Play and Space

I have been away playing. But it is not the kind that leaves you with the afterglow of enjoyment. It is more of the work, but non-work kind of play. It began when I got swept away into reading and posting about Poona on the Facebook group, but now the preference for this kind of playing has appeared in the workplace too. My research students and I founded a campus chapter in the professional domain we all belong to. It was a lot of hard work, mainly done by the two students who work with me, and it took as almost 1.5 years to get to a point where we could have an official launch. My own networking resulted in not one, not two, but three speakers from a global tech giant visit us to launch the chapter. It was a success.

The days leading to the launch were a lot of work, but fun work too. I was working closely with my own research students and other students who joined the chapter. I loved being a part of a WhatsApp group with them, planning and editing social media posts, giving directions, providing praise and feedback, and generally feeling contented after a long, long time. At times, I would also sit back and reflect on my journey at my current workplace. It has been a pretty bumpy road with hostility and microagrressions from my immediate colleagues that took me some time to get over and do my own thing.

My refuge in those days used to be this very blog and I would post all the time as a way to get away from all that unpleasantness. But, I also used to spend equal amounts sobbing, wracked with self doubt, self esteem, and sundry other things to do with self. I went to therapy then, but was too suspicious to let it work for me properly. Nonetheless, the little therapy I sought did help. It wasn’t until 2020 that I finally broke through and tasted sweet success when I finally had a publication, solo at that, in the venue that mattered the most, but then the pandemic hit and I could never fully capitalize on it.

My father passed away suddenly in the most saddening manner the year of the pandemic. It was devastating in its own way and its aftershocks continue to resound. Despite that I went on to publish another solo paper that year. It fetched me two very good research students who applied to work with me. I do not know if that was the universe’s way of replacing my father. If so, I would rather not have had it and I don’t want any such replacements again, ever. No matter how badly I may long for something.

However, from then on, there has not been a moment to breathe. I was pulled headlong into the world of work – weekly reading sessions for two very demanding students and to top it all, I staked claim to teach courses in the domain that I wanted to be identified with. It meant standing up to colleagues who did not want me to take over those courses, fighting to have my way, then teaching myself the subject, and preparing the lectures for class along with every thing else that was going on. 2022 was by far the toughest year for me work load wise in every way. Both the publications I submitted in 2021 and 2022 were rejected and I still have no published work to show for anything thought I have been constantly working on other fronts. The only hope is that the research students now are able to deliver on the time we have all spent working on their research. They are hardworking students and my constant anxiety is that I don’t mess them up.

Therefore, with all these upheavals and some of them positive, but maybe the positivity will take some time to make itself seen, having the chapter launch was a pleasant distraction. Until it wasn’t. For one, while it allows me to be closer to students and not feel alone on campus in the face of stonewalling colleagues, it sees my emotional graph peak and dip in crazy ways. And the result is never as satisfying as I thought it would be. Working with students comes with its own challenges and work of this kind while it allows you the satisfaction of trying to build something, is never going to count in academia that uses publications as the most important metric of your reputation.

And that is something I have been finding hard to do. I let myself be distracted, even if it is guiltily, because the temptation to go shoot some breeze and chat with students on the WhatsApp group or by having ‘meetings’ is too easy to give in. There is laughter, there is jokes, there is the satisfaction of unleashing your type A personality on managing social media accounts although our follower count is proceeding abysmally slow, and just the general feeling of having a tribe to both head and belong to. In my early days at this workplace, the other women colleagues in my domain would flaunt exactly this in my face and shut me off it. It has been therefore sweet building my own tribe that I could do through my own hard work and some fortunate allies that the universe sent my way and that actually converted into something real.

However, it continues to bother me that I am unable to feel fully satisfied. The last pandemic batch that I taught wrung me out dry with their antics and because I was anyway constantly on edge because of the sudden spike in my workload, I have been constantly burnt out and exhausted. The current batch, thankfully, is very healing to my sense of being as a teacher. They are attentive and listen to instructions, they don’t act out, and they don’t seem to have internal conflicts between them that I was constantly being called upon to resolve last year. The thing is I have never aspired to teach, but I work hard at it. It is also not the most satisfying feeling on earth nor do I feel very noble about doing, but I put in a lot of work for my classes and not having students who respond to that has been very very draining.

All of it means that I am now finding it difficult to focus on reading and writing for my own self. Some of it is also because I am demoralized by my paper rejections, but it is also a lack of inspiration and spark that will allow me to shut myself and just delve deep into a problem that I can write about. The thing is, I have realized about myself, that unless the subject appeals to me on a very emotional level, I am unable to do justice to it. I realize, I am not a professional writer or researcher in that sense. The kind that will be able to produce a paper from a distance. I am unable to finish a paper with some colleagues because I was not involved in the data collection myself. It was done by research assistants we hired and lacking that field immersion, I find myself unable to write. Again with a thesis student who was working on queer issues, but had a very poor work ethic, I took over her data and tried to write the paper myself (while giving her primary authorship), but the paper still bombed. Like Hanif Kureishi was tweeting the other day. The single most important requirement for a writer is material. You could be a good writer, but still amount to nothing if you don’t have material that you can make something of.

One of the most important parts of any writer’s ability is the discovery of his or hers subject matter, the part of the world that he or she makes their own. It could be daffodils for Wordsworth; Clapham for Graham Greene or Paris for Jean Rhys. It doesn’t matter so much what it is, but the two have to work together. I have known some talented young writers with great ability but who have yet to succeed in discovering material that brings their work to life.

The above is where I am currently at as far as a writing career or even an academic writing career is concerned. I see fellowship after fellowship pass with nothing worth its while in my hands that I could submit to and work on. Even my attempts to pursue something that I think has promise meets with failure and I am left saddenned and anxious at the passage of time and what I have to show for both effort and my age. Not a whole lot to be honest. I know I should not set store by achievements, it is not healthy, it is not good self esteem yada yada yada…. BUT. I enjoy writing. I enjoy appreciation. I enjoy the process of creation. I want to be known and loved for my work. I like scale. I like dreaming big. I like taking risks. I like going out on a limb. I like being curious. I like asking questions no one else has thought of. I like being this kind of a person. It is what makes me feel alive and fulfileed and I have not been in this groove for a while now.

More currently, I have my own data and even the promise of a very exciting deadline to spur me on to finish a piece of a puzzle, but I have struggled this week with focusing enough to get on with the task. Instead, I have been doing timepass on WhatsApp, posting snippets on Instagram, worrying over social media analytics of our chapter’s handle, and being stressed over two students non work, but who thankfully quit the chapter.

I also worry about my own interactions with students. I am trying to not let the chapter work and their volunteering for it interfere with the teaching, but the compartmentalizing is not always successful. I am worried both about how I interact with them, what they may think of me, and also what lessons they may be unconsciously picking up from me – the good ones I will be happy about, but what about the mistakes I make and the wrong things I do. I discovered these past couple of weeks that students don’t always appreciate an apology if I mess up and say something that may have crossed a line in the excitement of working at such close quarters. They often do not know what to do with an apology. Sometimes, it embarasses them, sometimes they deny that it ever violated their boundaries, sometimes, it emboldens them and they think it weak of me to say sorry. I think this kind of honesty does not really work well with students especially when power and authority to some degree is essential in the kind of pedagogy and classroom set up we are expected to function in. I am still figuring out how to best handle these situations and what to do, but I think these lessons will only become clear when the dust settles and I don’t have to deal with these things anymore. Maybe the lessons that I learn are going to be things that I will share with others for their benefit and not things that I can put in place for myself.

In any case, do I even want to continue doing this and being here? If so, how long? My life as it is today is nothing what I thought it would be for the age I am at. I have not met a single adult milestone and given how the world is wired, I feel beset by a constant sense of precarity and panic at how time is running by and how all I seem to do day-after-day is protect myself from the jagged edges that I have to dodge to survive.

Which brings me to space. In my head, I go to Instagram stories for relief from heaviness. My stories there are a mix of books, blog excerpts, and bollywood pop culture including holding forth on songs, films, and actors. It is a nice happy place. My blog I come to for long form writing. Posting daily thoughts has been exhausting and the compulsion to record your mental and emotional state everyday that I used to do last year has run out now. I now come to post publicly such as I have today when I feel that enough has accumulated for me to be reflective enough. I also do it to see if I will be able to get things off my chest and clear the blocks enough to be able to get some work done.

But I really want to talk about Twitter. I have surfaced there after some years. One thing that I used to feel sad about is that I lurk on Twitter anonymously after deleting my main account some years ago. Twitter has never been good for my self esteem. I used to feel ignored and silly there because I never knew enough exciting people to interact with and never made any ‘Twitter friends’ either. And this was from the early days of Twitter when everybody was bonding and friendly with one another. However, even at that time, I felt alienated from the twitter junta there. Later lots of things happened that only intensified this feeling and I quit. And have lurked anonymously though I resurfaced briefly once, I deleted again after a metoo story I shared about my experience Kiran Nagarkar when unacknowledged because the woman who originally tweeted about her experience did not appreciate that I quote tweeted her. I was confused and felt foolish again that I had messed up some social norm on this platform and just quit.

But not being on Twitter can hurt professionally. So, I resurfaced there this time and have gone about slowly trying to feel comfortable in that space by being deliberate about certain things. I chose my handle with care – thankfully I got what I wanted. My handle is takhalluss on Twitter although ideally it should end with just a single ‘s’. It means liberated and feeling secure in Arabic and also means pen name in Urdu. I can think of no other handle that would be perfect for my fraught relationship with Twitter and what I aspire to and what I hope to achieve feeling on Twitter than the notion of takhalluss. For the header, I chose a picture of the early morning sun filtering through trees. I took this picture in 2021 at Shivarkar garden near my home in Pune when I would go there for morning walks. It makes me feel very peaceful. I tried following accounts that I wish to connect with, but Twitter kept flagging my activity as suspicious since I was not being followed back by those accounts. This is how it messes with my head and makes me feel worthless. So, then I again spent some time unfollowing several people and am down to following mostly news outlets and not individuals.

The things I am doing to protect my mental health is to not tweet often, to not expect engagement or acknowledgment when I do tweet and to be okay with long periods of silence. The point is to just be present on Twitter enough that you are able to use your real identity to say things when you need to and for people to find you if they need to. It is working okay for me so far although I was stressing about engagment with my first few tweets.

Also, when I was lurking anonymously, I also used to think a lot about how I am operating in the shadows and how I don’t have enough self esteem to move into light, which is what tweeting with my real name and identity would mean. And I am happy that I finally at least made a move into light. The first display picture I put on Twitter this time around was also something to make me feel safe. It was a picture of me with a radio. I was also actively pitching an article on radio at that time to Scroll and Mint, but both did not respond to my pitch. I thought it would be nice to share an article if it was published on my Twitter feed as one of the first few things I tweeted, but that is not going to happen now. Also, while the picture showed the radio, it was tending towards being a bit shadowy and my full face was not visible. A few days ago I changed my picture to a full face photo in which I am smiling. I also wearing yellow in it although that is not visible in the picture. I felt like now I was fully in the light. And when you are out in the sun, the light shines on you and you grow in ways without always needing to make the effort. You just need to be in the sun. And that is where I am at now by coming out on Twitter. With a grand following count of 11 – mostly made up of some of my students. Let us see where I go from here. Hopefully first to be able to get some uninterrupted work time first, sans distractions

Missing

I read a fantastic blog post today. It was the kind that briefly transported me back to the good old days of blogging. Circa 2015/2016 was when I peaked with my blogging ‘voice’. This space was a major part of my life at that time, always at the foreground. I used it as an escape, to fashion a space away from everything else that was going on at that point in time – chiefly professional setbacks.

I used to put thought into blogging. Planning posts, finding words, engaging with readers, keeping up with their blogs and lives. It was a fun, buzzy place. I also was engaging with a lot of films and books at that point in time and a lot of what I wrote would draw from them. Pakistani serials were a particular passion at that point and I see how much I have written around that.

What I miss most from those days apart from the blogging life I lead, is reading. It is unthinkable to me today that barely four years ago, I was a regular visitor to the library. I cannot think of making space for such an activity in my life today considering the work demands on my time. I have almost wholly stopped reading for pleasure and I am very resentful of this.

It is because I have to produce original thinking and writing of my own and for that I have to spend time on work related reading. I find myself perpetually angry at this situation and wonder if and when I will have the courage to walk away from it.

It is not easy. Once you start building something from scratch, giving it up is both frightening because it signals a loss of control and also because you wonder if you are throwing in the towel a bit too early without giving it more of yourself. Of course, more important is perhaps financial insecurity. Why would you want to give up something that is a steady source of income and represents stability and security. Some time ago, a woman I follow on Twitter quit her job to take time to think of what to do next and all I could think of was what a luxury that is and I found myself envying her privilege of being able to do that on the strength of her husband’s job.

I would so love a sabbatical myself, but I think even if I did have that option, it would be very difficult to switch off from the work track I am orbiting in right now. I am simply not at a stage in my career where I see myself doing this. Even if I were on a break, I would likely be itching to write the next paper or begin a new project. I think as long as I feel that I have cemented some sort of mark for myself in this space, it is going to be difficult to let go, no matter how badly I want to. It is a weird equation and I can only hope that it does not go toxic at any point. God knows there is enough toxicity even otherwise.

So much of my life’s plans are about “some day” that I have delayed setting about some sort of permanency for my present state. I was telling my mother the other day that maybe, just maybe, I should take action based on “for the moment” rather than “I want to also do this someday” because the ‘someday’ is still vague and undefined, whereas the “for the moment” continues to become more and more rooted. So, while I am waiting to pull away and pursue the someday, I need to be comfortable enough to build a stronger “for the moment”.

You see, I am equally proud of what I am doing “for the moment”. To build a body of work that becomes closely identified with you is a lot of hard work. It has meant almost no time for myself and all the ‘fun’ I have had over the past three years has still always taken place in the context of work. My work is definitely not something I do half-heartedly and in fact my single minded pursuit of some things was also necessitated out of a sense of survival and the sheer necessity of proving a point.

But always, at the back of my mind is the question, “how much longer, more?”. Is this the only thing you want to do? I then ask myself if it were easier to leave once certain milestones had been achieved because then it would also mean closure to a particular way of life and one can move on without feeling too badly about not doing that forever once the milestone has been achieved and a sense of legacy, secured.

Unlike 2016 when I poured the heartbreak and ruins of my work life into blogging, this time around, this is not a space I return to for catharsis from the heartbreak of everything that is going on. Maybe because it is universal and the personal sadness becomes dwarfed or is played against a larger canvas of ongoing disaster.

May be because there are no people around anymore and blogging itself has changed. Come to think of it, I have not participated in any social media space since early June. I have not posted on Instagram and Facebook forever and have no desire to do so any time soon, either. Everything is so full of evil and sadness that there is little joy left in anything. The news continues to be a cesspool of snakes hissing away poisonous fumes on every thing and I find myself questioning the very point of living and of the continued existence of the human race. We are a shitty lot.

Right now, I am quite angsty about not having the time to explore Anita Desai’s books. I have not read her at all and I just randomly remembered her daughter whom I googled and then was reading her interviews and her books sound so interesting. I particularly want to read ‘In Custody’ given my recent forays into Urdu. This is just to say that I am hopping mad right now with a sense of quiet sadness and resignation and I miss what this space was for me in 2016.

The post that is definitely not an Instagram story

“It’s been a month since we have been working from home,” somebody posted in the WhatsApp group at work the other day. My immediate impulse hitherto, whenever such milestones were being declared was to mentally say, well whatever the number of days you are counting, I am 7 days up on you. This is because I was asked to quarantine myself a week before campus formally called off regular class and sent everyone home. I felt the need to remind people about it earlier. Now, I no longer have the impulse.

Things have become normalized to the extent that my sleeping patterns have slowly returned to normal. I mean as normal as can be given that I keep very irregular hours even pre-pandemic depending on what ‘work’ I had to finish. I have even kind of settled into this routine now because I can feel an urge to productivity rise again. The past month was largely spent very listlessly workwise, but I am beginning to get my bearings again. Let’s hope this will translate into concrete work output. But, it is so tempting to just laze around and do the bare minimum that I hope I don’t resist the thought of work too much.

Yesterday, I attempted to turn a blog post into an Instagram story post. I have sometimes shared screenshots of posts I have written here there, but yesterday I actually tried to present, what in my mind naturally belonged on the blog, into a 18-story-long 20-second/view post. It was a lot of work and I am also an impatient person in these matters, preferring to put out thoughts quickly, rather than labor over it.

Writing what I wanted to did not take long, but I wanted to add images to every ‘story’ in keeping with the Instagram ethos. What I like about stories is that you get to know who exactly is seeing them and their viewing patterns. I can estimate that well with the blog too, but it is quite interesting to me how readers who would normally have read the entire thing if it were a regular blog post, sometimes abandon stories mid-way if they see that there is a lot more to go on your account. Some of them message back with comments and reactions and it is always so nice to hear from readers.

Some of the people who view my stories and abandon it do come back to finish it so maybe it is just the urge to move on to the next person’s account and view there stories before deciding if your story is worth spending time on to complete. A lot of appreciation of course for the ones who always patiently read you to the end. There are some who just give up mid-way or in the early stages itself, but who are still ‘regular’ in checking what I post.

To be fair, I inflicted a lot of it yesterday on them by doing a 18 story post, but it has been interesting exercise in seeing who lasted the marathon. By its very nature, Instagram stories are more suited for brief sprints rather than a long format story telling so when I uploaded each story yesterday, my expectations about people reading the entire thing was pretty low. Still, it is not too bad. Some took a break and came back. Some lasted through the thing in the first go itself. In short, the length of the post itself did not have an impact on who would abandon it. The ones who abandoned and gave up usually do so on other stories too.  I also received a fair amount of comments from people today. One of them sent me links of other reminisces of Alaipayuthey, the film I was posting about. If Instagram allowed reactions to stories to be public, it would have been a nice bloggy atmosphere like the ones of yore!

None of this is to say that people who do follow you silently, necessarily like what you are posting. As the fair Paro, who these days is participating in a 500-words a day writing prompt exercise on Facebook, wrote a couple of days ago on how the kind of people we follow online may not always be because we like them. It can equally be because we are fascinated by them in negative ways. This, I find can be pretty true for me because I do visit some people’s social media feeds only because they repel me and I am fascinated by their thoughts in a negative way. This is usually because they indulge in hate speech. However, I don’t follow them. I just visit them in between to see what new vomit they are spewing out into the world.

There are those people who while they don’t repel me also fascinate me because they invoke a fair amount of judgment within about their posts. I then become fascinated with them for that reason. This too the fair Paro sums up aptly when she writes, “The good thing is – no fascination lasts. After some time I become benign and understanding of the behavior. “Once you understand where it’s coming from you don’t feel so judgy” I will intone to some friend who maybe mentally rolls their eyes.”

And thus I don’t necessarily take the regular interest as any proof of positive interest in my updates because it could also stem from negative fascination that can be attributed to any number of things. On the whole though, I hope my regular followers do find value in my updates that range from politics to poems, from serious to whimsical, from full emo to wise pretense.

Lastly, while I was writing this, one account that I have long suspected to be a stalker messaged and said all kinds of silly, nonsensical, and presumptous things about me going off on one of the Alaipayuthe stories that made up my post. I debated at first whether to accept the messaging request, decided to give it a chance, was tolerant for a couple of messages, and then I blocked. So, you see I have a nice diverse set of people following me on Insta stories – ranging from the nice and friendly to the silent, stalkerish, and scary.

That’s all. I will post the Instagram-story-that-is-actually-a-blog-post tomorrow.

Performing privacy

I do have a class coming up on privacy tomorrow. So, perhaps it is apt that I find myself writing about it although the class has little to do with the reason why, added to the fact that I had actually planned to write something else today.

Privacy is an immensely complex notion because it is very contextual. Our need for privacy is never static, never a yes-no binary, but relational, on-going, performative, and a constant negotiation depending on why, where, who, how, and what it demands from us.

When I write something on this blog, I do it with full awareness of how reader curiosity works and what it might lead them to do to connect dots on things that I choose to reveal about my personal life. My identity on this blog is very thinly veiled. All I want is that my students and colleagues not read this space. A student discovering this blog is a major reason why I shut it down for three years. Not because I was writing about my personal life because I don’t really do that, but it is because my students are not a reading publics whom I desire. Most often, they are at an age, when they rarely have the maturity to look at their teachers as people with lives of their own.

As a person, I am also very atypical for a professor situated in an Indian engineering education culture, which is strait-laced, conservative, casteist, bigoted, misogynist, sexist, and wholly uninterested in engaging with the world beyond placements. In short, exactly the kind of place that needs the humanities and social sciences. I am quite happy doing my bit in smashing a lot of these notions and I do get into some amount of trouble while doing it too.

Additionally, my single status is an anomaly and though nothing is ever said about it, I am fully aware that not only am I the only single person on the faculty, but I am also someone with some pretty strong political and social views that run contrary to majoritarian thinking. Among the faculty, I speak up sometimes and it does me no favors. But the institute culture is largely to leave people to their own devices as long as you are doing your work. No one really steps on your toes needlessly and I am grateful for the space that I have both metaphorically as well as my window-with-a-view office.

In the classroom, given the political climate of today, what I teach and what I choose to highlight can sometimes take a turn for the serious. This semester, a student walked out of my class on hate speech saying that she signed up for my class expecting “fun things” and did not understand why I was talking about hate speech and Muslims in India when Hindus are the ones in danger. Right. The last two semesters have been particularly stormy too when feminism came up. It is also what makes the students curious about me. For some, being single automatically equals to being a man-hater. Earlier, fighting perceptions used to take a toll on my mental health, but over time, it has strengthened me in ways that I have come to appreciate. Good fun.

I prefer fighting these battles in the classroom. When I do make self-disclosures in the classroom, these are done strategically. Having students and my colleagues read my blog is not a part of it. Therefore, one fine day when I woke up to find my institute’s IP address on my blog’s analytics, it was instantaneous lock down.

The posts that the student had tracked did not go beyond the most recent posts and the student hoping that I would welcome his engagement was sweet enough to even leave a comment so I knew exactly who it was because he wanted to discuss Indo-Pak politics. This student did what he did because in the previous class, we had been discussing digital privacy and I had explicitly said that there are certain online spaces that I was not going to be welcoming of students and the blog world was one of them. The student thinking this would be a good challenge to find out my blog did exactly that.

It left me feeling immensely violated, even though there was nothing on the blog that was sensitive content.

Now, this particular batch was a particularly inventive one when it came to finding me out on social media. Four other girl students wanted to follow me on Instagram, but they knew I wouldn’t give them my handle if they asked for it. They had already looked for me with a combination of names and could not find me. They then did the next best thing they could think of. They first tracked down my sister and found her Twitter handle. This is easy since she uses her real name. They then used that to find her on Instagram and then found my account from her list and followed me!

I was shocked to see them all in my notifications one day since I have a penchant for inventing various avataars for myself that differ from platform to platform. On Instagram, I have never used my real name and never even mentioned, leave alone, geo-tagged my work place. When I asked them how they tracked me down, they happily explained to me how they did it and they also told me I was being very mean by not interacting with them on Instagram and adding them on Facebook 😀

*epic facepalm*

I gave up and let them follow me on Instagram although I told them that I would not add them on Facebook even if they figured out a way to send me a request around my privacy settings. Long after they graduated, one of them continues to follow me. The others unfollowed me over time. My nerd quotient is not something the others could handle after a while because they were primarily interested in seeing things about my social life and I am quite nerdy and geeky about decidedly non-nerdy things like popular culture on Instagram instead of posting selfies and party pictures of which I anyway don’t have any 😀

I don’t mind the girl who continues to follow me. She is a good sort and genuinely liked being in my class and was diligent in her work. Her following does not feel like an invasion of my privacy, but because she really wants to keep in touch. It’s been two years since she graduated and if she still wants to follow me on Instagram, I think it is okay. I don’t think she has revealed my handle to her juniors. I hope not. I am loath to make my account private. I enjoy the serendipitous connections I make on Instagram and setting the account to private would not allow for it. Also, nothing I post is of a greatly sensitive nature. None of it is going to create any trouble for me at work in even the remotest way. It is just that I don’t want students explicitly a part of my social media publics.

With another batch of students, I myself told them about my Instagram as an experiment and a lot of them followed me. And then over time, I realised that I was not comfortable with certain students following me and when I switched my username, as I frequently do, I blocked and unblocked them so that they could no longer follow me. Now, I am clear that I don’t want students on my Instagram either unless I know them well over time, so I voluntarily don’t reveal my handle. But, some of them still find me if they are connected to me on WhatsApp for fieldwork or project discussion even though my phone number is not linked to any of my social media accounts. But, since it is all a Facebook family affair, if you are connected to me on WhatsApp, it is likely you can find me on Instagram. There is nothing I can do about it 😦

When I came back on the blog this year in July, it was with caution. I have still not succeeding in making it search proof so I am particular about tracking certain metrics and activities to make sure that no one from my work life is reading me. At the same time, I am okay with existing readers knowing my real identity.

So, when I chose to reveal my own experience with pain around heartbreak, I did it knowing what I am doing and who its likely readers would be. However, what I did not know is how I would feel about the additional ways in which the curiosity would manifest itself. I wasn’t surprised to see the city in South Africa that I had mentioned in my post being searched for on the blog. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that the posts that were served for that search term had nothing to do with the city. I was not in a bloggy mood for the most part of 2013 and hence this space holds no record of my time there. There are other things that I would have expected being dug up in relation to that post, but they didn’t figure 😀

What these search terms did do however, were to make me think about the nature of their curiosity because of how it left me feeling. I was largely okay with knowing that I was subject to curious speculation and that there was an active and ongoing search around what I had written. It was after all, my choice to write about this and I am a big girl.

However, today morning, I saw that the search had reached the publication page of my work profile. It is significant that no other pages on my professional website were visited so the focus was not on knowing more about me, but intent on discovering the identity of the person mentioned in my post. That made me a little uncomfortable. It felt more like having a harshly lit beam shine on the source of the pain I had experienced and not a gently curious exploration about the very many aspects of who I am that one would know through the other things that are also present on my work website.

To be fair, this may not have been the searcher’s intention at all and I really don’t hold it against them. Even if it was the intention, they are well within their rights to be curious on whatever aspect they want to be and satisfy it using whatever ways and means they want to employ.

So, this is more about how it made me feel. I, of course, like anybody else, realized that I strongly resist and rebel being viewed solely through the prism of heartbreak. And seeing the search effort travel across space to my work site to hone in on that one piece of information that would allow them to crack the identity of the person I wrote about made it seem like I was viewed only through that lens. So, this imprisonment of perspective is what I found myself being held by through the search activity on my work site.

Sure, if the intent was to identify conference names and look up their programs to find what you are looking for, it could work. Maybe, it will, maybe it won’t or maybe you will be completely mislead given the same people go to the same conferences and identities overlap. To the searcher I wish the sweet savoring of triumph if and when they succeed. I understand 🙂

But, turns out, at this point in time, it also left me feeling a little discomfited. Given I had also revealed a fair deal about the person’s identity it also made them vulnerable to identification. I felt that it was perhaps not ethical on my part to unwittingly reveal their identity, especially because I also had something to say on their political affiliation, which they may not want known.

Hence, I have converted the said post into draft status. It is no longer on the blog. Maybe, I will edit it lightly and repost it. Maybe, I won’t.

For the record, I wrote about heartbreak around a very unlikely attraction that took me by surprise and again the surprise pain I experienced when I realised that I had allowed myself to be led on. Writing it wasn’t planned, but it sort of merged with something else that I was analyzing on a certain inflection episode around romance in Hindi cinema. However, writing it was a good learning both on looking back on a personal episode that made me wiser in many ways and helped me learn about myself and when it was forcing its way into what I actually wanted to write, I realize I did not mind documenting it on the blog.

In my own dealings with the ups and downs of life, I have often been greatly helped by people who honestly, bravely, and publicly write about very sensitive aspects about their life. I have always been deeply moved when people, especially women write candidly about failures and loss ranging from the personal to the professional and everything in between. It requires a certain kind of evolution and bravery to put a painful bit of yourself out there and declare your humanity of missteps, foibles, and hurts. I am grateful to people who do that because not everyone has it in them to do so, not everyone would, and because you cannot control how people view you after you share something very sensitive. So, when people share, it becomes a part of my own repertoire that helps me make sense of my own life.

On some days, I need all the reinforcements that I can summon in resisting patriarchal, traditional, normative, and societal pressures to conform so that I can continue marching to my own tune and live life on my own terms to the extent possible. It is mentally and emotionally demanding in every way when you choose to stick out and I draw on these stories that people so generously give of themselves. Consequently, I have always hoped that I reach a point where I too am okay sharing about my own losses and failures in life.

But, maybe, I am not ready, yet.

The aftermath of publishing my post, also now helped me learn that perhaps there are some things that I would not really be okay with being determinedly probed beyond what I would like to make known. And now that I know how it feels like, I will account for it in the future. Sure, I could have been smarter in not revealing certain markers of identity, but the name of the cities, the regional and linguistic identity of the person in question were all so integral to my story that I included it thereby setting myself for further investigation. Omitting it would have been smarter in the interest of protecting myself and the person’s identity, but I was not going for smart when I wrote it.

To be very clear, this is NOT on the searcher who merely acted in a very predictable way and who could well have been me on someone else’s blog. Many are the times when I too have set about trying to search someone’s identity based on little leads dropped here and there so, again, this is not about the searcher. This is very much on me, about me and what I learnt from this episode.

Thanks everyone who is reading. Please come back.

Peace.

Like, Dislike

My mental model of a ‘Like’ while hale and hearty on Facebook and Instagram and serving a confused though functional bookmarking purpose on Twitter, is thoroughly at odds with a ‘Like’ on a blog. I actively use the ‘Like’ on Facebook and neither giving or receiving Likes makes me break into any kind of hives. When I first got on Instagram, the heart shaped button thoroughly confused me not because of its function but because I was suddenly receiving and sending hearts on the platform. I had a teeny weeny liking for a particular person on Instagram and it used to mess with my head every time he would ‘heart’ my pictures. Thankfully, the teeny weeny liking phased out with time and I am now an enthusiastic hearter and receiver on Instagram without reading too much into it other than that I like what you have shared. It got some getting used to, but I think that was only because of my teeny weeny crush. In fact, I now use the Like and the Heart on almost every single Facebook and Instagram post of The Delhiwallah as a substitute to screaming, “can I please marry you?” 🙂

Also disorienting at first was when the heart appeared on Twitter because ‘hearting’ on Twitter also serves to bookmark tweets and links to return to later. So, while I may not really like a tweet, I might find the link or some information useful and I use the heart button then, but I don’t really ‘heart’ it. Still, this is something I have gotten used to.

What I find difficult to digest is the ‘Like’ on WordPress. I hate it. Especially when it is regularly used by people as the only response to all the writing that goes on blogs. I will confess I have removed people from following my blog for using only the Like button as a substitute for any other kind of interaction. I have also removed people from following my blog for other reasons too, but there were some chronic Likers that I had to let go. I would rather you do nothing and just lurk rather than only Like because it makes me feel really creepy and I don’t know if I should comment on your posts or only Like them since that is your preferred interaction. Seriously, I absolutely don’t mind zero comments. After all, barring the last couple of years, I really had no reader interaction and I am fine with it. I know there are a couple of readers who do this quite regularly too, but hello, if you use the follow function on blogs and this post has appeared in your reader, then you don’t make me feel creepy because we do communicate on occasional posts, which is fine with me.

I don’t expect anybody to have something to say all the time, but I was totally freaked by some who unfailingly Liked everything I wrote with nothing to say ever. It just seemed like a pointless exercise in interaction because blogs unlike Instagram and Facebook are more than just a sum total of their Likes. I am sorry to be interfering with your agency and freedom to read and Like, but it drove me a little batty to have the Like notification blink on WordPress for a post I may have spent time thinking about and writing, but which your Like was rendering totally trite and trivial. I am also sorry that you actually might be using the Like differently than how I think about it on the blog and are doing it to send me an acknowledgment of having read what I am saying. Thank you, really. I appreciate it, but it was eerily disembodying to have this happen forever on my posts. I might appear to be an asshole and if I am then as my sister says when trying to come to terms with something, “it is what it is.” If this blog had heavy reader traffic like IHM’s, I could totally understand the Likes, but it is not even as if it is a wildly popular site. If it helps, I actually don’t think you are going to notice my posts missing from your reader at all because I don’t think my rambles here are worthy enough to merit that kind of attention. And if you do and you come here to see what’s up then this might explain why. And then you might curse me and call me names, which I can actually deal with better than the Like 🙂

Strangely though, when I used to put my blog links on Facebook back in the day, the Facebook ‘likes’ on the link were never an irritant. Simply because that is the grammar of Facebook. It is more in sync with acknowledgment and where the Like button is used heavily for relationship maintenance purposes. Unlike a blog, where we or at least, I,  am not writing for relationship maintenance, but writing to express and on some good days hope it evokes discussion and exchange thoughts with others too. Only goes to prove Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the the medium is indeed the message.

Also, I grew up a little some time ago and no longer feel the compulsion to comment reciprocally on bloggers who comment here simply because we should take turns on each other’s posts. I recognize that for some commenting is a way of getting more visibility and readers and while I have nothing against this school of thought, I don’t belong to it. I think that the best way to honor somebody’s thoughts and writing is to say something when you really mean it and not force a reaction out only because they comment on your posts. Writing this because some bloggers I know practice a heavy handed passive aggressiveness about comments when they don’t receive them which makes me uncomfortable. There is also some kind of Omerta around all of this because you don’t want to be ungracious to your readers and commenters. And rightfully so. But, I can only take so much of Likes before my dam breaches.

kthxbai.

In search of conversations

It could be because it is Friday evening or it could be because a friend cancelled on me for an event tomorrow. I am not entirely sure, but I find the need to talk. Perhaps, it is because run up to this event has been brimming with discourse about the need for conversations in the face of silences. I have been salivating over the line up all this week and was looking forward to a weekend of literary nourishment and dialogues.

Of course, I am still going to go, but the sudden loss of company is making me feel bereft. As if, I lost the opening sentence of a conversation and am now going to be spending the rest of it wondering about the import of what I missed instead of enjoying the rest of the dialog. This is really strange because I do most things by myself since I seldom find people interested in the same kind of things I like. So, I spoke to mom who had just returned from work and am waiting for my sister to wake up because she is in a time zone that is a laggard. Until, then I will type this out because I don’t like this feeling that has settled around me this evening.

For a few months now I have been thinking of changing the title of this blog to reflect my search not for colloquialism, but for conversations. A few posts ago, when I wrote that I love receiving comments, what I was perhaps actually trying to say is that I love being able to have a conversation over these posts. Over this past year when so much went down, I have slowly began feeling the need to carve and nurture spaces that will host dialogues and conversations. Barring my professional life when I am the very epitome of patience and empathy and invisibly labor to forge connections with strangers that will allow me a peek into their way of life, I have otherwise a streak of impatient individualism that has pushed me onward and not allowed me to tarry for others. But, these days I am willing to wait and slow down and spend time creating spaces that will allow me to converse without an agenda in mind.

Yesterday, when I walked in at work, I realized that I need to still come to terms with this new need of mine and allow it its space to flower. I can be very self-consciously socially awkward and introverted at the worst of times and I was taken by surprise by a group of professors and students cozily sitting and chatting over coffee. Exactly a space that I wanted to be a part of and exactly what I love about academia and places of learning. For the long pauses of restful spaces that they afford for exchange of thoughts and ideas. They called out to me as I was passing by. They asked me if I wanted coffee. I took this question too literally and stupidly refused to recognize it for the metaphor it was. “I don’t drink coffee,” I said and hurried away overcome with a sudden sense of shyness, which I wouldn’t really blame them for interpreting as standoffish. So silly. I should have stopped and said hello and asked them what they were talking about, but I think I was suddenly conscious of my newcomer status. Later, I did go to talk to my colleague. I carried along a gift that I had gotten for her from Chitra Santhe because she was so generous in lending me all her books without me even asking for it when I was a visiting faculty. And we talked and I was far more at ease in this one-on-one setting and it was a session that did me good.

I then started thinking about the places where I have really have had satisfying conversations with people and anybody reading, please don’t laugh, but I realized that for some days now, the fish market in the BDA complex behind my home is where I have had some really satisfying social interactions. I am good friends with the staff here. They are migrants from Jharkhand and I enjoy talking with them as I go about selecting my fish and exchanging notes on life.  I think they also rather appreciate having someone friendly to speak to in fluent Hindi and who like them, is also not a native of Bangalore.

Also, for some reason, whenever I go, I find myself the only woman there. All the other people who come in to buy fish are invariably men. In fact, I have never met a woman at this place ever, which is really weird. Every single time that I am here, some customer strikes up a conversation with me. Perhaps, they find my banter with the staff entertaining, but I always find myself being consulted about everything fishy – how to clean it, how to cook it, what recipes I use, where I am from, what is my favorite fish, why it is so etc etc… I wonder why their womenfolk do not accompany them to buy fish because the men I meet are really awkward and don’t seem to know the first thing about what they are buying. They are constantly on the phone describing to whoever is at the other end what is on offer that day and they turn to me with almost palpable relief. Now, though the stall has an enviable selection of fresh water fish, I have also never met a Bengali there because no self-respecting Bengali of either sex would be this awkward around fish. I hope I do because I have a few questions for them too.

I once had a man sit down and slide deep into nostalgia about sora puttu – it is a shark meat preparation native to Tamil cuisine and when he saw me buying it and discovered that I was indeed going to be making puttu, he could not help but lapse into recollections of the time he had it in Malaysia courtesy the Tamil Diaspora there. I thought he might cry so I hurriedly gave him the recipe which he said would be of no use to him because his wife did not want to deal with this particular fish and sadly shook his head. I almost invited him for lunch. Last week, I found myself get dreamy about bombil at the shop. This is only available along Maharashtra’s western coastline and it is my favorite fish. Bangalore apparently gets its supply from the eastern coast and bombil is never a part of the haul at any fish stall in the city. As usual, I was complaining about the lack of bombil to the staff when a customer butted in and wanted to know more about the fish. We had the most soul satisfying conversation about bombil and I think I left him all eager to want to visit Maharashtra to sample it.

Fishes are a good conversation starters. One fellow even went on to write a most entertaining book on them. If there is one book that I would like to recommend around this then it would be Samath Subramaniam’s Following Fish. It very neatly combines my love for fish, travel, and narratives. If you like fish, do read, and stop by to chat 🙂

Piku, again

I wrote a thought piece connecting Piku and bloggers. It appeared yesterday in the Hindu’s Sunday Magazine. This piece is dedicated to all of you reading this. I could have been happier about it, but I wasn’t because of bad days at work. Today, things got a little better. I spoke up about bad things and received reassurance in return. So, sharing the link to my work here too. The high point for me about all of this are as follows:

Brangan responded to my email asking if he would be interested in the piece with encouragement. I had sent out this piece to a feminist website too, but they did not get back for three days. Not only did Brangan respond within 20 minutes of my email to him, but he also put me in touch with other editors from his newspaper who would be interested in it. Immediately after this, the feminist people replied. By then, I had already committed to the newspaper. Brangan is the person to whose blog I go running to after every film viewing only to tally and see how our interpretations matched or differed. It felt very nice to know that he approved and thought this was publication worthy. I wrote him a ‘thank you’ note yesterday and he told me ‘welcome, Preeti’ 🙂

Yesterday, my article was featured just below his review of the Kamal Hasan starrer Pappasanam on the upper half of the landing page of the newspaper’s website for the entire Sunday giving it eyeballs. Though I would love to know how many clicked to read. Of course, I screenshoted it to look at to feel happy later. It will certainly be one of the mostest from these are a few of my favorite things.

Another happy thing was that one woman who read it hunted my contact details down and wrote to me saying that it resonated tremendously with her and she wanted to meet me. It was very touching and since she is Bangalore based, I will meet her some day.

Thanks to R too who excitedly whatsapped me after reading it in the newspaper. Very sweet of you, R.

That’s all. Hope all readers are in happy places in their lives work wise and other wise and I hope I get there too.

Blogging with Benefits

I chanced upon R’s blog one tear ridden night when I was trying to cope with something rather frustrating. A few posts that she had written resonated tremendously with me and helped me gain some perspective on my own situation. I left a comment on her blog letting her know of this. It led to a series of exchanges on both our blogs. It also led to small discoveries. How we both had a connection to Pune, how we both lived in the same neighborhood, and of course how we both were reading the same blogs. So, the obvious conclusion that Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi would independently reach is that we both are lovely awesome people. No cause for dispute there. Not one whit.

In between R went off to Bhutan and I went off to Seoul. When she came back, she blogged about her Bhutan trip and I enjoyed reading about it. You can find it here. We began emailing each other and R had both counsel and solidarity to offer which was a big help. In a delightful twist, the same day we  began emailing, Facebook also made a grand intervention. Someone from my friend list shared R’s Bhutan blog and we became Facebook friends.

Today we became friends in the offline world too. R and I met today and I had a lovely time. Meeting someone from the blog world was a first for me. And it was such a nice thing to happen. R was thoughtful and brought me a mint plant from her garden. I was thoughtless and brought her nothing. We met at a cafe and were soon chatting nineteen to a dozen. I felt comfortable enough to invite R home though it was a big mess. We talked about so much, our work, our interests, the blogs we read, and rounded it off nicely with some good blog related gossip 😀

Today was fun. Though I have been reading blogs since 2004 and writing since 2005, it is only now that I am actively commenting and conversing with other bloggers. Until now, I was the quintessential lurker. Reading everything, saying nothing. So glad that delurking actually leads to such happy eventualities. Very nice meeting you today, R 🙂