The Internet Personified: Trailer for sale or rent

I don't know how you neat freaks do it, no sooner do I declutter a surface than it is full of things again. An example: things I can see on my desk at this moment:
1) A lonely matchstick, unused thankfully.
2) One bottle of black nail polish.
3) Half a phone charger (the bit that goes into the wall.)
4) An egg timer.
5) One of those packets they give you a new SIM card in.
6) A postcard of Picasso's The Three Dancers, which I have also embedded as an image below for you to gaze at in wonder.
7) A bottle of half-used hand sanitiser.
8) A cloth clutch with "Yes" and "No" cross-stitched on either side.

And that's just the SMALL stuff. There's also a coffee mug, a Kindle, various books and notebooks, a Bluetooth speaker, a pen stand plus pens. I'm realising now why I've always been so partial to big desks, it's because they're the only ones that hold all my shit. Back when I used to work at a tabloid, I'd share my desk with this entertainment photographer who was a character and a half. He always wore these really bright shirts unbuttoned till his belly and he had a little digicam which he took to all the parties and then wrote up columns with his (terrible) photos next to them. However, his sort of thing was popular, so he was a bit of a diva. And since I was the youngest (and newest) employee there, it fell to me to do the television listings every day. You know, the stuff that used to be under the crossword and comics before Netflix came along. Someone actually entered that manually. Someone actually picked out shows from various channels to highlight. That person was me. I'd pile my TV catalogues up on my desk and leave for the day and come back the next morning to find them all in the bin. This photographer and I used to have massive showdowns, where I'd be like, "I NEED THESE TO WORK WITH" and he'd be like, "I AM CREATIVE I NEED A NEAT SPACE." Please. Everyone knows creatives like messes. But since he was more valuable than I was, he got his way and I had to crowd my TV stuff all in one corner and hope he wouldn't chuck them in the bin again.

(I just Googled him, because I am petty like that, and I can't find him anywhere on the internet so I and my messy desk feel super vindicated. If you work long enough, you can pretty much take revenge on everyone who's ever bullied you just by existing.)


This week in books: Went to the Delhi Book Fair yesterday which wore a sad and abandoned look since the major publishers (Penguin, Harper etc) weren't participating. Instead, there were rows of second hand shops (one novel for 100 bucks etc) and educational publishers. But, it turned out to be quite fortuitous for me, since I've been looking for more research material for the Girls Of The Mahabharata (I have to begin the next book quite soon), and I found it with two volumes from Bharati Vidya Bhawan: India in the Classical and Vedic ages, which will give me some of the information I need. What did they wear, did women have to live separately, what kind of tools did they use etc. The books are slightly dense and dry, but there's only so much on the internet, so research is a necessary evil. Especially since The One Who Had Two Lives is going to be significantly longer than the first.

Plus, I bought a whole bunch of stuff from the Sahitya Akademi including their four volume set of contemporary Indian short stories translated from various languages. I've been going back to Indian literature a lot this past month, starting with Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable and giving myself a crash course. I realise that while I know the new guys, your Vikram Seths and Chitras and so on, I barely know anything about the people who have come before. On that note, must also mention that I picked up a copy of Ismat Chugtai's memoirs at the second hand stall, and it looks SO GOOD.

Lest you think I've become all work and no play, must also mention that I found the missing book in my Babylon series. To elaborate: I've had these two books called Air Babylon and Hotel Babylon, written by this one woman in collaboration with anonymous people in the airport and hospitality industry respectively. SO good and so full of goss, they're basically my source on why I know so much about these things. (What? I TOTALLY do.) So, with Fashion Babylon, my Babylon collection is finished and now I can opine about the fashion industry with great skill as well.

This week in fashion choices: Returned to my tailor who sits right next to the organic store down the road from us, which is very convenient. I had three Kerala cotton saris sitting unused in a cupboard, and so I have elected to turn one into a dhoti pant-crop top set and the other into a shift dress. He's doing them for me for 500 each, and I will report on how they turned out in next week's edition, but I'm quite excited about seeing them. I had to give him some of my stuff for design, but I'm hoping to one day be able to draw him a picture and get him to work from that.



Thursday link list: SO MUCH stuff on the internet that I loved this week!

"I had grown up with poverty, abuse and molestation. If my daughter wasn’t worth saving, neither was I. Besides, I didn’t believe that biology guaranteed love. I had grown up in a biracial family, unrelated to one of my siblings and half-related to others, and I certainly didn’t love them half as much."
- Lovely Modern Love column on four unrelated people coming together to make a family.


Here’s an indisputable fact about all Indian air hostesses: No matter which airline we fly, our hearts uplift when we see more firangs at the boarding gate. We know it will be a civilised flight. Our arrival is acknowledged with faint smiles and expressions that read, “Oh hello, wow the crew is here already”, compared to the usual hostility and ugly looks from the brothers and sisters of my country that read, “Oh you! You lazy servants are here finally.”

- Diary of an Indian Air Hostess on Arre

As a girl, I would have liked to have my intelligence and intellectual labours regarded as an unmitigated good and a source of pride, rather than something I had to handle delicately, lest I upset or offend. Success can contain implicit failure for straight women, who are supposed to succeed as women by making men feel godlike in their might. As Virginia Woolf reflected: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

- If I Were A Man by Rebecca Solnit

People in yellow countries are the least likely to report having emotional experiences of any kind, positive or negative. Purple countries are where people report experiencing the most feelings.
- 40 Maps That Explain The World (esp loved the map about which countries are more welcoming to foreigners & the one about where people feel the most loved, because Indians actually do feel pretty cherished, it turns out.)

Jack: At 14, he’s the oldest dog in Niz East, and looks a bit like Tintin’s Snowy. Jack finds it hard to eat properly because of a dislocated jaw. Somebody may have injured him at some stage.

I too have had encounters with the Dogs of Nizamuddin East.

The machine under Clarke looks like a big pommel horse and moves in sync with a computer animation of what will become a dragon. Clarke doesn’t talk much between takes. Over and over, a wind gun blasts her with just enough force to make me worry about the integrity of her ash blond wig. (Its particular color is the result of 2½ months’ worth of testing and seven prototypes, according to the show’s hair designer.) Over and over, Clarke stares down at a masking-tape mark on the floor the instant episode director Alan Taylor shouts, “Now!” Nearby, several visual-effects supervisors watch on monitors.

Because I can't NOT talk about it, here's a great behind-the-scenes of Game of Thrones.

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 (suppport me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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