The Internet Personified: You're still young, that's your fault

We are back in Delhi after a long month in rainy Goa and cool Bangalore, and it's like a pressure cooker in here. So hot, you can feel your pulse at the back of your eyelids every time you step outside. But why would you step outside anyway? Inside our climate controlled apartment, everything is status quo. The cats seemed to have missed us, which means a lot of cuddles, but also, being sneaky fuckers, they have pissed in certain corners of the house which we are slowly eradicating. At least, we were. Now if there's a smell, it's been two days so we're used to it again. Bruno and Olga come from the same gene pool, and they both have litter issues, so really Squishy is our only "normal" cat, except he doesn't keep himself as clean as the other two--his fur is often dusty and his bum smells more than it should, poor fellow. So we have one perfectly well-behaved cat, who is a little smelly, and two soft powder puff cats who will go to the bathroom anywhere they see fit. Sigh. They don't tell you about all these problems when you first get an animal. At least we don't have to walk them five times a day.

Caveat: I'm feeling a little slow and stupid today, so this may not be the sparklingest letter you've ever received from me, in fact, it might be downright earnie, but we've got to mix it up sometimes, right?

Bangalore was great. Uneventful, but a fun city, and the weather is really A+++, maybe we should just pick up sticks and move to Bangalore. I know I said Panjim in my last newsletter, and I still think Panjim is way more charming, but in Bangalore, if you never leave your house except in the evenings as we do, it might work for us as well. We'd get a charming little house in Indiranagar, take all our animals with us, and enjoy the breeze year round. I had my air pollution app, Plume, set to Bangalore, and every morning it says things like "Moderate pollution, temperature 26" or whatever, and it was still doing this back in Delhi, so I thought to myself, "Delhi is not so bad. I mean, it doesn't feel like 26, but who knows?" and then I realised I hadn't updated my location. Delhi is fully in the severe range once again.

This week in settling in: What's the first thing you do when you get home after you've unpacked and made sure that all is as you left it? Mine is fixing up my breakfast foods. These days I make my own dosa atta. I'm enough of a South Indian to want to eat dosa in the morning, but not so much that I say "maavu" or whatever instead of "atta." A North Indian South Indian. Once, on a long ago trip to Bangalore, I met this girl who was the opposite of me, a South Indian North Indian, and we talked about tiffin boxes in school. While I wanted aloo paratha and Punjabi style vegetables in my lunch box, she longed for idli and sambhar. It's so silly when I look at it now, since I'll take an idli over a paratha any day, but you want to fit in no matter where you are. I had this one friend at school who was so fancy, she had ham sandwiches and sliced up apples in her tiffin box, with the crusts cut off, but even her food wasn't as appealing as my Gujarati friend's with her sweet mango pickle nestling nxt to her rotis. Going to friend's houses, hearing their parents say, "Beta, you don't look South Indian at all," and accepting it as a compliment. I wanted to be English, when I first read Enid Blyton, but once I was older, I longed to be Punjabi, with their relations--chacha-chachi, Nani-Nana, sounding so much more familiar than an Ammama or Thatha or anything.

My dosas are pretty good though. Najma (our housekeeper/cook) knows how to grind up the batter for me and leave it overnight to ferment, and she makes a pretty good coconut chutney as well. Sometimes I have grilled cheese toast, which is two slices of bread on a tawa, with mayo on each side instead of butter, and they are soft and crunchy and I eat that with hot sauce. I'm a picky eater, but once I've identified what I like, I can eat it again and again without growing tired of it. There's this great article about people who are actually AFRAID of food, but I have a (very mild) version of ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder). I've gotten a lot better at NOT puking when I taste something that doesn't sit right with me--certain textures (bananas) or smells (curd) will set me off, but I can deal with those just fine in, say, banana bread, or highly seasoned raita. I think at the end of the day, it's not the food that I'm avoiding, it's the vomiting, which of course, has a whole other name in the disorder section of Wikipedia. I used to vomit a LOT when I was a kid, lactose intolerance not being as widely known as it is today, and I remember very clearly once being given a piece of bread with cheese spread on it and the cheese spread had a crumb that looked like a bug, and it was puke city, so now I can't have my food touching unless I am controlling the touching. It's all very laborious. This, of course, restricts what you can eat at dinner parties or when you travel, but as long as there's a certain amount of control for me I'm good. (Spices really help, so I find myself ordering super spicy food whenever I can just so that can override any other texture/flavour concerns.)

Anyway, now you know more about my Weird Food Things than you wanted to. You're welcome!

This week in life lessons: Spending time with our friends in Goa, I got to love their philosophy about spending on little treats when you can. In their case, it was mainly with the groceries--nice wine, nice cold cuts, nice chocolate, but I have to say, it was nice having nice wine, even if I spent more on it than I would normally consider.

Yes, life is short, but life is also long, and you can either shrink yourself into a teeny-tiny corner of it and live out your days like that, smallened, or you can stretch across the whole length of your life bed, and shout into the corners so you've filled every bit.

I'm going to try letting loose a bit more, enjoy myself while I can. I'm not going to go crazy, blowing my entire budget on a five star hotel but I think I can afford a few of life's little luxuries without getting so goddamn anxious about all of it. Anxiety is such a wearing emotion.

This week in stuff I wrote: New myth column is up! This time, I talk about Nakul and Sahadev, the youngest of the Pandava brothers and whether they got a raw deal by being misters from another sister, so to speak.

Excerpt: We all know that ancient piece of gossip — Pandu, their dad, didn't actually father any of his five sons, since he was “under a curse” that meant he'd die if he ever had sex. (Sure, honey, it happens to everyone.) But the Pandavas' PR team is so good, we've all collectively decided that if they must be illegitimate, they must at least be sons of gods, the next best thing.

This week in stuff I liked on the internet

What was Krishna pointing at in that much-shared Mughal miniature of him supposedly indicating the Eid moon? Not that, says this very informative Scroll article. (Speaking of Scroll, they do a really good news roundup video every morning that you should totally watch. Fun and quick. You can get the link by signing up to their newsletter.)

Excerpt: Both paintings prominently show an ageing man dressed in a white tailored jama and coloured pyjamas. It is the presence of this man and his Mughal-looking costume that must have misled viewers into thinking Krishna was addressing a Muslim man. In fact, this is meant to be his stepfather Nanda. As he was known as the “king of the cowherds” or Nanda Raja, the artist has dressed him in the costume of the wealthy and powerful people of the day; this would be the jama and pyjama worn in Mughal and other related courts, with the patka sash tied around the waist and the atpati turban wound around his head.

And another Scroll article to round it off, what it's like to be the SECOND author out of IIT after Chetan Bhagat.

Excerpt: There I had been, intent on opening a dialogue with the Vikram Seths and Arundhati Roys of the world, on explaining how I was charting a new course in Indian English fiction, and here I was being skewered in ungrammatical terms for being a Me-Too novelist. I was indignant, but, since I had not made the successful transition to being a public figure that Bhagat had, my indignation only found outlet in gatherings of friends from IIT Delhi who delighted in my irritation and made it a point to stoke it at least once every time we met.

New ways to pamper your pet--and new ways to make a butt load of money.

Excerpt: Neuticles, one plugged-in acquaintance revealed, are prosthetic testicles for neutered pets. Kim Kardashian West’s boxer was Neuticled, as were Larry Flynt’s Doberman pinschers. Altogether over 500,000 animals have been surgically implanted with the silicone testes, according to Gregg A. Miller, who invented them in 1995.

Man, Prayaag's new fatherhood column is cracking me up.

Excerpt: For one thing, my wife barely acknowledges I exist either. When she does notice me hanging about the place, it’s as if she doesn’t really see me any more—she sees one of those inflatable dolls that were sold in the toy stores of our childhood, the ones that came up about knee-high, with the cute red clown nose that you could punch as sadistically as you liked and as often as possible, only to have it spring back up every time, grinning an insane grin.

Being a short man by the always brilliant David Sedaris.

Excerpt: I know that short straight men sometimes have it hard when it comes to finding a girlfriend, but I thought that for people like myself – “pocket gays,” we’re sometimes called – it was no hindrance. In retrospect, I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. The Washington Post has a regular feature in which they send two people out on a date and then check in to see how it went. Recently the couple was gay. Both stood more than six feet and listed in their “Deal-Breakers” box “short men”. They did not, I noticed, exclude white supremacists or machine-gun owners.

And finally, an obituary, run many years later, of Amrita Sher-Gil, who I would really, really like to read a novel about.

Excerpt: Sher-Gil died on Dec. 5, 1941. The cause was believed to be complications from a second, failed abortion performed by Egan, Dalmia wrote in her biography of Sher-Gil. She was 28 and was just gaining widespread popularity and taking on commissions.

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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