The Internet Personified: Like a Disneyland version of Berlin

A Berlin photo essay! Or a Berlin essay with photos!

This is a long post because of the pictures so please click on the title to read in your browser because Gmail will cut it off.

Being displeased with the Instagram algorithm (all I see are videos of people thrifting or cooking, which is fine when you swipe over to Reels, but on my main feed I want to see friends! Doing things! And my friends seem to only be on Stories, which is fun and fleeting, but sometimes I want to post nice pictures and tell you about what I was doing & feeling on the day it was taken) I’m reclaiming the photo carousel from Instagram and Facebook and sending it out as a photo essay instead, which is the explanation for this post.

The other explanation is that I have just finished yet another deadline so I’m still brimming with creative juices and needed an outlet. (Have already cleaned, thought up my wardrobe for the next two days and also painted a picture.)

Here then are some photos from May and June representative of my life recently.

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I. Golden hour, somewhere in Prenzlauer Berg

I’m on my way to a bar in this photograph, but I saw the gorgeous golden light on top of these buildings and stopped, literally in the middle of the road, but this is all mostly pedestrian streets, so it’s okay, no one honked angrily at me. You can tell how gentrified a neighbourhood is by how many organic baby boutiques it has, and Prenzlauer Berg has gone one step further: not just organic baby stuff but a whole shop just dedicated to selling water and water related things (including a brand of really fancy stainless steel bottles.) We don’t hang out here very often, but it’s really like a Disneyland version of Berlin, it’s got all the graffiti as you can see but also nice restaurants and bars that don’t allow smoking inside (rare) and yummy mummies pushing strollers, mostly expats from the US or the UK. Funny, because it used to be really run down and grotty, especially before the wall came down, then all these artists moved in and made their homes really beautiful and then it slowly got gentrified and priced the artists out. It’s still a really nice and lively area though and each time I go, I think, “Huh, how come we don’t hang in Prenzl more?” (This is the bar we were going to, which is v nice and does allow smoking inside which is less nice if you like smoking, sure, but like to also limit yourself to maybe three spread out over an evening and have gone to some pains to make sure you smell nice, only to emerge and be covered with a fug of grey blue smoke.)

II. Beef seekh kebabs on the grill

What an orgy of meat! My friend who is also our neighbour has a small electric barbecue which she deploys as soon as the weather is warm and invites us as well as the couple downstairs who are also friends. We’re a nice little community, and I’m lucky to have actual friends who live in the same building, it makes everything feel so civil and friendly. (How odd that it took me moving here to this city where people complain about isolation and loneliness all the time to actually make friends with my neighbours when back in Delhi, you know, the capital of a country that prides itself on community, I didn’t speak to anyone at all, except to say hi, once for a cup of tea, and when we had extended interactions it was always slightly combative.)

Anyway, I like to experiment with her grill and her only two rules are a) no fish (she doesn’t like the smell) and b) nothing with a drippy marinade, because it takes ages to clean. Which meant seekh kebabs, the kebab rolls from Delhi (Colonel’s for mutton seekh, Khan Chacha for mutton boti which they’ve sadly discontinued so maybe Rule the Rolls?) being something I crave and can’t duplicate.

Whenever I do something particularly difficult and it turns out well, I like to parade around the house and K goes, “Is there anything she can’t do?”

The seekh kebabs were a Parading Moment. I used this recipe and also made some green chutney for an accompaniment which turned out to be a bigger hit than the kebabs. (For the others. I was happy with what I tasted and saved some mince for our lunch the next day, when I also whipped out some frozen parathas and made my very own roll.)

[The green chutney is of my own devising, using tips and tricks from across the internet, tweaked to my taste: a handful of mint and coriander, 3-4 garlic cloves, 2-3 green chillis (I use the Thai ones which are very spicy so for an equivalent with the Indian variety use about 4) a teaspoon of cumin seeds, a tablespoon of lemon juice, salt and sugar. Blitz, open and add something to increase the creaminess either half a tomato or a tablespoon of yogurt. For spice averse friends who would still like to try it, mix a spoonful of the chutney in a small bowl of yogurt, whisk, add salt, it should be the colour of fresh grass.]

III, IV & V. Glimpses of the Carnival of Cultures parade.

For the first time (due to construction) the parade of the annual Carnival of Cultures which is like this three day long festival with food stalls and traditional clothes and… I don’t know, maybe performances? was diverted through our neighbourhood, so we decided to check it out. No offence if you’re a fan of the Carnival, but I’ve always found it a little cheesy, not counterculture enough to be cool, not underground enough to make me discover new things. Very basic, you know? (This could also be laziness, because the festival itself is about 40 minutes by train away, and eh, who can be bothered?)

But I was kind of right when it came to the parade. It wasn’t all that. There were huge crowds, like Beyonce-is-performing-for-free crowds, but the glimpses I got of the actual parade, from underneath armpits and if I stood on tiptoe, over some heads, was okay. Certainly not the Republic Day parade floats I’d been hoping for.

But I did get some good pictures.

VI. The Oberbaumbrücke from the river Spree

This bridge—iconic! in many movies about Berlin!—has long been my least favourite because there, where you see those giant turrets, are pillars where unsavoury characters could hide and attack you. Like, this is the perfect crime committing bridge and I’m amazed no one else has noticed it. As for me, when I’m forced to walk alone across it, I do it at a clip, not stopping to admire the pretty sunset or whatever. Once I was doing this (fast walking, clutching my bag to me, looking terrified) when a man jumped out at me from behind a pillar. “Are you all right?” he asked, no doubt surmising from my terror stricken face that something terrible had happened to me, but the suddenness of his approach just made me squeak and completely book it to the end of the bridge where at last there were no more pillars and no more lurkers. But yes. It’s very pretty, and those small lights are the U Bahn, so very picturesque as well.

VII & VIII. Snapshots of the Berlin Biennale at the KW art gallery

Friend Sarnath (hi!) was exhibiting his drawings at this edition of the Berlin Biennale which started yesterday. He got me and K and another friend on the guest list and we had a great time swanning around from gallery to gallery, being all fnah-fnah-hello-darling. This is from the KW, the first gallery we went to, which had four floors of art, of which I thought Sarnath’s (displayed above) was the best, not just because he’s my friend but also because I thought that he was the only one who seemed to have a voice and a point of view and all the other art left me a little cold because I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say beyond provoke, or like be photographed on Instagram? Here is a great essay on how politics destroyed contemporary art most of which I agree with, but this general feeling of “okay, and?” that I have about much of the New Art that is on display these days is one of tedium, because you know they’ve only done this for the grant, and not really because it means anything to them. Every now and then something moves me, but it’s become the exception, not the norm.

Like take this next photo, which was a line of text carved on to a table.

It was in this small room set up to look like a comedy club (perhaps they’re even having comedy as part of the art? WHO KNOWS BECAUSE THERE ARE NO SIGNS EXCEPT A VERY SMALL ONE ABOUT THE ARTIST) and all the tables had these little pithy sayings carved on them. This was the best, the others said things like “real men eat ass” which, again, okay and?

It’s why I enjoy art museums so much more than galleries I think. Museums have people who experimented and took risks, so much of gallery space is taken up by either the pretty pretty or the frankly bizarre. And I like weird, but this stuff is just weird for weird’s sake, not because it makes a statement about anything.

(Gallery SPACES are really cool though. One of the ones we visited yesterday was an old courthouse, abandoned for about forty years, which is now seeing new life as a space for art. Next door is an abandoned jail (!) which will serve as an artist’s residency and there’s a metaphor in there somewhere but I can’t find it.)

Anyway, that’s my two cents about contemporary art as a layperson. Feel free to contradict!

IX. Namesake and self, Mitte

The wind is whipping through my hair and the sun is directly in my eyes, but I had to stop for a picture at this intersection. (It’s a nice dress isn’t it? I got it at a Delhi street market this last March and have been waiting for the weather to warm up. I thought the pop art theme was a nice Biennale reference.)

Minna (short for Wilhelmina) Cauer was a radical feminist in Berlin in the late 1800s. She campaigned for abortion and voting rights, started a high school to prepare girls to go on to university and she was president at the first women’s right conference to happen in Germany. Generally a very cool lady and a good namesake to have.

I go by Minna a lot more here than I usually do, it’s quicker for one, and it’s also my name so I don’t feel like I’m losing anything by not saying Meenakshi. In fact, as I return more and more to using “Minna” as the primary name I respond to, I feel like I’m returning to a simpler sense of self. Minna has always been the little shadow of Meenakshi, a casual, loving nickname where Meenakshi had all the armour to face the real world. Now it’s part of my Berlin identity.

You’d think with “Minna” being short for “Wilhelmina” the Germans wouldn’t have such a hard time with it, but they have to repeat it as much as they’d have to repeat “Meenakshi” just to make sure it’s correct. On the other hand, over these past four years, all sorts of nationalities have told me they have the name “Minna” (well, okay, Meena but I can’t correct everything) in their language as well, so that’s nice, a sort of global name for me.

X. Summer flowers

That’s it, just summer flowers after a few weeks of wind and cold rain. So nice to see!

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xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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