The Venus Flytrap: The Catharsis of Tears

Even those who barely followed the Chandrayaan-2 lunar exploration mission knew how ISRO’s Dr. K. Sivan broke down and wept when they lost contact with the Vikram Lander last week. This week also saw two male sportspersons weep openly on camera. Yao Ming cried, taking responsibility for China’s defeat at the Basketball World Cup. Rafael Nadal sobbed elatedly after triumphing at the US Open Tennis Championships. Public attention during such personal moments is not always tasteful, yet these events spur discussion on a strangely divisive topic: crying openly. Many still find displays of emotion weak and unprofessional. Especially in men.

Of course, some will say that as a feminist I am predisposed to enjoying men’s tears (delicious, especially with a citric twist of bitterness – haha). Funnily, this is almost true. It’s not enjoyment, per se, but an appreciation for when someone has been willing to break through their own conditioning and be vulnerable and honest in a given moment. When we understand patriarchy to be a structural problem that oppresses people of all genders, we see what toxic masculinity does. The simplest manifestation of it is that boys and men are rarely permitted the catharsis of tears.

While women are undermined as being hypersensitive by nature, crying in professional situations is viewed on similar terms. When I was growing up, I watched and internalised a clip of Oprah Winfrey (or if my memory fails me, another influential woman) saying that she would never, ever cry in front of anyone in a workplace. I started working in my mid-teens, and learned quickly how to display anger professionally but to always cloak pain until I was in a more private space. I believe this to be true for many women who work outside the home. We steel ourselves.

One of the experiences that made me begin to unlearn this conditioning was being at a presentation several years ago in which a young woman broke down midway, due to criticism. I was powerless in that situation, but neither did I feel outraged on her behalf, because she was doing something that I could not relate to. I was aware that of the two senior men there, one enjoyed demoralising her, while the other saw it as a rite of passage that would instigate better performances. In the time I continued to work there, I saw many women crying in the same seat. I knew it was why they kept leaving, while I stayed, eroding a little more each year with all the humiliation I swallowed and expressed only as anger. I often found a way to tell them that they deserved better; but it was almost too long before I gave myself the same permission.

Tears have a natural place in every aspect of life – love, work, and even leisure (a great book, a thrilling game). They not only provide release, but also help us see the truth of our own emotions. An uncontrolled spate of crying tells us what we need to know, what matters to us, and what we should do next. Without that heartfelt expression, we sometimes cannot gain the momentum for the following step.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 12th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Enough of Enid Blyton

The UK’s Royal Mint has heeded the caution of its advisory committee and decided against issuing a commemorative coin to coincide with the 50th death anniversary of Enid Blyton, whose books have been a part of the childhoods of several generations of readers. The caution was because a backlash was feared; it’s difficult to miss the explicit racism (some critics allege sexism and homophobia too) in those books.

Those who think the Royal Mint’s decision was excessive argue that social norms keep changing, and that it isn’t fair to judge the people of the past by what is politically correct in the present. This would be a reasonable argument, since dead people don’t have the benefit of learning and evolving their viewpoints as the living do, except that Blyton was criticised in her own time for work which was already perceived as racist, even receiving a publisher rejection for a book long after she had established her career. What’s more evident here is not Blyton’s bigotry, which may or may not have been on par with her surroundings, but the bigotry of her defenders today, who are willing to overlook the damage that honouring a prejudiced person and their work can have.

Blyton died in 1968, and as far as I’m aware is not an author whose work has been kept in circulation through its inclusion in academic syllabi. Her books continue to be purchased by parents and libraries, with over 2 million copies reportedly sold in the last 5 years. This is not in itself a problem; no one with a respect for literature knocks a reading habit, wherever it springs from. But what is worrying is the context. A 2017 study by the Arts Council England discovered that just 1% of all children’s books published in the UK that year featured a main character of a minority ethnicity, despite nearly 33% of schoolchildren being from non-white backgrounds. When the literature being produced does not sufficiently reflect modern society, the continuing popularity of older work with problematic values is a matter of concern.

As it happens, assuming the ACE statistic could have applied to the year prior too, one of my own books – released in the UK in 2016 by Lantana Publishing, which was founded to produce culturally diverse children’s books – would have counted. When it comes to situations like this, one longs to not be among the exception. But when that book, The Ammuchi Puchi, was republished in India last year, it entered a vibrant, growing world of incredibly exciting work for all ages which normalises and celebrates darker skin tones, local names and environments, splashes of mother-tongues, folklore, indigenous artforms, progressive viewpoints, unusual storylines and more. Contemporary, original children’s literature is thriving here.

Any book-buying parent or educational facilitator in India who is still exclusively reaching for Enid Blytons or even Amar Chitra Kathas (with their colourist portrayals, among other uncomfortable things) out of sentimentality is depriving the reading child of a treasure trove. Give them your old favourites too; but know that they will be far more enriched by newer books, the kind we didn’t have when we were growing up.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 5th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Solastalgia

The omens on the path to hell appear to be beautiful. Last week, the sea waves swelled with light, transformed the shoreline into something out of a dream. I was too far from the coast and had too much lonesomeness in my bones – lonesomeness is the anti-venom, I am finding as the years pass, of adventure – to go and see them for myself. I envied those who did that night, envied them more than only the sight of it. Envied whatever it was – ease of companionship or with isolation, proximity, some uncomplicated impulse – that let them have it while I seethed, my eyes and feet dry while longing burned in me.

I had seen bioluminescence in sand once, when a zoologist showed it to me by digging his fingers close to the shoreline, conjuring a memory of how he had once brushed some off a nesting Olive Ridley turtle and found that it shimmered. “Sea creature on sea creature,” he had said. Magical. I hadn’t known at the time that bioluminescence in large quantities is dangerous, a sign of the apocalypse. I had known by the time the shore lit up, but the truth is that my sense of marvel would have been no less pure had I been in Thiruvanmiyur that night. “We used to see it in the water at Batu Ferringhi sometimes,” my sister told me, reaching almost twenty-five years into our childhoods. I had no memory of this, and rued this too. Awareness changes nothing of the ache of being drawn to a thing knowing it’s as good as a drowning.

Rivers covered in pretty water hyacinths indicate heavy metal poisoning, and clog the flow. Scenic casuarina and aromatic eucalyptus trees drain the soil, selfishly hoarding nutrients while other flora wilt. Botanists in the UK recently announced that cycads, palm-like plants which thrive in heavy CO2, have made a comeback. A male cone, followed by a female cone, have appeared, making reproduction possible. They were common 280 million years ago when Earth had more carbon dioxide naturally. Like the bioluminescence that embroidered Chennai’s waves, all these things appear to be more beautiful and praiseworthy than they actually are.

Solastalgia is the word for emotional and mental distress over climate change. It could replace “sapiosexual” in dating app bios. There’s also a nihilistic edge to it, something that suggests you’re willing to be spontaneous with whatever time’s left. To be solastalgic says, “Kiss me before my lungs collapse”.

It’s terrible to find beauty in such devastation, isn’t it? I’m asking because I’m not sure. Studies show that the carbon footprints of tourists account for almost 10% of carbon emissions. Wanderlust is bringing the end of humanity closer, but we can’t seem to stop wanting. Rainforests burn and glaciers dissolve, and still there is this hunger – to see it all, to feel it all, even if it means we are going to be the full stop after a very long, very irresponsible sentence. I’m telling you: I’d have gone to the seaside that night and been solastalgic, but there would have been goosebumps on my skin from something other than the salt-tongued wind.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 29th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Doting On, Then Dethroning

The social media world (which is a world, but not the world) recently officiated the dethroning of a celebrity who had made social justice a part of her branding. UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and actor Priyanka Chopra was unceremoniously “cancelled” when comments she made after being called a hypocrite by an audience member at an event went viral. Chopra had expressed pro-military views, which she did not recant or explain. She was no doubt caught off-guard when asked to comment on global politics at a beauty conference, but her response was weak for someone who had been associated with activist causes for almost a decade.

But Chopra’s recent comments were consistent with her prior choices and actions. Consider her track record – promoting fairness creams, making anti-black statements both on film and to the press, slut-shaming women in a commercial for a dating app she invested in, posing on a magazine cover with an anti-refugee message on her clothing, and so on. The real question is: how can anyone be disappointed?

There are so many songs with lyrics that are variations of the idea that people will build you up just to tear you down for a reason. The backlash came largely from the same people who had pedestalised Chopra.

Could it be that the nature of the hivemind – which is ultimately conformist because a notion loses its edginess the moment it gains traction – continuously demands sacrificial lambs? It just so happened to be Chopra’s turn. If you noticed, a fresh pedestal rose simultaneously, extolling Ayesha Malik (who had called Chopra out). If Malik chooses to remain visible and outspoken, she will eventually be dethroned herself. There’s no such thing as an #unproblematicfave.

As I watched the angry posts against Chopra roll in, I found myself fighting the urge to join in more. I’d already said my two-paisa, wondering how her dubious choices had been acceptable up to that point. I’d never been a fan, although I’d really liked when she spoke about finding love as an ambitious woman. I didn’t have anything to add. So why did my fingertips itch? Holding back, I understood that all of us online that day were being provoked into expression, fueling one another. It’s a scenario that repeats itself, sometimes several times a week. Chopra fumbled when asked for her opinion in an unexpected context; meanwhile, we the online citizenry have made it our second nature to form and share opinions even when none are asked for.

The Greek god Cronus ate his children because he feared being overthrown by them. What happens here seems to be a kind of reversal, in which the devout devour their gods. They replace them with new ones, then repeat the ritual.

To install someone on a pedestal is to give our power away. When they are knocked down, its our own power they lose. Imagine what we could do if we fostered things that matter, things we didn’t feel like breaking because somewhere deep down, we are afraid of what we are capable of achieving ourselves. It’s not only the power we misattribute, but the disappointment when it appears to be misused too.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 22nd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Victors & The Vanquished

Recently, I found myself in a long, fascinatingly civil conversation with a person who said he was engaged in bringing forgotten narratives into mainstream awareness and discourse, which is exactly how I would describe my own work as a writer. However, it was clear that our intentions were diametrically opposed: his interest came from the desire to celebrate and amplify stories of past glory, while mine is about challenging glorification and complicating established storylines through a multiplicity of perspectives. As we spoke, I was intrigued by how we used the same vocabulary towards completely different purposes. We both maintained a pretence of open-endedness. I saw how easy it is to concur that history is written by the victors, while thinking of entirely different sets as the vanquished.

It was clear we knew this mutual respect for the sparring partner would dissolve if we came to subjects of real stakes. As long as we spoke only about the very distant, we could differ pleasantly. For example, we agreed that Rani Padmini was probably fictional, a character from a medieval poem, although the wartime practice of jauhar that inspired her tale was probably real. He felt the symbolic figurehead was meaningful as a representative of actual events which he saw as heroic. My view was that this symbolism lends itself to dangerous uses, and flattens the motivations of individuals involved.

I had brought up the topic because what was really on my mind was how the bodies and minds of women are sites on which battles are inscribed, both viscerally and theoretically. I see a similarity in the unrecorded thoughts of those self-immolating women and silenced voices everywhere, now and long ago. In the writing of history, the fact of experience rests under layers of observation, interpretation, erasure and appropriation. In Behold, I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children by Freny Manecksha, the author writes of how she was spurred into embarking on her book because of two incongruent accounts she encountered about the death of one woman: “I will never know who the real Haneefa was or why she was on the streets. Was she indeed a protestor… or was she a [single] mother whose love for her daughter made her break curfew orders and seek medical help?”

 One of the ways that the ongoing situation in Kashmir is being celebrated is through blithely misogynistic statements about how Indian men can now lay claim to “fair Kashmiri girls”. Women are being spoken about as chattel, in the same breath as the purchase and settling of their lands. What do they think of all this? Due to a communication blockade, even those without harmful intentions can only imagine on their behalf. Hopefully, some day soon we will know, and listen to, what they are really feeling as these events unfold. But it’s likely that centuries from now, people will discuss a film character, a Kashmiri woman who was rumoured to be based on a true story, and even deified. They’ll use her legend as a way to tiptoe around pressing realities as they sip tea from some contested territory, and agree to disagree. Politely, and pointlessly.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 19th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Tacking The Tsundoku Pile

Between the beginning of May and the end of July, I finished reading 37 books. These comprised of: 18 novels, 3 graphic novels, 5 books of poetry, 3 short story collections, 4 picture-books for all ages, and 4 works of non-fiction.

I hadn’t been held hostage in a library. I hadn’t become unemployed; in fact, my overall workload had increased during this period. I hadn’t had a windfall and splurged it; with few exceptions, most of the books were from my splendid tsundoku collection (the Japanese term for purchasing books and not reading them, allowing the to-be-read pile to become a heap, then several).

The having of books – or if one cannot own them, the solace of wandering the stacks at a library or a good bookstore – is one kind of pleasure and self-care activity. Reading them is a completely separate kind. My book binge was deliberate. It was to limit my social media usage, both so I would spend my time better and because I was increasingly noticing how it drained more than just my phone battery. Studies show how social media usage can negatively affect mental health, as well as physical components like sleep, something most users know from experience.

Many wonder how to rekindle (pun intended) their earlier interest in reading. Innumerable suggestions exist: take public transport and read on your commute, carry literature at all times so you can read during waiting periods through the day, commit to an hour before bedtime or wake earlier and do it before even brushing your teeth. Notice how every one of these suggestions ultimately requires the same thing: a shift in unrelated habits. The thing you need to tweak to bring reading back doesn’t have to do with books at all. Rather than deactivate my apps, I simply decided to do more of something else, and this made me see how little I actually need them.

These days, I work at a desk beside a well-earned wall of books, and I hope I’ll always remember being giddy with joy and surprise on the night I finally set it all up, when it was like I was staring at my childhood ambitions come true. “Now I am a Lady of Letters,” I thought, grandly. “An L. O. L.”

And that’s exactly why I plan to read fewer books this month. The downside to reading so voraciously was that I’d left myself little time to write. After three months of gobbling through pages like a silverfish, I confronted the fact that my book binge was also an exercise in procrastination.

Still, I understood this only through the reset I experienced thanks to it. I had gained greater clarity on my goals, and become more mindful about how I utilise or fritter my time. I didn’t have as many low moods. My sense of self was richer, less reactive to the vagaries of the fickle hive mind. Not least, I experienced the sheer pleasure that comes from immersion, when you don’t shift your attention just because of one slow-moving passage. Ultimately, I found that the many worlds of fiction held far less artifice than the online world.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 8th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Selves Others Remember

A long time ago, a woman who worked with two children whom we both loved told me how much she dreaded the end of her tenure as their caregiver, even though that end was far away. I had thought my own claim to those children was stronger, bonded by blood. I empathised, but did not imagine that the loss she feared would soon be mine. It was only a short while afterwards when those bonds became collateral damage in an ongoing conflict between grown-ups. I was a young adult then. Enough years have passed now that when I recently met one of those children, he was already the age I’d been when we had loved and known each other best.

His childhood self is vivid in my memory in ways that have faded in his; I hold dear versions of him that he can’t remember. And among many younger selves of mine who have emerged in reflections and revelations lately, some painful but all healing, is the young woman he knew when he was that child. Do these selves of ours exist not only as I remember them, but also because I remember them?

Is there a way to speak of a separation to someone who does not recall or perhaps even know that it happened, and is it not unfair to burden them with the choices other people made? I treaded carefully around the tender edges of my sadness, still treating him as a young one to be protected. I had prepared myself for the possibility that despite not quite remembering me, somewhere deep in him would be a small scar of perceived abandonment or betrayal, which would affect his present response to me.

Meeting him again, anew, I noticed how in some moments, he moved like he had when he was a child, belly first, shoulders swaying. I could see no jagged edges anywhere; I could almost trace him through that decade of distance as if I’d always watched him from afar (I had not). He had none of the swagger and bristle of his peers. He was thoughtful, a listener. Pride is a peculiar emotion, an appropriation of another’s effort, but I knew the field of study he’d chosen owed something to me, and I wanted but could not share my recollection of when he first turned towards it. It fell into that heart-shaped box of anecdotes either too precious or potentially embarrassing to share in that limited, not private space. One day, I would like to give him that memory, and with it the assurance that he has always been who he aspires to become.

Perhaps he does have that small scar somewhere, from our separation, but he also has the imprints of having been loved by me, and having been taught by me.

Finally, I could no longer not ask, plainly – “Do you remember me?” “Of course,” he said, but I did not push further.

I cannot say with certainty if our unremembered selves exist or cease to, but I know that love travels a long way, a vessel that vanishes over the horizon but journeys onwards beyond our sight.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 1st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Fig Tree Tales

Some things call to you, and other things call to many, but not you. Firmly in the latter category for me is the excitement around the ascension of the statue of Athi Varadar of Kanchipuram. Except for one precious detail: the statue, immersed in a water tank and displayed for public worship only once every forty years, is made of the wood of the athimaram, the ficus racemosa. This tree is both the mythical udumbara of the Pali texts, and the humble cluster fig (I believe we mostly eat the ficus carica, the common fig).

The many species of the fig tree have a cherished place in the stories of myriad traditions. The wood in which this avatar of Vishnu takes embodiment is connected to the sacred Bodhi beneath which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment, the heart-shaped leaf of the pipal through which the Kutia Kondh goddess Nirantali created the first human tongue, the wild fig tree in whose roots was found the cradle containing the wolf-suckled babies Romulus and Remus (one of whom, having killed his brother, would establish Rome), the sycamore fig which was the abode of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, and numerous ‘world trees’ across cultures. The banyan too, that vast and intricately thriving repository of mystery and comfort, is a kind of ficus. Fig trees are special – givers of shade, stories, statues and, not least, sweetness.

Having tasted the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves into girdles to cover their bodies – the first undergarments (the Persian god Mithra too dressed himself with them). This Biblical parable gave rise to the literal use of the fig leaf motif in plaster casts commissioned by some museums to hide the genitals of sculptures when dignitaries visited, such as when Queen Victoria viewed a replica of Michelangelo’s David in London. Certain Popes also had fig leaf coverings made for works in the Vatican. Coincidentally, or not, the Greek god of debauchery, Dionysus, was also associated with fig trees, and one of his myths involves him making a phallus of fig wood for a secret rite.

It wasn’t until this contemplation that I realised why there’s something about the fig fruit that has always confused and seduced me. It’s because it plays a trick on the eye: green-skinned in the hue of a guava or pear, yet tender-fleshed in a way neither of those fruits are. I’m surprised every time by the lusciousness that’s inside that lacklustre rind. Perhaps this was that forbidden fruit, ripe with revelation.

Who knows who or what will still be standing in another forty years, in time for Athi Varadar’s next scheduled rise from his silver-casketed immersion. But fig trees have long lifespans – the fruit-bearing common ones can live up to two centuries, and folklore contends that banyans survive to a venerable ancientness. The elation around the idol’s current advent will lead to at least one lasting good: the Kanchipuram administration has committed to planting 40,000 fig saplings across the district in honour of the occasion. May those trees live to watch many tales, and keep safe many tellings under the aegis of their canopies.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 25th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Meaning of “Life”

Among the enshrined principles of the United Nations Population Fund is the concept that “Human rights are universal and inalienable; indivisible; interdependent and interrelated.” Among these, the belief in the inalienability of a right – in other words, the certainty that it cannot be taken away or given up – gives those who possess it a sense of resting easy. Something hard-won (even if also intrinsic) should be permanent, after all. But once in a while, an enquiring vigilance provides necessary maintenance of the right in question. When I came across news that India’s Supreme Court had admitted a petition to “decriminalise abortion”, I wondered what on earth they were talking about. It turns out that what is up for legal appraisal is the right to terminate a foetus beyond 20 weeks, which has so far been permitted only in case of abnormality or a danger to the mother’s life.

In a beautiful exposition, the petition asks about what the meaning of the word “life” in this context can be – whether it can go beyond physical survival to be “liberally construed so as to comprehend not only physical existence but also quality of life as is understood in its richness and fullness consistent with human dignity?”. Should this petition work, it may help to affirm a more progressive way of looking at the issue of abortion in India, expanding technical legality to make room for rights, freedoms and choices.

Why is (some) abortion here legal to begin with? It’s a let down to consider that this fundamental human right may be available not for sound ethical reasons, but due to an underside of female foeticide and even eugenics. As some experts like climate change specialist Fred Peace say, the use of the word “overpopulation” can be racist – for example, where the reputed Smithsonian Magazine described Mumbai’s Dharavi as “a vision of urban hell”, he saw it as thriving. When mass sterilisation and other draconian measures can’t apply, supremacists can still rely on the idea that people themselves (particularly the poverty-stricken) will choose termination. Every gynaecologist’s office in the country has a poster about not disclosing sex for a reason. Western conservatives’ “sacredness of life” argument, which is currently systematically challenging the right to abortion in state after state in the USA, is irrelevant in a place where certain lives are already devalued over others.

Here, the loss of virginity is more taboo than the elimination of offspring. Which is why the expansion of the legal provisions around abortion is important. By posing that crucial musing on the quality of life, the conversation broadens meaningfully. Just because a person won’t die in childbirth doesn’t mean that other aspects of her – creative, financial, professional, mental, among others – aren’t extinguished or debilitated. This isn’t an abstract consideration. Its tangibility lies in how we define the answers for ourselves.

Perhaps it isn’t enough to feel assured about the inalienability of rights, be they about bodily autonomy or any other subject. Perhaps by thinking about the potential of losing them, we find ways to both protect and to expand them – in spirit and practice, and for as many more people as possible.

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

The Venus Flytrap: The Vortex of Umbrage

There’s always another someone saying another something, and like cats chasing a laser pointer our attention jumps from one flare-up to the next. Last week, the Dalai Lama made sexist and racist statements better suited to a muted family Whatsapp group than to a dignitary of his position. This week, director Sandeep Vanga, whose Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh would have brought toxic masculinity back in style if it had ever gone away to begin with, claimed that slapping is a gesture of love. The designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee tried to sell his own products through a psychological trick called negging – undermining the subject’s confidence so as to move in for the kill (in his case, claiming women wearing gaudy apparel or makeup were secretly in deep pain). All these statements rightly deserve condemnation. But what happens when we get stuck inside the vortex of umbrage, retaliation and no change?

Watching women reveal their traumas from past intimate relationships on Twitter, in order to discredit the violent rhetoric in Vanga’s movies, horrified that they’d felt driven to share these experiences to counter the glorification of abuse, I encountered a necessary yellow-light-says-pause in my own outrage cycle. Those who refused to see the links between pop culture and lived culture were unlikely to have a change of heart. They’d surrendered both intelligence and goodness when they picked “It’s just a movie, yaar” as the hill to die on. At what personal cost were the survivors relieving their stories?

The author Toni Morrison is often quoted from a 1975 speech: “It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.” She went on to talk about how decades of research, art and science can go into proving a single prejudice wrong. All that energy is directed towards reaction, rather than innovation.

Every one of us falls into this trap unwittingly. Some even lay the trap unwittingly, wiring themselves into contrarian or essentialist positions, and then we’re in an endless volley of call (or it is call-out?) and response. The only people who win at this are full-time trolls. Most of us are not, but all of us who consume and produce real-time opinion get sucked into illusory distraction. It can make us feel like we are deeply engaged and constantly productive, but what is the accumulative good of the same?

A meaningful recalibration may require slowness and some silence, eschewing the quick rejoinder for a more involved project of engagement, processing and creativity. The truth is that when we are bombarded with information, we are overcome by a lemming effect. We look where we are directed to look, and then expend our energy as a unit. In the backdrop, everything remains perfectly intact while we agitate, swayed into overestimating our personal importance. But there is a place for that too. It’s in the work that we get distracted away from. What is that work – that intensive, time-consuming, tedious but important work that isn’t being done?

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

The Venus Flytrap: A Female Dalai Lama

Did you know that the current Dalai Lama guest-edited a 1992 issue of the French edition of Vogue? This incident is mentioned in a lengthy official clarification newly released on his website, which addresses some controversial points in a recent video interview with the BBC. In this interview, he said – not for the first time – that if he had a female successor, she would have to be conventionally attractive. The clarification alludes to how he’d once said the same in that magazine’s glamorous ambience, but not to how these remarks were repeated for decades to come, as late as 2016 and now, in 2019.

The clarification includes the following: “[It] sometimes happens that off the cuff remarks, which might be amusing in one cultural context, lose their humour in translation when brought into another. He regrets any offence that may have been given.” It’s true that offhand verbal slips aren’t the only measure of a person’s character, and that one of the excesses of “cancel culture” is that contrition is rarely enough even in the mildest of cases.

But is there really any context where judging a person on parameters of attractiveness, withholding job opportunities because of them, or ridiculing those who don’t fit them (the Dalai Lama even made an expression he called “dead face”), are amusing? Or is it more likely that there are some situations where these statements can be openly challenged and others where they can’t? Many of the reasons why not will directly tie into structural inequalities, which branch into toxic workplaces, family hierarchies, public safety concerns and so on. As anyone who’s had to proffer a half-smile or hollow laugh at an inappropriate comment made in any setting knows, confrontation is not the only measure of disagreement. The statement would be offensive no matter who made it, a recruitment manager or a spiritual leader.

And this is the big context: in a rapidly regressing world, a female Dalai Lama would be a historical first, and of significance to millions. A spiritual life is a life of seeking, sometimes without solutions. The desire to reconcile faith and feminism is made fraught by such beliefs and actions, be they from powerful and well-connected religious figures, or from astrologers, gurus, influencers and ordinary people who internalise and propagate dangerous ideas, including communalist, misogynistic and casteist ones. People invested in equality who also have spiritual lives use their discernment, express divergence when possible, but also risk alienation equally from skeptics and their own teachers or circles. But the alternative – disavowal – is not necessarily compelling.

The women whose words comprise the ancient Buddhist anthology called the Therigatha knew about another kind of disavowal. They wrote about leaving their homes and losing their youth. The celebrated courtesan and monastic Ambapali was among them, with a famous poem on aging in which she described the failings of her body. But her translator Martin Wickramasinghe, whose idea was expanded by her translator Charles Hallisey, insisted that she was not lamenting the impermanence of beauty. She was saying she had been beautiful once, and was beautiful still. Or perhaps, who knows, she was saying she couldn’t care less.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Emotional Excavations

Every now and then, a discovery occurs that reveals the imaginative or knowledge-based shortcomings of those who made it, or who first respond to it and shape how others view it. The Ishango bone unearthed in 1960, a baboon fibula with 28 markings dating to the late Stone Age, is a perfect example. The artefact has passed into modern feminist lore, with apocryphal stories of irate professors throwing their hands up in frustration, saying: “Think! Who owned this, if it was a calendar? Does a non-menstruating man need a calendar of 28 days?”. A related reference is a riddle which hopefully no longer challenges anyone: “A boy and his father get into an accident. Both require surgery. So why did the surgeon look at the boy on the table and say, ‘I can’t operate on him. He’s my son!’?”

To return to ancient objects, new information on the sprawling geoglyphs in southern Peru known as the Nazca Lines has excited researchers. The geoglyphs were created over 2000 years ago either by carving the ground, or forming images using piled stones. If seen from a great height, they reveal geometric designs and outlines of plants and wildlife, including numerous birds. Some among these birds are now believed to have been non-native, which lends itself to many theories.

But in these speculations is some condescension, including about how the geoglyphs were designed. It’s not like pre-colonial Peruvians had hot air balloons, went one throwaway remark. Well, to quote a meme illustrated with the Easter Island colossuses and various pyramids: “Just because white people couldn’t do it doesn’t mean it was aliens.” Perhaps there is extraterrestrial intelligence out there. More immediately provable is human contempt for the intelligence of other humans. We rarely appreciate the sophistication of those whose cultures (and populations) were systematically erased. Even when we don’t see the world as we were taught to, we often express our visions through inherited and absorbed vocabularies.

While meditating recently, I saw a vulture, and one of my most disagreeable beliefs about myself surfaced – that my ability to look others’ mortality in the eye is not what makes me a good caregiver, but is in actuality unsentimental and calculating. And then the creature’s message came forth: “The vulture waits not for death, but for sustenance”. Suddenly, this was as obvious as the symbolism I’d unthinkingly internalised. Afterwards, recalling the archaeological site of Catal-Huyuk, I read about vulture excarnation as a human pre-burial ritual and the prevalence of skeletons without skulls there. These are mysterious because they don’t fit satisfactorily into tutored worldviews. Practical explanations are given, like: this is because burials beneath the house would smell less if stripped of flesh. But does that engage the emotional? It’s bereavement we speak of, not the disposal of spoilt food.

That gender bias riddle in which a surgeon is prevented from operating on her son invokes medical ethics based on emotion. This is a rare acknowledgment of how reason, like art and ritual, is also emotional. What if every hypothesis got the heart involved, and that what we hold privileged as the mind included the vast province of the imagination?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 27th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Frida & The Finches

If the finches of the Galápagos islands can’t sing in key, they may go extinct. The males trill to draw their mates to them, and their courtship songs vary based on the physiological differences of their beaks. Through the ten thousand years or so of their existence, their beaks evolved in distinct variations to best suit the sustenance available across their habitats. Diverse shapes, sizes and sharpness for seeds, insects, or cacti. The birds are also known as Darwin finches, after the scientist whose work was heavily influenced by encountering them.

But a human-caused parasitic infestation is affecting their beaks, and thus their lovesongs. Their nostrils are being deformed by the larvae of a blood-sucking fly, which feed on tissue, keratin and blood. The songs of misshapen beaks, off-key and therefore off-putting, have ceased to have their intended effect. Not only are chicks dying from the parasitic attacks, but the survivors cannot sing their lineage into being. The mates cannot be seduced.

A line from of one of my favourite poems, Anne Sexton’s “Sonnet XLIII”, haunts me as I think of those birds – broken into, their faces and voices mutilated, still desirous, without having that yearning be met. And the thwarted mates: where does their disenchantment go? Beyond some point of no return, loveless but ripe with memory, Sexton wrote: “I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more.” I sought the finches’ songs, and instead found words – reams on their voices and their bodies, but not enough of their music.

Amidst this silence, a resonance. The National Sound Library of Mexico has just discovered and released the only extant recording of what may be Frida Kahlo’s voice. I had never known that I had never known what her voice was like.

In the recording, a woman reads a passage in intimate praise of Diego Rivera. The reading seems practised, with an easy rhythm. The motifs are familiar; the words seem to be Kahlo’s. Rivera the toad, the baby, the great artist whose hands are ever working. At first I wondered what her natural voice must have been like, especially if she had been coached and made a few attempts to perfect the audio. A little moodier, maybe. A little smoke-laced. But this voice is bell-clear, ebullient. Strikingly so when we learn that the recording was aired on radio in 1955, the year after Kahlo’s passing. This would complicate the possibility that it was her, except that the recitation was enigmatically described as being by “a painter who no longer exists”. Researchers believe it was made in the last, painful years of her life.

For a dying woman she sounds buoyant. Even rehearsed, this was Kahlo’s true voice then: her voracious desire to live and her adoration of her beloved both vivid. Having had an amputation, she had written in her diary of not needing feet, being winged. Thus returns the sorrow over the vanishing finches, so misunderstood. I wish for them mates who can perceive their true voices. Even in mutilation and dissonance. And for love or something like it to carry their timbre through.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 20th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.