Payal Dhar's Blog: Writer's Log, page 2

Thai Diaries (days 7&8)

Yoga, sort of

From soul to physical body. Museflower’s yoga retreat programme gives you a full physical workout every day, along with some pounding and pummelling at the spa. This is the package to opt for if you are in search of time to yourself. Or the spa package. 

Yoga begins at 7 every morning, usually taken by A or Eugenie. If there are no other takers, you end up with a personalised session, as I did with A, who put me through my paces for a challenging hour. She opted for a lower-body routine that started from gentle stretching and progressed to demanding endurance and balance challenges.

The next day, a Saturday, there were many more guests and it was a pretty packed class—and by packed I mean six of us. Eugenie chose a hip-opening routine that was mostly on the floor, and challenging in its own way. 

A note on the “yoga”. It really wasn’t! It was more of a yoga-inspired workout. Apart from the ubiquitous “downward dog” and the “child’s pose”, there were no mentions of anything yoga-related.

Yoga is followed by meditation every day. A—again, I was the only one—introduced me to a walking meditation technique. I think there was a bit lost in translation, so I’m going to look up details when I get home!

I also had two excellent massages from their freelance practitioner, Jang. The body alignment massage on the first day, followed by a Thai massage personalised for me, including Jang’s speciality, the chi ne tsang, a Chinese abdominal massage with healing properties. 

The other highlight was snatching a swim at the saltwater pool whenever I could. 

I’m going to miss the pool!

~PD

Thai Diaries (day 6)

Until we meet again

Some catching up to do here! Anyhow, day 6 was all about farewells. To Mine, Maren and Liz, my companions on an intense, revealing, soul-searching journey. This was a small group, just the four of us, so I suppose we all connected pretty well. We were all from different parts of the world, of different ages, and different professions, who happened to be in the same place at the same time. I think we were all looking for something, and that is what bound us together.

We slayed some inner dragons together and found others that are allies. Something tells me our paths may cross yet.

My time at Museflower, though, was not over yet. I stay on for the four-day yoga retreat and to meet a few more people. Esther from Holland, who is travelling in Asia with her family—they aim to travel for a whole year or more, with Thailand being their first stop—ditched her other half and her offspring in Chiang Rai town for some alone time with Museflower’s spa programme. Cindy from Singapore—who does at least one solo holiday a year—was here for the yoga retreat. 

Our writing retreat facilitator Sarah was also joined by her boyfriend Roy.

Thus, from matters of the mind to matters of the physical body—a new experience was starting to reveal itself. Intending to go in with both feet, I exchanged my afternoon yoga session with a 60-minute TABATA-style functional training session, lead by the versatile A. Sixty seconds on 30 seconds off—and at peak humidity (Museflower doesn’t have air conditioning in most of its public areas)—it was…interesting!

~PD

Thai Diaries (days 4&5)

The creepies and the crawlies

Museflower Retreat where I’m staying is in the middle of a jungle. There’s about 2 kilometres of unpaved roads to navigate to get here. While it’s nicely signposted, let’s just say you wouldn’t want to arrive in the dark your first time (unless you’re being picked up, of course). The other excitement about living in the middle of the jungle is—you guessed it, the creepy crawlies.

I am happy to coexist with the one-, two-, four-, six-, eight-, many- and no-legged ones as long as I don’t have to see them. This is not always possible, though, and it’s something I’ve made my peace with. Except when it comes to the no-legged. There is no room for compromise there. Unless you’re in a resort in a foreign country by yourself.

Over the past five days at Museflower, I have had numerous encounters, including with a few legless ones. And including some in my room. Though I am careful to keep the net protectors on the doors and windows firmly shut ALL the time, a few stubborn critters have crept in nonetheless. So far, I have escorted three worms, a caterpillar and a (dead, I think) beetle-like thing off the premises.

What’s keeping me from screaming blue murder is:

I don’t scream; andThere’s no one to hear me even if I did.

So off I go to negotiate yet another night in my jungle room, and as I do so, I leave you with these images of some creepies and crawlies I encountered in Chiang Rai’s walking street market. I don’t mind these at all. While I didn’t have the nerve to try any, I’m told they are delicious and very nutritious.

Stir-fried larvae, anyone?

~PD

Thai Diaries (days 2&3)

Let’s get eating!

Every weekend, Chiang Rai closes one of its main streets to traffic and converts it into a pop-up market. Food and drink, handicrafts, clothes, trinkets, art, toys—there’s a lot of it about. The walking street, as they call it here, is not to be confused with the night market, which is about half a kilometre away (you can walk from one to the other, but give yourself a good two or three hours at the walking street.

Food-wise, the most fascinating stall was one where they sold crispy fried insects and larvae. No, I didn’t try any. Yes, I wanted to but lost my nerve. I did try some coconut water, mainly to quench my thirst after a couple of hours walking around the market. This was my second coconut of the day and was, for the second time, amazed at the sweetness of it. I suspect there was some sugar added to the one in the market, but at Museflower they don’t use sugar.

Speaking of which, to top off yet another fantastic food-filled day at the retreat, I asked for a banana coconut smoothie. I had expected the banana and coconut flavours to blend well together, though I was unsure what the eventual result would be. What I didn’t expect was to be served a banana smoothie inside a coconut!

The soft insides of the coconut and banana were blended with yoghurt (no added sugar), plans there was some coconutty pulp still left inside, which I could scrape off with my straw. And I was right, bananas and coconut complement each other beautifully!

As for the custard baked into a giant pumpkin at lunch…a story for another day

~PD

Thai Dairies (day 1)

To eVoA or not to eVoA

Thailand’s evisa-on-arrival gets a thumbs up from me. The VoA procedure itself is a bit of a fish market at Bangkok (or maybe I’ve just arrived at the wrong times). There is an express counter for the privilege of skipping the queues, but you pay extra for that.

The process is particularly confusing if your port of disembarkation is Bangkok and you have a domestic connecting flight. In that case you’re likely to find yourself confused, with two arrows point in different directions. For the record, you must do the visa first, and then walk half a kilometre back where you came from. Think of it as an extra treat!

So the eVoA, then. Well, it made the immigration process a breeze. There was zero waiting in line; in fact the only wait was when the immigration officer was more interested in chatting with his colleague while his stamp stood poised over my passport for a good five minutes.

The eVoA costs the same as the VoA, which is nothing (for some travellers, and up to 31 October 2019). I just had to pay the THB 600 to VFS for the processing. Everything happened without my having to get out of bed, and I had the visa in my inbox in approximately 12 hours, on a Saturday. 

Where am I?

Museflower Retreat and Spa, where I will be spending the next eight or so days, is a green and open space, with a lake, salt crystal pool, spa centre, rooms and plenty of space for relaxation, meditation and their own programmes.

What will I do here?

A wellness-infused writing retreat for the first 6 days, then a 3-day yoga retreat. With plenty of time to write, relax, eat their lacto-ovo-vegetarian meals, and drink tea and fresh fruit smoothies.

Watch this space for more.

~PD

No.13 of #52Stories: Jinxed by Amy McCulloch

A round of applause to Amy McCulloch for a book (the first of a series) about girls in engineering. That and the the world-building were the two things that got me hooked on Jinxed, even though it ended in a cliffhanger, which I hate.

The story is set in a time about 50 years from now, when animal bakus (robotic companions) have replaced mobile phones, and society, at least in this urban Canadian landscape, is a closed hive of constant immersion and surveillance, all thanks to the capitalist hegemony that controls everything. These dystopian aspects were not exactly explored, though I hope McCulloch is keeping them for future books.

As for the story, here’s the blurb:

Lacey Chu has big dreams of becoming a companioneer for MONCHA, the largest tech firm in North America and the company behind the baku, a customisable smart pet that functions as a phone but makes the perfect companion too. When Lacey finds out she hasn’t been accepted into Profectus, the elite academy for cutting-edge tech, it seems her dreams are over. Worst of all, rather than getting to choose one of the advanced bakus, she’s stuck with a rubbish insect one. Then, one night, Lacey comes across the remains of an advanced baku. Once it might’ve been in the shape of a cat but it’s now mangled and broken, no sign of electronic life behind its eyes. Days of work later and the baku opens its eyes. Lacey calls him Jinx – and Jinx opens up a world for her that she never even knew existed, including entry to the hallowed halls of Profectus. Slowly but surely, Jinx becomes more than just a baku to Lacey – he becomes her perfect companion. But what is Jinx, really? His abilities far surpass anything written into his code or built into his motherboard. He seems to be more than just a robotic pet. He seems…real.

Lacey was a protagonist easy to get behind, even though things happened way too easily for her. This was the weak point of the book, the coincidences. There were a few other things I found trite – the plot, which was the stereotypical rivalry between our poor underdog (but brilliant) narrator and the spoilt (but also brilliant, if marginally less so) son of a bigshot father. In the end, Carter came off as more of a caricature than an antagonist to be feared.

The other letdown was the ending, not the cliffhanger itself, but the final reveal. After McCulloch’s fascinating set-up, the big reveal was too simplistic. As was the idea that a big corporation had the welfare of people as its primary agenda, but I’m sure that’s down to a 15-year-old’s starry-eyed PoV.

Then, the Baku Battles – I was not a fan. It was a kind of Hunger Games-type reality show, but for bakus, controlled by their owners. Didn’t quite ring right for me as either a learning assignment or as a top-secret incentive to get students to be creative. Surely there were better ways to have achieved that.

Finally, what really bothered me was that there were also way too many boys/men than girls/women. There were absolutely no women in power or any that took centre stage, even though the principal of the school was a woman and so was the head of the capitalist giant Moncha. In the end, neither of them counted; one quite the opposite. The fathers were more important than the mothers, even though Lacey had only a mother at home. The one adult that helped Lacey and her friends was a man too.

I wonder if this is an unconscious “balancing” out that happens when the main character is female. I am quite attached to this theory because I’ve seen in my own writing (I’m working on getting rid of it, of course). Basically, since we’ve internalised the skewed representation in media in general, and conditioned to give male voices more weight, we end up overcompensating when female characters are given the metaphoric mic. This isn’t conjecture; there have been studies about this. Gina Davis, in an interview with NPR Radio in 2013, said in the context of television, “If there’s 17 per cent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 per cent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” (This might be the study she was referring to, but I don’t know for sure.)

Last word: Despite all the moaning, my overall impression of the book was positive. I loved reading about a girl who was a brilliant tinkerer and I particuarly enjoyed seeing how the author had imagined our world in 2067. I am curious how she intends to take the story foward. I would suggest reading it if you like MG/YA sci-fi.

(Review copy from NetGalley)

~PD

Protected: An open letter to Catherine Russell

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Thank you for the music, Bernie Wolfe

I am writing this because Bernie Wolfe is dead. Or at least the powers-that-be at Holby City want us to believe that she might be. So, this is not about promiscuous bisexuals, or about dead lesbians (well, it is, but not in that way), or the fact that Bernie is dying to further a white man’s story; it isn’t even about Holby City’s malicious attempt to get back at the hundreds of women, mostly LGBT, who dared to criticise and protest about their creative scarcity. This is a short and sweet farewell to Bernie. Before whatever ill-advised story they have planned becomes canon, I want to say my goodbyes, on my own terms.

As a child, teen, and also much younger adult, I spent a lot of emotions on fictional characters. I imagined them as friends, as companions co-existing with me in my space. I imagined myself in their realities as well (exploring new life and new civilisations with Spock was such fun). I suppose a shrink would interpret that as me compensating for the real-life relationships I couldn’t have. All I know is that those people, even if they did not exist, were my escape when I couldn’t face the world; they kept me grounded (stop rolling your eyes) and happy; and most of all, they made me self-sufficient in terms of taking care of my mental health when I was too young to know what that was.

Bernie Wolfe was the first such character I had felt so strongly about in adulthood. I was in my 40s when I discovered Berena, Bernie, and Jemma Redgrave, and the reason I mention all three of them is that they all played a role. First of all, Berena was once a groundbreaking lesbian story, not only because it was about two older, professional women who were being shown as desirable and desired, but it seemed to be a well-told story in and of itself. Second, the character of Bernie was fantastic, a battle-hardened frontline trauma surgeon, who decided to give herself and love another chance at the age of 51. And Jemma Redgrave played an absolute blinder with Bernie. She brought the character to life, made her someone I (and I’m sure this is true for many others) both wanted and wanted to be. Taken all together, Bernie was a symbol of a future that I felt could be mine (minus the hair and the skinny jeans). Sure, it was a story of a white woman in an alien culture, but it was also a lot more than that.

Now we know that the brilliance of the story was an accident. The crackling onscreen chemistry was thanks to the actors, and its worldwide popularity happened because LBT viewers desperate for representation are very good at looking in obscure corners. But for a while, about a year and a half (because I discovered it much after it started), Bernie Wolfe brought me incredible joy.

So, thank you for the music, Bernie.

~PD

The Big Bang and the little whimper

**HERE BE SPOILERS**

The TL;DR version: I did not like the ending of The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon’s sudden epiphany about his “other family” was reductive, and what happened with Penny (pregnancy) and Amy (makeover) were downright offensive. Read on for the meandering version or skip straight to the comments to vent (or to disagree with me).

That last double-length finale was a protracted set-up to give Sheldon a short-sighted and unlikely, and I would even say unnecessary, character growth. One that left the others as stage props to facilitate the sudden and inexplicable change in him. But this is not mostly about Sheldon, because I’m not about to do the same thing that the show did. My beef is about the women of The Big Bang Theory, how even in its last hurrah, it hadn’t even the self-awareness to realise that everything they thought was progressive was actually just stereotypes heaped upon tropes.

That final episode saw a Nobel Prize-winning woman scientist having to undergo a transformation to become a more glamorous, more suitable-for-male-gaze avatar of herself. It saw another female character—in fact, the only woman who’d been in the show since the beginning, and in her own way, despite judgement and derision from the show makers and other characters, to stick to her own terms of existence—lumped with a pregnancy that she’d declared just an episode ago that she didn’t want. And this with absolutely no sense of irony given that bodily autonomy debates that are raging in American society right now. Perhaps there is some truth after all to another stereotype—of the clueless, insular American?

When I first started watching The Big Bang Theory, I identified with the men—all their nerdiness resonated happily with mine. While I never did quite warm to the depiction of Penny as the Trixie McBimbo (Gilmore Girls reference there; a hugely problematic series in its own way) of the show, for a long time I managed to ignore my misgivings. Or maybe I just avoided thinking too deeply about them. Then Bernadette Rostenkowski and Amy Farrah-Fowler were introduced, and the gender stereotyping and sexism became worse.

This was despite TBBT’s showrunners attempting to give all the women so-called “strong” characters and stories. All of them went on to become successful in their careers of choosing. Penny moved on from her part-time waitressing and failed acting career—though there was judgement there, in that acting was positioned as being lesser than the academic careers the others had—to become a successful sales professional, eventually managing her own team at a big pharmaceutical company. Bernadette also put herself through college while working at the same restaurant that Penny did, earning a doctorate and then landing a high-paid job at a drug company. In fact, she always earned a lot more than Howard did. Amy was the only nerdy one among the women, and of course she went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics (even though her main field of expertise was neurobiology, which Sheldon consistently put down).

The problem, however, was that it was always a show for straight (white) men, told from the context of a straight (white) men. So much so, that even their protagonists were set up as caricatures to be pummelled and derided, perhaps it was the playing out of the bizarre fantasy of mediocre white men who are threatened by their intelligent counterparts. (Raj was just the token diversity caricature, a ridiculous character place there to be laughed at even more than the others were. So much so, that he they didn’t even bother to get him a proper name.) All of this meant that their narrow straight-(white)-man worldview underpinned everything—from the premise (“A woman who moves into an apartment across the hall from two brilliant but socially awkward physicists shows them how little they know about life outside of the laboratory”) to the way it ended.

I won’t go into how and why the show was an embodiment of misogyny and toxic masculinity—there has been a lot written about it already, resources that helped me understand my own discomforts. My gripe has always been more about the way that it portrayed its women—all three, without fail, “mothered” their partners. The women were the ones who decoded social signals for their male counterparts, even to the extent that Amy’s nerdy-girl character had to be sacrificed for it.

The show was also incredibly racist, as mentioned earlier, though I’ll need an entire blog post to talk about how and why. In short, nothing about Raj was funny; he was an amalgamation of the worst stereotypes about Indians. And the way his relationship with Anu was depicted reflected ignorant, Orientalist views about Indians and arranged marriages. Raj had a funny-sounding make-believe name; his sing-song voice was ridiculous (nobody talks like that in India); nothing about his family or background was authentic (even a cursory couple of hours with Google would have produced a better backstory).

Coming back to how the show failed its women characters, I guess I’m angry that I expected anything different. After all, the benevolent misogyny had always been present, so why did I assume anything might change? It brings us back to the discussions we’ve been having in the #BerenaDeservedBetter campaign—the absence of actual intersectional diversity within production teams. This results in blinkered, stereotypical, mainstream representations of anyone who’s not the gold standard of normality that we know—and no prizes for guessing who that is.

And guess what? This is not going to change unless there is a collective understanding that every story looks different depending on who’s telling it and who’s listening.

~PD

Who decides who cares?

A couple of developments in the past few months have had me thinking about the power of stories and the different ways we experience them. As creators, we have no control over how a reader, viewer or listener may interpret our work, whether they will see it through the same lens we used to create it. On the other hand, as the recipient of that content, we can only experience it within our particular context, irrespective of the creator’s intent.

In early February 2019, a personal essay of mine was published in Open magazine, where I was finally able to articulate how the stories of Enid Blyton, on which I was reared, were spaces of significant discomfort and trauma for the child in me, resulting in issues of identity and self-esteem as a teen and adult. While most people received the piece well, there were a few who pointed out that children are not capable of drawing the sort of nuance I was alluding to, so the reactions I was reporting could not be true, and/or I was over-analysing the matter and snatching the joy out of children’s entertainment.

This incident came on the heels of the Berena break-up in Holby City about which much has been said and written (including this piece of mine). Once a symbol of hope and positivity, the story turned toxic in distasteful ways. But significant players in that particular game insisted that it was the fandom, instead, that had got it wrong, that it was in fact a mature and considered ending that we were unable to ‘get’.

Both examples lead to a flurry of questions. Is there a right and a wrong way to understand stories? And if so, who decides? Does fiction have to be accountable to its readers (or viewers and listeners)? Or is the creator’s intent paramount? Does fiction exist in a vacuum, independent of a frame of reference? Does where, when and why a story is being told matter?

***

Ever since it all kicked off with the BBC’s ham-handed attempt to show us a ‘mature’ break-up on Holby City there’s been a lot of discussion and exchange of ideas, both in public on social media and the BerenaDeservedBetter website, as well as in closed groups, about the storyteller’s responsibility. (An excellent piece on the difference between visibility and representation, and another one about context, both written with Holby City in mind.)

In the Berena break-up telecast in December 2018—go here for a timeline—three messages stood out. To recap, these were:

lesbian and bisexual women are not capable of monogamy (let us, for the moment, imagine that monogamy is the only measure of a proper relationship) and therefore cannot have committed unions;
women, and especially older women, must sacrifice their own happiness for ‘higher’ causes; and
a lesbian relationship is more dispensable compared to heterosexual and male homosexual ones.

When viewers contacted the BBC about this content, their responses in the three-round complaint process were (I paraphrase):

‘It’s not real, it’s only fiction, so get over it.’
‘We treat the gays just as we treat the straights, and they all have “drama”, so get over it.’
‘Fine, we agree offence might have been caused, but there was context. So get over it.’

What had happened was, the lens through which the break-up story was written was not the same through which hundreds of les/bi women around the world would eventually experience it. This was the story the show’s producers had promised was going to care about the generations of queer women reared on seeing their stories ending in tragedies; it was going to ‘get it right’. When it didn’t, it was the ultimate slap in the face, a reminder that women-loving women don’t deserve anything else. To the creators, though, this idea was unpalatable—it was a ‘mature’ story, exactly as it would have been for a heterosexual couple. And that was the problem.

Similarly, the dismissive responses to my Blyton piece have ranged from outright denial of the fact that stories were harmful to me (and to those few others who chimed in in the comments or in personal messages), to trying to contextualise why regressive gender norms were present in Blyton’s writing and why she was justified in her value system. These responses sidestepped the matter of where the reader was placed. I made no comment about Blyton’s content at all—it was about how the content was experienced by me that was the crux of my piece. It was not about the intent of the storyteller—it was about the interpretation of the reader/viewer. Just as in the case of Holby City, Enid Blyton’s reality was completely disconnected from mine, and not just in matters of time. She represented a world that was strictly patriarchal and heterosexual, where ambiguities existed either to be corrected or derided. There was no way a non-conventional child like me could feel comfortable in it.

So, yes, harm was done—in one case by creators who had promised not to and in the other inadvertently. But in both cases, the harm was a direct result of assuming that there is only one ‘correct’ way of viewing a story.

I believe it’s called the arrogance of the mainstream.

***

Opinions. Everyone is allowed to have them, but drawing conclusions from our own perceptions and from how we assume someone else experiences the same are two different things. And this compounds when one is judging the lived experience of the marginalised through a privileged pair of glasses.

When Catherine Russell tweets about the Holby City storyline being ‘grown-up’, when the BBC repeatedly responds that there is nothing objectionable about the story, or when upper-class, gender-norms-conforming people dismiss a child’s ability to see sexism, there is an underlying judgement that those who don’t view the matter like them are somehow in the wrong. Because these opinion-holders account for most people in society, this opinion is widely regarded as correct.

The reason the mainstream can assume the right to validate or invalidate the experience of others is heterosexism. It is the gold standard of social acceptance in our world; the definition of ‘normal’, to put it simply. It is really an umbrella term that includes the whole gamut of what we identify as ‘normality’—patriarchy, heterosexuality, the gender binary, ableism and so on. Heterosexism is what comes into play when the ‘majority’ argument is used—when decisions are made because ‘most people’ want things a certain way. What this does is, it pushes the already disadvantaged minority further on the back foot while reinforcing the needs and opinions of the mainstream. To put it bluntly, it is an excuse to shut out the voices of the marginalised and erase their experiences.

But ‘heterosexism is not an argument,’ as a blogger on the BerenaDeservedBetter website says. ‘It is a prejudice, and like all prejudices, it is reductive and circular—it needs itself to justify itself.’ (For a more detailed and nuanced understanding of how heterosexism twists the context to neutralise the perspectives that don’t suit them, read the full post.)

Heterosexism is a complex, insidious and well-entrenched system, one that we are conditioned from birth to accept as default. Even those of us who are not cis-gender or heterosexual are primed to see our lives through that lens. Being told repeatedly—in words and deeds—that this is the true way of the world means taking up space in that world often comes after a hard-won battle.

This is where stories come in—to remind us that the battle scars are worth it.

***

Does this mean storytellers have a responsibility? Or does creative freedom translate into a free-for-all? We could argue about one or the other till the cows—or even the gau rakshaks—come home, or we could consider that responsible storytelling and creative freedom don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Offence is contextual. ‘Offending’ the mainstream results in challenging entrenched beliefs (some of which could be discriminatory against others). On the other hand deriding marginalised communities plays into negative (and usually exaggerated or untrue) stereotypes that that these communities are already fighting in their real lives.

No creative work exists in a vacuum—where, when and why a story is told depends on where, when and how a creator was placed, a creator who has no control over where, when and how their story will be read, seen or heard. And to those raised eyebrows asking whether one needs to pander to every reader or viewer who may take offence, I say, ‘Get over yourself.’ All one needs is the humility to discern where one’s perception deviates from another’s, and rest will take care of itself.

It’s really that simple.

~PD