a friend and a therapist

Friends you can count on are rare. Friends who help you through depression are an even rarer subset. But should your friend also be your therapist?

I speak for myself when I say no, she should not. In the throes of depression I cannot see things which are fairly obvious. She makes the decision to be the calmer of the two and attempts to show these things to me. But this decision comes at a cost--she has to overcome her own fear and shock and try, at all costs, not to display it to me. She has to discard everything she's doing and concentrate entirely on me. No matter how she's been feeling, she must rally enormous emotional forces from within herself and use them to systematically counter every argument my corrupted mind throws at myself, at her.

But every time this happens, she is put in a terrible position of grappling between love and helplessness. Unlike my therapist, she has had no training in clinical psychology; any strategies she comes up with are ones she creates on her own, based on her intimate knowledge of me, the connections she makes from the history we share and her learnings from previous conversations. She never stops learning, she never stops trying for me.

But she's my friend. She's not a therapist. She comes from a position of love, and it is this same position which overwhelms her each time these conversations happen, because it is beyond the scope of our love to provide me with ways to cope with depression. Her love convinces me that I need these strategies, but it cannot always provide them to me. There is nothing right or wrong about this, and neither is this a limitation: this is a fact.

If you have someone like this on your life, don't take them for granted. Talk to them whenever you need to, but if you want help, go to a therapist or a doctor. Just like self-medication, forcing them to be your therapist is harmful and unfair on both of you. Remember that every breakdown you suffer from, they suffer with you, and somewhere it is worse for them, since they do not have medication or therapy to fall back on. You should.

can we be counter-imaginative?

It was half past eight in the evening. I was cycling back from university to my hostel. (The road approaching my hostel is hardly a road; it has bumps the size of small hillocks. I usually stand up and ride this rough stretch.) I was emerging from an unlit, dark 400 metre stretch of this road when a group of four men suddenly jumped in front of my cycle, shouted "Ha!" and ran away, laughing. 

I stopped in my tracks and tried to understand what had just happened. Was this an issue of safety, human dignity, violence against women? Why did they do this? And suddenly, a thought entered my head: what made them behave specifically the way they did? This wasn't a spontaneous outburst; it was a planned, unwelcome flash mob. Even if it took them a couple of minutes, they had obviously devised their scheme carefully. It had been executed with perfection. In addition to this, it takes a fair amount of controlled recklessness to jump in front of a moving vehicle in the dark. It was imaginative.

Which brings me back to the idea of using imagination to devise strategies which can counter, or attempt to counter sexual violence. This is, of course, applicable only in situations where the survivors of sexual violence wish to put themselves out there, once again, without any guarantees of safety or success. Apart from the survivor's personal choices, it also depends on the kind of sexual violence we are trying to devise strategies for. It may seem exceedingly difficult, for instance, to come up with a strategy to counter rape as it is happening. But can we come up with a way to respond to being ogled?

There is some work being done around this idea by Blank Noise. 

The question of context is never far behind when thinking of issues of sexual violence or really, any social issue. There are no universal values, and there can definitely be no "10 Ways To..." counter being forcibly objectified. That said, we definitely can benefit from imagining, visualising, discussing and hopefully experimenting with strategies to counter this kind of daily violence against women, within our specific contexts.  

dirty talk

Like sex, hygiene is something that people don’t talk about often enough. Everybody has their own personal definition of hygiene. Maybe we don’t need to talk about everything, you say. But when you share a bathroom, you do, I say.

We have our personal definitions of hygiene that we strangely believe everyone is aware of, and shares with us. We silently but irrevocably judge people based on how they leave the toilet, the sink, the floor, the taps, the drain. It is a testament to their character, their parents, their community and/or religion, the place they come from.

Notions of invisible ‘purity’ which form the basis of Hinduism and Sikhism may be hard to believe since they are, ultimately, abstract concepts upon which some people are alienated, murdered, sexually violated, exploited by other people in positions of power. But it’s interesting to note that while something might be visibly unclean to me, it might not be to someone else.

I live in a 2BHK flat with four other women. One of my friends in the other bedroom constantly complained how her roommate, K left the drain clogged with her hair every morning. To me, this is unforgivably inconsiderate.

After three days, I jumped in the middle of what was, technically, their dispute, because each bedroom has its own bathroom. I confronted her as soon as she came out of her bath. I spoke to her unkindly, asking her what she thought of herself to leave the bathroom in such a terrible condition for her roommate. I said a lot more, too, assuming that she was doing this out of laziness or disgust. (Eww, who picks up hair from a drain?)

She was stunned. She simply assumed that the cleaning staff was doing the needful. I sharply corrected her, no, it’s your roommate who’s cleaning up after you.

That night, I happened to eat alone in the mess; my roommates had finished before me and had gone upstairs. I realised that my friend had never mentioned having spoken to K about her discomfort. She, as I, had simply assumed that K was at fault because she didn’t share this common code of hygiene with the rest of us. Neither of us had stopped to think that we had never verbalised this code to anyone.

I hadn’t pulled up K for leaving the bathroom dirty. I had attacked her for not reading our minds.

Why can we not talk to each other about hygiene? Just because four women happen to follow a particular aspect of this all-important code doesn’t mean it becomes obvious. The bathroom is one of the most crucial spaces in a house—unlike the kitchen, it’s a space that everyone uses frequently. It’s a private space that we are forced to share. We confront our uglinesses, we let go (forgive the terrible pun), we strip ourselves bare in that room. It is impossible that each of us does this identically. Even when I was living alone, it was the bathroom that made me feel most vulnerable when a guest happened to use it.

I think it’s time my roommates and I overcame our shame and disgust and spoke to each other frankly about hygiene. In matters of dirtiness, the bathroom is no match for the mind.

Madras, meri jaan

It was perhaps a sign of things to come when the first thing I saw the moment I stepped into Chennai Central a year ago was a biriyani kadai. It was around 4 pm and a couple of people stood around, consuming generous plates of chicken biriyani. I thought to myself, chicken biriyani? Interesting. It wouldn’t have been ‘interesting’ in Bombay. It wouldn’t have been interesting anywhere else except in Madras, back then, considering I had assumed that the entire city was vegetarian.

I wish I could meet that girl and enjoy the surprised look on her face as she saw the streets lined with as many biriyani kadais as there were amman koils (perhaps more). Perhaps they became highlighted in my mind because I couldn’t immediately shake off my surprise.

We’ve all met people who say to women-who-take-offence, so what if we use ‘rape’ casually in our conversations? It doesn’t make us rapists, it makes you over-sensitive. The curious thing about language is how it infects you and sits in parts of your brain which get lit when you encounter change. I never realised that parts of my brain had been infected by ideas of Madras being a vegetarian city, until I passed by a couple hundred poultry shops, non-vegetarian restaurants and kadais as I left the station.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a change as obvious or tangible as moving cities. Perhaps there’s wisdom in the idea that it’s good to move around people different from you. What happened to me when I moved might happen over a conversation with someone tomorrow.

An overwhelming majority of my colleagues love non-vegetarian food. They cook, consume and celebrate it like I never have back in Bombay. I felt the irony: it was as if Madras was gently pulling my leg. Madras, like most Indian cities is a city of pluralities. There are only-on-Thursdays, everyday-except-Thursdays, egg-is-fine, fish-smells, chicken’s-best, swear-by-seafood, will-eat-anything-that-moves pluralities among non-vegetarians as well. Food is as protean and alive in its contradictions and patterns as its consumers are.

It isn’t as if these puzzles don’t exist among vegetarians. But it was important for me to understand that no city can ever be flattened into a single food type. Only living beings have blood types; places don’t. I would never do what I did to Bombay since it has an enduring reputation of being a melting-pot, cosmopolitan, global village, fluttering immigrant magnet, whatnot. But I did it to Madras because I figured it’s down south where everyone eats idli-dosa, is super-brainy and speaks Tamizh. How does one apologise to a city?

As April descended into Madras last year, the city’s famed summer season became a constant refrain. It gets hotter in a room if you keep saying it’s getting hotter. I couldn’t really feel the difference. People from Madras and Bombay alike would ask me, how are you managing? It must be so much better in Bombay, no? I’m managing fine, thank you, I said. If Madras gets hot by nature of its geographical location, Bombay doesn’t fare any better thanks to its relentless pollution and smog.

In a passive-aggressive conversation with my mother, I realised that the climate, like the food, is another infection we unknowingly let fester in our minds. The tongue is a vicious organ. The heat of Madras is as much about climate as it is about supporting a dark-skinned, loud-mouthed, Dravidian, anti-Hindi, conservative, ‘Madrasi’ narrative of the south.

Sometime in July, a friend from Bombay asked me if I missed the city. I had visited home for a few short days in June and began to outline to him specific places, moments in the day, restaurants, lanes, places and people that I could see vividly in my mind. Yes, I missed Bombay, I said. The friend nodded his head with great self-assurance. Once you’ve lived in Bombay, you’ll miss it anywhere, he said. Madras is no match for the energy, vibrancy and of course, the heady nightlife that the city has to offer. Do they have nightclubs in Madras?

This conversation repeated itself over many people across time. Unsurprisingly, none of these views came from Madrasis themselves. Which made me realise something else: Madras is possibly the most unpretentious Indian metro of all. It simply doesn’t believe in calling attention to its city-ness.

Perhaps the place where this hits you the hardest is its airport. Madras Airport is one of the most unassuming airports I’ve ever been to. A local train stops at walking distance from the airport: you can literally walk into it from the station’s subway.

Just late this February, I accidentally wandered into the International Terminal and it was calm, quiet and almost empty. There was a man sitting in one of those small shuttle cars and he asked me if I was lost. I told him where I wanted to go, and he happily offered me a ride. I couldn’t believe my ears. He ferried me—the only passenger—all the way to the Domestic Terminal and even stopped in the middle to offer his friend a lift. It was quirky, it was heart-warming and it was possibly when I realised for the second time that I had fallen in love with Madras.

Sometime in August, I was talking with a friend about something I don’t remember now. We were standing on her terrace which overlooked the junction between KMC and Eega theatre. While she spoke to another friend, I happened to look down at the traffic inching its way home.

Constant references to the horrible traffic in Bombay are not just a matter of fact; they are subtle boasts to Bombay’s city-ness. A city is not really a city unless it has frustrating, incurable traffic jams, yawning sky-scrapers, a ballooning population and a taxing daily life, among other things. Madras has bad traffic in patches, not too many tall buildings, a population which balloons in pockets and situations and a fairly laidback daily life. I wonder what makes Madras a city. I’d ask her but she doesn’t seem to care enough to answer.

What Madras does seem to be proud of are her beaches. And they really are worth the vanity. There are so many beaches, I could pick them to suit—or mould—my moods. Go to Bessie when I’m feeling light-headed, or talkative and friendly, or contemplative. Go to Palavakkam to be seduced. Go to Thiruvanmiyur beach when I feel I need to be alone, to be soothed and reassured. I’m not sure yet what Marina and Neelangkarai will offer me.

Sometime either in December last year or January I was going back home from Koyambedu bus depot. I was in an auto, and it stopped at a signal. It was around half past seven in the evening, and I was foolishly trying to read a book by the streetlight. As I bent the book this way and that, multi-coloured lights began gently streaking my hands. It felt like someone was playing with me: touching and letting me be as the streaks blew across my hand.

The book lay forgotten as I twisted my hands in the lights, feeling the colours wash over my skin. As the auto-anna restarted the engine, I peeked out to find the source of my delight. It was a string of neon-red, blue and green fairy-lights adorning the sign board of a fertility clinic. The clinic was shut but someone had left the lights on. Somehow they had bent and stretched their way inside the auto I was in and lit me up. That was the first time I realised I was in love with Madras.

arriving

4:23 pm: That feeling of wonder when you know that you have been in two different places in the same day. In the morning you were in one city: an entirely different experience which made a different person out of you. And then you crossed over to another city, setting on its horizon. Changing cities like a chameleon. It takes time to arrive to another place, even if you've been there before. 

Control ALT Delete

Money worth spending? Sunday, let's hope so! God bless you, Radiohead.

Writing without a point, because it's hard to find one

It seems like it's time. Then again, making your goodbyes public means you must take them seriously. You can't write a suicide note and survive to tell the tale without feeling at least the tiniest bit embarrassed with yourself.

How interesting unfamiliarity is. I came back here and something in my eyes went 'really?'; this blog theme is possibly one of my favourites. It began to seem a shame to leave, without having written anything worth the possibilities this colour-combination and font texture invite in a person. Perhaps I will override my farewell and come gatecrashing back. I think this is entirely likely; having invested two paragraphs already to one thought, there is a definitive possibility that I will change my mind swiftly. (Never must one think one does not know oneself. There only remains the prickly question of honesty.)

For someone with an abysmal memory, to have and keep a journal is a way of keeping off the sand dunes of time for as long as possible. When you are putting things down, a part of the reason why you labour so much after adjectives and descriptions is desperation. This desperation is borne of all the moments of disappointments you and others have felt, of having let something go. Is forgetting something a choice? Perhaps repression is. But why would you forget this, and not that? Is there a mechanism at play, of which somehow, slyly, you are aware? Does your ego not suffer when you forget important things, or do you admire how it somehow endears you to your loved ones? Oh, you're a crafty thing, you are. There is nobody more cunning than the one who manufactures innocence.

Where have I digressed to? This is the problem with writing at night while listening to music which sounds so familiar that you feel like you're strumming every wailing chord yourself. A girl I know once told me how she had stopped talking on the phone at nights, because she'd wake up next morning and be a tad mortified at the languorous rubbish she'd been spinning last night. I've felt that sometimes. So much sharing makes you lose yourself a little. Then you run around on a wobbling heart, trying to gather your dark secrets again, trying to feel that old sense of slight contentment, that there are things you want to share sometimes, but something has made you suspend that feeling, till another secret, another little bit of you comes along. Or you blog about it all at night. Oh, what an irony pickle!

So let's not blame myself. Perhaps it's this house. We're shifting soon and going to a house on the seventh floor, on a building made by vanishing a jungle. It's a conflict, truly it is. I knew this jungle, what it looked like, what it felt like. It was our myth come true, it was our gory battlefield, it was our daylight horror tale. To this day, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the day is my favourite nightmare. It is a breathless, hand-on-my-heart frightening a prospect for me. And now when I walk towards school, my mind nodding in agreement to the sprawling landscape of nostalgia, my heart crushes at the sight of this building. My forest has disappeared, and in its place is a thing as alien as a dinosaur. Perhaps it is one.

I need to stop growing so old, if truth be told, because things change, and our conversations with the past need to undwell on how similar or dissimilar the present appears to be. For this very reason I keep counselling myself to not give up on Bombay. Have I given up on Bombay? All I can see is an invasive, unmindful, graceless kind of change-brain, knocking things up and plonking down strange creatures in their place, creatures which seem proud of themselves, but are, in fact, painfully awkward in their ambitiousness and fresh paint. They look down at the few old trees which have been left alone, and something seems very odd.

There are creatures, however, who do seem to have a kind of bloom in them. A run-down little two-room opposite IDC has been recreated as a creche for children of construction workers. It has friendly, although incomplete, cartoons all over its outer walls, and despite the nauseating off-white paint scheme, it seems quite inviting and at peace with where it stands. If double-decker buses and the pavement book-sellers leave, if L'Amour book-shop at Hiranandani is replaced with an Arabic bistro, if Taste of Kerala goes away, if Anmol near J B Nagar loses its grand entrance to a steel gate... Seawoods station has already been turned into a monster, and some of us have been reading with trepidation at what is about to happen at Panvel because of the new airport. It's difficult not to despair, I can almost hear myself singing mournfully, 'Back in the days when taxis were black-and-yellow...'. And on the other hand, I tell myself that attachments stunt your capacity to remember things with love.

Our loves seem recycled, sometimes new, but our fears, they seem to be the same old ones.     

"I know."

What were to happen if we did have the ability to know everything about something? What if the possibility of knowing everything existed?

Say for instance, I know I need to get to Kanjur station quickly because a usual, I'm running late. It's 6:30 pm, and

the traffic is a mad, ravaging beast of screeching horns and savage wheels, a growling, yelling, vicious, anxious metallic beast, with its guts spilling out in all directions on the road, and

I know I'm going to get frustrated by the fact that the BMC/BEST has shifted the bus stop farther away from Main Gate, and built a road divider in between the lane going towards Kanjur/Eastern Express Highway, in an effort to create a separate lane for buses, but because bikers and company buses choke this lane, BEST buses usually take the other lane meant for everybody else, while I do an angry, dangerous dance from one lane to the other, and

I know that as a result of the frustration and lack of time, I'm going to hitch a bike-ride to Kanjur. 

It is so defeating to know everything. Surprises are lost. The kick you get out of doing something differently is lost. The exquisite angst of an existential crisis is lost, the overwhelming brightness and warmth of an epiphany is lost. The wonder at your abilities to do something you never imagined you could, is lost.

While reading the paper yesterday, I chanced upon an article by Jaron Lanier. He wrote a paper called One-Half of a Manifesto (2000), on opposing "cybernetic totalism". I quote Wiki -

At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. iedology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm, and causes the self-fulfilling destiny, which spoils people.

Isn't it amazing that we don't know everything, yet here we are, living life, making mistakes, celebrating, waking up everyday?

Hello

Tomorrow, I am travelling alone to Himachal Pradesh. I have never travelled alone like this before and the thought fills me with an unlikely mixture of satisfaction and excited curiosity. Satisfaction, because I have honestly acted on an impulse after a very long time and excited curiosity, because despite spending hours poring over websites, books, maps, blogs and talking endlessly to other travellers, my mind is a beautiful, snowy blank when I try to conjure feelings or images about the next fortnight of my life.

This trip is a thing of my dreams. When I thought about my itinerary, all I could think of was, "I want a river nearby." I know what I'm going after on this trip - it's that river. But what happens before, during or after - I don't know. And to know that this trip is such a mystery fills me with happiness. It is humbling and comforting to know that I desire things, but I can't design anything beyond that feeling.

I don't know everything about why I want to travel alone. A few reasons come to my mind like snapping fingers:

The freedom to go where I like, when I like, how I like.
The freedom to be lost somewhere, the freedom to go after something.
The space to choose within the choices that I create, and not choose between what I want versus what a fellow traveller wants.
The freedom to make personal, quirky travelling traditions and break unrelatable, rusty ones.
The freedom to be careful about something, and carefree about something.
The relief of being responsible just for me, the challenge of doing most things on my own.

Knowing me, other reasons why I want to travel alone at this moment may keep revealing themselves to me throughout my life. That thought makes me smile and it is a part of why I am writing this right now. I read this post recently and I was filled with a beautiful, blossoming nostalgia - a longing to be there once again, but a happiness to know that it happened, and that I was a part of it too.

Goodbye Bombay, goodbye to Vini in Bombay, and hello to the mystery that awaits me two thousand kilometres away.

Photograph of a Smooth Talker

You make me wanderlust
I don't want to stay anymore, there are
Too many little islands I've made.

I send out little paperboats
Every time I feel unsettled, I set asail
A wobbling, fearful, mute thing.

They talk behind my back
Inch by quiet inch the delirious glitter of
My lies washes upon the shore.

5 - Melancholia

I walked into the river
with a line from a song.
I wore my black cape
and I put on a frown.

I can't deny I want my
happy ending.

The smoke curled slowly
in psychedelic gloom.
The first time went by
in sadness for Haroun.

He can't deny he wants my
happy ending.

Going, going

 'ले लीजिये', Piu's parfoom, Chikan, चाट, भूतनाथ, Hazratganj, Jo's इमामबाड़े के कबाब, Royal Cafe, पलटन बाज़ार, Sunrise Bakery, Ghantaghar, मेरा पुराना देहरादूनी घर, Malbabu, फकीरे की दुकान.

निगाहें मिलाने को जी चाहता है..
                                                                     ~ सहीर लुध्यान्वी, दिल ही तो है

/

words prevent conversation. eyes. breath. hands. or leaving?

Knotworthy

A few friends and I will be going to the launch of Arundhati Roy's latest non-fic offering: Listening To Grasshoppers - Field Notes on Democracy tomorrow.

Till then, I have something for you to brood on.

Democracy is India's (official) political credo. Is this system a mistake?

.. and things that are not overrated

1. Colon spacing and indentation
2. Turmeric
3. Honesty
4. Satyajit Ray
5. Space and air (Reference: 7-11 am and 5-8 pm, any Bombay railway station)
6. Feminism
7. Sunshine
8. Intuition
9. Perfectionism
10. Desires
11. Hearing clearly
12. Freedom
13. The night sky
14. Shoelaces
15. Pink Floyd
16. Eye-to-eye contact
17. Love
18. Freshly shampooed hair and waxing
19. Selfishness
20. Modernism
21. Laughter
22. Optimism
23. Time
24. Ignorance
25. Odd numbers

?

The Night Perseus Tricked The Moon

I love staring at the night sky. If I had my way, I'd spend half a year at the North Pole doing nothing but staring at the heavens, night after night. Till then..

And thus this little celestial circular. Fellow night-sky lovers, do not forget to open your window tonight. Every year on the twelfth night of August, the earth enters the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle. A stream of the debris from the comet streaks our sky across the constellation Perseus. That's why this beautiful phenomenon is also called the Perseid meteor shower. The lunar shine usually gets in the way of seeing any meteor showers in their entirety, but the Perseid meteor shower is special. If you see the sky tonight between nine and eleven p.m. you will know why.

"Earthgrazers are meteors that approach from the horizon and skim the atmosphere overhead like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond," explains Cooke. "They are long, slow and colorful — among the most beautiful of meteors." He notes that an hour of watching may net only a few of these at most, but seeing even one can make the whole night worthwhile.

(Source)

No blankets

She has a way about her.
Brief welcomes, keenly felt goodbyes.
Incapable of small talk.
Makes you need to believe in something.
Walks on long roads, alone. Deepens breaths.
Has no tricks of light, no promises.
Freezes fingertips.
Electrocutes you and clenches your fists. In anger, no.
In protest of being wrecked and shaken and changed.
Makes you see Polaroid grainy.
Steals your breath, makes it white.
Burns with the sharpness of frost.
Gentles with mist and breeze.

Don't draw the curtains. Don't tighten, don't soften.
Don't close. Don't withdraw. Don't wrap, don't leave.

Let her in.

(Photo Source)

No, shocked.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/surprised/392625/0

Why.

Somehow, it's not a question anymore. All questions have a chance at an answer. Some questions are too cold to be answered.

Things will never be okay again. It's vital to understand this rather than go about airbrushing the scars.

I've not lived for too long yet. But sometimes in life, when you go through certain trying experiences, the ones you know you will always file separately in a place with treasure-chest antiquity, you realise things about life and people, like a sunrise. Slowly illuminating, sweeping the darkness away and just opening your eyes to so much that you feel your life's been one long, unending night before this.

What have I seen? That a true reflection is incredibly, incredibly rare. You can't see your face and your reflection at the same time, so there must be some kind of discrepancy somewhere. Light cheats. It bends around corners, it vibrates at the slightest uneven surface. So you can trust it to let you look, but you can't trust it to help you see. So something is different. As subtle, as quiet as that last known breath before sleep conquers all. But is.

So you must learn not to trust your eyes, but to trust your heart. Never, ever give up on that voice. Never forget anyone who can put up that kind of a mirror in front of you, which makes you see that sound. And hear it. And grasp it with both hands, like a breath.

I know I forget. A lot. Bits of conversations, movie scenes, book authors, twin moments, people we find in common, songs to send you, incidents, your favourite foods . .. ...

But you're my mirror. You flex your graceful fingers around my ignorance and you make me see. And no matter how dark it is, you're seeing what I see as well.

"Aww, cmon! It's just a post!"

:)