The Internet Personified: Life goes easy on me, most of the time

I have had a slow week. Last weekend, I had two house parties in a row, this is rare, because who hosts parties anymore? There was a time in Delhi where your weekends would be spent flitting from one house party to another--and I don't just mean sitting around with three people in a living room having civilised conversations. No, these were party-parties, sometimes you'd see the same five people, but in different combinations, sometimes the only person you knew was the person taking you there, not even the host, but it didn't matter, because you carried that bottle of Old Monk tucked under your arm as an offering, just as someone carried it to your house previously. Anyway, it is fun going to parties, especially unexpected ones, and making conversation with unexpected people, but you are required to be on in a way that is taxing, if you're not used to having conversations with other people apart from your partner, your employees (maid and gardener), and now your German teacher. (And with him, your conversation is about German, if not in German just yet, but it's a process.) (I have had only three German classes, scheduling has been hard recently, but the other night I dreamt of two German words--ich nicht--which means "I not" which is not a sentence, but in my dream it kept echoing in my head: ich nicht, ich nicht, ich nicht.) (Probably because they sound sort of the same.)

This week in movies: I did leave the house once though! Went to watch the premiere of Manto in the cinema with my friend Naila. The movie was great--a biopic of an Indian writer, done well and sensitively, and I'd recommend you watch it, but it's much clearer viewing if you've actually read some of Manto's short stories, because they're woven into the narrative. It could be confusing if you've never even heard of the man, but once you have, there's a thrill at watching him loaf around Bombay with Ismat Chugtai, that pre-Partition writer life, you know? I've seen biopics of writers across the world in a specific time period, and this was my first time watching something set in India. It was really very cool.

My only quibble is that it seemed somehow disjointed, like several different scenes as opposed to one long story, and also that he spends a lot of the second half feeling sorry for himself and gazing moodily into a whiskey glass, which okay, I suppose he might have done in real life also, but I would have liked to see more of the effects of drinking rather than the drinking itself. Watching someone get high in the movies or on television is very boring unless it's done really, really well.

Also, my Feminist Voice kept popping up in my head, no matter how many times I said, "Shhh! Just watch the movie!" "If Manto was a woman," said my FV, "Then he'd HAVE to get it together after Partition and keep his family together. He's only being so self-indulgent because he's a man." My FV keeps it real, she is the antidote to my usual Pollyanna-rose-tinted-glasses situation.

This week in make in India, I think?: A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a large bar of Amul dark chocolate, which was surprisingly so good, that I bought another bar, and now I can't stop eating it. Amul, a gift for someone you love, Amul, the butter guys, were never very good at the chocolate, sort of hard and chalky compared to Cadbury's (which I actually like the Indian version of more than the British one). BUT! This dark chocolate is kind of perfect. And so CHEAP, guys. It's a 100 bucks a bar or something, and this is a big bar I'm talking about, not one of those piddly little ones.

And while we're on the subject of Amul, please also try their gouda and emmental line of cheese cubes, which are heavily processed, but still tasty. They're not any kind of gouda you will be familiar with, but they still make a nice snack for between meals.

This week in books: Got sent the new Robert Galbraith Lethal White, and all I will say about it is that it is a) massive, and if you read in bed, you'll have to keep tossing and turning to get your wrists aligned properly and b) SO GOOD that you should probably clear your schedule for as long as it takes for you to finish it. (This Digested Read column about the first book Cuckoo's Calling is snarky and hilarious though.)

I just finished Lark Rise To Candleford, which is this semi-autobiographical life of a young girl in England during the 19th century. I have this other set of books which I love which begin with A London Child of the Seventies (that's 1870s, by the way) and this feels like a country counterpart. Lark Rise is also famous as a BBC show, which I just watched the first episode of, and it is VERY BBC period drama, so obviously I love it already.

Meanwhile, Galbraith put a spanner in my plans to finish reading Sapiens for my book club yesterday, but I mostly enjoyed that too. It's quite dense, but so many insights into what makes us human beings--how we work, how we think, how we operate. Plus written lightly, so it's very readable. Give it a whirl, except don't try to speed-read in three days like I did because then the only whirl will be inside your own head.

And last night, I began reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London at midnight, and by the time I finally was like, "Enough! Go to bed!" it was 2 am, so yeah.

This week in stuff I wrote:

In my books column, about mainstream books and being slightly bored with literary fiction:

Everyone and their uncle is talking about To All The Boys I Loved Before on Netflix, which is a rare, sweet movie, but sadly, the book trilogy is somewhat disappointing. Instead, read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, published and polished up posthumously by her niece Annie Barrows. There’s a Guernsey movie on Netflix as well — that’s the film tie-in cover you’ll get if you buy the book — but sadly, it fell far too short of the book. The book is a charming, epistolary novel about a burnt-out writer who starts corresponding with a group of real characters from the island of Guernsey.

In my mythology column, all about the bastards of the Mahabharata:

There is a whole legacy of illegitimate children born after Satyavati, in fact. When her sons of marriage die, she is left with two childless daughters-in-law, Ambika and Ambalika, which is when she calls on an old Hindu law that states that if one brother dies and leaves his widows without children, another brother can step in to take his place, just so the gene pool carries on. So, she asks Vyasa to “do the needful” as it were, and he sleeps with each daughter-in-law in turn. Unfortunately, being a sage, his personal hygiene was not tremendous, so it was more than a chore for young Ambika and Ambalika. One closes her eyes, and eventually her son of the union — Dhritarashtra was born blind. One leaves her eyes open, but is pale with fright, and her son Pandu, is an albino.

This week in stuff I loved on the internet:

Racked closed down! Which is sad, but they had a greatest hits list before they died, and here are my favourites:

Inside the world's longest yard sale

The world's longest yard sale runs for nearly 700 miles along a mostly vertical line connecting Alabama and Michigan, from the first Thursday in August through the first Sunday. It's called the 127 Sale, since most of it takes place along US Route 127, but that road ends in Chattanooga. There it's met by the sale's southernmost stretch, which winds for more than a hundred miles through the woody piedmont of the Appalachian Mountains, starting in northeast Alabama and veering over to slice off a corner of northwest Georgia, before coming to an end where 127 picks up just across the Tennessee line.

I've started following Barbie on Instagram because of this story.

"We pretend she’s a little person going to do all these things," he says, "so we think, 'How would she do them? What would she wear? What would her point of view be?' If Barbie’s like our celebrity and we’re her team, you don’t want her to falter!"

A brief history of women's fashion literally setting women on fire.

In 1861, Fanny Longfellow, wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, sat down at a table in her home to play with her children. A match or lit paper ignited her dress. In 1865, two women in New York came too close to a hot stove, which lit their dresses on fire. They weren’t even named in their death notice. In 1867, the Archduchess Mathilde of Austria held a cigarette behind her back to hide it from her father. The lit cigarette caused her dress to catch fire. In 1871, sisters Mary and Emily Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s half sisters) were at a Halloween party. While one of the sisters was dancing, her dress caught fire. The other sister rushed to help her, catching fire herself.

My one travel tip: just pack the red lipstick, it'll dress up anything you're wearing. Here's a history of that too.
(Hitler hated it.)

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman marched at the 1912 New York City Suffragette March, they wore red lipstick. It soon began to be regarded as a look that represented female liberation — not in terms of sexual freedoms, but social ones. Flappers began favoring dark red lipstick. It became a legitimate symbol of power and, for men, of terror. In New York in the 1920’s, all lipstick almost got banned again, because of fear that women might use it to poison men.

I love this story in Mint Lounge about the sex lives of India's rural women.

In Kokrud village in Sangli district, 36-year-old B has earned a reputation among the other women in her village for being gutsy. They call her “bohot daring”. B lives in a joint family. Her husband, 11 years older than her, migrated to Mumbai within a month of their marriage. He visited twice a year, for four-five days at a time. While the husband was away in Mumbai, his nephew, the same age as B, tried to force himself on her. She resisted. But the next time he tried it, she let him. Soon she was enjoying the sex. The nephew tried new things—things that felt unnatural with her husband. “My husband used to turn me upside down, make me watch dirty movies, make me do dirty things using my mouth. I thought he was an animal,” says B. Her husband is no more, but she still lives with his family, who know about her relationship with the nephew. They have been together for six years. The nephew is married now.

I tried ORS (oral rehydration supplements) one morning last week for a hangover, and I'm pleased to report it really worked. Here's how a pediatric company in America is turning that trend around to their advantage.

Pedialyte’s initial summer marketing push coincided with the second season of HBO’s True Detective, which drove 3 million prestige cable viewers to the brink of madness. In the fourth episode, Colin Farrell’s racist, corrupt-cop character Ray takes Taylor Kitsch’s closeted, war-criminal character Paul around in a truck, peer pressuring him to drink whiskey. “I just don’t know how to be out in the world, man,” Paul says (because this was a serious show concerned with the nuances of evil). To that, Ray says, “Hey, look out that window. Look at me. Nobody does. Hit that again. We’ll get you some Pedialyte.”

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 six books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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