Postcard from today VII (dedicated to Naziti)

1. Loving this SRK reel where he talks about Saroj Khan whacking his head for complaining that there was too much work. She told him that as an artist he shouldn’t complain when there is work because not having work is a bigger and more real problem.
2. The ability to breathe well is everything.
3. Silence is a reasonable response to women who perform male supremacy. Pointing it out is exhausting.
4. For my sister’s wedding, I wore a red chikankari kurta, the grandest set I own. Guests kept asking me when I was going to get ready.
5. I want to watch Farzi everyday.
6. Law is sexy. Reading it as literature is sexier.
7. I vaguely wondered if I would be taken seriously if I combed my hair more often. Then I told myself to fuck off so I stopped wondering.
8. Wondering is a reliable word.
9. Thinking about long and lazy lunches with women I adore makes me less bitter.
10. Poetry has all the answers.
11. This kept me up last night:

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9:01 am

Sometimes when I am a spoilt brat, I forget to remember that my job isn’t a curation of my bitterness against someone else’s. It is freeing to return to this thought when I think of all the possible ways in which my work and my writing could get stuck in a permanent ode to my own miseries about other people and what they are doing in their worlds.

Sometimes when I am not a spoilt brat, I remember to look at the sun and smile.

Morning loffs

I remember this time when posh girls I used to teach would roll their eyes every time I spoke about Elena Ferrante in class. It made me wonder if I should talk less about the writers I love and more about writers that were dead.

But my way was the only way I knew how to teach which was to take my fears, curiosities, love, and immense love into the classroom with me. It was only after I realised that rolling eyes was their standard response to anything that I learnt to laugh about it.

It taught me that teaching does come from a position of fandom. Franny’s exquisite writing captures this sentiment more efficiently than anything else can. Read her essay here. It’s a testimony to what’s possible when we open our minds a little more and remove ourselves from our heads when we read.

It reminds me that what we do in the classrooms must continue – despite eye rolls, the great shakespearean sighs of boy babies, and general intellectual/political snobbery.

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In other news, fother was reading Udayavani and laughing loudly this morning. It was a news article about a young boy in Patna who went to write an exam and fainted. Why did he faint? He found out that he was the only boy in the exam hall with 500 girls. When he regained consciousness, he had also developed high fever and shivers it seems. Fother, mother, and I sat together on their bed and laughed.

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I must remember to write about the Social Justice Film Festival we organised last week. Watched some super documentaries and now I have a slow itch to make one small kutti video.

Speaking of which, Meta prep is in full swing. My baady is sometimes dying sometimes ok sometimes alive. Last evening we made reels for JAM promos. Just A Minute is fun to watch and now perhaps funner to play. I made only 11 seconds but I laughed a lot.

All my stoods are mad. Reels will be available here.

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Pathan and then some more

1. India’s topmost scientists are representing the country at a science conference in Dubai where the president of India is going to deliver the keynote address. On the way to the conference, the scientists are talking about taking selfies with the president because one of the scientists wants to impress his wife – a woman he’s been married to for 40 years.
2. Mard ko dard hota hai: first time I am watching 2 action heroes sitting and eating pain killers together.
3. Deepika is bottomsupping whiskey like I want to bottomsup her.
4. One paapa sheep is grazing cutely on top of some afghan mountains while John and SRK are doing marvel type stunts over its head.
5. SRK’s face was in my hands when Deepika touched him – his skin felt papery thin. Soft. I was afraid to squeeze. But his veins were throbbing warm (do faces have veins?)
6. SRK’s Adam’s apple is the best apple in the whole world.
7. Deepika Padukone is a queen.
8. Dimple Kapadia’s name in the film is Nandini. I learnt this 2 mins before she died.
9. Putting small pox, 370, and Kashmir together in one line is funny. In one film, too much funny. Chumchumma throwing random words and all. K. Vish’s robots in his short stories do more justice to the feel of somesomethingandall.
10. I still want to know which film SRK was abandoned in as a young child.

Meta 2023

The few people who know me in reel (i.e through face to face/touch to touch type dealings), and the few others who know me in real (i.e here on rumlolarum) will know that every February, I become a romantic at heart and mind and other parts also. This is because since 2013, February is meta season.

Everything that needs to be said about Meta I have said and so have others. There is nothing new to say except come. Not because it is happening but because it is still happening. Through some magic and madness, even if we decided hundred times that we won’t do it this year- it is doing itself.

From META 2015

A few months ago, I was going through old emails from an ID I don’t normally use. I found a couple of emails from someone who disliked me quite a bit. I laughed because it felt good to have been disliked and not known it at all. I might not have laughed if I had known it then. In fact, I might have been sad also. But discovering someone’s dislike for you long after they leave your life is somehow funny. Like finding out years after you’ve left college, that that classmate who never spoke to you actually had a crush on you.

How can someone liking you be similar to someone disliking you? It’s the fact that you were oblivious to it when it was happening.

This person was fairly decent and until I discovered these emails I had no memory of them or of even talking to them. It still felt special though. I thought of all the things I was doing when they were around and for some reason Meta was prominent and this made me happy. To have lived through someone’s utter bitterness for you by remaining absentmindedly unavailable to it is a most thrilling feeling. When it should have mattered, it did not and now it is too late. And to add insult to injury – it has become charming – all bitterness gone, like an awww that unconsciously escapes an oval.

Why am I saying all this? Regardless of who is bitter or who full of love, since the year 2013, this thing called Meta keeps happening. As if it doesn’t care – as if it doesn’t give a fuck about either love or hate. And this is such a super invitation to live no?

For schedule/registrations/dates/details – please go to – metajosephs.in