Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 75
January 26, 2018
January 23, 2018
Today in Photo
Finally one of the Instant Pot meals pretty enough to share! I call it the Sorta Ramen Chicken and Spinach soup (with spinach, lemongrass and actual lemons from our garden!) Bruno didn't get any but we totally enjoyed it. With a few tweaks, I think we could add it to our regular meal schedule. #instantpot
via Instagram
January 22, 2018
Newsletter: Garbage fires, strange but true stories and what's cooking
(This went out as my newsletter yesterday to subscribers' inboxes! Sign up here.)
Since I left Goa, I have been embroiled in a wedding. This was of my cousin--my mother's younger sister's son--someone I grew up with and have spent many merry summers with as a child. My mother used to travel quite a bit for work, and when she did, she'd pop me on a plane (as an "unaccompanied minor") and send me off to my grandparents and aunt and uncle in Hyderabad. I remember the first time I did this on my own quite well, I was only three or four I think, and it was an Air India flight and the stewardesses made a big fuss of me and gave me an entire bag full of boiled sweets to carry away with me. I felt quite grown up arriving with my sweets, doling them out to my cousins if they were nice to me. (Although this time they told me that I also used to carry a large bag of Hajmola candy and only give them one or two at a time instead of sharing it nicely. I countered that if I had shared it nicely, the bag would have finished before we had even started.)
At age 11, my mother was going to be traveling to South America, and she decided this was a great time for both of us to see the States. So off I went again as an unaccompanied minor, only at age 11, I was not a very attractive child, so not much fuss was made of me this time. I had a horrible "boy cut" my mother insisted on keeping my curls in and I was skinny with scabby knees and I wore boy clothes and everyone basically thought I was a little boy, which delighted me, because it was much more fun than being a girl. The stewardess who was in charge of me during the layover and transfer was black--the first black person I had ever seen in my life--and she kept joking that she should put a sign on me saying "It's a girl!" I wasn't insulted, only deeply jet lagged, and I could only follow around behind her in a state of surreal waking dream-ness.
The last time I was in the US, I realised, talking to another cousin last night, was right after school, age 18, which was also the year before 9/11. Getting around was fairly easy then, the embassy still gave you ten year visas, without much fuss, and my first impressions of New York were the Twin Towers against the skyline. I wonder when I will go again, but it's so FAR and I have so many other places I want to visit as well. Tickets are expensive, and life as a freelancer will just about get you a round trip to Europe which I love. Not to mention, at this wedding was this young American, a friend of a cousin of the bride's, and he kept asking me questions like "do people live together in India?" and "are there gay people in India?" which made me want to roll my eyes back into my head, but I didn't, I was very polite and answered his questions with the minimum amount of irony, but I think I had a glint in my eye, because he avoided coming up to us after that.
But the wedding was fun, even though after five days of party, I am not ready to face the world for a good long time yet. I've barely settled in to our flat, and next month, I am off to Trivandrum for a lit fest, back to Delhi, and then to Kochi for a party my father is throwing for us, then to Bombay for another lit fest, so February will be busy and I am TIRED already.
This week in crazy but true stories: I heard this one while I was waiting for a delayed flight in Hyderabad: an airline had been killing pets in the hold consistently for three or four trips. (There's a regular baggage hold and a special one for your pets, and you can't pressurise the regular one, so if you mix them up, your animal suffocates mid-air.) One flight, they took out a cat from the regular hold but the cat was dead. They freaked out, because hello lawsuit, so with some quick thinking, they acquired another cat to replace the dead cat and proudly presented it to the owner. The owner was like, "DUDE WTF. A) This is not my cat and b) the cat I put in the hold was already dead!" (This is totally a true story, I promise.)
This week in how to be eco friendly when the world around you is a garbage fire: In Goa, not only did I get my period, but I also left my menstrual cup behind in Delhi. This would not be a big deal anywhere else, but Goa has a garbage garbage disposal system (heh) and so, unless you contribute to the many landfills cropping up all over the place, it's hard to get rid of things like tampons. Luckily, I had borrowed some organic cotton ones from a visiting friend, but when I was done, I still had this whole bag full of used tampons I didn't know what to do with. We decided to bury them in the garden, but the stray dogs dug them up, so finally K said, "Let's just burn them" so that's exactly what we did. Two were still charred lumps of coal when we were done, but at least the rest disintegrated, and we buried the coal-y ones again. Things you never think you'll be doing on holiday: burning your menstrual blood in a bonfire.
This week in recipes: So happy to be reunited with the kitchen and the Instant Pot! I am really getting into cooking, and the garden went sort of crazy when we were away so we have kilos of spinach and aubergine plus some kohlrabi which looks like a satellite and which I am completely clueless how to prepare. But since I've been looking up the internet for recipes and things to do which are easy, I thought I'd share them here. (Note: I haven't made them yet since I'm waiting for some ingredients, but they look fairly fool proof)
First: a spaghetti aglio e olio but with SPINACH so I can use some of it up. Very easy recipe and you can totally omit the parsley and the parmesan if they are hard to find or too expensive. I always put some whole dried red chillis into my aglio olio and it tastes amaze. (You fry it with the garlic for full flavour.) \
Then some Instant Pot recipes which you can also make in your regular pressure cooker: this chicken and spinach ramen (did I mention we have a fuck ton of spinach?) I will be making this without the bacon, using water instead of stock (and one spoon of fish oil for the umami flavour), plus adding lemon grass and sriracha instead of chilli paste. It won't look EXACTLY the same, but it will be quite hearty, I think.
And finally this mutton curry, which looks really simple.
I've already made this paleo butter chicken (and replicated on stove top for my friends in Goa who loved it). Cauliflower soup (bumper crop of that too.) And some other things which were also good, but not as successful as those two.
Monday link list to start your week out right:
MORE on the whole Aziz Ansari thing, but this time about the reporting which felt really salacious to me and most of my friends.
How do you, a black woman, talk to your white mother about race?
Sort of lost touch with Grey's Anatomy a few years ago--after they killed McDreamy---but this interview with Ellen Pompeo, the star, on how much she gets paid is really fascinating.
Since I left Goa, I have been embroiled in a wedding. This was of my cousin--my mother's younger sister's son--someone I grew up with and have spent many merry summers with as a child. My mother used to travel quite a bit for work, and when she did, she'd pop me on a plane (as an "unaccompanied minor") and send me off to my grandparents and aunt and uncle in Hyderabad. I remember the first time I did this on my own quite well, I was only three or four I think, and it was an Air India flight and the stewardesses made a big fuss of me and gave me an entire bag full of boiled sweets to carry away with me. I felt quite grown up arriving with my sweets, doling them out to my cousins if they were nice to me. (Although this time they told me that I also used to carry a large bag of Hajmola candy and only give them one or two at a time instead of sharing it nicely. I countered that if I had shared it nicely, the bag would have finished before we had even started.)
At age 11, my mother was going to be traveling to South America, and she decided this was a great time for both of us to see the States. So off I went again as an unaccompanied minor, only at age 11, I was not a very attractive child, so not much fuss was made of me this time. I had a horrible "boy cut" my mother insisted on keeping my curls in and I was skinny with scabby knees and I wore boy clothes and everyone basically thought I was a little boy, which delighted me, because it was much more fun than being a girl. The stewardess who was in charge of me during the layover and transfer was black--the first black person I had ever seen in my life--and she kept joking that she should put a sign on me saying "It's a girl!" I wasn't insulted, only deeply jet lagged, and I could only follow around behind her in a state of surreal waking dream-ness.
The last time I was in the US, I realised, talking to another cousin last night, was right after school, age 18, which was also the year before 9/11. Getting around was fairly easy then, the embassy still gave you ten year visas, without much fuss, and my first impressions of New York were the Twin Towers against the skyline. I wonder when I will go again, but it's so FAR and I have so many other places I want to visit as well. Tickets are expensive, and life as a freelancer will just about get you a round trip to Europe which I love. Not to mention, at this wedding was this young American, a friend of a cousin of the bride's, and he kept asking me questions like "do people live together in India?" and "are there gay people in India?" which made me want to roll my eyes back into my head, but I didn't, I was very polite and answered his questions with the minimum amount of irony, but I think I had a glint in my eye, because he avoided coming up to us after that.
But the wedding was fun, even though after five days of party, I am not ready to face the world for a good long time yet. I've barely settled in to our flat, and next month, I am off to Trivandrum for a lit fest, back to Delhi, and then to Kochi for a party my father is throwing for us, then to Bombay for another lit fest, so February will be busy and I am TIRED already.
This week in crazy but true stories: I heard this one while I was waiting for a delayed flight in Hyderabad: an airline had been killing pets in the hold consistently for three or four trips. (There's a regular baggage hold and a special one for your pets, and you can't pressurise the regular one, so if you mix them up, your animal suffocates mid-air.) One flight, they took out a cat from the regular hold but the cat was dead. They freaked out, because hello lawsuit, so with some quick thinking, they acquired another cat to replace the dead cat and proudly presented it to the owner. The owner was like, "DUDE WTF. A) This is not my cat and b) the cat I put in the hold was already dead!" (This is totally a true story, I promise.)
This week in how to be eco friendly when the world around you is a garbage fire: In Goa, not only did I get my period, but I also left my menstrual cup behind in Delhi. This would not be a big deal anywhere else, but Goa has a garbage garbage disposal system (heh) and so, unless you contribute to the many landfills cropping up all over the place, it's hard to get rid of things like tampons. Luckily, I had borrowed some organic cotton ones from a visiting friend, but when I was done, I still had this whole bag full of used tampons I didn't know what to do with. We decided to bury them in the garden, but the stray dogs dug them up, so finally K said, "Let's just burn them" so that's exactly what we did. Two were still charred lumps of coal when we were done, but at least the rest disintegrated, and we buried the coal-y ones again. Things you never think you'll be doing on holiday: burning your menstrual blood in a bonfire.
This week in recipes: So happy to be reunited with the kitchen and the Instant Pot! I am really getting into cooking, and the garden went sort of crazy when we were away so we have kilos of spinach and aubergine plus some kohlrabi which looks like a satellite and which I am completely clueless how to prepare. But since I've been looking up the internet for recipes and things to do which are easy, I thought I'd share them here. (Note: I haven't made them yet since I'm waiting for some ingredients, but they look fairly fool proof)
First: a spaghetti aglio e olio but with SPINACH so I can use some of it up. Very easy recipe and you can totally omit the parsley and the parmesan if they are hard to find or too expensive. I always put some whole dried red chillis into my aglio olio and it tastes amaze. (You fry it with the garlic for full flavour.) \
Then some Instant Pot recipes which you can also make in your regular pressure cooker: this chicken and spinach ramen (did I mention we have a fuck ton of spinach?) I will be making this without the bacon, using water instead of stock (and one spoon of fish oil for the umami flavour), plus adding lemon grass and sriracha instead of chilli paste. It won't look EXACTLY the same, but it will be quite hearty, I think.
And finally this mutton curry, which looks really simple.
I've already made this paleo butter chicken (and replicated on stove top for my friends in Goa who loved it). Cauliflower soup (bumper crop of that too.) And some other things which were also good, but not as successful as those two.
Monday link list to start your week out right:
Because of the amateurish way the Babe report was handled (her wine choices; her outfit), and the way it was written with an almost prurient and unnecessarily macabre interest in the minute details of their interaction (“the claw”), it left the subject open to further attacks, the kind that are entirely, exhaustingly predictable. The usual subjects emerged with the usual opinions: within minutes, alt-right toad Mike Cernovich was dismissing Ansari as a “beta”; within hours, neoliberal icon Caitlin Flanagan had written a confused, disingenuous essay in The Atlantic using Ansari’s race as a rhetorical device for her disdain for #MeToo; within days, hardline carceral-state cheerleader Ashleigh Banfield was accusing Grace of harming the entire #MeToo movement. To no one’s surprise, The New York Times’s Bari Weiss weighed in on Monday night, rolling her eyes at what she considered to be Grace’s requirement that Ansari be “a mind-reader.”
MORE on the whole Aziz Ansari thing, but this time about the reporting which felt really salacious to me and most of my friends.
Our mom never thought that our blackness would hold us back in life—she thought we could rule the world. But that optimism and starry-eyed love was, in fact, born from her whiteness. It was almost impossible for her to see all of the everyday hurdles we had to jump, the tiny cuts of racism that we endured throughout our lives. For our mom, we were black and beautiful and smart and talented and kind—and that’s all that mattered. And in the confines of our home, it was all that mattered. But as we left home, and our mom began to see us interact as adults with the real world, she began to suspect that there was more to being black in this world than she had previously thought. I could tell that this made my mom uncomfortable, to know that the babies that she had birthed from her own body had entire universes she couldn’t see, so the more that my world and my career became focused on race, the less my mom acknowledged it. She just really didn’t know what to say.
How do you, a black woman, talk to your white mother about race?
For me, Patrick [Dempsey] leaving the show [in 2015] was a defining moment, deal-wise. They could always use him as leverage against me — "We don't need you; we have Patrick" — which they did for years. I don't know if they also did that to him, because he and I never discussed our deals. There were many times where I reached out about joining together to negotiate, but he was never interested in that. At one point, I asked for $5,000 more than him just on principle, because the show is Grey's Anatomy and I'm Meredith Grey. They wouldn't give it to me. And I could have walked away, so why didn't I? It's my show; I'm the number one. I'm sure I felt what a lot of these other actresses feel: Why should I walk away from a great part because of a guy? You feel conflicted but then you figure, "I'm not going to let a guy drive me out of my own house."
Sort of lost touch with Grey's Anatomy a few years ago--after they killed McDreamy---but this interview with Ellen Pompeo, the star, on how much she gets paid is really fascinating.
I remember going to one city, not particularly famous for its culture, and discovering it had two literature festivals. When I got there, I realised they were both happening at the same time and they seemed to be intent on clawing each other’s eyes out. One apparently was calling the hotels where the other had booked guests and cancelling the bookings. As the organiser handed me two drink coupons for the inaugural party, she complained that two of her writers had gone to the rival camp’s party. To add insult to injury, they had used her festival car, which she proceeded to recall with some relish. [...] Later that night I discovered my hotel bathroom came with one tiny sliver of green Medimix soap. My friend who was attending the other festival said his bathroom came with soap, shower gel and ear buds. I feared I was at the lesser festival. I just went down to the reception and asked if I could have a second Medimix soap, so I was not ferrying one sliver from shower to basin.Going to Indian lit fests during lit fest season
January 21, 2018
Today in Photo
Portrait with the groom, my younger cousin where he has me in a headlock and right after he shouted into my ear, deafening me for the next hour so yes I guess we're totally grown up now. #readyforreddy #weddingdiary
via Instagram
January 20, 2018
Today in Photo
Harvest. Lettuce, spinach, radish and one sleepy sun kitty. #terracegarden #eatwhatyougrow
via Instagram
January 19, 2018
Tsundoku: three books to begin 2018 with
This appeared as my column in BLInk in January
Happy new year, readers! I have just—for the third year running—set my reading challenge on a website called Goodreads. It lets you log and rate each book you read, and by the end of the year, you have a nice record of all your reading habits. It's been quite invaluable for me, since I read a lot, and often forget what I was reading a month or two ago. Another new habit I've started is a reading journal, a sort of companion to my Goodreads challenge, where I write down the books I'm reading, my thoughts and add lists of books I'd like to read in the coming month. With those resolutions in mind, this month's theme is new beginnings, and what better way to start than to inspire yourself with some books?
Water cooler: Even if you're not on the publishing circuit, it's very likely you would have heard about Sujatha Gidla's book Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. It's been widely reviewed in the US, where it was first published, and even though it just came out in India a few months ago, the buzz has been building around it. Through meticulous research and lots of interviews, Gidla has managed to put together a fine portrait of a young untouchable man—her uncle—who grew up Christian but renounced religion when he joined India's nascent Communist party. There are stark pictures of poverty and injustice in this book, and I warn you, it is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one. Gidla moves down the generations, from her grandfather, who was a teacher, to this uncle who changed his fortune, and also manages a look at the life of her own mother, an intelligent sharp woman, who also became a teacher, despite an unhappy marriage and three small children. Make this the year you find out more about the varied histories of India, not just the stuff in your old school textbooks, and this book with its focus on the rise of the student movement and how it affected young lower caste men will give you the alternate view you never knew you were missing. Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla, Harper Collins, Rs 599.
Watchlist:I don't know about you, but this is the year I tried to get away from all the bad news by reading a lot more about people who survived in the wildnerness, alone. Something about being all by myself was greatly appealing to me this year: even if it was just reading about it. Perhaps your resolution is to exercise more, and what better way to inspire yourself than by reading Cheryl Strayed's gorgeous memoir Wild? The book is the story of how she trekked the Pacific Trail, a long hike that cuts across a large part of America, and has been written about often, most famously by Bill Bryson in A Walk In The Woods. Wild has also been made into a movie, starring Reese Witherspoon, but even if you've watched it, I urge you to read the book as well, because not only is it a walking memoir, it's also a grief memoir, as Strayed, who has just lost her mother and her marriage, resorts to walking eleven hundred miles just to make sense of it all. Her prose is almost like poetry, and even though her pack is heavy and her shoes are tight, it'll make you want to follow in her footsteps. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Penguin Random House, Rs 399.
Way back: And perhaps, you're inspired by my own resolutions at the top of this column, and want to build up your reading habit. The first question is always, “Okay, but what shall I read?” For this, and for a love letter to books and reading, pick up Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, a book I first read at age nineteen, but which I can still remember vividly, like an old, dear friend. In this slim volume of essays, Fadiman moves from subject to subject deftly and often, humourously. There's one about what happens when you mix your books with your husband's, what do you do with the spare copies? Another on the treatment of books: do you dog-ear to mark the page, or are you fastidious about bookmarks and never placing your book splayed across a pillow? And my particular favourite: the essay about books about food. Delicious. Fadiman says in her preface that she began writing the book when she noticed how books were being sold like toasters—one cheaper than the other, which one was a better one and so on. She wanted, instead to address the people for whom reading also lay in having a connection with your old books, not just which new book to buy. I think that still holds true. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, Rs 443, Penguin Random House
Happy new year, readers! I have just—for the third year running—set my reading challenge on a website called Goodreads. It lets you log and rate each book you read, and by the end of the year, you have a nice record of all your reading habits. It's been quite invaluable for me, since I read a lot, and often forget what I was reading a month or two ago. Another new habit I've started is a reading journal, a sort of companion to my Goodreads challenge, where I write down the books I'm reading, my thoughts and add lists of books I'd like to read in the coming month. With those resolutions in mind, this month's theme is new beginnings, and what better way to start than to inspire yourself with some books?
Water cooler: Even if you're not on the publishing circuit, it's very likely you would have heard about Sujatha Gidla's book Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. It's been widely reviewed in the US, where it was first published, and even though it just came out in India a few months ago, the buzz has been building around it. Through meticulous research and lots of interviews, Gidla has managed to put together a fine portrait of a young untouchable man—her uncle—who grew up Christian but renounced religion when he joined India's nascent Communist party. There are stark pictures of poverty and injustice in this book, and I warn you, it is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one. Gidla moves down the generations, from her grandfather, who was a teacher, to this uncle who changed his fortune, and also manages a look at the life of her own mother, an intelligent sharp woman, who also became a teacher, despite an unhappy marriage and three small children. Make this the year you find out more about the varied histories of India, not just the stuff in your old school textbooks, and this book with its focus on the rise of the student movement and how it affected young lower caste men will give you the alternate view you never knew you were missing. Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla, Harper Collins, Rs 599.
Watchlist:I don't know about you, but this is the year I tried to get away from all the bad news by reading a lot more about people who survived in the wildnerness, alone. Something about being all by myself was greatly appealing to me this year: even if it was just reading about it. Perhaps your resolution is to exercise more, and what better way to inspire yourself than by reading Cheryl Strayed's gorgeous memoir Wild? The book is the story of how she trekked the Pacific Trail, a long hike that cuts across a large part of America, and has been written about often, most famously by Bill Bryson in A Walk In The Woods. Wild has also been made into a movie, starring Reese Witherspoon, but even if you've watched it, I urge you to read the book as well, because not only is it a walking memoir, it's also a grief memoir, as Strayed, who has just lost her mother and her marriage, resorts to walking eleven hundred miles just to make sense of it all. Her prose is almost like poetry, and even though her pack is heavy and her shoes are tight, it'll make you want to follow in her footsteps. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Penguin Random House, Rs 399.
Way back: And perhaps, you're inspired by my own resolutions at the top of this column, and want to build up your reading habit. The first question is always, “Okay, but what shall I read?” For this, and for a love letter to books and reading, pick up Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, a book I first read at age nineteen, but which I can still remember vividly, like an old, dear friend. In this slim volume of essays, Fadiman moves from subject to subject deftly and often, humourously. There's one about what happens when you mix your books with your husband's, what do you do with the spare copies? Another on the treatment of books: do you dog-ear to mark the page, or are you fastidious about bookmarks and never placing your book splayed across a pillow? And my particular favourite: the essay about books about food. Delicious. Fadiman says in her preface that she began writing the book when she noticed how books were being sold like toasters—one cheaper than the other, which one was a better one and so on. She wanted, instead to address the people for whom reading also lay in having a connection with your old books, not just which new book to buy. I think that still holds true. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, Rs 443, Penguin Random House
January 18, 2018
Today in Photo
Finally a #readyforreddy post (plus one gatecrasher) celebrations for my cousin's wedding in Hyderabad before we all fly to Delhi tomorrow morning.
via Instagram
Today in Photo
My niece and I have been bonding. I taught her all about good angles and good snakes and also told her 4 +7 was 13 until I was corrected by everyone else, but hey, she's four and not judging my lack of maths. #auntyminna
via Instagram
Today in Photo
Morning reading nook on a swing on a terrace in a flat in Hyderabad. That little red and blue thing is a Wendy House my aunt built for her granddaughters, and it is SO adorable I want to live in it. #terracegarden #itdontmeanathingifitaintgotthatswing
via Instagram
January 15, 2018
Newsletter: Bad dates, dive bars
I'm assuming you've all seen the Aziz Ansari story yesterday about what a shitty date he is. I've been rewatching Parks And Recreation on Amazon Prime recently, and he comes up a lot--almost every single episode, and it's hard to watch scenes with him now without thinking back on his behaviour. Worse still was the set of episodes also guest starring Louis CK, because then you look at all these men who are known for being great actors and comics, and winning awards and what not, AND Parks And Recreation is also Amy Poehler's baby, and she's always seemed like an amazing woman to me, so how do you separate in your head the art someone creates with the way they are in real life? I find myself to be a lot more unforgiving of the men, even Aziz, who is this little brown guy winning awards and generally being charming, someone you WANT to root for, and when you learn about him being basically like everyone else, it's a little bit of a betrayal. Whereas with Margaret Atwood--a way more articulate person than Aziz or Louis--her saying that #MeToo was:The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.Which is kind of true, in one way: #MeToo would not exist if the legal system was perfect. But to dismiss it is unfair, because it is exactly what was needed. Maybe the legal system needs to change and embrace the way we can--each of us--go to the internet and say something each time something or someone has wronged us. I know from personal opinion that when you tweet at a company, they are more likely to fix something than when you just call them and sit for hours with a customer service representative. I've tried both. And the way women are taking down powerful men using their words goes to show that if you hold someone accountable in a public forum, they are far more likely to offer apologies for their actions, rather than just lame explanations. And hopefully, some man somewhere is reading all the testimonies and thinking, "Oh hmm, maybe it's a bad idea to put my hand inside my intern's shirt as she bends over." I think that's a win, anyway.
As for the people turning this into a "humiliation" thing, I'm not sure what their reasoning is, despite reading loads of tweets around the same argument, and this one long Atlantic piece I've linked to above. Is it just because the idea of a "bad date" doesn't gel with the idea of a sexual harasser? I have been on bad dates, and I have been on dates where a person doesn't listen to your body language (OR YOUR WORDS), and I can tell you that despite that, I still said goodbye to them with a semblance of a smile. Teeth gritted, face in an "I want to get out of here" expression, but still a smile, because politeness is drilled into us way more than saying no in a hard situation. So there's that.
This week in further meditations: I am still in Goa--leaving today for Hyderabad for a family wedding and then back to Delhi--and I have fallen into a comfortable routine. I write during the day, stopping for lunch and then a brief rest before writing again, and then go out to join friends. Which means my favourite part about Goa, its dive bars. Yes, you can keep your beach shacks and your fancy restaurants, for me, nothing says Goa more than rolling up to Siolim crossing and jumping into one red-walled bar where a man called Rock knows my drink order and always keeps the same table for us.
If there's one thing Delhi lacks, it is the character filled dive bar. I think it's also because of Delhi's attitude to women, most dive bars there have a faint attitude of seed. Like if you sat there alone too long you would inevitably become newspaper headlines on page three the next day. There are a few that I loved in Delhi but then 4S became too popular (the idea is you can dress how you like to go to a dive bar), Saki bar in Connaught Place is too far (Hotel Alka, I wonder if it's still a thing) and while I like Road Romeo, it doesn't really begin to compare to Rock or Paulo's in Goa in terms of sheer atmosphere.
A true dive has all of the following: a) cheap drinks, b) small, too-close-to-each-other tables, c) a regular clientele so you always run into the same people, d) something to distinguish it from all the other dive bars next to it, so you're justified in picking your favourite. In the case of Rock, I actually like the food, and I like how friendly the owner is, and I like almost sitting in the street as I drink. In the case of Paulo's, it's full of leathery old hippies who sit there, one imagines, from morning to night, and who are almost as much a part of the decor as the old prints of famous musicians on the wall. Paulo's has gotten a little trendy now though, they even gave me a laptop decal the last time I was there, and one Iranian lady will come around selling sandwiches off the back of her scooter. That's Goa for you. I return to Delhi drawing rooms soon enough.
This week in endorsements: Lots of love for Before, And Then After on the interwebs this week, and here is a screenshot from one reader on Twitter who loved it.
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Then, to my complete surprise, I see Confessions of a Listmaniac/The Life And Times of Layla the Ordinary is on this list of the 121 best Indian books in English OF ALL TIME. So that's very flattering and nice, especially for one of my young adult books which I always feel get a little lost in the shuffle. Just the sort of motivation I need to finish up my next book. (Here's a link to buy my books in case you're curious now.)
Monday morning link list:
When Nathalia brought two new poems to her father a few days after her mother’s faux pas, he was very impressed, as he told it, but wanted a more expert view. He suggested she send them to an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Times whom he knew vaguely from his short stints at various copy desks before reenlisting when the United States entered the First World War. There was a flurry of attention at the Times, and Nelda started sending out more of Nathalia’s work, some of which was apparently published without further fuss. So a year later, when Edmund Leamy, the poetry editor of the New York Sun, accepted a poem that Nathalia was said to have sent on her own, he had never heard of her. He assumed the author was an adult. After all, in his experience, no “child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words ‘Aged __ years.’” And “The History of Honey,” rhythmical and ingeniously rhymed, bore no obvious literary mark of immaturity. Nor was there girlish handwriting to supply a clue. When Leamy invited this new contributor named Nathalia Crane to drop by to confer about another poem and have lunch, he mistook her mother for the poet. Flustered to learn that “Miss” Crane was the “little, long-legged, bright-eyed child,” he forgot about the promised meal, as Nathalia noted years later.
- This story about a child-poet genius (including her rather excellent poetry) is a fun and sad read.
But online, we inhabit an unrelenting present, where artificially spatialized time appears severed and successive. The present is announced by the externalized whims — notifications, replies, mentions — we swipe at, scroll past, click through to. On Twitter, for example, each tweet’s timestamp — 17 min, 42 min, 3 hr — announces time since. Time, rather than passing, continuously refreshes. The latest is, of course, predicated by news, or by whatever resembles news. The unrelenting present is continuously under threat of assault from the caprice of one man’s sleepless whims. A new sense of dread accompanies checking one’s phone in the morning. It can feel like waking up and tuning in to the apocalypse.- The more I stay off the internet, the more sense life makes to me.
Also, remember if something is making you miserable, you do have the power to change it - in work or love or whatever it may be. Have the guts to change. You don’t know how much time you’ve got on this earth so don’t waste it being miserable. I know that is said all the time but it couldn’t be more true.- Before she died, Holly Butcher wrote a letter to the world.
