The Internet Personified: The maze, the maze, the Crystal Maze!
Every week as I collect stuff to tell you about in the newsletter, I add little notes for myself in the drafts. And the first note for this week was to say THANK YOU NEW SUBSCRIBERS! Welcome to our little party! If you're curious about how this whole thing began, here is a link to the very first issue of The Internet Personified, sent out almost two years ago. In the years that have gone by I think I've found my voice and the tone I like, but essentially, it's still the same: I tell you about stuff that I think/watched/saw/read this week, and sometimes you write back to me which I like very much.
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This week in suddenly my calendar is very full: Because I am in the midst of writing my next book (number seven for those of you keeping track at home!) and because this book is significantly longer and also has more characters than my last one, I'm trying to keep to some sort of schedule by only putting in one social plan per day. Which means suddenly--SUDDENLY--I have plans all the way up to April. I quite like the feeling though, I feel very popular by spacing out my friends like this, and I like filling in the little squares in my calendar, so I can look at my week and think, "Hmmm, well done, well done" like Napoleon conquering things, except in this case I am only conquering... my own life?
Despite this, I had a pretty quiet weekend. We did go to the birthday party of friends' two-year-old, and as usual, all of us kidless people gravitated towards each other, and the bartender made very strong gin and tonics, so after two, I had to go home so I could sit down in a quiet room. Plus cake! Not enough people have cake at their parties. (Yes, there was a bartender. God, I love Delhi.) (We gave him books, but I think he was more enchanted by the wrapping paper which he ripped off and then flung across the lawn and then went and collected again, proving conclusively once and for all, that children are just like cats.) (On the other hand, this one has two kitty companions, so maybe it is just learned behaviour.)
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This week in HAH I TOTALLY HAVE GRACE AND COORDINATION TAKE THAT CLASS 9 PT TEACHER!: Sometime in December, we went to friends' farmhouse where they had set up a trampoline for their kid, but also we could totally go jump on it if we wanted to. And I've always wanted a trampoline, so I took off my boots and jumped around till I exhausted myself and then I lay there and gazed up at the leaves on the trees and the sunlight coming through them and I thought, "In 2018, I'm going to be more childlike about stuff like this--I'm going to do shit because I enjoy it, and I mean PG rated stuff, like climbing and jumping and skipping and what not, and I'm going to remember that nestled inside my thirty something body is the seven year old who would have gotten a kick out of this." Because, after all, friends, are we not all like onions, ultimately? Layers and layers and tender bits inside, each bit of our past selves waiting to be unboxed like Russian nesting dolls, if you don't like the onion metaphor. And at thirty six, my outside layer is firmer than it was at twenty something, but there are some essential things about your personality that stay the same, and you should honour your own inner seven year old, who thought that once you were a grown up, you could mostly do fun stuff without anyone telling you not to.
Let's not fool ourselves: I was never a very active child. But when my hula hoop arrived last week, you guys, I got into it with a passion I had previously only reserved for smoking a cigarette at the end of a long week of non-smoking. A friend gave me a hula hoop once, ages ago, for my 26th birthday, I think, and I never could get the damn thing to move. The one I bought (that Rosalyn recommended) is this weighted one from Decathlon, which I had an affiliate link up for here, which is why this newsletter is coming to you so late (Tinyletter did not like the link, so there was a whole hoo ha while I was locked out of my account for a bit) HOWEVER, if you want to know how to buy it online, let me know and I will send you the same link but like privately. (I might be migrating this to a different platform soon but not to worry, if you have signed up here, your email address will move with me.)
There's a certain addictive ping feeling the first time you get into the rhythm of it, your body does something instinctively and before you know it you're spinning it around you like a champion. (I use the Dance Pop playlist on Prime music to hula to and today discovered the joys of hooping to Under Pressure and all of Queen really) I can't describe the feeling, the only similar-ish thing I can think to compare it to is the first time you know how to drive after lessons, suddenly everything is just happening, your foot is on the clutch, the gears are moving, you're not thinking about it anymore. You know? K has also really gotten into it, and since he is a much more athletic person than I am, he mastered it in one day and is now doing all sorts of fancy things like spinning it around his legs, whereas I am happy if I just manage to finish one song without dropping it. It's also a fantastic cardio workout, if you're in the market for one.
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This week in the best TV show you're not watching (but you have to acquire it through nefarious means): The Magicians! Also one of the best series of books I've read (thanks Samit!) but now an amazing TV show. It's three seasons long now, so you can binge watch it happily, and it's fantasy mixed with millennial drama, so it's also hilarious, especially when there's magic and also some guy in a magical kingdom going, "Allow me to mansplain this to Your Majesty." Dark and funny and super addictive. (Read the books also please.)
Okay, okay, I know you're all only here for the WEDNESDAY LINK LIST
On the shady shadiness of Baba Ramdev, the billion dollar yogi.
Excerpt: It might seem like an impossible arrangement—observing an oath of poverty while also being one of India’s top entrepreneurs. But Ramdev is a master of contortion. Patanjali is an omnipresent brand in India, and though everyone refers to it as Ramdev’s company, he’s not technically its owner or chief executive officer. It would be scandalous for a sanyasi to profit from a corporation, and Ramdev neither owns shares nor takes a salary. He says his net worth is zero. The company calls him merely its “brand ambassador,” a title that belies his power.
Oldie but a goodie, why is India so obsessed with Hitler?
Excerpt: Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the journal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years. (Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Roadrunner, has sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these are significant numbers.
Thinking about fruit bats this week, thanks to this article in Mint
Excerpt: As nocturnal creatures, they laze and sleep for most of the day, becoming active at dusk. Flying around the trees in large numbers, they squeal and chirp, roosting on trees with some water bodies nearby, in the vicinity of India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan. Water is the first thing they have before they set out to forage. A few times, I have seen a flying fox swoop down on the sarovar of the Bangla Sahib gurdwara a little after midnight. In the hot summer months, when the temperature nears 45 degrees Celsius, they can be seen flapping their wings frantically and sticking their tongues out to beat the heat. In winters—which are equally extreme in Delhi, with temperatures often falling below 5 degrees Celsius—they remain tightly huddled, rubbing their bodies together to generate heat.
Also I'm still looking for a good book about crows, since they are the most interesting bird species.
Excerpt: But what if I were to tell you that the crows you spy in your yard are almost always the same individual crows? That those birds—usually two, a male and a female known as a territorial pair—don’t live there but fly in every day from 20 miles away? During the day urban crows rummage and build nests in a specific spot, in a specific neighborhood, then decamp for the evening to a massive, crowded roost outside the city—their own crow planet— and report back to the neighborhoods each morning. Like you, they commute to work.
And while we're on the subject of urban wildlife, here's a nail biting story about a lost cat.
Excerpt: I love dogs, too, but in terms of pure cuddliness and entertainment value, Sami took a back seat to nobody. During warm-weather months, I’m in the yard a lot, watering plants and pulling weeds. Sami was usually with me, and his presence was an immeasurable contribution to the fun spirit of our home. (Half seriously, Susan said that if we never found him, we’d have to torch the place and leave.) He liked to run around, get chased, snooze, climb trees, get fed, get brushed, and be comforted with behind-the-ear scratches. Despite my pessimism, there was no way I’d let Sami die alone—wondering why his friend hadn’t come to help—without giving the search maximum effort.
This is a strange little story, but if you follow the YouTube links you will not be sorry.
Excerpt: Making a song sound as if it were coming from another room isn’t hard: you lower the high frequencies, raise the low frequencies, and add some reverb. (Programs such as Pro Tools, Ableton, and GarageBand make it simple to play around with a track in this way.) To make a song sound as if it were playing in an empty mall, you cut the low frequencies, raise the mid-range frequencies, and add a delay, which imitates the way sound bounces through a big, empty space.
Are "fierce feisty feminist" slogans just appropriation?
Excerpt: Who decided we couldn’t be scared? Why all this interminable energy? To be female, even to be feminist, does not require full-time perkiness. In fact, in my experience quite a lot of the time to be a woman is also to be a bit cross, with a slight headache, occasionally overwhelmed. But I suppose that’s less snappy on a T-shirt. We don’t all have to be incredible, or inspiring – most of us just want to be accepted as equal. Show me a fearless woman and I’ll show you someone who has pressed their fear into a crack inside them like a prayer in a wall, or who carries it hidden in their palm, a small thorn made of experience. Show me a feisty woman and I’ll show you someone who finds it hard to be alone. These are not essential qualities. They sit alongside the less marketable ones, always.
Have a great week!
xx
m
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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 (suppport me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
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