The Internet Personified: Karaoke nights and other miscellaneous items
Sometimes I write about the small stuff
My most esteemed and valuable reader,
Even though the relentless socialising of January and February seem to have let up (a weekend we spent doing nothing, except a usual day’s routine: reading, working, TV, some chores and bedtime) I’ve still been catching up on an apparent sleep deficit. I wouldn’t think I was sleep deprived, I sleep all the time, I love sleep, the sweet oblivion, the entertaining dreams, I could sleep all day like a cat. I used to have a sleep tracker on a fitness band, and it told me that despite my long hours in bed, I was only spending two hours in “deep sleep” and shallow sleep never helps that well-rested feeling. But I have taken to falling asleep around 11 or midnight, and then waking up only at 11 am the next day, like today. A full twelve hours! I’m not sure what is leading to it, but my dreams have been really great (flying! cycling like the wind! people doing whatever I ask them to!) so I’m not complaining.
I do remember most of my dreams, if they are vivid, and I’m not woken from them suddenly. For example, the doorbell rang the other day in the middle of a bright and beautiful piece of dreamwork, and startling awake, it all left me. The best way to remember your dreams, if you’re wanting to remember them ie, is to take a second in the morning, and quickly recap the story to yourself. I find this helps me enormously. The best way to have dreams at all, well, that involves going to sleep as soon as you’re sleepy and staying asleep for at least two REM cycles, if we’re getting scientific. Sometimes I can even lucid dream, which is me only slightly waking up and going, “This is a dream” so I can rewrite the story to suit myself, but usually, I like the free association of dreaming, and I like analysing them after (so that’s what I was thinking!) so I leave it, even the nightmares (usually someone I love dying) that wake me up with pounding heart and sweaty palms.
I went for karaoke night this week, with Ameya, who is a karaoke regular and knows which bar has karaoke on any given evening; and Ashwati, who is a professional opera singer. Did these two facts intimidate me and stop me from doing a very deep voiced version of Creep, a very breathless version of The Sign and a not-terrible version of Thank Abba for the Music? They did not. I too am a karaoke head, but I am of the opinion that the true Point of karaoke, is not so much to show off your singing chops, which are excellent chops to have, but to allow those of us not super blessed musically to have a little fun and pretend like we’re Live! In New York!
It’s also very encouraging, I realise in retrospect, to be at a table with people who can sing well, because then people are inclined to view you kindly anyway, and your friends are so flushed with their success and applause, they cheer you on. I told them this story that night:
In Bombay, at Soul Fry, in Pali Naka, they had a karaoke night on, I think it was Mondays. Despite the anti-social day, Soul Fry karaoke was packed and a thing. (My friend even met her future husband there, she turned around to tell him to shush and stop heckling whoever it was on stage. They fell in love. Soul Fry catered one of their events.) Anyway, one evening I had gone with two other friends, one of whom was a professional singer, and we picked that old stand-by, Bohemian Rhapsody. I am a rather soft-voiced performer [all through my drama days in school and college, someone or the other was shouting at me to, “PROJECT, MINNA, PROJECT!”] but the layout of Soul Fry that particular evening meant my singer friend was behind a pillar and I was the one everyone could see. And so everyone thought the person belting out “BEELZEBUB HAS A DEVIL PUT ASIDE FOR ME, FOR ME, FOR MEEEEEE” was actually me, and I was inundated with compliments all evening, which I gracefully accepted, with surprise, until I realised what had actually happened.
In Delhi, last weekend, we were at a Connaught Place dive-ish bar called Route 04, filled with random memorabilia, like a full size yellow Transformer in one corner, and a working traffic light in another, and long dangling chandeliers, which looked, as Ameya said, like saggy testicles filled with light. Drinks were cheap, which is always a per-requisite for karaoke night.
Delhi has a bunch of Karaoke Regulars, a group of people who do this thing where they travel from one bar to the next every single day of the week, and always sing the same three songs they did at the bar before. These Karaoke Regulars usually filter in around 10 pm and they are all very good singers. There used to be a time when you’d have a balance: non-singers to actual good singers, some drunk girls always giggling their way through Mariah Carey or something, some old man doing his rendition of My Way, but now it’s usually just the Karaoke Regulars and a few people like us, who aren’t, like, DEVOTED to the cause but are into karaoke enough to have it as a bachelorette party theme (self).
Of all the arts, writing is the least performative, and so, sometimes, the least affirmation-giving. (Even with painting or sculpture, at least you get to put them in a room and stand around being all, “Behold my sculpt!” A book launch is kind of “Behold my sculpt” but people have to listen or read, which is not the same as just plopping a painting in front of them.) I sometimes wish there was such a thing as a Writing Karaoke, which would be writers and amateurs just WRITING all evening, and then random people at a bar could also tell me how cool I was. Hah. Can you think of a duller evening for everyone else? Can you think of a more mortifying thing than no one thinking you—the Professional Writer— was actually better than all the newbies? But no, sometimes everyone needs props, and if karaoke night will give that to you, even in terms of “You’re so brave!” I’ll take it.
We have been without help for the past five days as well, because our part-time housekeeper/cook/general Keeping Our Shit Together person, Najma has a son getting married so she’s off, after giving me a look and asking if she should come after all, because otherwise “how will you manage.” “We’ll manage,” I told her, and she looked skeptical and asked if we were getting anyone else in to clean, and I said no, and the skepticism increased, but after all, her son is getting married, so I didn’t have to twist her arm too much to convince her that we’d be fine and to just take time off already, so she left, with instructions on how to get to the party she’s invited us to this week.
But I have to say, I am feeling pret-tee smug about how well K and I have held up. The kitchen is clean, the rest of the house is… not clean, but it is TIDY, and we wear our shoes indoors so it doesn’t matter that the floors have not been swept. We have so many machines, which also makes life easier: a dishwasher, a vacuum cleaner, an Instant Pot, in which I have been making daals and rajma and things, so we have fresh home food to eat every day and do not have to rely too much on Zomato. The only thing is Najma’s going has mixed up the days of the week for me, because I’m so used to her not being here = Sunday, so it’s felt kind of like we’ve had one long weekend since she’s been gone.
Wow, what an achievement, cleaning your own house. You don’t have to eye-roll at me, because I am doing it to myself. I understand that it is ridiculous that two adults in this year 2020 should take pride in living like we have no help, even if we do live in India, where a lot of people do not know how to clean or cook their own stuff and so hire people who have had no choice but to learn those life skills, but honestly, if it was not for the women in my life who I employed to clean and cook for me over the years, I would not have the life I do. Household work is DRUDGERY after a while, the sheer monotony of it, things never just stay clean goddammit, and I see how this could be and is, a full-time job for so many women. I had gone to this AAP get-to-know-you meeting last month and I suggested that they unionise the maids of Delhi and the guy laughed, and Niyati who was with me said there’d be almost open revolt from all the upper and middle classes if we messed with the (current, fucked up) maid system. Things could be better though and maybe more of us would know how to keep our own goddamn houses clean-adjacent. (Reading recommendation: Tripti Lahiri’s Maid In India, which interviews maids across homes in India.)
I wrote a new Mythology for the Millennial column! On Kamadeva, the god of lurveee and a weird, almost-incestuous story about how his wife Rati saved him.
Reddit Thread Of The Week (RTOTW): Cooking exciting meals when you are homebound thanks to the coronavirus outbreak.
Read More Things:
Loved this story about old fashioned neighbourhoods and neighbours, it made me remember my own childhood, now sepia tinted, the ‘90s and apartment complexes in India.
Incendiary piece on what is wrong with the publishing industry in India today.
Aw, loved this sweet reported piece on what Wendell Rodericks meant to the Goan village he called home.
Attending a weird right wing event so you don’t have to.
OB.SES.SED with researching zero waste cooking, one day I will actually use all these tips and recipes.
Does historical fiction have to be historically accurate? How The Tattoist of Auschwitz made a bunch of shit up.
How a soup recipe went viral and viral foods in general.
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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