The Internet Personified: I take a deep breath and I get real high
This week's newsletter title: What's Up by the 4 Non-Blondes
What a week. Dirty men being forced to crawl out of the woodwork. Endless conversations about what "counts" as sexual harassment and what doesn't. (Pro tip: if you've said no to someone and they continue to try, it's sexual harassment, not just clumsy flirting.) I think it's also polarised my friendships, like back when the BJP was winning power, suddenly you're looking at your friends like, "I can't believe you think that way." When you're still processing, like I am, it means these conversations are adding to the confusion in your head, so it's all a blur of noise, which is why I decided to switch off for a little bit. Many women can't switch off. I think of them all the time.
This morning in sudden awakenings: I mean that quite literally.
5.05 am: I am jolted out of my dreams by a mosquito bite right underneath the strap of my fitness band (which I literally only wear for the time now, so it's like a watch that's also a pedometer). I scratch it and attempt to go back to sleep.
5.15 am: windows are rattling with the force of a bass sound, I assume it is a truck or something.
5.20 am: It is not a truck, it is rhythmic, going "pound-pound-pound, pound-pound, POUND POUND, pound-pound-pound."
5.30 am: Holy shit, I realise, it is a dance party. Someone is having a dance party at five in the morning in our very sleepy, almost-entirely-populated-by-senior-citizens colony.
5.35 am: I roll over with a grunt, and realise that K is awake too. We have both been AWOKEN by the music, which is not stopping. K goes to investigate the park (through the window) to see if there's a party we can see (and shout at).
5.45 am: Music has finally stopped. It wasn't Park. We figured someone complained, but this morning on the RWA Whatsapp group, which is usually FULL of complaints about the most ridiculous things: "someone left cement in the back lane" "dogs are barking at night again" etc is quiet on the subject of early morning dance parties. K starts to dream dreams of this underground rave thing that happens in another colony in Delhi and wonders whether it's moved to ours, but I soon shatter his illusions by reminding him where we live. "Yeah," he says, gloomily, "With only one gate being open at night, no one will even be able to come to the rave."
9 am: Having fallen into an uneasy but deep sleep, woken up by man wanting to check the gas reading.
9.15 am: cats have come into the bedroom, and began being all cute and cuddly but then decided it was as good a time as any to fight their blood feud.
9.20 am: I give up and get out of bed. Suddenly, all is quiet and serene around us.
Where was that party though? Was it like a shared illusion thing? Did we dream it together?
This week in stuff I wrote: I have a long essay in this month's edition of Indian Quarterly (IQ) on my public and private personas. It's in print only at the moment, so you'll have to get a copy, but it's such a gorgeous magazine that it's totally worth the money, I promise.
Reposting some old essays I wrote because they have CONTEXT.
I had this long conversation with someone at a party recently about why a generation of Indians knows some retro music and not others, and I am actually an expert on the subject because I wrote an article about it in Open in 2011.
In the 1980s, my gurus of music were my older cousins. They procured bootlegged cassettes containing the songs that were popular then. La Bamba played over and over again, as well as Walk Like An Egyptian. We had ways of letting music filter down to us, even as we eschewed anything to do with Bollywood or simply ‘the Hindi film industry’, as it was called then. Bollywood was not cool, and even if we didn’t quite know what cool was, we knew what wasn’t. Across the country, other younger siblings learnt the same things. They were more familiar with the Spanish in La Bamba than with any Hindi songs, especially if, like me, they didn’t come from a particularly musical family.
And on street harassment growing up in Delhi back in the day for Ladies Finger in 2015.
Already back then, what was pretty and what was not was snuck into our systems. Curly hair, bad, straight hair, good. Flat chests, attractive; large breasts, unwieldy and awkward. Once, a girlfriend even said to me, “Look how nice and thin your upper lip is, it’s too bad your lower lip is so full.” I went for years thinking thin lips were a sexy thing. Everything I remember from that time was divided into ugly and not ugly. A t-shirt with polka dots on it? Ugly. A t-shirt with stripy zig zags and a tie-up front? Very not ugly. And people, even though they may have been perfectly normal looking. We were so comfortable with tossing around the word ‘ugly’, even though it makes me cringe now to use it. Anything could be ugly, but not as ugly as you thought you were in the mirror. Maybe Aman* (totally not his real name) was perfectly normal looking for a 19 year old guy, but when I remember him now, I just remember jeans, a t-shirt and a face with Ugly written across it.
Too sleepy to write more, so here's this week's link list!
I used to have a Cabbage Patch doll back in the day, and this story talking about labour and the Cabbage Patch doll factory is strangely touching.
Throughout the ages, women’s bodies have been poorly understood—particularly as reproductive vessels—and they have often been subject to myths and wild speculations that were treated as facts. For example, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that menstruation was clearly understood to be linked to ovulation; before that, people thought that women bled for no reason, or as a way to release their emotional hysteria. (Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote: “Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren … hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air.”)
Instagram "poets" are really quite hard core about their rivalries.
His identity had remained cloaked until last week, when a rival Instagram poet, Collin Yost, revealed the name of the author behind Atticus. He posted evidence on his Instagram account, as well as a story accusing Atticus of plagiarism, piling up examples of verses that appear at worst cribbed and at best vaguely similar to quotes from writers like T.E. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde, and to Pinterest slogans commonly attributed to Albert Einstein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
If you haven't yet read this piece about a young reporter going to watch The English Patient and realising how much it sucked then do I have a treat for you!
The movie seemed very clearly bad. Binoche tittered with rueful appreciation as her patients sexually harassed her, peeled a plum with her sexy teeth, and—because what’s hotter than an irrepressible spirit during war—tickled out Bach on a bomb-damaged grand piano. Meanwhile, post-burns Fiennes refused to let his physical deterioration interfere with a compulsion to offer unsolicited literary advice like, “You have to read Kipling slowly, your eye is too impatient.” This particular gem was delivered to Kip, a Punjabi Sikh played by Naveen Andrews (Sayid from Lost) who, no doubt, had waited his whole life for French Fry Fiennes to coach him on this very topic!
On navigating money once you've fallen in love. PS: we are between couples 2 and 3, but mostly 3.
I began asking our married friends and was surprised at how different the arrangements were from couple to couple. They tended to fall into one of four scenarios:
1. Couple with no kids. Separate accounts. Strictly split everything down the middle.
2. Couple with no kids. Separate accounts. Split large recurring expenses based on pro-rated incomes. Everything else was improvised.
3. Couple (artists or freelancers) with no kids. Separate accounts but fully support the other when money is tight, essentially allowing for desperation clauses in their contract.
4. Couple with kids. Started out with separate accounts, but several years in threw up their hands and said fuck it — can you make sure we have enough to pay the babysitter? Also, can you help me wipe the toddler vomit off my dress?
Have a great, non-toxic 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 six books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to that one friend who insists on defending a very clearly bad man if you didn't.