Tag Archives: the venus flytrap

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.

The Venus Flytrap: A Deeper Shade of Brown

I probably wouldn’t have watched the new live-action Aladdin remake, but it was the birthday girl’s outing of choice. Social media had prepared me to cringe at just how problematic this beloved movie from my childhood really was, full of Orientalism, cultural conflations and racist tropes. But there I was with tears streaming down my face during the “A Whole New World” sequence, smudging the 3D glasses and my real glasses both, moved by the surrealness of watching the song in a new rendering. Briefly, I forgot the different sort of pang that had come earlier – seeing that Princess Jasmine, unlike her animated counterpart, was light-skinned. I was surprised by how hurt I felt, grasping then just how powerfully her original incarnation had impacted me.

As far as princesses go, it was 2009 before a black girl, Tiana of The Princess And The Frog, was illustrated. Amazingly, brown kids like me had Jasmine back in 1992. She was a rare representation. Not of brownness per se, but of darker skin (the actor in the remake is half-Indian: technically brown, but light-complexioned). Jasmine, the cartoon, was properly brown, “like dosas, samosas and stikki chikki”, as the title of a children’s book on skin colour goes. This was why I was also vividly drawn to Esmeralda, from the often forgotten The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Brown like caramel and sapotas. Brown like me.

My skin tone is the kind that gets bleached out in sunlight and in smartphone selfies (there’s a historically racist bias in photo technology, some of which remains in play with manufacturers today). I prefer my true colour, and I wish to be visible as a darker-skinned woman who is achieving things, going places, and yes, is even attractive. I want to claim and share the space, the void really, caused by colourist erasure. It is currently over-run by light-skinned brown celebrities criticising racism in the West but promoting fairness creams and practising casteism in India.

An international publication once adjusted the settings so much on my portrait (which perfectly captured my true tone) that I looked positively pink. Bubblegum pink. Someone must have thought they were doing me a favour, like how people are quick to say like it’s a compliment, “Don’t worry, you’re not so dark.” Conversely, any fetishizing of dark skin takes me right back to the creepy man who told me when I was little – “Black Beauty. Like that book you’re reading instead of talking to me.”

But I am worried. Even today, many children do not have enough positive acknowledgments of their appearances. This includes all non-normativity in: skin colours, body sizes, hair textures, the shapes of facial features, heights, (dis)abilities, illness-related conditions, amputations, scars and more.

There’s a feminist twist in the new Aladdin and it can’t compensate for the whitewashing of the iconic original Jasmine for me. Despite all that character’s flaws, she was a way for some (though not all) darker-skinned children to see ourselves as being at the centre, admired. She was beautiful. For those of us who didn’t know we were too, it meant the world to be shown a reason to believe it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 13th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Doomsday Clock

I had thought that human life on this planet had about a dozen years left, based on a UN warning last year, but it looks like a new report, released just ahead of World Environment Day on June 5, has given us an extension. Australia’s Breakthrough National Centre For Climate Restoration now sets the doomsday clock to 31 more years before climate change will have killed most of us.

“Even the ozone layer repaired itself,” someone shrugged when I chided them recently for a careless disposal of plastic. There is no doubt that the planet has self-healing capabilities. The problem is that we expect it to continue to both tolerate and heal from our damage at the same time. The anthropomorphisation of the planet and of its presiding sentience into Mother Earth and Mother Nature, respectively, are perfectly in line with how the human species regards its mothers too. Ascribing qualities like self-sacrifice, benevolence and forbearance while treating them really badly, and expecting them to take it. What’s the planet-sized version of misogyny? Whatever the punchline is, the joke’s on us.

Because there’s no reason to believe that this self-healing, evolving, extraordinary planet cannot go on without us. It will, no matter how we annihilate ourselves. Other life forms will replace us as the dominant one. Perhaps they will be all-seeing plants, because surely there must be plants. Or yet-imagined creatures made for new climes or through resourceful mutations. Or simply the sorts of species we used to crush underfoot, or consume, or whose habitats we turned into conurbations. We may not have their resilience. Nothing of our so-called superior intelligence has suggested that we will, not when we have allowed for all that has already happened.

I’m not here to offer solutions, because there’s nothing we don’t all already know. We’ve all seen the images of sea birds with six pack rings around their throats. We adjust our consumer choices with mindful boycotts. We don’t leave the water running as we brush. We even know that just 100 mega-companies are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions, and that while the blame doesn’t squarely fall on us, the burden does. And we do what we can.

We (must) live within the likelihood of apocalypse in the same way that we live despite the inevitability of our individual deaths. There are two ways to parse this statement. The first is insouciance: changing nothing about consumption or usage, insisting that the AC is personally well-deserved and there’s always mineral water to bathe in if the tankers don’t come, and generally continuing as though every resource, particularly one’s own privilege, is infinite. This is what many of us do. The second way is with awareness. To understand that individual effort without collective backing can do little, but to do it sincerely. To make choices which are really apologies, but at least those are better than excuses. To accept that the collapse is coming, but that our surrender will be with some certainty that we tried. To consider this goal daily: that this life, hurtling toward drought and misery, extinction and doom, was still experienced with honour and humility.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 6th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Dutee Chand & Two Taboos

Champion sprinter Dutee Chand made history recently when she announced that she is in a romantic relationship with another woman, whom she describes as her soulmate. As the first sportsperson in India to come out as queer, she has hopefully paved the way for more people – in a field that is rife with gender-related difficulties, including discrimination towards those whose hormones don’t conform to a binary – to not have to be secretive about their lives.

But when Chand next spoke on the matter, she revealed that she had only come out about her personal life because of one of her sisters had been blackmailing her to the tune of Rs25 lakhs, threatening to inform the media about her sexuality, as well as physically abusing her. It seemed like Chand would not have discussed her personal life without the blackmail holding her under duress. The decision to counter it through speaking out first resulted in certain invasions of privacy, including the exposure of her partner’s address, whom she had not identified so as to shield from her such attention.

I would argue that this revelation about blackmail and abuse has an almost equal amount of cultural importance as her speaking about her sexuality. Family dysfunction of all kinds are still mostly taboo topics, because the institution is regarded as sacrosanct. Among these, sibling abuse is one of the least discussed forms. It’s intensely painful to concede that one’s sibling or offspring is malevolent, so we tread on eggshells, making excuses.

Sibling abuse can be extremely insidious particularly in adulthood, because it takes advantage of the fragility of the elderly, who are unable to comprehend their roles in creating that toxicity. It plays on every twisted dynamic in existence for decades. It knows where all the buttons are. One of my dearest friends and I endured a nearly three-year separation because one of our siblings conspired to break us up, and not being able to recognise sibling toxicity as a real force made that possible. That is my own most minor example. As much as I wish to be as brave as Chand and speak my truth more fully – in the hope that it can hold a comforting mirror to what many experience – I just can’t.

Despite the harrowing circumstances in which Chand was forced to reveal her relationship, she has since commendably chosen to discuss it in happy and revolutionary ways. There are still very few openly queer public figures in India, and among them lesbians are even fewer. Significantly, Chand has spoken about the right to wed, taking a tentative next step toward complete societal acceptance since last year’s scrapping of the draconian Section 377.

By sharing about the love, support, companionship, romance and joy she has with her soulmate, Chand makes a triple triumph. She has set a meaningful precedent for queer visibility, spoken publicly about the taboo of family abuse and specifically about rarely-acknowledged sibling toxicity, and then shown how it is possible for those wounded by it to build new and beautiful bonds. Free of the institution, and full of all the things that it is supposed to – but doesn’t always – provide.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 30th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Natural Boundaries

The sea at Timbulsloko, Indonesia, didn’t just sweep in by itself, eroding the coast by miles. This gradual inundation was caused by human choices. Mangroves had shielded the land since time immemorial, allowing agriculture to flourish. But once people started to cut them, the sea began to reshape the coast, even washing away villages. Now, brushwood and bamboo structures have been set up to slow the tides, encourage sediment build-up, which will hopefully lead to the eventual formation of new mangroves.

The thriving, natural boundary that is the mangrove – lush, salt-saturated, interlocked grace, often the habitat of creatures of the sky and sea – has something to teach us. So does the restoration undertaken by the people of Timbulsloko. Sometimes we blunder. We think our boundaries aren’t important, and then we suffer. But we can correct this, provided we understand their necessity.

Another beautiful assertion of natural boundaries is how, in parts of the world including Kerala, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, marauding elephants have been kept from entering crop fields not through electric fences, but through a border of beehives. Not only are elephants frightened away (peacefully), but the devastation the planet will experience with the coming extinction of bees is averted just a little.

When it comes to interpersonal boundaries, many perceive them as restrictions only the unkind would impose. But the opposite is true. In order to have real goodness, one must have a clear sense of respect towards self and other. Healthy boundaries protect and nurture. Like cacti, palmyra and other organic fences used in rural homes, they are lovely to have, and hurt no one except those who intend to trespass.

Pondicherry’s French Quarter escaped the impact of the 2004 tsunami because of a 300-year old colonial stone seawall which was frequently reinforced. But the barrier had never had the larger population in mind, and hundreds of fisherpeople who lived and worked beyond its length were killed. Sometimes old protection mechanisms become insufficient, and we must find meaningful, updated methods. This can happen especially to those who are usually very good with maintaining boundaries. We fail to account for unexpected breaches.

Sometimes a barrier needs to be instated despite how unpleasant it feels to do it. Being reasonable and gentle does not always work. So if the scent of marigolds (known to repel rabbits, mosquitoes and certain insects) won’t do, perhaps the stink of coyote urine needs to be deployed. Coyote urine is used by agriculturalists in the US to deter against smaller pests including deer, skunks, rabbits and raccoons. As for larger predators: there is a point beyond which self-preservation must come first. When someone invades your privacy or space, threatens or disrespects you, demands your attention or drains you, you have every right to cut them out completely. They already have their explanation.

A story, too, can be a boundary. This is how sacred groves have survived around the world, through myths that rendered them inviolable. Long before the word “biodiversity” was coined, a native knowing ensured that what was precious was safe. Sometimes, the entirety of the story is just one powerful word, a word like “Enough”, or “No”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 23rd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Nobody’s Muse

When the legendary cultural critic Susan Sontag was 17 years old, she married a sociologist around a decade her senior, with whom she had a son. Her husband, Philip Rieff, published Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, widely considered a landmark text, in 1959. For years, rumour held that Sontag had such a large role in the work that she was practically its co-author. Now, her latest biographer claims to have evidence that it was her work all along, and that she had signed over authorship out of desperation to keep her ex-husband from gaining custody of her child in their divorce.

History doubtlessly contains more erasures like this. I recall once watching the cellist and poet Kevin Gillam perform Bach’s beautiful cello suites. But which Bach did they belong to? He cited scholarship by the conductor Martin Jarvis that it was Anna Magdalena, the composer’s wife, who wrote them. Perhaps this memory surfaced because I’ve been rationing the final few episodes of the cancelled TV show Mozart In The Jungle. I adore it. It “has blood”, to paraphrase the maverick maestro Rodrigo De Souza (deliciously portrayed by Gabriel Garcia Bernal) at its heart. He is irresistible – therefore, best on screen and as far as possible from in the flesh, please. Please! Brilliant, and potentially brilliant, women spin into disorder following affairs with him. One of them begins to receive visits from ghosts of musicians past, just like he does. But it’s women who come to her, beginning with Nannerl, Mozart’s thwarted sister. Then others: women forgotten because they weren’t allowed to shine. They come as warnings.

And there are those left to wreck themselves, supernovas self-imploding, as the profoundly feminist and beautiful Savitri Ganesan biopic Mahanati (which I watched to avoid finishing Mozart) illustrates.

It’s something I think about a lot in relation to #MeToo. A monster’s art isn’t as interesting to me as the art that they suppressed. Many women went underground, remained footnotes, lost confidence and disappeared with nothing to their names. They only came into the orbits of monsters because they had some spark of talent in them too. There must have been more Sontags who didn’t manage to surface again. Maybe their work was stolen. Or maybe it was never made. It might be better to be celibate than to be someone’s muse.

Actually, to be honest, there’s one more alternative. The much-married Lawrence Durrell wrote (this quote is famously misattributed to his friend and fellow rake – I mean writer – Henry Miller): “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” Well, speaking as the woman, let me rephrase. Replace with the pronoun of your weakness and try again: love them, suffer for them, and turn them into literature. I prefer to do it all, do it bleeding, and put my name on it too.

Come to think of it, it’s a sweet irony that Durrell is rarely credited for these words of his either. I wonder what Sontag (or her ghost, appearing to an ingénue on the cusp of a mistake) might say about that.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 16th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

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 9th 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 2nd 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 28th 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 18th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.