May 2020 – Page 5 – Sharanya Manivannan

The Venus Flytrap: So Many Stalkers

A random cricket fan went from anonymous to anything but overnight, thanks to zealous people on the Internet who thought that brief footage of her cheering her favourite team on was an invitation to stalk, name and even impersonate her.

I’m willing to buy that the first few who posted wondering who she was were idly curious. We sometimes use social media fairly unthinkingly, sharing what we’re watching, eating or doing. But the aggressive wave that followed was not curiosity. They – first people, then press – ran image searches, stalked her social media, revealed her name and profession and reposted her photos. They felt entitled to know all about her, and then to use her likeness and identity to their own ends. They believed the world shared this right, thereby making their own breach of her privacy acceptable. Objectification is inherently dehumanising; but this went further, conferring celebrity status and professing adoration as veneers for crude behaviour. At its worst, it reinforces the belief that a woman cannot have fun for her own sake; it must be repossessed for male pleasure.

I had a hunch that she would have been forced to lock her Instagram account because of this scrutiny. What I found was worse. There were multiple profiles in her name (which I won’t mention). I clicked on a couple. Each had tens of thousands of followers. Her photos had been stolen and reproduced, and accounts impersonating her had mushroomed. Sickened, I didn’t keep looking for her real profile.

There’s a chance that the woman at the centre of this is enjoying the attention, and may be using it productively. More power to her, if so. One good way to subvert attention, desired or otherwise, is to leverage it. But the moment she begins to, she’ll find herself trolled, and be accused of opportunism. This salivating horde will never allow her to have a personality; she can only be an object of fantasy.

In the best case scenario, she will be thick-skinned, boost her career, raise awareness for whales and abandoned children, and live happily ever after. But this is not just about her. We aren’t only just beginning to work out the ethics of such privacy violations, because we’ve seen them before. A teenage actor winking, a tea seller with eyes the colour of colonial aspiration, a student standing in the background of a Shah Rukh Khan selfie (have you forgotten most of them? Good.). And the most sobering cautionary tale of all: last year’s so-called #PlaneBae.

During #PlaneBae, someone overheard a man and a woman getting to know each other on a flight, live-tweeted their interaction, and got thousands excited about what seemed to be a developing romance. The man was happy to make TV appearances afterward. But the woman had to issue a public statement pleading to be left alone. She had been doxxed and stalked both online and offline. She had neither asked for nor benefited from the situation, and it had come with consequences.

One stalker could be called a creep. But what do you call a crowd of them? And what about when global Internet culture itself cheers along?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 9^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: A Yeti And A Lot Of Internalised Colonialism

Who knows what really made those prints in the snow near Makalu Base Camp, Nepal – the strange, evenly spaced line of tracks that suggest an enormous foot-shaped pogo stick as much as anything else. The Indian army has declared them as belonging to a yeti, an elusive, extinct or perhaps imaginary creature, causing great amusement to many.

But there’s something about the seeming one-leggedness of what made those prints that conjures a more mysterious possibility. Lepcha people traditionally believe that if the corpse of a hunted animal is left in the forest overnight, the deity whom we know (through a series of confabulations) as a yeti would come to revive and retrieve the animal. To prevent this, one foreleg and one hindleg of the creature, on opposing sides, have to be maimed so that it can no longer be reintegrated.

Consider how one of the names of the yeti is “Abominable Snowman”, coined by a British journalist who mistranslated the Sherpa term “metoh” or “man-bear” to mean “filthy”. Not a leap, then, the subsequent popularity of “abominable” – like the rest of us subjects of the empire, primeval and uncivilised. Lepchas call the entity “Chu Mung” (Glacier Spirit), a feared, venerated and altogether meaningful part of their mythology.

So when we laugh at the idea of the yeti, lets be mindful of who we are really laughing at.

What’s missing in all this is the fact that we ourselves are colonisers. In this case: mainland India’s enfolding of peoples, ethoses and regions. They fall under the umbrella of diversity but in actuality suffer various erasures and deficits. So what happens is an interesting recursive colonisation. First, the adaption of imposed Western colonial thought, then the application of this thought onto cultures which themselves have been usurped of power – by cultures which now control the narrative.

I know about the yeti’s importance only from reading (Tintin isn’t enough), and to open my mind to these stories is the respectful thing to do. I have not been to Sikkim, but I’ve experienced the arcane in other places, and know the subtle shift between what I’ve been taught to see and what I can see when I shed that imposition. If it wasn’t for this, I could go to Sikkim and still laugh. Many do.

Internalised colonialism, when conflated with rationality, logic or science, does the work of entrenching both new and old colonialist modes. Not only in the realm of stories, but equally and detrimentally so in medicine, fashion, economics, immigration and more. There’s a difference between working with the consequences of the past – such as, for instance, reading and writing in the language of the oppressor – and allowing those consequences to swell – such as treating as inferior those who are illiterate in it.

This embarrassing gaffe by the Indian army’s social media wing will probably fizzle out with some bland information about what made the tracks. But I like their statement on having released the photos to “excite scientific temper and rekindle interest.” They did, and I read some lovely lore, and learned. Curiosity, after all, is really the opposite of being certain of what you’ll find.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 2^nd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Voyeurs & Vultures

Nobody’s saying a divorce can’t be celebrated – except, that right belongs only to those directly affected, who may feel a sense of liberation or closure. But imagine having hordes of people enjoy the news of your divorce, because they hope you’ll be miserable enough to make art from it. That’s what’s happening to singer-songwriter Adele, whose personal announcement has caused great excitement among many fans. Gleeful reports about how she was spotted entering recording studios, with “sources” saying a heartbreak album is around the corner, add fuel.

Some dug up how she allegedly joked to the press, early in her career, “When I’m happy, I ain’t writing songs. I’m out having a laugh. If I ever get married, it’ll be, ‘Darling, I need a divorce. It’s been three years, I’ve got a record to write’”. As though a carefree statement made when she was both younger and just getting acclimatised to success makes such vulture-like anticipation acceptable.

How does Adele feel about her divorce? The correct answer is: none of our business. Is she going to make beautiful music from it? If she does, let it be for her own catharsis. Let her lock it up and have it be revealed in a hundred years. Because those who think she owes it to them to mine her pain for their pleasure – or as a soundtrack for their own cathartic moments – don’t deserve it. An artist’s only obligation is to honour her own journey, in life and work. The audience is incidental. Honestly, so is the art.

I remembered how disappointed I was in 2005 when Tori Amos, my personal queen of teenage intensity, released a seemingly uninspired (but actually deeply grieving, gently healing) album called The Beekeeper. Like other entitled fans, I thought moving to Cornwall to raise chickens and a child had made her lose her edge.

But so what if she had? Did she not deserve her peace? I understood only once I was on the other side, and felt the exhaustion of being projected upon. A literary author is not a superstar, but in smaller but still prickly ways, dehumanisation happens. It runs the gamut from backhanded compliments like being told at a celebration for a book how someone preferred an earlier one and expected more like it; to disrespect of boundaries because personal interaction was presumed to be an all-access pass; to an ugly experience when readers knew a loved one was dying, and someone still had the malice to send me casual criticism while claiming to usually enjoy the pieces they’d never once dropped an appreciative word for. The equanimity I strive for now is this: knowing both praise and aversion are reflections of the recipient, not the maker.

And you know what? And after all those dramatic years of loving Amos’ dark albums, it’s funny how The Beekeeper is almost the only one I still listen to. And I understand now: it’s not that she had lost her charm, or her edge, back then. It’s that I needed to grow before I could see it, and recognise the grace and fire that had withstood what went into the work.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 28^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Waiting For A Love That May Not Come

Some years ago, a list of 36 questions from a study on intimacy became popular because of an essay on how these questions could make two people fall in love (its writer’s bio at the time said she was “working on a book about the dangers of love stories”). I would’ve liked to try that experiment, just as I would’ve liked to report my findings after serving Come F*** Me Penne à la Vodka, an urban legend aphrodisiac.

But to do either, one needs a willing participant. And those are few and far between.

Interestingly, of those 36 questions, four pertain to death – three of them, to imaginings of one’s own death. Let’s refer to an out-of-syllabus philosophical question: “If you could find out exactly how and when you will die, would you want to know?” Paraphrase it: “If you could find out exactly how and if you will find lasting love, would you want to know?”

Be careful before you say yes, because remember: death is an inevitability, but love is not. Do you know the boarding school horror story about a girl who saw a grotesque image in the mirror after performing an occult ritual meant to reveal her destined beloved? What if you peered into the future and found there was nothing to see? Or something that spins all you believe into disorder?

I’ve had my share of tarot cards turned over. I’ve watched pencils track planetary orbits on paper-charts. I’ve circumambulated shrines wearing garlands that turned to flower dust, as they waited without explanation for the one who did not come. Prosaically: I’ve held my heart open. I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted. I’ve waited. Were they lies or miscalculations, the things that did not transpire? What if someone had told me, at one cusp of questions or another, that they never would?

What if it happens now, at the next onslaught of yearning – that someone will fold my fingers over my fate lines and finally tell me the brutal truth? Would I want to know? Would you?

Or what if the truth was that the route ahead is sinuous; that one day, after long meandering, I’d come upon it, add it to my silvered strands, someone else’s children, the sweet tattoo of the scarlet letter, a bricolage of experience – a life so unlike what anyone expected? How would I choose to fill the years ahead if something was to reveal that the apportionment of time I will have with what I long for will be but a fraction of my life? How would I fill my “nothing”? Or is it better to not know, to hold hope that beyond each turn in the brambled growth is the fulcrum?

So be careful as you consider that question. And move delicately when another person shows you their own longing. Don’t tell them they will certainly find the love that they’re seeking. Don’t tell them it’s their fault that they haven’t. Don’t tell them that you know, because that’s a lie. Some lives fork into unmapped places, and are whole even so – even if, in some slants of starlight, something still tenderly aches.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 18^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Learning To Love

It doesn’t matter, ultimately, what your marksheets say. Some doors will open because of them, others will open in spite of them, and still others will be slammed in your face anyway. So many students, actively having been taught otherwise, crumble under the pressure of having to prove themselves within systems that exclude more than they educate. So it’s refreshing that Kanishak Kataria, the IIT-Mumbai graduate who topped this year’s UPSC civil services final exam, is being discussed so much not for his academic achievement, but for a statement he made to the press when asked about the same. For what seems to be the first time anyone can recall, Kataria thanked not only his family but his girlfriend too for having supported his efforts.

It says so much about us, about the culture we live in, that what should have been an obvious and even casual statement was instead an unprecedented one. Noted activists celebrated it as a challenge to India’s caste-codified and otherwise constricted societies, in which love has neither place nor value. Others also applauded how so simple an acknowledgment proved how relationships, and by extent our general emotional lives, are no hindrance to hard work, or success. This small of note of gratitude delivered a double blow both to many families’ insistence that romance is damaging to studies, and to the profoundly toxic way in which young people are forced to hide their romantic and sexual selves, often to their own detriment.

And for once, it’s a beautiful thing that a woman wasn’t named, but was acknowledged for her role alone. She need not become his spouse, or follow any other trajectory that leads back into a normative model of societal expectations. Through her anonymity (which will hopefully continue, for her sake), Kataria’s girlfriend can be just that: a person whose support made a difference to him at this stage of his career, and because of whose existence we have another reason to talk about the deep linkages between love, caste, gender and social progress at our dining tables and our tuition centres.

As we don’t know her name – and have no right to know it either – she also avoids being identified forever after in reference to this relationship. This is a trap that even highly accomplished women, including human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and actors Meghan Markle and Angelina Jolie, have repeatedly been dragged into, both in the media and in the collective imagination. The anonymous woman who is the girlfriend of the UPSC topper can go on to become anyone; if we ever learn her name, let it be for who else she is, not for whom she is currently dating. And as for Kataria – no matter what he makes of himself in the future, he’s already made a difference now. Not because of his academic ranking, but because he has shown students and their parents that all this is possible, at once: to be in love, to be open with one’s family about romantic relationships, and to respect and acknowledge people while also respecting their privacy, all while aspiring to (and sometimes accomplishing) great things.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 11^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Alebrijes

In 1936, the artist Pedro Linares Lopez fell into a delirium during a high fever in which he saw a group of fantastical creatures in a forest. There was an eagle-headed lion, a rooster with a bull’s horns and a donkey with butterfly wings – all vividly-coloured and striking, and all shouting the same word repeatedly. “Alebrijes! Alebrijes!” When Lopez recovered, he set to work recreating the hybrid creatures he saw using papier-mache and cardboard. He named his statuettes alebrijes. Lopez lived well into old age, and in the 1980s his alebrijes (which had caught the fancy of the Kahlo-Rivera household, among other tastemakers, when he had first made them) came to tourist attention. They began to be produced from copal wood, held sacred in Mexican culture, and alebrijes are now common souvenirs.

I heard of alibrejes in an interview by the TV journalist Jorge Ramos with an author who influenced me greatly, Sandra Cisneros. Both of them are American citizens of Mexican heritage, and Cisneros had a particularly interesting trajectory: she grew up in Chicago in a conservative working-class background, defied familial expectations by rejecting marriage and pursuing literature and travel, discovered that she was profoundly unhappy trying to fit into and study in the white western academic context, and pioneered a linguistic style that mingled languages and connotations, eschewing translation, trusting in the heart’s power to emote and be understood. Following her success, Cisneros tried her luck in Texas, a little closer to her cultural roots. Still not content, she finally moved to Mexico in middle age.

In the interview, Cisneros described both Ramos and herself as being alibrijes, winged and amphibious and capable of understanding and being in many places. It’s one more lovely way to name ourselves: we who don’t truly belong, who know ourselves best in the margins.

Here is me as an alebrijes right now: light-footed, carved of petrified wood; feline in so many ways; winged, sharp-stingered and solitary as a wasp; my halo held up by flimsy but proud horns. By the time you read this, I will be somewhere in my own heartlands, in a place I’d belonged to my whole life before I’d even set a paw in it. And to where I’ve kept returning, pursuing the truth to a point so deep it becomes fiction. And here is the alebrijes who’s been my obsession, the creature because of whom I first gave myself permission to come to these lagoons: a fish with the upper body of a woman, or a woman who is half-piscine. She doesn’t speak; she sings, and weeps. I have heard her. I have listened carefully.

Over my recent visits, I have found others like me: a new kind of diaspora, neither broken into amnesia nor uncomfortable with our discomfort. Perhaps what we have in common, us alebrijes, is that we know we are different. We know our own sharp edges. And we have learnt to thrive by using the friction of ambiguity as polish. Perhaps it’s a lifelong project, but surely it’s possible: to be made of so many contradictory fractions, but to always hold the knowledge that they re-assemble into wholeness.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 4^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Spacewalk That Wasn’t

Every March 8, International Working Women’s Day, institutions and companies around the world participate in activities that celebrate women. While many fail, making it a day about rose-and-chocolate distribution and even gobsmackingly regressive events like beauty contests, some do hit the mark and do something meaningful. Even if it’s just for a day, it still feels powerful to see all-women plane crews, media coverage on gender issues, announcements of long-term equalising strategies and the like. Those that consult their calendars a little too late but want to jump on the bandwagon sometimes aim for Women’s History Month instead. It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems a bit like that’s what happened at NASA. The US space agency announced at the start of the month that the first ever all-women spacewalk, supported by an all-women team on Earth, was to take place on March 29. Only they must have come up with the idea quite soon before that announcement, because they’ve just made another one.

The historic spacewalk won’t happen because, despite some of the most meticulous planning that takes place on this planet or any other, they somehow failed to account for the astronauts’ spacesuit sizing requirements. Given the incredible things that happen to our bodies in space (from growing taller to losing fingernails due to compression), and how carefully these variables are met or made as comfortable as possible, it’s interesting how standard size differences weren’t considered. In the case of something as simple as stocking enough variations more likely to be used by women, who are often smaller, the need simply wasn’t expected to arise.

It gets more awkward. Of the two astronauts selected, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, only one will now be able to execute the spacewalk. Both require a medium size hard upper torso of the spacesuit, and there’s only one available at the International Space Station. Koch will wear the spacesuit for what will now be a routine spacewalk. It’s obviously just an embarrassing lapse of attention on NASA’s part, but it still causes a twinge. Because unfortunately, here on Earth we’re used to power games where there’s room for only one woman on a team, and women are pitted against each other as competitors even otherwise. Routine, for us.

Somehow, the iconic words that Neil Armstrong, first astronaut to walk on the moon, spoke there come to mind. Actually, it’s the misquote that made history that comes to mind: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong told the press that he had actually said “a man”, but the word wasn’t heard or registered. Millions readily accepted that he said something more abstract and vast, but why? The parody account @manwhohasitall explained English’s internalised sexism best with this Tweet: “I’m not hung up on the term ‘spacewoman’ because I know it refers to both women and men.” Tim, age 44, male spacewoman.

This muddle in NASA’s attempt to score woke points during Women’s History Month shows how in certain ways, some people are definitely still stuck in 1969. If “man” is to “person” as “mankind” is to “humankind”, what’s “woman” then? Well – “token”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 28^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Pollachi Crisis

The media shorthand for the situation is “the Pollachi case”, but with possibly hundreds of people directly affected by it, it might be better to call it the Pollachi crisis. A violent scheme in the town, in which women were lured, filmed while being assaulted, then blackmailed, was exposed recently when the brother of a survivor pursued her assailants. The police were alerted upon discovering the videos on their phones. The number of women who have been assaulted is estimated to be as high as 200, partly based on one of the five accused claiming that “99 women” consented to sexual encounters (Did they consent to being recorded? Did they consent without coercion? If not, it’s still assault).

The organised nature of the racket has induced widespread horror, but the reality is that the violation-and-extortion method is not uncommon in the digital era. It happens in less organised ways too, mostly by abusers exploiting the fact that women (and all queer people) have a precarious standing in our society, especially when found to have exerted agency or challenged patriarchal morality. Blackmail cannot happen otherwise. The societal rot goes so deep that photos of a sister of one of the accused were circulated with calls to rape her. Those seemingly outraged by the crimes of this racket actively encouraged further crimes, revealing how little they understand or care for the personhood, autonomy and right to safety (which is completely different from right to protection) of women.

I drew a distinction between victim and survivor, just as I drew a distinction between safety and protection, because the quantum of damage inflicted is almost certainly larger than what we know. Reports say police are reopening investigations into women’s suicides in the region over the past year because there may be a link. Given the entrenched societal misogyny, it’s likely that certain cases within this larger crisis reached such a harrowing conclusion.

It’s equally likely that the families of victims, having internalised that misogyny and thus only able to reach for its lexicon, will use terms like “love failure” or “spoiled her/her life” to explain events. It’s similar to how the original media shorthand for the crisis was not even “Pollachi case” but “Pollachi sex scandal”, as though an affair coming to light and criminal assault can both be described using the same tabloid terminology. The inability to distinguish between violation and sex – an inability that can trickle all the way down to survivors themselves, who may or may not have unlearned misogynistic conditioning – is what allowed this crisis, and others like it, to occur in the first place.

Because ultimately, “the Pollachi crisis” is also a misnomer, for it’s not restricted to Pollachi alone. The crisis in its broadest scope envelopes us all, and makes vividly clear how boasts about South India, or Tamil Nadu, being safe (or comparatively safer) for women are purposefully illusory. If hundreds of women were silenced by just five men, imagine the bigger picture. The façade of safety is maintained through denial and complicity at every level. And define “safety”. Once again, let me remind you that it isn’t the same as “protection”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 21^st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: How Book Piracy Kills Book Culture

This question is on Quora: “Where can I download the book The Queen of Jasmine Country?” As the author of the said novel, I’m uniquely qualified to respond. Not about where to illegally get a free digital copy of my book, but about what happens when you do.

Writers may be creatives, but publishing is a revenue-based corporate industry. Publishers invest in authors (from accepting their submissions to allocating a promotion budget) based on how their work is projected to fare on the market, and then does. If book piracy undercuts profits, it significantly impacts the author’s career, and prospects for future books in its genre.

You may think it’s just one little download – but just like “one vote” or “one plastic straw”, you’re not the only one. Collectively, that’s a lot of lost sales. To be considered a bestseller in India, a literary fiction book in English only needs to sell around 2000 copies. The author makes just 8%-10% on royalties. Once, I bought a box of sweets for former colleagues when I signed a book contract. As I stood at the counter, I calculated that in order to pay for it from my royalties, every single person in that mid-size agency would have to buy a copy. I think three did.

Which brings us to day jobs and side gigs. Here’s the secret: if they don’t come from or marry into wealth, authors in India earn their incomes from something other than their books. Mine is from content writing, ghostwriting and journalism. Tell me: if I’m hustling constantly for paid work, growing disillusioned because making literature is so financially unviable, how am I going to find the time and headspace to write more? It’s a practical question.

Even bestselling commercial fiction writer Durjoy Datta has gone on the record to say, “You cannot expect to pay rent or even the electricity bill with a writing income.” Imagine the situation for lit-fic or poetry.

Libraries and piracy are simply not the same; it’s not classist to oppose the latter. With a library membership, you contribute to and participate in reading culture in a meaningful way, keeping books in circulation, supporting spaces in which they are sacred, and making them accessible in a fair way. Book piracy, on the contrary, has detrimental effects on this culture. It actively limits which books enter the market.

Don’t have a good library close to you? Look harder. Chennai, for instance, has: Madras Literary Society, Connemara Library, Anna Centenary Library, British Council and American Consulate Libraries, Roja Muthiah Research Library – and these are just the major ones. You can also access free online collections, such as Open Library, which work in exactly the same way.

There are only a few cases in which the downloading of illegal e-books is marginally acceptable, such as for prohibitively expensive academic texts, out of print works and banned books. But for a new book available for the price of a designer coffee, and deeply discounted through online retailers? Why would you hurt the author that way? If you want more books by them in future, buy (or borrow) the ones they’ve already written.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 14^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Poppy-High Parrots

Silence isn’t usually associated with parrots. But intelligence is, and in the farmlands of Madhya Pradesh, a wickedly intelligent pandemonium of them have learnt the value of keeping watchfully quiet. They wait until a farmer enters the poppy field and cautiously slits a pod to help it ripen, exposing the latex inside. And then they swoop in, diving right for the opium milk – sometimes tearing the stalk off below the pod so they can fly away and feast. Then they perch somewhere and bite into the pods, holding the stalk in one claw like a kid nibbling at candyfloss. They can’t get enough of the high. One opium expert said the parrots enjoy opium like we enjoy caffeine. Except they crash into branches, lie around dazed and evidently take evolutionary leaps in their desire for the next hit. Parrots that don’t squawk? Stoned, surely.

These parrots are addicted, and are causing severe damage to the livelihood of farmers in the Malwa-Mewar belt, where opium cultivation for medicinal purposes is legal, monitored by the International Narcotics Control Board. But illicit smuggling is a problem, licenses are renewed based on production, and the farmers are struggling, just like farmers all over India. Throw in a frenzy of drug-addled parrots and you can see why the pods are cautiously slit. Not because the flowering plant is delicate, but because it becomes liable to immediate plunder. Nilgais, scorpions and snakes are also common pests in poppy fields, attracted to the opium. But the parrots have the advantage of flight. And obsession.

These marauding parrots call to mind ones from classic literature who enjoyed trickery and entertained themselves by distressing people. It’s easy to imagine some of them drug-intoxicated. Take the raunchy one from this poem, translated by Martha Ann Selby, from the medieval Sanskrit anthology Subhasitaratnakosa: “At daybreak, / when the parrot / was bent on mimicking / her cries of passion / in front of her elders, / the doe-eyed girl, / embarrassed, / drowned it out / by jangling / her stacks of bangles, / clapping / as if to make / the children dance in play.” I must confess I was amused when I first saw videos of them guzzling opium. I wondered: how did they escape with their loot without it falling out of their beaks during a triumphant cackle, like a bird in a cautionary folktale?

But this was ignorant. Not long ago, I was upset by a photograph of the corpses of poisoned peacocks – only to learn that they are actually pests in paddy fields. In these cases, parrots and peacocks are to the farmer what pigeons and mosquitoes are to us in cities. For me to find the thought of junkie parrots hilarious was only a few steps removed from those who snatch beloved creatures away from indigenous minorities in the name of animal rights. For us humans who do not really co-exist with undomesticated wildlife in our ordinary lives, our views on fauna will always be lacking. We could learn from those clever parrots, maybe – how to be quiet (and listen) when all we’ve known to do is talk, talk, talk.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 7^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Premonitions Bureau

In 1967, John Barker (a psychiatrist drawn to the occult), a science journalist and a newspaper editor set up what they called The Premonitions Bureau in the UK. The Bureau logged data from people who reported on dreams, physical sensations and other portents which accompanied a sense of knowing (always, notably, of calamity to come). Rather than relegate these findings as symptoms of psychosis that required treatment, the Bureau hoped to understand the phenomenon, and perhaps to use it to prevent disasters. Two of the most accurate percipients, who had between them predicted a plane crash, a major landslide and a shipwreck, among other tragedies, also both repeatedly shared warnings with Barker that his life was in danger. He died of a sudden illness soon after.

Reading a lengthy article on these events, I found myself interested only in two things: Barker’s work in reforming mental health facilities in the UK, and the fact that the Bureau was set up in a field that typically views the paranormal with not just suspicion but condescension.

As for visions, precognition, multisensory awareness? Neither new, nor restricted only to a gifted or cursed few (a vital distinction that redistributes power; important especially in our context with its fraudulent masters). What’s interesting is that Barker sought to reframe them in modern Western psychology, a project which held potential in decolonising the field.

The view that anything that cannot be explained by rationalism (or in shorthand, “science”) is non-existent, or that everything can be explained by the same, is deeply problematic. Those who expand and decolonise healing practices incorporate the work of shamans, doulas and many other therapists into the fold. The metaphysical has a place here, and the Cartesian mind-body divide is refuted. Do vaccines work? Yes. Does acupuncture work? Yes.

The derision of indigenous knowledges exists in many fields. Medicine, for example: many allopathic practitioners, even here in India where systems like Siddha, Unani and Ayurveda exist, tell patients to engage with “alternative” therapies at their own risk. The vocabulary itself reveals the problem – alternative to what? Queerness used to be described that way too, as an “alternative lifestyle”. Alternative, basically, to what’s acceptable.

Decolonising mental and physical health practices is not the replacement of systems (which is erasure, and counterproductive), but concurrent appreciation. The idea is not that any one is inherently better than another, but that they co-exist. And that the correct balance is deeply subjective, varying from person to person, ailment to ailment and situation to situation. Someone I know corrected a common illness we both have using only yoga; I on the other hand prefer to pop a daily pill, and probably will for the rest of my life. But I chose to treat another condition with herbal medicine alone (it worked), instead of a three-month allopathic course I didn’t want the side-effects of. The point is not to privilege one system or another, but to recognise them all as valuable. And human knowledge, both learned and intuitive, as vast. Capitalist pharmaceuticals, flawed education systems and internalised colonialism keep us from tapping into – and healing through – more ways that can quite beautifully be reconciled.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 28^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: You Must Not Forget This Story

I wonder how many languages will die in the months to come, during the year which the UN has designated as the “International Year of Indigenous Languages”. Most of us will never know of some of them. Perhaps we’ll hear of them later, for the first and last time, in a news item announcing the loss. Or a stray phrase or word will drift to us, Romanised. We won’t know how to pronounce it but will treat it like a window into a perished world (like this: itek eoirapnene; later, I’ll tell you what I’m told it means). And every language, every dialect really, is a world of its own – with a worldview that is intimately tied to the words that describe the speaker’s experience of that world. February 21, observed annually as International Mother Language Day, is a fine time to reflect on this.

Languages seldom die organically, even if it seems as though the demise of the last speakers is the reason. The erasure begins far earlier. Centuries ago, with Western colonisation. In more recent decades, with globalisation and capitalism and the ways in which the hungry mainstream always pushes the so-called fringe further and further beyond the margins. And still, and ongoing, with all kinds of cultural impositions, some so subtle they are unfelt except once their changes have become entrenched. According to the UN, 43% of the approximately 6000 living languages in the world are endangered, and a language disappears every two weeks, “taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage”.

“Untranslatable” words are among the most popular cerebral memes, and geeks everyone have become familiar with the poetic mangata (Swedish: the path-like reflection of the moon on the water), the now ubiquitous hygge (Danish: a cosy contentment) and even the gorgeous mamihlapinatapei (Yaghan: an unspoken moment between two people, neither of whom may act on what’s between them). But the words are not necessarily untranslatable, as their descriptions prove. Only their brevity doesn’t transfer. The listicles thus allude to something else, an intangible interplay of knowledge and loss. Perhaps it comes from the awareness that a thing exists but can only be experienced out of context, for the world it arises from isn’t a world one has the vocabulary to imagine.

Literally. This is why the widely-held idea that Inuits have one hundred words for snow persists, when the reality is that their languages are structured polysynthetically, and what we think of as an English sentence may be one long word. To satirise this, someone named Phil James made a convincing list, with some red herrings – “warintla: snow used to make Eskimo daiquiris” and “depptla: a small snowball, preserved in Lucite, that had been handled by Johnny Depp” should have tipped anyone off. Still, these un-dictionary definitions even find themselves onto baby name websites.

And finally, itek eoirapnene. These are Ainu words, meaning “You must not forget this story”. The Ainus have an ancient Japanese culture I only learnt of while reading on vanishing languages and the worlds they sustain. This is as far into their language as I may ever go. But that message is worth carrying forward.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 21^st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Strawberries In The Salt Sea

So the meerkats at the El Paso Zoo love crunching on cockroaches, and the zoo’s Valentine’s Day fundraiser has them snacking on lots of them. So many, in fact, that it seems like the zookeepers feared the meerkats were going to have a roach overdose and decided several more species could enjoy the treat. Now, cotton top tamarins, golden tamarins, white-headed marmosets, rhinoceros hornbills and northern tree shrews also get to partake of the pests. The reason? The zoo’s donation drive, called “Quit Bugging Me!!!” (all exclamation points deliberate – and probably appropriate), lets people name a cockroach after an ex, before it’s fed to another creature. And since there’s a webcam livestream for the meerkats, participants can even watch the devouring. Catharsis via cockroach proxy. Other zoos, including the Hemsley Conservation Center, UK, and the Bronx and Boise Zoos, USA, are doing the same. Meanwhile, the Sydney Zoo is offering to name a snake after an ex for just $1. But those snakes are staying alive.

Petty? Valentine’s Day is an occasion that inspires a range of reactions in the unpartnered: from a melancholic twinge to righteous rage. Indifference is the ideal, but it isn’t possible every year. As much depends on what you see around you as how your heartscape feels. Of course, the truth is this: every day is Valentine’s Day for those deeply in love and those who are deeply lonely.

If you’re in the latter category, but aren’t feeling bloodlust this year, there’s a better sight worth pondering on. A striking photograph was shared online from Ventura Beach, California, in which strawberries lay scattered on the coast at low tide, with hills on the horizon and a blue afterglow in the atmosphere. Strawberries, heart-shaped and show-stoppingly crimson, are widely regarded as an aphrodisiac. Still on the twig, in this photograph they appear at first glance to be red roses on long stems, the green calyxes seeming like plant sepals, the fruit like blossoms.

But as beautiful as they are, these shore-strewn strawberries are not edible. Neither is their presence miraculous, for all that happened is that storm water washed the fruits out of the farms they were being cultivated in, close to the beach. They mingled with effluents in the drainage before being flushed out to sea. Then, the tide brought them in, salted. They are not meant for our mouths, but they are pretty on the eye.

There’s a Scottish folksong, recorded by Sandy Denny as “The False Bride” and by other singers under different titles, that describes this scene almost eerily. In the song, the lover has wed another and the abandoned one must somehow perform joy at the ceremony. The lyrics contain this mysterious verse: “All men in yon forest they asked of me, / ‘How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?’/ And I answered them with a tear in my e’e, / ‘How many ships sail in the forest?’” Those toxic strawberries that seem out of a dream remind me, to quote another line from this song, to bid “Adieu to false loves forever”. And keep my eyes open for other, truer, fish in the sea.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 14^th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.