sometimes I play an important part as audience. as someone who will feel the story, feel it's horror and disgust and feel each thread of its messy moral dilemmas tug and shred my heart. someone who will get into the character, feel his pain his desperation - that which makes him adopt a story in which he is not his daughter's father, so that she is no longer haunted by his life and his stories. I can also see her demons come alive just as they do for her, while in the moment separating myself and watching as if an out of body experience; that little shield saves me from going where there's no coming back from, that she wouldn't have. I can feel that loss of grasp too, even though she is just a story. I also feel responsible and complicit, on both sides, on all sides, because I am her and him and them who traumatize them. and I am me too, the one on the outside of it all, protected and unscathed and probably therefore somehow the reason. 

we all play a part, each complicated and with unforeseen impact. the important thing is not to let their stories fade. so watch Stateless on Netflix and let yourself in.

life is coming apart at the seams these days. I can't believe the things I'm having to do. I flit between hopelessness and anger at the world. In fact, if not for the anger, it would be hard to wake up every day and continue on from where I left the night before. 

Apparently I am too old for entry level AP positions in govt funded universities. In the US, I had gotten used to people telling me that discrimination based on age (or anything else) was illegal. Here, they close the door for you at 35. Plus, a school got back to me saying I wasn't eligible because I didn't have first class in my Masters degree; regardless of my PhD. They asked me if I had a second masters in which I could show first class. The irony is that an American PhD contains a masters in it but most of us don't bother to get a degree for that lesser milestone cos we have bigger things on our minds. So guess what, now I have enrolled as a masters student again, at my alma mater, to use my past coursework to get a new degree. So I am doing another masters now, five years after finishing my PhD.

Going through setting up and activating my student account, communicating with admin and academic advisors, is driving me nuts. Plus because the degree will only now come at the end of fall 2020 semester, I am requesting an official letter certifying that I finished the course requirements in the past and stating my GPA that can be translated by Indian authorities into a class/division. And guess what, after repeatedly asking the academic advisor to include my GPA in this said letter, I received it without it. I already have a masters degree, so a letter stating that I completed requirements for another is useless to me without also certifying a first class equivalent.

Arrgh. 

On top of that since June the interviews have started again after 3-4 months of coronavirus shocks. But nothing has so far translated into an offer. People just keep talking with me, and talking again and again. 

Oh yeah also mother in law keeps going on about the "beauty of Hinduism" and ranting against minority religions. Forget how I deal with it, more important is how hubby loses his shit on the phone with her and then roams around with chronic sullenness. If it goes on, I will have to ask her to stop calling. I have anyway stopped talking to her, maybe once in a fortnight I show her my face on his videocall or sound out a hello. I've stopped bothering any more than that. There's too much shit in this world anyway, to allow polite nodding in response to more.

we are watching The Handmaid's Tale on top of that. Quite a mirror for our world these days, maybe not literally in every sense, but you can always recall or find some event/context in this world we live in that matches the horror in the show. 

I keep wondering, how do people bring kids into this world? 

Oh yeah I forgot a more interesting detail to the whole first class masters eligibility requirement. A couple years ago someone had forwarded a news piece about automatic future eligibility for PhDs from well ranked universities from abroad. So when above school said the requirement was from MHRD, I dug up the facts. Found a UGC requirement for 55percent (not even first class) in masters that had been scrapped in 2018 to allow automatic eligibility for PhDs from universities ranked globally in top 500 according to some rankings. Dug up the rankings, forwarded all of it together to the communicating person. No acknowledgement, no reply. So I don't know if they threw my application in the waste bin or not.

How can one go through this life without anger??

Update: so I now know that I was wrong, UGC rules apply to universities, not to institutes of national importance like IITs and IIMs, that are the bulk of where my CV has gone. Apparently, AICTE regulates those and most rules are based on engineering and physical science timelines; most of those ppl probably don't work before going for a PhD. Anyway. 35 is the age cap both for entry level school teachers and assistant professors in this country even though eligibilty between those two differs by a 5-6 yrs PhD!!

some people write so badly. reading their writing gives me this ugh feeling, and it has nothing to do with the subject of their writing. it's about how difficult it is for those words they forced in those sentences to be together. there's this one guy whose writing in general is pretty good, and then when he thinks he is writing poems, oh my god, the rhymes are so forced it's almost like the words have been forced to copulate together under some threat. there's this other gal who writes as if it's an excuse to use big words in her sentences, and as if she still hasn't learned how to form them smoothly. and these are two people who think they write well. so therefore they post their prose and poetry on facebook, the platform where good writing gets discovered, where amateurs practice and depend on their audience's impartial criticism <sarcasm>. in response, people rave about their writing; god knows who these people are. I've thought many times of leaving an honest comment, "your rhyme is very forced. your prose on the other hand is beautifully written." Or, to the gal, "please don't write, just to use words that don't belong together." but of course I can't do that. 

recipe, for 7 years later

about 7 years ago I ate dinner some evening, alone in some lil eatery behind a produce market in Jerusalem. today when I stared into our fridge vegetable tray, wondering what to cook, and saw these beautiful round eggplants, bought about a week ago but still taut and fresh (eggplants in India are v fresh that way, the tiny ones and the long ones often get worms v quick but the big round ones somehow defy them), I suddenly had this strong sense of recreating that dish. so here goes, what I did with the memory of my tastebuds and the ingredients available in my kitchen and fridge. 

first things first: the dish uses some ground red meat in its original form, but I took out a couple chicken kebabs from our freezer in lieu of that. Let aside to thaw.

Slice eggplants to resemble the pieces of an orange, not too thick, about an inch of skin at its widest on each slice. On a flat pan, cook these in olive oil (eggplants and extra virgin go very well), with some salt and pepper. Each slice on both sides of the bare flesh. I did two eggplants. You can cover the pan on low heat for more even cooking.

Slice some onions, squash and peel some garlic, and slice a tomato or two. Brown the garlic and onions in olive oil on a wok (while the eggplants are cooking on the other burner). By now the meat should have thawed. Chop it up if it's not ground. Throw it in once the onions are brown. Cook a lil, and then throw in the tomatoes. Stir in some salt and pepper, if meat doesn't already have some spice in it. Can add other masala too in that case (I didn't need to, but I'd suggest powdered cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, etc.). Cover on low heat. Throw in a tablespoon or two of coconut milk and stir and cover. When meat is kinda done, and the tomatoes soft, add some tomato puree as well. Stir, cook a bit, add water, bring to boil, and simmer and cover. 

The original had some pinenuts, but I used frozen corn from the freezer instead for similarity of shape, color, crunch, and sweetness. Throw it in and let simmer covered. 

When u feel like the meat gravy is kinda done, taste for salt. Dip the cooked eggplant slices in. Push them in to submerge in the gravy and simmer just a lil bit more. Turn off the gas/heat. You can add chopped cilantro/coriander or some other herb. Can eat with naan/bread/rice/paratha or even some plain noodles if u want. The flesh of eggplants should literally melt in your mouth. Lick your plate clean after.