it's not just a problem for you

I would never fit either.
So what's the point?

Post travel blues

In my head, I was never going to be one of 'those' travellers who come back from a trip gushing and starry-eyed, "it changed my life!". But I think I came back with a little piece of my heart still in Saigon, unironically, in the sense that I still daydream about living there. And it won't be a stretch to say that I was really swept up in the magic that was night time Hoi An. I haven't looked at the pictures since because... just because.

I don't know what more to write. I've told the stories over and over, and while Saigon and Hanoi I've shared with people openly, Hoi An and Ha Long Bay I've kept to myself.

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What happened to the girl who couldn't get through the day without breaking down? She's been replaced by the girl who screams inside the car and runs around sounding manic on the phone. Healthier probably.

posting this from kl airport

because i can. now waiting to go to ho chi Minh city.

sleepy and crampy and grumpus. thank god i am not on Facebook and obligated to !!!!

there are white women here wearing skimpy tank tops that say NAM in hot pink. this has got to be interesting.

Skin

For a few hours after being waxed, skin feels like what it really is - rubber stretched over and folded up to make your body, keep all your organs inside. There's a weird detachment in touching and poking smooth, hairless skin, and for a moment you're aware - this is not how it should be.

I've been unselfconscious enough for the past few months to walk around hairy. I can say this time it was a choice, to put my skin through trauma and myself through an hour of silent self-beration.

A year or so ago, I didn't see the same person when I stood naked in front of the mirror. Funny how things change. Funny what love does. People jump continents and people burn villages for it. Funny what love is.

Life lessons from Candy Crush

1. If you play it for too long your wrist starts to hurt. 
2. Closing your eyes after playing it for half an hour, trying to clear your head of references and chapter structure and points to include and how little time is left, seriously results in psychedelic colour swirls behind your eyelids.
3. After playing it for an hour the screen looks pretty psychedelic and makes no sense.
4. Phone clocks get pretty messed up.
5. The promise of extra lives and getting through the quests without waiting for a day in between is not enough to make me rejoin Facebook.
6. That's all I got.

Delhi roads

I kept smelling blood all the way home tonight.

a house

Have spent the morning not working but prodigiously reading a blog, digging through her archives and everything. So comforting her posts are. Then I saw the comments on her posts and it got me thinking. This blog doesn't have comments, not even pageviews as Blogger has decided to kindly inform me.

I deleted my last few blogs because I was out of inspiration and patience. And to be honest, because I didn't get comments. Now, it's not an issue. I... don't want everyone I know to read what I write and think. When this poem got published, it gave me a panic cramp to think that it's up there, with my name on it. But then, it started to feel detached. So then I struggled for literally three hours with the decision to send out the link to people who wouldn't come across it otherwise. My friends were kind enough to reply with congratulations and "wah! I didn't know you wrote!" and I left it at that. It's not like I have some great treasure of poetry waiting to be shared. And then, of course, I very confidently showed it to a blowhard who felt the need to offer constructive criticism and like an idiot I felt totally shattered. For a while. The next morning I was detached again, but well, that solidified my decision to take a step I'd been meaning to take.

I do check back on that page to see if there are more comments. Which is very hypocritical of me, because I am AWFUL at leaving comments myself. [Attention to this is a result of my teenage years spent in LJ and many deleted LJ blogs]. Maybe I should leave a comment on that blog I was reading this morning. Or maybe I shouldn't spend the next one hour worrying about it. I don't know. These decisions shouldn't be so hard.

Maybe I should be ok with writing for myself. Even now one part of my brain is chiding me - you're using 'I' too much! There's no funny anecdotes in this post, why would anyone even WANT to read it!  There's no politics, no current affairs, no analysis, no insight into the human condition! You could just write this in your diary! - well, brain, maybe I won't. Maybe I will turn my mundane, blah-thinking brain inside out on the internet.

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Someone told me the story of Amrita Pritam last week. Women who make unconventional choices, girls who don't compromise, will be rewarded; with rewarding lives. A girl called me up yesterday and her problems mirrored mine, but with far worse circumstances, and she needs help in getting out of the house. I should be thankful, I should be strong.

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[There are some things I don't tell you. Please understand.]

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I titled this post so because one of things I like to think about when trying to de-stress is a house of my own. How it would look, from the inside and the outside, with what furniture and what food and bookshelves and potted plants I would populate it. I shared that with J one day to help him calm down enough to sleep and I think he liked that. He brought it up in normal conversations afterwards.

In times like these I feel a cold sense of superstition settling on my shoulders. What if what if what if my brain chants. Don't think don't talk don't want it says.

Well, traditionally, superstitions that are sanctified - lucky days on the Telugu calendar, rituals for the spring and all - result from a sense of insecurity and instability in the face of very high stakes. Harvests could fail, lives could be lost as a result of a single snake bite, each child born was a liability, whether alive or dead. All these practices and rituals and beliefs were to hopefully even out the uncertainties of capricious life with no systems of redress and no reliance on man-made justice.

One of the bong bigwigs, I think Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote about superstitions once - that private superstitions are fine, from sports day practices to pre-take off  rituals, as long as they're not public and don't influence public behaviour, something like that. So, footnoting that then, now the stakes feel so high in my head, and in my puny little individual life bound up in ambitions and relationships of love.

No one will love you the way you want or need.
They will only love you the way they know how.

Cause that's not the way the world is baby

Rhyming sits heavy and sluggish on my tongue, I'm not like you. These words come readymade, but they are never quite what I want to say; they are so much more. But not like how sometimes what I want to say feels too huge, too raw and yearning. See how inarticulate. And sometimes a constant, sweet ache in the hollow of my throat which is when one traditionally resorts to gibberish endearments, pressing artificial points of pain that ease that ache.

These are my little tricks. I will always try to impress you, that impulse has not yet passed.

Mending Wall, Robert Frost
[Soil Physics! Gettingit.]

The faithless, Marge Piercy
[Did you sleep ok?]

Maybe You'll Remember, Pablo Neruda
What it says.

I have lost my ENGAGEMENT RING If found please contact I will be very gratefull

My mother and I have fought again. It is completely awful; I really marvel at people who live at home but their parents aren't a big part of their lifespace, in an active or hurtful way. I also can't shake the little voice in my head telling me these are all histrionics, that I am actually fairly blessed to not live in something like an abusive household. I saw a notice stuck to the JNU library wall yesterday that panickily pled passersby for a lost engagement ring - now that must be an awful, awful spot to be in. Even in every best case scenario, the ring wearer must be beating themselves up inside their head.

I feel really alone in the silence of my room. I've been stuck here for the last four months, since J left, writing my MPhil. I would really, really like to be unstuck from this room, and no longer have to banish myself to my room everytime there's a fight, or there's some Telugu TV game show that I can't stand, or a phonecall. Space in this house is shrinking.

staircases

In a limbo state again, which is not conducive to peace of mind. This is not a time of happy relaxation with literally nothing to do but chill - which I would dearly love to have. Instead, I'm bogged down by worries and anxieties, more than ever - What's next? What about work? When do I get to move out? How much does it cost? When do I start feeling like an adult with some worth? How easy the MBA's have had it, it seems.

Introspection came easier during the period of MPhil writing; it's harder to do with so much free time. Perhaps because during MPhil everything was a way of procrastination, and nothing seemed more important than gazing into that screen of endless meaningless words. 

There's so much to do, so much to be done. I'm thankful that I'm not completely at loose ends; I'd go nuts. In the past couple of weeks I've done things that I've never tried before - took a kickboxing class, taught an MA class. I've bought a truckload of books that I'm looking forward to reading.

And yet, there's that niggling feeling that all these are things to just plug into the void of nothing to do. Things to do to pass the time till the next hurricane, the next transformation.

Someone in real life said the other day that they feel the return of the 80's feminist anger against all men. The ones on the street are lecherous assholes, the ones in our lives are conciliatory idiots who don't understand. 

Someone on the internet said making lists to organise their life made it easier to free up their brains to do other stuff. Maybe I'll try that.

independence day and chennai axepress

I'd vowed to boycott Chennai Express, bloody northies think they can get away with making a "parody" of southie movies, who do they think they are? Lungi Dance irritated the crap out of me too. But faced with an indulgent uncle willing to spend 325 rupees for me, I shrugged and caved. I was half dozing through the thing anyway, only engaged when Deepika and her ridiculously cute accent [and her bindi, what gorgeous] were on screen. I came out of the hall, and couldn't find it in me to bitch about how very loose and idiotic the plot was, how very tired the jokes and scenarios, how cliche and stupid the whole thing was. 

This may sound pretentious of me, but I didn't mind Chennai Express so much because all throughout the climax I had Ilaravasan in mind.

He married for love, and people died and died for it. He died for it. In the end when Shahrukh spouted off about girls who aren't free to marry for love don't have the right to celebrate independence day, I could only think of how fucked up caste and mafia-structure wise Tamil Nadu is, men aren't free to marry for love either. The whole of India really. Khap panchayats spare none, "honour killing" doesn't always differentiate.  And reading about abandoned NRI brides, diasporic India as well. Love is fucked up. There's that incident in JNU, that had us students in a daze for a few days - a country revolver that refused to fire, an axe turned on a girl, poison that killed the boy finally, all in the name of love. 

And it's a total stretch of course, to connect the two. But, man, in the CGI-d heartland of Tamil Nadu, to watch Shahrukh get beat up and make a speech and get to go away with the girl he wants to be with -- Ilaravasan never got to do that. He never would have. Such escapist fantasy it was, I couldn't help that feeling of looking at the screen with a sigh, oh if only. If only life was slightly more like Bollywood, if only life followed principles such as looking past caste/community/religion/class to look at people's "hearts" because they've survived being supremely beaten up, if only a village protected him and his wife, if only he got to live and love. 

I always think about bit in Arundhati Roy's book, about love laws - laws that decide who can love whom and how much.

Man, what are our movies doing to us.