the alpha male. They are naturally drawn to the ‘leader of the pack.’” Valdez elaborates later in the manual: “The alpha male is the selector, he chooses… he is not chosen.” But how do you present yourself as an Alpha? “Never compliment her without a qualification,” he writes. “Let her know what you want in a woman and make her explain why she fits those criteria.”

Since I'm watching some superhero movies, this one about the Avengers in general and the idea of an American hero in particular was interesting.

Excerpt: Yet even as the films restore a sense of heroism to a war that has become bureaucratic, they also betray profound anxiety about that war. This emerges through a peculiar feature of the Marvel movies. The heroes confront threats of all sorts, but time and again, they fight their doppelgängers. Iron Man takes on other scientists in metal suits. Ant-Man’s enemy is Yellowjacket, who is, like him, a shrinking technological insectoid. Captain America battles serum-enhanced supersoldiers (“What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on him to protect his country?” he asks, winking). Often, the heroes simply face their relatives, as when Black Panther fights his cousin, Thor fights his siblings, or Peter Quill, the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, fights his father (while another Guardian, Gamora, fights her sister). The Hulk’s antagonist is the Abomination, a similarly sized creature made with the Hulk’s own blood. And SHIELD, the shadowy governmental organization that runs the Avengers, must face HYDRA, another shadowy governmental organization that has infiltrated it.

Hey did you know Aatish Taseer once dated a royal? Did you? Did you?

Excerpt: My own enduring memory of the Windsors was of constant cutbacks and reduced circumstances. To fly with royalty was to fly EasyJet. On the flight back from Sardinia, a velvet rope cordoned off the first row alone, behind which Their Royal Highnesses—Prince and Princess Michael—sat with Ella and me. A moment of silence ensued, then there was a dull roar on the Jetway, and a planeload of lobster-red British tourists poured onto the flight, muttering, “Wot’s this, wot’s this?,” as they rushed past the grandson of George V, Emperor of India.

Cape Town is fucked. But there's the very merest glimmer of hope because society.

 

Excerpt: Wealthy South Africans, traditionally, have had fastidious cleanliness standards, a way of distinguishing themselves and of tapping the vast labor reserve of cheap maids. Now, being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl, proving you do not flush, is a proud moment. Body odor is less taboo. Many women have radically adjusted their haircare routines: embracing natural curls to diminish the need to wash and style, shampooing only once a week or, as one woman told me in a discussion on a community-run drought Facebook page, “experimenting with spraying my hair lightly” with a plant mister. Others chopped hip-length hair off into bobs or Sinéad O’Connor shaves. A queer friend of mine complained she didn’t know who to hit on because “there are queer haircuts everywhere.”

How to have a conversation with a grieving friend (or a friend in trouble, even.)

Excerpt:  Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency to insert oneself into a conversation as “conversational narcissism.” It’s the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself.

A conversation with the woman who was raped by Mahmood Farooqi

 

Excerpt: The decision to press charges against a person is never a onetime event. For me, it was a decision that I had to make repeatedly day after day as pressure to drop the charges surrounded me – some of it even coming from well-meaning people attempting to protect me from further pain. It was a decision that I questioned daily because I was never quite sure if I would have the strength to survive the process. Reliving your trauma time and again to strangers, a necessary requirement of partaking in the judicial system, is – in a way – beyond explanation. It is hard and it is heartbreaking. But in the way of which it breaks you apart, the act of being heard, of having a voice also made me grateful. It allowed me to have hope that I could put myself back together again. It reminded me that I am still alive and able to fight for myself. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated being socially ostracised by groups of people I had considered friends, both in India and America, that was perhaps the most difficult.