There is no trace of this morning’s brief rain shower. It is scorching hot once again yet I am sitting on our dining table without the fan. Soon, my body’s sweat will stick to our wooden chair, like it has for countless summers. I remember being a girl, shuffling my thighs to avoid the chair from pinching my skin. It’s hard to remember when exactly we got this table. Which one of the many homes was it inaugurated in? My father’s pride at having been able to afford this large, wooden table with a black marble top is distinguished in my memory. When I was a teenager, I remember flaunting my arms open to reach its corners. Even today, I can’t reach the other end. I remember the sparkle in Papa’s eyes. It lights up when he smiles sincerely. I read it now like he was telling us, “It’s something isn’t it? Where was my dining table when I was growing up, forget this lavish one. I have built this so you can have a different life. You will live and know a new story. One unlike and one wrenched apart from my unresolved one.”

I want to tell him. I want to be stern about this but these attempts always invoke a chuckle from him unless I am entirely consumed with rage or going into a tantrum. I am conscious and I don’t want to come off as declarative. Our family loves to recount stories of attempted grandiosity and I - the youngest of my lot - am the easiest to take this bait even though I can factually verify that my older sister is far more dramatic than me. Yes, I will tell him without an intonation in my voice. I will bring him back from the dead. I will say, “I am your child. You live through me. You have to. You know, I inherit everything you don’t finish within your life.”

We go on like this. Often, I am talking at him. I like to fill him in on my latest thought spiral. Last fall, I was quizzing him about the nature of men: is a kind man superior to an ambitious one? As if Dad’s grand insights could break through my series of spectacular failures. I could get into the details; tell him about the specific men I tend to fall for. I’ve long learnt that this would spur him to pretend as if I had said nothing of note. He’d depart our conversation with a suaveness I am still learning to emulate. Without a word, I understand that he has gone for a smoke or to check-in on the palak paneer cooking on our stove. The gravy has to be just the right thickness before you turn the heat off and the spices need to have lived in it for precisely ‘enough’ time. It is like it has always been for us. There’s a delight in remembering our dynamic where suddenly he’s just the dad of a teenage girl so amused by the vivid and unsettling promise of romance. We are both reduced but Papa is so much larger.

I am reading a book titled The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai. I carried its orange body across two oceans and three continents, consumed by the stories of many generations in a mixed-race Sri Lankan family. Somewhere between last night and this morning, I read about the tale of “The Demoness Kali” as narrated by the protagonist’s grandmother. A rich merchant has two wives. The older, barren wife poisons the pregnant, younger wife - committing bad karma. In every future life, these women try to kill each other and their offsprings. So continues this incessant cycle until the divine intervention of Lord Buddha. He counsels, “.. you cannot use vengeance to cleanse a past wrong. No, it is only the waters of compassion that can cleanse your past enmities.” The women reconcile in their Nth life and one takes the other home for shelter. The author is careful not to end the story there - one magnanimous act does not cure. He wants me to know that repair - like suffering - is also arduous and exacting though it comes without the thrill of passion. The older woman keeps laboring at their settlement until, one day, her good deeds transform her from a demoness into Goddess Kali The Merciful.

I am made tender by this novel. It moves between countries and generations but is shaped critically by the nation its author was born in: Sri Lanka. It traces the riots, pogroms, extra-judicial killings of dissenters, homophobia, and class oppression that scarred the country for three decades. Yet, it would be dishonest to deem this the theme of the book. Nor is it reducible to ‘intergenerational trauma’. This is a story about the inescapable entanglement of familial relationships. The characters estrange from each other, move continents, ‘start over’, and find love (some find deep, delicious love gentle while others seek benevolent, caring love). They numb; they yell; they cry; and they just move through their laborious lives until they choose to labor through repair.

I am yet to finish this book. This is now my third time procrastinating its closure. I don’t want it to end. I read a chapter and run my hand through the thirty remaining pages. I want these people to enmesh into my lives for a little longer. So I get up from my bed and make myself a Indian Iced Coffee. Like everything else in my culture’s kitchen, this too is laborious and still refreshing and comforting. The iciness of my coffee doesn’t hurt my throat because it has been made gentle. It rests as a cold, frothy foam above the milk. I slurp at my beverage and return to my teenage summers. Dad and I are sitting on our dining table and the fan is off. He doesn’t like the noise it makes while it runs. I have now learnt - from living - that the fan menaces the cigarette because the ash scatters everywhere. I ask him about his childhood. He is divulging only the details he wants me to remember. I wonder what parts of my story I will reveal to my children and what they will have to discover. We keep on going. We labor.

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Why write anymore?

Writing my own words without AI feels like a dead end now. I don’t need any consolation here because I hold this to be a fact. Most AI does write better than me especially when prompted thoughtfully. So why indeed should I write on my own anymore?

I have resorted to this insufficient perfect answer. For myself! Writing is important to me; for me to feel and be like myself. It is okay if it’s not superior to anyone or anything else; I don’t need to write so I can find my rightful stature in The Celebrated Club of Capable C[writers]. Writing helps me belong with myself. It is my anecdote to emptiness, hurriedness or boredom. It’s hardest to write today because I really can just outsource the task of struggling with the questions to a machine.

But what did Rilke say about that?

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

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That’s it for this edition of Uno’s Thought Scramble. Thank you for making it so far.
If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~Stay cool,
Uno

It’s the most self-absorbed emotion, no? Unlike desire or sorrow, it centres solely on my experience and my felt sense of injustice. And still, it’s also communal. My anger; my injustice cannot exist without you, the wrongdoer. Agnes Callard calls this the ‘uncanny intimacy of anger’.

“Though you can’t stand to be near me, it is also true that no one could be closer to you than me. I have infiltrated the patterns of your thought; I have my fingers on your heartstrings; I have even been put in charge of your sense perception: you see traces of me everywhere you look. You complain about me to anyone who will listen, and when no one will listen you shout at a mental effigy of me. I’ve colonized your fantasy life. Holding me responsible involves an embrace, albeit an adversarial one.”

Agnes Callard

Rage is among the most important emotions in the world. Most broken relationships carry anger for years after because, without repair, our anger lives on forever. Well articulated rage can drive and sustain war efforts far beyond what an army can feasibly handle because of rage’s communal power.

And yet, I’ve always distanced myself from it. Even when I’m taken over by impassioned anger, I perform it as pragmatic disagreement complete with composure without a hint of irrationality. When someone thinks of me, I want my portrait to signal: kind, smart, funny, practical, wise. I do not want: “will get very upset if you upset her”.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that Shreya, author of Bread Factory and my bestie of ~10 years, is here to take me to school on my bullshit. She’s among the most attentive and gentle listeners I know, and a solid person to think ‘bigly’ about small things. We speak about where anger takes its meaning from, what it means to us, and much more. Among the questions we ask are:

• What does rage feel like physiologically, and psychologically?

• Righteous vs petty rage

• Who gets to be mad?

• What comes after rage?

• What is the opposite of rage?

• What helps with anger? What doesn’t?

“..I think a lot of rage comes from impotence; from feeling like our agency has been thwarted in some way because we haven’t been allowed to do something that we should be able to do.”

shreya

I hope you’ll listen to our conversation and take something from it - a reframing of your own (or someone else’s) anger, a memory from when you were pissed over something ‘petty’, or a simple laugh about how ridiculous we both are. I wish for you to enjoy any time you spend graciously listening to us.

Something more

The Guest House

by Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Footnotes

• Chake de India, fight scene referenced by Shreya. It’s titled “girl power”. Take from that what you will.

That’s all for this edition of Uno’s Thought Scramble. Thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

Taking in some sun and lots of love,

Uno

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The month of love has come and gone, while I am still thinking about an experience close to love but with its own independent identity and raison-detre - flirting. I invited my dearest friend and esteemed flirt, Shreya, to chat with me about it. So, here’s a slightly patchy but (i lightly promise) entertaining conversation between us.

If there’s anything you take away from this conversation, it is that flirting - much like friendship - is important because it makes you feel good. Not ‘good’ generally but in an important, feel ‘good about yourself’ way. Our flirting style (and friends) mirror parts of who we aspire to be, and they bring out our best side. We typically look askance at flirting but, instead, we should encourage it and ensure it’s careful and gentle. That said, flirting should not be agnostic of feedback. When done well, it can have the wonderful result of making a regular human being feel special and desirable. It doesn’t need love or sex to mark its success, but just a smile - or a smirk - as one tilts their head back.

Something I didn’t express as well as I wanted: Projection is the playing field where we all play and flirt. I can’t speak for men but I fear that women often try to project intellect and humor as a way of gaining respect; to not be cast aside as a ‘typical girl’. In the conversation, Shreya jokingly and accurately calls this the ‘feminine urge to be a complete package’. Certainly, for me, I know a lot of flirting has been ruined because I am absorbed in the obsession with earning the guy’s respect. I wonder how doing away with dichotomies of maddona/wh*re and “guy’s girl vs girly girl” would reimagine flirting.

A Question I’m still asking: How to flirt well in-person while sober, i.e. without alcohol?

Order of this conversation:

• Guardrails for the conversation

• Why is flirting important?

• Where does flirting fit in the hierarchy of love?

• Bollywood’s depiction of flirting

• Bad vs Good flirts and Flirting vs Having a Crush

• What makes a compliment fail/work? Or, the important balance of attention and simplicity

• What are our own flirting styles? and the importance of *incorporating* feedback

• Why rape culture ruins flirting

• What spaces and dynamics are well-suited to flirting?

• Does flirting end with love? (EN: I absolutely love this one!)

• Are you cheating if you’re flirting outside your relationship?

• Care and responsibility in flirting

• Offline and online flirting

• Some fun, flirty one-liners (+ bonus non-flirty but very funny chats from Shreya)

• Songs that capture flirting vibez (pls excuse my mistaken lyrics and horribly narrated lyrics)

Footnotes:

• The beautiful, flirtatious scene from Piku that Shreya describes.

• Pakistan grape video . Warning: Reduce your volume. There’s a lot of screaming.

• Our spotify playlist with flirty songs

• I know the AV is quite patchy here and I promise to do better in future. If you have any free podcast recording services I can use, please suggest below.

Before you go: Please check-out ’s substack, Bread Factory. In addition to being my dearest friend and favorite person, she is also among my favorite writers because she writes with attention, humor and sexy punches. To start, I highly recommend my favorite essay analyzing the kiss scene from the movie, Sir.

As always, thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

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The sides..

Recommendations sprinkled with lots of Uno’s commentary. You did sign up for this, didn’t you?

1. Making sense of the glim IPO trend - In 1980, 9 of 10 IPOs were profitable. That’s down to just 2 of 10 in 2021. The rise of venture capital and private equity has meant that the return on the company valuation is largely extracted by the time the business is ‘tossed over to the public markets’. Reading this article raised many questions: First, how many VC-backed businesses really need to IPO in order to raise capital and expand (which should be the primary reason for a company to go public). Second, are the financial markets, proudly held by capitalists as a place where markets work perfectly, really benefiting the general public or just the top 2% who can put their money into early investment funds? Third, given how this trend maps the supposed ‘democratization’ of access to stock markets, were these markets - like most others - always supposed to benefit the richest few? Perhaps, the moment access to markets grew, they changed the game again to get their returns early. Just wondering…

Companies going public today aren’t necessarily bad businesses. Airbnb is a great company, one of my largest holdings, but it’s been a far better investment for its private backers than people in the public markets — three years after its IPO, it trades below its first trade, when public-market investors could purchase stock. Private investors who don’t need the public markets to fuel growth anymore are holding on to companies longer, squeezing all the juice before tossing husks to the masses.

-Private, No Mercy / No Malice by Scott Galloway

2. In India, too, this trend maps similarly. See what I mean below. However, one might argue (and perhaps be right) that the low-base effect is at work. That is not to say that we aren’t headed for the same future of private capture and public pump and dump as the US.

The investor who started in 1996 would have had ₹93L (~19.5%) by the time they stopped in 2010. The investors who began in 2005 would have had 46L (11.7%) when they stopped in 2020.

-The 12% Myth: Estimating Long-Term Equity Returns, CapitalMind

Note: The article discusses a very different topic, and still makes for an interesting read.

3. Main dekhu toh sahi, duniya tumhe kaise satati hai. Koi din ke liye apni nigahbani mujhe dedo: Switching lanes rather abruptly, here’s a beautiful song/poem/ghazal on the same lines as, “Dhoom dhoom just break my heart, aa lele tu meri jaan.” I strongly believe that this is indeed the crux of all love songs. Jokes apart, nothing cracks me open like Sahir Ludhianvi’s writing, and this song sung by Jagjit Kaur is simply something else.

Tum apna ranj-o-gham apni pareshani mujhe dedo,
tumhein gham ki qasam, is dil ki veerani mujhe dedo,

ye mana main kisi qabil nahi hoon in nigahon mein,
bura kya hai agar yeh dukh, yeh hairani mujhe dedo

main dekhu toh sahi duniya tumhe kaise satati hai,
koi din ke liye apni nigahbani mujhe dedo,

vo dil jo maine manga tha magar gairon ne paya hai,
badi shai hai agar uski pareshani mujhe dedo..

-Lyrics from Rekhta

4. Cosmetic procedures and radical transparency - what does it matter? Recently, a very fashionable influencer admitted to having gotten lip fillers. In their comments section, opinons ranged from, “we already knew this. It’s obvious you got work done.”; to “so?? why are you talking about this? who asked you??” (this one always cracks me up); to “You are a disappointment to your young followers, and you should be ashamed of yourself”.. Truthfully, I think this transparency is a step forward in clarifying how crazy the beauty standards are. Yet, I don’t know if it does anything to breaking these norms altogether. One can argue whether that’s the job of influencers and celebrities.. and I will argue back that it is!

“I’ve always known that I am beautiful. I’ve also experienced moments of insecurity. Lip fillers didn’t erase these insecurities, but they gave me a much needed confidence boost. People dissecting my face, hurling insults, and labelling me as ‘fake’/'‘plastic’ & ‘unbearable’ is a harsh form of critique that NO woman should endure.”

No one should face online abuse but.. judgement? I think a little judgment is just about alright, especially if you are a social influencer. We must insist that people browse the internet with more judgement, not less. It’s actually good that this ‘dissecting’ happens concurrently as more and more people submit to cosmetic procedures. While US tops the cosmetic procedures trend, India is not far behind - it’s 4th place, actually. I also think it’s okay to call some bullshit on this kind of faux transparency. Saying “I got work done” is not the same as admitting to the entire journey of why you got the work done and how that’s changed (or not changed) your insecurities and your life. As Mother Jessica Defino has written before,

I’m sorry (I’m not), but admitting you got a face lift is not radical transparency. It’s regular transparency. Radical transparency would be emotionally contextualizing the face lift — maybe a statement along the lines of, “The superficiality of this world is simply too much for me to bear! Maybe it’s the industry I work in, but if I don’t feel young and hot, I don’t feel worthy. I am willing to have a surgeon cut off my face and sew it back on, but tighter — yes, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic! — because my identity is tied up in my appearance, and because facing my mortality is fucking terrifying, and because no one ever teaches us how to deal with these emotions. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I don’t recognize myself anymore! On some level, I guess I understand that that’s part of being human… that you’re not supposed to recognize yourself as you get older, that you’re supposed to evolve and grow and shape-shift and learn and expand into new experiences and continue becoming you. But nah. I don’t wanna. I got used to the previous version of me, thanks, and that other stuff sounds hard, so… a face lift it is. You feel me?” Or, you know, something to that effect.

5. The internet right now perfectly captured by The Onion.

That’s it for this edition of Uno’s Thought Scramble. Thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~ Judging-ly,

Uno

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1. When the Chandrayan-3 Mission landed on the moon, did you (like me) feel… nothing? This piece from Manu Joseph spoke to the ambitious patriot in me and made me feel less alone. “I guess pride is a side of shame.”

Pride is a low-hanging fruit of happiness.. I do not grudge them that. Many people go through their whole lives doing nothing they can be proud of, so why not usurp a bit from the nation?.. But, somehow, people do not feel the same way about shame. People don’t look around at the corruption and mediocrity in evidence, even when they take two hours every day to travel a mere 20 kilometres in a city, and feel the shame of it all. Even though they probably have a greater role in our disgrace than what is exceptional about some of us.

Or, maybe people do feel shame. I was looking in the wrong places. I was chatting with fintech entrepreneur Kunal Shah in a totally different context, about human nature in general, and he said, “I guess pride is a side of shame."

2. What becomes of the roots of a city after it gives way to the DLFs and Jaypees of development? What sits next to the glam and shine of fresh, service class money? Backlash from moneyed yet rootless original inhabitants who were land-owners before and are now struggling to find their place in the new social order. After I read Manu Joseph’s last piece on pride/shame, I started reading through his other gems, and found this speaking to my experience of Noida/ GreNo.

   Old Gurgaon’s landed grew rich, but they had also become a social underclass because of executive migrants who gave Gurgaon its reputation for ‘cosmopolitanism’, a word with no meaning. About a decade ago, the local men dealt with social confusion by routinely beating up sahibs after street altercations. Now, the sahibs have become wiser.

   Gurgaon continues to boom. The rent of my home has doubled in the last two years. But the fundamental nature of the place is the nature of its original people, the people of rural Haryana. Even Mumbai could not pretend for long that it was anything more than a large Maharashtrian town.

   One of the great civil wars of our times is the battle between the idea of the village and the idea of a city; the battle between roots and rootlessness. It is a battle that the village is winning everywhere.

3. “It is unavoidably true that every choice we make as women in a patriarchy—from plastic surgery to motherhood—is informed by patriarchy.” Allie Rowbottom’s interviews have me gripped to each line that comes out of her gorgeous mouth. This one is no different. I urgently need someone to gift me her novel, Aesthetica. I believe it is the only potion that can pull me out of my reading slump.

Judgement of women who appear to cater to the male gaze (after being indoctrinated by it for all of their lives) is a national pastime in America and something most of us are trained to do, myself included. So I think it’s often not just easy but comforting to dismiss women who make choices—aesthetic choices, in particular—perceived as vain, superficial, and for men.

The boob job is the ultimate example of this. Whereas women who reduce their breasts are often applauded for the choice, women who enlarge their breasts are often seen as dumb, feeble minded, pawns of the patriarchy. I suppose this sometimes may be true, but not always, and I would wager not often, actually. Besides, what if a woman just wants bigger breasts? Why is it more morally acceptable for her to reduce, diminish, make smaller, but not for her to make bigger, to take up more space?

And yet it is also unavoidably true that every choice we make as women in a patriarchy—from plastic surgery to motherhood—is informed by patriarchy. It’s the invisible, inescapable umbrella under which we all try to find contentment let alone empowerment.

4. The classic Allopathy vs Ayurveda debate unpacked in two parts by Kiran Somwanshi on her fab podcast, The Morning Brief. In the first part, she asks common and important questions in this debate to Dr. Abby Phillips (aka LiverDoc). LiverDoc is famous for counteracting myths and misinformation about Ayurveda/ alternative medicine. I used to maintain that ayurveda is alright even if it’s clinically ineffective as, at most, it causes no harm. This interview made me question that. A lot of herbal supplements and ayurvedic fads cause real, often irreversible damage to our bodies. LiverDoc has been sued by Himalaya for causing significant loss to their business through defamatory allegations against their products (ie that herbal supplements don’t work and can cause damage).

5. Uno’s life-enhancing recipe to make your protein shake not suck. After complicating this too much, I have finally found a way to palliate the horrible flavour of plant protein. It’s just three basic ingredients and doesn’t even need a blender! You need: Plant protein powder (I use Cosmix’s cocoa flavors), Instant coffee, and Soy milk. Here’s what you do:

   • Add half a cup of soy milk to your shaker

   • Add a spoon (or three) of instant coffee and a scoop of protein powder

   • Add 2 cups of soy milk

   • Shake well. And Voila.

6. The song Hawayein from Jab Harry Met Sejal. My god, the song is lovely and the movie is intolerable. Regardless, as is evident below, I love watching Shah Rukh romance.

   चेहरा क्यूँ मिलता तेरा ,

   यूँ ख़्वाबों से मेरे,
   ये क्या राज़ है?

7. The wonderful show, Platonic, on AppleTV that stars Rose Byrn and Seth Rogen. It’s a hilarious show about two best friends who reunite at a horrible point in their lives and help each other mend again while also being incredibly destructive for each other. I laughed for so long it felt like I was held a 12 minute plank (which I’ve obviously never done).

8. A complementary and depressing poem about longing from Frank O Hara.

   what are you doing now
   where did you eat your
   lunch and were there
   lots of anchovies it
   
   is difficult to think
   of you without me in
   the sentence you depress
   me when you are alone
   
   Last night the stars
   were numerous and today
   snow is their calling
   card I'll not be cordial
   
   there is nothing that
   distracts me music is
   only a crossword puzzle
   do you know how it is
   
   when you are the only
   passenger if there is a
   place further from me
   I beg you do not go

Thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~ Doing alright,

Uno

I loved Rocky Rani ki Prem Kahani. It was a delightful movie packed with a cute plot, great actors, tolerably flawed characters, and nostalgia bunched across the soundtrack. I adored Rocky because, paraphrasing Karan Johar, he wears both his Gucci and his heart on his sleeve. Rocky is brighter than sunshine, and a misfit lover in today’s (tiny) progressive bubble. He is endearing despite his dated charm because he has a large heart and an open mind. These are two things Rani’s enormous ego allows no space for. You respect Rani but find her insufferable with her feminist savior complex. I yuck her from my deepest core because I see myself in her follies the story lets us overlook - she ruins Rocky’s acts of love without considering that they don’t just serve her but also him. She presumes oppression where there could be a complicated kind of love, and the story rewards her endlessly despite all this. You are rooting for Rani not just because she seems right, but also because you are always rooting for Rocky, who loves her hopelessly.

The movie was a delightful package. As with Anupama Chopra, “it put a smile on my face and a spring in my step, and .. it just made me really happy.” The dialogues were thought-provoking while also being accessible. Karan Johar can made us North Indians question the way we see men performing delicate dances, see the cruelty of fat-shaming in our families; forced us to confront the mystified feminine lingerie with a great monologue .. all while sprinkling us with memorable characters, glamorous outfits and lots of abs. The movie started so many conversations. Everyone took something back. For instance, my mom remarked about how both homes were governed by a dominant woman. Even Rocky’s father, though traditionally macho and seemingly the patriarch of the family, was ruled by the wishes of his mother. The difference between Rocky and Rani’s fathers were not of masculinity vs femininity, but of secure vs insecure manhood.

But …

Where was the chemistry? Rocky and Rani have NO vibes. The chemistry was so hollow that even great acting, direction, dialogue, and songs couldn’t establish why they are both drawn to each other. This is not an exception. It seems that most movies now sprinkle enough ‘steamy’ scenes to signal that two adults are making love. But since when did Bollywood give up the romance in love-making? I feel (low-key) betrayed. ‘Steamy’ scenes today follow the input>output>outcome formula, leaving the audience with nothing memorable. Rocky touches Rani; Rani acts like it’s super hot; and this gives the plot the outcome of great chemistry. In all this, the intimacy is nowhere to be found - When and where do two people understand each other?

I know Bollywood gets a lot of hate for “eye-fucking” as opposed to showing nudity/sex. I see why - I really do - but I am strongly on the side of (erstwhile) Bollywood, where intimacy was established through a lot of connection that didn’t solely emanate from sex. Trust me, I hate being old-school about most things, especially sex. However, eye-fucking is essential to a story of opposites attract. Without it, all you have is a story establishing why two people are so unlike and bad to/for each other. This staring into the eyes is the acknowledgement of each others different - and similar - personhoods. How else do you know that they see each other for their all? Dharmendra and Shabana have more chemistry even though their love story gets half the spotlight. This is because the audience is with them on their journey - why they were drawn to each other originally (bad marriages, shared interest in art). Even today, their revival is spent in shared activities and singing songs to one another.

All this comes back to the central premise - why do I (we) love watching romance? The catharsis was never about ‘happily ever after’. The catharsis is when two deeply flawed people see each other with the sparkle and the shadows, and still accept each other; still love each other. The classic Bollywood movie establishes unconditional love. It’s so very flawed, but it’s lovely and i miss it so, so much.

“Pyaar toh bahaut log karte hai,

lekin mere jaisa pyaar koi nahi kar sakta.

Kyuki kisi ke paas tum jo nahi ho.”

Kal Ho Na Ho, Aman using his love to tell Naina how much Aman loves her. A dialogue that can never be justly translated.

The sides…

1. If you thought feminism was making romance chaotic, wait till you dissect the cocktail the cultural Right is making and trending across social media. This essay made me pause and slow clap so much that the notes and highlights could almost make another essay:

   The sexual revolution, whatever its benefits, also blew up virtually all the social structures and strictures that used to regulate romantic entanglements, leaving young people to navigate a lawless, chaotic landscape in which there’s no guarantee that the person you’re sleeping with even likes you, let alone intends to commit. Almost every trend in this sphere — from the demisexuals who insist that requiring an emotional connection before sex represents a protected identity category to the ubiquitous therapy-speak that turns ordinary disappointments into pathologies — represents an attempt by young women to reestablish some sort of order, to make their romantic and sexual lives make sense. And when young women are less likely to be looking for Mr. Right than hunting for the red flags that reveal a man to be undateable, it’s not hard to see the appeal of imposing a rigid framework on the whole endeavour, even if that framework is rooted in manipulation and pretence.

   The new Rules-esque paradigm, on the other hand, wants little to do with that. The woman who successfully employs these methods isn’t loved; she’s pampered, paid for, and worshipped like the goddess she is. If marriage is mentioned, it’s as a business arrangement, one in which the woman trades her presence — and, if her husband plays his cards right, sex — for being kept in the manner to which she’s accustomed. Men are meant to be milked for all they’re worth and summarily discarded the moment they step out of line. One of the movement’s biggest influencers, Chidera Eggerue, actually got her start as an evangelist for the “dump him” school of feminism, which is exactly what it sounds like. The central thesis is that any relationship which makes demands on a woman’s time, energy and attention — which is to say, every relationship, ever — is better off terminated so that she can focus on the only thing that truly matters: herself.

   if you imagine that women are the eternal underdog in a relationship landscape ruled by patriarchy, it’s possible to convince yourself that literally anything you do at the expense of a man — including batting eyelashes until he buys you shoes — is a form of female empowerment. Just ignore the part where it reinforces rather than subverts every gendered stereotype of women as hypergamous gold diggers. This is how men who manipulate women’s psychology to get them into bed can be derided as loathsome misogynists, while women who take a similar approach with men are yass kweened all the way home… But they’re both playing the same game; indeed, they couldn’t exist without each other. And more than that, they’re making the same mistake with their suspicious, mistrustful approach to the opposite sex. The pick-up artists instruct that women need to be tricked into giving up sex, their sole asset in the dating marketplace; the dump-him feminists do the same with men and their money.

   “..the desire for love and companionship doesn’t break down along gendered lines. Most people want to fall in love. Most people want to find a partner. And most people understand that these desires are not grotesque weaknesses, but a normal — and, if you’re lucky, wonderful — part of the human experience.”"

2. On cultural exchange, cultural appropriation, and some strangely appropriate parallels to intellectual property rights. This Podcast debates - very nicely I might add - whether Artists Should Be Allowed To Borrow From Cultures Besides Their Own?

Thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~ Feeling at home, whilst writing from home,

Uno

1. AppleTV’s Physical, a show that covers everything from diet culture and eating disorders, sexual traumas across the spectrum and how they shape our self-image, fatphobia in female friendships, men ‘doing better’, women hating themselves with that loud, gnawing self-talk, and so much more. I loved and inhaled this show for so many reasons.

It's me, but it's not me. It's just a voice inside my head. Sounds crazy.

Yes, it is. And she controls you?

Well, it feels that way, yes.

And do you hate her?

Intensely, but I am her too.

Who messed with you when you were a kid?

Friend of my father's.

Me too!

Ding, ding!

2. Grassroot and online activisim, on top of years of research and advocacy, led to a reduction in costs of diagnosing tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest disease. This is a huge win for healthcare access, with important lessons for what informed public activism (and invoking Taylor Swift as a strategy) can achieve.

3. A new, uncomfortable, yet fair way to consider the decision between a lab vs natural diamond. Plus, some harshly dished advice. Dude wants to get his future wife a lab-grown diamond. Except, he thinks it’s okay to lie to his intimate (soon, legal) partner because, after all, he is building a cruelty-free world. A real ethical dilemma.

First, let’s acknowledge that there is disagreement about the environmental virtues of lab-grown diamonds; they’re often made in China, using electricity that comes mainly from coal. And you can source natural diamonds from places that regulate working conditions. Even if your assumptions were correct, though, the worldly consequences of your individual purchase, by itself, would not be significant. What is significant is your willingness to consecrate your union with a lie.

The giver of a ring should be concerned, foremost, with what the ring means to the recipient. You’re free to tell your girlfriend that you’re unwilling to buy a natural diamond. But the deception you’re contemplating would be deeply disrespectful of her and her desires — and a wildly inauspicious step toward marriage. That ring is a promise, and you would be establishing that you can’t be trusted to keep one.

4. This little poem that made me giggle, especially when Shreya reacted by saying, “I love living..”.

5. A fancy consulting firm studied used AI to supplement its work and found, unsurprisingly, that productivity improved quite a bit. It brought ‘poor performing workers’ at par with the top crew. Yet, when the AI screws up, consultants using it can’t make up for its gaps. There’s a lot of insights from the study, nicely captured here.

“AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one. Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore. AI is not quite at that level of change, but skill levelling is going to have a big impact.”

6. Small, potent observations made travelling as I was travelling to work on a less disruptive, rainy day in Mumbai.

7. Everything from this conversation between Amit Verma, Mohit Satyanand and Kumar Anand about the barriers to development in Bihar. Shownotes took me to Kumar’s blog, which is another special treat.

Thank you for making it so far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨thoughts✨, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~ Very exhausted,

Uno

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This is a lovely question to inspect at crucial moments of our lives - are we being guided by love or by fear? Are we choosing so we don’t lose what we have? Or are we submitting to the self-debilitating power and magic of love?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler - people behind the five stages of grief - also wrote about this in their book, LIFE LESSONS: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living.1

It’s true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear, but it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we’re not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. Can you think of a time when you’ve been in both love and fear? It’s impossible.

All of our invented fears involve either the past or the future; only love is in the present. Now is the only real moment we have, and love is the only real emotion because it’s the only one that occurs in the present moment. Fear is always based on something that happened in the past and causes us to be afraid of something we think may happen in the future. To live in the present, then, is to live in love, not fear. That’s our goal, to live in love.2 And we can work toward that goal by learning to love ourselves. Infusing ourselves with love begins the washing away of our fears.

I actually hate this. I find this idea of love and fear being opposite, mutually exclusive emotions ‘self-evidently silly’3. In my experience, fear and love have always coexisted together like loyal partners. The very act of love is informed by a deep-seated fear of loss. There’s a persistent and gnawing fear of losing the love - the source, form or magnitude of it. I imagine myself in love like I am holding onto love like holding onto a bunch of heavy groceries and no bag. If I lose my grip, one by one, everything will begin to fall..

If you know me, you are thinking, “Uno, this is because you saw someone you love pass away recently. So.. of course, you are scared that other people will die too.” Well, yes, of course. I regularly spend nights in worry over the well-being of my loved ones. If my mom is ever driving from place A to B and back, I find it hard to focus on anything until I know she has reached back home safely. If I go to a new place, I ask about the nearest hospital. My weekend chores include outlining my grand will. Last week, I spent 25 minutes discussing why (and to whom) I want to give away my journals after I die. So, yes, sure. I am very much being ‘led by fear’ at this point in my life. Has this fear of losing someone else prevented new love? May be? I am not an egotistical maniac. This is not the hill I want to die on. I can accept that being in the thick of grief may affect my aversion to the idea that fear and love are opposite emotions. Those are my priors to this issue. But now, kindly allow me to make my case.

I insist that we feel both love and fear together. I resist the general positive/negative spectrum of emotions but I think it’s specially inaccurate and harmful here. Why is love positive and fear negative? Haven’t we felt incredibly painful and ‘ugly’ emotions of anger, envy and distraught because we felt love and feared that we would lose it? My love will and has always been guided by fear. One cannot possibly love fearlessly. To love is to accept the fear of loss. To love is to hold and guard preciously what you know will destroy you at some point in life or death.

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.

In Passing by Liesel Mueller

Over a year ago, in another country, a heart-broken woman sat across my bed and baffled at the unwarranted cruelty of break-ups. You love someone; you’ve designed your entire life and routine around them; and when you decide that you shouldn’t be together in the earlier way, in one clean and sudden sweep.. it’s over? You’re supposed to redesign your whole life and sweep out all the affection you feel for them because you’ve just ‘broken-up’. She pledged to never do this again. I gave her hot cinnamon tea, agreed on the need to legislate for gentler break-ups, smiled gloatingly many times, and assured her that she will certainly love again.

And then, last night, I was right there. I texted a friend, “I am so young and I feel like I’ll NEVER fall in love again, which I know is a lie but IT FEELS SO REAL. IT IS SO SILLY! Sometimes I think I hate him for putting me through this. Like how dare he! But then the feeling passes and I’m like it’s fine it’s not a crime to not love me lol. BUT IT SHOULD BE 🤪.”

When we choose to live - and we make that decision every day - we also choose the kind of life we want to live. I know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross meant that ‘being led by fear’ can often prevent us from simply trying. But is the resolution here to 'lead with love', whatever hell that even means? Or is the resolution in the acceptance of the fear and even in the imagination of the loss? That we may fail and lose everything we hold so precious. And that will destroy us. But from that rubble too, we will emerge okay. And if we don’t fail at that attempt, we may find immense joy, success and love. But we will fail at something else, and that could break our soul. Vicious, inescapable, Sisyphean, but also the best feeling in the world for which no price is too high. Not even grief. A ‘khubsoorat bala’4 if there ever was one. Truly, grief is the price we pay for love5.

It’s an honour to be in grief. It’s an honour to feel that much, to have loved that much.

Liz Gilbert

The sides…

Recommendation corner:

1. The gentlest poem, Love Is A Place by E. E. Cummings:

love is a place

& through this place of

love move

(with brightness of peace)

all places

yes is a world

& in this world of

yes live

(skilfully curled)

all worlds

[TW - discussing weight loss in the bullet below. skip to the poem with a screenshot if you want to avoid that :) ]

2. Internet is always forcing us into ethical dilemmas. New weight loss drugs are throwing even the tiniest of work we may have done on body acceptance into the garbage. If you’re caught in this mess, oh do I feel you. I highly recommend Mikaila Jamison’s newsletter on body image discourse and specially for this. I loved her advice to, “figure out what your values are and act accordingly.” It’s not straight and simple. It’s very hard, actually.

   A good way to figure out your values and whether you might need to adjust them is something else Jessica DeFino told me: Every time you get an urge to participate in something, some sort of beauty behavior or a negative thought about yourself and your body, just keep asking, “Why?”
   Why do you feel the need to have the same body as the people around you? Why do you think your life will be better if you lose 11 pounds? Why is a drug a better choice than some other means of action? Why is it important to you to reject any intentional interventions? Where do all of these motivations come from? Do they serve you first and foremost?
   Stop asking questions about the behaviors of celebrities and start asking questions about yourself.

   In another piece, she said:

   I can admit why I’ve cared about a celebrity or anyone else’s body before: Grappling with my own body image makes me insane, I’m insecure and emotionally and psychologically damaged about my body, and it can be a relief to fire some of that energy outward … Any time I’ve been in my feelings about someone else’s body for simply existing, it’s because I’m envious, it’s because I’ve felt it a great injustice that they “get” something I don’t have, it’s because I understand that our culture places a premium on looking a certain way and that way is not achievable for me or most people without a great many expensive or time and money-consuming interventions or cosmic blessings. I’ve had to realize that these feelings come from what I’ve been taught—that a predetermined idea of beauty is the most important thing about me—and that it will likely not be the case in my lifetime that this unfair reality will change. Some people just get all the luck. All I can do is work to unlearn what I’ve been taught and divest from the idea that a celebrity’s body - UB edit: ANYONE’S BODY - has anything to do with mine.

   If you’re interested in the science and fatphobia of the new weight loss drugs, read here.

3. Everything Is A Sign Today by Amanda Moore.

4. The Oedipus Trap, a far more interesting concept than the Oedipus Complex.

..the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother… this wasn’t really his fault; he didn’t know who they were. But that didn’t stop his mother from hanging herself when she found out, or Oedipus from gouging out his own eyes. There are some mistakes no one can live with, no matter how innocently they were made.

Thus the trap: If you have made such a mistake, it is obviously better not to know you have done so. And as Feynman said, you are the easiest person to fool. Which, of course, raises the disquieting question: What Oedipus traps might we have stumbled into unawares? And more importantly, if we have, how do we get out?

Questionnable screenshots

• I downloaded a dating app last week so my screenshot folder is full of messages boys have sent me by way of flirting. It’s too soon to find them funny so I will simply refrain. Meanwhile, please enjoy.. laughing at me.

• This snip that spoke to the insides of my soul from Alison Roman’s “I love baking, I hate baking. it's wonderful, it's the absolute worst.”

  

That’s it for this edition of Uno’s Thought Scramble. Thank you for making it this far. If you liked it, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

Hunched over my laptop at my friend’s living room couch, feeling the body ache of a fever that’s about to fully soak in,

Uno

How did you spend the most cringey month in the year? Don’t you just hate February? First, the ads are everywhere. And they’re all trying to make you feel miserable about yourself. You can be happier in love or gladder single if you just spent 3000 bucks on a useless purchase. I tried to be cool and forget that February is the month of Valentine’s day, my parents’ anniversary, my most loved and unloving ex’s birthday (ew), and my birthday. And yet, I bore witness to so much love this month, most of it unromantic in the typical sense. Since you didn’t ask, here are some things that stuck out for me.

I hopped from my home to the homes of my friends, whose families welcomed me like I had always been a part of them. I was reminded of the refreshing wisdom, grace and lightness that respectable elders can bring into a room. It’s such an odd and intimate gift to know my friends by way of living with them and their families. Somewhere, there’s a level of friendship you unlock when you know what’s in their pantry, how their mothers wake them up and how their fathers say goodnight. I am so grateful to have learnt of new reasons and ways of loving them.

I observed feeling incorrectly occupied in social settings. I’d be in the midst of an event I had spent an embarrassing amount of time getting ready for and yet I’d be completely lost as to how I was to attend it. What’s my role as an audience? I developed a sequence of things to do when I’d find myself confused at an ‘event’ as the event occured. First, I’d look to my phone and start scrolling social media. Then, I’d look around to find my friends who were - arguably just as confused but still - more comfortable. Third, I’d identify' ‘tasks’ to occupy myself with. Does a group of aunties need food? Right away! Do you need me to count the men to whiskey ratio? On it. At parties, whenever I was not actively speaking, I’d observe others with a hypothetical pen and take mental notes. Where are they looking? Are they attempting to butt into the ongoing conversation? Are they listening, really? Who’s bored? What thought are they lost in? (and is it sad?) How are they going to distract themselves from this distracting thought? I tend to think they made themselves another drink or went out for a smoke or asked if someone else wanted to partake. Before people on the internet diagnose my ‘social anxiety’, I’d ask for some restraint. I didn’t feel anxious in these situations, just curious and observant. Seeing just how many people experienced this confusion made me imagine an implicit solidarity - a room full of people dedicatedly drinking with no central purpose? That is so strange!

I caught myself beginning to really like Bombay/Mumbai. I always say Bombay and then, politely add Mumbai. It’s the usual crush: things you’ve done before are ‘novel’ if done in a new city and everything is observed with a sepia light and everyone is charming. Take the obscene amount of time I spent on Bombay roads. To my horror, I did not hate at least 60% of it. I took one fast local train and raved about it incessantly for an entire week to everyone I met. I mostly travelled my new city in autos, which are incredibly dangerous, very romantic, and, most importantly, have a fixed rate for distance. As a passenger, I also observed that Bombay traffic is more chaotic than Delhi’s - two and three wheelers will swivel to pass through the smallest spaces and take the sharpest of turns. But, Bombay drivers are still less aggressive than Delhi ra(n)gers. Even when small collisions occur, I saw ‘Mumbaikars’ respond with a rude, "What are you doing?”; a simple “Tchh”; and - to my greatest horror - complete silence by both parties. At peak Delhi summer last year, I had the front of my Uber destroyed in the middle of a fly over because my car’s driver began to yell after his (already broken) rear view mirror was scratched. I have a few theories about the diverse range of rage in the two cities, which I’ll probably nerd out about in a separate post. I attended the lovely and free Mumbai Urban Art Festival, which left me happy for days. I took my life’s second kali-peeli to walk by marine drive as the sun set. I ate lots of sev puri and raj kachori from old newspaper packets. I was shocked to see how men in Bombay can ask you out and it not be the scariest thing to happen to you that day. The audacity, the confidence, and the skill? I am both irked and impressed by this.

I ate so much fresh fruit. I am not sure when I stopped eating fruits - grade 9 or 10, may be. I am certain that it was some stupid logic to lose weight. It was also bull shit. This month, I ate what felt like the entire universe of fruits - figs, cherries, gooseberries, apples, red grapes, green grapes, strawberries, cheekoo, valencia (deep orange) oranges, regular greenish oranges, blueberries, pears and then some more. I observed the spectrum of ‘sweet’ from tart to decadent to painfully meetha like chashni. Can we start doing a fruit-and-cheese party without adding wine to the menu? And we can we end it at 9PM? Fruits are awesome.

I questioned how we are imagining a return-to-office world without increasing office temperatures up to productive levels (22°C for me). Most centrally air-conditioned offices are set to temperatures that are way too cold. Unsurprisingly, women experience greater discomfort because of this overcooling. I don’t know about you but I’d personally like to work in a space where my brain doesn’t freeze out and I don’t have to pack a shawl, jacket and socks inside my tiny lady’s purse.

I came back home earlier than promised to surprise my mother. Instead of being happily surprised, she suspected that I really came back for a boy (that doesn’t exist). Her skepticism grew stronger because I had pimples and a rash on my face, something that usually happens because men have horrible hygiene. However, my skin rash had occurred because I applied too much make up. Compounded by my mother’s need to plan logistics and resolve her tech issues at 3AM; my month long social exhaustion and sleep deprivation that came to its knees the moment I entered my home; and my general ability to take my mother for granted, I have now spent the entirety of last weekend in a fight with my mother. Not the most romantic end to the month of love, I’d say. We’re on the mend now, though..

The sides…

• More celebrities got married and all of us - publicly or secretly - obsessed about it. I recommend reading this piece about how celebrities are misplacing the (already confusing) purpose of weddings. My highlights:

Weddings and celebrities are both steeped in perfection. And for a lot of couples in general, and women in particular, your wedding day is your moment of celebrity. For a day, you get the hair, the make up, the photography, all the attention on you. I can see the throughline of why we find celebrity weddings so seductive, and wanting a piece of that action. But.. celebrities, who ironically can afford every lavish detail for their weddings, often get things comp'ed in exchange for visibility or alignment for their weddings. So, we consume these photos, and over time, they set this ridiculous standard for which people strive, and it weirdly normalizes their over the topness.

The cultural obsession we have with weddings is misplaced. We want to see what they wore, what the ring looks like, what were the flowers, blah blah, but we don't mourn if that marriage ends in a few years. It contributes to this over-investment in weddings, while we pay little attention to marriages. It is sad.. The message to couples is that what matters is how your wedding looks and the success of your marriage is secondary to that.

What's also problematic about the commodification of weddings is what is commodified, and that's often women. The wedding industry is synonymous with the bridal industry: not couples, not grooms. So, there's this massive machine that is selling women this fantasy of being a bride, on being thin, looking the part, springing for lash extensions, you name it. There is high-grade pressure on women to transform into a bride, regardless of who she is, her background  or what her values are.

• In similar vein, Roxane Gay’s refusal to accept the glorification of horrible and unhappy marriages.

• The movie, Catherine Called Birdy on Prime Video. Watch this movie if you’re craving comedy/romance/historical fiction/or just cute feelings. This movie was so beautiful, funny, romantic, silly, and atrociously cute. Lena Dunham directed it, if that means anything to you.

• The book, The Newly Weds by Mansi Choksi. Just 3% of married couples in India chose each other. This book traces the journey of this small minority who chose love despite the many challenges put against them by society. Not only does the author ask the classic question, “Do they win despite the odds?”, but she describes how the odds transformed them and their love. I loved the earnest writing style in this book and strongly recommend it if you too love wondering, talking and reading about love.

• Ranveer Brar’s galawati kebab recipe. I can watch Ranveer Brar literally pick at his nails all day but him narrating tales about galawati kebab and kneading through the kebab mix.. leaves me feeling many sorts of lovely ways.

• This sticking sentence by Garth Greenwell that I am quoting completely out of context: “..call it a moral quagmire if you want, or call it depthlessness, an awareness that our knowledge of others is always partial; an awareness that the value of others’ lives is not exhausted by their bad acts, that such value can never be exhausted. This doesn’t mean permanently suspending judgment, or suggesting that “nobody is at fault”; it means seeing that no one is reducible to fault.”

• Why isn’t male birth control a thing? “98% of women would trust a committed partner to use male birth control, and over half of men say that if birth control sans side effects were available, they would happily take it.” Leslie Shrock discusses promising trial results about male birth control pills and what it’ll take men to get them to use the pill if it ever comes to market.

Questionnable screenshots…

• A note I made:

• Where there’s hurt, there’s a great deal of love.

Thank you for making it this far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

From my blue childhood bedroom with a finished bowl of strawberries by my side,

Uno

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After a recent and 100% avoidable heartbreak that everyone and their autocorrect could anticipate, my mom said to me (in exasperation), “Uno, you are the romance. You make it up. In your brain. It’s not them.” Ouch. I’ve been occupied with this ever since - that the romance is, mostly, my making. Who I decide to open up to, look into the eyes and share a vulnerable moment with. The actions of the potential paramour matter but much of their desirability, i.e. whether I find their game attractive, is my decision. For instance, I could interpret our messaging throughout the day, sharing memes and long phone conversations as a sign that we are using each other as a source of entertainment to pass time in an otherwise boring life. Or, this could be a once in a lifetime, instant and soul-sparking connection. We seem compatible on every marker and the things we don’t agree “make life more interesting”. This make-believe is rarely adjusted for the reality of who the beloved is and what they are doing. When they say love is blind, they mean that it is literally altering your brain chemistry in the initial few months to leave you wanting your beloved more, no matter the red flags. 1 2

Neuroscience agrees. Stanford kids experience this brain-altering phenomenon called love too.

Neuroscientists and psychologists have been trying to unpack the components of romantic love for decades. Early stages of it have been associated with euphoria, intense focus on and obsessive thinking about the romantic partner, emotional dependency, and even “craving for emotional union with this beloved… Noting that all this sounds a lot like addiction..researchers to specifically test whether romantic love activated the same brain regions as drugs like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, including what is called the ventral tegmental area, the source of dopamine in the reward circuit.. Once subjects were determined to really be in love, the researchers put them in an fMRI scanner and had them view pictures of their romantic partner (the “active” condition) as well as a friend of the same sex (the “comparison” condition) while their brain activity was being measured…

Perhaps not surprisingly, the research team found increased activation in the dopamine-producing part of the brain (the ventral tegmental area) in response to feelings of romantic love. The more attractive the subjects had rated their partner, the more activated the area was. This result supported predictions that romantic love activates our brain’s reward circuitry, as the endless stream of expressions of love—poems, art, songs—sent throughout the world would seem to suggest. As Fisher quipped, “Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.”

Excerpt from The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits, Judson Brewer

This took me back to a poem by Sylvia Plath I read years ago:

Mad Girl’s Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I can’t stop obsessing over every line in this poem. The repetition, like desperate reminders, that she made up the romance in her head. Reminders to whom? To herself? To me? The hyberbole of the entire ‘world’ dropping dead because ‘she’ shuts her eyes - we get so absorbed in our story that we forget that this romance - seemingly our entire world - is just a tiny cog in the actual world’s uncaring wheel. Notice how she never gives up her agency, even when she wishes she didn’t have to take the blame. She wishes (‘dreams’) he bewitched her but she’s sincere and self-aware (and also not mad) to acknowledge making it all up in her mind. That she titles the poem a mad girl’s love song because .. well, this is madness! Who doesn’t want their brain to return to normalcy when days feel like days and not your favourite love song playing over your life? 

Well, I don’t. Off the record, I love living inside my head! It’s the best! I can make myself feel all these lovely ways and I don’t even have to move out of my bed? Sign me up. Unfortunately, begrudgingly and, disastrously, this sucks. It’s so unsustainable. Falling in love in these escapist ways mean that, eventually, when the brain chemistry normalizes, you come to terms with the relationship being a routine part of your life, as in the life you can’t escape forever. This means actually meeting and confronting your beloved’s entire personhood - the good, bad, and unknown. It’s like you gambled in the dark but you can only find out if you won or lost months later.3 Also, why does love only seem possible when I escape my life? The wholesome life I’ve crafted, which has some beautiful people who offer me love, honesty and reliability? Note to self: Do better.

The more I think about it, the less depressing it feels. If I am making up the romance, I can also.. kill it? I can also.. choose differently? What if we find romance in the actual loving exchanged as opposed to in the thrill of ‘will he / won’t he’. Because, he mostly won’t and you shouldn’t celebrate someone loving you sparingly even if exceptionally when they treat you meanly as the norm. Love should not feel self-annihilating no matter what our cultural scripts of heteronormativity make us believe. Women, especially, must reckon with this ambition. We’ve been raised to normalise altering and ‘fixing’ ourselves to appeal to men who will believe us to be these binary, straightjacket ideas they can put on a pedestal only to knock off to indignity when they don’t like what we do. No person should feel obligated to absolutist notions of themselves, no matter who the notion belong to.4

“Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.” 

From Andrea Dworkin's Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (strikethrough is mine5)

This is exciting stuff. I am 25 and, thus, sheepishly young. Still, I expected myself to have ‘figured out’ love by now. I’m currently reconsidering and parking many ambitions I expected to have achieved by this age - grad school, the partner I would marry, marriage itself, kids, working and traveling as both my parents comfortably retire, etc. I am swimming through the grief of acknowledging, “I may never experience some of these things in the traditional way or at all”. On the other side, I feel excited in the un-knowing of what else could be in store. I feel immensely grateful to be entitled to carve my own way and choose for myself. I have a special liberty that women before me could not afford - I want romance and I want for it to feel deepening, joyful and expansive. I want to never settle for a romance that can grow only if I make myself small, that parks parts of me in spaces with shame and loneliness as co-residents; or a man who makes me act out in insecure and anxious ways just to feel connected to him. All this hard work is made easier in the community of friends and family - places I first found and learnt unconditional love - who will settle for nothing less when it comes to me. Having the space to choose romance has meant acknowledging that there is a life out there without it. This realization feels frightening and expansive at the same time. Approaching romance as a choice has made me break it into its parts and inspect where my own desire lies for validation, physical intimacy, emotional vulnerability, parenting, financial partnerships, solitude, and so much more.

Boys I’ve loved have told me that I over-analyze love to a fault and end up complicating experiences that should be straight-forward. They’re not wrong. But romance has never felt easy for me. It’s felt wonderful, heartening, ecstatic and really really lovely but it’s never been easy. I’ve always wanted to love with certainty in my mind. And, sure, duration is no testimony to the greatness of love and neither are the negative feelings that fill us up when we are in conflict, but I still resist using vague language when describing love. For me, vagueness brings up doubt and I have neither patience, nor space, nor the emotional complexity in my body to practice an uncertain kind of love. Love you (/me), love you (/me) well, and love you (/me) whole. Let’s not waste our precious times.

..romantic love used to mean sizzling attraction and butterflies, though it has morphed in front of me over the last few years. now, it means feeling free, safe, and comfortable with each other, without feeling the anxiety of maintaining gendered performances. it’s still exciting, although now the foundation is stronger. i never thought this could happen, but with the friends i have dated, even though our romantic relationships have shifted, we still remain friends today. i want to dedicate this year to melting down the hard protective barriers i have made in compartmentalizing love, romance, friendship, intimacy and sex. what i thought impossible in my lonely teenage years feels like second nature to me now. love, in all of its many myriading forms, cannot be categorized nor even defined. it is constantly imagining and imagined, and there is so much more to learn.

by Mimi Zhu on Romance as Deep Presence 

Onward. 

Share Uno's Thought Scramble

The sides…

Recommended reading:

1. We resort to describing ourselves as victims to stay at the centre of a conversation, especially when we are about to be held accountable for our own complicity in oppression. Aubrey Gordon on ‘it’s fatphobia, not internalized fatphobia'. “What you are feeling — that compulsion to object — might be a sign of what happens when your sense of centrality is challenged.” More highlights:

   If you don’t experience a particular kind of oppression, it isn’t yours to internalize. And despite the pain endured by many straight-size people (that is, people who don’t wear plus sizes), that pain isn’t internalized oppression… when thin people come to believe terrible, judgmental things about fat people and weight gain, even when they extend those judgments to themselves, that isn’t “internalized fatphobia” or “internalized anti-fatness.” It’s just anti-fatness.

   ..You may yearn to stay thin or get thinner, at least in part to avoid the discriminatory attitudes and actions that are so commonly leveled against fat people. You haven’t internalized our oppression. You’ve learned to keep yourself out of the line of fire. And instead of making the world safer for all of us, regardless of size, you focus on keeping yourself small — and maintaining the dominance you’ve been taught you earned.

   ..Learning about these concepts and learning to see your own complicity in oppression may make you uncomfortable. It should. All of us should be uncomfortable when we realize the ways we’ve asserted our power over others. And we should use that discomfort to power our own growth — not to push painful realizations aside but to grow through them, to become better, to make new mistakes, and to grow through them too.

2. Kindly, do not text your ex, you stupid beetle. Follow BreakUpBestie’s four things you could do instead. I’ll admit I followed these and also recorded an 11 minute voice note with all the things I would say to my bad beloved and sent it to my “Uno self” chat. I do not have the courage to EVER listen to that.

3. Life and Beth by Amy Schumer on Hulu. I saw this many months ago but was reminded of it because I’m in a fight with someone that’s now lasted months and, yes, somehow all of this is related. The show is touching, funny, self-aware, so cute and so very awkward. I loved loved loved it.

4. On Jainism, animal consciousness, Delhi’s bird hospital and the wisdom of the crows, bees, octupuses, and all animals. A journey into the animal mind by Ross Anderson. My highlights:

   ..Either consciousness evolved twice, at least, across the long course of evolutionary history, or it evolved sometime before birds and mammals went on their separate evolutionary journeys. Both scenarios would give us reason to believe that nature can knit molecules into waking minds more easily than previously guessed. This would mean that all across the planet, animals large and small are constantly generating vivid experiences that bear some relationship to our own.
   .. The notion that we are kin across this expanse of time has proved too radical for some, which is one reason the ever-changing universe described by Darwin has been slow to lodge in the collective human consciousness. And yet, our hands are converted fins, our hiccups the relics of gill-breathing.
   When we pull a less cognitively blessed fish up from the pressured depths too quickly, and barometric trauma fills its bloodstream with tissue-burning acid, its on-deck thrashing might be a silent scream, born of the fish’s belief that it has entered a permanent state of extreme suffering.

5. Establishing why zero sum games suck via probability from this cool thread on the gambler’s ruin.

6. On why mosques don’t (usually) have representational art, how their beautiful blue and mathematical symmetry came to be, and the context behind the word ‘iconoclast’ - by The Culture Tutor.

7. On platonic polyamory and how state-capitalism puts up barriers against living in community with your friends even when it’s the efficient outcome. This episode on the Mistakes Were Made podcast.

Questionnable screenshots (which are very wholesome today)

• Lena Dunham’s very loving note to self as we descend into another year we will hate to live through.

• Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System:

  

  

Thank you for making it this far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

Hunched over my laptop, wearing three thick socks, mindlessly eating an orange,

Uno

Have you come across tiktok/reels that go, “The most chronically online take I saw this week..” and it’s someone who claims that encouraging aspiring parents to be financially independent before having a child is eugenicist? These reels/tiktoks are hilarious because they acknowledge a real disconnect between the escalations we raise online and the issues in the real world.

Of course, when I assert something like this, I spiral into - What is The Real World? Why do I claim that the digital world is not part of my full reality when my iPhone can vouch that I spend 4 hours and 48 minutes on it - giving it 20% of my every day. How then can I make meaning of the world without considering the weight the internet takes up in my life? Perhaps that’s the description of the problem phrased as a question. You can read about the issues with our internet diet here, here and here but, really, just study the number of phone pick-ups you make in an hour, wonder what they really did for you, and then ask yourself if you have a problem.1

I came of age online. I started actively using social media in 2009 with Orkut, Hi5 and the likes and have voraciously consumed it ever since. Over the past few years, there’s been a shift in what the internet has felt like. Earlier, I had an online presence. Today, the online commands a significant space in my offline life. As I walked my dog a few evenings ago, my mind immediately crafted up a potential reel to the simple views on my walk. It made me wonder if I exist on Instagram as content and my actual (real) social life serves to mirror that curation. Perhaps this is an exaggeration of slight magnitude - so you can add as much salt to moderate this assertion - but it does feel that way sometimes.

And, I’m not a ‘hater’. I love and appreciate all the wonderful things social media brings into my life. I have 574 posts on Instagram (with my last post being yesterday). I’m one of those people that have a curation of Instagram story highlights (the levels on this woman, right?!). I ‘have a close friends’ but fail to develop a consistent criteria for what goes to which audience. I even updated my Facebook last month after what felt like a century.2 I am chronically online. Instagram helps me stay connected with my widely spread out network of friends without exerting too much effort. Whatsapp would occupy the top rank if I made a #What’sInMyBag video because that’s where my mom receives my 8 hour live location, Uber link, friends’ contact details along with hourly updates about my well-being when I step out of the house. I develop most of my opinions on pop culture through Diet Sabya or by googling things like “hbo girls atlantic review” / “mad men don draper hot but self sabotage making charm fade away”. I tolerate hour long cab rides because of my well-prepared podcast playlist and I exchange mind-bending article links and gossipy screenshots across multiple group chats with friends. I’m also getting into the soft and stupid drama of sending-memes/reels-as-a-way-of-flirting.3 Surely I spend all this time and effort on these apps because they bring my some joy, right?

None of this is to establish my credentials so I can go on to claim how ‘social media is ruining our lives’. I mean, it kinda is, but (I know) I’m not the first person on the internet to come to that realization. It’s to underline the kind of performativity that’s changing on and because of the internet. I began by saying that we used to have an online presence, the persona we took on the internet, which was different from who we really were, i.e. in our real lives. Some people had a curated archive of vacation photos, work achievements and warm celebrations with family and friends. Others curated a niche to capture interests they shared uniquely online - a movie genre, fitness, cooking, unhinged memes, and so on. But now, the online persona has come to occupy a life-sized presence in our offline lives. How did this shift happen?

First came Stories. It felt as if all of internet went through an #AuthenticityWreckoning™ over (what felt like overnight but was really) the last few years. Everyone wanted to post their ‘full selves’ online. A parody of this is the influencer posting a make-up free selfie of her ‘natural’ skin which costs a monthly USD 1,000 to maintain. You can see different iterations of this in any content creator’s Instagram - they aren’t just fashion or fitness or cooking influencers. They must also share well-crafted snippets of the mundane parts of their life to be accepted by their audience. We need content about their friendships, love lives, political opinions, bad days, insecurities, and more. Everything is up for views as long but, please, be sure to get the aesthetic right.

Then, TikTok happened. And with that, every single second of our life got a soundtrack. You can now romanticize literally anything from making toast, taking a shower, wearing clothes, journaling, meditating, visiting a monument, drinking coffee, .. and, of course, driving in the car. Earlier, we reserved our phone cameras for a special moment. Now, every moment experienced is special because I’m romanticizing my life with help from easy-to-make-and-mimic reel formats. Our phone cameras and the stories follow us.. to every single moment. A flock of pigeons passed my window before sunset yesterday and, despite my hatred for these perpetually sex-ing birds, I thought, “How beautiful. Do they always find each other before flying out? Is it a common crew every day or anyone goes?” Before I could explore any of that, another instinctive thought followed - “Should’ve captured that and added some slow Rajasthani music to go with it for my Instagram”.4

Performativity itself isn’t new. For centuries, we have performed gender to be accepted into civil society and win favour with the powerful. We also perform when we are in front of our bosses at the workplace, on a first date we want to succeed, or a friend we want to win over. All performativity is not equal. Some is harmless - if not helpful - ‘fake it till you make it’ performance where you externally act as if you were the ideal person you desire to be. If you struggle to manage your temper, it’s okay to perform as a well-tempered person in social situations. A lot of performativity is harmful, such as when men are expected to perform toughness and only express their sorrow and grief in the form of anger. Some performativity is also (super) cringe, such as when aspirational allies to a movement go on to make ostentatious gestures to signal their support. Dominant culture has always delineated the performance it expects from desirable contestants. To win, you must conform.

What do we win when we perform well online? You spend some time on any social media platform; You get hooked to the cycle of finding worthy content (For You); you engage by sharing it with friends, posting your own content, and repeating that cycle a few billion times. This gives the platform insights about your - and your groups’ - buying preferences. But what does this give you? Us? I don’t mean that we are well connected, etc etc. We covered that above - it’s great. I mean, what does our performance get us? When I shave my body hair to look more feminine, diet myself into a smaller body and an eating disorder, restraint my feminism to fit likability moulds, etc. I do gain some thing - I gain favor and status within patriarchy. I can bitch about patriarchy all I want but, within its lose-lose nexus, the status it bestows on me for performing feminity is real. Marriage, for example, has offered social, economic and physical mobility to many women even as it has restrained them into a patriarchal bind of endless unpaid labour. What do I gain from having a “strong Instagram game” in concrete terms?

There’s a lot of talk about blending our authentic selves into our online persona; ‘brand image’ or something. But, can I really learn who I am when the internet has already decided for me? The nudge-to-buy content we consume (and are suggested) is constantly categorizing us into a (very) accurate consumer segment. To perform your authentic self online is challenging when you can simply choose from a premix of online personas that are close enough to your ‘vibe’ and help you ‘stay relevant’ in whatever sense that word appeals to your usage of the internet. All this reversion to the average (mean) on the internet is then coupled with the internets’ perpetual presence in our constantly-diminishing-offline lives. This leaves us unable to even imagine ourselves as separate from who the internet tells us we are. Because self-discovery requires pause, reflection and reckoning. This work rests on our ability to resist the urge to immediately numb the present discomfort with some scrolling5. It is saying something grand like, “This is uncomfortable and I have to sit in it long enough to see what lies under this feeling and beyond.” We need to do some offline work to find out who we are, what we want, who we desire, and what we make before we take it online. Otherwise, I fear what will remain of us are marketable personas with little space to accommodate and, more essentially, understand the fullness and the complexity of our real personhood.

The sides..

Things I loved:

• The album 2030 by Gone Gone Beyond. I enjoyed this a bit more because it felt like having my friend, Ankita, loudly type on her laptop while simultaneously calming herself down by singing in my blue room. The first song, Canyons, is what she can sound like sometimes. Other times, she sounds drinking a spiced hot toddy by the fireside at a terrace in December Delhi.

• Par chanaa de by Noori and Shilpa Rao. I was listening to this song in the car with my mom when she told me that this is about Heer-Ranjha, the Punjabi folk lore about an inter-caste love affair that led to a deeply tragic honor killing of Heer. There are many versions to this folklore but here’s what I inherited. At night, she would swim through the river Chenab to meet her lover, Ranjha. Her parents protested against their affair given his caste but she persisted. Finally, they replaced her clay pot with one made of sand, which quickly dissolved when she took it in the river to assist with her swimming. She drowned. The lyrics to this song are beautifully descriptive and they made my eyes well up. ‘Adhiyal’ is a word often used for disobedient girls.

  Couple’s therapy: The premise is in the name - couples come in to weeks of therapy with each other and we get a glimpse into their sessions and a slight peep into their lives. It is so good. I’m two seasons in and I have written notes from this show. I am intrusively curious about how people fight. I want to know what you say to hurt someone; how your eyes roll when you listen to someone else’s narrative about an experience you both shared; whether you cry or throw a fit when you have to own up to your part of the fight.. i want to know everything from the sideline. In an episode, someone literally said that they withstood the afternoon heat without the AC so their relationship could be better. The show also feels to be in forever winter. It reminds me of how I’m always dressed to prevent myself from freezing during the winters but am never comfortable. Anyway, this show was made for me and I loved it so much.

• the Physicals vs the Virtuals. Lyons’s description of a thinking class that is always online vs a working class that builds the functional world felt important to me. The article discusses the culture backing the truckers moment in Canada and is worth a slow reading.

  The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

  The second class is different.. This group is the “thinking classes”.. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

• John Lennon’s Love, whose lyrics are so simple, so soft, so perfect.

  Love is real, real is love. Love is feeling, feeling love. Love is wanting to be loved. Love is touch. Touch is love. Love is reaching, reaching love. Love is asking to be loved. Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be. Love is free, free is love. Love is living, living love. Love is needing to be loved.

  

• A special shout down to Moving in With Malaika. Not to be a petty bitch but I could not bare it for longer than 20 minutes. It gave me no entertainment, no gossip and way too many ads.

  Things I am ??? about:

• What’s in season? Noting the irony - Is there an online guide to what fruits and vegetables are in season depending on the different parts of India? I’m confused as to when exactly we started growing strawberries/blueberries in India. I am also deeply confused by how papaya is still rampantly selling even though it’s supposed to be a summer fruit. I get it, everything is four seasons now but, still, some guidance, please. What fruits and veggies are in season and recommended to buy?

  Questionnable screenshots

• From my notes app: I mean this statement 80%. I would take out ‘never possible’ to instead say ‘rare and requires deliberate care and attention’

• Everyday on the internet i practice the art of realizing no thought or feeling i’ve ever experienced is original

• For when you need a reminder: Wait. Longer than that. even longer than that.

Thank you for making it this far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

Clasping a warm mug with both my hands,

Uno B.

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At a given point of time, one has about 24 friends in their life. I consider myself rather social and ‘extroverted’, so I think this number could apply to me. I am also self-indulgent enough to say I can pass off as ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’ and ‘moralistic’ by those looking to classify people with such labels. So, what I’m getting at is.. if Muslims make up ~11% of my country’s population, I should at least have 2–3 close friends who are also Muslim. No? No.

I can only think of one close friend who’s a Muslim — 67% less than ideal. Most others are — and it has always gone without saying — Savarna (upper caste) Hindu friends. Growing up too, I don’t recall my elders having close friends who were Muslim. When there were inter-faith marriages, they were only ever talked about as an aberration (bad, even if it worked) or a lesson (bad, and it didn’t even work). All this while we considered ourselves progressive. And to be fair, we are not uniquely racist — 86% Indians say their closest friends are from their own religious group. And Hindus and Muslims are no different from each other when it comes to this practice. 99% of married couples in India surveyed in 2019 shared religion with their spouse. This, too, is unsurprising given how couples who do dare to marry outside of their faith are brutally terrorized if not actually murdered. It’s often (insincerely) argued that this segregation is not from some inimical hatred or bias but really just “the way we have lived together for centuries”. But this segregation has also erased knowledge about one another and led to a reliance on stereotypes which are increasingly informed by divisive political narratives.

Despite how violently we assert our differences, we seemingly care a lot about the rights of Muslim women. I was fed with many narratives about how Muslim women in India were deeply repressed. I thought that they were barred from entering mosques; their husbands were polygamous and could divorce them on whim; and many other half-truths I never checked given I never knew many Muslim people myself. This distance was never exercised explicitly (although sometimes it was) but it was implicit and well-understood.

Importantly, I learnt of the repression of Muslim women before I understood that of Hindu women. I imagined a Muslim woman clad in her burqa unable to tell pavement from road without feeling any dissonance as a Hindu woman who herself was afraid to step out in clothes I wore out of my own choice. All this feminism for Muslim women before I acknowledged and understood how women are ill-treated according to my own religion’s scriptures and contemporary practices. Brahmanical patriarchy was rarely a place of inspection because the Muslim woman’s status was always worse.

“No woman wears hijab by choice. Did women ever accept triple talaq malpractice by choice? Ask those daughters and sisters.”

— Yogi Adityanath/ Ajay Singh Bisht, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh

P.S. Imagine what fresh heaven would break lose if Yogi Ji truly did ask and listen to Muslim daughters and sisters..

Why are we so interested in the special repression of Muslim women? This dilemma — although eternally relevant — has become acute recently as college authorities, violent mobs of unemployed men, and even judicial courts across India took issue with women wearing hijabs to attend their classes. As we all watched women being harassed by men who violently insisted they remove their hijabs, I wondered if India hates its Muslims more than it hates its women. I asked myself..

Who — and what — are we freeing Muslim women from? For many Indian women, covering their heads (through hijabs, ghoonghats or other clothing) allows them to step out of the house to go to work or simply for leisure. 60% Indian women cover their heads when stepping out. When you take away this freedom to cover her head, are you not possibly coercing women to stay home? Are you not adding the additional threat of violence from Islamphobic mobs because they covered their head in addition to the threat of violence from simply being a woman in public space in India? [And to indulge in some fun what aboutery, why only the hijabs? What about turbans, which are an essential religious practice to Sikh men? And the ghoongat, which Hindu women use to veil themselves from men aside from their husbands? Why are other head coverings such as the ghoongat and turbans tolerable and respectable but the hijab is not?]

Who are the oppressors of Muslim women and are they really that different from the oppressors of other women? Indians have long demonized the young Muslim man as barbaric, predatory and criminal. We see this stereotype in popular Bollywood movies such as Sooryavanshi, Padmavat, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, and many more. The Hindu man’s masculinity seems to always be in crisis. Today, the Hindu man is asked to bulk up and arm himself with rightwing camps in small towns so he can protect his Hindu sisters from love jihad (the holy war for love — if irony was spelled in five words). During India’s partition from Pakistan too, there were similar narratives to anathemize violence by Muslims while at the same time condoning and rationalizing violence by Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims.

“…the theme that the Muslim is strongly sexual, with an uncontrolled libido, and if you allow it free expression, then the Hindu and Sikh woman’s sexuality, till now kept in check by men of their communities, will be equally freed and become very dangerous. Built on it is the narrative of the masculinity of Muslims and the lack of it in Hindus — they are shown as weak, emasculated, non-meat eating — what rubbish. Thus, Hindus are shown suffering because of Muslims. The Hindu isn’t abducting or raping women. If he is indeed raping women, it is either because there has been a terrible provocation or it is an aberration. This is the narrative they are building all the time.” — Urvashi Butalia

What is the freedom we are gifting women? Will we stand for the freedom to choose even if the choice doesn’t suit our narrative and our privileged status in society? Let’s say we forced Muslim women to be free of their hijab. Can they wear anything they want or only clothing deemed ‘respectable’ and ‘tolerable’ by our intolerant republic? Can they go out in public without fearing sexual violence? Will we stand for their freedom from violence by the Indian state in Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat? Or are these violences acceptable but the hijab is not?

To draw some analogies (none of them perfect), why should we be surprised that Afghan women did not throw off their burqas when we know perfectly well that in our society it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the Metropolitan Opera? … People wear the appropriate form of dress for their social communities and their social classes. They are guided by socially shared standards and signals of social status.. The ability to afford proper and appropriate cover affects choice. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we might also remind ourselves of the expression, “the tyranny of fashion.”
~Lila Abu-Lughod in Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

To be clear — Yes, Muslim women are subjugated. And yes, they are subjugated in ways specific to their religion. AS ARE OTHER WOMEN. To be clearer still, the interest we have shown in their subjugation — the kind that violates their privacy and harasses them in public spaces — comes from our intolerance, ignorance, and complete disinterest in understanding what freedoms they want. We have grown so distant and hateful that we will go to great lengths — even play pretend feminism — just so we can keep our unemployed mobs busy with violence against Muslim people in our country. Before we play feminist with our Islamophobic lens, let’s investigate how Brahmanical patriarchy subjugates women and Dalit people in our own homes and communities. Once we are standing up to these injustices, perhaps we can ask Muslim women what freedom to choose would mean for them?

“Both instances — strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries — may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren’t really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn’t about the hijab. It’s about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.” ~Arundhati Roy

~

Truth also is the pursuit of it:

Like happiness, and it will not stand.

Even the verse begins to eat away

In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;

A wind moves a little,

Moving in a circle, very cold.

How shall we say?

In ordinary discourse —

We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,

The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable

Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights

Daily with that predominance

And we have become the present.

We must talk now. Fear

Is fear. But we abandon one another.

— George Oppen’s Leviathon

Things that informed this thought-web:

• Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”

• The dangerous twists and turns of Kannada TV media’s coverage of the hijab row, The News Minute

• Video of a ‘reporter’ harassing a young girl who is wearing a hijab

• The entire 2021 pew research report titled “Religion: tolerance and segregation in India”. You can also read this article for a quicker skim.

• Urvashi Butalia’s book, “The other side of silence” which investigates real stories and made-up narratives about our partition from Pakistan

• NewsLaundry’s article on How the Hindu man’s crisis of masculinity fuels Hindutva

• The Hindu’s article on Love in the time of honour killings

• Dynamics of inter-religious and inter-caste marriages in India, a paper by Kumudin Das, K. C. Das, T. K. Roy and P. K. Tripathy

• Chandar Bhan Kaifi Dehelvi’s Hindu musalmanon ka ittihad, which was beautifully read by Fabeha Syed on her ‘Urdunama’ podcast. Excerpt from that ghazal below:

rahne meñ kuchh hai ‘kaifī’ barbād ho ke rahnā

kyā gosha-e-qafas meñ nāshād ho ke rahnā

sīkho vatan meñ apne āzād ho ke rahnā

gulzār-e-ārzū meñ shamshād ho ke rahnā

bāheñ gale meñ Daalo be-iḳhtiyār donoñ

haañ chhoḌ do ye ranjish ban jaao yaar donoñ

And yet, couldn’t they try to fix it? After all, they had been in love for ten years. Ten years. Twenty years if you consider their individual time spend. (Thirty years if you validate my self importance and imposition on their relationship.) Ten years of phone calls and letters exchanged across the country, poetry written to each other that matured with their age, endless songs sung and playlists made to capture the many seasons of their love, friends mixed and families understood, tattoos etched with seeming permanence, and a life shared with the promises and hopes of forever. They’d spent 40% of their lives so far with each other. How could they now wake up tomorrow and just.. start over?

I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes 
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly

decorative, a mermaid on the prow. 
Whether I brought him better luck 
is not my weather to tell. I cost him.

Time. He costs me. More.

Snipped from Divorce Song by Jameson Fitzpatrick

The year is 2017. I am 19; I identify very deeply as an ‘econ student’; I do so because I am deeply insecure but I am always trying to seem cool and credible; I have the tendency to theorize personal disasters to simplify and solve them; I act before I can fully understand what my actions can do. I really thought I had cracked it — their relationship was struggling and it seemed like the only reason they held onto it was because they wanted to salvage the irrecoverable ten years. But having loved once was no reason to love always. And I — Miss Reasonable to many faults — had no patience for irrationality. So, I emailed my friend the research on ‘sunk cost fallacy’. “The phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.”

The year is 2022 (it’s a few days ago). I’m with my dog on our daily morning walk and it begins to drizzle, rain and then obnoxiously pour in the matter of a few seconds. As I rush home, I see a mother and her (presumably) 8 year old son seek temporary shelter before he can catch his school bus. As much as I want believe that I’m onto some new bullshit, I am still thinking — SUNK COSTS! We know no real learning occurs in schools when it rains. The uniforms are soiled, girls are pre-occupied with ensuring their white uniforms haven’t grown transparent, the classrooms smell nasty, and it’s just too damn dirty and chaotic for the orderly enterprise of a school. The kids (and admittedly also the teachers) are in no real mood to really study (or teach). ~ The vibes are just off~ .Why ruin your mood, get drenched in the rain, and all for a wasted day of learning? Can’t he just study at home instead? Isn’t she making the sunk cost fallacy by forcing him to go to school — when he clearly won’t learn much — simply because they’ve gotten ready for it?

Time by Alex Dimitrov

Again I am unprepared
standing under an awning
in the middle of summer
autumn, winter, spring
watching the downpour
in what could be
the middle of life;
wondering how long I’ll wait
before becoming the rain.

I wonder — why do we commit this fallacy? If we indeed “vote with our feet” — and many economists insist that we do — might it not be better for us to keep trying to hold-up the damaged ship rather than letting it sink?

More interestingly, what do we look to salvage in these otherwise ‘doomed’ projects? While I don’t think the (popular use of) sunk cost fallacy theory is entirely wrong, I do think its over-indexes on an assumption that is often unintuitive — that we would be better off if we stopped investing in these seemingly unproductive decisions. It ignores the cost, the pain, the shame, of giving up. I think the trade-off should consider the costs of a sunk ship more sincerely.

We serve a multitude of projects and objectives through each act. When the mother sends her kid to school on a rainy day, she is not just catering to the project of his education. She may have woken up early, cooked and packed lunch boxes for her kid, ironed his uniform, dressed him, all while replicating the same chores for her husband (who hopefully dresses himself). There are planned tasks for the rest of the day which presume her kid is at school. Canceling school would spin these plans into chaos. The benefit of having a drenched kid out at school and absent from home during the day may be greater than the cost of monitoring him to study from the comfort of home while upsetting all your plans for the day.

Committing the sunk cost fallacy is — clears throat and straightens spine — crucial to a stable social order. We invest effort to make our promises seem credible. Keeping our promises — especially when they are hard — is how we develop resilience in our relationships. ‘Come rain or shine’ is about both perseverance and commitment. First, determination, among the most important mental muscles to nurture, is essentially committing the sunk cost fallacy and never giving up. There’s a lesson the mother is teaching her kid when she sends him to school even when it’s challenging to go: You persist at arduous things especially because it’s part of what makes the eventual success rewarding and credible. Second, who are we without the promises we keep? An unreliable flaker whose friends can’t trust them to show up when they said they would. Doing hard things for our loved ones is among our many cherished love languages.

The popular use of sunk cost fallacy often under-estimates the cost of disinvestment. This oversight is what makes the theory rather unintuitive. We must be interested in why we salvage our sinking ships. One is bound to find cracks at some point or the other in any long-term project or relationship, no matter what kind. And that is when things get interesting. The commitment and perseverance to these relationships — including the one we keep with ourselves — floats us through these moments and ties our bonds stronger. To love, then, is to make the sunk cost fallacy over and over again.

Of course, sometimes the relation-ship is wrecked beyond repair and there’s little that one can salvage. In those times, we need grace, courage, and abundant love. Instead of sending my friend the research on sunk cost fallacies in breaking up, I should have paid heed to why she wanted to hold on and what she feared would happen if she didn’t — what about your life with this man are you trying to salvage? How can we recreate parts of it together even in his absence? What will you need to start over? What will you miss? How do you feel? Have you eaten? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Untitled by Clementine von Radics

I thought leaving you would be easy,
just walking out the door
but I keep getting pinned against it
with my legs around your waist and it’s like
my lips want you like my lungs want air,
it’s just what they where born to do so
I am sitting at work thinking of you
cutting vegetables in my kitchen
your hair in my shower drain
your fingers on my spine in the morning
while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know
you will never be the one I call home
but the way you talk about poems
like marxists talk of revolution
it makes me want to keep trying.
I’m still looking for reasons to love you.
I’m still looking for proof you love me.

-

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

Thich Nhat Hanh, via The Nook

-

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

Indulge away :)

1. It Ends or It Doesn’t by Caitlyn Siehl

It ends or it doesn’t.
That’s what you say. That’s
how you get through it.
The tunnel, the night,
the pain, the love.
It ends or it doesn’t.
If the sun never comes up,
you find a way to live
without it.
If they don’t come back,
you sleep in the middle of the bed,
learn how to make enough coffee
for yourself alone.
Adapt. Adjust.
It ends or it doesn’t.
It ends or it doesn’t.
We do not perish.

2. That’s not how this works by Trista Mateer

In a universe parallel to this one, you and I stay up some nights, holding hands in bed, worrying about all the versions of ourselves that don’t end up together. Parallel You says, “Somewhere we never even kiss.” Parallel Me says, “Somewhere we never even touch.” Parallel You supposes that the universe in which we never cross paths must be a kinder one than the universe where we make the effort to love each other and fail at it so miserably that we part ways and never speak again. Parallel Me says, “That universe doesn’t exist.” Parallel You says, “That’s not how this works.”

3. Lillian Gish goes to Hell by Richard Siken

I am no stranger
to love and I am not waiting for you, because
I believe we will be reborn, because I believe
everything, and I believe that we will meet
again and suffer together again. The future
belongs to China and yet I want to learn
French. This, too, is another kind of suffering.
Once, at a truck stop, I ate an entire banana
cream pie and half a pound of bacon, which
is a kind of suffering for some, but I felt
fucking great. You know this, you must know
this. We are lovely and full of desire, we die
so many times and come back here, to cross
paths. I didn’t fall off the roof, I was pushed.
I want neither revenge nor relief. I crave no
rescue. What I want, Lillian, is to be gigantic
and perfectly lit, to be with you again, carnal
in our reincarnation. The future will find us
handsome taikonauts in a small ship spinning
out of control, flawed by love and plunging
realistically toward the heart of a hellish sun.
In the future we will suffer together in outer
space and eat crème brûlée out of a silver tube.
The novelty never wears off, Lil. It never does.

4. Marg-e Soz-e Muhabbat / The death of the fires of love by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Original (urdu/ hindustani?): It’s best read at Rekhta, which i have hyperlinked, because you can also look up the meanings of compound words.

aao ki marg-e-soz-e-mohabbat manā.eñ ham

aao ki husn-e-māh se dil ko jalā.eñ ham

ḳhush huuñ firāq-e-qāmat-o-ruḳhsār-e-yār se

sarv-o-gul-o-saman se nazar ko satā.eñ ham

vīrānī-e-hayāt ko vīrān-tar kareñ

le nāseh aaj terā kahā maan jaa.eñ ham

phir oT le ke dāman-e-abr-e-bahār kī

dil ko manā.eñ ham kabhī aañsū bahā.eñ ham

suljhā.eñ be-dilī se ye uljhe hue savāl

vaañ jaa.eñ yā na jaa.eñ na jaa.eñ ki jaa.eñ ham (Uno reads as “Waha jaye ya na jaye ki jaye hum?”)

phir dil ko pās-e-zabt kī talqīn kar chukeñ

aur imtihān-e-zabt se phir jī churā.īñ ham

aao ki aaj ḳhatm huī dāstān-e-ishq

ab ḳhatm-e-āshiqī ke fasāne sunā.eñ ham

English translation:

Come, let’s celebrate the passing of the passion of love

Come, let’s burn our hearts with the cold beauty

of the moon

Let’s rejoice in the pangs of separation from the

beloved’s frame and figure

Let’s punish our sight with the sight of the cypress

and the rose and the jasmine

Make the desolate life even more desolate

Let me heed your advice for once, dear counsellor

Sheltered again under the hem of spring’s rain

Soothe and placate the heart at times, shed tears at times

Untie listlessly the tangled knots of such questions:

Should I go there, or not go; not go at all or go for real?

Preach to the heart yet again the doctrine of restraint

And again avoid testing the resolve to be patient

Come, for the story of passion has concluded today

Let us now narrate the tales of love’s ceasing to be

5. Dil tadap tadap ke keh raha hai sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh

Dil tadap tadap ke keh raha hai aa bhi ja,

tu humse aankh na chura,

tujhe kasam hai aa bhi ja

Dil dhadak dhadak ke keh raha hai yeh sada,

tumhari ho chuki hoon main,

tumhare paas hoon sada

6. Tasting the moon by Caitlyn Siehl

I am thinking about
the crescent scar on the
roof of his mouth that he
got when he fell with
a straw between his teeth
and how it felt to run my tongue
over it.
How it felt to taste the moon.
If love is anything tangible, it
is his mouth,
his mouth,
his holy goddamned mouth.
He says my name
and the whole sky is talking.

7. Burning by Caitlyn Siehl (yes i inhaled her poetry)

Love, you said, was a fire
outside the door of a place
you don’t want to be anymore.
An ambulance waiting
around the corner.
I pictured the cathedral of you
going up in flames, then,
the holy dresser melting your
holy clothes.
Every inch of the blessed bed orange and
angry.
I swear I’ll survive every fire
after this one.
I’ll walk out of every house
I ever missed you in
and let the smoke eat the doorways.
I’ll write on the walls:
You are sacred because
I have made you sacred.
There is no burning that I did not create.

8. Wash by Caitlyn Siehl

Love ended and there
was no music.
Not even
a violin.
All that was left was the
driveway where it happened
and the sock that they dropped
on their way not-home,
not-here, not-anymore.
It happens like that.
No one makes a plaque for the death
of a small love.
No one makes a statue for forgetting.
They just wander over the dirt
until the grass grows back.
So you wash the sock
and place it in your drawer
where it will find its way
into the pile of unmatched
ones and you’ll wear it
one day without even
realizing.
You remember
but it doesn’t
hurt
anymore.

9. Loveless by Caitlyn Siehl

In the dream that matters
I have nowhere to be.
I have four dogs who sleep
in the bed with me, and I can
drink coffee again
without getting
sick.
I always talk about love
but I’ve seen a life
where I can live without it,
where I can eat with my hands,
make the whole bed,
and leave the light on
for myself.

10. Instructions for the journey by Pat Schneider (via The Alipore Post)

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

11. There Comes the Strangest Moment by Kate Light (via The Nook)

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free — 
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want — my want. I love — my love. I’ll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

12. In the Company of Women by January Gill O’Neil (via The Alipore Post)

Make me laugh over coffee,
make it a double, make it frothy
so it seethes in our delight.
Make my cup overflow
with your small happiness.
I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle.
Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
Let me listen to your ringing and singing
as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.
Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.
Not tonight. Not here.
No makeup. No tears.
Only contours. Only curves.
Each sip takes back a pound,
each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.
Can I have a refill, just one more?
Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.
Let us take this joy to go.

India is supposedly the fastest growing market for menstrual hygiene products (i.e., pads/tampons/menstrual cups/etc). And yet, we buy <5% of the sanitary napkins compared to China even though we have a similar potential “market” size (i.e. the number of women). This is not that jarring given China is richer and more developed than us. Countries with higher per capita income also tend to have higher use of commercial menstrual products. Within India too, commercial menstrual product use is correlated with development — Women in the highest wealth quintile are 4X times more likely to use a commercial product such as pads or tampons compared to the lowest wealth quintile; 81% well-educated women use commercial products compared to 20% among women who’ve never been to school; 78% urban women use commercial products compared with 48% in rural areas.

Most (62%) Indian women in my age-group still use cloths. In contrast, I am among the 2.4% minority of women aged 15–24 who use tampons. There’s little that we share except the important fact that we both bleed. They are likelier to live in rural areas, while I live in the metropolitan city of Delhi. I enjoy privileges associated with being the fourth generation of an educated, upper caste family while women who use cloths are likelier to be from communities identified as Scheduled Tribe or Schedule Caste or Other Backward Classes in India. A woman from my wealth bracket is 4X more likely to use a tampon compared to a woman who is in the lowest wealth bracket. Just 13% women in the lowest wealth bracket use sanitary napkins compared to almost about 71% women in the highest wealth bracket.

Not all menstrual hygiene products are equally good (but most could be better). Women may use multiple products on their periods. Personally, I use tampons because they win on convenience — it’s less messy and offers more mobility. ~42% women use sanitary napkins and 16% use locally prepared napkins. About 62% users in India will use a thick cloth (often stripped from an old shirt or sari) and tie it to their panties. While it is possible to safely reuse cloths, typical practice risks overflow, is culpable to stain, reduces ones’ mobility and is highly correlated with infections. This explains why women who use home-made products such as cloths have lower school attendance (40%) compared with their peers who use commercial products (72% attendance). Any safe reuse of cloths requires women to wash them regularly with clean water and soap — things often restricted from Indian women due to social and cultural reasons. Cloths need to be dried in the sunlight to be disinfected but this is difficult for women given menstruation is relegated to hidden, private corners given the stigma it continues to carry in our society. And rarely do Indian women have the private space to wash and dry blood stained cloths out in the open where neighbors and strangers can see visible proof of menstruation.

When it comes to the taboo associated with menstruation, Indian society shares it across income and class. Most of my male friends are unable to have a non-awkward conversation about periods. Our country released its first tampon ad just five years ago and it was basically a tampon 101. Even today, women — especially caste women — are deemed “impure” during periods and suspended from “purer” spheres such as the temple and kitchen. Periods therefore become a marginalized experience mostly endured in private but also sometimes in community with other women comrades.

Excerpt: “I grew up in a pretty religious Sanatanist Hindu family in Trinidad. It was therefore not uncommon to hear comments about someone being unclean, and having it explained to me that: “The blood is dirty, and puja things have to be clean, so you can’t touch anything for the puja.” I used to help my mom set up everything for puja. When she “wasn’t clean,” I did almost all the preparations myself, following her instruction. Sometimes, I too would not be clean, but out of habit, I would still touch things. I might wash a thali (platter) or pass the sugar from the aunties making sweet rice in the kitchen to my mom setting up in the living room. I would exclaim, “Oh I touched it! I’m not clean,” but my mom would dismiss it, “It’s alright. Didn’t you wash your hands?” or “Don’t worry about it.” Perhaps it was this dismissal that planted the seed of doubt in my mind about how necessary it was to adhere to these practices of purity. This doubt has matured; I am no longer religious.”

So.. should we just wait for economic growth to render women the access to safe menstrual products? We must refuse such a lazy answer.

In a future post, I want to explore the supply side of this story: Who sells menstrual products in India? How can we bring the price down? What else can we do? Shout at me if you have thoughts about this!

—

Notes:

1. I acknowledge that menstruation is not specific to any one gender. Many trans and gender diverse people may also have periods. In this article, I use women to include all people who experience menstruation but do not cover how trans and gender diverse people may experience this differently.

2. India has ~663mn women compared to ~687mn women in China.

3. I am 24 years old as I write this post.

Sources:

1. https://www.psi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Menstrual-Hygiene-Management-Recommendations-India-July-2018.pdf

2. https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR339/FR339.pdf

3. https://www.unicef.org/media/91346/file/UNICEF-Guide-menstrual-hygiene-materials-2019.pdf

4. https://www.fsg.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/An-Opportunity-to-Address-Menstrual-Health-and-Gender-Equity_0.pdf

5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4488331/

Summary: What happens when your local government operates like a jugaadu capitalist? Answer: ghettos that make poor people invisible when they aren’t serving the rich / an avoidable public health disaster / all while bombay still gives you the posh city of dreams #vibes.

The full download:

Rich people hate looking at slums but not in an absolute sense. On one hand, we need slums and chawls to ensure workers live close to their place of work and also so we can enjoy an artsy slum tour. We are fine with abject poverty so long as it doesn’t stare blatantly in the face of our obscene opulence. In Mumbai, this duality exists as if a renaissance artist had crafted it to make a perfect point. What’s the point? When the government operates like a jugaadu capitalist, public health disasters occur and poor people die needlessly.

To balance the need for a sufficient reserve of labor while also ensuring that poverty (caused by low wages) is invisible to the employers living in their posh high rises, Mumbai’s local government transitioned the responsibility of building affordable public housing for slum dwellers to private developers by selling slum land to them at 25% of the market value if they sought 70% of the community’s consent (which they were able to through the promise of affordable housing).

Did the slum dwellers receive housing? Inarguably, they did not. Only 2.5 lakh homes have been built in the last 25 years and <20% families of the promised families have been rehabilitated. 55% of Mumbai’s population was still living in slums in 2018 compared to 41% in 2011.

What about the houses that were in fact built? Scam. The private developers must be congratulated for the shoddiest housing ever made. Meanwhile, the government resold the surplus land at market rates. To make things worse, they also developed special slum redevelopment regulation to ensure that poor people didn’t receive the regulation that oversees regular residential housing (for the rich):

“.. builders were allowed — for the first time — to stack buildings just three meters apart instead of sixteen meters.”

And what else? This cramped and suffocating farce for a housing project caused a severe and concentrated public health disaster. These houses lack proper ventilation, plumbing, sanitation, waste management, etc. Further, they are stacked so closely to each other that sunlight doesn’t even reach the lower floors. This has led to several health problems but most painfully, it led to tuberculosis outbreaks within these buildings. In this post-covid world, we imagine that a disease is “contracted” from somewhere else and safety is found by sheltering at home. In this case, you contract a deadly disease because you are at home.

“..There is a direct correlation between the height of the building and tuberculosis — families living on lower floors have more TB cases because they have less access to sunlight and fresh air. Second, the disease affects more women, and especially women of reproductive age, since they are most likely to be home bound. The researchers ..found that less than 20 per cent of all indoor space was getting natural light. All ..buildings face each other, and most windows aren’t used, further causing shortage of fresh air and sunlight.. Residents on upper floors toss garbage out of their windows because of the lack of a functioning trash collection system, and since it can fall into the chawls below if the windows are left open, the residents there tend to shut them.”

Mumbai’s experience with scam-my affordable housing is not an isolated incident. Poor people everywhere are denied access to decent, safe and stable shelters. First, they are paid abjectly low wages that prevent them from affording residential housing ‘acceptable’ to the “formal” class of residents. When they do create housing alternatives such as cluster and slum settlements, they are abruptly and violently evicted from them through institutional police force. Jhuggi jhopris (or informal, cluster shelters) have often been demolished to ensure clean public spaces, i.e. private open spaces for the rich. In 2017, Delhi’s Development Authority (DDA) violently evicted informal residents (or “encroachments” as the law prefers to call them) living in and around the a park in South Delhi. It’s believed that the community living there was predominantly Muslim and consisted of beggars and street hawkers. Rehabilitation was either insufficient or completely absent. Just today, Muslim Bengali migrant workers in Bengaluru are being assaulted by the police and being forced to prove their Indian-ness. Injustices against poor people in India are routine and commonplace, but we refuse to grow accustomed to them. As Vidya Krishnan says towards the end of her book,

“The fundamental question here is.. whether individual decency — that encourages us to fight for the right to health and the right to dignity for the poor and vulnerable — will prevail.

There lies our salvation. No one is safe until everyone is.”

Additional reading:

Phantom Plague by Vidya Krishnan

Why Loiter by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade