"am I good enough?" I read that in some review of M. Obama's recent book 'Becoming', that that question underlies every phase of her life narrated in her autobio. to me it gives an immediate sense of humility, maybe even of insecurity of losing one's achievements, also of strife and struggle that makes every achievement more precious and viewed with more distrust, almost un-believingly.

yet it is possible to have that question gnawing inside you all the time while lacking humility, while being afraid that you overestimate yourself. maybe because 'good enough' does not have an external scale, but is measured against an internal one, that keeps adjusting, moving, fading, colliding with one's perceptions of others.

how do class, birth, and social privileges manifest themselves in one's self-opinion? and how does a big exogenous shock to one of those settings in which one finds oneself, shake those indelible markers of opinion? how do relationships change it, if they are honest enough to present truths about us, fairly or harshly worded?

last evening I suddenly got tear-ily nostalgic about my early twenties. about the people I found then in life, many of who have stayed, but don't feel the same as then now. all the tests I have put myself to since then, have altered the sense of entropy I had then. it was probably the last time in my life when I felt confident and bursting with potential, although acutely aware of my weaknesses but at the same time endowed with a sense of being able to fix them. and yet after falling a million times I feel happier in my withering than I could have ever imagined it then. I have evolved wings, and fins, and filters too. and have learned how to do the penguin walk for fear of slipping and falling on my face.

some people I now keep bumping into take me back but not in a good way. what is it really? do they remind me of myself screaming with my friends while we stood frozen between zooming cars in Dhobi Talao (those friends I no longer call friends), or me yelling 'asshole' affectionately at the guy for who I had a mixture of disdain and fascination because he seemed something I knew I would never become, or me in those years when I started to become myself how at first I had to find my tongue again and therefore often blurted things I shouldn't have in civil company and started to give in to lost temper with those around me. No I have considered all of these. I think what they remind me of is the self-centeredness one realizes in early adolescence after the awkwardness of the teens melts away and one feels for the first time like one is in control and that one understands deeper meanings in life and loves. this comes to stay, but without an honest critical lover or friend, or life that knocks one down time and again, it becomes a little obnoxious.

"her eyes stared vacantly at mine every time I told her a tale, but sparkled when she cut in to our conversation with a completely off-track statement that centered attention back at her. she couldn't stop talking, or voicing aloud that she was drunk. "

from now on, in family gatherings I should talk less and write what they are talking instead. I'll call it the ludicrous journal cos they do say such ludicrous things. so far I tried to argue, tried to get them to see sense, to rationalize what they were saying and what their words implied. but I only agitate myself, and it gives them pleasure - to see my logic be frustrated because they simply deny it. and they continue to bait me in this, cos it is a source of entertainment for them.

I have sometimes ignored it, sometimes zoned off, sometimes categorically refused to engage in their futile conversation.

today for the first time I tried Lockwood's tactic - of giving them more of what they desire to such an extreme so as to expose their ludicrousness. the journal is yet another of hers I plan on emulating.

today this is what happened.

background: my mother in law knows I don't share her laughs on the issue of sexually abused women (or people as I like to think) coming out with their stories after many many years. she finds it funny, both the issue itself and that it angers me that she finds it funny.

so today she forwarded some 'joke' poking fun at accusations of sexual assault after years of the episode having occurred. where else? but on whatsapp. I don't read whatsapp forwards, so I didn't read this one. it was however followed by a message addressed to me, in the family group (my dad in law, her, hubby, his brother and sis in law, and me), saying exactly the following:

"__, apologies but there is a lighter side to serious issues. Has taken me courage to forward it on ___ (this group)."

it made me glance at the forward before it. I still did not read it through but caught the words: Jill .. Jack ... sexually assaulted her ... 102 years ago ... ... and laughter emojis.

My reply:

"Mummy you have freedom of speech and I have freedom to not read whatsapp fwds. but haan try and read 'rape joke'. By Patricia Lockwood. she was raped by her bf when she was a teen."

Mummy: "Yes - we live in a free world. What you refer to is certainly not humour. But this bit of not having courage earlier, in the me too movement by so many does amaze."

me: "Do not doubt Lockwood's humor."

Mummy did not reply. nor I believe did she look for and read 'rape joke'. but you my reader must, its quite something.


aside: its actually funny how people who laugh at rape and sexual abuse and victims' 'courage', cannot even grant victims the right to laugh at these very ideas themselves.

Patricia Lockwood is quite brilliant (she didn't even go to college because she had a strange dad who killed her chances by not saving money for his kids' college education). that's her below, writing about the sexual misconduct cover-ups in churches.

"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine - it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to choose the secrets you've been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

In the not-so-far future, Bishop Finn will be forced to resign by Pope Francis, who is proving to be a figure worthy of some study. My father will publish a letter of staunch support in the church bulletin, suggesting that the bishop was being persecuted for his conservative beliefs, that in fact he had committed no crime at all, and that the prosecutor in his case was a mercenary with "strong ties to the abortion industry." I will be so disheartened by this that I can barely speak to him or meet his eyes for weeks. Though later he will tell my mother, with perhaps the first stirrings of doubt, "I'm beginning to think any one of them would have done it. That the position is more powerful than the man."

i am lonely, conceited, proud, and a self-made failure. what do I do now?

it cannot be a coincidence. a lot of my last few posts have been about reading, the act of it, the process of identifying with the author and with the character, the religion of it, loyalty to it, about how mostly I've been left alone to love it. etc. etc. for the first time in my life also, the words I've been reading have been coming from people as old as me, almost, round about. this is the age when geniuses begin to shine, have been noticed, been known and start to live upto their introductory fame, and often to overtake that. one of the last few writers I got impressed by - and then felt disappointed by because all her books are like that, beginning with a lot of excited promises, then they pause midway somewhere, kinda lose what they were trying to do and then become little shadows of themselves and wither into some endings - got her PhD the same year that I did, went on a road trip through a similar route that I did (a little before in time than me but hey I didn't know that then), got pulled over and was scared by it in Arizona somewhat like I was. and now this writer I'm reading and am totally in love with right now is guess how old?! just about two months older than me. its not a coincidence, its a sign. but some signs die out, repeatedly, stopping short of manifesting what they portend.

one thing is clear. I will die with an unfinished book on my kindle, in my hands, near my pillow, or wherever or on whatever futuristic device people will be reading in those years. I will die with some future plan of travel, if my death still has an element of surprise in it for me; if not I might die while traveling if I plan it. but in saying this I'm assuming Sartre was right and that my life then - the last few moments of it - will be much like my life now. its funny when I was a young adolescent I once told an aunt that she would find me more than 10 years later still wearing my favorite pair of tights and t-shirt that I was in then. when I was young(er) I believed more that I was an old soul, and as I am increasingly addressed as 'aunty' by kids playing on the road, I've stopped asserting that to myself. I don't even know when I threw those tights and if they had even earned it with any holes in them. many things in fact get trashed now because my marriage is too old to count anymore, and one's husband has to see too much of the things one loves too much. at some point you have to sacrifice one love for another.

about that by the way. I don't remember too many people writing this in too many books but the tenderness in one's marriage grows with the waistline of the husband even though occasions of sex (or the desire for it, or is it quite the contrary and age and this country kill desire by making it ludicrous when there's more urgent stuff always to take care of) dwindle, and a rubbing of cheeks and a peck on the ear feel lazily satiating. and yet I want to share more and more with him. so much so that I have become a running commentary on our surroundings, our friends, his friends, our family, the movies (and other things) we watch, don't watch, pretend to watch, and are forced to watch for lack of choice. I have become like my mother but only in the volume of talk that comes out of me. the nature of it is thankfully different. in short, I am my version of my mother. and I don't even have enough lived life and experienced suffering to my claim. not even the accidental or planned creation of new life for my entertainment that grows out of its purpose, and therefore not even the torment at its (his or her) hands. all that I have gifted myself is a pointless continuous rebellion without a goal and in the process lots of lost friends and earned detesters. and I do have enough to be ashamed of. time to write that book. only if I can muster the guts to come out clean. before I'm much older than the people I read.

okay, buckle up. its time to get some discipline in life and finally grow up. somehow it took this month of travel back in amreeka for this to dawn on me, and not the whole of the year gone by in which it now seems I've aged a million years.

this really needs putting down on paper.

I recently turned 36 (I often forget what age I am, not because I'm already suffering from a degenerative mind but because the calculation of years doesn't agree with my intuitive feeling of age and therefore I often let my mind mislead me. in that too, I'm not special), and hubby and me have been traveling for almost 3 weeks now, combining summer work and visiting family and hiking and driving and all the things we miss in the place we now live. as a result, for the first time in 36 years I had the feeling of being homeless: I said bye to him cause we were flying to different destinations out of different terminals at the airport today, and I worked my way to my gate. on getting there I sat down to adjust and pocket all important things in my hands and well just to think about how to spend the next few hours of waiting. and as soon as my bum touched the seat, I felt a lil afraid, a lil lost, a lil lonely. of course I blamed the desi lifestyle for it, the getting used to having people around you all the time such that one cannot spend time alone at all. but then it wasn't just loneliness; I am now a lil also fatigued and as with any longterm travel I suddenly yearned to go home. that was soon followed by a questioning - where is home? I don't know. for the first time in my life there is no place I think of when I yearn to go home, and its not because I'm transitioning or 'shifting' or 'moving' from one home to another.

I wasn't alone in this apparently. he kept forgetting and thinking that he was flying back home, to DC, and had to keep reminding himself that he wasn't.

the one thing, the only thing, that I appreciate, been given time to live in Delhi in these days, is feeling part of the social upheaval and of the huge female emancipation that is going on in India right now. the focus on women in Indian movies, the emphasis on their point of view, on their desires, their pleasures, their sexuality, their freedoms, their refusal (and slow societal acceptance of this) of the social roles they had so far been forced into.

there are many symptoms of this. women are much better accepted in social outdoor spaces today than they were when I lived in this country the last time. men actually maintain their physical distance now and keep their eyes to themselves, and seem to be less lecherous than I remember them being (hubby says this is a function of my age or rather my aging body). women can wear what they want and men are getting used to it. single women and divorced women are more common today than before, and families are so much more okay with that. women refuse to have kids if they don't see themselves fitting that role, and with this although people still keep "helping and advising" against it, their talk is becoming more futile (and they realize that) and is being met with more opposition. and of course, household chores are being so much better shared between the sexes, and most important of all, there is much less co-habiting with in-laws in younger married couples' lives. of course, I'm only talking about the upper strata of urban society, but just that is a huge improvement.

and bad as they are, Indian movies are getting better, more realistic, sometimes overdoing it a lil to tip the scales away from the earlier bias. but still worth it all. lust stories latest of them all. but even veere di wedding. although I still don't understand why the objectionable part in the movie for some of the audience was a woman masturbating on screen; it should instead have been her being embarrassed about it enough to be blackmailed for it and also for considering it an act of "cheating on her partner". really?!! it will probably take India some more time to understand how natural masturbation is.

its been 2/3rds of a year us having moved back to India. some of what people told us: "your life is over, you won't be able to travel like this there" has come true; some of what we were afraid of has splashed over the top of our expectations and bewildered us, broke us out in sweat, and left us literally gasping with our tongues hanging out like dogs. I notice I have written a lot less here during all of this, precisely because. and now Tony is dead, killed himself (?) and Tony used to write regularly. most people are stunned to hear of his suicide because they thought he had it all; why did he want an escape from the dream life. I am saddened because I thought he had figured it all; what then did he fail to come to terms with. there's this video on youtube (yes, we continue to watch more than a few of those almost everyday, even now) where he talks about going into a deep depression for days because of a bad hamburger. if I had seen that before, I'd have thought he was kidding around. but now, what do you say to that now? in the same video he talks about being really affected (saddened) by a quote by Orwell: "a human being is like a tube to stuff food into...". the full quote from Goodreads is below.

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”

apparently this struck a nerve with Bourdain because he ate his way through the world for a living - he stuffed food into himself. Ironically, Tony was one rare chef and food enthusiast who provides an answer to what Orwell finds curious: Tony is one rare foodie who has become a 'statue', and yet one whose words and actions will be remembered long after his burial. what's sad then is that Tony took this quote and derived some sense of futility out of it, some sense of being an inanimate, useless, food stuffing, tube. when he was in fact the polar opposite of that. what was remarkable about Tony was not his understanding and appreciation of good food, but his curiosity of why and how that food, and by who. his ultimate interest always were the people. and he possessed (or curated) such 'extreme empathy' (new yorker's words) for people all around the world, of all shapes and colors and ideologies, that in that he was almost super human. much higher above than all the food he ever ate. I admired him for that. I felt like he and Michael Palin were/are similar in that, to some extent.

Tony was a cancerian by the way, a few days (and many years) before my birthday. and he used to say "be humble".

my country is like gaol

desperately needed some dose of idealism. it was high time I read Nehru. this below, from the pages of 'An Autobiography':

"Fortunately almost everybody in that barrack was known to me, and there were many friends. But the utter want of privacy, all day and night, became more and more difficult to endure. Always the same crowd looking on, the same petty annoyances and irritations, and no escape from them to a quiet nook. We bathed in public and washed our clothes in public, and ran round and round the barrack for exercise, and talked and argued till we had largely exhausted each other's capacity for intelligent conversation. It was the dull side of family life, magnified a hundred-fold, with few of its graces and compensations, and all this among people of all kinds and tastes. It was a great nervous strain for all of us, and often I yearned for solitude. In later years I was to have enough of this solitude and privacy in prison, when for months I would see no one except an occasional gaol official. Again I lived in a state of nervous tension, but this time I longed for suitable company. I though then sometimes, almost with envy, of my crowded existence in the Lucknow District Gaol in 1922, and yet I knew well enough that of the two I preferred the solitude, provided at least that I could read and write. "

infidel preferences

can having choice reverse preference? I hadn't realized the fading of my love for India till my choice of flying out was taken away. maybe in the same way, people from other countries find India romantic because they can come and go when they want.

is this similar to marriage? do people feel chained by marriage, and is that in itself the cause that they unravel? theoretically, marriage shouldn't change anything though, togetherness should always be preferential, optional. walking out is open.

but borders have visas. and passports. and nationalities. and love doesn't decide any of these.

...

on a different note: I never was a fan of Konkona Sen Sharma, other than in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (she is also good in the recent Lipstick Under MY Burkha). there was something about her in most other movies which felt overdone. I remember I once shared a flight with her, and was completely unimpressed by the excitement in the air (pun intended). then recently I saw her directorial debut. my mind was blown. I think she found her purpose in life. she was born to bring that story to life on the screen, the story of Shutu, Mimi, Tani, Vikram, and the Bakshis. if she died now, she shouldn't feel sad. but I guess she should live on some more. after all it looks like she has just become herself (you can kinda see that in the way she dresses too, as if she wears clothes only that resemble her skin her soul). but yes, she can now never create anything anymore and her life would be accounted for.

I'm still searching, I'm still trying different garbs. nothing seems to fit.

coming back though, regardless of how brilliant her movie is, it depresses me, not because of the tragedy in it, but because it spells out yet one more aspect, one more thing about India(ns) that I hate and that hurts me.

strangely, few people I know who saw the movie, seemed to have understood the last scene. and I guess none of us would have got it if she hadn't revealed it in the first scene. so the movie works better if you're streaming it or watching it such that you can go back to the first scene after the last. if the big screen is where you saw it, the likelihood is greater you will misunderstand, cos then you will think you know, misled by a combination of your memory and your self pity. cos each of us was Shutu at some point. Konkona too. Vikram too. but Shutu cannot grow up alone, if Vikram doesn't, if Mimi doesn't, if Tani doesn't. one cannot drive safely on Indian roads unless everyone does. but we in India don't learn how to grow up. I guess it says something about the self pity in our lives that we feel good with aggression behind the wheels.

rebirth

I'm back here, after ranting aimlessly and complaining endlessly about a sudden turn of events (and location) in my life. with an epiphany of sorts. I don't have to be here. and I don't have to be a star either. I can just be. even within my average (lack of) achievements and my average constraints, I can still choose, quite a lot. and I can still do, quite a lot.

as I understand myself better, and this world, as I grow older, many things become clearer.
1. It never makes sense to do something for the sake of doing something, despite what they tell you.
2. All those "someday I will ... " , what day are they waiting for? Don't expect life and time to be patient with you.
3. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, even if just to prove you to yourself. But you must have patience with life.
Do (1) and (3) seemingly contradict each other? Or do (2) and (3) do so? But if they do, then they must only for those who don't really understand, and that shouldn't stop you from writing them.

some words emerge out of the chaos between what I've been taught and told, and what I've managed to forget and unearth. privilege. access. sharing. time. effect.

there are many trade-offs in life. but one will always be in some form, in many different scenarios, that to change yourself or not. some vices are dear, and would alter one's character too much. what is the story one wants to leave behind, even if one leaves no one to remember.