The Internet Personified: Picture yourself in a boat on a river

Today's newsletter title: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by the Beatles.

Have you ever considered how much easier it is for us to escape boredom these days? I don't mean just the obvious things--television and outings and what not, I mean, that if something or someONE bores us, we feel well within our rights to say, "Omg, you're boring me, please stop" if it's someone you know well, or move away after five minutes of conversation if it's someone you don't. In Austen's time--and I'm picking Austen, because no one wrote socialising in drawing rooms better than she did---you HAD to listen to that boring old uncle (Emma's father going on about his diet, for example) because you lived in the country, and your choices for meeting people were limited, and so you made do with what you had, and hoped Boring Old Uncle had some rich hot son or nephew to take you away from the minutiae of drawing rooms.

Today, our friends are many, and scattered, our time is more precious than it used to be, and an evening out requires a certain amount of investment, so you don't spend your time with the Boringsons more than once. After you've made that mistake, you hop over to more interesting people at the house party, or you simply fade out of Boris Boringson's life, till it's like you never existed. I was thinking of that when I thought about travel stories recently--we are leaving TONIGHT for our grand South East Asia ADVENTURE* and while it's going to be super fun for us, it's not really very fun to LISTEN to someone's travel stories unless you a) know them super well and you love their stories or b) they went out partying with Peter Dinklage or something, and even then, even in that last case, you're like, "Okay, you went out partying with Peter Dinklage, how many times do I have to hear THAT story, Neharika?**"

The Goods did a great story on why travel stories are boring, even though generally being well traveled is meant to indicate a smart and open-minded person, with lots of worldly wisdom and all that. I only started to REALLY travel in my thirties, and it has been a great decade, but I'm not sure I have all that much more worldly wisdom for all that. I do know how to navigate airports though, so that's something. I also have learned how to manage my packing anxiety by making a list and just checking shit off that, though that's not really wisdom, that's something every organised person has been doing since the dawn of time. Cave people off to migrate across a continent probably made a packing list: "Grob! Did you take the wolf furs?" "I took the lion skin! Do we NEED the wolf furs? We already have so much baggage and we haven't domesticated horses yet!" "I think we should wear them and go, it might be cold on the way!"

Anyhow, I will attempt to send you a few newsletters from on the road, tips, tricks and what I ate, usually, and if you want photos and things as I go along, here's my Instagram. I take nice photos and I write long captions, so it'll be kinda travel magazine-y.

* [I just realised I never told you where we're going! First stop: KL for two days, then on to Vietnam for a few weeks, beginning in Ho Chi Minh/Saigon and making our way up to Hanoi by train, stopping on the way. Then a few days in Bangkok before we come home. Travel tips are always appreciated! We've only been to Bangkok from that list, so everything else is brand new, although I did just watch half of Apocalypse Now recently (half was all I could do, it's a LONG movie!) and as a result I had dreams about the war, so THANKS, K.]

**[Neharika being my standard annoying girl name. Nothing against real Neharikas, I've never actually known one, but you know that schtick when people tweet, "Get off my back, KAREN" where Karen is a placeholder name? Neharika is my placeholder name. I don't have one for boys yet, but I am leaning towards Karandeep.]

This week in stuff I wrote: My Mythology for the Millennial column came out a little late this fortnight, so my great JK Rowling-Naga peg was a little stale, but it's still a really good column on all the various snake atrocities in Hindu mythology.

Or take a lesson from the Real Housewives of Ancient India, and try and not fight with your sister as Kadru did with her sister Vinata. To be fair, Vinata sounds like she was pretty unbearable as well. Take this for example, their shared husband, the sage Kashyapa, asked them both to pick a boon. Kadru asked for a thousand Naga sons, and Vinata, not to be outdone, said, “Oh, I'll only have two sons, but I want them to be more powerful than all those thousand my sister just asked for.” Then the women lay eggs, which is horrific, and Kadru's sons hatched first, and Vinata, in her desperation, broke open one of her eggs, and her half-formed foetus flew into the sky cursing her for her impatience and telling her she'd have to be her sister's slave for a hundred years. Eventually, the other egg hatched as well, turning out to be the half-bird, half-man god Garuda.

This week in movies I watched: We had our first wedding anniversary this week (seven years together!) and we treated it as sort of a joint birthday, and took the day off and went and watched a daytime movie. In this case, Crazy Rich Asians, which is super fun, but also kept reminding me of that old Karan Johar classic Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham except, not so many songs, and the wounded mother in CRA gets much less screen time than Jaya Bachchan in KKKG. The SRK character in CRA is this very rich guy who somehow neglects to tell his serious girlfriend that he is basically royalty in Singapore, and I can't believe she has never Googled him up until the time they both get on the plane to go home, and she's like, "Why are we traveling first class?" Like come on. If you were going to meet your boyfriend's mysterious family, would you not put some research into it? At least check them out on Facebook to see what you could expect? I mean, I do that with HOTELS before I visit. Seriously, get it together, Rachel. But such a fun movie, you should watch it, and the food looks SO GOOD, you're going to want to eat a mountain of dim sum when the movie is over. (We went to Nando's instead, which is also nice.)

Anyhow, it's been a slow couple of weeks, and I am looking forward to adventurous times ahead. Plus cleaner air, god, one week, and I can taste grit in my teeth each time I go outside.

This week in stuff I read on the internet

Loved this article on why the majority of Indian organ donors are women. (Ans: because men are valued more.)

“The transplant took place in June this year, eight months after the money was ready. Why? Because the mother, who was pregnant at the time, was made to undergo a medical termination of pregnancy, then they waited for her to recover and donate her liver instead. He did not tell us this; I learnt it later. I believe the father’s parents said their son should not risk the operation for a daughter; that the couple could try for other children.”

And in Keeping It Real news: the real biological clock is that you're going to die.

This world devours every person and moves on. It does not stop moving, even as we pass through the middle of life telling ourselves it is the front end. Before the children arrived, there was not much difference from one year to the next. In some ways, in the adult, professional sphere, there still is not much difference. In a chair, at a computer screen, 47 doesn’t feel that far from 37. A little trouble in the lumbar region, that’s all. Some wiry gray at the temples in the bathroom mirror.

Remember to do what this woman did if you're ever, um, seized by an alligator underwater.

I was like, “Don’t struggle,” because two things can happen. Crocodiles will either bite down harder, and then I would start feeling pain, and then: There goes all my rational thinking, really. If it bit down harder, not only would it possibly be painful, but it also could have taken out a chunk of my leg. Or, the worst scenario is that it rolled. That’s how a lot of them incapacitate their prey.

Loved this op-ed by Paromita Vohra on why men are having a hard time grasping #MeToo

I have understood, at first with anger, then with amusement, that men are not interested in what women have to say. For men, smart women are, at best, trophy listeners, a high-level audience to endorse their interesting image. With hot girls, they just pretend harder. And this is the simple truth. A man who does not see women when he is not interested in sex with them (or in commandeering their abilities to write his script, review his book, comfort him with cooking) is not going to see women when he wants to have sex with them either.

On nostalgia YouTube. I spent a long time gazing at a video of Delhi in 1985 after I read this article. Not that I remember much about 1985, but it's a FEELING, you know?

Nostalgia’s status as a painful pleasure is now a cliché, but knowing this doesn’t prevent me from seeking it everywhere. Where else — and when else — could I go on YouTube? I watched a grainy Fourth of July in my mother’s hometown in rural California. I watched scenes from Israel, country of my birth, which I left before lasting memories could form. I found the channel of a Canadian, now deceased, who has hundreds of videos of trips he took in the 1990s. I watched his long segments on Athens — another place I used to live — his humdrum narration in a soothing Canadian accent bringing forth the exquisite pain of return.

And speaking of YouTube, there's a whole generation of toddlers going crazy for this Bangalore man's shiny animations and tinny nursery rhymes.

After Krishnan rewrote a nursery rhyme, Chandar would then take the lyrics and compose music around them. The songs are simple, but if you hear them once, you will hear them for the rest of your life. Krishnan would storyboard the videos, imagining the sequence of shots, as befitting his youthful dream of becoming a movie director. ChuChu productions are essentially music videos for kids, sometimes featuring Tollywood dance moves that Chandar and Krishnan demonstrate for the animators.

Why are so many fantasy novels obsessed with academia?

J.K. Rowling did not invent the boy-wizard trope, but she did expand, enrobe, and embellish it—so magnificently that her millions of readers would have gladly returned their high school diplomas for a do-over at Hogwarts.

How they pooped in Harry the 8th's time. (I mean, WHERE they pooped, since how is answered by biology.)

The smelly truth is that Hampton Court was not well-equipped to serve the bodily needs of hundreds of servants. During the king's boisterous banquets, busy servants regularly heeded nature's call by relieving themselves in hidden hallway corridors and on sizzling fireplaces. In the kitchen, the boys assigned to turning the spit were commonly found "interlarding their own grease to help the drippings." The walls reeked of urine so badly that, according to historian Lucy Worsley in her book If Walls Could Talk, "the palace management would have crosses chalked onto the walls in the hope that people would be reluctant to desecrate a religious symbol."

Since I am rewatching Friends (again) here's a brief history of the beloved trivia episode.

The more popular the show became, the harder the writers had to work to meet viewers’ expectations, while not pandering. The audience was not only familiar with Friends, but emotionally attached to it, and therefore highly attuned to its rhythms and beats. Another Season Four episode had Rachel impulsively proposing to Joshua (a guy with whom she’d gone on four dates) in an effort to one-up Ross (who’d just gotten engaged to Emily). It was meant to be funny — Rachel at her most ridiculous. But in the script, the scene came directly after Ross announced his engagement, and it just seemed sad. The audience felt awful for Rachel and couldn’t bring themselves to laugh at her. The writers quickly realized they couldn’t tweak their way out of this one, and decided to simply shoot the scene as written, but move it into the next episode, giving Rachel and the viewers some recovery time. You’ll notice Rachel is wearing the same outfit in both “The One with All the Haste” and the following episode, “The One with the Wedding Dresses.” As if Rachel would ever repeat an outfit. . It was an extreme change to make, but that’s how much faith they put in their audience. Kauffman explained, “We had to trust their judgment about things that were working and not working.”

And here are really bad reviews of over a hundred Netflix original movies in a list titled, ironically, "Best Netflix Original Movies."

147. Brij Mohan Amar Rahe
Evidently a satisfactory number of people tuned in for Brahman Naman and Lust Stories, because Netflix has continued their campaign to sew up the Indian sex farce with this comedy that Adam Sandler might describe as “a little on-the-nose.” Not since the days of the Entourage movie has a script’s gender politics so transparently outed itself as being written by men: bra shop proprietor Brij Mohan (Arjun Mathur) can’t stand his humorless shrew of a wife (Nidhi Singh) and wants to begin anew with his 24-year-old girl on the side, so he pulls a move I call the Slimeball Tom Sawyer and fakes his own death. Of course he can’t make a clean getaway, and eventually he (in the guise of his assumed identity, Amar) faces a comeuppance. Seeing someone contemptible get their just desserts should be gratifying, and yet the absence of any character that isn’t a mean-spirited manifestation of male insecurity prohibits that feeling. It is, at least, slightly less unpleasant than The Do-Over, though not for lack of trying.

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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