tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36497668900705476272024-03-14T20:03:44.536+05:30Through Eyes Like YoursShreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.comBlogger202125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-80580270210061834322022-04-25T00:22:00.002+05:302022-04-25T00:22:35.108+05:30Our Ancestors' Ways of Knowing (And Why An Israeli Professor Made Me Think About Them)<p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span> </span>On Youtube, there is a channel
called Big Think. It’s basically a stage for public intellectuals, many of whom
are noted academics as well, to come and share what they have learnt. I watch
it regularly. A few days ago, I watched a video featuring Tal Ben-Shahar titled,
“Don’t Chase Happiness, Become Antifragile.” In the video, Ben-Shahar, the man
who designed the most popular class at Harvard, breaks happiness down to five components:
spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, and emotional (acronymed the
SPIRE model for happiness). You can watch the video here: </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-or_D-qNqM" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-or_D-qNqM</a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Ben-Shahar is a white (albeit
Jewish) man who has integrated himself into the Western tradition of
understanding and knowledge production. That’s why most of you will probably
roll your eyes when I tell you that what Ben-Shahar is talking about is
basically a Harvard-version of the yogic concept of ‘pancha-kosha’ originally
developed by yogis in the Indian subcontinent. (Are you rolling your eyes yet?
In more extreme cases, are you calling me a <i>bhakt</i>? Since I’ve already
predicted these reactions, bear with me a little longer.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The ‘pancha-kosha’ concept breaks human
existence down to five sheaths: food (in modern terms this would probably be
physicality), vital life-force (in modern terms this would probably be kinesiology),
mentality, intellectuality, and spirituality. Not too different from what
Ben-Shahar is talking about, right? In his video, Ben-Shahar also explains how
investing in all of them equally is basically what helps us bounce back from an
attack on one a lot more easily, therefore making us antifragile. But the yogis
went one-step further. After acknowledging the need to invest in all five <i>koshas</i>,
they claimed that an illness in one sheath cannot really be treated by treating
another sheath, or at least treated fully. Consider the following examples:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Someone who has become bitter and angry due to a
physical ailment (source of pain: physical <i>kosha</i>, manifestation of pain:
mental <i>kosha</i>)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Someone on anxiety medication that reports fewer
symptoms but still doesn’t feel any better (source of pain: mental or spiritual
<i>kosha, </i>remedy of pain: physical <i>kosha</i>)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->First-world diseases such as diabetes and high
blood pressure (source of pain: quite literally the food <i>kosha</i>, manifestation
of effects: physical, kinesiological, and in a lot of cases, social and
therefore intellectual and spiritual as well)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Working a high-paid, socially validated job but
still being miserable (source of pain: in my opinion, intellectual and
spiritual, remedy sought after: physical or vital life-force related).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So my first question is, what is it
that our ancestors figured out that we are now laboring to rediscover instead
of building upon? We are all familiar with the phrase “reinvesting the wheel”
when it comes to the physical and technological world, why do we disregard the social,
psychological and spiritual knowledge generated in those wheel-inventing times
as “outdated” without even testing it first?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">My second question is, why is our
current government act like its so committed to reviving and rejuvenating
Indian traditions, but so neglectful of the <i>real </i>wisdom of our
ancestors? Why is it only about praising and celebrating certain men in certain
epics and historical episodes, and performing rituals? What about all the contributions
our ancestors made to botany, science, psychology, economics, and so much more?
Yes, a lot of the actual knowledge has been debunked now or become outdated due
to more nuanced knowledge generated in the past, but what about the theoretical
frameworks and intellectual traditions? I can understand that more modern
people want to reject certain findings of our ancestors, but what if their “ways
of knowing” had timeless merit that we’re now ignoring in favor of more
superficial aspects of “Indian culture”?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Now are you expecting me to end this post with some wise words of wisdom, something prescriptive to help you with your life. Unfortunately, I can't do that. Unlike ancient yogis and Harvard professors, I actually have very little competence in terms of giving people fool-proof advice. So once again, I have no answers
to my questions. Just more questions. I leave you with these questions, hoping
maybe someone will read and have answers to give.<o:p></o:p></p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-24508673095395583122022-02-07T09:52:00.008+05:302022-03-11T21:53:31.068+05:30Blue, Painful, Fragile<p> Who remembers being uselessly idealistic in their youth? Or, I guess a better question would be, who doesn't remember that? <i>Blue, Painful, Fragile, </i>a Japanese film directed by Shunsuke Kariyama and available on Netflix, takes one back to that time in one's life when one doesn't bother to test their ideas and beliefs against reality. </p><p>The story centers around two outcast college students, Hisano and Kaede. One day, the outgoing and idealistic Hisano suddenly approaches the avoidant Kaede to start a college club that aims to end "global hunger and bring world peace." While Kaede isn't much of a believer in Hisano's lofty goals, he goes along. Slowly, he finds friendship and purpose in their humble two-person club, up until the point they begin to genuinely help people in their community.</p><p>In the present day, however, the club has changed dramatically. Kaede is back to being an outcast (and has an outcast friend) and Hisano is dead. The club has left behind its idealistic and small-scale roots and is now a campus-wide phenomenon attracting students with its networking events that help them make connections and eventually land well-paying and respectable jobs. This transformation is heartbreaking for Kaede. In his eyes, the club he built from the ground up with a beloved friend who is now dead has now been corrupted by a new administration with nothing but a capitalistic agenda on its mind and leaders who exploit their power. Together with his friend, Kaede embarks on a mission to bring the club back to its original state, or else destroy it completely.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0VnhAZEct2gdPQmDadFSwiZys02PXp6TrhyoJsV_RNJ62itPx5MWsYvlLcWoiZQy-D0gC2In8s5dOTbdH9zhlmoUe2OSzru2bVZ_pOOE_YjN2OSHaaKouSPMkHdEo3kIjibmqu_R2dXIHkN3PW3mdsPrW2pKHn4nJYVh2mVH1qQWBTwo_OzOz0jIW=s1024" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0VnhAZEct2gdPQmDadFSwiZys02PXp6TrhyoJsV_RNJ62itPx5MWsYvlLcWoiZQy-D0gC2In8s5dOTbdH9zhlmoUe2OSzru2bVZ_pOOE_YjN2OSHaaKouSPMkHdEo3kIjibmqu_R2dXIHkN3PW3mdsPrW2pKHn4nJYVh2mVH1qQWBTwo_OzOz0jIW=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #666666;">Image Source: Netflix</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>While this seems like a campus-superhero/vigilante story at first, the revelations that follow reveal the truth of what happened beyond what we see from Kaede's perspective. In reality, Hisano never died. In fact, she was the one who helped grow the club to its present status. To Kaede, that was the death of Hisano. Although he tries to dress up his sense of betrayal with clothes of betrayed ideals, it soon becomes clear that his betrayal actually stems from the fact that another outcast left him behind. The ideals he had adopted from Hisano, and the bubble they had created with it, put Kaede in a comfortable spot where he did not have to feel challenged or grow. He could feel better than others by telling himself he was striving for goals the average student didn't have the morals to care about. At the same time, he could avoid feeling lonely or expand his worldview because he had one partner by his side, which is often all one needs in the moment. When Hisano grows out of their bubble, embracing the reality of changing the world by adopting real-world "means and methods," what Hisano is really upset about is the shattering of his comfort zone. It is the bitterness of those who never grow out of their college self, using their youthful ideals as excuses to not face their own shortcomings. By the climax, when Kaede manages to destroy the club as he planned, it becomes clear that he is no superhero or vigilante. Instead, he is the villain in his own story.</p><p>We are shown a montage of what could have been. Instead of petulantly leaving the club he built because it no longer nursed his precarious comfort zone, Kaede could have chosen to grow with it. Instead of dismissing club activities as "networking," he could have made new friends. Their is a warmth in these alternate-reality scenes which contrasts with how Kaede has been portrayed , and a humility and gentleness that show the audience that "what could have been" could easily have been if not for Kaede had not ruined it with his own jealousy. After all, what had hurt him the most was the loss of his only friend, and he had contributed to that loss with his own indignation. What he had wanted was friendship, togetherness, laughter, and the joy of accomplishing small objectives together, all of which were within his reach with nothing holding him back other than own mind.</p><p><i>Blue, Painful, Fragile</i> took my back to my own childhood. I was a bit of a Kaede, using my ideals to justify my loneliness in school and my inability to get along with people, telling myself I am better than others and that I could be alone if nobody wanted to join me. From my insular viewpoint, there was nothing wrong with my thoughts. Fortunately, it did not take a revenge plot for me to change. Instead, it was something much simpler--it was the sheer joy of genuinely connecting with other people. First, it was one best friend, and then there were two, and then there were three. Then I changed schools and started participating in as many extra-curricular activities as I could. I failed at most but succeeded at some. I made another best friend. In college, I formed a short-lived sisterhood with girls I shared a room with, and eventually packed a rucksack full of memories with my classmates. All of these events, although small and insignificant for most people, were building blocks in healing my from my self-sabotaging personality. I have come to realize that I don't want to be "different" or "more moral" or "less hypocritical" or "more intellectual" than anyone. I simply want to be the best I can be and I want to do it with close friends. With my personality, I don't think I can ever be popular or the life of the party, but I can be happier with people who care for me by my side, and I don't want to lose that in pursuit of moral or ideological superiority (or if we are being honest, the pursuit of looking superior to everyone else).</p><p>Fortunately, Kaede is not doomed to be a villain forever. At his core, he knows his own contributions to his misfortunes and has a big enough heart to feel the pain of hurting his former best friend by destroying what she worked so hard to build. In the last scene, after months of not seeing Hisano, we see Kaede finally accepting the challenge of facing his own demons and rushing to apologize to a girl he sees crossing the street who looks like Hisano.</p><p>Japanese films have always had the ability to unearth moments and memories I have buried under layers of growth, and they do so by confronting me to the parts of myself I am quite honestly ashamed and embarrassed of. But, in a way, shame keeps us accountable, and <i>Blue, Painful, Fragile</i> does just that. <i>Getting </i>the chance to grow is often not the difficult part of life. It is the <i>embracing </i>of those chances that is difficult, because it implies mourning our present self to give birth to our future and more often than not, it implies being wrong. I hope everybody embraces the chance to grow the way Kaede did, and nobody has to live life lonely and bitter just because they couldn't let go of their pride.</p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-24176480430465069092021-06-11T02:14:00.000+05:302022-03-11T21:53:44.702+05:30Covertly Toxic: Jim and Pam<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8A8bh6cZ54oz2Xv7MGhCg9Kdw4Jsw38PejZXa8hhNonFIEadTmK826YRm4oyA7wIshmhagK-RY-LnhhjnvLsBpZv6z6bcg9BAzh7GULNPFdpBQ2IYRCw8Y_VsBEgzzXw4y3xnSSGTH0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="2000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8A8bh6cZ54oz2Xv7MGhCg9Kdw4Jsw38PejZXa8hhNonFIEadTmK826YRm4oyA7wIshmhagK-RY-LnhhjnvLsBpZv6z6bcg9BAzh7GULNPFdpBQ2IYRCw8Y_VsBEgzzXw4y3xnSSGTH0/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Before I started writing this piece, I had to take a moment to myself. What's going to happen to me once people find out that I think that one of the most beloved couples in the history of American television is--dun dun dun--toxic. "How many romantic dreams will I be breaking today?" I wondered. "How many fantasies will I be shattering?" I mean, it's not like I am some expert in matters of the heart anyways, so should I dare?</p><p>Thankfully, in spite of these reservations, I finally decided to write down my thoughts on Jim and Pam, the poster children of a "normal love story," the down-to-Earth people with the most heartwarming grand gestures, the heart of <i>The Office</i>. </p><p>The truth is that there is a ton I love about this couple. I love how their relationship is based, first and foremost, on friendship (or at least that's what I thought in the beginning). I love their shared sense of humor, their ability to take pleasure in the little things, their general good-naturedness. I understand why millions of people have watched and re-watched the highlights of their relationship on Youtube, and why people cheer for this couple which seems to have so much magic in the confines of their unremarkable lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After all, who doesn't want a teapot full of memories and a heartfelt letter in the age of texts and Snapchats? It is a heartwarming love story that seems at once fantastical and approachable, set in a familiar environment and validating the lives of those who have felt genuine love and affection even if it wasn't in Paris, Milan, or whatever is the romantic destination people care about these days.</p><p>And then the later seasons happened.</p><p>From what I understand, for most of the audience, the show ended with the exit of Michael Scott, and for good reason. After he left, the show went from being a relatable mockumentary to a run-of-the-mill sitcom where characters (especially the secondary characters) increasingly act immature and senseless just for the sake of getting some laughs in a manner that is completely different from how they were portrayed before. Kevin goes from being the secret mastermind to the office dumb-dumb. Meredith goes from being the struggling single mother to the slutty weirdo. Oscar completely abandons his ability to call people out on their indiscretions (and yes, I loved how a gay man got this part on the show) to one leg of a bizarre love triangle (although I did like how he supports Angela and her son in the end). Jim and Pam, for their part, lose their spark. Suddenly, they're fighting all the time or avoiding fights that are threatening to break out from under a flimsy surface. It's clear that they have differences that somehow went unexplored before despite the warm friendship the couple shared before marriage. This is not the couple we fell in love with, the audience thinks. What's wrong? Where did our Jim and Pam go?</p><p>Here's the answer: they went nowhere. This is Jim and Pam once the love story is over and the life story has begun. They are no longer the shy receptionist and salesmen secretly harboring feelings for each other from across the corridor. They aren't the leads in a romantic proposal outside of a convenience store. They're not having their "own wedding" at the Niagara falls before their social wedding at the church, with Jim proclaiming how he wanted to marry her the day he met her. As a cherry on top, it is revealed that their exes went on to find both personal and professional growth and happiness once they were freed from partners who were secretly madly in love with other people. This is not the writers doing a poor job of writing even though that's what happened with the other characters. This is the writers braving a deeper look at what happens when after the "cute" love story between two people who 1) are non-confrontational to a fault, 2) somewhat scared of inevitable growth, and 3) (and this is logistical) when you actually think about it, didn't really get to know each other as partners for very long before they had their adorably romantic wedding.</p><p>The truth is, both Jim and Pam are frustratingly flawed characters. Jim loves Pam, but he does so to the point where he is almost afraid of her. He cannot imagine what would happen if he pointed out her insecurities and irrational behavior. To him, she is the dream woman he shared all those quirkily adorably moments with. I mean, how could he ever recreate those magic moments with someone else? This is not to mention that she is also the mother of his children, and as much as we try to trivialize breakups and divorce, the truth remains that most people share a deep bond with the people they share children with, bonds that are too difficult to break for casual judgement from "progressive" and "free-spirited" college students (no, I'm not advocating for staying in unhappy marriages; I'm just pointing out why some people can't leave as easily as other people think they should). Pam, on the other hand, is lovely and gentle and beautiful, but insecure and cowardly on the inside. She <i>needs </i>to be the person Jim is constantly chasing and proposing to and making grand gestures to, and when that doesn't happen, her very identity is threatened. Some people have told me that they find Pam to be a hypocrite because she is so happy when Jim buys a house without consulting her but then completely falls apart when Jim undergoes a career-change without consulting her. Honestly, I think it goes deeper than that: I think she is used to being the center of Jim's story, and when that doesn't happen, she simply cannot accept it and in her insecurity is willing to watch Jim slave away as a salesman at the corporate hell that is Dunder-Mifflin even though he has both the ability and the opportunity to make a more meaningful life for himself at the cost of disturbance to his wife and kids that go no deeper than a simple move from one suburb to another. </p><p>Me pointing out that Jim and Pam are flawed is not a criticism. Most people are frustratingly flawed because, well, nobody is perfect and nobody's idea of "perfect" is perfect for everybody. It is also important to point out that we have culturally normalized the narrative of the man being smitten with the woman, initiating the first date, proposing, making grand declarations, and the woman being the recipient of such romantic grandeur. I mean, be honest with yourself and tell me when was the last time one of your female friends proposed to her boyfriend? And if she did, when was the last time a man actually accepted the proposal and showed off his ring (while pretending to not be that excited about it because aren't we all such social media liars)? Jim and Pam are merely enacting the new cultural standard. Its not a cultural standard based on duty and sacrifice and acceptance, which was more aspirational in the past and problematic in its own way. It's the cultural standard where the love story is more important than the life story, and where people would go to great lengths to preserve the idea of their specific romance rather than embracing growth and change. Add to this the pressure of maintaining an image to outsiders, and not being able to share your personal life with others in fear of judgement. And honestly, I don't judge that fear, because these days nobody really helps anybody in this arena and people just say "well, if you're not happy (every moment of every day for the rest of your life), just leave! You deserve better! You can do better! Your partner doesn't deserve you! Blah blah blah!"</p><p>So here's my thesis: Jim and Pam are not the ideal couple, nor are they a toxic couple (like my clickbait-y title says). They're simple two flawed individuals who got together and had the privilege of making some memorable moments along the way that they can proubly talk about at parties. I have no doubt the love each other and, at the end of the day, want what's best for each other, but what we see in the latter seasons of the show is simply them coming to terms with that with there still being a long way to go (Pam, please don't sell your next house without speaking to your husband first. Please. Haven't you learnt that life is about more than grand gestures and pleasant surprises? Just freaking communicate! Just say, "Hey, I am willing to support you in the next stage of your career now; how do you want to proceed?" See? Not that hard.) Even though many people think that the story show should have ended with Jim and Pam getting married, I actually support the writers' choice to go farther than that. After all, aren't most of all guilty of wanting love stories too? And aren't most of us honestly clueless about what happens after?</p><p><br /></p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-69637848398831406472021-03-01T09:11:00.005+05:302021-03-01T09:11:42.639+05:30Poor Feminism<p>Today I was scrolling through my Instagram and I came across
a video of Priyanka Chopra talking about how women would never need a man if
only they were financially independent. To be honest, there is some truth to
this. In my life, I have slowly come to accept that money is, in fact, power. Not
having money leaves one open to exploitation and abuse, and even in the best-case scenario there is some risk of being disrespected with terms like “gold-digger”
and “sugar baby” (especially for a woman and even if an individual is married).
I have sat through way too many <i>baithaks </i>of men around me going on rants
about how women make plans to divorce them just to take half their wealth to
ever believe that I’ll be respected without money, even if I became the brightest,
kindest, warmest wife on the planet, or the most capable and diligent mother.
As much as we don’t like to admit it, we gauge a person’s worth by the money
they make, and in today’s world even women are not exempt from that.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">However, it is also true that low- and lower-middle-class
women (or even men, sometimes) never become “financially independent” the way women
like Priyanka Chopra talk about. They may be able to afford their own food and
a humble roof over their heads (and in countries like India, “humble” is quite a
stretch sometimes), but they don’t have enough money to use their wealth as a
shield or as a weapon. In such a situation, getting married, and pooling the labor
and capital of two people, is not something people should a) be judged for or
b) be preached out of from a position of privilege. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, it must be kept in mind that just
because people sometimes marry for financial stability does not mean that they
don’t love each other. In fact, the opposite is true—in many studies, it has
been shown that “financial infidelity” is one of the leading causes of divorce.
Because we’ve developed our ideas of love and marriage from watching movies, we
often forget that one of the key components of any happy relationship is a
respect and understanding of each other’s labor and capital, and denying that
fact is being a hopeless romantic. Some might argue that being a “hopeless
romantic” is good, because all our role models are, but I don’t agree if being
a hopeless romantic means making your own life (and the lives of people around
you) harder just for the sake of making a good story.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I also want to point out that when preaching things like
this, people often approach issues with the mentality of “if you want money,
just work harder for it.” Hard work does not always lead to wealth. A nurse
probably works just as hard as an actress does, but does not even make a
fraction of the money. In fact, even a female doctor does not make the kind of
money that an actress does. Forget, doctors and nurses. Think about the poor
women who leave their rural homes to work as carers for old, rich people in
their finals years. Think about women who work for their families by taking
care of special needs children, or physically or mentally challenged family
members (and yes, this sometimes includes husbands as well, because all
statistics show that sick women get abandoned way more often than sick men even
if that statistic does not speak for all men). We live in a world where we let nurses
and mothers save our lives but take our feminism from actresses. The truth is
that if superstar actresses stopped making blockbusters, we’d still be getting
our entertainment from more humble sources. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, if all nurses went on strike, we’d be
in big trouble. Fortunately, we’ve insured against that possibility by making paying
nurses (and other such service positions) so underpaid that they could never go
on strike for too long without going into panic about how to make ends meet. After
all, only very rich (both financially and socially) women get to go on “hiatus”
and then make a “comeback.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My attempt here is not to bash any woman, including celebrities.
What I am trying to say is that celebrity women are often in a position where
the only disadvantage they need to worry about is the one that comes from being
a woman. Not only could ordinary women may have other disadvantages compounded
to that, but there being ordinary may not be a result of a lack of work ethic,
hard work, financial management, or emotional dependence. In fact, this is true
for both men and women. We live in a top down system where no matter how much
we try not everybody can be “rich,” so lets not conflate being rich with
ideologies like feminism and general morality. <o:p></o:p></p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-43153057485144698922021-02-28T06:37:00.001+05:302022-03-11T21:53:58.008+05:30My Best Argument Against Cultural Appropriation<p> What is cultural appropriation? Unfortunately, I don't believe most people can answer this question with much confidence. For starters, in today's globalized world, it is more difficult to draw lines between cultures and therefore more difficult to separate mixing from appropriation. Secondly, most of us (myself included) mostly know about cultural appropriation through our knowledge of controversies related to it on social media. While social media is great at introducing us to new topics, it is not always good at letting us delve deep into them. In short, it is better at "breadth" than "depth," and therefore increases our exposure while limiting our understanding. </p><p>I can't say I am an expert on cultural appropriation. However, in recent years, I have had an experience that has given me a personalized perspective on it. Today, I would like to share it with you. In order to do that, first take a look at the following images:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKUhB53-MQg01kYwKELoHyB6QIzm2L7u_A5pHbOn5zcT_za2w7U-zXTdCCG3mrFWvpLc1sYKX-89mL4nT0KWTyBNZu4M4Eu_67GhMydJ5ogcWOqnRDKlfZEoyyiqEssoGTFm8LHp9_kJk/s3648/DSC07089.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3648" data-original-width="2736" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKUhB53-MQg01kYwKELoHyB6QIzm2L7u_A5pHbOn5zcT_za2w7U-zXTdCCG3mrFWvpLc1sYKX-89mL4nT0KWTyBNZu4M4Eu_67GhMydJ5ogcWOqnRDKlfZEoyyiqEssoGTFm8LHp9_kJk/w480-h640/DSC07089.JPG" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUZnv6UudgP9n975Xxnf_TR3zAH0n86P9Uf8RJIWupxjOl90RGbsdyCy_E-ydCvs4_2HSIlqzyHw0G9xvbpE5hMY5i7_n8wlmpx1K9FanAKYGJ_CGhsbtKc79-CAts8kwbrPDo3H0qiv4/s5152/DSC06874.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3864" data-original-width="5152" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUZnv6UudgP9n975Xxnf_TR3zAH0n86P9Uf8RJIWupxjOl90RGbsdyCy_E-ydCvs4_2HSIlqzyHw0G9xvbpE5hMY5i7_n8wlmpx1K9FanAKYGJ_CGhsbtKc79-CAts8kwbrPDo3H0qiv4/w640-h480/DSC06874.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>If you're Indian, especially if you're Hindu. there is probably nothing that jumps out to you in these pictures. Nothing jumped out to me at least. These are the homes of working-class people living in very small homes in Mumbai. Most of these people, regardless of what one might think, are actually very open and accepting of other kinds of people. During my site visits, it was very common for me to see Hindus, Muslims, and Christians living together harmoniously as neighbors in the same chawl, slum, fishing village or gaothan. I don't know my research subjects personally, but I'd hesitate to suspect them of any bigotry.</p><p>When I presented these images to faculty members, I was taken aback by their dumstruck reaction. As it happened, some of them were Jewish. In case you are Indian, you probably did not notice the swastikas in these images. My Jewish professors did. They had to stop me in the middle of my presentation to question me on the significance of the symbol, and I was forced to explain how this swastika is different from that used by Nazis. </p><p>I have presented these images many times now. I have always had the option of blurring out the swastikas in the images for the sake of cultural sensitivity. However, I haven't done that because I feel this is a good opportunity for me to both reflect on and talk about cultural appropriation. </p><p>The swastika was originally a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. There was no malice associated with the symbol. Neither was it a divisive symbol, its connotations linked more to the spiritual aspect of religion than to the group identity that religion creates. Today, however, most people in the Western world link the symbol with the Holocaust. The Western world undoubtedly has a cultural dominance internationally (think international media), and therefore, many other cultures also associate the swastika with the Holocaust. Recently, I came across a post made by a friend on social media. This friend is a Jewish high-school student in State College, Pennsylvania. She wrote in response to piece of Jewelry by Shein with a swastika locket: "After the suffering that was experienced by millions, the swastika can never again be a symbol of peace and spirituality."</p><p>My question is: Why?</p><p>I don't think India is perfect. As we can clearly see in the current political climate, there is a great deal of religious and communal divides present there. However, India is thought to be the only country with no history of persecuting Jews (some Jewish friends of mine have contested that Japan holds this title as well). Isn't it ironic then that the country which has never persecuted Jews is also the country which uses the <i>swastika </i>symbol everywhere? And I mean, everywhere. I actually did not realize how widespread this symbol was until my Jewish professors pointed it out to me because it was literally in every one of my fieldwork images! As an Indian and a Hindu, I have normalized it to that extent! Isn't it also ironic that the people who would suffer the most if the <i>swastika </i>was to be culturally banned would be the people who never persecuted Jews? As an additional tidbit, I'd also like to mention that a significant percentage of people who perished in the Holocaust were Romas, a fact that is forgotten due to the focus being mainly on Jews. Romas have descended from Northern India, and their cultural practices can be traced back to the same cultural practices that gave rise to the <i>swastika </i>symbol! The irony!</p><p>We can keep arguing back and forth about the <i>swastika </i>and what it means, but the point I'm trying to make here is about how cultural appropriation can affect the perception of groups other than its own. In the case of the <i>swastika</i>, a group that considered itself to be superior adopted a symbol it didn't have much to do with and gave it a new, sinister meaning. The symbolism of the <i>swastika </i>was corrupted not by the actions of the people who originated it, but by those who adopted it with complete entitlement based on its own belief of superiority. Since European history tends to take centre stage in our educations, once again due to the dominance of certain groups, there are many people who will never know the true meaning of the <i>swastika. </i>They might also presume negatively about the originators of the symbol, a perception that would be completely unfair.</p><p>This is the risk of cultural appropriation. When cultures are <i>appreciated</i>, they retain their original meanings. When they are <i>appropriated, </i>their meanings are lost and at risk of corruption. I hope my personal experience has helped you get some insight into the cultural appropriation issue, or at least more than whatever you thought after reading about the latest controversy about some popstar's headgear in a music video.</p><p>(As a silver lining to this article, I just want to mention that after my presentations are over my Jewish professor's and I usually have a good laugh about this issue. We are friendly with each other, and appreciative of the relationships between our cultures. My Jewish professors have also been very welcoming of some of my rather controversial ideas, and mostly encouraged my intellectual curiosity. I, too, have developed a respect for Jewish culture and ideology, and look forward to a trip to Israel in the future. Perhaps some relationships cannot be destroyed by the misuse of cultural symbols and artefacts, or at least that is my hope.)</p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-84464379671617447682021-02-17T01:45:00.003+05:302022-03-11T21:54:06.342+05:30The J.K. Rowling Controversy, and What We Can Learn From It<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yesterday,
my friend and I had a heated discussion about the J.K. Rowling transgender
controversy. I must admit that at the time, I did not fully know of the
controversy. I am not a big Harry Potter fan, and J.K. Rowling’s tweets are not
on my feed. So, I had to look up a recap of what happened in order to take a
clear stand on the matter. Obviously, as a nobody, my stand on this particular
issues is of no consequence. However, I would still like to take this use this
as an opportunity to intellectually explore concepts of progressivism, social
media activism, and political correctness. Disagreements are welcome, but not
disrespectfully.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">To start with, J.K. Rowling posted an opinion piece
by </span><span style="background: white; color: #999999; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3649766890070547627/8446437967161744768"><span style="color: #336699;">Marni Sommer</span></a></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3649766890070547627/8446437967161744768"><span style="color: #336699;">Virginia Kamowa</span></a>, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3649766890070547627/8446437967161744768"><span style="color: #336699;">Therese Mahon</span></a> (all three women, by the
way) titled, “</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people
who menstruate.” The article further goes on to address the challenges faced by
people living in overcrowding and poverty in the Covid era, whose needs are not
being met due to circumstances. The article clearly specifies what it means be
“people who menstruate”—girls, women, and non-binary (specifically trans-women).
It is a harmless enough article written so people won’t forget that
menstruation makes life harder sometimes but that can be easily overlooked
because of how common that difficulty it is; situations like Covid further
exacerbate these difficulties, so perhaps now is not the time to overlook them
as a “part of life.”</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">In response to this article, J.K. Rowling wrote: “</span><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">People
who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone
help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” Later on, after she was accused of
‘transphobia,’ Rowling backtracked by saying she did not want the specific
challenges of women to be forgotten in the face of having to include non-binary
folks. The controversy that continued is not of my interest, because it took on
a life of itself beyond what Rowling initially did. For today, I will only
focus on Rowling’s initial tweet. There are two issues with her response:</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">1. It is clear Rowling
did not actually read the article because of how fixated she is only on the title.</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">2. It is again clear that
she did not actually read the article because the writers have clearly
mentioned who they mean by “people who menstruate.” Rowling’s sarcastic
reminder of a word for such people is simply ignorant, not to mention
insulting.</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">If
I had written the article (and I say this as a social scientist), I would be
particularly offended for the following reasons:</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">1. The article is written
by people who are clearly feminists, and who do more than just tweet about
issues. And yet, J.K. Rowling assumes that she has a right to educate them on
‘feminism.’ I must also mention that these are WOMEN of COLOR, a section of
society that Rowling claims to be very supportive of, and yet she did not think
twice before invalidating their whole article with a sarcastic tweet. Here, the
sarcasm is relevant, even though some may claim it is not. If Rowling had
engaged with the article in a respectful way by questioning in plain language
why we are so afraid to say “women” these days, there would be a case to be made.
However, she insulted the authors with a joke about how they don’t even know
the word “women,” and adopted the same tone that progressives use to debunk the
ideas of Trump supporters. (I mean, if this is not progressives eating their
own group, I don’t know what is.)</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">2. There is a clear power
differential in this situation. The well-intentioned article is written by
women who clearly have less power, influence, and money than Rowling does.
Rowling is also probably a better writer (I’ve been published; writers are
nothing if not great manipulators of words, and I say that about myself, too).
Rowling’s tweet was, I assume, read by millions more people than the article
was. In case of a situation like this, there is very little the authors can do
in response. Sure, they can defend themselves on social media, but Rowling’s
defenses will still be read by many more people, not to mention vehemently
supported by her ‘fans.’ In case you don’t know, social scientist and
journalists, who touch upon social issues much before celebrities do, don’t
have fans to defend us. Do we have to live in fear that celebrities with a) no
background in journalism or social sciences, and b) much more social power than
us, can always invalidate our written work with their less-than-120-character-tweets.
I respect Rowling and her talent, but she needs to respect other experts in
their fields and not use her fame against them, especially by typing out
belittling sarcastic tones.</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">I
also feel that the whole controversy was not about feminism versus trans-rights
at all. I think it was about a rich, famous, influential woman inappropriately
responding to an article written by learned individuals who, in all
probability, knew what they were talking about. The article will, now, forever
be mostly remembered mostly in relation to the Rowling controversy. Its real
content—about making menstrual care available to the less fortunate—has been
completely lost in controversy it in no shape or form called upon itself (as
Rowling would have known had she even bothered to read the article; I mean it’s
not just women who get periods but also ‘girls’).</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Also,
Rowling supporters have called out the social media social-justice warriors who
came after her for invalidating all the good Rowling has done for
progressive causes due to a single tweet. Here is my response to that—did
Rowling does not invalidate all the good three women have done for progressive
causes with a single tweet? Did those women deserve it more simply because they
did not have the talent to write Harry Potter? I am guessing the answer is
‘no.’ For this, I go back to my personal motto, that in life it is very difficult to be "right," but must still strive to be "fair." I don't know who was right, Rowling or those who created the backlash, but I do think Rowling was a little unfair in her engagement with the authors and her subsequent reaction to the criticisms directed towards her, and to me, that is something even if the whole episode will be forgotten the minute the next controversy comes along. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Another point my friend made was that such backlash scares celebrities away from their fans. They are not able to engage with the public as freely as they did before. First of all, celebrities these days already get way too much of a platform to interact with their fans. I mean, they could literally be sitting on their kitchen counter eating breakfast and be interacting with millions of people, not to mention the media. Secondly, as a social scientist in training, I desperately want to introduce more people to the causes I care about and to my ongoing research work. It is my dream to be able to educate people further and to expose them to my "opinions" which, at least in my specific field, could be a lot more constructive than the opinions of an average person who does not as much about the field as I do. I am sure the authors of the article in question had similar motivations. Do you not think that people like me are not scared that we will write and publish something, and some celebrity will just start a controversy around it? Is that fear of people like me less valid, especially since a) we get such few opportunities to interact with the public anyway, and b) we don't have the resources to face up to a controversy (I mean, my response letter will hardly be published by the Guardian and New York Times even if get two PhDs and serve as a dedicated public servant for two decades)?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-outline-level: 1;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Finally,
I would like to touch upon celebrity involvement in social issues. I agree that
celebrities have the right to an opinion in the same way everybody else does.
It is also our tendency to fully rally behind celebrities who rally for our
causes, and express disappointment in celebrities that we think should but
don’t. However, the issue is that even though celebrities have more wealth and
power than us, they are not always necessarily more qualified to speak on a
subject than an average individual. Therefore, we must respect it when
celebrities choose not to speak up on something, we want them to speak on: that
may not be a symptom of apathy but an acknowledgment of having the little
qualification to speak on a matter. Rowling (or any female celebrity) is not
necessarily an expert on all women’s issues. Shah Rukh Khan is not necessarily
an expert on all Muslim issues. Kaitlyn Jenner is not necessarily an expert on
all trans-issues. Think about it this way—we all have so many facets to
ourselves, and how many of those facets are we fully capable of educating other
people on? Forcing celebrities to “speak up” when they don’t want to can create
more problems than override the benefits of using their platform, and if we
want to be smart about the causes we want to progress, we must let certain
things go.</span><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p><p></p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-9781664318522573092021-01-03T11:32:00.006+05:302021-01-03T11:32:35.815+05:30Princess Diana versus Michael Fagan<p> <span style="color: var(--primary-text); font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seems 'The Crown' has created a renewed interest in the life (and death) of Princess Diana, most of which is relevant due to her ill-fated marriage to Prince Charles. People just cannot stop talking about the unfairness of the treatment she received in the Palace, how inconceivable it is that someone could choose a woman like Camilla Parker Bowles over her (I mean, of course nobody understands why a man would love an older, educated woman over a teenager), how the royal family killed her warm heart with its coldness, how she never deserved her fate, and on and on it goes.</span></p><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="" dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="ecm0bbzt hv4rvrfc e5nlhep0 dati1w0a" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id="jsc_c_6l" style="font-family: inherit; padding: 4px 16px;"><div class="j83agx80 cbu4d94t ew0dbk1b irj2b8pg" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: -5px; margin-top: -5px;"><div class="qzhwtbm6 knvmm38d" style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql rrkovp55 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto" style="color: var(--primary-text); display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.3333; max-width: 100%; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-break: break-word;"><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, 'The Crown' also has a compelling episode about Michael Fagan, a man who broke into the Queen's chambers in the Buckingham palace in 1982. Margaret Thatcher's economic and foreign policies had reduced public spending to such an extent that unemployment levels rose to unprecedent levels, and Michael Fagan, a painter-decorator, was caught in the crosshairs of decisions he'd never made. "People don't have money to buy or build homes that I could then paint," says the working-class professional to a local government representative. He is unable to be a provider, which affects his mental health, and as a consequence he loses his wife and children who, to be fair, were in a difficult situation as well and were merely trying to make ends meet. Over and over, he is told that he has 'mental problems.' He doesn't, he insists, he's just poor. Given the way he says it, and the lengths to which he goes to make his voice heard upon knowing that Queen Elizabeth would be the only one higher up than the Prime Minister who could hear him, you know that he's right. You know that Michael Fagan would have been a completely different person if he only had--and I put this bluntly--lots of money. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">But the person people care about is Diana. Because Diana was a celebrity, beautiful and rich and capable of garnering praise for things that many ordinary people did on a daily basis. Diana existed a long time ago, before we were singing songs for healthcare workers and calling out celebrities for singing 'Imagine' at the worst time imaginable. At the time, a woman like her 'deigned' to be good and upstanding; it was an unnecessary choice she was making, particularly unnecessary given her youth and beauty, and so, she was sparked love and worship in the hearts of many. Her marriage, her divorce, the issues in her personal life, the unfairness she was dealt with--people will continue to speak of these for decades to come.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">But what about people like Michael Fagan? Normal people whose marriages broke down despite their best efforts? People who had to live under rules laid down by others and suffered as a consequence? People like you and me who remain burdened by everyday life, most of which is a collection of factors we did not ask for? Why is it nobody sees the tragedy in the personal life of Michael Fagan? People go on and on about how Princess Diana couldn't bear to be separated from her precious prince for two weeks, but what about the millions of parents that get separated from their children every day due to brutal economics? On 'The Crown,' Princess Diana cries and wails over not being able to leave her child with a nanny for two weeks to fulfill her royal duties, the same duties that elevate her and her children from being above average looking regular human beings to 'important people,' and people go gaga over how good of a mother she is. Meanwhile, women from impoverished countries or backgrounds have to leave their children just to feed them, and we accept it as 'just life' Some of them don't even get to witness their children grow up because they are busy making sure their children do, in fact, grow up. (And don't get me started with the 'if they are poor they should not have children.' As Indians, many of our forefathers, including our grandparents, were dirt poor, and we are not. Things change, and it is often worth investing in the future). </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">I think our response to the two characters on 'The Crown' reveals a fundamental flaw in human beings. For us, there will always be 'important' people and 'unimportant' people. 'Important' people will be rewarded for airing out their private lives in public. "Look how vulnerable they are being!" people will say, or "Look how she is creating awareness about (insert problem)!" Regular people will never get that privilege. People have been talking about Diana for decades, whereas people lose patience with their friends if they talk about the dissolution of their relationships for more than two weeks. I mean, it would be different if people did not give importance to celebrities either, but clearly, that's not the case. Maybe this is why we have created this love-hate relationship with social media. For all its downsides, it is a strange place where we get to act like 'important' people, to tell our 'stories,' to act as if our chosen causes should matter, to create a persona that seems more important than our averageness that captures the attention of only a few people. It's difficult to say. For now, I guess I will have to accept that most of us are 'unimportant' people and live our lives accordingly.</div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="stjgntxs ni8dbmo4 l82x9zwi uo3d90p7 h905i5nu monazrh9" data-visualcompletion="ignore-dynamic" style="border-radius: 0px 0px 8px 8px; font-family: inherit; overflow: hidden;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="l9j0dhe7" style="font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><div class="bp9cbjyn m9osqain j83agx80 jq4qci2q bkfpd7mw a3bd9o3v kvgmc6g5 wkznzc2l oygrvhab dhix69tm jktsbyx5 rz4wbd8a osnr6wyh a8nywdso s1tcr66n" style="align-items: center; border-bottom: 1px solid var(--divider); color: var(--secondary-text); display: flex; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9375rem; justify-content: flex-end; line-height: 1.3333; margin: 0px 16px; padding: 10px 0px;"><div class="bp9cbjyn j83agx80 buofh1pr ni8dbmo4 stjgntxs" style="align-items: center; 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cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-height: 1.3333em; outline: none; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: inherit; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: none;" tabindex="0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="bzsjyuwj ni8dbmo4 stjgntxs ltmttdrg gjzvkazv" style="float: left; font-family: inherit; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; width: 100px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="gpro0wi8 pcp91wgn" style="font-family: inherit; padding-left: 6px;">3</span></span></span><span class="gpro0wi8 cwj9ozl2 bzsjyuwj ja2t1vim" style="background-color: var(--card-background); float: left; font-family: inherit; margin-left: -100px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="pcp91wgn" style="font-family: inherit; padding-left: 6px;">Umme Hani, Sudeshna Kumar and 1 other</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="pcp91wgn" style="font-family: inherit; padding-left: 6px;"><br /></span></span></div></div></span></div></div><div class="kb5gq1qc pfnyh3mw c0wkt4kp" style="background-color: white; color: #65676b; flex-grow: 0; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; width: 7px;"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-40741906590221210182020-11-07T00:09:00.001+05:302022-03-11T21:54:28.960+05:30The Real Tragedies of Bong Joon-Ho<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNTlXDXjGjQrGsC3wkFOouboI4EPuZJ6TBxOe4ip694MNpu2oUrDa8IpGZdTvdT4hGbvM7IVqdbPmMN5TtStki1Tvp3la-glIB1ZvZpuuifm-FIa-49Dn-pj0EPTBgymXzXQpNIJS40I/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1124" data-original-width="1999" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNTlXDXjGjQrGsC3wkFOouboI4EPuZJ6TBxOe4ip694MNpu2oUrDa8IpGZdTvdT4hGbvM7IVqdbPmMN5TtStki1Tvp3la-glIB1ZvZpuuifm-FIa-49Dn-pj0EPTBgymXzXQpNIJS40I/w640-h360/image.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />Bong Joon Ho's films don't start out as masterpieces. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the greatest trick his genius ever pulled was to convince us at the beginning of every film that it does not exist. The first act is often slow and descriptive, and the confronting revelations of the last act safely at a distance. However, something happens between the beginning and the end--and it would be hard to put a finger on the specifics of this phenomenon because that is how subtle Bong Joon Ho can be--that leaves you not only at the edge of your seat by the time the curtains roll but teetering at the edge of your perception of the world. You suddenly realize that the story you were just told followed the conventions of storytelling--I mean, Bong Joon Ho doesn't necessarily play around with the conventional storytelling format of introduction, inciting incident, rising action, climax and falling action--and therefore had a clear beginning, middle, and end, but you're somehow not done with the story. There is still much to think and talk about, because the story's relevance goes beyond its own universe.<p></p><p>Part of this magic is owed to the fact that Bong Joon Ho consistently reveals tragedy by the end of his films, and although at first glance the tragedy seems confined to the lives of the characters, our hearts know the tragedy is in fact universal. Bong Joon Ho may even try to give you a happy ending, but the fakeness of the happiness, the shadow of truths that we know remain unsaid, keep bothering you hours after the film ends. It is almost as if Bong Joon Ho is baiting you to call him a liar by presenting to you the same 'truths' that keep us safely in our boxes, and in calling him a liar we are forced to confront our own comfort in the way we think the world works.</p><p>The best-known example of this is probably <i>Parasite. </i>In the end, we are a universe away from the humor of the first half. We can no longer remember the simultaneously naive and clever families on opposite sides of the economic and class divide. We can't fathom that the story began with a young man telling his friend to tutor a girl he likes in his absence because he can't trust his rich friends to not steal his crush (a notable cameo by Park Seo-Joon, arguably the most charming actor of K-drama land). The final scene has the protagonist sitting in his dingy sub-basement home, wowing to rescue his father from the modernistic mansion he is now trapped in by buying it for himself one day. The scene is reminiscent of the final scene of a superhero's origin story movie. However, this is no origin story; this is a story that tells you that people rarely more than what their origins predetermine for them. Watching the young man fantasizing about buying what is sure to be a multimillion dollar house, you so want his dreams to come true. You want to cheer to cheer for him as though this is the beginning of the film and the best is yet to come. But the wall between the film and the audience has already fallen away, and we are forced to confront how in the real world, no amount of hard work or luck will help the protagonist reach his goal. The fact that we know this without being explicitly told confront us to the fact that in reality, we too are aware of the unfairness of the world, maybe even complicit in it, and are only trying to create a narrative of fairness so the hopelessness doesn't kill us. The real tragedy, as it turns out, is not the violence and bloodshed from a few scenes ago; it is the very nature of the world we live in.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7tkArsJWdWfeR_1GsRS8eLmWO52dkaZmq3H4Eq_S_QWDG91HdQjC9gPDicezJ17ygoW8Z2GGthZzd7Jj2PHljcMV70cAfxfimfuDjeSYFNzIIuZLjD69h02-AY8jgYU2W_GXODZ0vgAY/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="630" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7tkArsJWdWfeR_1GsRS8eLmWO52dkaZmq3H4Eq_S_QWDG91HdQjC9gPDicezJ17ygoW8Z2GGthZzd7Jj2PHljcMV70cAfxfimfuDjeSYFNzIIuZLjD69h02-AY8jgYU2W_GXODZ0vgAY/w336-h640/image.png" width="336" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>In Okja, Bong Joon Ho takes a different approach. Our protagonist, a little girl from the mountains, is able to rescue her beloved pet pig from the evil meat company, but as you watch her walking out of the meat factory, you are simultaneously confronted with thousands of other pigs who will go on to meet a deadly fate because they were nobody's fate. The screen is split in half. In one half, there is reunion and homecoming. In the other, there is cruel slaughter. In the final scene, we are back in the idyllic mountains, watching the cute antics of Okja and her human friends, but Okja's scars from the meat factory are still on display, reminding her she survived when others did not, all for the sake of greed and gluttony. The real tragedy isn't Okja's individual trauma; it is the piece of pork on our plates consumed barely hours before we watched the film.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2xar2_W34419rlcNdMkVA0HzyeVNfRS9BL2DQufVRcmCjWHKfSbmK2BNTb6zZiQfxQrFXJlTDoZG9MIqOMeDSshyphenhyphenm_wpgZauot5VKH_Jv2DqrBVopK9frqaym3PI5y06OMHRB_MPhYrE/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="220" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2xar2_W34419rlcNdMkVA0HzyeVNfRS9BL2DQufVRcmCjWHKfSbmK2BNTb6zZiQfxQrFXJlTDoZG9MIqOMeDSshyphenhyphenm_wpgZauot5VKH_Jv2DqrBVopK9frqaym3PI5y06OMHRB_MPhYrE/w432-h640/image.png" width="432" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>The last Bong Joon-Ho film I saw was <i>Memories of a Murder</i>. It is about a series of rape-murders that took place in rural Korea before such settings even understood the word 'serial killer.' In this case, the ending is that there is no ending. The crimes remain unsolved. Life goes on. In the grand scheme of things, the rapes and murders don't matter, and in the final shot, when the protagonist stares directly into the camera, you know that he is looking for the culprit in the audience. Since the culprit was noone, it can be anyone, even the person sitting right next to you in the theatre. The film mocks both the idea of the incompetent cop and the Sherlockian detective. The real tragedy is not the crimes we witnessed on screen; it is the fact that good doesn't always triumph over evil simply because human beings have their limitations.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj76YhCqm15h3EyuoD_MaFDM-8oMRvT8t2fEQCcBM6rdIQHXdf0F58j3t2RHo80N1ln30Qx126A8bpMB7nIwzHSAl1l39RMgh-2b3k3z9nduY3e5KJniPzquGt0xFmSAjcyXlm7jWwWc2E/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="305" data-original-width="206" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj76YhCqm15h3EyuoD_MaFDM-8oMRvT8t2fEQCcBM6rdIQHXdf0F58j3t2RHo80N1ln30Qx126A8bpMB7nIwzHSAl1l39RMgh-2b3k3z9nduY3e5KJniPzquGt0xFmSAjcyXlm7jWwWc2E/w432-h640/image.png" width="432" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>It is this ability to see and depict the real tragedies of the human condition that make Bong Joon-Ho the director he is. He is the sort of storyteller who doesn't have to resort to out-of-the-box gimmicks and time- or space-bending narratives to pull one into a rabbit hole of thought. Who knows what a mind like his will confront us with next? I, for one, am both scared and excited to find out.</p><p><br /></p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-33897154689114867052020-11-04T22:41:00.000+05:302022-03-11T21:54:40.173+05:30The Bright SIdes of Work From Home<p> It's been 10 months since the pandemic began, and by now, work-from-home using virtual tools has become an indefinite reality. It can be depressing at times, being confined to the same four walls of our homes for days on end, having to deal with family all day, the constant needs of children, and the elderly overlapping with the constant needs of the boss. It's no surprise that many of us want this to be over already and go back to the drab workplaces we once loved to hate. However, since the pandemic doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon, perhaps it could be good to take this as an opportunity to assess the upsides of work-from-home. Mind you, in this post, I am only talking about work from home as it pertains to adults over the age of 25. Why only adults? To know the answer, ask any parent who currently has to deal with children with online classes. Why above the age of 25? Because that is the age at which most people's prefrontal cortex is done developing (in other words, they have reached neurological maturity according to the most basic science out there), which means the socializing effects of meeting friends and coworkers in workspaces has a lesser developmental impact. I will first talk about what I think are the upsides and then talk about the potential drawbacks of those upsides, so please bear with me till the end.</p><p>First of all, not everybody hates WFH. Because the pandemic is a negative experience in general, I feel as though we are lumping all changes that have come in response to it in the same negative mindscape. On social media, people keep complaining that they want to go back to work already but in private, many people are saying that the WFH system is saving them a lot of time and energy. People are not restricted by strict dress codes and don't have to conform to 'workplace' behavior outside of Zoom calls. The feeling of being in a panopticon, where one's boss can always monitor your every move, has subsided. Work can still be monitored but not the actions and mannerisms of people that have less to do with work and more to do with 'workspace culture.' Besides, in many places where space is at a premium, such as Mumbai, WFH was a growing trend even before the pandemic for cost-cutting purposes. If we remove WFH's association with the overall traumatic experience of the pandemic, we might learn to embrace it more and therefore help reduce some of our pandemic trauma in the process as well. We must remember that many positive changes in history have come as a result of adaptation to less-than-ideal circumstances, and if that is what is happening right now, we must learn to recognize it.</p><p>Secondly, WFH can help with people's physical health. Long commutes, exposure to air and noise pollution, overcrowded transportation, the threat of accidents--all of these have negative impacts on health and well-being that we have learned to accept as a side-effect of modern life. Some of us may not have to accept it anymore. Also, it must be noted that COVID is not the first contagious disease in the world. Traveling in overly crowded modes of transportation, a reality in many developing countries, put people at risk of contracting many other diseases such as the flu, tuberculosis, conjunctivitis, and so on, and not traveling (or at least not being forced to travel every single day) can help ease the burden on already overburdened health and transport infrastructure.</p><p>Work from home can have large-scale environmental impacts. Remember when Arvind Kejriwal said that in order to reduce pollution in New Delhi, he'd enforce restrictions on driving? Maybe the answer was not to drive at all. After all, if WFH is adopted to its fullest extent, the dreadful office hour traffic and all the smoke, soot, and smog that goes with it can be eased. Also, this is not just a developing country issue. In cities like Los Angeles, commuting by car for three hours a day is a reality. Think of all those cars just sitting there on superhighways, guzzling gas, and exhaling carbon. All this to get to jobs that, as the pandemic has shown us, could be done at home! Do we all really need to be buying $100,000 Teslas if a part of the environmental problem could be solved by, well, fewer cars on the road? I also think that the reason that solutions like limiting driving privileges are suggested in cities like New Delhi is that it is much easier to regulate the behavior of employees, who have less power, than to regulate the requirements enforced by employers, many of whom are very rich and powerful and want to regulate the behavior of their employees using the confines of the workspace to reinforce that power. These issues of spatial politics are rarely brought up in public discourse, but since we all have a chance now, maybe we should reflect upon them.</p><p>Now let's come to the potential downsides of the upsides we have talked about. To start with, I agree that WFH is not for everybody and by no means want to advocate for it in a way that neglects the needs of people who need to be physically present at their workspaces in order to do their jobs. Not too long ago, I had such a job, so be assured that I don't mean that WFH needs to become the new universal.</p><p>Then there is the issue of disturbance and distraction that is bound to happen if one is working from home, especially if they are living in crowded intergenerational homes. However, I would point out that maybe if we expand our idea of WFH a bit then we can manage this downside. For example, WFH does not necessarily have to be within your actual home. Housing needs to accommodate for WFH as another need of its occupants. Lobbies and common rooms need to be used more efficiently to double as workspaces. Even within our homes, WFH plans can be made to avoid disturbance and distraction. With a little bit of planning, which would be possible if WFH was a choice instead of an emergency step taken in reaction to a pandemic, perhaps the home can become a multipurpose space better. I know a lot of people reading this right now are probably shaking their heads, but in my humble opinion, that may be due to our own lack of imagination regarding our work as we are used to work systems being imposed on us and then complaining about them rather than designing the system ourselves, and that is not completely our fault. </p><p>WFH also brings to light the digital divide. Not everyone has the access to the same digital resources, and that can effect workplace performance. However, the digital divide may be an easier divide to conquer than, say, the transportation divides or the prevalent pay gaps. The time people spend commuting to work is essentially unpaid labor, and different people put in different amounts of it, which means that there was a divide there that we were not talking about because we took it for granted. One can suggest that companies should bear the cost of transport, but in reality, it is impossible to truly bear the cost of being crushed between two strangers for two hours a day on a train or sitting in your car and straining your back (and your brain) because your lane of traffic just won't move. If companies had any intention of bearing such hidden costs, they would be doing so already, but they aren't. Wouldn't it be easier to demand that companies take responsibility to help their employees with the digital gap than with every other gap in the world? Isn't the digital world, in some ways, just more equitable that way? I mean, the difference in my boss' car (transport) and home office (workplace) may be insurmountable huge, but the beauty of the digital world is that it is not bound by the hierarchal structures of money, space, and time in the same way. I think it would be reasonable to expect companies to take responsibility for the digital accesses of their employees, especially given their wealth and power. Also, perhaps we should take this as an opportunity to refamiliarize ourselves with community-level resources such as community rooms in co-operative housings and public libraries, which are institutions that have all been forgotten due to the demands placed by workplaces. Investing in those facilities can have larger positive impacts as they serve purposes beyond the profits of the company, and are in that way, more socially efficient.</p><p>Lastly, there is the issue of domestic and child abuse getting aggravated if everyone was WFH. Sadly, I don't have a solution for this. However, people shouldn't have to go to work to escape abuse. If that is the world we are living in, then we need to reevaluate it asap, WFH or no WFH.</p><p>Clearly, WFH is not for everybody. It has its upsides and downsides, and I wouldn't want to come across as overly optimistic about it. However, it could be worth assessing the ways it can help us now that we have no choice but to participate in it. There could be something positive to come out of these very unfortunate times, and we wouldn't want to miss out on it simply because we refused to look at the bright side.</p>Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-68348336771213780912020-06-29T04:00:00.004+05:302022-03-11T21:55:27.865+05:30The Possible Outcomes of Sharing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Click to read my short story, <a href="https://roadrunner.lasierra.edu/the-possible-outcomes-of-sharing/" target="_blank">The Possible Outcomes of Sharing</a>, published in The Roadrunner Review. It is almost a love story set over a monsoon in Mumbai. </div>
Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-68205951500551221152020-06-29T03:57:00.001+05:302022-03-11T21:55:35.122+05:30Fish Ghostess<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Click to read my short story, <a href="https://queenmobs.com/2020/06/fiction-fish-ghostess/" target="_blank">Fish Ghostess</a>, on Queen Mobs' Teahouse. It's based on Bengali folklore and set amidst the current pandemic and natural disaster.</div>
Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-22200154746672692212020-02-27T07:53:00.002+05:302022-03-11T21:55:45.858+05:30THE NATURE OF REALITY IN THE REAL WORLD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
What is reality?<br />
<br />
Depends on who you ask. Scientists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, linguists, Elon Musks...they all have their own answers. Unfortunately, I do not have the mental capabilities to be any of those things. All I have is limited life experience, so take my words with a grain of salt, but I have formulated the beginnings of an answer to this very enigmatic existential question. So, here we go...<br />
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Question: What is reality?<br />
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Answer: It is the weighted average of what everybody wants.<br />
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Disappointed? I was too. I was hoping to find something more *ahem* Musk-ish, what with the allure of us living in a simulation and all. But unfortunately, in my current state, I have come to no such exciting conclusion, but can offer an explanation to the one I have derived.<br />
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So what do I mean when I say reality is the weighted average of what everybody wants? For starters, I'd like to clarify that I only meant to seek the nature of reality as it applies to most of us mere mortals in our everyday lives. I looked at reality not as objective conceptual truth but as an experience. What struck me with this method of approach was how universal it was in nature. You see, scientists, philosophers, linguists, Elon Musks all have their own answers but at the heart of all of those answers is the fact that they all think they are right, the others are wrong, and now, human beings in general should orient themselves based on that answer. Mind you, I understand that all of these great minds have very compelling arguments for their respective cases. But what is still universal is them thinking something and then somehow WANTING it.<br />
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We all want something, depending on where we are in life and what education we have received regarding what we should want. The problem is that no matter how inclusive and selfless we are, we are bad at this little thing called sacrifice, and thus we are locked in eternal battles between selfishness and selflessness, the individual and the community, personhood and family, yin and yang, the masculine and the feminine, and on and on it goes till we reach a weighted equilibrium. The reason I say it is 'weighted' is that your influence on the outcome is based on circumstance, power and privilege. One can conceptualize this as some sort of cosmic point system. Money, beauty, intelligence and high status will get you positive points, while poverty, disfiguration, disability and low status will take away some points. In a more intimate setting, things like family dynamics, age, and experience can be the parameters. This is actually not as hopeless as it sounds, because you can sway the equilibrium more to your side by being more in number than the contrasting side. And thus, when all is said and done, reality is, quite simply, the weighted average of what everybody wants.<br />
<br />
And those are the two cents of this amateur.</div>
Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-49949628897506607512020-02-23T05:52:00.000+05:302022-03-11T21:55:58.194+05:30THE REPRESENTATION LIE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The media cannot stop talking about representation. Yay, we have a Pacific Islander actress in the 75th Star Wars movie! Women in Scandinavia rule! We have a transgender politician and the world is just so inclusive these days! </div>
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Those statements are misleading of course. Representatives are often exceptions and their presence is not reflective of the general conditions of the group they are representing. A black president doesn't necessarily correlate with significant improvements in the lives of the black community or the death of racism. There is no guarantee that more women CEOs will empower ordinary women. Parasite (once again, great film) winning four Oscars doesn't mean we now live in a translingual world where people don't get frustrated with you if you don't speak the prevailing language. Bill Gates being a college dropout doesn't mean college is now useless and those who can't afford it have nothing to worry about because Bill freaking Gates! What 'representation' often does is create a hopeful yet false narrative of progress and inclusion that bears little relation to the real world, and give those in power more of a reason to dismiss the problems of the disadvantaged. Don't worry if you're held back by (insert social impediment) because look at that one in a million case we all read about in the papers and if they can do it you will too! It also leads to a culture of encouraging people to live vicariously through famous idols, building a false sense of pride in sharing superficial characteristics with them while their own lives stagnate.</div>
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However, none of these is the representation lie I am referring to today. What I am talking about is less sociocultural and more personal. It is something I have encountered frequently as a woman and I think it's time for people to stop countering me with this baseless lie. I have lost count of how many times people have told me that the reason there aren't as many female directors / scientists / engineers / any profession associated with men is because women are socialized to believe those professions are not for them owing to having fewer examples to look up to in those fields. To this I finally say--do you think women are freaking fools?</div>
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I don't know about you, but when I read the works of Carl Jung at night, I am not too bothered by the fact that he didn't have breasts, and his chromosomes don't deter me from harboring interests in environmental psychology. I don't discriminate between Einstein and Curie based on their gender, and don't find one more inspiring than the other. Many writers I read are male, and that doesn't hold me back from wanting to write myself. I don't turn the channel when Scorsese talks about the art of framing and jump to Katherine Bigelow because I know if anyone ever dreams of becoming an effective storyteller they need to shut up and listen when Scorsese talks. I wouldn't side with Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders just because, or come to the conclusion that Mayawati trumps Modi. The idea that just because I am a woman, I cannot draw inspiration from a man, is insulting and honestly based on very little fact. It is infantilizing fake feminism which, when examined deeply, reveals itself to have very little respect for the minds and agency of women. Women need to be <i>told </i>what they should aspire to in technicolor images and news captions starring people with curves, this feminism says. Otherwise, these poor women simply wouldn't know what to do! Now let's give that boss lady a Woman in Business Award because a trophy rewarding a subset of success will emancipate women.</div>
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Yeah, right.</div>
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While we're counting how many speaking roles women had in Hollywood last year and performing studies on why fewer women commit massive frauds than men, the common woman continues to be empowered by her own self and surroundings, and simultaneously held back by her body, a dwindling social support system in an increasingly individualistic world, and so-called fake feminists who only acknowledge the contributions of women in the world if they are contributions mostly associated with men. In fact, people often use examples of women who 'made it' to shame women who didn't, not taking into account personal circumstances and creating more unrealistic expectations for women than any men's magazine ever has before. Moreover, there is something very toxic about comparing men and women all the time, creating a strange competition with no winners. It's time to think about this because clearly we haven't thought this through.</div>
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In the end, I have only one thing to say. If you have a daughter, sister, relative, or female friend, maybe don't go around looking for a female picture she can emulate and worship. Instead, be her example. Be all the things you think she could be, and trust she's smart enough to learn from you and want to be you without having a gender in common. Because you know what? She probably is.</div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-36309794548094635052019-12-15T12:06:00.001+05:302022-03-11T21:56:07.353+05:30THE POOR CHOICES OF POOR PEOPLE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am financially comfortable and educated. The people around
me are financially comfortable and educated. Great! But sometimes its not so
great, when we start to make judgements about the choices made by less
fortunate people. I mean, we’ve read the books, consumed the newspaper and watched
the TED talk. Of course we know more about being poor than, well, poor people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recently, I was trying to figure out the psychology behind
those moments where I have at my disposal Netflix, Viki, and Youtube, and yet I
lazily just watch The Office for the millionth time. It took some digging on
Google scholar (yes, I have lots of free time and very few friends), and I
stumbled upon papers on decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is the phenomenon of
mental tiredness experienced where a decision needs to be made which causes
people to just not do anything at all. This kind of fatigue can be experienced
when one can’t really answer either/or questions at the end of a long day, browsing
through every channel to conclude there’s nothing to watch, or having a
frustrating and time-wasting online shopping session which ends with a ‘0’ in
the cart. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the papers mentioned something about how the number
of decisions made is impacted by what you have now and what you need. The more
comfortable you are in life, the more things feel like decisions as it is only
a decision when there is some weighing of options involved and the more comfortable
you have the more you can get something without a huge cost to something else.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now think about the times you or someone you know said one
of the following about the poor: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Why don’t they just send their child to school? It costs
nothing.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Did they really buy a TV? They don’t even have a toilet!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I don’t understand. Why don’t they just save that money for
their son instead of buying a TV?” (The TV thing seems to come up a lot.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The answer is this: because these are all either/or decisions
for the poor, and they already have to make a lot of them. They are the worst
affected by decision fatigue as every action is essentially an impactful choice
for them<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One example of a choice is one between using up money for
daily expenses or putting some away in some sort of insurance policy. If you
are not in abject poverty, there is really no decision to be made here. An
insurance policy isn’t something you <i>decide </i>to get, it’s something that
you figure you have to. But if you are poor, you figure I can do this but if I
do, something that I have right now, something that brings me a little bit or
joy or comfort in the harsh grind of my life, will have to go. A poor person’s
decision will come at the cost of either the present or the future, thereby
calling for a carefully executed DECISION, whereas if you are not that poor,
the cost to your present will be relatively insignificant to the added
advantages to your future, therefore requiring less of a decision a DECISION.
This is how poverty makes people give up. When the decision to buy or not buy a
bar of soap requires the mental gymnastics of calculating the weekly budget (or
lack thereof) while standing at the counter of the only local <i>kirana </i>store,
it’s understandable to disregard the nationwide campaign for handwashing and
just skip the soap this week in favor of feeding your child an extra chapatti.
Because it really is a choice between bathing and feeding, something that we do
not understand as we shrug off using soap as basic hygiene and crinkle our
noses at those who don’t.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now let’s look at those lines again:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Why don’t they just send their child to school? It costs
nothing.” To the poor it costs time that could be spent learning a trade, doing
housework, or otherwise making ends meet. An either/or decision.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Did they really buy a TV? They don’t even have a toilet!”
To the poor this is a choice between just a tiny amount of comfort after a very
long day at work or waiting many years and saving up the money for many TVs to maybe
(it is often not assured) get a toilet with faulty plumbing. An either/or
decision.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I don’t understand. Why don’t they just save that money for
their son instead of buying a TV?” (Dude, they can’t change their whole lives
with the cost of a TV anyways. Just let it go!)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Poverty is defined, first and foremost, by inflexibility.
This is why it can be the same in a rich country like the US and a poor country
like India. In the US, if you are poor (with a very likely overlap with some
sort of drug use, broken family, and colored skin), you could lose one job—just
one shitty job—for a reason as innocuous as oversleeping one day, and the next
thing you know you’re homeless and shooting up heroin because what else are you
going to do? I mean, I have overslept a couple of times and this would never
happen to me. I have made bigger mistakes but my education and status give me
safety net that a poor man from Harlem or the Ozarks simply doesn’t have, even
though I am originally from a poorer country. In India, all it takes is one
year of rains not showing up for a farmer to kill himself or a family to starve
to death. Isn’t it so strange? I mean, I have some food on my plate if it’s
flooded in Mumbai or swelteringly hot, and it’s difficult for me to imagine
that rains being two minutes late can cost someone their life. Really. That is
all it would take. The inflexibility of poverty is a state of
if-one-thing-goes-wrong-everything-falls-apart. It is a constant tightrope walk
over deep shark-infested waters. The inflexibility causes decisions to appear
in your life in a way that make you choose between two options that in your
context are equally costly, and also, <i>everything </i>becomes a decision
between having one thing or the other. Anybody would be fatigued after that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My intention here is not to say that our prescriptions to
the poor are wrong. What I am trying to say is that the psyche of the person
you are trying to help should be understood with greater compassion instead of
urging someone poor to do something and then getting frustrated when they don’t.
Because if you really want to help this is a decision fatigue you will have to
face: do you keep making the CHOICE of helping or do you see that people aren’t
listening to you and decide “Oh, they just want to stay this way!” If you’ve
ever done grassroots level work, you know what I’m talking about. Perhaps this
can help you understand the tiredness that causes your prescriptions to be met
with such resistance by the intended beneficiaries, explain why some people “just
don’t seem to listen,” and conceptualize the real psychological cost of buying
that damn bar of soap.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So next time you are on the verge of criticizing the
decisions of a poor family, know that making the obvious choice between enjoying
the money they have now for simple pleasures or getting some sort of insurance policy
is not an obvious choice for them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /></div>
Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-36941004777461178112019-12-03T23:45:00.002+05:302022-03-11T21:56:21.012+05:30The Toxicity of Social Media: How To Suffer and Come Out Looking Good<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You know how people post their foreign vacations and pre-wedding photoshoots on Facebook? We all do. At this point we are all familiar with the phrases 'insta-lie' and 'toxic positivity'. We know that a lot of the cheer isn't real. People only show their triumphs and not their challenges.<br />
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Well, I'm here to tell you that isn't the case.<br />
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It's not true that people don't show their suffering on social media. They do. However, the tales told on the platform often do not reveal the true ugliness of suffering. It is suffering in the Russian tragedy way--sadness draped in a romantic poeticism to the point where the world of the characters somehow draws you in.<br />
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There are three ways I have seen this phenomenon manifest.<br />
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1) One is a social media post where someone expresses their negative feelings but the way it is described feels sanitized and romantic. Think somber-looking Instagram photo with very long caption detailing what has caused the suffering in question and how it's now a burden they carry. These posts can get a lot of likes because they claim to be fighting a culture of toxic positivity because at least someone's not pretending to have a perfect life. However, after a while it can start to feel contrived in the same sense cinema can feel contrived. Think about the movies you've seen where there's a sad ending and that's why you might think at first glance that it's more realistic than the cookie cutter all's-well-that-ends-well but there's booming background music to go along with it, making the sadness feel more cathartic and meaningful than it would have felt in real life. This kind of cinema can, in many ways, be more dangerous than the formulaic happiness because at least when you're watching a song and dance routine you know it's just an escape whereas here, it kind of feels like real life so we forget to notice how it's minus the boredom and drudgery and the unendingness of a medium where the credits never roll.<br />
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I have also noticed that sometimes people can present their suffering with an air of martyrdom. Look at me quietly carrying this burden. Look how I still manage to smile. Look how I don't pretend to be happy all the time. But this has the same negative impact as the obnoxiously positive posts in the sense that they still manage to portray the person in a flattering light. After struggling with some depression over the past few months the first thing I have learnt is that mine looks nothing like quiet suffering. There have been times when I felt horrible so I made other people feel horrible. I texted my friends in a state of mania. Depression also made me selfish because I didn't really care about others as much; my first priority was to make my own pain go away. I projected a lot, which was made worse by the fact that I was alone in a new foreign city with only my job to fill my mind and the lack of connection was making me overthink other people's motives. I worried my parents. I worried my friends. I worried everybody who cared. It was a toxic loop where I felt bad so I put my loved ones in a state where they'd be scrambling to think how to make me feel better. Nothing would really work which would a) make me feel worse and b) punish my loved ones because they were getting tired and rightfully so. In a lot of ways, I became an emotional terrorist. I was not a martyr. I was not silently bearing my pain with a smile. I was hurt but also very hurtful.<br />
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Social media posts almost never show this side of suffering--the part where you unconsciously become the <i>cause </i>of suffering for other people as well. Nothing that makes the poster look unflattering--that's still the golden rule.<br />
<br />
2) The second way this phenomenon manifests is in the storytelling. We all know a story when we see one. There's always an arc--a beginning, a middle and an end. Instagram suffering can be like that as well. People write a long paragraph about what happened to them, followed by a long paragraphs about how they picked up the pieces, followed by a long paragraph about how they've achieved some glorious transformation through the process or how they've learnt a valuable lesson or some variation of that.Phrases like 'I'm a survivor' are used (more on that later). Real life almost never has this kind of a neat arc. Things never quite 'end' per se. It's more of a spider's web. Here's an example to illustrate this. My grandparents are survivors of a very bloody Partition. That's their tale of woe. It's brutal. We don't always remember to acknowledge it, but they've suffered more wounds than us social media warriors really even know. But the thing is that never meant that they became transformed by their suffering or tragic heroes or anything like that. They still got bothered by little things, acted petty, were hurt by loved ones even though that pain was smaller in magnitude than their hometown burnt off in riots. Heck, they may have even hurt people with their words and actions sometimes. You know why? Because they are people. They are not 'survivors' or 'refugees' or any other such label with positive connotations. They don't have a story, they have a life.<br />
<br />
3) The third one is the 'I'm a survior/fighter/whatever phenomenon' which I will elaborate more here. If I sound bitter on this one, it is because I am. This phenomenon has the same toxicity that motivational speakers sometimes do. It's when a person tells you what happened to them and how they overcame it; a true hero's journey to boot. But not everybody goes through things the same way. What this up-and-at-them attitude does is that on top of the suffering people are already going through, it adds to it by telling them<i> how</i> to suffer. This may be a tasteless example but sometimes families of cancer victims can unintentionally do this. They will paint a picture of their deceased loved as if they were superhuman infallible creatures who fought till their last breath, and in a lot of ways they are right and I understand that it helps to remember your loved ones without the shadow of everything that made them human. When this happens in real life, it <i>is</i> understandable. But social media has made this psychological phenomenon blow up to a point where now there are sometimes impossible standards for how you should be fighting in the face of adversity and nobody is talking about that the same way they are talking about the impossible standards of beauty or success. It can also make communication with loved ones difficult. I mean it's true that people are living on a dollar a day and we know about it from the comforts of our neoliberal, affluent, urban lives because we read stuff on the Huffington Post, but maybe that's not what you should be reminding people when they are going mad looking for an OPT job or going through a breakup or dealing with family issues. Unfortunately many will not understand this until it happens to them.<br />
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We've talked enough about toxic positivity. We all know that couple with the fantastic honeymoon fights sometimes. But now, let's put a stop to the toxic inspiration. It's hurting all of us. We just don't know it till we do.</div>
Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-48405778724741506282019-10-17T23:13:00.000+05:302022-03-11T21:56:39.207+05:30Who's Laughing Now?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Like every
human being in my planet, I saw Joker. I've been thinking about doing a review,
but today I want to pose a question that the movie brings to light. (Spoilers
ahead.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For those of you who haven't watched the film, the climax
involves Joaquin Pheonix's Joker appearing on a talk show which had previously
used a clip of him failing at a comedy show to elicit laughter from audiences.
This should be good. He's said previously in the film that for his whole life,
he didn't know if he existed but he does, and people are starting to notice.
Now that he is appearing on a late-night show hosted by his comedy idol, it
should be the high point of recognition. He should be excited. But he isn't
because he sees the truth. He sees that even when he <i>noticed</i>, it is
as a clown meant to be ridiculed so the network can bring in the ratings. He is
a joke, not a person because if we saw someone as a person, we wouldn't take
the most embarrassing moment of their life and play it on TV. The humor in this
'joke' basically lies in the audience feeling superior to this poor, pathetic
man who bombed on stage, even though most people would probably not even go on
stage in spite of having half as many challenges as the Joker, and the pathos
of the situation reminds us of ancient times when stoning and hangings were
witnessed for entertainment. It begs the question--is public ridicule the new
public stoning?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The sad part is that the ridicule that Arthur faces are not
the worst part of his journey, even though they make be the breaking point in
the plot. What really makes him snap is the silent expectation that even after
watching himself being laughed at in addition to being poor, fatherless,
mentally ill, recently unemployed, generally disrespected, and struggling with
his mother's hospitalization, he should appear on the same show that humiliated
him and "be a good sport." It wasn't bad enough that on top of
everything else, the country was laughing at him. He was expected to laugh at
himself too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Tell me. How many times has this happened to you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The whole idea of making fun of people makes me uneasy
sometimes. I'm always told it's all in good jest, and sometimes it is. But
there are some patterns of "friendly ridicule" that I find hard to
ignore. For example, people only make fun of people they think are below them,
particularly in cases where the ridicule is to one's face. People who say this
hierarchy doesn't exist are lying. In the larger scale of society, there are
those who are above ridicule (Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Aishwarya Rai), the
average folk in the middle, and those who have dropped so down the
respectability scale that they are now unembarrassable (Donald Trump, Kim
Kardashian, Rakhi Sawant, KRK). At this scale, one can argue that the hierarchy
is based on how much respect one has <i>earned</i>. But I have seen this
hierarchy to exist in my own lives as well. It seems social hierarchy is sadly
inevitable, and the ones who benefit from it deny it to preserve the benefits
and those who don't benefit from it deny it to stay in the good graces of those
who do. I am sometimes left wondering if its all in good jest, why isn't some
of the jest being extended to the cool kids? Don't you want to include them in
the fun too?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Another pattern I have noticed has to do with intentions and
reactions. When jokes are made just for good fun, the intention is just
that--good fun. If the recipient has a reaction that isn't aligned with the
intention of everyone just having a good time, then the person making the joke
usually just says apologizes, or says "just kidding" and lets the
moment slide. However, if someone makes a joke at someone else's expense and is
met with resistance, and the resistance is challenged too much (Wait, why did
you get so angry? Dude, can't you take a joke? I mean, I don't understand!), it
is usually a signal to me that the joke was not made with the right intentions.
I mean we all know that nobody wants to be made fun of all the time and we all
have some topics that are sensitive to us, and we all need to understand that
we shouldn't say things and then automatically expect people to react the way
we want. If our intentions are pure, we are usually okay with facing the
consequences as we know it was just a misstep on our part. If our intentions
are impure, we usually get defensive and blame others' reactions to our actions
and insist they change their personality or worldview instead of seeing them as
merely consequences that we could not have predicted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then there are the situations where <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfWv0EnHQw" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri light" , sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">we
collectively decide some people just deserve to be made fun of because they're
dumb or whatever and we keep doing it again and again with an air superiority
until the "dumb" people resent us for not respecting them</span></a> from
our neoliberal, urban, upper middle-class bubble and get back at us in the next
election. Yeah. That happened. In more countries than one. At about the same
time. Let's just top it off with with a guy standing on top of a car with clown
makeup.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A lot of
people have talked about what Joker means about society and the haves and
have-nots. And I agree. It is about the haves and have-nots. Those calling the
movie an incel training manual are naïve in thinking that every action boils
down to personal responsibility and that personal responsibility is detached
from personal circumstances. But I think it would be narrow-minded and a little
bit of a cop out to just say if Arthur had money none of this would have
happened. The whole movie, he wasn't asking for money even though he
desperately needs it. What he really desperately wants is exactly what he <i>says </i>he
wants in the following quotes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“I don’t want anything from you. Maybe a little warmth, maybe
a hug, dad, maybe a bit of common decency!” It was not about the money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“The worst
part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you
don’t.” How far is that from saying "We'll laugh at you. Just be a good
sport." How far is that really?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTin7MQanHw7R9k4cyArNrg7D2SE-38lA6TVTtVPJZKGIsMPeumyyh6JVXl1g9dM54lEt7EZoBOcdTNOevejjdDPVVUfLCb2OBKDfOg_D9Q3eBuFLVjEjplbg8Uv0ULOxY-pYFVwJksDM/s1600/joker3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="759" data-original-width="623" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTin7MQanHw7R9k4cyArNrg7D2SE-38lA6TVTtVPJZKGIsMPeumyyh6JVXl1g9dM54lEt7EZoBOcdTNOevejjdDPVVUfLCb2OBKDfOg_D9Q3eBuFLVjEjplbg8Uv0ULOxY-pYFVwJksDM/s640/joker3.jpeg" width="524" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then
there are those times when someone goes into depression or kills themselves or makes
a man who set fire to his city the new king. That’s when we must remember these
words <span style="color: #353535;">“Well, no one’s laughing now”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-84091159716122556612019-10-12T07:40:00.000+05:302022-03-11T21:56:47.453+05:30Emotions-- The Unfashionable Edition<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's World Mental Health Day. Here's my question: Do we all suddenly have anxiety? Here's my answer: no we don't.<br />
<br />
Before everyone goes up in arms about how I'm just one of those people who thinks I am just one of those people who thinks people are just faking their mental illnesses to get attention, give me a chance to explain my statement.<br />
<br />
The last few weeks have been horrible mental heath wise. No, I don't have a particular reason for it. No I will not validate it by giving it a name like 'depression.' Despite being relatively lucky I've been very sad. I have needed to express myself but funnily there haven't really been many people to express to. Funny because it's not that I had nobody to talk to but because somehow I didn't feel heard. It made me wonder why the good-natured efforts of my friends were sometimes making me feel worse.<br />
<br />
I don't have a precise answer but I have a guess--it was because there were times when I felt an emotion and expressing it simply was not fashionable.<br />
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So here goes.<br />
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I feel insecure sometimes. I know I'm supposed to trust all my relationships but I don't always do. In my bubble of urban, upper middle-class, woke neoliberalism, insecure people are considered pathetic. The worst thing a guy can say about a girl is "she's just so insecure!" For me feeling insecure is about these sudden fleeting moments where I feel the boat of everything I have built in my life is shaking, when I realize thaat reality there is nothing much I can do to stop it from toppling over. This leads to another unfashionable emotion I sometimes feel- I get scared of losing things. They tell me that if I love something enough I should be happy having it in the moment and not think about the time and energy that went into it or worry that I may not be able to take it into the future. I'm supposed to look at everything like a passionate artist who practices his art simply because he loves it and never expects any reward. But the reality is that I cannot feel that way 24x7 and if I tell people they just judge me, thinking I'm the kind of person who only pursues things with an end goal in mind.<br />
<br />
There are also rare occasions when I get jealous (I'm just bringing out all the ugly emotions today, aren't I?). I will admit that most of the time I get jealous of other women. I sometimes get jealous of how those women look in the eyes of men. It's not the most beautiful women that trigger this feeling. It's mostly the 'cool girls'--the ones that are always up for a drink and a party and always kind of available and never question men on anything they do. I, on the other hand, don't drink and am too neurotic to party all the time and when I see something a guy does that seems hypocritical or pack-minded to me I find it very difficult to just keep my mouth shut. And I know that at this point you're probably thinking that I'm just trying to show how superior I am while pretending to be self-critical but I promise I'm not. Everywhere I look I see a mirror which tells me I'm not an easy person, and I wish I was, and there are rare occasions where I get jealous of women who are. I am a bad feminist in that way. I'm not allowed to say I sometimes get jealous, though. I have to cheer and support other women all the freaking time otherwise I am an enemy to an important social movement. Also, I have never heard anybody--and I mean anybody--tell me that they were jealous so I guess I also fear that maybe I am the only person in the universe who feels this emotion and everybody else is just to confident, self-assured and content for it.<br />
<br />
Speaking of jealousy, a lot of my unfashionable feeling are related to modern-day feminism. Once again, in the urban, upper middle-class, woke neoliberal bubble I live in, I almost feel inferior because I like and want children, want to get married someday and want to have a good family life. I am surrounded by women who claim they don't think very seriously about these things. I am surrounded by women who call themselves career women and they say they respect my 'choices' but I don't really think I'm making any choices as much as I'm just being who I am. I am not a career woman in the sense that although a career is very important to me it is not the ultimate MOST important thing in my life. If I had to choose at gunpoint--and I really hope this never happens--I would choose having a family. Once again, I really, really hope I never have to choose because I do want both a lot but in the back of my mind I know that I love one a little bit more than the other. Maybe this is all in my head but sometimes I get this nagging feeling that the career women I'm surrounded by think they are superior to me because they don't want long-term commitments from men or families. But who I am I to say anything? Most of them are headed to Silicon Valley or getting PhDs in subjects like maths and genetics and whatnot so they are much higher on the modern feminist ladder than I am and yes I do think that ladder exists even though we're supposed to be respecting all women the same and yes that doubt is another unfashionable feeling I have.<br />
<br />
Then there are the unfashionable emotions I feel we all have. For example, I get this sense that everybody wants to be special and wants some proof that they're special but nobody admits to it because it sound embarrassing. It seems that the last thing anybody wants to be is ordinary even though that's what most of us, including me, are. It's kind of how nobody really admits they want to be famous but a lot of people do.<br />
<br />
I'm not saying that I am generally insecure, jealous, neurotic, hateful of modern-day feminism and desirous of being special. Most days I am not. But I admit today that there are days I falter. The issue is that when I falter with an emotion like, say, anger or vengefulness I might be met with some fair criticism but people would not look down upon me, whereas if I express the emotions above I would be met with cringe. I think what tipped me over to this was the fact that nobody else seems to every be feeling these things. It's always only me. It seems that most people wouldn't be caught dead saying any of the things I just said, which is fine, except that they can somehow at the same time be okay with admitting things like disloyalty, self-centredness, a lack of empathy or shallowness.<br />
<br />
Being the overthinker that I am, I did further analysis on how society was making distinctions between which negative emotions are okay and which are not. My hypothesis that we generally look down upon emotions which are triggered by external factors and suggest a lack of control and agency. For example, if a person is jealous, they're essentially reacting to an external circumstance while not holding any real power. On the other hand, something like a lack of empathy, although very negative, suggests power and control. Strangely, emotions that can hurt people are looked at with less contempt that emotions that only hurt oneself, and most of my cringeworthy feelings are on the latter side of that spectrum.<br />
<br />
When you can't admit to what you're feeling, it's easier to just say you have anxiety. But for me, anxiety can almost always be broken down to these bits and pieces that make me look bad, way worse than the word 'anxiety' does. This pressure to not admit to this side of myself makes something simmer inside me and there at times when the simmer comes to a boil.<br />
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-59245776331075889972019-07-19T00:04:00.000+05:302019-07-19T00:04:20.298+05:30Language Limitations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Like most Indian families, my family has a Whatsapp group. Everyday, someone or the other sends a forwarded joke in the group for all of us to read. A lot of times, the forwards are in Benagli. I grew up in Delhi and Mumbai and although my Bengali is very fluent, reading and writing has never been my strong suite as I never had to do those things in school and there was little energy to pursue it outside of school. When I was seven or eight years old, my mother asked the caretaker <i>mama </i>of our Kolkata home to get her a <i>Shohoj Path </i>so I could start learning. I only got as far as "<i>Kau, khau, chhoto khoka bole kau khau." </i>Or something like that. Five years in Kolkata taught me to read the Bengali script. However, reading still takes twice as much time than it usually should for me. I am pretty late on responding to forwarded jokes, and I sometimes think maybe my family members misunderstand and think I'm above it.</div>
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I have often thought that I <i>should </i>be better at reading and writing Bengali than I am. Language isn't a weak spot for me. I can both express and comprehend well enough, which, by the way, a lot of people can't even if they know how to speak, read and write a specific language. I went to a <i>very </i>English medium school and still won awards for writing fiction in Hindi, a feat that is underestimated by many as people don't understand how obligatory Indian languages become in English medium schools, and how people from non-Hindi speaking families often have their Hindi skills limited to high fluency in speaking. I now have five years in Kolkata under my belt, where reading signboards, notices, and banners on minibuses has familiarized me with the Bengali alphabet. Why the hell does it still take me five minutes to get through a three-paragraph forwarded message?</div>
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This actually takes me back to my struggles with another language--Sanskrit. My elder sister had done pretty well with Sanskrit, and my parents said I should start taking it in fifth standard as it was a "scoring subject" and would help me do well in my Board exams. Every time there was a Sanskrit test, the whole class would hold its breath as soon as the teacher announced my marks. Nobody would quite grasp how a student doing well in all other subject could suddenly be failing in Sanskrit, and they feared they would fail as well. Such was my struggle with Sanskrit!</div>
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Another disappointment was my stints with Duolingo. I tried to learn Spanish and Norwegian, but the learning curve was too steep, especially when my only exposure to the language was through an app. Watching <i>Skam </i>and eavesdropping on Mexican passsengers on the subway could only do so much.</div>
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My mullings over language have lead me to question certain things.</div>
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First off, foreign language is often thought of as a skill, and people who can't speak one are advised to "just go online and learn." I now doubt the plausibility of such demands. I did some research, and apparently, most people cannot learn new languages that they are not using on a day-to-day basis, and the reasons behind that are often cognitive (go to Google Scholar and verify this yourself!). I wonder how okay it is to say a forty-year-old from middle America is insufficiently qualified because of being able to speak only one language and he or she should just take some online classes to fix this. On the flipside, I wonder how we can stop imposing languages on people. For example, there have been many accusations in India about how 'main' languages are being imposed on Indian tribes in education systems. However, many tribes have a very small number of people, and even smaller numbers are educators, and an even smaller number is involved in producing educational material, and it is <i>extremely </i>difficult for non-speakers to master these languages and produce educational materials in them. It is easy to criticize people who do the work from the outside, but would you be able to monitor education in a foreign language with a very limited number of translators? It's often a very tricky subject, and there are no easy answers. It could feel like whichever way you go, you lose.</div>
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Secondly, I have been thinking about how parents are disappointed when their children don't master the parents' native tongue in places where the language isn't spoken. I can sympathize with the disappointment. The thought of my children speaking in an American accent often freaks me out. I feel as though it would be an extra mile to the already existing generation gap. But are the children really to blame, especially if the parents also criticize where they came from in addition to demanding their children adopt their native culture more and don't put in the effort to immerse their children in the culture?</div>
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The root of these difficult questions is the notion that learning languages is easier than it really is. Maybe we should start changing that notion, and then the solutions will start to present themselves. In the meantime, I think I'll send a laughing emoji in response to the Bangla forwarded joke. </div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-1889194279548747852019-07-06T01:23:00.000+05:302019-07-06T01:23:16.019+05:30Permissible Blasphemy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Given some recent incidents in my life, I was taken back to a memory from over twelve years ago.</div>
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My mother, my sister and I, were on the train in India. I forget the destination, but it is very likely we were returning to New Delhi. Our seats were in the same division as another Bengali family, as well as a pair of young adult Christian siblings. As was usual at the time, conversations began. My mother struck up a conversation about Swami Vivekananda with the gentleman from the other family. At some point, the conversation veered to other semi-religious figures.</div>
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At the time, I knew less. I believe my mother was talking about my grandmother's devotion to Bharat Sevashram. Like any smartass, I made a mild joke about the naming system of <i>sadhus </i>at the institution. I said it was all just religious nonsense anyways. My implications were clear--that women who go to <i>ashrams </i>are essentially stupid fools, no different from the dreaded Hindu nationalists that lynch people of other faiths, and religion is nonsense anyway. The set of Christian siblings laughed at my joke. But I could see I had disappointed my mother.</div>
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Later on, my mother expressed her disappointment. She said that at the end of the day, everybody is allowed to practice their own faith as long as they don't disrespect other people's faith. She said that had I instead brought up a joke about Catholics (she didn't specify, but an example would be a history of Catholic priests molesting children, and the practice being too widespread to be isolated incidents), the sibling duo would have been very offended. Most religions have some history of violence, persecution, discrimination, irrationality, and injustice, and even today, most religions have such practices in most parts of the world, but that does not mean we have the right to make fun of the faith of individuals because it's true that religion also bring solace and community to many. </div>
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At the time, I was indignant for a while. In the following paragraphs, I describe the reasons why.</div>
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The first reason was because I don't practice faith. In my family, it is said that I take after my father more. Like him, I have been agnostic since birth, even though most of my family is Hindu. It was not because of political reasons. In middle school, I tried to be religious for a while, having my own <i>thakurer ashon </i>an all. My devotion felt forced, like a series of activities I was doing hoping I would see some point--mental, emotional or ethical--to the endeavor. But over time it became clear that religion somehow never brought the solace to me that it brings to many people, and it also did not help me become a better person. I also noticed that even in hard times, I never, ever prayed to God, simply out of instinct. Perhaps if my child was dying, I would become helpless enough to finally resort to a higher power, but in my levels of suffering it simply did not happen. In tough times, I somehow forgot that God existed and instead started thinking of circumstances around me. For a while, I truly believed I was intellectually and socially superior to religious people. I didn't need a God! I was strong enough on my own! I believed in reason! All the usual stuff.</div>
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The second reason was that I was young, and even though I thought I was fair and nuanced, I was not. My worldview was simplistic. Hindus were always the villains (unless it was in Western countries, where Christians are always the villains). Men were always more privileged than women. White or upper-caste or Hindu speaking people could never have anything worthwhile to say if they were not "standing up" for the less fortunate because all I needed to do was say "You're privileged," and all their arguments would fall flat to the ground and they would be forced to shut up. I was too naive.</div>
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Over time, I obviously grew up, and I saw that privilege is not so straightforward. As the SJW culture grew, and I started meeting more people like me, I started to see my mother's point. I started to see what political correctness meant, and how political correctness nullifies pretty much any argument that somebody can make as long as they were somehow discriminated against. In the real world this was how it manifested--I was more obligated to side with a Muslim making legitimate complaints of discrimination in India than my Sindhi neighbours who had recently migrated to India due to severe persecution in their hometown in Pakistan, or I was more obligated to see the sufferings of women (and I do acknowledge those sufferings can be severe) but not the higher rates of suicide and mental illness in men, and on a lesser severe scale, the fact that realistically, good men feel more pressure to be breadwinners for their family than women do.</div>
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My grandmother's village was burnt to the ground during Partition. She witnessed the killings of family members and unfortunately belongs to the same area where the worst riots in Bangladesh took place. My grandfather was a migrant too, but from what I hear, things were slightly better in his village. In spite of this, they have always supported me mingling with Muslims and have shown no disdain to the fact that we live in a Muslim majority society in Mumbai. They are kind to our neighbors and do not actively pursue hate. Why was I making fun of my grandmother's faith? I mean, let's keep it real. I wouldn't dare crack a joke about any other religion. Just because we are the majority, does that mean we don't have the right to practice our religion? If it's wrong to say all Muslims are intolerant, isn't it wrong to say that all Hindus are intolerant? Take this example--in the United States, even if Mormon man makes adjustments to his faith to be more tolerant, people would say, "He's so nice, why the hell is he a Mormon?" but we would never say that to a practicing Muslim. </div>
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With the unfortunate rise of Hindu nationalism and the liberal meltdown that has followed, I have had many interesting conversations. Yesterday, I was asked a very interesting question by someone who thinks that India is one of the most intolerant countries in the world and people are killed left right and center for not saying "Jai Shri Ram." This was his question, "If you go to a temple, and say 'Ram <i>chhoot </i>hain, do you think nobody would beat you up?"</div>
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But see, that's the point. If people are at a temple and practicing their religion, do you have the objective right to go over there and call their deity a <i>chhoot? </i>Can you do that in a mosque? Can you do that in a Jewish temple? Can you do that in a church? How is going to a temple and saying "Ram is <i>chhoot </i>okay on any level? How is it not intolerant. One is allowed to say whatever they want outside of a person's place of worship, but in a place of worship? Time for more nuanced questions--if we say again and again that out of 1.8 billion Muslims most are good people, why do we not think the same about 1.08 billion Hindus? Is there any objective evidence that Muslim majority areas in the Middle East and others are significantly more tolerant that Hindus in India? Is there any evidence that these countries treat women better? Is there any evidence that Sindhis are treated better than Muslims in India? But why the caveat for one group and not the other.</div>
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(As a caveat, I would like to say that this is not just applicable in the Indian context. A survey recently reported that the United States to be one of the least safe countries for women in the world. I wholeheartedly disagree. India was reported to <i>the </i>least safe country, and therefore I would be accused of bias, but I am sure there are many countries in Asia, Africa and South America (including India, I admit) which are far less safe than the United States is. It is notable that the methodology behind this research was self-reporting of women who reside in their own country, which could explain a lot. I mean, I may be wrong about this, but I think it's true for me as well, because if I were born in Pakistan, I would be a lot more afraid of writing this blog post. However, I invite my Pakistani friends to debate me on this, because I probably just don't know.)</div>
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One could ask me why I am writing this in the first place. The world is becoming more and more right-wing. In more and more countries, heads of state are being elected on the basis of the religious identity of the majority. People argue that it's simply because of ignorance and illiteracy, but that would not make sense because, in those very countries, more secular parties were elected just last term or the term before that. Like it or not, elections are about numbers, and do you think that if hundred people voted, and during one term sixty people were enlightened and forty people were ignorant, in the next term forty of the people from the first group became ignorant and forgot all their enlightnement, and suddenly became illiterate fools. Enlightenment does not work like that. </div>
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What does work like that is a feeling of being shortchanged. When I was doing research in the slums of Kolkata, every one of those slums had a temple, which shows that their faith was important to them (this is in one of the most communist states in the country). These people were oppressively poor, living next to train tracks, expecting a fatality every week. They did not have access to water, sanitation, jobs or more than 4'x1' of space for families of five. They may not be persecuted for their religion, but they are for being <i>bastiwallahs. </i>Crimes are often pinned on them, and their young men taken away to jail. Even if they are exceptionally good people, I really do not expect them to care more about Rohingya refugees than their own selves. Do you think they want enlightenment from the liberals of Jadavpur University and NRIs? Do the liberals of Jadavpur University and NRIs know more suffering than these people do? Do you think the Bangals of Baubagan Rail colony, in their abject poverty, know less about being a poor refugee than liberals who live in bubbles? The fact is that these poor people could not use their identity. For long, their sufferings were <i>weighed </i>against the sufferings of other by people who really were not suffering that much. People made fun of their religion and linked them having faith with illiteracy and ignorance. For them, perhaps voting right wing is the last resort. In most populations, there are many, many people who live in desperate situations, even if they are the social or religious majority. What the left in media and university campuses does is weigh their suffering against the suffering of others, forgetting that suffering doesn't work like that, <i>especially </i>in poor countries. So, yes, the left pushed too far for too long, and when you push something too hard it breaks.</div>
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As I conclude, all I can say, is that I am very saddened that at the end of the day, the world <i>is </i>becoming more and more polarized, and we, the university-educated privileged individuals are way more responsible for it than we think we are. In the future, I anticipate even more division amongst people, and I feel I can do nothing about that. </div>
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(Considering this is a controversial topic, I request people to be respectful in the comments. I would welcome written debate with points written down the same way I have cared to do. However, I would not want to be called names, or be directly accused of religious intolerance or racism.)</div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-85999085676085208982019-06-26T01:48:00.001+05:302019-06-26T01:48:52.727+05:30Why Having Free Time is the Worst<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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These days, I have lots of free time. I have finished my graduate studies and am now waiting to graduate. I have no assignments, no deadlines, no problems I simply cannot solve. Life is chill.</div>
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I f---ing hate it!</div>
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It's not that this hasn't happened before. Every time I complete one academic phase and am about to start the next one, I find myself in the in-between space full of free time and lots of mental space to spare. The only difference is that this time, I'm abroad and relatively more alone. My family isn't here to keep me company and neither are my old friends, and I don't have the opportunity to engage in their small joys and petty dramas. Also, there is very little prep that I need to do for my future, unlike previous breaks where I had to prepare for college in a new city or grad school in a new country. I've basically been living the 'temporary' life for two year now, and it's easy to uproot that kind of life. In a nutshell, there is a whole lot of unoccupied space in my brain and schedule right now.</div>
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It's not that I do absolutely nothing all day. I read books. I find recipes to try out. I attend dance classes. I write on my blog. I make plans for travel. I hang out with new friends. Somehow, the seconds turn to minutes which then turn to hours, and the day ends. When people are busy, they dream about this kind of downtime. Let me tell you that this is no dream. It is teetering on the edge of being a nightmare. It's difficult to explain why that is, but it's perhaps because human beings don't really need 24 hours a day.</div>
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I used to think that school and jobs were way too time-consuming. But honestly, I don't think they are. Suppose I sleep for eight hours every day, work for another eight, do chores for two more and use half an hour for meals (although one can argue that I can eat my meals while working). I would still have five and a half free hours per day. Let's say I use two of them to socialize or keep in touch with my family. I would still have three hours to do whatever the hell I wanted. That's how my life has been for the past two years. Three hours doesn't sound like much, and I admit a lot of people use those hours to commute, something I have never had to do. But when it comes to pursuing hobbies and interests and going after my dreams, I was making much better use of my three hours than I am with my twenty-four. Time was both more structured and more precious. Procrastination was rare. Life wasn't stagnant. It flowed, sometimes at my will and sometimes obligatorily. Now that I have so much free time, I feel a lack of both motivation and inspiration. I can write stories, but can't settle on a premise. I can draw pictures, but my brain doesn't conjure images. I cook, but how fun is that when I'm only cooking for one person? I try to read up on architecture but with no immediate place to implement my knowledge my knowledge slips through the cracks and recedes to my subconscious. I have activities, but my activities feel inconsequential. Every day is kind of the same. Sometimes I feel like I have become the person in the physics problems I solved in high school. The person is swimming upstream at x velocity, acceleration, blah blah blah. The stream is flowing at y velocity, acceleration, blah blah blah. How far does the person get? The answer is not far at all.</div>
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Some of my free time has been used up in mulling over the concept of free time (as if that wasn't obvious). I have been thinking about how it would feel like if I lost or quit my job. I have been pondering the pros and cons of meditation retreats. Would clearing my mind really be that awesome? Or is it better to just have some junk and some treasure in my mind, keeping it full always? Would I really enjoy writing and drawing and dancing all the time? How much can I realistically write? Man, do I have respect for Stephen King! Is this what happened to George R.R. Martin? He had every opportunity to write, but the words didn't come out and we got a shitty season 8?</div>
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Not surprisingly, my thoughts were echoed by a writer. Here is John Green's TED Talk, where he talks about what happened when he quit his job to write.</div>
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I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Green here. Although schools and jobs may not be our dreams or be interesting all the time, they do immerse us in an atmosphere of learning and collaboration. And guess what? Learning and collaboration are awesome, and so is being busy. Because 'structure, is often the inescapable norm, we grow to resent it. But structure can be like home, taken for granted but you need it to come back to. Besides, eureka moments are, well, moments. You don't need necessarily need twenty-four hours for them. Perhaps great minds sinking to depression and debauchery has less to do with the downsides of genius and more to do with how great minds find themselves submerged in a sea of their own genius, with no deadlines or assignments or obligations, trapped in the belief of others' inferiority when in reality there might still be a lot for them to learn outside of their field of expertise. They say an artist's best work comes before fame. I am starting to think that an artist's best work comes when they still had day jobs.</div>
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The lack of structure also has social ramifications, I'm sure. Whoever says that not having a job and getting freebies from the government is a privileged position has obviously never been unemployed. There are serious psychological consequences of being jobless. There is much truth in the empty mind and idle hands stuff, and us denying that is privileged overeducated nonsense. Why can't one be happy on their own? Why can't one discipline themselves <i>by </i>themselves<i>? </i>Why does one need external agencies to be told what to do? Why can't we all be free standing pillars? Think about all the crimes committed because one had nothing better to do, all the drug addicts created out of boredom and hopelessness, all the families broken by the frustrations of the patriarch's unemployment. It's <i>horrible </i>to live without consequential work, and it just as wrong to expect every person to buck up and build their own structure and be enterprising as it is to expect everyone to be an Olympic gold medalist. Not everybody is the same, and it is everyone's benefit is everyone is busy and productive.</div>
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I still have many weeks left of aimless freedom, and hopefully, they will pass before I descend into madness. Honestly, I feel a whole lot better after an hour of writing this. I think this period was a period of learning for me, and in the future, I want more than anything to always be busy and productive.</div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-25677825215763908012019-06-01T12:38:00.000+05:302019-06-01T12:57:01.915+05:30Our World is Slowly Losing it's Storytellers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Our world is slowly losing its storytellers. There I said it.</div>
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Recently, somebody gave me a compliment. We were atop a hill looking over the night lights of State College, cooped up in a dark car. I was telling my friends the story of how some men tried to scare us from outside the window of the ground floor PG I lived in when I was in college, and the night we discovered them trying to violently shake the window open to possibly come in. The events could evidently be summed up in two lines, but I took my time fleshing out the details and building up the dialogue. When the based-on-true-events story was done, I went on to narrate a made-up story about a small child's encounter with a witch in her neighborhood. At the end of it, somebody told me that I was a good storyteller. They went on to elaborate the specifics of why they thought so, and I was truly flattered.</div>
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Then I had the shattering realization that I only had two stories in my <i>jhuli</i>. I would make a terrible <i>thakuma</i>.</div>
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When I was younger, I had two kinds of storytellers. One came in the forms of grandmothers (or grandmother-figures). My paternal grandmother and her best friend were particularly fond of telling me stories of divine intervention. They started out in some small locality in Bangladesh and ended with them having a heart-to-heart with Lord Shiva himself. There was Tolkien-level worldbuilding involved, with characters going from magical versions of the Himalayas to obscure islands in the Indian ocean, and somehow ended in cloudy heavens where the Hindu Gods had round table conferences like corporation boardrooms. The second form of storytellers came in the form of caretakers in my home. They were usually young girls from villages in West Bengal, and they always had tales to tell about their life before the big, bad city. They did not seem to have memories of homework, ma'ams or exams. Instead, they shared with me how they once almost got kidnapped by <i>chheledhora</i>, how their mother first saw a tiger in their Sundarban home and wanted to run away, their best friend's marriage interview, or tragic village uproars that ended in someone's death. I did not need to read <i>Malgudi Days. </i>I had <i>Midnapore Days, Sundarban Days </i>and <i>Birbhum Days. </i>There was one occasion when both forms of storytellers became combined. It was when a nurse was hired to look after my grandma and she claimed <i>she </i>had divine powers and was possessed by Goddess Kali sometimes. She had many stories, but for me, she also became <i>a </i>story.</div>
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I write a lot of stories just because I like to. But can I tell them at the drop of a hat like my childhood storytellers could? I don't think so.</div>
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Before there was <i>Game of Thrones, </i>for thousands of years, there was the oral tradition of storytelling. Ancient myths and epics are essentially the results of stories being passed down from generation to generation until someone decided to write them down. In the distant past, women helped each other by sharing their stories away from the eyes and ears of men. Cautionary tales were disguised as fairy tales. There were some stories that everybody in a village knew, and they were united by that before written history tied us together with the thread of common heritage. Eventually, though, stories could be written, printed and copied, and the tradition of storytelling changed.</div>
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It didn't change too much, though. Up until the last generation, grandmas telling stories to children was a common fixture in every household. Sometimes, granddads pitched in too, with stories of what happened during the war/partition/independence movement. My grandfather actually wrote a Bangla book about his childhood, every chapter rich with details. Even though I can't be sure yet, I don't think my parents will tell stories to my niece the way my grandparents told to me. Honestly, I fear I won't be able to tell any at all.</div>
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What is happening to our imaginations? No, really.</div>
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Well, I am no expert on this cultural shift, but my theory is that with TV and internet, we are constantly in a state of absorbing information thrown at us. For stories to grow, you need to be a creator in your own world for a while, but every time we get distracted by TV or social media, that brain space gets taken up by whichever plot is currently making waves, and our own stories get buried too deep within our own minds. But how happy am I that I will be passing down George R.R. Martin's stories to my grandkids and not my own? I mean I will obviously take out the parts where Daenarys takes off her clothes, but still. It's not that I'm choosing not to be the <i>thaakuma </i>with the <i>jhuli. </i>I don't freaking have a <i>jhuli</i>! I barely have a tiny story wallet as thin as my actual wallet!</div>
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The problem is that I think it's not just me. I think we are losing the oral tradition of storytelling in general but not noticing it. We have so much to give our future generations in the materialistic sense, but one by one, we might be losing the social and emotional tools that helped families bond. Now it's up to us whether we care about this as much as the most recent viral social justice issue. Just saying.</div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-76644056905742149462019-02-16T05:51:00.001+05:302019-02-16T05:51:38.441+05:30Tamasha<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If you're a young Indian on the verge of enrolling into an engineering course, with entrance exams hitting you like bullets piercing through your skin to reveal your relative mediocrity and dreams unrelated to nuts and bolts dissolving to nothingness before your eyes, well trust me, I've been there. In fact, so many of us have been there that middle- to upper middle-class Indians giving up on their dreams to embrace the blanket of security and stability are not even tragicomically funny anymore. It's a joke that's way too played out, as much of a given now for many people as the mere act of breathing.<br />
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<img alt="Image result for tamasha" src="https://i1.wp.com/images.mapsofindia.com/my-india/2015/11/tamasha.jpg?resize=665%2C348&ssl=1" /><br />
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Perhaps that's why 2015's Tamasha did so well. Underneath the typically Bollywoodised storytelling was a tale of being crushed under the weight of a conventional corporate lifestyle that one has been forced into, as well as a depiction of the mental toll it can take. It has also been instrumental in many creative personalities finally breaking free from the confines of their stable jobs and pursuing what they always wanted to do, now empowered by advancements afforded by the Internet and a more connected world.<br />
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I was one of those people who feared getting into engineering. There are many people who may not be particularly inclined towards it and dream of living in a first world country where other avenues would be more viable, but at the end of the day, they are accepting of the more conventional profession and even go on to embrace it for the comforts it can provide them. I was not one of those people. I loved the sciences, but I also loved the humanities, and making a choice was too difficult for me. I eventually chose architecture, and have never regretted my choice. Architecture will never be my first love the way writing is, but it is a close second or third, simply because of the multidisciplinary nature of it.<br />
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However, over the past two years, the cost of making this choice has become more clear. My classmates from high school who did engineering or medicine or economics are already settled into the beginnings of a proper career, and I am still educating myself and if I follow the path of high education as I intend to, I will not be in a 'career' till I am in my 30s. I have had episodes of acquaintances look down upon me because they think if I was brighter or smarter or something-er, I would have a job in Bangalore by now. The difficulties of my career choice are seldom appreciated, and the good old "those who can't do go on to a PhD" is not explicitly said but heavily implied. The length of my career trajectory will also have an impact on my personal life according to my parents, because I may not be stable enough in terms of geographical location to consider marriage till I am very late into my 20s or early 30s, something that worries them, and there are comical legitimate concerns expressed about my biological clock. I make enough money for myself, but it's not money that is enough to plan a future around, a luxury that IT professionals, bankers and doctors can afford even in their 20s. Even in the US, while my friends who are in some form of engineering or IT get into companies which gives them a large number of cushy benefits, I can only expect those benefits if I get recruited by the very top architecture firms, which seems unlikely for someone who has a degree that focuses on housing.<br />
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The irony is, in the grand scheme of crazy careers, mine doesn't even qualify. I did everything a good student would do, and was only about two millimeters left of center in my choices. But those two millimeters were meaningful.<br />
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Don't get me wrong. I still surprise myself when sometimes I look back and realize if I had to do it all over again, I would make the same choices, even knowing what I know now. The point that I am trying to make is that in life, it is rare to have everything and more often than not, the pursuit of dreams leads to compromise in financial security, social credibility and one's personal life. Now, whether one thinks those compromises were worth it or not varies from person to person, but it is naive to say that the compromises don't exist. I assume that in the core arts, like the theatre, film, writing, art and so on, the compromises are even bigger. In the mildest cases, it's your relatives calling you a 'band master' when you're really a musician. In extreme cases, it is about being broke in Mumbai and considering offers to "compromise" (wink wink nudge nudge) because you're desperate and you've burnt other bridges and you feel too old to start all over again.<br />
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This is where Tamasha lost me. I felt for Ranbir Kapoor's character when he becomes what is essentially a zombie, and then transitions into a ticking time bomb. It made me sad to think about how lonely he must be feeling in the cage he has built for himself. I was invested enough to forgive the hare-brained first half with its manufactured romantic storyline, and forgive Deepika Padukone's character for depending on Ranbir Kapoor's for showing her a more interesting life instead of simply pursuing one for herself. But where I couldn't support it anymore, was when Ranbir Kapoor's character become quits his job and becomes a theatre sensation overnight. No uncertainty, no struggle, no doubts. The movie even presents the cinematic version of an artistic career, where you only see the final masterpiece of the artist but not the thousands of hours of work and frustrations and redos that went into creating it, which is unfortunate because a lot of the general public sees real life artists that way as well--as people with dreams and uncommon natural ability who were only ever stalled by external hurdles and never by their own learning curve of their craft or their own insecurities, with those dark hours hidden from the audience's view. I would go so far as to say that such a view of artistic careers is insulting to those who are actually involved in such careers, similar to how it was insulting to real ballet dancers who had been dancing since they were three years old when Natalie Portman claimed she had done all of her own dancing in <i>Black Swan </i>after a year and a half of training. Ironically, this overnight success happens to people like, well, Ranbir Kapoor, who undeniably has uncommon natural ability but had the advantage of being from a film family and was able to overcome the failures of his first few films which could have crippled another actor's career.<br />
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I will admit <i>Tamasha </i>broke down one dream for us--the dream of getting good marks, getting itno a good engineering college, doing an MBA, getting an indisputably white collared job at a multi-national corporation, getting married and having kids, and expecting all of it to automatically make us happy. But it did sell the alternate dream that just because you choose to follow your dreams, you will become successful and secure in your chosen profession on the basis of talent and passion alone, and that was how it made a <i>tamasha </i>of the audience.<br />
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-91020161685010866072019-01-09T11:00:00.000+05:302019-01-09T11:00:05.331+05:30Women-Characters or Performers?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In today's day and age, it's easy for someone like me to go off on film and literary analysis. Let's be honest. Everybody in my particular social class agrees on what is good and bad, to the point of there being very little difference of opinion to pique my interest, and most people get their opinions from reading reviews or watching video essays. Now, there's nothing wrong with this widespread interest in film and literary criticism. However, there is a lack of artistic honesty with believing every source of such criticism and repeating the views of someone else without thinking it through.<br />
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A lot of complaints made by cultural critics have been regarding the lack of "strong, female characters" in cinema. I say that in quotes because the term has been used so many times now that it has become less of a description and more of a trope. Just imagine a stone-face, straight-backed woman in muted colors, fast-talking and straight-talking in a way that would undoubtedly make her sound cold in real life, walking with her head held high into a boardroom/operation theatre/NASA/inner city high school/war (or intergalactic war, I am looking at you Rae) or whatever high stress scenario the writers decided to put her in. Critics had reasonable complaints about the lack of strong portrayals of women. However, at some point, the criticism went on for so long and existed so unchallenged that now, what we get in the name of a 'strong, female character' is not a character representing a person, but a character <i>performing </i>feminism. She has no flaws, no weaknesses, and is always ahead of the men around her in a way that is not only unrealistic, but also looks down upon the audience, as if we don't understand that women are strong <i>in spite </i>of having weaknesses and not because they were born with Angelina Jolie's face body with killer martial arts and mathematical skills and just jumped out of the womb ready to raid tombs.<br />
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If you're looking for examples, just think about Hermione from Harry Potter, a character so brave, so self-sacrificing, so intelligent, that it is obvious that she is what J.K. Rowling wishes she was, a character I can't bring myself to like because in high school, I was plainer and more bookish than Hermione was ever portrayed to be (thank you, Miss Watson). It's because no my plainness and bookishness had a consequence--no Victor Krum would have asked me out back then, I didn't always get the smartest lines in my group of guy friends, and most importantly, even though I wasn't beautiful by any high school standard, I didn't really have the heart to look upon the girls who liked makeup and clothing and had boys taking interest in them because while I got into a reasonably good architecture course in Kolkata, some of those girls went on to become doctors and economists by getting into colleges I honestly wouldn't have gotten into. Their overt femininity had nothing to do with their brilliance, and I'm saying that even though I didn't necessarily share a great relationship with them. I wonder why nobody looks at the Yule Ball scene as frivolous wish fulfillment even though we're so critical of ugly duckling-to-swan stories where a girl takes off her glasses and is suddenly beautiful. And this is arguably the most beloved female character for our generation.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXVYzdWq-rxfSZd1_pat7C9awFyKvbYTYk3sc9B0WZFPWpuvczMxylw2rg-TMQAs6l_PATwJVn8Nlp5-DG2RgyZCYG5Q_go1DHqJ1oZoD4smVXxa1T14wOPabYZ1jllfqu9XuYapLEVQ0/s1600/220px-Hermione_Granger_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="243" data-original-width="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXVYzdWq-rxfSZd1_pat7C9awFyKvbYTYk3sc9B0WZFPWpuvczMxylw2rg-TMQAs6l_PATwJVn8Nlp5-DG2RgyZCYG5Q_go1DHqJ1oZoD4smVXxa1T14wOPabYZ1jllfqu9XuYapLEVQ0/s1600/220px-Hermione_Granger_poster.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hermione had one flaw, that she was plain. But<br />they fixed that when they cast Emma Watson.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Then came the Reys, the Katnisses, the Trises (because in young adult fiction, 'strong women' can't have normal names). I'm sure this trend is not over, even though the YA dystopia genre is struggling and is getting replaced by the John Green-brand of flawed, sentimentality rooted in real world struggles. Unfortunately, adults don't fare much better. I've already spoken of Tomb Raider, a woman so perfect she puts her male contemporaries to shame, but I must say the reboot did a much better job with its central character. Then there's the superhero genre, which went from corners of nerd culture to the most mainstream cultural phenomenon of the 2010s. There you have your Black Widows, your Captain Marvels and all the women in Black Panther (and I freaking <i>loved </i>Black Panther). These women can have bad things happen to them but they have no internal weaknesses. These characters have no real flaws to speak of, and when they do, it's usually something that's not a real flaw but is presented as a flaw, such as being adorably naive or improbably clumsy or just blissfully unaware of her own beauty. The only exception was Wonder Woman, who is all-powerful but still fawns at the sight of a baby (okay, so maybe I'm being a bit biased about this, as people who know me will say). They perform the feminist narrative of women being equivalent to goddesses, a narrative based more on superiority than equality, and unfortunately, a narrative developed primarily by first-world white women who are now in a position to influence millions of people.<br />
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In Hollywood, the festival circuit has been more successful in portraying real women. I fell in love with Ladybird last year, and it didn't matter that she was white and had first world problems because she was real. The unlikeable, difficult and whiny protagonist of <i>The Edge of Seventeen </i>won me over and made me laugh. Heck, <i>Hidden Figures </i>had <i>three </i>heroic, humble, and most importantly, undeniably female and feminine characters that I will remember my whole life. But commercial blockbusters have, for the most part.<br />
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What might be surprising to many, but not surprising to me, is that Bollywood has faired much better in this regard. The moral struggles and dilemmas of <i>Raazi's </i>Sehmat had me at the edge of my seat, because she wasn't the usual spy, the killing machine originally written for men and then replaced by a woman. She is a spy <i>because </i>she is a woman, and it is when she sacrifices the stereotypically female ambitions of love and family that I felt the most for her, because one can see how much this sacrifice cost her. For a veriety of reasons, <i>Queen </i>wasn't my favorite film, but Rani's decidedly Indian naivety was so relatable at parts that I had to forgive some double standards in the film and enjoy her antics. People make fun of me for my love of traditional Yash Raj Films, but I related to Shruti Kakkar's dreams in <i>Band Baaja Baraat, </i>and cheered when it was her hard work and diligence, and not male-defeating one liners, that bring her success, and then rooted for her when she chooses to get into an arranged marriage for the sake of her family and her own security, true to her Janakpuri upbringing. But my favorite is the title character from Piku, because give me a few years, and that is who I am becoming--perenially irritated by my parents' house but actually becoming like them, and to top it all off, she was an architect! And I am so proud that these films were not just critical darlings but also commercial successes in a country like India, where <i>Ladybird </i>and <i>Hidden Figures </i>have to settle for festival circuit success which only gets some financial recuperance after awards season promotions.<br />
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The reason for this is simple. Commercial Indian cinema written with female characters (at least the good ones) is often written with adult women in mind. Commercial Hollywood fare still has more male fans than female, at least statistically, whether politcial correctness lets us admit it or not. They are geared towards the crowd that grew up with comic books and fantasy worlds, and there is nothing wrong with that per se (even I love myself some of that action) but to hail these characters as the championing voice of feminist representation is to spread misinformation and sets up more unrealistic standards than any Barbie doll could ever set. As a real-life woman, I find it difficult to relate to women on the page or on screen who are so strong, independent and flawless that they could never be real human beings. I feel as if these characters are just wish fulfilment for their writers (whether male and female) who grew up on first world feminism, and their fictional women are projections of what they wish they could be or have. Unfortunately, these characters have an inordinate amount of influence, and are informing a whole generation about what 'good' women are like. What is also unfortunate is that this generation is being deprived of mainstream female role models, ones that we can realistically look up to.<br />
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-56797170158976226852018-12-26T11:26:00.000+05:302018-12-26T11:26:02.638+05:30Indians in a Gun-Free (Fictional) Paradise<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently, I was reading a thread on Quora, all posts answering someone's questions regarding the pros and cons of settling down in the United States. Unsurprisingly, most of the answers were from men, as up until recently, it was men who made the decision to stay and their wives, regardless of whether or not they had a career, who stayed with them. Things have obviously changed. Now, women can purposely seek a life in the States as a part of their life plan, a freedom that many women are taking advantage of, a fact that I am very happy about. The right to choose is relatively new for members of the female persuasion, especially in the Indian context, but it is a welcome change.<br />
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Trust me, I wanted to just be proud and be done with the thread. But of course, one woman on the thread had to say something that now has me typing away in the middle of the night, with much to say and nobody to hear me.<br />
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Just go on. Read what she wrote:<br />
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I'll be honest, her reply left me feeling embarrassed. It is hard not get defensive about the place you were raised in, the one which gave you much of what you have today, even though any NRIs refuse to acknowledge the contributions of IITs and ISIs and many other universities and a traditional family structure in their achievements. As a knee jerk reaction, I wanted to tell this woman (a Bengali woman, one who was probably never exposed to the misogyny and dangers of much more regressive states anyways) that I may not have had a similar sparkling clean park in India, I did enjoy street shopping, street food, and tiny benches under banyan trees, all things that could be relegated to 'cute' by Westerners but had deeply calming and reinvigorating influences on my life, especially when I was in college.<br />
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But then the knee jerk reaction was over, and I was struck by a more disturbing realization. This woman is acutely aware of crimes against women in India, and yet, she doesn't seem to register the horrific and inexplicable gun violence in the United States. One day it's a church, the next a school, and then a concert. Lady, innocent children are dying in the middle of class and a hell lot of people think that the answer to that is more guns!<br />
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I'm sure some people on the thread pointed this out to her, to which she replied that she was simply stating an undeniable fact. However, her obvious inclination to state the horrible undeniable facts of one country while completely overlooking the undeniable facts of another country signals to a disturbing pattern amongst Indian expats to cherry pick in a way that justifies their decision to stay in foreign lands at the expense of the reputation of an entire country full of people.<br />
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Now, there are three possible explanations for this.<br />
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The first is that when these people arrived in the United States, they were taken by the obviously better infrastructure, cleanliness and the freedom of being able to start over in a place where nobody knows you. I reluctantly say that this is quite understandable.<br />
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However, I believe that the second explanation is more likely. This explanation revolves around a perpetual need of some Indian expats to paint themselves as lifelong victims of oppressive, regressive and sometimes violent systems. If you read the pieces written by these women (including another piece I commented on a few months ago, which many people read and commented on), one notices that their pieces sound somewhat similar to those written by women who escaped, well, the Taliban or North Korea. Sometimes, they claim to be "immigrants" the same way those illegally crossing the border to flee dangerous homes claim to be "immigrants" (I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few who uses the term "expat.") The gun violence doesn't register to them, because that recognition doesn't benefit their narrative. At the end of each piece, when they stoically leave their beloved families behind or resist tears when making the decision to settle away from their motherland, it is obvious that their language is borrowed from accounts of real victims, which is shameful because if most grad students who come to the US, especially women, come from relatively well-off families, have educated parents, attended private schools and later reputed universities which operate as liberal bubbles, and (I know I am generalizing here, but still) were for the most part insulated from the lack of freedom or violence that they allude to. Don't get me wrong. Obviously, I am one of those women. The only difference is that I don't use my from-a-developing-country status to spin myself a tale of escape and liberation.<br />
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To think of the fact that a few years ago a private conversation between Aamir Khan and his wife, where they talked about leaving India due to safety concerns, became such a heated debate, but there's hundreds of NRIs selling stories of escaping the shackles of India, and even though they are not famous, they do have a voice on the Internet.<br />
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I understand that my comments on this matter might seem inflammatory to some. Some might argue that, well, this woman was just stating her opinion and everybody is entitled to do so. I would counter that by saying that language is very important, and the way many of these pieces are written often don't blame personal problems of a strict family or Indian customs, but of vague, generalized social problems that they can't allude to having much first-hand experience in. In fact, those are the parts where they start to write in more literary and imaginative language because these are not really <i>their </i>problems. So, yes, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and I'm entitled to point out what I consider to be stories and would be happy to debate anybody who would like to challenge me. You see, even though I grew up in the same country these women did, I am capable of constructive debates. I actually prefer it to unnecessarily being a victim. Would you look at that!<br />
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3649766890070547627.post-91376688328258892882018-10-12T02:14:00.000+05:302018-10-12T02:14:52.417+05:30Time and Time Again<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There's been a lot of hype about this new movie that's come out, called 'A Star Is Born.' Initially, I didn't pay much attention to the movie, because we've seen way too many renditions of the same story. But that was before I realized that this is actually the fourth remake of an evolving movie franchise. The first one came out in the 1930s, and there were remakes in the 50s and 70s, and now, our generation got its own version. Perhaps the story of the transient nature of fame ring true as a fundamental reality of life, and the student surpassing the teacher is something that never stops being complicated. The timeless story is getting enough buzz. Maybe there's going to be an acting Oscar for Gaga. Maybe a directing Oscar for Bradley Cooper. All that typical buzz, which seem well-deserved for the people involved in the making of this movie, but today I would like to talk about something outside of the universe of this franchise.</div>
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A video essay I saw on Youtube makes a point about how the character of the male star (played by Bradley Cooper in the most recent version) pointed out that when you put all movies together, it's the evolution of the male lead and female leads in relation to each other that shows how the same story would play out with the passage of time. The first female lead was a headstrong ingenue dreaming of making it big in Hollywood, the second an exceptionally talented young woman to whom fame just happens to by chance, the third a feminist rockstar, and the fourth, played by Lady Gaga, a woman insecure about her ability to 'sell' because of her unconventional looks in a world of Photoshop and 'Most Beautiful' lists and women being open about their imperfections and subsequent insecurities. All timely portrayals of women, but all somewhat politically incorrect for their times. When women were supposed to be subservient, we got the stubborn woman who got to dream. The 70s gave us girl power and Barbara Streisand's rebellious heroine. The 2010s gave us a fragile woman in a time when it's all about 'strong female character' and 'Miss Strong and Independent,' when acknowledging the role of a man in your life is almost taboo.</div>
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But it's the male protagonist's development which is the more politically correct one, and it's surprising how that development is what I found more compelling and thought provoking. Over the years, the male lead's ego seems to have grown less of a factor in his journey. Their growing irrelevance in the entertainment world in contrast to their partner's growing popularity has slowly become less of a factor in their eventual downfall and (spoiler alert) death. The 1930s hero just couldn't bear to be someone's husband and offed himself. The 1950s one was slowly broken by how the world that made him abandoned him in favor of new talent, showing a vulnerability that can't be tied only to masculine pride. The 1970s version was the self-destructive rockstar, and it is in this period when we see that how maybe its not external factors but internal demons that consume him, and his partner is the mere collateral damage in that process. Then we have Bradley Cooper, with his history of mental illness and his inherent goodness and weakness and efforts to fight the monster growing inside him but constantly failing. We now have a man who is not afraid to cry, unreluctant to share his darkest and most vulnerable self, and it is somewhat ironic that he is portrayed by a man that is the stuff of dreams of many women, something that would have been unimaginable in previous decades. This is no rebel without a cause. It is a human being with issues, and to humanize him further, there is an honest effort to heal and overcome, even if in the end, the efforts are in vain.</div>
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So we have the evolving characters, but there is one thing that remains unchanged. It is the bond shared between the man and a woman, and yes, its portrayal evolves with the passage of time, but does it really? You see, when we evaluate interpersonal relationships, we are bound to put them in the cultural context that we live in, but it is our naivety and not our intelligence that tells us that something that is politically incorrect is not real love. In previous generations, parents were not informed by parenting books and just went with the flow. They sometimes hit their kids, more usually boys. They didn't give special thought to the development of their children's self esteem. They may have been less acceepting of their gay kids. Does that necessarily mean they loved their children any less? Similarly, in older times, a lot of men were troubled if their wives had more professional success or power than them. Now, we think of those men as such losers, don't we? They're just the old-fashioned caricatures with their 'toxic masculinity' and 'male ego,' men who would scoff and spit at any talk of mansplaiing and manspreading. But do we stop to think that maybe they loved their partners too, maybe as much as men today? Do we consider that they too, like women, had pressures to be 'the man,' pressures that could be just as crippling as pressures to be 'the woman'? </div>
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Unfortunately, what doesn't evolve in this movie franchise is the ending. The male lead always dies in the end, emblematic of setting the woman free. And yes, Aashiqui 2 was a remake of the original A Star is Born, which is why this ending might feel familiar to you even if you haven't seen any of the movie. I am unsatisfied by this lack of evolution. In fact, I hate it. You see, if mankind in general evolves over time, so do people over the course of one lifetime, and if we weren't okay with a suicide in '13 Reasons Why' we shouldn't be okay with it here. It sounds cheesy when I say this, but I think for this franchise to grow, the next version actually needs a happy ending. You see, we may try to deny it, but a final death, a great sacrifice, these are dramatic gestures romanticized to the point where they don't convey the unfairness of life as much as a mythical dramatic end. But this is a talk about stars being born, and I think the ending needs to reflect the theme of 'life goes on' a little better. Maybe we see more fights, more relapses, more compromises towards the end, but I think this movie should end with the two characters committing to to give their relationship another chance. That is a messy story without a neat ending, and that is what the audience needs to see.</div>
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It's strange, but I think a Bollywood movie, Abhimaan, starring Amitach Bhachchan and Jaya Bachchan did this. It had the same story as A Star Is Born, but it's a lot messier. Amitabh's character is flawed to the point of being hard to like at points, and he goes so far as to have an sort-of affair in the movie. Even in the 21st century, a relationship challenged by an affair is hard to portray because it's ugly, it's messy, it's so goddamn <i>human</i>, and we, people who claim to be practical and sympathizing viewers, can sometimes not digest the inherent betrayal of such a gesture. There is some talk about how this may have been the real life story of the Bachchan couple, who at that point of time, may have struggled with Jaya Bachchan's respect and popularity when Amitabh was still growing as an artist, a gender role reversal difficult to digest at the time, and the alleged infidelties of one of the most respected artists in the industry. Or maybe that's just Bollywood gossip fed to me by my parents. Whatever it is, the movie ends with both Amitabh weakening one last time and in a moment of true humility, in a momoent completely unlike his 'angry young man' persona, genuinely apologizing to his wife and asking for a second chance. And no, his wife isn't the 'strong, independent female' here, refusing to take him back and walking away in slow motion. Instead, she gathers the strength to forgive somebody who loves her but has made mistakes. There's very little that takes the kind of courage that this kind of forgiveness takes, and this is what we need to see on screen the next time we see an ingenue and a megastar and how their roles shift.</div>
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Shreyontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15254019690778821929noreply@blogger.com0