The Internet Personified: Come and knock on my door

(but, like, text first to make sure I'm home and ready for visitors)

Well, hey there.

Notice anything different about this newsletter? *ahem* It’s not a new haircut, but I’ve moved us all to Substack! Which is this new newsletter startup, because people like to fiddle with email also and some people are making lots of money off of this thing by charging subscription fees and so on. (Not me. Not yet. But you’d be able to help me keep this shit free and fun for all of you by buying a book I wrote, which is the stuff I actually do for money. And love. But you can’t live off love alone, and I’ve tried.)

Anyway: Substack. While I’m writing this to you, in the usual draft page, it’s all very slick and cool. Plus there’s a comment section, so you don’t have to send me a private email if you want to share what you have to say with the rest of us. And my URL has changed, so if you want to send this link to a friend, it’s now mrm.substack.com which is pretty easy to remember and type, I think.

***

We spent Diwali in Delhi for the first time in a few years. This was because I had one lit fest in Dehradun before Diwali and another one in Chandigarh this coming weekend and then we have to go to Bangalore for a bit to dog-sit for K’s mum, so all this rattling around the country made me tired. Not to mention it’s awful for the environment etc. How bad can it be, we thought, and ordered off some air filters for our purifier and stayed mostly indoors. And you know, it wasn’t so bad, up until last week. It was actually quite pleasant. Firecrackers, yes, because there’ll always be assholes who think the rules don’t apply to them or that they’re somehow sitting in some Hindu bubble that protects them from bad air because they’re following some religious sentiment or whatever. But this is not going to be a long rant on the AQI. It’s bad enough looking at the grey sky from where I’m sitting, and Twitter is full of it and I’m on antihistamines, and it’s not very pleasant, but I’m going out of town, so I’m just holding my breath till then. (One last word though: I wrote some bad verse on the climate situation for my Instagram which I like enough to share here.)

No, instead I wanted to talk about homes I have loved. Because this is a great home, the one we’re in right now, and part of the whole Diwali Thing is liking where you are, making it welcoming and festive, cleaning so you’re in touch with everything you own and so on.

I moved out of my parents’ house for the first time when I was 21. I had just gotten my first job straight out of college, and was making the princely sum of Rs 7,500. My dad agreed to keep financing my petrol (my car had been a 21st birthday present) and my pre-paid phone bills (with a cap), so I had all this money and nothing to do with it, except, I thought, it would be a great time to get a flat of my own. I was jonesing to do this, ever since I was in college. I had definite ideas of the kind of house I wanted, the kind of stuff I wanted to surround myself with, and also, yeah, let’s be honest: I wanted the independence, to not be told what to do, to have boys over, to be able to smoke in the living room if I felt like it, that sort of thing. I was rich(ish), I was spoiled, and I was ready to play house.

If you’re driving down the Malviya Nagar-Shivalik Road, and you pass Pema’s on your left and you keep going a little bit, you’ll see a small park shaped like an isosceles triangle on your left. Just above and beyond that, there’s a narrow tall building, about four storeys high, so thin that it looks like someone’s wedged it in between the two broader ones on either side. That’s where we used to live: D and P and me. D and P were friends of mine from college, but also besties with each other. I didn’t know them extremely well, but we all seemed to get along the few times we met, and when they mentioned they were looking to move into a flat, I asked if they’d have room for a third, which as it happens, totally worked, because it meant our budget for renting suddenly shot up and we could get a nice place.

It seemed almost palatial, our first house. It was built like a train, you walked through the living room to the first bedroom then the kitchen (with a bathroom on the side) and then at the very end to the last bedroom, which was mine. I got it to myself (attached bathroom and everything!) and I don’t remember fighting very hard to get it either, it was just decided that I as the latest sleeper and person who wasn’t bestie to the other two, get the bedroom to myself, with a note that this would reshuffle as and when we saw fit. Worked for me! That might’ve been the last time I felt rich and spoiled though—I mean, sure, my privilege has worked for me in many different ways over the years, but oh boy, nothing like living with two equally broke young women to really fix your notions of what you can and can’t do.

All three of us were young journalists, I think, and all working really weird hours, so there wasn’t much time to actually set up our house. In retrospect, my life would’ve been easier if I stayed with my mother until the early years of my journalism life were over, but I sort of thought that if I didn’t leave then, I never would. It’s hard to explain. I saw people much older than me, in their thirties or forties, still living with their parents, and back then it filled me with so much dread. What if that were me? What if I lived a life like that, stuck, when all I wanted to do was spread my wings? No, I don’t think I would change my decision now even if I could go back in time and talk to my younger self and say, “Listen, kid, life is going to be hard, so take the easy route every now and then, give yourself a break.”

As it is, what I didn’t know was that I would move back in with my mother once I realised I couldn’t actually make rent and pay for food and all my sundries with my salary. It was not, in fact, meant to be a living wage. It was supposed to be something for a person like me, a little extra pocket money, while Mummy-Daddy take care of the big bills. I moved out again (for good) when I got a new job and a slightly better salary (a nice jump to Rs 15,000 a month). I learned to budget and balance. I went back to my parents a few times for cash over the years, because I was lucky enough to have that option, but over time, I stopped.

So when I say, “I’ve been living alone since I was 21 years old” you have to remember all that other shit as well. You have to remember that we made coffee with hot water from the geyser because we didn’t have a kettle or a gas stove. You have to remember that we drank cheap rum but we smoked expensive cigarettes. You have to remember that I learned to cook in that house because I was so hungry and Maggi wouldn’t cut it, so I made myself bhindi, actual bhindi and I was so amazed by the adult-ness of this dish that I ate it all, and I remember it was delicious, because of my pride. This is how we learned to pay the electricity bills but also where we learned how to tell the maid what to do. This is where we had people over to our own home for the first time, and all our friends congregated on us, because we were the first to have a grown up house, no grown ups at all.

More on the rest of my homes another time, maybe. Meanwhile, it’s off to the links with us!

• How the giraffe’s neck evolved.

• Why do we think cats are unfriendly? (Meanwhile ours are doing less cuddling, more sleeping. I really must speak to their supervisor.)

• Are writers supposed to be social media influencers?

• Millennial astrology and how it consumes us. (Me, anyway. I have two horoscope apps and I can also tell you that I am Sagittarius sun, Libra rising, Cancer moon with my Venus in Aquarius.)

• What’s going to happen to Greece’s most Instagrammable island?

• Related: Iceland is facing an overtourism problem, which is sad because I really want to go to Iceland.

• Great piece on teens and social media but also how we just want to scrutinize teenagers and they’re kinda beyond scrutiny.

• Zadie Smith on London vs New York fashion.

• Email as a venture capitalist’s game. The story that made me switch to Substack.

• WTF happened with the Booker prize this year? (That being said, I do not want to read a book that consists of just one long sentence, no matter how good it sounds.)

  Have a great week!

  xx

  m
  

  Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week. 
  
  Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
  
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