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.
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.
****
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.
****
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.
****
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.
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
On M.G. Road last week – between the long stretch of utility building and barton centre, I was hurrying to get to a dinner I was already 2 hours late for. When I eventually got there, my bag felt heavier – buckling under the weight of my carelessness and what my mother irritatedly calls ‘taking life like a joke’. It was too late to even walk in casually because this was a fancy restaurant – one that can get away with having extremely small tables cramped together on an even smaller terrace. Tall and short glasses were clinking daintily so my bag and I quietly bolted.
Walking back to my bike woefully, angrily, I saw a boy and a girl holding hands and swinging towards me. The girl was wearing a purple sweater – the kind of purple that makes walking on MG road on cold nights seem like it is New York. She stopped next to a two-wheeler and took a peek at the small mirror on the bike’s handle. The boy was holding a Magnolia Bakery cover and looked straight ahead, not even a little interrupted by her detour. They were still holding hands.
When she came up to breathe, she demanded to know why he hadn’t bothered to point out her hair which was all over the place and that she looked like a monkey walking on M.G. fucking Road. He only said no baby, and they walked on.
They were still holding hands.
No scene from any film has had this much mood-lifting spirit.
Found this on twitter and spent half a day reading and rereading it. For as long as I’ve known myself, I have been attracted to freedom, and freer people – even more. It’s why I enjoy teaching. It’s a way of meeting some of the freest people on earth.
When I say freedom, I don’t mean the kind of freedom that results in having your own home. I mean the kind that comes from cultivating a certain life of the mind which results in an unchangingly tough attitude in the face of charming situations and charminger people. A kind of self-assuredness that isn’t scared away by anything. A bigness of the mind, an unreachable, unavailable space for manipulations – other people’s and your own.
This blog was interesting to read because it breaks down large ideas like freedom, and self-hood into small, hold-able sizes.
Through that, I found Allie Brosh’s comic essay on depression which is as decent a read as possible, considering it’s about a subject whose discourse is becoming exhaustingly savarna by the minute. Allie’s approach is funny, gutting, and very much in touch with the fraudulent side there is to depression, its claimants, as also the rest of us who believe we are not depressed but sad.
I’ve been curious about how people remain unsentimental and also experience love and desire by holding on to every inch of their self-respect. This was a good read and I’m now curiouser.
The writer is a dude named Venkatesh Rao. Whoever you are, thanks boss. Yesterday, his work gave me a different set of eyes to see the world with. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see a parrot without thinking of this anymore.
It’s a Saturday today and tomorrow is Sunday. That’s all I know for now. An Instantgram reel I saw this morning broke it down quite simply. Are you more afraid of what’s coming next or that you can’t see what’s coming next? Here’s a thought – can you see your next step? If you can, then just take that. Don’t worry about anything else.
Too much funda on rumlolarum is not allowed. I will now go watch a cat video and feel better.
I wish there were two mornings in a day. In one, I would wake up early to read, in the other I’d wake up early to talk to trees.
In one, I would do yoga, in the other I’d watch a film.
In one, I would write, in the other I’d go for a walk.
I wish there were two mornings in a day. In one I would go back to sleep, in the other, I’d keep sleeping.
Rum Lola Rum 