Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 69

Newsletter: Two Year Anniversary Edition

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

You, waiting for a new newsletter from me

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


New favourite gif

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Today in Photo

Magnificent specimen of a black cat, but let's face it, he really is just a Squishy. #blackcatsofinstagram #catsagram

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Today in Photo

WHAT WHAT WHAT #bruno #catsagram #tabbiesofinstagram

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Today in Photo

What I've been reading recently: 1) Chasing Redbird is excellent because Sharon Creech is excellent, one of the best YA writers of all time, especially read her Walk Two Moons. 2) Surprised by how much I liked Shotgun Lovesongs, the story of four friends from a small town in Wisconsin where one friend is basically Bon Iver. But, in a book about four men and their friendship my favourite bits were the one about with the lone female perspective which was very well done. 3) Currently reading Brat Farrar and I adore Josephine Tey for her mystery novels that are really novels about real people doing real things, the mystery is secondary. So good! 4) Finally the bummer: did not enjoy The Past as much as I thought I would, I didn't care about the people or the story and I made myself finish it but eh, it struck me as a lot of words there just for the sake of them not because they added anything to the book. But mostly I've been winning with my reading choices! #bookstagram #158in2018 #mrmbookclub #nowreading

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Today in Photo

Bought this jumpsuit in Goa, at the Artjuna café, a couple of years ago and had left it in Goa to be a part of my wardrobe there. When we gave up the house, I brought all my clothes back and found this at the back of my cupboard today, which I thought was perfect for lunch with the very stylish @pragyatiwari. I chose to do a dance position pose to show you the drop crotch, but Kian (my reluctant photographer) refused to take more than three pictures so believe it or not, this is the most flattering one. #whatiworetoday #delhidiary

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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?

Today in Photo

Having a YA day. Sarah Dessen reminded me that I had this gorgeous gold and black hardcover of Looking For Alaska on my shelves (thanks @manasisubramaniam!) I think I've read it once, but too long ago to remember much so rereading on this very slow Tuesday. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub#nowreading #158in2018

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Newsletter: Making a cup of memory tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Juul has made smokers out of non smokers 

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

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

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

Today in Photo

#found in my second hand copy of Good In Bed. Since it's not addressed, I can imagine it's for me. Thanks M & D (mum and dad?) I am having a lovely time and looking after myself. #bookstagram #postitnotes

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Today in Photo

OK, so I have a book hoarding problem. OK, so when I'm bored or anxious, I online shop. (it soothes me) But Book Chor were having a massive sale and most of these were only ₹68. That's nothing, guys! Practically GIVING them away. And I'm going to read them all this week and next, between book reviews and edits on my own book and some socialising can't be helped also. People who know me (and maybe you guys too) know that I'm pretty much ALWAYS reading so a pile like this isn't so much intimidating as it is an invitation. What would I do without books? I can't even imagine that sort of world. PS: yes I finished my last stack of books I bought from them. #bookstagram #bookmail #nowreading #mrmbookclub

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