Well, hey, it’s me again, back in your inbox after only a week. (Don’t get used to it, I just have a lot to say—and end of year lists I have to send you—so we’ll probably be back to our usual (irregular) programming next month/year.)
As someone who is extremely online (I mean, that’s where the name for this newsletter comes from) and has been since it was possible to be extremely online, I’m used to people having opinions about me without actually knowing me. I say “used to” but I’m lying, I’m not actually used to it. I’m no Caroline Calloway, but living a life online and publicly—books, articles, Instagram posts, what have you—means that people will make assumptions about you.
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This was brought to a head a few weeks ago when someone told someone else that they didn’t like me because, and I’m paraphrasing here, “She’s snobby and a bad writer.” The second someone told me that they asked the first someone if they had ever read my writing and the first someone admitted they had not. It was just something they thought, based on whatever. I guess you can’t be a good writer if you don’t fit someone’s ideas of what a good writer is? If you like clothes, for instance, and I love clothes. If you’re happy, and I’m mostly, usually happy. If you don’t choose your words for like depth and seriousness and instead use “like” as an article to attach your sentence together.
Snobby though. That made me laugh. Friends, I’ll tell you a secret here: I’ve worked my whole life towards being intimidating. It is one of my ultimate goals. I’ve always wanted to be the person who walks into a room and people are a little awed, a little frightened, a little less likely to take liberties. I had to work against a lot, being short with a friendly face and a generally vague demeanor does not lend itself nicely to being intimidating. Even at lit fests, people are constantly treating me like someone much younger than I am. (It is a blessing to look young mostly, but not if you’re a writer. I get why so many women writers wear saris in this country now, because at a recent lit fest I was at, hanging about, waiting for the doors to open so I could go listen to a panel, at least three people assumed I was one of the volunteers, and asked me admin-related questions. At another lit fest, I was an older writer’s unofficial minder, just because I happened to know him and looked lively and dispensable and so, once again, got all the admin related queries.) I find myself saying, “I’m older than I look!” a lot. Maybe my face doesn’t give me gravitas, but being thirty eight definitely should. My name is a weighty name, all those three syllabled words, so emails addressed to me are always super respectful, but really, I blame my face which is not my fault, and my hair, which one hundred per cent is, but if having a half shorn head with badly done highlights makes you look young, then I think I should be giving the gift of this tip to others as well.
Anyway, being snobby is a weird one to tackle. Sometimes it takes me a while to recognise people, even if I’ve met them a few times. (Some of my friends complain about this in our early years of meeting.) I met an actor/artist the other day who was completely open with me about his face-blindness, it was so bad, he didn’t recognise people at all, and to help other people like him, he got a tattoo on his neck, so you know what to look for. I loved this so much, that the next time we met, I introduced myself. And again. And though he acted like he remembered who I was, I thought it was cool that he said he might not, so I wasn’t offended. After all, I too have acted like I know people when my inner thoughts are just a wild scramble of piecing together hints from our conversation to figure out how exactly I know the person. There’s no science to it, sometimes I remember people, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’ll have a heavy or intense conversation with someone that requires making a lot of eye contact, and so their faces are burnt into my brain. Sometimes it’s just banter, and who pays attention to the other person when you banter? I’m too busy thinking about my next clever line to really focus. I’ve had to re-introduce myself to several people who are confused by my haircut, as if they were looking for wild curly hair to place me in their brains.
But, who am I kidding? I can also be a little snobby about certain things. Books. Opinions. Sometimes, and I hang my head to admit this, but I’ve set out to be honest with you: sometimes I also judge clothes. Like, not poorly dressed people, but people who don’t take enough risks with their fashion. I dismiss them too quickly. (People who experiment with print, form or accessories always fascinate me no matter how good or bad they look, I just like that they tried and I think it makes them more interesting.) You try to be good, you try to be non-judgemental and open and kind and some bad stuff slips through.
Before, it used to bother me that people had opinions on the way that I looked. To paraphrase the end credits of Bojack Horseman (GREAT SHOW): “back in the 2000s, I had a very famous online blooog.” I remember reading whole threads devoted to my Orkut profile picture where people were amazed and shocked that I wasn’t attractive. (I wrote about this in greater detail in an essay I did for Indian Quarterly.) But as time went by, I became so okay with people thinking I wasn’t that attractive that I started chronicling my clothes online also. From hiding behind anonymity to literally celebrating my face and my body. So I’m not drop dead gorgeous. Who cares? Like seriously: WHO CARES? Am I spending my entire life looking at my face in the mirror thinking about ways I could be hot? I am not. It’s only other people who have to look at me who might suffer a moment of “Wow, she’s not that pretty, I feel cheated.” Sometimes I feel a bit bad for people who spend their whole life in pursuit of making themselves more lovely, because what an endless, thankless task they have chosen. (This zen-ness has taken me this entire decade to reach, by the way, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re still struggling with it.)
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This is a very self-indulgent newsletter, and I’m sorry for foisting it upon you when I could have been talking about different things. I’m almost done though, I want to close with something someone else said, this time a taxi driver, when I was on my way back home from the airport. We’re sitting in traffic, I’m on my phone, impatient, and tired and he goes, “You can connect your music to my sound system if you like.” I must’ve shrugged and said, “Eh, I don’t think I’ll bother” to which he said those words that always make my hackles rise, “If I say something you won’t feel bad?” Ugh. Hate those words, because something bad is always coming. But I was stuck now so I sighed and said, “Okay, go ahead” and he goes, “No one is joyful anymore. There used to be a time in my taxi where four friends would get in and talk to each other, people would play music and have fun and now as soon as they enter, they’re on their phones, their laptops. A husband and wife will sit next to each other on their phones and not talk at all. I mean, the only time people talk to their loved ones is on the phone.” This is not a new and sudden revelation for me, of course, or for you, either. We know we spend too much time on our phones. But the “no one is joyful anymore” that stuck with me. No one is joyful anymore, and when I thought of that, when I thought of all of us, grim and tired and angry, I just felt a wave of wanting to change that. So I pulled out a playlist on my Spotify and I played it and I sat at the back of the car listening, and the cab driver drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music and it was nice, it was a nice drive home from the airport.
Joy! That’s what I want to tell you all: even if you heard some strange shit someone tells someone else about you, remember there is joy in the world if you take a moment to find it. And I love you all, even the ones I’ve never met.
I wrote another poem this week, this time about my flight (actually wrote it on the flight, so it’s very aeroplane-y)
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I reviewed Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s collaborative graphic novel for Open, which I really liked. Read it here.
And now, on to the link list!
Arundhati Roy (fellow Sagittarius!) wrote this searing essay on Modi’s popularity in India + Kashmir + other things that I think you must read.
Yes, I’m linking to another essay about Japanese reality show, Terrace House, the best show on Netflix you’re not watching. (In case you missed it, here’s my newsletter on Terrace House which explains why I love it.)
Loved this behind-the-scenes story on airport secrets. (Who doesn’t love airport secrets?)
The battle between the real fancy reusable water bottle and its many cheap knock-offs.
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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