Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 28

Today in Photo

Nest. #olgadapolga

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The Internet Personified: Look on My Works, ye mighty, and despair

My beloved monarch butterflies,

Home is a two bedroom apartment. It has been for the past five years. It belongs to us, no landlord’s whims, no ditching it as soon as a paint job or plumbing repair needs to be done. It has two bedrooms, one small ante-room built off the living room which serves as my study, a living room and a kitchen.

I’m divided about which my favourite part is: is it the bedroom, flooded with natural light which I keep out with black out blinds, a bed as wide as a ship, a mattress topper on top of the already thick mattress, so I am like the princess from The Princess And The Pea? Is it my study—frequently out of commission, last year because the monsoon made a large chunk of the ceiling fall down, this year because the AC repair guy did not, in fact, repair the AC and now is out of town because of all this, understandable but frustrating—my study with floor to ceiling bookshelves and every single book I’ve ever owned, only I’ve stopped using the shelves closest to the floors because the cats also love to pee on books? Often it is my balcony, we put in a hammock for K’s birthday last year, and last year we had an uninterrupted view, all the way from our terrace over the large park next door, all the way to the malls of Saket, the domed roof of Select Citywalk twinkling in the distance.

The author in her apartment smoking her cigarette, her husband disapproving behind her

That’s been taken away from us, almost like a home invasion, and it’s almost fitting, almost poetic, that it’s all happening at the same time part of my city is being taken away from me too, by Modi and his set of… oh, what can I call them to indicate how deep my hatred is? I, who don’t normally hate, have been brought to this as well, losing a part of my personality as I lose so many other things to Modi and his government. When I think about him, my stomach churns, no, literally, as I am writing this, there is a fist and it has grabbed my stomach, and my heart rate has gone up, and my teeth are involuntarily clenching and rage is dropping like a blanket behind my eyes so I can’t be reasoned with, I just have pure undistilled hate like an essential oil, oozing from me.

Our house was perfectly cat proof before a building came up next door, now the cats hop in and out of the site, and we have to put in a fence. Our house had a window in the living room, a lovely large picture window, and that’s gone. It was hubris to build that window, no one in Delhi does on a connecting wall, but the lady who lived in the house next door said she wouldn’t sell it till she was dead, and she’s pretty young, so we thought it was a good gamble. Unfortch, the house was not hers to sell, an important detail she left out. One day the family next door was there, the next it was broken down and a four floor monstrosity came up. If this house didn’t belong to us, wedded and committed, this would be the point we’d consider leaving it. Just because of the view, you’re asking, shaking your head at me, and I think, yes, because I am so angry, how dare they take what is mine. This is unreasonable, I know, the view was never mine, it was only on loan, but it’s surprising how fast you can get used to something, how fast now I have gotten used to only seeing the Front Small Park not the Side Huge Park, how fast I have gotten used to hating my future new neighbours, people I don’t know anything about.

Meanwhile, we are thinking of leaving this city as well, the worse it gets the more we want to leave, jump like rats from a sinking ship. The whole ship, all of India. K’s parents are in Germany and we haven’t seen them in two years, so we are trying to finagle a trip there next month. We’ve had one round of our vaccinations (luck, Max Panscheel, flu-y but no fever for 24 hours) and hopefully, by the time we leave, we can have our next jab too. (EXTREMELY UNLIKELY, given that we’ve all but run out of vaccinations and most people can’t even get their first jabs but a person can dream.)

The author leaving India being all like “don’t cry for me Argentina”

Homes. Delhi is littered with my homes. I’ve lived away from my mother’s since I was 21, first Malviya Nagar, a “train compartment” flat, one room leading to another, then close by a few years later in Anupam Enclave (you won’t know it, it’s very small, our flat was likely illegal construction, it was on the fourth floor and swayed in the wind when anything larger than a small car drove by). Back from Bombay, I moved to a small annexe flat in GK1 (“servant’s quarters,” some people informed me wisely, but it was a nice tiny flat, just big enough for one, then Nizamuddin West—three homes—one had a bathroom on the landing, so you had to be speedy about dashing indoors with your towel wrapped around you, one had only Indian toilets and a nasty landlord (I could live with the loo, but the guy renting to me was the worst, I’m all for them leaving me alone, but he seemed to actively be impeding me. He was a traditional sort of guy, so maybe that was the problem) and a lovely “proper grown up” house we left later for this one. I’d lived alone in Delhi in Act II of my life here, K only moved in with me for the last of my Nizamuddin houses

Of all the cities in this country, Delhi is the most welcoming. Okay, I don’t mean in terms of breaking into a social circle, that can be hard to do, most Delhiites are clannish and prefer to stick to people they’ve known since school or college. But I’ve tried briefly living in Goa before, and I noticed my friends there, even people who had literally just moved two years ago, were putting on airs about how they were “more Goan” than the rest of us tourists who trooped in and out. Definitely more Goan than me, but er, the average Delhiite will still be a Delhiite, even if they spend years in Goa. Not to me, what do I care, but to the Goans definitely. In Bombay too, they judged you by how long you’d been there, where you’d come from, Delhi got a lot of flak, people liked to bitch about the city, and even though you know it isn’t personal, it feels personal, like you’re judging the city through me somehow.

Here in Delhi, sandwiched between the original urban villages that used to once be all that was here, driving past a traffic light and seeing a magnificent tomb and it isn’t even an extra-special tomb! It’s just oh another one of our artefacts from 1330, you want special, you really should check out some of the stuff they’ve refurbished. I have friends from here, like me, and I have friends who chose this city to be their home, like my parents did many decades ago, and Delhi is okay with both sets of people being like, “Yup, I’m from Delhi.”

This is, of course, if you can hack it. The city is against you from the start: if it’s not punishingly hot summers, it’s incredibly cold winters and in between, there’s so much air pollution that it was only just knocked from the “what way will Delhi kill you fastest” charts by COVID. It’s like Mad Max Fury Road, only you can’t take it personally because the city essentially hates every single one of its inhabitants. If you’re very rich, you waste a lot of the city’s water (also running out soon) on watering your lush lawn on which you will attempt to have tea at 5 pm on a summer evening only to realise it’s not actually possible to sit outside at 5 pm on a summer evening, maybe you should try for six? But oh, at six pm there are mosquitoes, some of them as large as teacups, all thirsty for your ankles, and at seven, it’s too late for tea, so you may as well sit inside and gaze at your lawn while also managing to ignore the poor people you hired to tend said lawn, some of whom have run out of water in their neighbourhoods so long ago, they no longer remember what it was like to turn a tap and have water rush out of it. So Delhi hates you, but it hates them more, and there’s nothing like everyone ignoring everyone else to make a city collapse in on itself. The rich care about other rich, the upper middle class about other upper middle class people (see thread below) and the poor, well, they care about what they can care about to stay alive.

[image error]Omair Ahmad @OmairTAhmad1. "Nobody shows as much class solidarity as the rich," forget where I read it, but this keeps ringing in my ears as journalists write, "India mishandled the second wave". No, dude, India mishandled the first, but it was largely the poor that paid the price, so you didn't care.

May 7th 2021

3,930 Retweets10,567 Likes

This is probably true of the rest of the capitalist world as well, not unique to India, but what is unique to here is how large the gap is. The man watering the lawn goes home to his family in the village during India’s first lockdown because there are no jobs anymore, and on the train he’s on, several people die of dehydration because there’s no drinking water provided. The rich owners grumble about their lack of help, because they’re not used to having their houses dusty, a cobweb dares to appear in the corner, how will we cope, how will we cope?

In the last year, I, one of the Rich, had to live for the first time in my whole life without a maid. Even typing that makes me blush deeply, what kind of person admits that? What kind of person gets so frustrated with house cleaning that she leaves things to get as dirty as they can until finally, in a burst of guilt and despair, she mops (unevenly) and dusts (leaving the corners untouched) and cooks (that she’s actually discovered a small talent for)? Good practise, I told myself in December, for when we actually move abroad. We bought machines to help us, we’d always had a dishwasher and now we have a small robot vacuum cleaner that zips around the house picking up clumps of cat fur. It can also be programmed to speak in many different voices, I have chosen the English Butler because it tickles me to hear it say, “Just putting my feet up for a moment” but then it also says, “Back to the servant’s quarters” and we can laugh that a machine says it in a British accent, but we laugh with deep survivor’s guilt.

Home became not just a state of mind but an actual physical destination. These four walls, my cage, but also my haven. Home was only our apartment, nowhere else, the city might have faded in and out outside, the trees alternatively blooming and shedding and turning brown or yellow. We lost control over everything else: our plans, our lives, but home remained constant. That is until the building came up next door.

Modi is not from Delhi. He’s made that pretty clear. I loved this piece (and when I say I loved it, I mean it made me angry but also like I was seen) in the NYRB called Modi’s Folly. Why, asks the article, is he spending so much money on a project that doesn’t need to be done, a vanity project that far surpasses when people are dying because they don’t have enough oxygen? He’s building himself a motherfucking house, you guys, and pretending like it’s for the greater good. Or is he even pretending? This government is kind of done acting like they give a shit, isn’t that scary? What do they have planned for us next?

Toward the end of his first term, in 2019, Modi said that his only regret was that he could not make the people of Lutyens’s Delhi his own. But it was these people who found themselves displaced in Modi’s Delhi, not the other way around. Things got done the way he wanted them done. His second term has checked off items that have been on Hindu nationalism’s wish list for decades: the annexation of Kashmir, the erection of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya (on the same spot where Modi’s party had led a mob to demolish a mosque in the 1990s), the erosion of civil rights from India’s non-Hindu citizens. Now, with a rebuilt capital, Modi wants to enshrine these aspirations in concrete, to mark his conquest—much as Europe’s fascists did a century ago, the very movements that inspired Modi’s spiritual mentors in the paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to envision a Hindu India.

A patch of land that was until recently open to all Delhi’s people, where anyone could go for a stroll on a summer night, buy an ice cream from a mobile vendor and contemplate the prospect of Indian democracy, is being usurped. It will now house high temples of a Hindu state, where vacant-eyed careerists will work with great efficiency for the benefit of the Hindu volk. But Modi’s Delhi has a contradiction at its heart: while claiming to be consigning the colonial past to the museum of history, it is in fact delivering the same old imperialism in a new, homemade wrapper.

India Gate was actually taken from farmland. It used to belong to someone, all that land, when Mr Lutyen decided to turn it into something else.

These daily wagers from Pignor village near Palwal in Haryana are the fourth generation descendants of Kallu, who owned the land in Raisina village and carried out agricultural activities on it with his son Nathu, who also owned a part of the land.

Both Kallu and Nathu lost their land to government acquisition in 1911, when the British government decided to shift the Capital from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi.

The area comprising Raisina and Malcha village were chosen as the new administrative head as it was green and well drained. Large chunks of land were acquired and the landless farmers moved out of Delhi.

Kallu and Nathu were awarded compensation of ₹2,217 10 anna and 11 pai. They never accepted it and shifted out of Delhi to Pignor in Haryana. Travelling to and fro was not easy in those days and so, Kallu and Nathu never returned to claim an enhanced compensation. The generations that followed never had enough money to contest the same.

It was stolen land then from the farmers, it will be stolen now from the people of Delhi and of this entire country, who can also stake a claim here in this city, because it is the capital, because it belongs to you as much as it belongs to me.

All my homes were in the sky, third floors, fourth floors, one first floor, all in the sky, so while I understand legally how we can own the piece of land the foundation is built on, I don’t get it in principle. I am in the sky, do I therefore own this patch of sky in which my house stands? Does anyone own anything? I’m going to slip into a Harry Potter analogy for a second here, bear with me: the goblins think that selling goblin-made goods to a wizard should only last a wizard’s lifetime and then return to the goblins, and you know, I do not disagree. I also think we should do away with inherited wealth, even though I have benefited from it. Because there’ll come a day when there are no patches of land (or sky) left and no one will be able to inherit it anymore. Of course I don’t want to give up my house or my life, but what if that was normal, that you gave stuff up when you were done with it, that your father bought a house for him to use and then it returned to the common land once he was dead? What if hoarding homes and wealth was as bad as hoarding oxygen during an oxygen shortage? What if doing so—giving it back once you were done—was the only way to keep real estate at a price scale that you could reasonably expect to afford by the time you were old enough to own a home? What if that removed wealth snobbery entirely, you could only be snobbish if you made your own money? What if some people decided to retire from the idea of money entirely since you can’t take it with you when you die and you can’t pass it on to anyone else and this changed everything?

For my potential future home, I’m learning German. As in all languages, I’m starting with basics, I can ask how you are, and I can tell you I want something. We’ve instituted an “only speak German” rule in the kitchen, so I say, “Wash this please” and “where is the __?” In my old home, I don’t have to say “where is the” because everything is where I expect it to be, in new ones, I will have to.

[image error] The author after mixing up the word for “table” and the word for “bag” wondering why she has to learn German at all

I’m also seeing some plus sides to the construction site next door. It’s cooler now in afternoons, because there’s a building between us and the sun. That’s something. You learn to live with everything life throws at you after a point. One day we’ll look at Modi’s new project and we’ll struggle to remember what life was like before.

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Previously in the alphabet series, which I admit is slightly off the rails this time but it can’t be helped: A, B, C, D, E, F and G.

Links, links, links

I hope you are all okay, or as okay as possible. Here are some distracting (and some rage inducing) stories to read. Skip if you can’t handle it, read if you can, write back to me and let me know you’re fine.

I wrote:

For my latest Auth Couture column, a story about Jhumpa Lahiri and identity.

Pandemic:

Arundhati Roy blazing in The Guardian.

The invisible struggle of registering on CoWin.

Non-pandemic:

Some British royal family stuff.

What are “good” immigrant novels?

My male friends make me sad.

The weaponization of the female orgasm.

Inside an international tech support scam (originating from where else? Right here.)

Lots of love,

xx

m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to anyone asking “if not Modi then who?” if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

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Today in Photo

Doodle faces (aka what I do when I'm watching Gilmore Girls for the one zillionth time). #doodle #portrait #faces #sketch

via Instagram

What I'm Reading

The Baader Meinhof phenomenon, aka the frequency illusion is a cognitive bias that makes you see a thing a lot more after you learn about it than before. (Like me and the Baader Meinhof phenomenon for example). I knew Louise Penny before last month, I'd read her first book a few years ago and never really got into it but then everyone started mentioning Louise Penny, friends, acquaintances, random newsletters I subscribe to so I decided to give her another go to see if she "took" this time, and friends, it is a go. I'm now reading book three of this series, starring a sweet, kind hearted inspector and a cozy village full of quirky characters and also MURDERRRRR. RIYL cozy crime and are longing for a murder mystery where the detective doesn't have a secret drinking problem or whatever. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #121in2021 #louisepenny #stilllife

Today in Photo

There's this line from The Duchess Of Malfi (which I had to do in college) that I always loved. Something bad is going to happen and someone says, "Look you, the stars shine still." the world goes on even as it doesn't. To paraphrase: look you, my champa tree blooms again. #terracegarden #champatree

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Today in Photo

Wish I could sleep this blissfully. #catstagram #catsofdelhi #brunothetabby

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The Internet Personified: Second Wave

I hate that this painting from 1562 feels so current

Hello,

I just wanted to write you a note, since you haven’t heard from me in a while, to let you know I’m okay. Shit is bad here, you’ve no doubt heard how bad things are or are living it so what can I say to add to that?

K thinks it’s dumb, me writing to you: “Are you going to say, ‘Hiiii Substack People, just wanted to let you know I haven’t died yet?’” “Basically, yes,” I say. I have friends who have COVID, some for the second time, I message them every morning, “Hello, just checking in.” We’re all saying, “Please don’t die yet.” I hear from friends around the world, “You guys ok?” (Please don’t die yet.)

But in our very own personal world, we are only locked in. We haven’t left our house in so long we didn’t know that our first floor neighbour had been taken to the hospital or that us, and the people directly below us, were the only people left in the building. I found this out when our downstairs neighbour—a doctor—called me yesterday because she could smell gas. “It’s not from our house,” I assured her, “Have you checked with the other houses?” And she laughed, lightly, grimly, “There’s no one else in the building.”

There was this “we’re in this together” feeling of the first lockdown, which is absent now. Everyone is hunkering down, staying in, but this time no Facebook groups about recipes are popping up, no reading recommendations or movie dates suggested. Instead, all across social media, there’s calls for help, “URGENT SOS PLEASE HELP ME NEED OXYGEN.” It’s like being attacked, you can’t think of anything else, so you doom scroll and retweet when you can, and say angry things about Modi and the government when your rage pushes you to the brink, but mostly you’re holding your breath, let today be the day disaster sidesteps me. Repeat as needed, which is every morning, when I reach for my phone and check my WhatsApp messages first, ok, ok, everyone’s good, everyone’s fine, I can get out of bed now, and make jokes about things for a little while, until boom, once more I am sucked in for the day into articles about how many people are dying and how bad this is and then panic once more.

I’m actually a little surprised when I get my period. Like, “oh, this is still happening?”

Some people are using their time online to help other people. I wish I could be like them. I feel guilty for reading so much, for pretending like the outside world doesn’t exist, and the guiltier I feel, the more I read. I stress-shopped for a bunch of used books off BookChor. I’ve just (re)discovered Louise Penny and adored Willa Cather. I’m snatching books off my shelves that I’ve never managed to read before. I can’t write, putting one word in front of another is hard, and I’ve had to write for work, but I can read, faster than I have before, burrowing like a mole into the pages so no one can get me.

They should call them bookmoles not worms.

There should be a word for the feeling you have watching your friends and family live perfectly normal everyday lives in a country that isn’t India. You’re jealous but you’re also glad for them and you’re also sad for yourself and everyone else here with you. If wishes were teleportation devices, you’d be so far away right now. Then the guilt again.

I wonder if we’ll be able to get registered for the vaccine today or whether the supplies will run out so fast we won’t even see them and should we be getting vaccinated when there are people who need it more but shouldn’t we be getting vaccinated because everyone who does is stronger against this invisible beast?

Please stay home if you can. Please wear a mask. Please open your windows if you have someone else in the house besides the people who live there. If you don’t live in India, learn from us: how a country can get so smug that they declare the pandemic over and do all sorts of foolish and highly irresponsible things and here we are again. If you can get vaccinated, please do. If you’re bored, remember how much worse the alternative is.

I love you all, please stay safe.

I read a bunch on the internet, both pandemic and non-pandemic, which might distract you as they did me, so I’m including them here, but you don’t have to look at them if you don’t have the bandwidth.

Pandemic:

How the Kumbh Mela wasn’t supposed to happen at all this year but astrology.

Liberalising vaccine sales may block access to millions of people in India.

Affluent Indians were the COVID superspreaders.

Interview with a cremator.

UK’s COVID deniers.

(Please consider donating to keep journalism like Scroll and The Wire free and able to pay their reporters for all the excellent work they’re doing.)

Non-pandemic:

Excellent essay on chess players in Chennai.

I also liked this, from Fifty Two: the history of India’s LGBT couples.

Related: why the UK is so TERF-y.

Staying with the Hadza tribe.

The problem with designer dogs.

Photo essay: how rideshare apps have changed the lives of Indian women.

These are terrible times, friends, but I hope we’ll all come out of it together.

xx

m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the influencers insisting we “stay positive and stop spreading negativity” if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

What I'm Reading

I am rubbish at keeping a schedule for this thing but you know, it's been a WEEK and I'm sure everyone is as distracted as I am. I'll share more kids books later this week but I've also been reading some fun things while I retreat into my bookshelf and pull the covers over my head, trying to pretend like the outside world isn't happening. One of those books is My Antonia by Willa Catcher, an American classic I'd been avoiding until very recently but you know, I'm glad I read it now, not when I was much younger. It came to me at exactly the right time I think. Up until now my only experience with America's pioneers was Laura Ingalls Wilder who I madly adore and who aroused an interest in me for how people got on in that strange and interesting time. My Antonia is about settlers, a Bohemian family who moves in next door to our narrator, a young boy and the trials and tribulations of Antonia, the oldest girl. It's not a sad book, it's actually quite a happy book, but sad things do happen. Mostly I loved the descriptions of friendship and quiet camaraderie between the two as they walk across the vast prairie together. A lovely book. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #121in2021 #myantonia #willacather

Today in Photo

Black and grey mornings. Have had to deny cats terrace access till they finish up next door and we can net it properly but every now and then we feel bad for them and let them scamper about. Here's Squishy, surveying. #catsofinstagram #squishytheblackcat #catsofdelhi

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What I'm Reading

People never talk about this book when you ask for recs about a childhood in a small town in India. It's all "Swami and Friends this or Ruskin Bond that" and it is a SHAME, friends, because I love Rohit Manchanda's book so much, this is actually my second copy, having read the first to pieces In The Light Of The Black Sun fits my #kidsbookweek because it is a book about childhood as seen through the eyes of young Vipul in Khajoori, a coal mining town where his father is a manager. Vipul tries to grow taller through yoga, battles for how many mosquitoes he can kill, discovers the BBC World Service as well as the sexy dancer at his local Ram Leela and all told with this super authentic voice that makes you feel like you were there, even if at the time you first read it, you were a teenage girl in Delhi. I am very sad it is not more widely known and so this is my way of making this book a thing. I suspect it's out of print and I'm hoping @penguinindia will see this post and instantly make it available for us all again. This is truly a modern classic. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #rohitmanchanda #mino #inthelightoftheblacksun