Love Island

Last weekend, I caught a few episodes of the reality dating show that has captivated England this summer: Love Island. The show became so popular that even the serious press had to take it seriously. It has been analyzed from every possible angle, although a frequent theme of the articles about it is how dating is a minefield of rejections and insecurities even for pretty people. I didn't want to see what the fuss is about, I was just bored and wanted something mindless to fill the hours.
The men were the epitome of laddishness, with a wiseguy and a Mr. Universe thrown in for relief. The girls, on the whole, were nicer and more tolerable, as women generally are compared with men. It wasn't a surprise that there were no feminists, and there were a number of misogynistic quips thrown around. The one that caught my attention was by one of the female participants, which was something along the lines of "Women get very jealous, we can't help it". Interestingly, she said it soon after a male participant had blown his top off because he was jealous of a guy who was on a date with the girl he (the angry guy) had been paired up with.
He had reacted to jealousy with anger--the default male reaction to any negative event. If you smoulder in silence you are a woman, if you blow your top off you are a red-blooded male. Jealousy is associated with passivity, which is portrayed as a female trait. Anger is  the quintessentially male trait. Men often take out their pain--be it anger, be it sadness--on women. They punish women because they (the men) are so bad at processing their feelings that it is easier to externalize them by lashing out at the women in your life, who are unlikely to retaliate. 

Why We Write

This morning I read a really good article about the benefits of writing. Actually, it was specifically about the benefits of writing a novel, but I think a lot of the ideas apply to other forms of writing. There was a few lines that resonated deeply with me.

Writing is about claiming ownership of yourself in order to become the person you know you can be. It’s about acknowledging to yourself that writing is not just a hobby, but a profound force in your life, one that will help you to achieve a deep sense of self-expression.

Writers don't write because they love to, they  write because they must. Writing sets them free, it makes them whole. In an earlier blog post, I had written about how I wanted this blog to be about writing that flows from staring into space. Writing that isn't therapeutic, that doesn't aim to make sense of something (although both are useful purposes), but writing with a higher purpose. Writing is a way of relating to the world and to oneself. It is an act of harmonization even if the subject of one's writing is dark and morbid. It is an act of truth-making, which might seem like an oxymoron because how is it the truth if it is made up? I am not talking about facts here or entering into an epistemological debate about fact and opinion. I believe we have inner truths--ways of being--which have to be not just accessed through writing, or any other artform, but made. These truths are not gospel truths, they are not unchanging, so why call them truths? Because, as the philosopher Georg Simmel said, what is useful is true (as opposed to what is true is useful). Which is why I think poetry is such a exquisite art-form because it helps us access places that are beyond the reach of prose and make truths from what we find.
I suspect I might have rambled incoherently, so I am going to come back to the article. There was another line, which I really liked.

Try to write from your stomach, not your head or heart.

I have written before about how our stomachs are in tune with our inner rhythms, both physical and emotional. I would go so far as to say, the stomach is the seat of emotion rather than the heart. Our brains might verbalize a particular emotion, but if it is a strong one, we first feel it in the stomach. This is a short poem I wrote:

When you love someone,
when you fear someone,
when you miss someone,
you feel it in your stomach.
So,when your tummy churns,
ask not what you ate
but what eats you.

Home

My sister is currently visiting India and she and my parents are spending the weekend with my grandmother in Pune. My mum sent a text saying they were all missing me, which made me almost tear up.
The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend about the idea of Home and I was telling her that I don't easily get attached to places. India will always be home, but that doesn't mean I want to live there. I feel little attachment towards Thane (Mumbai), the  city where I grew up in and where I have spent most of my life. I had a great time in Chennai and The Hague, but that is more down to the courses I was studying and my classmates rather than the cities themselves. I am pretty sure I wouldn't particularly enjoy living in either city otherwise. 
Liking a place is more than about the liking your job or university or the people around you in that place. It is the physical space, the weather, the  public, society, politics and culture, and it is something more. It is a feeling of belonging, a sense of harmony with the place. I have never felt like I have belonged anywhere and my attitudes towards places is similar to my attitudes towards groups.---I hold myself back, unwilling to give all of myself. But, if pressed, I would say Pune is where I feel like I most belong. I didn't spend a particularly happy period of my life there, but I still have affection for  the city. Maybe because my grandparents, and now my grandmother, have lived in the same house in Pune since I was a few months old, so I have strong roots there and a truckload of memories. But, I just find it a more gentler and easygoing city than Mumbai, and with a more expansive sense of space. After college in Pune and Chennai and a brief stay in Delhi for work, I moved back to Mumbai in early 2009 and lived there till 2014. But, while my career flourished in Mumbai, I always knew that it was a temporary halt, a place to rest before I moved on. Never say never, but I think it is extremely unlikely that I will ever live there, not least because it doesn't have many opportunities for someone in my current career.
Another characteristic of Home is its the place you run to to seek refuge when the shit hits the fan. Of course, you could argue that that is Family, but the place itself can have a comforting effect. Last year, when the dark clouds seemed impenetrable, I ran back to Mumbai to heal and convalesce. While it didn't seem like the city had a comforting effect on me at that time, it does now. And, it was important for me to come home to heal. I don't think I could have worked through my problems anywhere else. 

Tell Me Lies

I was out with someone yesterday and we got talking about Brexit, as politically engaged people in Britain are wont to these days. She said she couldn't believe how the Leave campaign got away with blatant lies. I said something which I now feel was pretentious, like "Liberalism  is dying, the rules of liberalism don't apply".
What rules are those? A watertight distinction between fact and opinion and a rejection of the viewpoint that facts and opinions are on a spectrum. There is no clearly defined boundary between them. The claim that there is an objective truth which can be represented by a fact, and then overlaid by a subjective view to arrive at an opinion is difficult to sustain. Does that mean that there are no facts in the world? Can we say nothing with certainty? Of course we can (although, if one were to nit-pick, not with absolute certainty). There are some definitions and descriptions which are unanimously agreed upon, such as mass, height, etc. But, such definitions and descriptions are representations of reality and not reality itself which is too complex and messy to be faithfully represented. And any representations or symbols can be contested, although it's not worth our while to contest a majority of representations in our everyday life. So, if you use an agreed upon definition and say that something which matches that definition occurred when it didn't, you are obviously lying.
The other explanation is, of course, that there is a lack of faith in the establishment and the experts. But what caused this collapse of faith? That is, of course, the million-dollar question.

Race Issues

Today I read an article on white privilege/fragility which articulated my views on the subject more eloquently than I ever could. That racism is not a pathology but is a set of ideas and assumptions that live in all of us (to differing degrees of course). This is not an apology for white privilege along the lines of "Coloured people are racist and it is human and natural to be so". Racism is a psychological violence that teaches people of colour to see themselves as inferior to white people and superior  to people of colour who are lower down in the race hierarchy. Racism is not a pathology and "racist" should be used as an adjective not a noun. As the article points out, when you treat it as a pathology you make it sound so rare and abhorrent that no reasonable person could even imagine himself (the male gender is used here deliberately) as a racist. Systemic, institutional and more subtle forms of racism get a free pass.
But, in addition, I had drinks with a white person with whom I didn't have to pick and choose my words when talking about race. That was such a relief! Someone on Facebook shared a video of the Swedish girl who stopped a deportation as an example of a "white ally" in action. That is too high a bar. That act required a level of bravery that most of us would struggle to muster as well as strong conviction  in one's beliefs. You can be a white ally by listening to people of colour emphathetically when they talk about their experience of race. To show solidarity not pity. The virtues of listening are so understated.

Health Wobble

The trouble with a long run with good health is even a slight wobble throws you off balance. I'm feeling a bit under the weather and it is causing me no more mental anguish than physical discomfort. I am not even ill enough to be able to describe what exactly is wrong with me. My stomach is slightly off and I don't feel drained out, but that is about it. And as someone who occasionally struggles with anxiety, every time I feel physically less than 100%, I assume its my anxiety acting up. Often, there is no obvious trigger so I just wait for it to pass. That has worked so far. And while I am skeptical of  the body-mind separation, I am not suggesting that all illness is in the head. Infections are real, cancer is real and the fact that I haven't fallen sick in a while is possibly down to good luck rather than any valiant effort on my part to keep myself in good spirits. But certain symptoms, such as an unsettled (but not necessarily upset) stomach, lethargy, insomnia, definitely correlate with anxiety.  

Brilliant Bigots

How brilliant do you have to be for people to overlook your bigotry? The other day I was reading about how students at Manchester University had painted over a poem-mural by Rudyard Kipling to protest the deification of a notorious racist. An English professor had reacted thus to the incident: "Of course he was a racist, of course he was an imperialist, but that's not all he was ... Dickens said dreadful things about black people in the Jamaican rebellion. Does that mean you stop reading Dickens?" But the issue here is not whether one should read Kipling but whether one should deify  him. A common argument in such debates is that it is improper to judge historical figures against current norms. How does anyone judge anything except against the norms of their times (unless you can teleport yourself and your psyche to a different age) is beyond me. But the students were not protesting Kipling, who has been dead for ages. They  were protesting their university's decision to glorify a person whose views many people of color find offensive. And, context matters so much. Lionizing a racist in Brexitting Britain, with its resurgent white nationalist movement, is either a malicious or a foolhardy move. I am personally opposed to deification of any sort. Critique a person's work by all means and praise their work if you think they deserve it. But don't make a personality of him. And I really believe the bar for brilliance is significantly lower if you are a privileged white heterosexual male.