According to the internet, a whole shelf of creative writing books quote Toni Morrison as having said or written, “All art is knowing when to stop”. I couldn’t verify whether the late author was the source, but suffice to say: someone wisely said this, and it is wise as well to heed the advice. 

The news that Sex and the City – the groundbreaking television series that had a vast, and arguably international, influence on sociocultural developments – will be returning for an encore was what brought this to mind. The original series ended sixteen years ago, a long time given the pace of the world in the interim. It was followed up by two films, and the second one, at least, was an extreme disappointment (some feel this way about the first, too). So this new revival series, slated for ten episodes and entitled And Just Like That…, takes several risks just by being attempted. The most kamikaze of them all is that it will not feature the show’s strongest character, the vivacious and lovable Samantha.

The reason why is that, unlike everyone else involved in this production, the actor who played her – Kim Cattrall – knew when to quit. In fact, Cattrall has given various exasperated interviews in the past about how she felt bullied into doing more work within the Sex and the City franchise, becoming increasingly firm and vocal about her stance in recent years. She has also made no secret of her poor relationship with the show’s lead star and executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker, which contributed to her not wanting to reprise her role, going as far as calling her colleague out on social media. But most importantly, she has been quoted saying, “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself.” In this regard, Cattrall shares some core similarities to the iconic character she essayed. Joy and pleasure are pivotal; self-assertion is a must.

Those are among the fine takeaways that anyone who watched the original series already has, so what will this revival accomplish? There are a hundred shows out there now that play with the same themes, and suit current tastes. Sex onscreen barely elicits a blink anymore. Neither does talking about it. Those hundred shows owe something to the original Sex and the City, and are arguably a part of its legacy. But as for And Just Like That…, just how edgy or interesting can a programme about three privileged white women in New York City be in 2021, really?

There is one twist, though: it will be a show about women in their 50s, aging women, and perhaps we still don’t have enough of those. On the one hand, there’s no better case against the axiom that one should quit while ahead than a project that challenges how women are forced into retirement (whether from employment, or from exploration or enjoyment of any kind) by societal expectations. But the chasm between a high note and a has-been is perilous in the world of entertainment and art. Can they brave it without Samantha: the oldest, wisest, warmest of them all?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 19^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

In the year that the kurinji last bloomed most profusely, I waited in this coastal city for my body to stop bleeding so that I could travel to the hills to see the flowers. My body, imbalanced, did not stop in time. The summer slipped away in illness and sorrow, and even by the season’s tail – when just enough flowers remained like a whispered rumour – something else kept me away.

One morning in the last gasp of December, I woke to the calculation of how much time had passed since, counting to the next season when purple petals will unfurl in the hill, a revelation. Only nine and a half years to go.

I had read that a kurinji inflorescence occurred in 2020 too, little-documented because people were not yet cavalier about travel then. There are different cycles because of different times in which the plants took seed, and because of other vicissitudes of the natural world. Perhaps the next chance to see them is closer still, but what feels like chance is often only a sum of circumstances. 

More than one person told me back in 2018 that they were pessimistic about whether the flowers will bloom again in 2030. But we don’t know, do we, if we will even be here on this planet then? Or what this planet will be, after our extinction. Remember the phrase “nature is healing”, that so quickly became a caption for hoaxes and humour? I can believe the kurinjipoo will still be here, even when our footprints no longer make paths in the dirt to see it, to capture its image, then to show ourselves to the world through that image. It’s easier to believe in a flower than in human wisdom sometimes.

Extinction is not an auspicious idea to break a new year open with, perhaps. Let us say finiteness then. The finiteness of a calendar year, a month in which only one moon-bleed should come unless the tides of body and world are out of sync, a single day. How will I fill this finite year, taking into it the lessons of the last one – a year even non-believers felt was cursed, and all who experienced it were forced to take in small increments. Did you, like me, keep lists? I found one from March or April, headed: “What I will do in the next 21 days of lockdown”. Many of us would not have survived if we’d known how long the winter was to be. Many didn’t.

I am 35 years old. I have seen neither the kurinji nor snow. What do I know of any seasons but the ones my body has clocked?So here we are at the start of a year that feels less like a fresh page and more like wiping off the debris on a windowpane and daring to look at the horizon again. Here’s what I know: if I focus on life hour after hour and week by week, working sedulously with what is at hand, that’s enough. What is beyond will still arrive in radiant glimpses, even if its blossoming is still a long, abstract time away.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 7^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Deepa Mehta’s celluloid adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy has had a truly rocky run: from pre-release controversy over its casting and language issues as well as its political moorings, to poor international reviews and now the loss of its status as a foreign language Oscar entry. In November, I had a negative experience as a token consultant on this movie, and wrote about it at length on Medium. While that experience made me disengage from the film and its attendant discourse, there was one aspect of the hullabaloo that I kept contemplating. How does an artistic project get made without anyone involved flagging its problems while it’s under process? Without condoning the bad choices made in the production and release of this movie, and in no way absolving those who made such choices, I felt that there were some lessons therein – from a creative angle.

When one of its actors posted an objectionable Tweet, likening the film’s critics to trolls who haven’t created anything of their own, I saw a glimmer of significance in that sentiment that made me pause. She was wrong, and in a racist way, about the detractors in this case being trolls. She was not wrong, on a more general level, about there being aspects to artistic creation that only those who have done it can understand.

For example: when I write about books now, as the author of six of them, I approach the texts quite differently than how I did much earlier in my career. Thinking back, I recognise that ignorance and inexperience made me unduly harsh then. It’s not that experience makes one’s standards lenient. Rather, the standards themselves become more thoughtful, realistic and worthy as one’s capability increases. Opinion is not the same as critical appreciation or analysis, and consumption alone does not translate to the ability to meaningfully engage, a nuance lost in a world of one-click ratings.

That’s on the criticism side; as creators, we can adjust our approaches too. Artists, across genres, are always at risk of not being able to see beyond our passion, self-belief (which may cross the line into egotism) and insecurity. This results in thin skin and defensiveness.

Here are some of the measures I’ve been using, to build shock absorption into my creation and release processes. They are a combination of professional due diligence and self-care practices: finding beta readers beyond known circles; requesting accuracy/sensitivity reviews of work-in-progress; avoiding checking post-publication reviews on shopping/books websites; not having notifications for my name or my titles; incorporating disclaimers and uncertainty into the work; getting better at discerning who comes in good faith and who doesn’t; and very importantly, trying to be conscious and self-forgiving (not self-justifying) about the choice to put something out there knowing it can either be skewed or that I could have been mistaken. These make the process more inconvenient, but letting go of the output becomes healthier.

Humility, not hubris, is the key – both for creators and for critics. We are all only working with the skills we have at any given point of time; this knowledge itself goes a long way towards gaining more.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 31^st 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

For everyone in India, the end of this year, just like the end of the previous one, brings another new question on the notion of belonging. Last December, the Citizenship Amendment Act passed, inspiring significant protests, including the iconic Shaheen Bagh peaceful sit-in which was dismantled when the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown began in March of this year. The notion of belonging addressed then was about nationality, about paperwork or its absence that could render a person either enfranchised or stateless. Now, another question on belonging arises through the passage of Uttar Pradesh’s Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, known popularly as one of the ‘love jihad’ laws. Madhya Pradesh intends to follow suit, with its paradoxically named Freedom of Religion Bill 2020. Karnataka is considering similar legislation. The question of belonging that these concerns is this: who does a woman belong to? Its base is the belief that a woman cannot belong to herself.

The ‘love jihad’ laws, even in their terminology, appear to criminalise one religious community. But in the fortnight since U.P. passed theirs, the most reported of their seven (and counting) cases reveals another target. The first woman to be held under the law was a 22-year old of Hindu background who is married to a Muslim man. She was arrested upon a complaint lodged by her mother. The woman says that she was administered injections that forced a miscarriage in custody. Officials deny her story.

The very concept of ‘love jihad’ is based on the idea that Muslim men with nefarious intentions use marriage to forcibly convert Hindu women. It negates any agency on a woman’s part. She is property, and the owners of that property (family in collusion with public authority, or vice versa) do not wish to transfer that property to a man they disapprove of. Forget the law for a moment and look at the sentiment that undergirds it: an adult woman belongs to her parents, the nation-state and her husband; her personhood and body are not her own; her human rights can be suspended if she acts autonomously. 

This week in Bihar, something like an episode out of the Mahabharata happened: a man allegedly gambled away his wife in a game. His friends sexually assaulted her; he also attacked her with acid. We can be wilfully impervious and say this was a twisted anomaly. Or we can acknowledge that such atrocities don’t happen in a vacuum. He believed he owned her. It’s this fundamental belief that plays out across a spectrum of oppressive/abusive behaviours and societal norms, culminating in legislation that sanctions the same.

Whenever a cruel new law is brought into force, many people express shock. But legal passage takes time, and cannot happen unseen in a democracy. Democracies also become non-democratic through the assent of citizens, who pay no attention to emerging changes, then feel as horrified as if the ground shifted beneath their feet. Then, they accept the status quo – and are shocked once more by the next ethical earthquake. But all this was warned of years ago, and more dire warnings hang in the air. Are we listening to what’s coming next?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 19^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Whether you’re the kind of person who doesn’t keep avid track of the figures, or the kind who types “coronavirus Chennai” daily into search engines to see the latest ones, you probably know – the official case numbers have been falling steadily in the city. But this is not yet cause for celebration, as dire second waves in various parts of the world should show us. It is now, when the caseload is within a bracket that feels manageable (“feels” is very subjective: I mean manageable only from a general public perception, not from the perception of frontline workers, for example), that we must exert the most care.

Like all who diligently wear masks when heading out, I’ve heard plenty of arrogant statements from people who refuse to, or who have taken no effort to cut down on non-essential activities. Boasts: “I would have had it already, since I’ve been out and about everywhere without a mask since March”. Insensitive remarks: “Most people survive, and everyone I know who’s had it said it was mild,” or, “Look, if it’s your fate to get it, you will.” Whines: “I’ve been cooped up, and I deserve to enjoy an evening out.” There’s also what some have termed “COVID bullying” – peer pressure, including taunts, to resume social activities.

The world is over a year into this pandemic, and we all know the basic etiquette around it, yet too many wilfully insist on flouting the same. The refusal to wear masks even on request should be a punishable offence at this time. Moreover, it’s alarming how some have been holidaying, holding non-essential gatherings and more. Those doing such things for fun, because they miss aspects of their lifestyle and feel entitled to them, are not the same as those venturing out for necessities. A need like getting a computer fixed is nothing like a craving to hang out in a café. No one should feel emboldened about carrying on as we were pre-pandemic.

Sometimes, after I’ve ventured out, I’m assailed by feelings of shock at how restrictive my year has been and how much I long for normalcy, and various shades of anger, fear and sorrow. It is my guess that these unpleasant emotions are rife in the population. They would only be natural effects of the challenges we are facing, collectively and individually. Yet, some individuals – enough individuals as to form a mass – respond to this complexity through inconsiderate behaviour. 

Every place in the world that has managed the pandemic well has done so through public cooperation and common sense, not denial and discourteousness.

It’s important to remember how this pandemic came to India: through international travellers. Then, in the early months when the privileged stayed indoors and learned how to whip dalgona coffee, it spread among those who had no choice but to head out. A series of decisions on administrative, organisational and societal levels further proliferated it. If we experience a second wave, it will come through irresponsible choices. All around us, people are making them. Let’s not give in to the pressure to do the same. Next year promises to be better only if we don’t.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 15^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Amidst all the PTSD we’re going to have, this may also be remembered as the year when cringe-TV – any series that everyone claims to hate, but everyone also devours compulsively – finally got its due for what it is. Escapism. I’ve found myself quite enjoying shows I would earlier have considered badly-written, boring or even upsetting, in the way that glimpses into lives one cannot have can sometimes be. But what is it to me who got to jetset off to where, when no one really lives the way they used to anymore? Right now, reality TV of the non-gaming variety has been just frivolous enough to take the edge off, well, reality.

The latest series I watched was about four very ordinary but very privileged women, second-tier Bollywood personalities. Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives is essentially a platform-raising gimmick for its principal cast, right down to a clearly staged stalker storyline, which I won’t spoil for your own cringe-binge viewing. It was totally vapid – so of course, I watched all of it. 

But the show was so overly-curated (not necessarily scripted, just that there was an obvious unspoken code between the cast that they would get along, steer clear of touchy subjects and so on – which is, in its way, commendable) that not once but twice did a villain have to be thrown into the mix. That villain was its executive producer, Karan Johar. First, he instigated a fight at a restaurant by urging the women to nitpick each others’ flaws, flaws that they had clearly agreed off-camera to keep that way. Then, he gatecrashed their holiday, gathered them around, and threw trollish questions their way. He called them pre-menopausal, as though this natural process is something negative, and unemployed, as though their fashion and jewellery design lines didn’t exist. This time, they laughed off his sexism. Johar’s appearances were evident attempts to stir drama into the decorum. In that way, he turned out to be the show’s most recognisable character.

We may not be dripping diamonds and chillaxing at resorts, but we all know a K-Jo or two. There’s a thorough moral ambiguity to them, and they often appear to be on friendly terms with everyone. Which is to say: they are frenemies to all. They pocket relevant information to spring at the right moment, are often charming without being sweet, and thrive on unpredictability even if they appear to lack mystery. Unlike the self-absorbed, who may annoy in similar ways but aren’t trickster-like at the core, they are constantly observing everyone. Unlike those who hate themselves so much that only someone else’s strife can give them a feeling of triumph, they are only after mild amusement. The boat, or the yacht shall we say, never gets rocked badly enough that anyone is really scathed.

And so their noses and meddling fingers stay in our lives, and we figure out a way to be at least partially as amused by them as they are by us. Though once in a while, for the sake of our own peace, we must ask ourselves a slightly trollish question too: does the Devil really need another advocate?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 3^rd 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

When I lift my chin, slightly westward, from where I sit working, I see a handmade sign. It speaks to me now, in this time that often feels like being on a catamaran on the wide open blueness with no land in sight. The poster was made crudely and quickly because the words on it, decontextualized from Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, are all that matter.  “If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else is coming.” The original text ends on “was coming”, but the words I want to look at every day do not. That one tweak brings a sense of honest futility to the line. I need it, because self-valour cannot help me any more than sorrow can. 

“No one is coming,” a close friend who resurrected her life this year also said once, about herself. It is true for me too, and maybe even for you.

Vuong is not a poet from some previous century. He is young, feted, and uses Instagram. There, he took the time to respond at length, on the Story feature, to a query about using metaphors in poetry. Except, he may have gotten metaphors and similes somewhat confused. This resulted in a slew of disproportionately antagonistic posts about him on Twitter, a platform he doesn’t even use.

There, the poet Phillip B Williams candidly pointed out the covert reasons for this furore: “No one yet has been brave enough to say ‘I am sick of hearing Ocean’s name, reading his poems, seeing him win shit, and reading his quotes everywhere.’ Because that, my friends, is called being mean. So you hide it behind posts about craft or fairness or whatever.”

Envy and entitlement driving the belief that one has the moral or professional higher ground is more common than you’d think. It happens all the time, and cowardly attackers push others into casting stones as well. Their joy in bringing someone else down will invariably be short-lived, however. What they truly want is to have attention, and unable to create anything of value that draws it to them, they manufacture a spectacle instead.

To quote from the novelist Alexander Chee’s post: “I keep thinking about how in a year Ocean is going to get asked for a blurb by the people who did this metaphor crap.” When it suits the spectacle-starters to ingratiate themselves, they always do. When condemnation magnetises more mileage, they do that instead.

The attacks on Vuong caught my eye not only because I use his words daily to corral my broken heart into a shape I can live with. I noticed and kept thinking about them because they were the perfect example of a scarcity of goodwill in human engagements, both with those personally known and those recognised only by name or work.

Life may be arbitrarily cruel, but people are not. We get to choose malice or kindness, over and over. It says so much that somehow, the same knowledge settles into so many: that there’s no one coming, no one else in the world, as populous and polyphonic as it is.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 26^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

“Mary On The Green” was a ten-year-long fundraising campaign for a memorial to the influential 18^th century feminist theorist Mary Wollstonecraft to be erected in London’s Newington Green. It came to a dramatic conclusion with the unveiling of a statue earlier this month, which has had a divided public reception. Created by the artist Maggi Hambling, the statue is for Wollstonecraft, not of Wollstonecraft, and features an “everywoman” figure. It is a relatively tiny figure, emerging out of a surge that some interpret as a “a swirling mingle of female forms”. It is naked, slender and toned, with a physique that adheres to non-inclusive beauty standards. Except for, well, luxurious pubic hair. Its visual politics aside, it’s also strangely lacklustre for all the collective energy that went into it.

Beholding or consuming art is subjective, but I’m with the chorus who finds this work uninspiring. 

However, most of this chorus has only just been introduced to this work – although as a publicly-funded campaign, there were democratic involvements in its processes. Most significantly, the final shortlist before the commission was awarded had come down to Hambling and to another artist, who according to historian Dr. Fern Riddell on Twitter happens to be a man. That a man should create this homage to Wollstonecraft was shot down by public opinion.

Except, Dr. Riddell shared images of the two finalist works side-by-side, and… You’d have to be quite wilful about refusing to admit the advantages of the one designed by a man, to prefer Hambling’s trophy-like sculpture. The other one was both aesthetically attractive as well as functional. It even had curved bench space that could allow a person to sit within the work of art, and perhaps hold a meaningful conversation (with the statue, as one does with the sea or with a tree, or with another person). Of course, I know these are lofty ideas – drunks would have passed out on those benches, troublemakers would have graffiti-ed it, pigeons would inevitably have showered their insults all over it too. Maybe, if not almost definitely, some people would have had sex on it too (in the tradition of Wollstonecraft’s daughter, of course, who was the author Mary Shelley. She is widely believed to have hooked up on her mother’s grave with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley). 

Overall, that tasteful and overruled sculpture was a rendition with pleasing possibilities. There’s an interesting lesson here on the dangers of over-democratising art, even as the broader public discourse is very heatedly still on questions of representation, appropriation and more.

Amidst creating new work of my own, I’ve been mired in such anxieties, second-guessing, seeking opinion, learning, questioning, withdrawing in worry and more. Then, I had a different, personal glimpse into how a renowned artist had relied only on trusted collaborators who had somehow failed to convey pressing issues, resulting in controversy.

I’ve arrived at the conclusion that well-considered art comes together neither by consensus nor by sovereign choice-making. There’s an interwoven listening stage, gathering inputs. Then, there’s doing what one’s heart tells one to, respectfully and with acknowledgement that one only knows what one knows. Finally, there’s the letting go.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 19^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Kamala Harris’ ascent to the White House makes me feel represented. No, I’m not talking about her being of partial Indian heritage – as too many have, obnoxiously, usually erasing her Blackness while asserting their caste pride. I’m not even talking about her being a woman, because feminism has evolved to a point where representation isn’t quite so simple, and we must consider her record and role as an American politician foremost. All that said, I identify for an unsophisticated reason: Harris has a big laugh, and bursts into peals of it frequently. So do I.

There are whole video compilations online of her laughing, sourced from footage from over the years. I’m hardly the only one to notice and be attracted to her mirth. I could watch that laugh all day. She seems to do it everywhere, even right into mics in front of her, which amplify that glorious, open-throated cackle. She doesn’t cover her mouth when she does, or apologise for it. She laughs lavishly.

To have women laughing, without inhibition and often, is still noteworthy. Our laughter ripples the fabric of any setting – a society, a workplace, or a seat of power – where certain subtle rules and controls are in force. Decorum is a smokescreen.

I’ve written in this column before about being requested to laugh quietly while in a (not even fancy) restaurant, which was promptly exited and boycotted henceforth. People are not comfortable with women who take up space in any way – even with the intangibility of our voices, whether that’s in a big laugh or a screaming orgasm or even a quietly but firmly delivered argument. In the last of these, noise pollution is not even an excuse, and that says it all.

Laughter isn’t just an expression of enjoyment. It can be used to convey unkindness, be a sardonic expression of bitterness, signify nervousness, or simply be the body physically relieving emotional stress or tension. There appears to be joy in the kind of laughter Kamala Harris has so often been captured collapsing into, the kind of laughter I collapse into. But it’s more than that.

I’m trying to explain this without projecting onto Harris, who is ultimately a public figure with a track record that some admire and others are suspicious of, and who like anyone entrusted with power must be held to a high standard. But the reason why her laughter makes me feel good is something like this: I weep torrents and thunderstorms. I don’t dismiss my anger, although I am learning the art of slowing down reaction. I have the work drive of a honeybee. When I laugh out loud it isn’t always because I am in such abundant euphoria or have so little concern for public courtesy. It isn’t because I lose myself or my manners. No, it’s just that – like my sorrow, my fury or my work, I inhabit my laughter completely. A loud laugh implies: “It’s not only my laughter that is irrepressible”. Perhaps that’s not a good trait in a politician, elected to serve. But it’s a wonderful trait in the rest of us, especially the (extra)ordinary women of this world.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 14^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The actor Vijay Sethupathi has withdrawn from a film on the cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan due to online pressure, which included a rape threat being made against the former’s child. When the possibility of criminal prosecution arose, an apology video allegedly by the troll was published on a news platform. He claims to have been overcome by anger related to job loss, calls the child he threatened his little sister, and ropes in his mother to plead his innocence. It is not yet verified whether the people in the video are who they say they are.

The channel that had broadcast it showed blurred screenshots of the offensive tweets, and that’s when I noticed that the fake profile used a display photo of another Kollywood actor. I’ve seen his face in many DPs. You see, a malicious person once distributed my phone number in a fan group of his. 

Let’s talk about anger, since the man in the video seems to think the emotion justifies the action and the threat. I still boil with rage when I think of that situation, only the least of which was the number sharing. It was part of a larger scenario which emotionally scarred me in ways I’m unlikely to ever fully heal from. No one who was involved ever apologised; the closest was when a woman who defended my harasser begged me not to post his identity online, because that could ruin his chances on the matrimonial market. I didn’t not for him, but for her.

Where do I put my anger? None of us is perfect, and all of us are wounded. We have volcanic pain within us, and we become inflamed when its memory surfaces. But anger is not the primary emotion. “The anger tells me something important about me, and about how I am out of balance. But beneath that, the love is helping me to move beneath the anger to sit with my basic woundedness, the basic heartbreak, and that’s real complex,” Lama Rod Owens, spiritual teacher and author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, says in a video clip.

I can’t speak for the inner work the troll with the anonymous apology is still capable of doing or otherwise; we only know that he’s sorry he got caught. Inner work is a choice, one that drags us into harrowing places. Not everyone makes it, by which I mean both the choice and the meaningful culmination of the work.

Someone I cherished suddenly ended their friendship with me this year because they were angry that I was in strong spirits despite personal challenges – this is not inference, but literally what they told me. Their choice was to not explore what truly pained them in their own life, but to find a projection screen and punching bag instead.

Leaning into the heartbreak beneath my anger in myriad situations is teaching me much about why people turn abusive, across contexts. We are all powerless against Life, but the exercise of self-reflection can in turn become tiny pockets of agency, determining so much about our experience, and how we impact the experiences of others.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 2^nd 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Outside a New York City courthouse now stands a sculpture by Luciano Garbati, depicting the mythical Medusa, who was cursed with a gaze that turns all who look into her eyes into stone. In this rendering, she holds the decapitated head of the demigod Perseus in one hand and a sword, tip pointed at the earth, in the other. It is intended to subvert the classical story, in which Perseus beheaded her.

Like any myth worth its salt, there is more than one Medusa tale. Each is no less true than the other; all depends on who is doing the telling, and who is doing the listening. We know her largely because of Greco-Roman mythology, but according to the 5^th century historian Herodotus, she was absorbed into their mindscapes from the Berber traditions of North Africa, where the snakes rooted and alive in her scalp were sacred. The goddess in some cultures became a monster in others.

It is not only because of the relationship to stone that Medusa’s story is like Ahalya’s, of the various Ramayanas. In the version we are mostly familiar with, via the poet Ovid, Medusa was a priestess of Athena. She was punished with snake locks and a fearsome appearance after being raped in the temple by another deity, Poseidon/Neptune. But then, the contemporary poem by Patricia Smith, in which Medusa didn’t mind at all that they “defiled that temple the way it should be defiled” is another way to see her. Even if seeing her comes with a consequence. 

Similarly – perhaps Indra deceived and raped Ahalya, for which she was punished with petrification. His punishment was having his body covered by a thousand vaginas, which later turned into a thousand eyes upon worshipping the goddess Nagapooshani, over whom snake heads loom like a parasol. Ahalya, turned to stone, must wait for touch to free her.

But in ancient and medieval texts including Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara, Kamban’s Ramavataram and the Yoga Vasistha, as well as modern renderings, Ahalya knowingly and delightedly responds to the seduction. An S. Sivasekaram poem rues over why she chose a humiliated life over eternal life as a stone; in K.B. Sreedevi’s story Shilpe- rupini, she turns back into stone upon hearing of injustice done to Sita; in Sant Singh Sekhon’s play Kalakarshe invites Indra’s artistic gaze. In Sujoy Ghosh’s short film, she is a desirous woman, and accomplice to a darker greed.

To look upon desire with fear is to be unable to recognise what it is truly dangerous (and may come disguised as beauty). In Hélène Cixous’ well-known 1975 essay entitled “The Laugh of the Medusa” are these words: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she isn’t’ deadly. She’s beautiful and laughing.”

When I view images of Garbati’s Medusa, with her Caucasian features and her thigh gap and her pudenda curiously free of serpentine curls, I still think – this is just one version of her. One interpretation doesn’t usurp all the other ways in which an archetype speaks to us. Each of our gazes is its own rendition, and none need to be set in stone.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 24^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

In the final instalment of a popular advice column, the journalist Oliver Burkeman listed out eight learnings that he believes are the secrets to a happy life. One of these points begins, “The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower”. In the paragraphs that explain what this means, an aside jumped at me: “This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.” How true this is – a tire punctures, and we tell the world. A mosquito buzzes us awake, and we tell the world. Then, we stare at the screen as we wait for whatever proceeds next IRL, watching our notifications as we do. 

IRL – “in real life”. I think I encounter this acronym less often than earlier, possibly because the demarcation is no longer as clear. Social media is also life, now. Real life, with real stakes. This is despite knowing that online platforms are not the world. They are always only a bubble, or a tightly knit cluster of bubbles, one that we used to believe was self-curated but increasingly understand is based on algorithmic dictations as well as agendas with money and power behind them.

We understand this, we do, but we frequently behave exactly how the system coaxes us to. Hardly a day goes by when one’s entire timeline isn’t talking about the same topic. When it’s a major event, cataclysmic or otherwise, this makes sense. But sometimes it’s literally about picking an arbitrary target and then – like those little creatures trailing each other off a cliff in the Lemmings game from the early ‘90s, inspired by the myth (aka “fake news”) that real lemmings die en masse this way – following the designed flow. Some days, people lose hours to dissecting another random individual’s equally random opinion. Later, each party’s personality becomes set in stone: there’s the person who fleetingly expressed a fatuous idea, and may it never be forgiven, and there’s the hero whose hot take made that original thought go viral for everyone else’s self-righteous responses and ridicule.

This has an impact on our daily well-being and ability to think holistically, and over time it becomes dangerous on larger levels. Let’s take a hypothetical situation, wherein someone with a talent for making anything about themselves leverages on some incident and begins to spin a narrative around it, drawing in more and more people and implicating them all. Soon, organisations, institutions, the press and more get involved and…

Oh, that’s not a hypothetical situation? Yeah, I know.

This is our cue to derive inspiration from some of the pettier people we know, IRL. You know the frenemies who somehow never hear about any good that comes your way, but always ferret out every tiny trigger and criticism and personally ensure that you’re aware of it? That superpower for acknowledging and talking about only what serves them is something to learn from, and selectively use. When we do this, we can also ask, each time we get distracted by some concocted drama: what is being made to disappear from view because my attention is not there now?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 5^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.