Bombay recommendations (which you probably know) & Delhi ones (which you may not)

 Do you hear that? It's the distant sound of me sniffling and wheezing. To be fair to Delhi though, I think I picked it up in Bombay where I was for a few days this week [EDIT: THIS IS OLD NEWS, BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS STILL RELEVANT], having meetings and running around in Ubers like a high flying executive. Should have worn heels for maximum effect. On the flight there from Delhi, several people coughed and sneezed right on me without covering their faces, which, like, gross and then on my way BACK to Delhi, I noticed that one of my lymph nodes right under my jaw was quite swollen, and so I've been sniffling and coughing to myself, and laying off the cigarettes, and generally being quite grumpy, but the swelling has mostly gone down now and I'm self-medicating with rosehip tea. Which brings me to the first of this week's recaps!

This week in grocery shopping: An oldie but a goodie, and besides I didn't have this newsletter the first time I visited Roots: The Organic Store, which is literally down the road from my house. Imagine a small general store that carries everything, and everything they carry is GMO free, or organic or something. Even the socks. We went to pick up some environmentally friendly washing powder for the machine (otherwise all that Surf and stuff goes into the drain and eventually mixes up with your ground water, which you eventually drink, so not good all in) (that being said, I do love my fabric conditioner, but I only use very little of that, she says defensively). We also bought similar floor cleaner, and then, errands done, I think we bought half the shop. The rosehip tea I'm drinking now, for instance. Cereal-y things for K. Cheese. Cooking oil. Spirulina spaghetti they threw in as a sample. If you live nearby, it's a great store to use as your local kirana.

This week in motivation: No coincidence that the word "motivation" has "moti" in it. I have gotten on the fitness band bandwagon, and purchased a Mi Band 2 (Xiaomi) in the hopes that this little silicone handcuff will get me up off my ass more. This explains why I walked down to the grocery shops yesterday, when I usually just sit on a couch and get everything sent home to me. My step goal is 8000 and even with pacing about the house, going to the shop and back, walking around the newly refurbished Ansal Plaza (more on THAT shortly), I only managed to do 2.5 kilometres or 5000 steps. At this rate, I'm never going to make it. The Mi Band is a cheaper version of the FitBit, and has all the features of the fanciest FitBit, you've gotta love Chinese ingenuity. I'm also kind of obsessed with it, much like David Sedaris was. Unlike David though, I actually once got a little statue of a man sleeping with the words "World's Laziest Person" on it for a birthday present, and I was PROUD of it, I displayed it for YEARS, so I'm fighting against all that conditioning.

This week in Bombay food, drink and retail:  Between meetings, I was stuck in that Bombay thing: having to sit at a coffee shop in the 'burbs for several hours because you have to meet your friends in Bandra and going back to town where your hotel is just doesn't make any sense. The "cafe" for me was Birdsong, which is great to sit and chill, but the food is not that good, so I'd suggest just sucking it up and going to Starbucks. I like the vibe at Birdsong a lot though--very hipster, very pretty, lots of people, but you do feel compelled to order something every thirty minutes so they don't judge you, whereas at Starbucks, I feel like I could hide from everyone in that one couch with one coffee and no one would care. Something to be said about corporate owned chains.

After Birdsong, I had some time to kill (MORE time) and so I decided to check out this export surplus shop I used to go to a lot when I still lived in Bombay called Cotton On. It's still there, but the prices have gone waaaay up and customer service has gone waaaay down, or else they were just as rude seven or eight years ago and I just didn't notice because I was in my twenties and coated with a layer of self-assurance no one could touch. I did buy a pretty black Banana Republic dress though since I was there and all, but I will not be going back I don't think.

Post, met a friend at a new Bandra bar called It Happened In New York with PCO-style food and drink, ie expensive! But good. Even if I did have to tell them that I preferred my Bloody Mary salt rimmed. Also went the next day to a lovely place I was taken to the LAST time I was in Bombay for a bit called Eddies Bistro, no apostrophe, which makes me wonder if there are several Eddies, since Eddy-singular traditionally ends with a "y". Eddies Bistro, so everyone who goes there is called Eddy? They only serve Eddy? I spent a long time gazing at the sign and wondering. 


This week in airport sightings: Way in: Kangana Ranaut, wearing a lovely camel coloured coat. She's much taller than I expected, but I didn't gawp properly, because I was doing that thing where you ignore celebrities and expect them to notice how cool and ignore-y you are. (She didn't notice.)

Way out: Two gorgeous golden retrievers called Peppa and Sunshine as part of a new programme bringing therapy dogs to airport for nervous flyers. "Do they help?" I asked the handlers, and they said the maximum amount of people who stopped were people whose flights were delayed and they needed something to do, so bored flyers more than nervous ones, but they DID put me in a very good mood, so there's some therapy to it after all. (At Bombay's international airport on the weekends, three hours in domestic, three hours in international.)

This week in cats: Speaking of animals, our three are great, happy to have us home and everything but SO FAT. I had posted a link to an article on our Whatsapp cat group (Kool Katz, four members) about  how to make your indoor cats more happy and engaged by making them food puzzles--essentially making them work for their food instead of just laying it all out for them. So while I was in Bombay, K set about training them to get their food differently. Quite easy: we had already bought a thing called a Kong Feeder which is essentially this hollow rubber dummy you fill with treats and then your pet has to push it over to get the food out. It's supposed to slow down eating, a problem we were having earlier with Bruno. K replicated the Kong Feeder times three with empty tonic water bottles. Bruno's gotten to be quite a champ at it, pushing the bottle whenever he needs it. Squishy just lies down with his mouth to the mouth of the bottle and sucks on it until the food comes out, and Olga is really not very smart at all and needs one of the boys to upset the food before she can get it. I thought I raised her more feminist than that.

This week in birds: Birdwatching continues! Not as exciting as Goa, but I did get a chance to make three new entries in the Notes section of my Salim Ali. The first two: the common myna and the Alexandrine parakeet. Bo-oring. But the third was the spotted owlet, a whole fam of them, hanging out a tree branch right below our house and chilling in broad daylight. Ol' Salim describes them as chilling by ruins or in trees in groups, but if they think they've been spotted, they very peevishly fly out, making clownish sounds. Quite a zoo.

This week in Delhi food, drink and retail: Went out with the Kool Katz to Delhi's newest Bombay import, Kofuku, which is this AMAZE Japanese restaurant I used to LOVE in Bandra. Like, every time I visited, had to have at least three meals there. The Delhi version is also damn nice, and it's in Ansal Plaza, which is a total blast from the past. I remember sitting at Geoffery's and The Buck Stops Here for ages, watching some kind of World Cup with friends from college and drinking all afternoon. Plus, there was a Reebok store where I bought my first and only pair of floaters that lasted me a good ten years I think, until I lost them. Also Ansal Plaza has a shop called Decathlon, which is a very large shop catering to every different kind of sport, which means they have some really cool products like these "rambling" pants I bought, with pockets, super comfy and easy dry so they're perfect to wear when you're traveling. Or like pollution masks in packs of three. Or excellent fleece jackets. We were there for badminton rackets, having left our set in Goa, but we also got sidetracked with all the other things.

Thursday Miscellany

(This was sent as a newsletter last year or thereabouts. Like, most of this stuff is older writing now anyway, except for the Today in Photo. I suppose my newsletter has turned into my blog? But I still archive things here because there are still people who prefer it. So there is that.)



 
I have had a slow week. Last weekend, I had two house parties in a row, this is rare, because who hosts parties anymore? There was a time in Delhi where your weekends would be spent flitting from one house party to another--and I don't just mean sitting around with three people in a living room having civilised conversations. No, these were party-parties, sometimes you'd see the same five people, but in different combinations, sometimes the only person you knew was the person taking you there, not even the host, but it didn't matter, because you carried that bottle of Old Monk tucked under your arm as an offering, just as someone carried it to your house previously. Anyway, it is fun going to parties, especially unexpected ones, and making conversation with unexpected people, but you are required to be on in a way that is taxing, if you're not used to having conversations with other people apart from your partner, your employees (maid and gardener), and now your German teacher. (And with him, your conversation is about German, if not in German just yet, but it's a process.) (I have had only three German classes, scheduling has been hard recently, but the other night I dreamt of two German words--ich nicht--which means "I not" which is not a sentence, but in my dream it kept echoing in my head: ich nicht, ich nicht, ich nicht.) (Probably because they sound sort of the same.)
This week in movies: I did leave the house once though! Went to watch the premiere of Manto in the cinema with my friend Naila. The movie was great--a biopic of an Indian writer, done well and sensitively, and I'd recommend you watch it, but it's much clearer viewing if you've actually read some of Manto's short stories, because they're woven into the narrative. It could be confusing if you've never even heard of the man, but once you have, there's a thrill at watching him loaf around Bombay with Ismat Chugtai, that pre-Partition writer life, you know? I've seen biopics of writers across the world in a specific time period, and this was my first time watching something set in India. It was really very cool.
My only quibble is that it seemed somehow disjointed, like several different scenes as opposed to one long story, and also that he spends a lot of the second half feeling sorry for himself and gazing moodily into a whiskey glass, which okay, I suppose he might have done in real life also, but I would have liked to see more of the effects of drinking rather than the drinking itself. Watching someone get high in the movies or on television is very boring unless it's done really, really well.
Also, my Feminist Voice kept popping up in my head, no matter how many times I said, "Shhh! Just watch the movie!" "If Manto was a woman," said my FV, "Then he'd HAVE to get it together after Partition and keep his family together. He's only being so self-indulgent because he's a man." My FV keeps it real, she is the antidote to my usual Pollyanna-rose-tinted-glasses situation.
This week in make in India, I think?: A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a large bar of Amul dark chocolate, which was surprisingly so good, that I bought another bar, and now I can't stop eating it. Amul, a gift for someone you love, Amul, the butter guys, were never very good at the chocolate, sort of hard and chalky compared to Cadbury's (which I actually like the Indian version of more than the British one). BUT! This dark chocolate is kind of perfect. And so CHEAP, guys. It's a 100 bucks a bar or something, and this is a big bar I'm talking about, not one of those piddly little ones. 
And while we're on the subject of Amul, please also try their gouda and emmental line of cheese cubes, which are heavily processed, but still tasty. They're not any kind of gouda you will be familiar with, but they still make a nice snack for between meals.
This week in books:  Got sent the new Robert Galbraith Lethal White, and all I will say about it is that it is a) massive, and if you read in bed, you'll have to keep tossing and turning to get your wrists aligned properly and b) SO GOOD that you should probably clear your schedule for as long as it takes for you to finish it. (This Digested Read column about the first book Cuckoo's Calling is snarky and hilarious though.)
I just finished Lark Rise To Candleford, which is this semi-autobiographical life of a young girl in England during the 19th century. I have this other set of books which I love which begin with A London Child of the Seventies (that's 1870s, by the way) and this feels like a country counterpart. Lark Rise is also famous as a BBC show, which I just watched the first episode of, and it is VERY BBC period drama, so obviously I love it already.
Meanwhile, Galbraith put a spanner in my plans to finish reading Sapiens for my book club yesterday, but I mostly enjoyed that too. It's quite dense, but so many insights into what makes us human beings--how we work, how we think, how we operate. Plus written lightly, so it's very readable. Give it a whirl, except don't try to speed-read in three days like I did because then the only whirl will be inside your own head.
And last night, I began reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London at midnight, and by the time I finally was like, "Enough! Go to bed!" it was 2 am, so yeah.

Why I Love Terrace House, A Japanese Reality Show

Guys, I am obsessed with Japan.

Like ob.ses.sed.

The thing is, all us post-colonial children of colonised countries, we've always kept our ideas of exotic firmly planted in the West. Exotic is Famous Five, Jane Austen, daffodils even. Exotic is white people doing white people things. Exotic is us in our Decathlon ski jackets posing on the streets of Scotland. Even now when the world has both shrunk and grown larger, a "foreign holiday" is only truly satisfying if it is to London or Paris (or maybe one of the other EU countries. I was at VFS this morning, and you know how they have these little number tokens you get and you can see which country has been super busy? Well, apparently FINLAND is seeing some sort of crazy Indian tourist boom, as is Malta, oddly enough.) (I was in line for Germany, which is always steadfastly popular, right underneath France and Italy. Switzerland, usually a favourite, seems to have dropped to number five on the list, right after Portugal.) But, if you turn your eyes East, as many of us elite English educated type Indians are doing these days, there's all these possibilities. Sure, it's not White Guy exotic, but tell me that running through Vietnam isn't just as foreign as running through France. Even more, because I didn't know a thing about Vietnam before I visited, except for the food and the war.

Anyhow. Japan. I am late to the Japanese party, I have never even been to Japan, but my first taste of Japan came, quite literally, when I was still living in Bombay. There was a Candies not far from my house. Candies, for everyone who isn't familiar, is a large cafe? restaurant? bakery? all of the above? It's hard to classify Candies, but they sell food, often pre-packaged for takeaway, like an English M&S (tossing a little exotica in there for you) and they had, that month, a range of cheap sushi. 100 bucks, give or take, and a whole box of sushi for you to take away. Now I can't comment on the excellence of this sushi, since it might have been my first time eating it, but I remember thinking it was delicious. And this is before I even learned the whole muddle-the-wasabi-in-with-the-soya-sauce Americanism that I do now. After that, I was open, ready to eat all of Japan, just by that one little gateway drug of a box. And then other Japanese restaurants opened and we went to them for sushi, and for a long time I was only eating sushi, and then I discovered yaki udon, and then I discovered other things, and suddenly it was like all of Japan was laid open before me, just through my mouth and my battered copy of Memoirs of a Geisha. (Which is a problematic book, but one that I credit with teaching me the Japanese habit of calling people "chan" or "san" after their names.)

And for a long time, that was it. Until, a month ago, coming across one of those random Buzzfeed listicles, I heard of a show on Netflix called Terrace House.

Okay: Terrace House. How to explain Terrace House? I'm hoping I can come up with a better written description of it than my first raves to my confused friends. To them I said, "It's a Japanese reality show where six strangers go and live in a house together. There is no script. All the producers give them is a car and a house. And we watch what happens." That's pretty much directly cribbed from the opening minutes of Terrace House. There are six commentators, well known figures in Japanese pop culture, all sitting on a sofa. "Kombawa," says one, Japanese for good evening, and I have picked up a lot of Japanese conversational words just by watching this show. "Kombawa," says everyone, they introduce the premise of the show and then they do a quick recap of the week gone by. Except, you then realise, these are not the six strangers. They are, in fact, the Greek chorus, the internet recappers, the you watching the show, and the six young people on Terrace House are as alienly familiar to them as they are to us, the people watching.

The show follows a set format: there are at all times three men and three women. Everyone is single. The goal of the show, which is never articulated, but which you sort of guess at, is for everyone to hook up. Sometimes people don't hook up, and their storylines just dangle there, a bit like they're treading water, but pretty soon they announce to the house that they are done and they're leaving and someone new comes into the house and there's that frisson all over again. But, in between the dating, which is a long and elaborate thing involving several trial runs, people declaring their intentions and so on, there's long moments of nothingness. Like, for example, a boy and a girl will be having a conversation in the living room about something she cooked. "Where's the meat?" the boy will ask, poking around the gravy and the girl will say, "Oh it overcooked so it's part of the gravy now." Then the scene will change and the three girls will be talking to each other about their plans for the next day. Unlike most reality shows, the Terrace House crew is free to come and go as they wish, so each goes to work or to university or just potters around wherever they are. This means the scope of the show expands to include co-workers or waiters in restaurants or ex-boyfriends or, in one case, a double date with two cast members and two of the girl's other friends from the outside.

Here's a great article I found that breaks it down even more. (People in America are so obsessed with Terrace House, that Netflix actually acquired the show and now airs it on all their platforms.) In the article, the writer mentions that after a while, we're just waiting for the commentators to come in again. Instead of being extra to the show, they are why we watch. Every viewer probably has their favourite commentator, and mine is a man who goes by Yamachan on the show. He wears glasses and he usually sits by the Boy Wonder that rotates with each new installment (some sort of pretty boy off Japanese music or cinema who doesn't contribute much but looks nice). Yamachan is mean, but like, the kind of mean you'd encourage to come and sit by you at a party so you could judge everyone else. Among the other panellists, You stands out (no, really, that's her name) an older woman who is always handy with the one liner.

I began my Terrace House career by watching Terrace House: Aloha State, which was set in Oahu, Hawaii, known for its large Japanese population, I guess? It's widely acknowledged as the worst of the Terrace House series, but even at its worst, it was this fascinating gentle twisty story. I genuinely rooted for the virgin, but I also sympathised with the hot girl who turned him down. I cheered when the actor got to kiss the divorcee, and I was avid when one of the women brought drama into the house. (American-born). Terrace House: Aloha State had so many rotating characters that by the end of it there weren't any members left from the original cast and also there were about three "non-performing" members, which meant Japanese people who wanted to come to America to fix their careers or something and decided joining Terrace House was an easy way to start. I'm now watching Terrace House: Boys x Girls In The City, which is much milder than all the American stuff, set in Tokyo, and the current romance I am rooting for is between the model and the hairdresser. (Of course, it's not ALL sunshine and roses. Japan's patriarchy is quite visible: women holding their hands in front of their faces to laugh, men expecting the women to cook, even when they're told off, and my favourite lol of the season, the med student telling the hairdresser how hard it is to be a female doctor and the hairdresser going, "Yeah, it's the same for hairdressers, phew, it's a really tough industry.")

I don't know why I'm so into this show. No, that's not true, I do know. I've been feeling TV fatigue recently, all this pressure to keep up with the latest and greatest, appointment television, HBO specials, blah blah blah and I just wanted a show with no spoiler alerts unless I went looking for them, no crazy fandoms vs people crazy to prove how they were so much cooler for not watching (*coughGameofThronescough*) no thinkpieces everywhere. I just wanted a quiet pleasurable show, not comedy, not drama, just, I guess, six people living their lives on camera for all of us to watch. I don't even need to read internet recaps because Yamachan and the gang do it for me. I love it so much. Please watch and thank me later. (Start with Boys x Girls In The City, that's the first installment after the Japan-only version that Netflix brought to the world.)

And the other day, Anna made Taishi a bento box with fried chicken and nothing would do for me but to eat Japanese fried chicken, and K said, "There's a new Japanese place, shall we go check it out?" and we went and they had a bento box with fried chicken and it was like I was there.

 

Newsletter: Two Year Anniversary Edition

(Missed a week, but do you want to never miss a week again? Sign up here!)

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: Wake me up when April ends (hey!)

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This week in accomplishments: This newsletter is coming to you one day later, because I finished writing my book--okay, I finished writing the first draft, anyway. I read this author interview somewhere, where the author was like, "There aren't that many rewards in the writing life--it's often lonely and isolating and thankless--so you need to take your joys where you find them, so take a moment to celebrate when you finish writing a manuscript." I have taken a moment. There's this one glorious golden bit, where your book only belongs to you, not to readers, not to editors, not to the whims of the publicity department, just to you, and it's yours, for whatever it is. And that is the moment I took, just to pat myself on the back and think, "Okay! Look at you! You did this!" I haven't done this for previous books, so I never remember the very day that they were done and how I felt (good, I assume) before self-doubt started creeping in so with The One Who Had Two Lives, I'm marking it.


After this weekend (when I am taking a nice break from anything work related), I will read the manuscript again, make some edits and send it off to the publishers, and then will begin the long back-and-forth editing process, until the book is ready to see the world in its final form. I don't much enjoy edits, but they are extremely necessary--both your own, and the outside eye--to make a book into something other people will enjoy reading, which is why we're doing this, right?

This week in leisure: I was having a conversation with K the other day, and I realised I could not call to mind any favourite movies. Isn't that strange? It's been a regret of mine for some time that I'm just not into films, they don't interest me like books, they don't move me like music, they don't hold my attention like TV shows. But then, films are more accessible now than they ever have been, so many choices, so many streaming services, and it's sort of weird to be a creative, thinking person with such a gap in my cultural knowledge. So I decided that I would watch movies when I normally would turn on some show or the other to binge watch, and I made a list after going through all the streaming services I subscribe to (Netflix, Hotstar and Prime) as well as a few more that I acquired elsewhere. It goes (just legal streaming):

Netflix:

Still Alice (86% Rotten Tomatoes. Loved the book.)
Steel Magnolias (69% Rotten Tomatoes, women bonding in a small town salon PLUS Julia Roberts.)
Breakfast At Tiffany's (88% RT, can you believe I haven't watched this yet?)
To Kill A Mockingbird (91% RT, ditto)
Sense And Sensibility (98% RT, watched this last night, see thoughts below)
The Meyerowitz Stories (92% RT, Netflix Original that I am curious about.)

Amazon Prime:

The Edge of Seventeen (95% RT, new young coming-of-age movie)
20th Century Women (88% RT, not quite sure about this, but the premise looks fun.)
Wonder Woman (92% RT, because everyone went on and on about this one so much.)

Hotstar:

Deadpool (83% RT, because I like snarky smart superhero movies, not the ones that are super earnie)
Moana (96% RT, I will watch a Disney movie over another movie any day.)
Hidden Figures (93% um, hello, the first black women to work at NASA? How could I NOT?)

Other movies that are not streaming anywhere but I am still looking out for:

Election (93% RT, on a recommendation by Mansha, watched yesterday, see thoughts below.)
Pan's Labyrinth (95% RT, seems to suit my Mahabharata frame of mind.)
Remains of the Day (97% RT, very much enjoyed the book.)
Blade Runner (90% RT, because I am feeling open minded about cinema in general.)
The Post (87% RT, STREEP AND HANKS IN A NEWSPAPER STORY)
I, Tonya (90%, because of a vague interest I have in Olympic figure skating.)

LOVED Election--so funny, so sharp, so based on a book by an author I love (Tom Perrotta!) I think if I had watched it a decade ago, I would have disliked Reese Witherspoon's character a lot more, and sympathised with Matthew Broderick a lot more as well, but in this age of #MeToo, even the nuances of this comedy stick with you. I'm not saying any more because spoilers, but yes, very good.

Sense And Sensibility is, would you believe, an Austen I haven't read (that and Persuasion) and the movie was so good I immediately went to Gutenberg and got my free Kindle file to read. Excellent. I was enthralled till the end. Critics online call it the best Austen adaptation ever made.

Anyway, that is my list. Please send recommendations if you have any. I do not like violence, too much bloodshed and gun or drug stories, plus movies that spend a lot of time in dark, not well lit rooms. I like twisty personalities, sharp dialogue, and movies that make you pause them and go, "WAIT A MINUTE...."

This week in all play and no work: I am actively looking for freelance work, by the way, if you are or know someone looking. I can turn my hand to most kinds of writing and editing. Erm, I feel like I should have one more line here so: yes! I am good! Hire me!

This week in stuff I wrote: Vice India has just launched and I did a fun piece on the most interesting girls of the Mahabharata and their place in the modern day world.

Excerpt: But even if you take Hidimbi at face value: she’s a cannibal sent to lure the five brothers back to her brother, Hidimba, for his evening meal, but can’t go through with it because she falls so madly in love with one of them. Raised as a rakshasi in a forest, perhaps only knowing her brother (I haven’t read about a whole tribe of them being there), there’s a certain Flowers In The Attic appeal to Hidimbi’s story. Two siblings, outcasts from “civilisation”, existing in their own little world. I imagine Hidimba would have been a loving, kind brother, but I also imagine he would have wanted to preserve their world because it was the only one he knew.

This week in where I'm spending my money: I had heard of Bookchor before but only in an abstract sense, and then I read about them in an article last week, so I checked out the website, and it was pretty cool. Second hand books, good prices, pretty good selection, I ordered a bunch of books, and was so pleased, I will be using them again, even though my shelves are now literally groaning. Not very responsive on social media or to email though, so you'll just have to wait for your order to arrive and not, like, ask any questions.

Also, I went out for lunch with my mum yesterday and we got me an I-Finished-My-Book treat, which was a nice new pair of blue jeans from Levi's. Haven't been to Levi's in SO LONG, turns out they only have two styles for women these days: straight and skinny. I bought straight fit, which are actually a little skinny? But I only have one pair of comfortable jeans and those are jeggings, the others are all too small, too tight, too thick, too something. If you travel, you need jeans. It's just the way of the world. Don't ask me, I didn't make the rules.
 

Friday link list!

Two con stories for you this week:

1) The woman who pretended to be a fancy New York socialite and took all the reporter's money (tsk):

Excerpt: The vacation was Anna’s idea. She again needed to leave the States in order to reset her ESTA visa, she said. Instead of returning home to Germany, she suggested we take a trip somewhere warm. It had been a long time since my last vacation. I happily agreed that we should explore options, thinking we’d find off-season fares to the Dominican Republic or Turks and Caicos. Anna suggested Marrakech; she’d always wanted to go. She picked La Mamounia, a five-star luxury resort ranked among the best in the world, and knowing that her selection was cost-prohibitive for my budget, she nonchalantly offered to cover my flights, the hotel, and expenses. She reserved a $7,000/night private riad, a traditional Moroccan villa with an interior courtyard, three bedrooms, and a pool, and forwarded me the confirmation e-mail. Due to a seemingly minor snafu, I’d put the plane tickets on my American Express card, with Anna promising to reimburse me promptly. Since I did this all the time for work, I didn’t give it a second thought.

2) The man who pretended he wanted to marry a lot of women in India and took their money (tsk TSK):

Excerpt: His strategy with the women was similar: He posed as an IRS officer who worked undercover. This helped him explain away tricky situations like why an office wouldn’t acknowledge his employment, why he needed to keep his identity secret, why he carried an identity card in another name, or why he couldn’t make money transfers from his bank account.

 

Tell me again why you killed all your girl babies? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS

Excerpt: India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.

 

How does my voice assistant know what I'm saying?

Excerpt:  Voice recognition and responding to voice commands are really hard problems computationally. And we’ve made amazing strides forward but there’s still a fair way to go. Accents, for example, are still really hard for these kinds of systems, and complex commands are really hard for these systems.

Don't be this guy.

Excerpt: That’s probably all that needs to be said, but in case you’re reading this out loud at a bar or restaurant and your companions missed it because it’s so loud in there, here it is again: IT ONLY TAKES ONE PERSON TO RAISE THE VOLUME IN A RESTAURANT.

Newsletter: Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As always, you can subscribe to my newsletter here for it to arrive into your inbox instead of waiting for me to post it here! 

This week in further signifiers of my old age: I taught myself to type. I learned online--the best way--by going on chat rooms and talking to people around the world. Age 14. The internet was brand new in India, my dad needed to amuse me one long summer, so he took me with him to work every now and then, where there was an internet enabled computer. Everything took several minutes to load, but worth it. We got the internet at home, eventually, and soon the speed picked up and so did my typing skills. (You can read all about my early experiments with the internet on this longform piece I did for Yahoo Originals a few years ago.)

So, I wrote everything--six years of journalism, ten years of freelancing, almost ten years of book writing--using my two index fingers. The hunt and peck style so favoured by grannies around the world, except I can go damn fast with my hunt and peck, at my prime, I was averaging five thousand words a day without breaking a sweat. (Now I am old and my words are more considered, so it's down to 2000 including sweating.) Alas, friends! Alas for everything, because now my money makers, my two index fingers, have been FELLED by old age and greed! I started developing a TWINGE in my right forefinger which quickly became an ache which quickly became so bad that I couldn't open things or pull tabs off packets or do all the motor skills stuff you depend on your forefinger and thumb to do.

K is sadly familiar with carpal tunnel syndrome (also known as repetitive strain injury or RSI) but I was foolishly hoping to wait until I finish my next manuscript before I mentioned it, because even as I'm writing this, I'm forcing myself to try and use other fingers but I feel CRIPPLED. Anyway, the pain got too much to ignore and I started to worry about seriously doing myself an injury so now I'm wearing his old wrist guard and I've swapped my mouse around so that it's on my left side (very hard but you have to begin using your left index finger) and I'm trying to type this half on an external keyboard and half on my laptop. In the meanwhile, if any of you have done exercises for your hand and wrist with good results, please share them.

This week in VOGUE VOGUE VOGUE: Went to Sarojini Nagar with my mother--an outing we do quite a lot. I have some secret shopping places both within the large Sarojini Market, some stalls to hit which always yield good results, as well as one more export surplus-y place in East Delhi quite near her house where I always score pretty incredible accessories. I have a rule of thumb when buying stuff off the road: mostly it's about fabric. The synthetic stuff always looks cheap, unless it's got a nice geometric or some such pattern--and you're looking for BIG prints not small. Fitted dresses are tricky to figure out size for, I bought a lovely white cotton dress, but alas, it doesn't zip up all the way, so we had to go to the tailor this morning and get him to add a panel to the sides so it expands a bit. This time though, there wasn't such an embarrassment of riches as there usually is, so I think I'm going to need to make another trip soon. *yay*

Oh, the tailor! It is a temperamental shop with a revolving cast, one masterji, who I barely see and instead deal with a tall, handsome young fellow who appears to be second-in-command, but it is right down the road from me, so I go often and I am ALWAYS optimistic. There's always some dress I used to love but is now too old, too faded, too worn, and I want to revive it by giving it an all new cast and crew as it were. This time I'm aiming for a lovely grey kimono/kurta/dress thing with an orange embroidered panel at the back, and it'll either be AMAZING or.. well, it HAS to be amazing because I am paying seven hundred bucks for it, which may not sound like a lot to you, but is roughly double of what he normally charges because of the complicated sleeves and pockets and what not.

Also last week I bought a lovely dress off Olio Stories. I've been wanting to buy a dress from their website for a while, because it all looks so airy and COOL, like with-sunglasses, not temperature, but it's always been ridiculously expensive (you see how I'm wailing about 700 rups also here, so you get my general spend on clothes) but they're having a clearance sale, so you should check them out while the going's good. (Tip: everything is a bit big so even the small which I ordered is slightly loose on me, but in a nice way.) (I normally wear a medium.) (Check the size charts before you buy ANYTHING on the internet.) (The dress was cheaper when I bought it.)

This week in food and drink: Have all the men left after all that chat about clothes? WELL ANYWAY, I am now going to talk about sausages which is a very manly food--both in shape and in cooking techniques, so come back, men!

Vir Sanghvi just wrote a long wailing column about how there were no good sausages to be had in Delhi, unless you go to the OBEROI, DAHLING, but only because they export everything. Now, Vir Sanghvi is very posh and I am not, so I have ONE WORD to say to him, and that word is Pigpo. Pigpo continues to knock it out of the park in terms of sausages. I am no connoisseur, unlike certain Germans in my life, but the teeny Pigpo sausages, about the size of your thumb, are delicious, freeze well and are incredibly easy to just pop into a pan. With them, last week, I made Instant Pot Mashed Potatoes off this recipe from Lifehacker, which you can also make in your pressure cooker. I substituted the half and half mentioned with coconut milk, and they came out just as creamy and no lingering coconut flavour also. (I seriously pop coconut milk into so many things these days that I've just begun buying loads each time I do.)

Sadly, Pigpo is very far away from me, and while the meat delivery website Lionfresh looks nice and all, it is really only Pigpo I crave. Next time I'm just going to buy two kilos and freeze all of it. Instant sausage fest! Perfect for Sunday night with Netflix.

Wednesday Link List!

When Harry Met Sally is definitely on my top five list of best movie of all time. ALL TIME!

Excerpt: Perhaps because Ephron took so much from real life, When Harry Met Sally is a surprisingly grounded romantic comedy. It’s made up largely of low-stakes hangout scenes that have more in common with today’s more realistic rom-coms than they do the glossy rom-coms of the 2000s. For instance, the film contains perhaps the most hilariously accurate depiction of a game of Pictionary
ever captured on screen. Although the dialogue often has the patter of a play, Reiner and Ephron anchor those well-written conversations in the natural milieu of New York City life. Harry and Sally discuss their dating lives while unrolling a rug or wandering through Central Park or spending a day at The Met, delivering silly banter in goofy voices.

Basically: eat your vegetables.

Excerpt: The body detoxifies itself daily; that’s a primary job of the liver and the kidneys, and they are really good at it. (The intestines, spleen, and immune system are in on it, too.) So, you want to take good care of your liver and kidneys, gut, and immune system. That’s a far better “cleanse” than any juice. How do you take good care of all your detoxifying organ systems? By taking good care of yourself, of course. That means eating well, not smoking, exercising, sleeping enough, managing your stress, and so on.

Why should you care about all that Facebook stuff?

Excerpt: If you keep secrets about yourself, even innocuous ones, Facebook is likely aware of them in some capacity thanks to the sites you visit, the profiles you linger over, the comments you leave. And it’s not comforting to think that you’re not in charge of that data. Remember when we found out the NSA was spying on everyone, and people argued that “if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t be worried”? This feels kind of like that. You should care about what companies can learn about you without your permission, and what data they can retain against your wishes.

Three links about pets this week because I will read anything domestic companion animal related. (Sadly, these are all about dogs, but they should get some internet love too.) (Dammit, I want a dog for my collection.)

Who is my dog? This writer did a DNA test on her mutt.

Excerpt: Oh, you would like to know even more about Peter? If you insist. He has velvet ears. He has a spotted tongue. When he walks down the stairs, at his moderately paced gentleman’s trot, you can tell he’s a bit bow-legged. He has the heart of an angel and the soul of a poet, and there’s a hint of sadness to him that makes you want to protect him against all of the world’s harshness. He has whiskers that are so prominent they make you second-guess whether whiskers are a typical dog trait, or whether he could potentially be part mouse. He will sit his big, fat butt on your lap like he’s tiny, when he is actually 25 pounds. He’s affectionate, but not needy. “He’s just so...kind,” is how a cousin of mine once described him, and it’s true: he’s just so kind. Also he loves to burrow under the covers, and he loves to sleep with his head on a pillow like a tiny little man.

We treat our pets around the same way ancient cave people treated THEIR pets.

Excerpt: As civilization proceeded and small-scale hunter-gatherer societies gave way to urban elites and subservient rural populations, pet keeping entered a completely new phase. In the generally egalitarian communities of the Paleolithic everyone could keep animals as companions, whereas in the highly stratified societies of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, right up until the twentieth century, the poorest had little opportunity to acquire pets for their own sake. That’s not to say that they didn’t feel affection for dogs and cats, but those animals had to earn their keep. The surviving evidence generally suggests that from the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries bce) until the end of the nineteenth century, pets played a part in the lives of the wealthiest members of society. As the less well-off inevitably left fewer traces of their lives, we can only guess at how they interacted with their animals; no doubt they had less time and fewer resources to devote to them. Not until the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle classes, did the keeping of pets for their own sake become widespread once more.

The long and complicated relationship between humans and wolves.

Excerpt: It is alarming, although perhaps predictable, that in the US attitudes toward wolves are becoming divided along political lines, with Republicans continuing to introduce and support laws that restrict or persecute them, while First Nations people and many Democrats are much more tolerant, or even encouraging, of the animals. In Europe, by contrast, a more easygoing relationship is being established, as was demonstrated in 2016 when one of the first wolves to enter the Netherlands in centuries crossed the border from Germany. It wandered the streets of a village for several days, the sanguine Dutch displaying little more than minor concern. Elsewhere in Europe, however, where wolves cause more harm to livestock, schemes are in place whereby farmers are compensated by the EU for losses to their flocks. Conflict between wolves and humans in Europe will doubtless continue, but in Europe wolves have a bright future, in part because most landowners seem willing to abide by laws and regulations formulated to address their interactions with the animals. In the US, however, wolves continue to be shot whenever they encroach onto private land. As a result, today more wolves can be found in Europe than in all the US, including Alaska, despite the fact that Europe’s human population is more than twice as large as that of the US.

Newsletter: Making a spectacle of myself

(Almost a month old, but I realised I hadn't cross-posted newsletters here in a while! Sign up here for a more updated me in your inbox every weekend.)

This week in new accessories: The biggest news I have for you this week is that I got glasses. No, not drinking glasses (although we did realise that we didn't have any tall glasses left, so I ordered a set online--with cut glass bottoms, which one of us calls "Addams Family" and the other thinks are really fancy. I'll let you guess which is which.) No, I mean spectacles, which make me think of Benjamin Franklin, inventor of--among other things--the bifocals. (Have you seen that great animated movie about Benjamin and the mouse that lives in his house? It's called Ben and Me, and is a 1953 Disney short film. Watch here.)

 Anyway, back to the glasses. K and I did "mall day" as our anniversary celebration, which is very exciting for two people who never leave the house, and we decided to make a quick stop at the mall optician for an eye test. Long story short: I need glasses, but not like in a I'll-be-super-blind-if-I-take-them-off way, but just to make my vision sharper. Also, they add great value to my "look." Which is basically Zooey Deschanel meets Monica when she comes back from the Bahamas.

This week in food and drink: At aforementioned mall day, we had lunch at Yauatcha, which I've been meaning to try. They had a great set lunch deal, Rs 1074 ++ including a glass of sparkling and with three sets of dim sums each, two mains and two noodles/rice, we were stuffed. Recommend!

Also in Asian food, went to the Asian Hawker's Market, one of Delhi's new "food festivals" which is basically a bunch of restaurants getting together and selling food at the same restaurant prices in an open area. Kinda pointless, if you ask me. I'd like, for example, one of these Grub Palate what have yous to also have individual portions, so you can graze, maybe an assortment box with best of, maybe more food trucks and home caterers so it's not always the same five people, you know? However, I did eat a lot of sushi wandering about Select City Walk's outdoor courtyard yesterday, which was nice. Everything nice was sold out or closed by the time we got there (.9.30 pm) so if you're planning to go tomorrow, go a little early. But it's also the mall on Sunday, so order in from Noshi instead, one of the new places we tried, Yum Yum Tree's sushi delivery service which also has ramen etc on the menu. 

Then, against my better judgement, also went to HKV on Friday night, but I think either a) Friday is not a popular night or b) HKV is done, because the traffic was not terrible and the crowds were not so crowdy. In fact, shouters at various bars kept urging me to come in ("free drinks for ladies!") so next time I plan to take them ALL up on it, and just get drunk for free, barhopping in HKV. I went to Roost for a live band, which was nice, but whose name I never learned, so there's that.

Earlier in the week, made the trek to Gurgaon, where the Uber driver did not trust his own navigation system and RIGHTLY SO because bloody Google maps sent us on some u-turn mission. FINALLY, after ducking into a side lane in Vasant Kunj to rejoin the highway, we wound up on the WORST road I have ever been on, and right in the middle of the city too. So strange. Anyway, was in Gurgaon to watch Radhika Vaz (more on her below!) at Manhattan Exchange, one of those bars where you watch the prices of the drinks rise and fall and then order accordingly, which seems gimmick-y but which I also had great fun with. However, Gurgaon.

This week in live events: Radhika Vaz's new show Older, Angrier, Hairier, which I very much enjoyed in a "it's funny because it's true" way and also because she talked a lot about pooping and vaginas. The show could have done with a few edits though, some "bits" went on a it, but all in all, would recommend! It was more performance art/spoken word and less stand up, but still worth a watch. I also liked her warm-upper, a young woman named Sonal? Sonali? Jeez, I am terrible with names, but she was very good too.

This week in stuff I wrote: My fortnightly feminism column on dating manuals from the 1990s is quite true and funny too, I think.

This week in great stuff I bought: One is endlessly grateful to Ameya (hi!) for introducing me to the Body Shop line of hair care for curly hair. I've been using the shampoo and conditioner for a while, but recently splurged also on the Brazil Nut curl define serum, which is OMG YOU GUYS SO GREAT. Everyone's all, "I love your hair!" But also it is what passes for fall in Delhi, which is basically the season in which I look my best (very small window, which is why I socialise so much this time of the year.)

Oh also, I bought this little wheely plastic box to take my laundry to and from the washing machine, which may not seem very exciting, but listen, if you had three cats hell bent on OUT? OUT! WHEE! each time you open the front door, you too would appreciate having a wheely crate so at least you're not juggling an armful of clothes and cats besides. (Oh, but you might not have your washing machine outside your front door, I forget that this is not normal.  We had nowhere else to put it, so it lives in a nice cupboard on the landing.)

Reading list: Hot chaiwalla ** Why the internet's love for the hot chai walla is unethical and classist. ** Letters to Michelle Obama. ** Why you should have never come to Goa in the first place, guys. ** Why Marmee from Little Women is evil and other thoughts on the text. ** Prayaag on how he moved to Mumbai for his then-girlfriend and now wife and what it taught him about his own ideas of masculinity. ** Jokes for feminists. ** Wiki time suck: people who disappeared mysteriously. **


Have a great week!
xx
m

Newsletter: she's addicted to nicotine patches

I've recently started an email newsletter, which you can subscribe to by clicking on this link. It's out every Friday with stuff I'm reading, thinking, and doing that week. I've decided to also cross-post on the blog, just in case you don't like emails and prefer reading stuff online, old-school. Here's volume three. 

GUYS, I have been adding to this newsletter all week, so prepare yourselves for a long one. It's also partly because I'm spending my summer in Delhi unlike most of you gallivanting off here and there, so with a staycation (HAH. I'm chained to my bloody desk. Greed has brought all my deadlines to roost) I have a lot more time to introspect. This morning my friend called and in course of conversation said, "I'm really enjoying all your Facebook updates these days. They're all about the little things." That's my life right now--the little things.

Stuff I wrote this week: My F Word feminism fortnightly column this week was all about raising feminist children.  I called and spoke to two of my girlfriends with daughters and we all had a very insightful chat, so read. Also in feminist writing, I gave advice as Aunty Feminist this week to a young person who wanted to know how to reconcile her often sexist and homophobic family with her liberal, feminist values. Over at HuffPo, I have a blog up about Susan Miller, astrology and horoscopes as hope. On my blog: let us now forgive powerful men, on Tejpal & co. And in my relationship column, the lure of the Delhi Gymkhana, Thursday nights and being called "adorable."

I'm "curating" the next edition of Prose At Toddy, which basically means I've invited a bunch of writers I admire to come and read at the Toddy Shop on June 22nd (Wednesday!). It's a non-fiction edition, which I'm very proud of, so come! Starts at 9.

This week in weird medical stuff: I've been having these strange vivid flashes of SMELL out of the blue. Suddenly, on a flyover, for example, I'll smell coffee so strongly, my nose wakes up. Or, in a really posh bar, miles away from the facilities, I'll smell urine. I thought with my usual jump-to-worst conclusion, that I was probably having a series of mini-strokes (because it could happen). I ruled out a brain tumour, because I've seen Grey's Anatomy and I don't have a headache. WELL. The actual answer is something called phantosmia. Turns out my nose is hallucinating. It's pretty weird and it can happen with a sinus infection, a sudden sneeze and/or smoking. AT LEAST I'M NOT DYING (yet.)

This week in book-adaptation television: Some people say, "How do you work from home? Do you have fixed timings?" and to them I usually say, "In my pajamas, and yes." Well, not exactly, but I usually start work around 11-ish, that's deadline work, not work like this newsletter which I do pre-deadlines, and knock off about 7 pm. Which is also usually when I watch a lot of TV on nights I'm not going out. This week I discovered The Durrells, an ITV period drama based on GERALD DURRELL'S Corfu Trilogy. Obviously I had to watch it. It's good, except it's not really the book at all, focusing more on Mama Durrell as a spunky, single mother who has to forge ahead etc. Also in period drama: Poirot! But Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are all 45-minute case of the week stuff. The really excellent episodes start Season 4 on, where it's two episodes per mystery and three mysteries a season. (This is my Sunday.) Also 11.22.63 based on Stephen King's time travel novel of the same name, ALSO a period drama. The book is great and the show with a brooding James Franco as lead, is pretty faithful.


Does anyone want to go to this sari class with me? How about the Harper Collins sale?


Throwback book of the week: Paper Moon by Joe David Brown. This is a con man story with a TWIST, it's actually a con GIRL and all she wants is love and a family and also to rip people off. A charming narrator, one of the funnest YA characters I've read. Later, this was turned into a film, starring real life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal as Addie Pray and her "daddy" Long Boy.

Snack of the week: My friend Ishi always has the most exciting food at her house. Recently, while over there, she fried me up a set of pre-made snacks called Bean Bullets (Bean Bites?) by The Temperamental Chef. YOU GUYS IT WAS SO GOOD! And vegetarian, so you can totally pull them out the next time your lone veggie friend is sadly eating chips while all around her, they're snacking on chicken tikkas.

Speaking of food OR why I'm not buying chicken anymore unless it's "certified organic." Besides which, think of all the antibiotics you're eating! Gross. I'm well on my way to becoming a crunchy granola type hippy, evidenced by the fact that I looked up and ordered "almond milk" off Grofers this morning. (UPDATE: they cancelled, as Grofers is wont to do.)

Song of the week: This is the song that is basically your stand in front of the mirror, getting your confidence up before you go out anthem. Meghan Trainor with another very addictive song: Me Too. (Chorus: if I was you, I'd wanna be me too, I'd wanna be me too.)

Purchases I made that I love: Someone tweeted about a basic matte red lipstick by a brand called Sugar, so I Googled it, and then it turns out they had a lovely nude (called Holly Go Lightly) and I already have two bright red lipsticks but I'm always searching for a good nude one (sort of purplish pinkish brownish) so I bought that and then I fiddled around the site looking to see what else they had and they had a sale on this thing called a Tangle Teezer. Which is basically a tiny hairbrush, but with "revolutionary technology" and everyone on the internet was raving about it so I was like OKAY and

I bought myself one too (at Rs eight hundred something, I've never spent that much money on a HAIRBRUSH before.) Anyhow, both arrived last week and the lipstick is lovely but the hairbrush, you guys! My hair is so soft! And wavy-ish! And stayed that way even while I slept! And absolutely zero effort required, no pulling and tugging at knots, just zip-zip-zip and you're all set. (In an article I read about it, they said that people are now saying, "Can I borrow your Teezer?" instead of "brush" now so it's basically the Macbook of hairbrushes.) Anyway, there I am rhapsodising about a hairbrush, but it really is very good and also very cute and has a little thing you slip on so you can pop it into your handbag. Especially since I'm now growing out my hair out of idle curiosity.

Stuff I watched this week that wasn't TV: The Breakfast Club  which I have NEVER seen before. (Also a bunch of other classic films, so basically I probably HAVEN'T watched it so don't ask). What a fun film though. Even though I was kind of expecting it to be a bit like The Dead Poet's Society,  except, um, with BREAKFAST.


This week in stuff I read: Dayanita Singh on the Steve McCurry debate. In Japan, they're taking house party classes because of course they are.  TRUMPISTAN. Even Google has feelings.


And that's all for me and this (very long) newsletter this week! Stay cool, and have a nice weekend.

xx
eM