The Internet Personified: Four observations and an event
Happy New Year! Can I still say "happy new year" when it is four days old already? But four days isn't very many, it's still shiny, out of the box, you haven't dropped it yet, so there are no scratches, if this year was a baby, it would still be sort of blob-like, curled like a prawn into your chest, still remembering its time inside the womb.
I'm in Bangalore, where I have been for the past ten days, and before that, a week in Cochin, so I have thoroughly acclimatised to the South, while the North has a cold wave, and I'm shivering already in Bangalore, so you can imagine what a treat awaits me when I return to Delhi on Sunday. I'm in Bangalore for pleasure, we spent New Year's Eve here as well with two friends from Delhi and their friends, but also! I'm having a book reading and discussion tomorrow at Atta Galatta, Koramangala. Here is a link to the FB invite, tell your friends and please come and say hi. (Also had an event in Kochi that went very well if you need more reason to come.)
And if you're in Delhi, and you're like WTF, did I miss the Delhi launch? I have good news, you did not! It's on the 10th, invite below. Once again: come in droves, tell your friends.
I've been so all over the place that I haven't taken any notes, but here are a few observations off the top of my head. (NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: GET THIS NEWSLETTER BACK TO ONCE A WEEK.)
1) I'm a fan of the Karnataka dosas, I like how squishy and ghee-y they are. But I'm also the sort of person who prefers give to crunch, I like the soft part of samosas much more than the "kurkure bits" as my friend in school used to call them. (We had a good system--split the price, I ate the centre, she ate the outside. I might have come off better in this deal.) Cheese, for example. My favourite is brie. I love popcorn and makhana though, so there may not be complete logic to this system. However, I must say that the sambhar in Bangalore is EXTREMELY disappointing--SO sweet, no snap and fire at all. In Kerala, en route to Munnar, we stopped at a famous idli shop (called just Idly Shop, so we made some "we cannot just sit idly by" jokes) and there they had very nice sambhar, so perhaps the Bangalore sambhar disappointment is also offset by that one Kerala sambhar that we had?
2) I totally Marie-Kondo-Cabin-Crew-ed my luggage this time, guys! Normally, I am a W-R-E-C-K about these things, and this time I had to carry two saris and nice clothes also, not just random hippy things that I wore in Vietnam and so on. But! I rolled everything up tight and there was room to spare in my little suitcase, which I adore. (My parents got me a set of luggage to celebrate my first book tour, one Kipling strolley and one big VIP suitcase. The big one hasn't gotten much use, it's too large for most of my trip luggage allowance, but the little one goes with me everywhere and is still going strong. I also have my purple backpack Natasha DeTasche, but she is only for trips where I don't care about creases.)
3) HOWEVER: I also bought like ten books? One day on the second hand bookshop road, old Blossom, new Blossom, Bookworm and Goobe's. (New Blossom is the clear winner in terms of selection and aisle size.) And today I went to this AMAZING kid's bookstore called Lightroom, and I normally would not have bought anything, but they had this incredible selection of YA and middle grade books as well, my particular kryptonite and ALISON UTTLEY who literally only my friend Niyati has heard of, and Beverly Cleary's AUTOBIOGRAPHY and well, I've been wanting to read Coraline for a while, and you've all heard of Coraline. However, they didn't stock my own YA books, which made me sad, but I wrote the names down and told the salesperson to be sure to get them in, which is shameless, but you have to be a bit shameless in order to make it as a writer in this cruel world.
4) I've forgotten the joy(ish) of taking a train. I mean, sure, flights are cleaner (MAJOR BONUS FOR ME, as I age, I'm getting hyper aware of grime in places like transport and restaurants and so on, and your non-Rajdhani, non-Shatabdi are often quite grubby) but flights are also a pain in the ass. The drive to the airport. Checking in an hour early. Waiting in ten thousand lines. The luggage allowance. The screaming child (okay, it could also be on a train). The seats. The seatbelts. Waiting for your luggage at the other end. QUEUES QUEUES QUEUES. We took the day train from Ernakulam to Bangalore this time round, because well, what was the great hurry anyway? It was a twelve hour long journey, and apart from the grubbiness, and the need to stretch around hour eight, it was a very comfortable ride. I read two and a half books, bought everything from the food vendors who walked by every thirty minutes, looked out the window... it was so nice, I'm thinking of doing trains more in the future. (Except, like, short distances only and when tickets are available and so on and so forth.)
What I wrote recently:
My massive year-end list of books up on Scroll.
And on the other side of the coin, my first Tsundoku column of the year is my What To Look Forward To In Books list.
What other people wrote that I loved
Obviously you have read the glitter piece. But if you have not: please read the glitter piece.
When I asked Ms. Dyer if she could tell me which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market, her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.”
I was taken aback. “But you know what it is?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said, and laughed. “And you would never guess it. Let’s just leave it at that.” I asked if she could tell me why she couldn’t tell me. “Because they don’t want anyone to know that it’s glitter.”
“If I looked at it, I wouldn’t know it was glitter?”
“No, not really.”
“Would I be able to see the glitter?”
“Oh, you’d be able to see something. But it’s — yeah, I can’t.”
I asked if she would tell me off the record. She would not. I asked if she would tell me off the record after this piece was published. She would not. I told her I couldn’t die without knowing. She guided me to the automotive grade pigments.
Mothering a daughter through Instagram---this piece was quietly sad.
After more than a decade of nurturing and feeding and picking up and dropping off and helping with homework and braiding hair and supervising play dates and fighting battles and holding hands to cross the street, you are suddenly shut out. The bedroom door is firmly closed. Every now and then I knock and go in, but I always feel like an intruder.
Okay, but, I LOVE Black Forest cake. (don't judge me.)
While not all black forest cakes are created equal, they have one thing in common: they are awful. There is no reason for a cake to be drowning in cream. The sponge cake itself tastes like styrofoam. There is too much chocolate. The pineapple is bitter. It’s difficult to fathom why—of all the dessert trends that have come and gone in Pakistan—the black forest cake has endured, or why it’s still popular.
Why do so many foreigners go missing in Parvati Valley?
The valley may appear idyllic, but it holds a dark past. Over the past 25 years, according to both official and unofficial reports, at least two dozen foreign tourists have died or disappeared in and around the Parvati Valley. Among the vanished are people from Canada, Israel, Japan, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia. Distraught loved ones post stories of the missing on social media, online message boards, and travel forums with scattered details and few clues.
Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story
One of the definitive works of scholarship to come out of the summer of 2003 was a 7,800-word essay titled “The Case for R/S,” posted on LiveJournal by a British schoolgirl writing under the name elwing_alcyone. “Current mood: jubilant,” the essay begins (opening with one’s “current mood” was LiveJournal house style, the equivalent of the MLA header), and then proceeds to track, cite, and analyze every mention of Sirius and Lupin in the entire series. At one point she counts the lines of text that appear between two phrases: “Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius” and “said Lupin quietly, looking away from Sirius at last.” The number is forty; Lupin stares at Sirius for forty lines’ worth of plot action. “JKR didn’t have to write that in,” she gushes. “I can’t think of any other examples of one character spending so many lines simply looking at another.” Current mood: jubilant, indeed.
Just... read this essay
Maintaining a dog is mostly not that difficult. The worst part is the constant fear you’ll kill it, particularly in a way that lets everyone else know the death was your fault. The second-worst part is knowing that, even if you don’t kill it, it’s definitely going to die. And from then on you’ll carry around the weight of your beloved dead dog that you won’t be able to talk about as much as you want to, because it’s just a dog, not a human, and the humans you know will also be dying. Otherwise it’s really good.
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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