Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 77
December 25, 2017
Ugh, why can't I just buy face cream already without being hit with a patriarchal burden?
(This appeared in February 2016)
Today I tried to buy a face cream. (Yes, I know, I know, they're mostly a rip-off, and there's no science that says regular body lotion can't be used on your face, but I'm a woman and susceptible to these things.) I say “tried” because no matter how many search results I saw online—and I waded through loads—all of them offered me “whiteness improving night cream” or “fair and bright day cream.” Nothing was just plain old face cream, as far as I could tell, until I landed on one simple one, not at all as nicely packaged as the others, but a face cream that was just that: cream for your face, without any added transformative effects.
The page refreshes to show items that are “based on your order” after you buy something. Here's what I got for the cream I had so painstakingly purchased because it didn't offer me a two-for-one fairness deal: Whitening Day Cream and Whitening Face Wash. The website seemed to be taunting me: oh, you didn't get the fairness cream? Why not add it now? It reminded me eerily of going to a beauty parlour and having my eyebrows done when I was younger with the beautician asking if I didn't want a “detanning facial” or a scrub. When I'd say no, I was quite happy with my tan, she'd make a face and say, “Well, your eyebrows are very weird.” (I stopped threading my eyebrows into oblivion after it was made quite clear that no one actually noticed my eyebrows even though that whole operation is extremely painful.)
White facing like a boss
I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that fairness has become the default for beauty. From people having a choice to aspire to be fair, bringing about brands such as Fair And Lovely (and its male counterpart, Fair And Handsome), it's become something companies think you want so much that they don't seem to make any other options.
My first reaction was to blame the companies. I mean, if Olay or Garnier or Lakme weren't pretending these were the only ways women could keep their skin beautiful then we wouldn't buy into it. But then it's probably also the customer's fault. Sadly we've been conditioned to think that our skin needs to be pink and white to be beautiful—something that's almost impossible for most of the country. If you think of India itself by its skin colour, it varies so much that yes, some of us are fair—but there's milky fair which becomes bluish or yellowish fair, moving into a reddish tinge and then there are all the browns: from golden skin to light brown to dark brown to very very dark brown. We have them all—and the funny thing is that no beauty company has found a way to market to that. I, with my coffee-coloured skin, would enjoy a cream made for my complexion, as would someone who was perfectly fine with the amount of “white” they were and just wanted to stay that way and not get any paler.
The most ironic thing is that they don't actually work. Nothing can make you fairer if you have melanin in your skin. It's something that you know and I know, but people all over the country are buying into this myth, and therefore buying into the companies. Week after week they slather these snake oils on their skin and when they don't as the ads say “grow many shades lighter” they're deeply disappointed. The consumer court made Emami Limited, a skin care product company known for their brand Fair And Handsome, pay a 15 lakh fine for misrepresenting costumers. The complainant was a man called Nikhil Jain from Mumbai who said he didn't see any difference in his face after 3 weeks, even though he had been using the cream.
[I find it interesting that a man brought in this case, because I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions of women in India who have thought the same thing and haven't had the courage to admit they wanted to be more beautiful. Interesting also that according to a sales trend report done by Snapdeal recently, more men than women are buying fairness creams and grooming products.)
I would like options. We'd all like options. And I'd like people to be more careful about what they promise in advertising. Is this an utopian ideal? Perhaps. But if enough of us want it—like enough of us want fairness creams—maybe it'll happen.
Today I tried to buy a face cream. (Yes, I know, I know, they're mostly a rip-off, and there's no science that says regular body lotion can't be used on your face, but I'm a woman and susceptible to these things.) I say “tried” because no matter how many search results I saw online—and I waded through loads—all of them offered me “whiteness improving night cream” or “fair and bright day cream.” Nothing was just plain old face cream, as far as I could tell, until I landed on one simple one, not at all as nicely packaged as the others, but a face cream that was just that: cream for your face, without any added transformative effects.
The page refreshes to show items that are “based on your order” after you buy something. Here's what I got for the cream I had so painstakingly purchased because it didn't offer me a two-for-one fairness deal: Whitening Day Cream and Whitening Face Wash. The website seemed to be taunting me: oh, you didn't get the fairness cream? Why not add it now? It reminded me eerily of going to a beauty parlour and having my eyebrows done when I was younger with the beautician asking if I didn't want a “detanning facial” or a scrub. When I'd say no, I was quite happy with my tan, she'd make a face and say, “Well, your eyebrows are very weird.” (I stopped threading my eyebrows into oblivion after it was made quite clear that no one actually noticed my eyebrows even though that whole operation is extremely painful.)
White facing like a bossI suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that fairness has become the default for beauty. From people having a choice to aspire to be fair, bringing about brands such as Fair And Lovely (and its male counterpart, Fair And Handsome), it's become something companies think you want so much that they don't seem to make any other options.
My first reaction was to blame the companies. I mean, if Olay or Garnier or Lakme weren't pretending these were the only ways women could keep their skin beautiful then we wouldn't buy into it. But then it's probably also the customer's fault. Sadly we've been conditioned to think that our skin needs to be pink and white to be beautiful—something that's almost impossible for most of the country. If you think of India itself by its skin colour, it varies so much that yes, some of us are fair—but there's milky fair which becomes bluish or yellowish fair, moving into a reddish tinge and then there are all the browns: from golden skin to light brown to dark brown to very very dark brown. We have them all—and the funny thing is that no beauty company has found a way to market to that. I, with my coffee-coloured skin, would enjoy a cream made for my complexion, as would someone who was perfectly fine with the amount of “white” they were and just wanted to stay that way and not get any paler.
The most ironic thing is that they don't actually work. Nothing can make you fairer if you have melanin in your skin. It's something that you know and I know, but people all over the country are buying into this myth, and therefore buying into the companies. Week after week they slather these snake oils on their skin and when they don't as the ads say “grow many shades lighter” they're deeply disappointed. The consumer court made Emami Limited, a skin care product company known for their brand Fair And Handsome, pay a 15 lakh fine for misrepresenting costumers. The complainant was a man called Nikhil Jain from Mumbai who said he didn't see any difference in his face after 3 weeks, even though he had been using the cream.
[I find it interesting that a man brought in this case, because I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions of women in India who have thought the same thing and haven't had the courage to admit they wanted to be more beautiful. Interesting also that according to a sales trend report done by Snapdeal recently, more men than women are buying fairness creams and grooming products.)
I would like options. We'd all like options. And I'd like people to be more careful about what they promise in advertising. Is this an utopian ideal? Perhaps. But if enough of us want it—like enough of us want fairness creams—maybe it'll happen.
Today in Photo
2017 has been kinda great for me and I'm a little guilty because the world didn't gave such a good year and I'm a little fearful because what if I jinx it for next year but still it's important to acknowledge that for me 2017. Has. Been. Wonderful. #throwback to #barcelona, my brand new engagement rings on my finger. #traveldiary
via Instagram
December 24, 2017
Today in Photo
Merry Christmas! I hope all of you got books in the mail like I did this morning. My mother gave me an Amazon gift card and I have spent part of it on books. Which adds to my now tottering TBR pile but hey, I'm an addict. From left to right: winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, a book that's been on my wish list for a long time because it's one of the best food memoirs out there and a new Japanese crime thriller because I've never read any from that country. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #christmas #booksarealwaysagoodidea
via Instagram
December 23, 2017
An open letter to the man who thought he was being supportive but really wound up sounding patronising
(This appeared as my F Word column in March 2016)
Dear Man At A Recent Event I Was Speaking At Who Stood Up To Say, “I think mothers are the epitome of power and we should respect mothers,”
And when I said, “And what about those of us who aren't mothers?” you said, “Obviously I'm talking about the rule not the exception.” and then I rolled my eyes but it was quite clear that everyone wanted me to not Go Into It, because I'd been Going Into It all afternoon and the audience just wanted their cake and tea.
So I shut up.
But I thought of you later. You're obviously someone's son, and you're probably a dad as well. But when did your conception of women become narrowed and defined to just Woman As Mother?
Let me explain to you why your words made something cringe inside me, like you were scratching nails down a chalkboard. It was as if you were saying, “Women exist to give life, and it is that we should respect, and none of the rest of it.” It's as if you were standing in for society who has been looking askance at me as soon as I hit 25, wondering when I was going to stop faffing around and do what nature created me to do. It's also like you were saying women who are mothers don't count for anything else, their greatest role in life is basically producing their children. Who, if they are girls, will have their own greatest role to play and so on and so forth, until we're all Russian nesting dolls, our charm lying in the fact that our tops can be snapped off to reveal the generations that lie within us.
I have not one hundred per cent decided that kids are not for me. I thought I had ruled firmly anti-child when I first hit my thirties, but now coming up on five years in this decade, I'm wondering if this is an option I should reconsider. Unfortunately, my decision rests not on any altruistic reasons to have children—Looking to the Future and Love of Small Creatures but on very selfish things: a) I'd like everyone to get off my back and b) I don't want to die alone. These, I'm sure you'll agree, makes me the opposite of Woman As Strong Mother and basically makes me one of those people who is so scared by her own mortality that she's thinking of ways to prolong that.
Like you, I too have my own personal mom. She's great, totally awesome, totally strong, kick-ass in many ways, and has done many things to shape me into the person I am today. But while my mother may have grown into her own personal stree shakti as it were during the time she was my mother, I like to think that she would have grown and evolved and become this person without me in her life as well. To put it more succinctly, even though she may say this out of love, I do not think her biggest achievement in life was to bring me into this world.
In fact, while I'm thinking of my mother, I'm also thinking of an old friend of hers who never had children, and who was around my whole childhood. She was the person who gave me Little Women when I was seven and told me that while the small print might be intimidating, I would love it (I did, and when I visited Louisa May Alcott's home when I was eleven, I was the only person shown into the writer's private writing room, an honour accorded to me as the youngest reader on that tour.) She treated me as a small adult, I can't remember a time she ever talked down to me, and that shaped the way I thought of myself—your parents don't count, because your parents are duty bound to love you and listen to you—as well as the way I speak to children now.
In many ways, I think of the older women I met, my mother's friends who didn't have children and yet who knew how to connect with a child. Would you call their lives pointless? Some were in my life only very briefly, but I remember them all so strongly. One friend I remember gave me a set of two carved combs shaped like a man and a woman. “Oh, a man and his wife!” I said, delighted and she looked at me and said, “Why not a woman and husband?” Why not indeed? That's the first time I ever thought about that, and it may have been a throwaway conversation, but somewhere in my head it took root.
What about the mothers who lose their children? What about women who can't have children? What about more like me who don't want to? What about the women who produce terrorists and murderers? A blanket statement like yours is so harmful because it brushes everything else under the carpet, because it airily dismisses everyone else as “the exception.” Why, I bet even the woman you're holding up as this ideal of Motherhood has mixed feelings sometimes about her own kids.
All this to say: sometimes you need to think before you speak. #notallmothers
With love,
A Not Mother But A Woman Nonetheless
Dear Man At A Recent Event I Was Speaking At Who Stood Up To Say, “I think mothers are the epitome of power and we should respect mothers,”
And when I said, “And what about those of us who aren't mothers?” you said, “Obviously I'm talking about the rule not the exception.” and then I rolled my eyes but it was quite clear that everyone wanted me to not Go Into It, because I'd been Going Into It all afternoon and the audience just wanted their cake and tea.
So I shut up.
But I thought of you later. You're obviously someone's son, and you're probably a dad as well. But when did your conception of women become narrowed and defined to just Woman As Mother?
Let me explain to you why your words made something cringe inside me, like you were scratching nails down a chalkboard. It was as if you were saying, “Women exist to give life, and it is that we should respect, and none of the rest of it.” It's as if you were standing in for society who has been looking askance at me as soon as I hit 25, wondering when I was going to stop faffing around and do what nature created me to do. It's also like you were saying women who are mothers don't count for anything else, their greatest role in life is basically producing their children. Who, if they are girls, will have their own greatest role to play and so on and so forth, until we're all Russian nesting dolls, our charm lying in the fact that our tops can be snapped off to reveal the generations that lie within us.
I have not one hundred per cent decided that kids are not for me. I thought I had ruled firmly anti-child when I first hit my thirties, but now coming up on five years in this decade, I'm wondering if this is an option I should reconsider. Unfortunately, my decision rests not on any altruistic reasons to have children—Looking to the Future and Love of Small Creatures but on very selfish things: a) I'd like everyone to get off my back and b) I don't want to die alone. These, I'm sure you'll agree, makes me the opposite of Woman As Strong Mother and basically makes me one of those people who is so scared by her own mortality that she's thinking of ways to prolong that.
Like you, I too have my own personal mom. She's great, totally awesome, totally strong, kick-ass in many ways, and has done many things to shape me into the person I am today. But while my mother may have grown into her own personal stree shakti as it were during the time she was my mother, I like to think that she would have grown and evolved and become this person without me in her life as well. To put it more succinctly, even though she may say this out of love, I do not think her biggest achievement in life was to bring me into this world.
In fact, while I'm thinking of my mother, I'm also thinking of an old friend of hers who never had children, and who was around my whole childhood. She was the person who gave me Little Women when I was seven and told me that while the small print might be intimidating, I would love it (I did, and when I visited Louisa May Alcott's home when I was eleven, I was the only person shown into the writer's private writing room, an honour accorded to me as the youngest reader on that tour.) She treated me as a small adult, I can't remember a time she ever talked down to me, and that shaped the way I thought of myself—your parents don't count, because your parents are duty bound to love you and listen to you—as well as the way I speak to children now.
In many ways, I think of the older women I met, my mother's friends who didn't have children and yet who knew how to connect with a child. Would you call their lives pointless? Some were in my life only very briefly, but I remember them all so strongly. One friend I remember gave me a set of two carved combs shaped like a man and a woman. “Oh, a man and his wife!” I said, delighted and she looked at me and said, “Why not a woman and husband?” Why not indeed? That's the first time I ever thought about that, and it may have been a throwaway conversation, but somewhere in my head it took root.
What about the mothers who lose their children? What about women who can't have children? What about more like me who don't want to? What about the women who produce terrorists and murderers? A blanket statement like yours is so harmful because it brushes everything else under the carpet, because it airily dismisses everyone else as “the exception.” Why, I bet even the woman you're holding up as this ideal of Motherhood has mixed feelings sometimes about her own kids.
All this to say: sometimes you need to think before you speak. #notallmothers
With love,
A Not Mother But A Woman Nonetheless
Today in Photo
A good short story collection is like the best thaali meal. Everything won't be to your liking but you'll try all of it and like most or it and by the end, you gave a better understanding of what's representative of the food of the area. Nothing against "collected short story" books, I have one myself after all (Before, And Then After. Very good. Please read.) but as the introduction to this volume says the short story is meant to be read as a one off, each writer standing out for their own style and narrative. I'd recommend this volume for anyone looking for a fix. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #nowreading
via Instagram
December 22, 2017
Newsletter: Resolutions, resolutions
Four days into thirty six, and I am filled with good resolutions. None of your humdrum ones either, no, these are little lifestyle changes that, if done properly, should reclaim all the parts of me that are scattered everywhere. The first one is to not check my phone the first thing when I wake up. It's harder than it sounds, so I've taken to putting my phone on charge in the dining room, which means I have to leave the coziness of bed to get it. It means that my mornings belong to me again, the outside world does not interfere until I allow it to, and I wake up slowly, eyelids fluttering, echoes of sleep still everywhere. I lie in bed then, sometimes I think about my dreams: when you look at a phone as soon as you get up, you don't remember your dreams anymore. Sometimes I talk to K, sometimes I think about the day ahead and what I'd like to do. It's become sort of precious, this just-this-house-just-this-bed time. Of course, since social media is a hard habit to break, I felt a bit fidgety this morning, but my brain learned to deal with the fidgets, it produced a train of thought for me to go down, a cat appeared to walk across my chest and meow for her breakfast. If you think of waking up each day as a rebirth, then every morning is the day you are born, you do a little accounting with yourself: how do I feel today? Are all my limbs intact? I feel in a better mood than I have on several mornings, I feel bright and alive.
The other thing I have done, and maybe I shouldn't mention it until it takes is started a reading journal. A "Book of Books" which is an idea I got from this article, earlier this year, but never thought to take up. However, starting to diarise again, no matter how small and specific, has been good for me. Because while the pages of my notebook are filling up with what I'm reading, and what I'd like to read, and books on my to-be-read pile and so on, there's also insights into my state of mind, which I wouldn't have thought of had I not been writing all my bookish thoughts down. Pamela Paul, the author of that article, felt the same way, she loved opening her "Bob" to see how her tastes had changed, how one genre influenced another and so on. I have gotten out of the habit of hand writing anything, but slowly--and with the help of a beautiful pen--I'm hoping to reclaim it.
This week in books and reading: The book that inspired me to begin this in the first place was Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark, a book it felt like the whole world had read except for me. I came home from Goa and found a copy waiting for me, part of Bloomsbury's new editions of some of their more popular books. In many ways, the cover of my copy is what drew me in, it was so beautiful, this mysterious woman done in shades of flame orange and burnt sienna, the satisfying heft of it, even the font, never say that new editions are a waste of time, because they can draw in the most unlikely of readers. Having tried to read this book several times in the past, especially when it first came out and everyone was reading it, and having abandoned it, I only picked it up because I wanted something fat and solid and maybe a little fantastic. To my joy, I realised it was the book that Jane Austen would write if she wrote books about magicians. I loved it, despite, or perhaps because of the fusty language, the "shewed" for "showed," the "surprize", the descriptions of history laced with magic, the hundred footnotes at the bottom of the pages. It's been so long since a book has felt like serendipity, look, here I was all along, and here you are, come to discover me. I think that's a sort of falling in love as well, of all the libraries in all the world, and here you are, in mine.
Now I've finished it, however, and my own Bob is teeming with ideas about what I should read next, and since a friend kindly gave me an Amazon gift voucher for my birthday, I bought four books off that and am reading one right now: Still Life by Louise Penny (that I am currently reading) (the first in a series of detective novels about a Canadian inspector called Gamache, and I have heard nothing but good things.) (I don't normally buy crime novels, but it's a genre I enjoy SO MUCH that I'm just going to own to it, guilt-free). I also bought Deep South by Paul Theroux (review), The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story: From PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (review) and The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier (review.)
This week in parties: My own birthday party last week was excellent, and here is a photo of me and K dressed as Mario and Princess Peach respectively.
Our cook made a feast, and everyone drank and ate and talked, and it was all very civilised.
And because it's December in Delhi, literally my favourite time of the year, everyone's so social! And in such a good mood! We have become very Adult about our socialising and have created a shared Google calendar, just so you know we're that couple now. I'm not sure what use it is, because I keep diligently marking down all the parties we've been invited to, and K, just as diligently, asks me "what do we have on Wednesday?" But hey! At least the CONCEPT is grown up.
This week in food and drink: Kofuku for my birthday dinner with just the two of us. Lovely. Perhaps the best Japanese food I've had and the sushi was soooo good. And it's in the weird dystopian Ansal Plaza which makes it even more exciting.
Town Hall with my friend Nayantara, where because of MCD something or the other, they've stopped their terrace seating, which is too bad, because it was a very pretty terrace, however, we sat downstairs, she gave me a gorgeous box of Ruskin Bond inspired hand painted stationary and we drank copious amounts of wine.
Then Indian Accent, the new one at the Lodi, with my friend Shrayana, and we drank MORE wine and ate: panko crusted chillis stuffed with goat cheese, baked fish, bacon kulchas, mushroom kulchas, daulat ki chaat and a surprise birthday cake! Mmmm.
Then my friend Samit's birthday party last night, where he served up this insane haleem and nihari from some place called Purani Dilli? Sadly, I was too full from all the fried fish he waved in front of us for starters to do much justice to the meal, but out of greed, I tasted everything.
It's been a good week.
This week in stuff I wrote: A response to the Cat Person short story in the New Yorker for Scroll. ** I've also started to put a lot more of my archives on my blog, so please look at it also.
Sunday link list
- Lit Hub's most savage reviews of the year.
-Quartz has a great series on the nostalgia economy
- Tis the season to rewatch Love, Actually and have arguments about it
- On being Muslim in India
- I love this DIY gift guide by Atlas Obscura most of all the gift guides.
The other thing I have done, and maybe I shouldn't mention it until it takes is started a reading journal. A "Book of Books" which is an idea I got from this article, earlier this year, but never thought to take up. However, starting to diarise again, no matter how small and specific, has been good for me. Because while the pages of my notebook are filling up with what I'm reading, and what I'd like to read, and books on my to-be-read pile and so on, there's also insights into my state of mind, which I wouldn't have thought of had I not been writing all my bookish thoughts down. Pamela Paul, the author of that article, felt the same way, she loved opening her "Bob" to see how her tastes had changed, how one genre influenced another and so on. I have gotten out of the habit of hand writing anything, but slowly--and with the help of a beautiful pen--I'm hoping to reclaim it.
This week in books and reading: The book that inspired me to begin this in the first place was Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark, a book it felt like the whole world had read except for me. I came home from Goa and found a copy waiting for me, part of Bloomsbury's new editions of some of their more popular books. In many ways, the cover of my copy is what drew me in, it was so beautiful, this mysterious woman done in shades of flame orange and burnt sienna, the satisfying heft of it, even the font, never say that new editions are a waste of time, because they can draw in the most unlikely of readers. Having tried to read this book several times in the past, especially when it first came out and everyone was reading it, and having abandoned it, I only picked it up because I wanted something fat and solid and maybe a little fantastic. To my joy, I realised it was the book that Jane Austen would write if she wrote books about magicians. I loved it, despite, or perhaps because of the fusty language, the "shewed" for "showed," the "surprize", the descriptions of history laced with magic, the hundred footnotes at the bottom of the pages. It's been so long since a book has felt like serendipity, look, here I was all along, and here you are, come to discover me. I think that's a sort of falling in love as well, of all the libraries in all the world, and here you are, in mine.
Now I've finished it, however, and my own Bob is teeming with ideas about what I should read next, and since a friend kindly gave me an Amazon gift voucher for my birthday, I bought four books off that and am reading one right now: Still Life by Louise Penny (that I am currently reading) (the first in a series of detective novels about a Canadian inspector called Gamache, and I have heard nothing but good things.) (I don't normally buy crime novels, but it's a genre I enjoy SO MUCH that I'm just going to own to it, guilt-free). I also bought Deep South by Paul Theroux (review), The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story: From PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (review) and The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier (review.)
This week in parties: My own birthday party last week was excellent, and here is a photo of me and K dressed as Mario and Princess Peach respectively.
Our cook made a feast, and everyone drank and ate and talked, and it was all very civilised.And because it's December in Delhi, literally my favourite time of the year, everyone's so social! And in such a good mood! We have become very Adult about our socialising and have created a shared Google calendar, just so you know we're that couple now. I'm not sure what use it is, because I keep diligently marking down all the parties we've been invited to, and K, just as diligently, asks me "what do we have on Wednesday?" But hey! At least the CONCEPT is grown up.
This week in food and drink: Kofuku for my birthday dinner with just the two of us. Lovely. Perhaps the best Japanese food I've had and the sushi was soooo good. And it's in the weird dystopian Ansal Plaza which makes it even more exciting.
Town Hall with my friend Nayantara, where because of MCD something or the other, they've stopped their terrace seating, which is too bad, because it was a very pretty terrace, however, we sat downstairs, she gave me a gorgeous box of Ruskin Bond inspired hand painted stationary and we drank copious amounts of wine.
Then Indian Accent, the new one at the Lodi, with my friend Shrayana, and we drank MORE wine and ate: panko crusted chillis stuffed with goat cheese, baked fish, bacon kulchas, mushroom kulchas, daulat ki chaat and a surprise birthday cake! Mmmm.
Then my friend Samit's birthday party last night, where he served up this insane haleem and nihari from some place called Purani Dilli? Sadly, I was too full from all the fried fish he waved in front of us for starters to do much justice to the meal, but out of greed, I tasted everything.
It's been a good week.
This week in stuff I wrote: A response to the Cat Person short story in the New Yorker for Scroll. ** I've also started to put a lot more of my archives on my blog, so please look at it also.
Sunday link list
It’s true that the bulk of these seventeen—seventeen!—stories sound like Tom Hanks movies. Or rather, they are stories that could have been written by an alien whose only exposure to the planet earth is through Tom Hanks movies … This book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper was never going to be a book exactly. It is a gift, something that parents give to their college-bound children as revenge for making themselves difficult to understand … in four hundred pages, there’s hardly even a hint of conflict or a suggestion that American life is anything less than a holiday where everyone rides Schwinn bikes, leaves the immigration office to go bowling, and has a dog named Biscuit.
- Lit Hub's most savage reviews of the year.
And that’s where memory—whether direct, or received from elders or pop culture—can be most subjective. As bad as the present may seem, the people who actually lived in those “simpler times” had less education, less health care, less equality, and less ability for economic and social advancement than today. It’s a little like the fallacy of past-life regression: no one ever thinks they were once a lowly peasant, or died of disease at birth. But we couldn’t have all been princes or kings. Now is still the greatest time to be alive, in other words, for the vast majority of humankind.
-Quartz has a great series on the nostalgia economy
You’re exceptionally hairy. A shock of bristly setae covers your body and face to help you keep warm, collect pollen, and even detect movement. Your straw-like tongue stretches far beyond the end of your jaw, but has no taste buds on it. Instead, you “taste” with other, specialized hairs, called sensillae, that you use to sense the chemicals that brush against particular parts of your body.- What's it like to be a bee?
Jen: But the prime minister is the second-worst plot in a movie with 855 plots (number approximate). Can someone tell me what the meeting when PM Grant and President Billy Bob Thornton was *actually* about? Anyone? Anyone at all?
Tanya: It was about creating more tension between Hugh and Natalie. She was "his" in his mind because he had a crush on her and her chocolate biscuits and tea.
Jen: Which is *ridiculous.* Would the prime minister of Great Britain really take a stand against ... whatever he was discussing with the president ... just to declare his secret love for an aide? Please say the answer to this is no, please say the answer to this is no ...
Tanya: Well, um ... huh? I think someone's calling me.
- Tis the season to rewatch Love, Actually and have arguments about it
I'm Harry Potter! The Dark Arts better be worried, oh boy.- What happens when a bot rewrites Harry Potter? HILARITY, THAT'S WHAT.
At my Delhi school one day, a seven-year-old in my class found out that my middle initial “A” stood for “Abdul.” He declared it was something to be ashamed about—rather viciously for his young age and in the unrelenting manner that children do when they pounce on an embarrassing secret. I realised at that early age that my Muslim surname was unlikely to ever be an asset and was best kept to oneself when it could be helped.
- On being Muslim in India
Engraving can make anything—even the most humble of junk store finds—feel a little more precious. Adding a personal message quickly and easily transforms a tchotchke into something meaningful. For instance, last year I found a WWII-era brass compass for my fiancé. I polished it up, took it to my local jewelry store, and had them etch in a phrase that—I swear to god—came to me in a dream.
- I love this DIY gift guide by Atlas Obscura most of all the gift guides.
December 21, 2017
Living in Bandra East (not THAT Bandra)
(Wrote this for a city newspaper)
I still remember where I was when I decided to move to Mumbai. It was a cold winter's evening, we were in a friend's flat in East Delhi and I was grumbling about how everything was the same-- much of a muchness. Sure, I was due to start a new job with a magazine very soon, but I had grown weary of Delhi, the city I had grown up in, and continued, it seemed, to grow old in.
This party was a combination birthday/farewell do for our friend, who was moving to Mumbai with a new job. “How lucky,” I sighed, and he said, “Come with me.” I might have laughed disbelievingly—one didn't just give up house and job and life and move so easily on suggestion—but the idea turned in my mind from a ragged broken piece of bottle to smooth-edged sea glass, and by the next morning, I called him and said, “Okay. Okay, if you're serious, I will come.”
I'm not going to get into all the minutiae of moving, but suffice it to say, when I joined him, suitcase in hand three months later, I had not only a room, but also a neighbourhood. All brand new and ready to call my own. This was Bandra East, a firmly middle-class residential colony, a seeming hold-out from the already rapidly gentrifying West, a stroll across the train station, a neighbourhood where Bal Thackeray was our “down the road neighbour” and the only food delivery option was a Mangalorean sea food restaurant down the road. Our flat was part of a set of buildings called “MIG Colony” or “Middle Income Group” and apart from our landlord, who had moved to South Bombay ages ago, everyone else there owned their property.
These were conservative people who kept to themselves—my friend had told the landlord we were a married couple to save appearances, and this we laughed about later when once he came to visit and asked why we didn't just move both twin beds into one room for our convenience. (Later when my friend moved out—another city, another job—and I moved two girls from my old college into his old room, we told the landlord we were having marital problems, something he probably already guessed by our lack of shared bedroom.)
In the beginning, Bandra (E) (even the bracket pulling me away from the lure of the West and its fanciness) didn't mean much to me in terms of where it was located. I was still Bandra, wasn't I, still in the thick of things, still trendy and cool with a posh address. (Nowhere but in Mumbai—and maybe certain pockets of South Delhi—does your address so quickly become a shorthand for whether or not you can be friends with someone. Live close enough, and there's an instant relationship, but live two or three unfashionable suburbs away, and even if you get along like a house on fire, it's unlikely you'll hang out all that much.) It took me a while to cotton on to the full extent of exactly how residential we were, how tucked away from everything else. For those not in the know, Bandra (E) began with a long tree-lined road, with the flats tucked away in side lanes. So quiet, you couldn't even hear traffic, so quiet that even getting a rickshaw at 9 pm was impossible, unless you walked all the way to the main road. As a result, our rents were at least 30 per cent cheaper than our neighbours in the West, but the price we paid was living in provincialism, so to speak, while all around us, Mumbai exploded with the cosmopolitan lifestyle I had moved to the city for.
Eventually, I moved to the West after all—and it was everything that it promised to be. From a morning woken up by crows in the coconut trees outside my window, I'd be jolted awake in the middle of the night by kids in their daddy's cars, racing down the drag of a sea facing road. In just five minutes, I could walk to any cuisine I desired, and my friend were suddenly accessible, next door, I didn't even have to plan my evenings to set out at a time when public transport would be available. It was ideal—and yet, and yet, when I think about Mumbai, I think about MIG, and being ensconced in that world, a slow world that rocked me into the idea of living somewhere else. If my friend had taken a different decision when he picked our shared real estate, I might have been a different person today, but as it was, there we were, and now on my visits back to Mumbai, I feel a stab of fondness for that street when I pass it. Once, it was home.
I still remember where I was when I decided to move to Mumbai. It was a cold winter's evening, we were in a friend's flat in East Delhi and I was grumbling about how everything was the same-- much of a muchness. Sure, I was due to start a new job with a magazine very soon, but I had grown weary of Delhi, the city I had grown up in, and continued, it seemed, to grow old in.
This party was a combination birthday/farewell do for our friend, who was moving to Mumbai with a new job. “How lucky,” I sighed, and he said, “Come with me.” I might have laughed disbelievingly—one didn't just give up house and job and life and move so easily on suggestion—but the idea turned in my mind from a ragged broken piece of bottle to smooth-edged sea glass, and by the next morning, I called him and said, “Okay. Okay, if you're serious, I will come.”
I'm not going to get into all the minutiae of moving, but suffice it to say, when I joined him, suitcase in hand three months later, I had not only a room, but also a neighbourhood. All brand new and ready to call my own. This was Bandra East, a firmly middle-class residential colony, a seeming hold-out from the already rapidly gentrifying West, a stroll across the train station, a neighbourhood where Bal Thackeray was our “down the road neighbour” and the only food delivery option was a Mangalorean sea food restaurant down the road. Our flat was part of a set of buildings called “MIG Colony” or “Middle Income Group” and apart from our landlord, who had moved to South Bombay ages ago, everyone else there owned their property.
These were conservative people who kept to themselves—my friend had told the landlord we were a married couple to save appearances, and this we laughed about later when once he came to visit and asked why we didn't just move both twin beds into one room for our convenience. (Later when my friend moved out—another city, another job—and I moved two girls from my old college into his old room, we told the landlord we were having marital problems, something he probably already guessed by our lack of shared bedroom.)
In the beginning, Bandra (E) (even the bracket pulling me away from the lure of the West and its fanciness) didn't mean much to me in terms of where it was located. I was still Bandra, wasn't I, still in the thick of things, still trendy and cool with a posh address. (Nowhere but in Mumbai—and maybe certain pockets of South Delhi—does your address so quickly become a shorthand for whether or not you can be friends with someone. Live close enough, and there's an instant relationship, but live two or three unfashionable suburbs away, and even if you get along like a house on fire, it's unlikely you'll hang out all that much.) It took me a while to cotton on to the full extent of exactly how residential we were, how tucked away from everything else. For those not in the know, Bandra (E) began with a long tree-lined road, with the flats tucked away in side lanes. So quiet, you couldn't even hear traffic, so quiet that even getting a rickshaw at 9 pm was impossible, unless you walked all the way to the main road. As a result, our rents were at least 30 per cent cheaper than our neighbours in the West, but the price we paid was living in provincialism, so to speak, while all around us, Mumbai exploded with the cosmopolitan lifestyle I had moved to the city for.
Eventually, I moved to the West after all—and it was everything that it promised to be. From a morning woken up by crows in the coconut trees outside my window, I'd be jolted awake in the middle of the night by kids in their daddy's cars, racing down the drag of a sea facing road. In just five minutes, I could walk to any cuisine I desired, and my friend were suddenly accessible, next door, I didn't even have to plan my evenings to set out at a time when public transport would be available. It was ideal—and yet, and yet, when I think about Mumbai, I think about MIG, and being ensconced in that world, a slow world that rocked me into the idea of living somewhere else. If my friend had taken a different decision when he picked our shared real estate, I might have been a different person today, but as it was, there we were, and now on my visits back to Mumbai, I feel a stab of fondness for that street when I pass it. Once, it was home.
December 20, 2017
The Girl On A Train, Unlikeable Characters and Gone Girl
Comparisons are odious as the old English saying goes. But it’s something people in the publishing industry are guiltier of than anyone else. Whether it’s commercial fiction blaring the name of a more popular writer in the genre: a pink packaged book with “the new Sophie Kinsella!” on it for example, or a horror book called “just like Stephen King”, they put things in little boxes making it easier for old readers to access, but maybe a little off-putting to the person who didn’t like Kinsella or King to begin with.
Which brings us to the problem with The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins. Hawkins’ book is an energetic crime thriller, a narrator who isn’t quite what she seems to be, and that was enough to make her publishers think, “Hmm, who was popular recently? Oh, yes, Gillian Flynn!” So inevitably, her book got called “the new Gone Girl” which led a lot of people who loved the book and/or the movie to pick it up in great excitement. Which led to the downfall.
I’ve read almost all of Flynn’s work. I’m a fan. But Hawkins’ first book under her own name (her fifth in total, the other four were romantic romps under a pseudonym) is as apart from Gone Girl as say The Millenium Trilogy is from The Mockingjay Trilogy. In The Girl On The Train, Rachel, a narrator who you learn in the first few pages, is commuting to London from her flatshare in the suburbs every morning at the same time, looks out for a certain house on one of the train’s usual stops. In this house is a young couple, whose life seems idyllic to her—they sun themselves, they seem happy, they laugh, and she makes up names for them and invents a life.
You can tell quite early on that Rachel isn’t happy with her own life (the reasons, innumerable, are revealed later) and so the book has a crazy, vertiginous feel. The reader is in the head of someone not quite reliable, and as it is with point-of-view narrators, you only are given the story in the beginning through Rachel’s eyes. When she is revealed to be not what you thought she was, you feel as betrayed as she does, and yet Rachel with all her flaws is a more likeable, more relatable character than Gone Girl’s Amy. You might have Rachel for a co-passenger, you might even make some chit-chat with her, but with Amy, you’d probably be a little intimidated by her beauty and wit.
Of course, you don’t have to like the main character of a book. The “anti-heroine” is coming into full force, but while men almost crave the anti-hero (consider Walter White in the TV show Breaking Bad and how men across the globe both longed to be him or be around him), women find it almost personally insulting. Novelist Claire Messud was taken aback when an interviewer from Publisher’s Weekly asked her why her main character was so unlikeable in her novel The Woman Upstairsand said, “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’ ”
Which leads me to a deeper question: why do we read? Some of us do read to find friends, an idea that Messud thinks is ridiculous, but which is evidenced by how many feel-good pap novels still dominate the bestseller lists. When it comes to your average mystery reader, you read to feel engaged, to feel alive, goosebumps rising on your skin, your heart thumping as you stay awake till way past your bedtime just to find out who did it. In all this, it’s very comforting to have a main character who is as troubled by the mystery as you are, but who also figures it out two steps ahead of you, but sometimes, like in the case of The Girl On The Train, it’s also an interesting feeling to let go and let the novel take you where it will like an unmanned ship on a stormy sea. I will say this for both “Girls”, they give the reader the same sense of having your legs kicked out from under you: you think you know where you are until you don’t. You think you know this person whose head you’re inside until… well, until you don’t.
Which brings us to the problem with The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins. Hawkins’ book is an energetic crime thriller, a narrator who isn’t quite what she seems to be, and that was enough to make her publishers think, “Hmm, who was popular recently? Oh, yes, Gillian Flynn!” So inevitably, her book got called “the new Gone Girl” which led a lot of people who loved the book and/or the movie to pick it up in great excitement. Which led to the downfall.
I’ve read almost all of Flynn’s work. I’m a fan. But Hawkins’ first book under her own name (her fifth in total, the other four were romantic romps under a pseudonym) is as apart from Gone Girl as say The Millenium Trilogy is from The Mockingjay Trilogy. In The Girl On The Train, Rachel, a narrator who you learn in the first few pages, is commuting to London from her flatshare in the suburbs every morning at the same time, looks out for a certain house on one of the train’s usual stops. In this house is a young couple, whose life seems idyllic to her—they sun themselves, they seem happy, they laugh, and she makes up names for them and invents a life.
You can tell quite early on that Rachel isn’t happy with her own life (the reasons, innumerable, are revealed later) and so the book has a crazy, vertiginous feel. The reader is in the head of someone not quite reliable, and as it is with point-of-view narrators, you only are given the story in the beginning through Rachel’s eyes. When she is revealed to be not what you thought she was, you feel as betrayed as she does, and yet Rachel with all her flaws is a more likeable, more relatable character than Gone Girl’s Amy. You might have Rachel for a co-passenger, you might even make some chit-chat with her, but with Amy, you’d probably be a little intimidated by her beauty and wit.
Of course, you don’t have to like the main character of a book. The “anti-heroine” is coming into full force, but while men almost crave the anti-hero (consider Walter White in the TV show Breaking Bad and how men across the globe both longed to be him or be around him), women find it almost personally insulting. Novelist Claire Messud was taken aback when an interviewer from Publisher’s Weekly asked her why her main character was so unlikeable in her novel The Woman Upstairsand said, “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’ ”
Which leads me to a deeper question: why do we read? Some of us do read to find friends, an idea that Messud thinks is ridiculous, but which is evidenced by how many feel-good pap novels still dominate the bestseller lists. When it comes to your average mystery reader, you read to feel engaged, to feel alive, goosebumps rising on your skin, your heart thumping as you stay awake till way past your bedtime just to find out who did it. In all this, it’s very comforting to have a main character who is as troubled by the mystery as you are, but who also figures it out two steps ahead of you, but sometimes, like in the case of The Girl On The Train, it’s also an interesting feeling to let go and let the novel take you where it will like an unmanned ship on a stormy sea. I will say this for both “Girls”, they give the reader the same sense of having your legs kicked out from under you: you think you know where you are until you don’t. You think you know this person whose head you’re inside until… well, until you don’t.
Today in Photo
Too cold to do anything but contemplate what sort of horcrux Olga would be. #bookstagram #harrypotter #calicosofinstagram
via Instagram
