You do find it. Redeemable, I mean.

It is a story about a comedian’s (allegedly) failed relationship where he get’s obsessed at figuring out exactly why did his girlfriend of four years break up with him. I have been that girlfriend. I have been the girl in a relationship for 6 years and broken up with a guy I love(d), without having the full breadth of strength and patience (and frankly, the ability) to explain the why. I am sure it led him into the madness. As knowing that, I will never really be able to translate my why to him, led me into the madness. A lot of people, most of the people, tell you to sit with the bad things that happen to you, because, that’s also where the good stuff comes from. Alderton takes the longer route in explaining, it is like making lemonade from lemons, you have to make the good stuff out of it, the bad is well, just really good material for it.

Sure, lemon is after all, a great ingredient.

And for Andy (our comedian guy we are supposed to root for), this stands true. His failing career as a comedian is given a chance at resurrection when his breakup becomes the star focaccia instead of the indigestible sour dough he usually serves (bad analogy, I know). The yeast to his rise, his breakup leads him through invention of a credit system to be able to talk about his ex in front of his friends, ( honestly, this part I really liked, because who hasn’t dreaded knowing when you are using your last credit about talking about your ex before your friends decide they have had enough), have an inverse proportion of deleting carbs to drink alcohol, (because you gotta look hotter but drink to commemorate the rite of passage of a breakup). He befriends a 78 year old guy and moves in with him who gives one of the best advices to men in accord to women, I have ever come across. “Life is a bit more difficult for women. More difficult than it is for us, I mean. And you don't need to ask them to explain why or understand it all. You just need to be nice to them.” He tries to get obsessed with self care, diet and girls younger than him, learns that you have to block them because you love them, and to accept that it is okay being pathetic for a while. But most of all, he learns how to write that feeling into his material. Not before he really fucking seems irredeemable.

This article isn’t for Andy and the obvious metaphor of his journey. It’s Jen’s.

At 30 she has what every 21 starting out in the adult world, girl wants in her life, minus the guy. So Jen gets one, not just a guy, but one she really seems to love. He makes her laugh and has 90% of what she wants, it is the 10% that is missing. Jen is amazing, chalant and cool in a way where she cares. She is not afraid of being alone, in fact she is quite good at being alone. But at 34, even after having the guy, she doesn’t really believes that this is the life she wants for herself. She can not believe that even when you love the good guy so much, he will be insecure, not care about you in ways that you want, be self obsessed and sometimes even be insensitive. And you will be asked to accept these as a small price to sacrifice to be in a relationship.

For Jen, it doesn’t make sense, because is this what is the price to be involved in her girlfriend’s club? of all those who grew up with her but can no longer be with her, if she doesn’t jumps over to their curb? The crystal clear vulnerability with which Alderton writes the skepticism of the person wary of joining a club where they doesn’t know if they belong to, makes your skin crawl with the times you have felt the same.

It’s not only a book about a woman navigating the social pressures of life, especially the institutions of marriage and of the evil time crunching biological clock, it is more so about how people who are supposed to be your allies in this, in being able to resist it, figure it out, or just support you, often start making you feel isolated in it. Any woman who has hit her mid 20s, would know what I am talking about.

It takes Jen being in a decently good relationship for four years to know she doesn’t wants to be in one. And especially not in this one. Categorically, their relationship can not be termed bad, in what we are used to hearing from our friends, family, books, and knowledge about realistic relationships, it’s an okay one in the least. Knowing with clarity that she is okay being alone, irrespective of loving Andy, is her good material out of this bad breakup. Even at 35.

There is this wonderful line where Jane, her bestfriend says to Jen, “be alone, Jen. You know how to be alone without being lonely. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how much I wish I could do that? It’s a wonderful thing you’ve got going on there.” It surmounts to permission you don’t often give yourself because no one around you gives it to themselves, and it makes me wonder, how often do we need to hear it from other people before we start accepting it ourselves.

Alderton’s work gives me hope, because even when the world pressures a woman to have it figured out by her earliest, we need more stories, literature and representation of women, who don’t know if what they are expected of is something they want to fulfil yet. You especially need the messy, the volatile, the unaccounted for to keep reoccurring in voices you listen, read, and see to feel okay about figuring out. Period. Age no bar. Jen’s rumination’s are most girl’s nightmare, not just to find themselves at 35, childless and unmarried, but even questioning four years into a relationship with a person you love if even you want it. Jen voices that fear out, and still is able to make a good material out of the bad.

I would rate this book a solid 4 out of 5. For all the Jen’s in this world, and what they do for us.

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I am falling in love with my COUNTRY! And the YOUTH right now. Because CJP (”Cockroach Janta Party”) on its whims & the country’s youth’s fancy just pulled off a masterstroke from Gandhi’s playbook! A non-violent ( at least on one end like always) protest that shook the very rooted, very strong, unshakeable majority ruling party, the infamous BJP, who had to surrender their Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to the demands of Gen Z! They won this fascinatingly, through love, memes, reels and through unquieting determination. And in such a wholesome, beautiful way it made me smile every single hour that I was aware of what was happening on ground (and digitally).

It roughly took them 36 days of protest at Jantar Mantar, coupled with the hunger strike of Sonam Wangchuk who endured a 26-day hunger strike, along with three student activists who upheld fasting for justice. The CJP gave a call for a march, naming it “Sansad Chalo” on 20th July ‘26, which was one of the biggest, most charged and jubilated crowds I have seen and felt in my life. I went because my sister really insisted on being there, so I went with her along with my flatmate.

Anyway, half hungover, eating an egg & a protein bar, we reached the area adjoining Jantar Mantar, at the crossroads of Janpath metro station, gate 2. Only to realise — it’s BIG! It’s incredible. And I had downplayed it every possible time I had the opportunity.

What came out of these protests?

• Police brutality against (upper)caste, innocent young students was what it took to move a whole country, a country that would not have felt for those same children had they been Muslim, or on the fringes of society. People finally saw the Delhi "police" for what they are: the state's — (Shah's)— extension, [the] banality of evil in uniform. It really took students whose identity couldn’t be questioned, being beaten up for this to become an overnight sensational movement. They used lathis, pellet guns, tear gas, even bullets (in Bihar's Jehanabad) & bashed heads, legs, children & women. They cried & still came back for more.

  

• If I can’t dance then it’s not my revolution. I realised you can make fun of yourself in the process of asking someone ( the whole ass govt!) to take you seriously. If you can’t laugh, find a way to spread joy, then it won’t be contagious enough to spread.

• I’ve read earlier that revolution was televised — the Gulf Wars, the American narratives spun on TV’s and wars streamed on television. We are in an age where the revolution happens online, digitally, & then transforms on the ground. The digital platforms are no longer windows into revolution, it is the door. Time passes & it stands true for two truths, what’s revolution today will be conservative tomorrow. And each generation gets their own revolution & the responsibility for one.

  

• The level & quantity of pure gold memes/edits/creative sloganeering and sentiment-swaying this protest created, will go down in the history. PR of a protest lies on the combination of the audio to the visual and is directly proportional in its power to win the narrative and the battle. The level of emotional outpouring I have felt in a week has paralleled my most emotionally swaying era of having gone through 2020’s CAA-NRC protests.

  

• I am grateful there’s a resolution, even if it’s an ill-baked one. It’s still a step taken. It thrills me that this reality they ( and we) have shaped is negotiable. It doesn’t need permission to rebel, to question yet. That there is strength in numbers & the numbers still have strength inside them. Everyone wanted to be a part of this, however they could, by amplifying, or sending food, by emailing/calling, or helping those who could help. In making reels, raging through sloganeering, placards and tweets. Through smiling at the end of a screen and hitting the like, share button. Demanding.

  COURAGE is incredibly contagious. And combine that with JOY, and this combination was a beauty to behold and hold the government to one’s demands.

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Watching a movie made 14 years ago, it firmly stood the test of time and changing audiences both. The soundtrack stays with you long after you have slept and the story clings to you in a familiar manner of hope and chance that good bollywood movies gives you. Like Akira questions, ‘Kya aisa pyaar ab bhi ho sakta hai?, Mujhe bhi mil sakta hai"?’. It subtly leaves you swaying in the questions of what love is without madness, whether it has any merit in it if there is not unwavering faith in it, unquestionable wait in it.

It ignited a beautiful feeling in me, of nostalgia of past dreams and a hope for a future inlaid with more passion. Akira’s passion for making movies, working for discovery channel and travelling the world, echoes the classic early 2010’s millennial dreams of globe trotting, leaving a world of responsibilities to explore one’s own desire. From YJHD, ZNMD, the yearning for travelling wasn’t simply about getting to see the world but the possibility that you get to go out of your own little world, wrapped in the secure yet claustrophobic embrace of your home towns. It made me yearn not for Akira’s life, of being 21 and wanting a career so badly to kickstart at the seams of courage and blinding optimism but of Yash Chopra. Of your passion morphing your life and becoming your partner as you walk through life. “ Tumhare kadam se kadam milane wala, tumhari aankhon mai aakhein daal kar , tumhara dil chura le”.

It seems that SRK is onto something when he insists on finding that source of passion in your most intense emotions towards something, even if it is in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, “ek tarfa pyar ki taqat hi kuch aur hoti hai; auron ke rishton ki tarah yeh do logon mein nahi bat'ti; sirf mera haq hai ispe.” It’s owning upto your emotions giving in, Ghalib’s “ek aag ka dariya hai, issey doob kai nikalna hai”, how lucky are those who can drown and survive on the other side. It is a metaphorical substance to be burned in the passion and yearn for it in the middle of it all, Jab Tak Hai Jaan.

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I realize that it is not plainly true of a woman, but of women. I found Flea Bag a phenomenally good series, so good that I have a poster of Phoebe Bridge covering my walls, smoking up and I regularly believe I break the fourth wall of my life talking to her. But there is an excruciating simple reason, we, women, like her. We almost resent how much we find it relatable (at least I can speak for myself). I am a woman who has made many, several mistakes, and I found it relieving that there is space for such a woman in an audience, not a male one, who can project their worst fears and patch her up with a mutiny of immoral adjectives, but a female audience. To portray in surprising prickling honesty, the normalcy of being messed up, and to view it not from the lens of a societally prescribed character of a woman but of a woman. Period.

We view oneself outside out of ourselves, the constant perception is shaped by what we consume, where we travel, what we read, watch, engage with, talk and are treated like. We validate what we are, we are not, or what we should be through external representation. This representation has again a phenomenally advantageous

masculine design, when it comes to characterizing women in media. According to my theory, mostly this can be divided in two kinds of representation.

The first are the overtly pretty, kind, humble, accommodating, innocent, life happens for them and not to them, they deserve so much, yet they are always going a step further with doing more, being more, the perfect daughter, wife, mother, sister, friend. Always aspiring to be perfect. Now pick any movie, and I can guarantee there is one such character that fits the bill. Even if not all the bills, the aspiration is just there. These are the woman to whom life happens, it’s either someone else fucking around them, them getting involved in a catastrophe of not their own fault, they get cheated on, or they do something bad, but again there is a perfectly good excuse for it. There is a Oh, poor you moment just hidden there. You feel bad for them, they didn’t deserve it. They are innocent, the good girl getting hit because life happens to them. Things can get restored sure yea, but again, it is a sort of ingenuine representation of a perfect person being cornered.

The second is the mind numbingly sexy, confident, selfish and almost anti-heroine for their own good. This representation is a salivating tongue twister for both the male and the female gaze. She is a man eater, she has done everything to possess her beauty for her benefit, defies expectation and will not submit socially. She is smart, if she fucks up? Who cares, she doesn’t. But if she does, she resolves. She can explain, fix it and in return is not to be messed around with. Girl boss is a real phenomenon and I submit willingly to it. This representation is also, unreal. We infact can not engineer ourselves out from committing a mess if we can be extravagantly fashionable, confident, rich or hyper self-aware, emotion repelling, logic magnets. There is men for that.

Any of these representation, does not has space for an actual woman. Enters Fleabag. Now, Fleabag is extremely disruptive. It particularly fails to fall in either category, refreshing as it is that is directed by Phoebe herself, it doesn’t caters to the male gaze or infact the traditional or the feminist, raging, self justifying anti heroine, women gaze. Instead of wallowing in romantic optimism, it allows the character to mess up, and still hope for romantic optimism. The grief, the inability to find comfort, the fucking up and confiding in the viewers as a witness in it. It invites us to the front row crash of her life and still makes us hope for her win.

That’s what so killer about it. Phoebe knows how much exciting it is to watch a woman mess up, to fuck up. But to not victimize her, to not allow pity, or hatred as the lens for the character but deeply confusing feelings of resentment, rooting for her because oh you can relate somewhere and in spite of not sympathizing, hope for her resurrection. That is a great play on part of spectatorship.

So, we know that gossiping when a woman messes up? It’s just a tad bit more juicy and surprising than when a man does.

Fleabag would be a failure if the lead was a man. it is the love to hate philosophy, people like to hate more than to like things. We love women train wrecking because representation has never allowed a woman to be seen as a human, capable of falling like a man can. We haven’t seen, heard, read, been represented enough to have this part of our lives genuinely been seen. The too good of the woman falling off from her pedestal, is a sight one can’t not look at, and inadeptly and secretly root for. And so when she does mess up? She finds herself isolated, alienated in her own shame and rumored more than supported.

This perverted inversion of feminist solidarity gains popularity of woman hating onto another? All because representation really just narrows us down into stereotypes and we hate women who can perfectly fit into them and know their place vs the ones who don’t. The only way to fix it? Is again, to see more, to be seen more.

Like Fleabag, I love watching women who mess up, they grow. She can see herself beyond her own representation, what she ought to be, and actually a little bit more towards what she is. Forced to accept and acknowledge herself out and beyond representation and perception.

True representation brings out the honest in us, the good, the ugly and the in-between. Even when it starts with resentment, and then through relatability and then finally wanting to see the woman resurrect herself out of her own mess.

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