long long time

It's been forever it seems, or as usual Medusa is hyperbolic. If one carefully and patiently looks through this blog's archives, there will definitely be longer periods of silence and even longer absences. But as medusa is neither patient nor careful, she will just let her hyperbole be, and wonder, whether, in blog-world, silences and absences can be differentiated between?

However, as usual, that is not the point. The point is, after a recent trip to Shillong and Cherapunji, Medusa returned to a boiling Calcutta with an obsessive desire to live (and in extension- to work) in a place like this:

Ok, not exactly down a winding road covered on all sides with tall pines (for that matter, while passing by this road Medusa didn't even know that these were pines trees), but in a hilly-ish place, that's cool/cold, close enough to civilization to offer uninterrupted high speed internet access and medical shops, slightly far away from bus stops etc. to make walking mandatory, and on the outskirts of a city filled with restaurants and shops.

Why, you ask? Its been a recurrent fancy for a while now, but having spent a few days in a hilly place for the first time in her life, she is smitten by the quiet, the possibilities of exploration and long walks, the climate, and yes, the promises of ever elusive work! With no other temptation in sight, she will have to work, won't she?

The Taking of a College

Now, the hellhole where Medusa works, was the last bastion of the CPM, at the heart of the Industrial Wasteland. Industrial Wasteland had long been lost to them, the Loksabha seat, the other colleges and the shramik bhavan. The one who used to rule this place was now not even allowed to stand in the assembly elections, and good for him! Because even the formidable NS who stood for CPM lost.

Anyway, that is just background baloney. What continued to be interesting was that despite the entire area more or less having turned, or made to turn TMC, the ruling union at the hellhole continued to be SFI, which everyone knows is just yet another name for CPM. Every year before the admissions and before the elections (a selection actually) there were muted noises about how "this time TMCP is going to come to college", but nothing happened. At the admissions all the students who managed to pay the union got in, paying their college fees and SFI membership fee (for three years) at the same time, during the elections no one other than the "party" approved candidates filled in nomination forms, and there was a due celebration for them having won "uncontested", yet again.

but day before yesterday, it changed.

Medusa was trying to beat the heat by seeking shelter in one of the science departments: they are scientific so they have AC. They heard some muffled slogans from a distance, and ventured out in the heat to investigate. Medusa is not so nosy, but slogans in a college deserted due to vacations and exams, were something that just begged to be found out. What she found out was the following:

There were about fifty men holding TMC flags, and loitering around the Principal's office. They were NOT students, they had possibly never been students. They were big burly men, ill at ease inside the college, but taking their time to let the office staff know that all this vacation and all is bull shit. the college must be open at all times, after all it is their money that the staff is being paid on.

While the strongmen guarded the outside, the Principal was closeted inside with the few who were actually students of the college, or of some college. They were placing their demands: and what were their demands? That they be given the same privileges that SFI had been given all this time.

Now this might sound strange, but it is not. All these years, beyond the first twenty people admitted in a class, all the rest of the students have come through the SFI office located conveniently outside. They have regularly asked for the admission form prices to be hiked: so that their share of that money increases- who cares for those who will actually buy the forms? Attendance in classes is not necessary, neither is pass marks in any of the exams. What was necessary was presence in the CPM rallies and donation to the fund. If this be the mode of politics in an institution- the students's union acting as yet another organ of a very well oiled machine: cogs of which are the Principal who belongs to the same union whose sister organ is the union that the teachers belong to, which falls under the same banner that the office staff organize themselves under- and all cowering under the might of the mighty Bikash Bhavan where hopes and spirits are crushed and demands annihilated (unless you know someone strong enough in the party)- and where politics is reduced to lobbying for transfer/ selling the seat to the highest bidder, what else can a new party, trying to make its mark even hope to achieve? Their members are the same, their field of operation is the same, their imagination of what a student's union could/ should do, continues to be the same. The names have changed, and the flags have been swapped, but the structures retain their internal logic where the government and the various allied "political" organisations ensure co-dependence by killing off all possibilities of politics.

What will happen now is: the two groups will fight each other for who should control more seats during the admission, who will more successfully foil the others' attempts at filing nominations at the elections, who will bring more people to their rallies (actually, its unlikely the SFIs will have any rally to go to!), who will bring burlier individuals to beat up rival students and who will organise the saraswati pujo. Obviously, no one will talk about the fact that the girl students have to go to loos that has not had running water in three years, or that there is no drinking water in the college, or that there should to be new courses introduced or that there ought to be remedial classes for the weak and backward students.

And more and more of them will continue to drop out because they got a job at the factory across the highroad, or they got married.

what do fucking fitness advice columnists know?

Now, everyone knows that Medusa is addicted to women's magazines, and she justifies her daily devouring them in the name of archival research.
what everyone might not know is, medusa also believes in them. every trick that will make one lose weight, or make one's skin glow or turn the frizzy mess on her head into soft and alluring curls, medusa believes. the emphasis in the previous sentence however, is on the word "trick". anything that requires hard work or repetition, medusa steers clear of. after all, reiteration has produced gender, medusa can't possibly take on something as powerful as that! what attracts her are the quick fixes, and easy DIYs.
so, there was this piece in the magazine today, called "climbing workout". which basically promises that climbing up and down stairs is the best form of workout one can have, and that running up the stairs can make one lose 1000 cal in an hour!
medusa quickly did some mental math and lured by the promises of a non-bulging belly, forgot all her pledges to the fat pride movement (fat pride is only present in capitalist countries after all- she told herself, us below poverty line losers have to deal with other more "real" stuff) and put on her walking shoes.
yes she does have them, two pairs, and walking music too.
having thus prepared herslef she climbed 54 steps down, and climbed 54 up, and 54 down again and then 54 up again.
and then she came indoors and lay on the floor panting for dear life.
what do these fucking advice columnists know? do they know that it is impossible to run up stairs, and that to do so for one full hour is bloody unimaginable. and that it is better to cuddle up to a person with some flab, that the stick thin insects that must be dying from a lack of calories in their systems.
fat pride, here we come!

trendsetter medusa!

Did y0u, dear readers know, how well versed Medusa is in the fashions of the years to come? in fact, so well advanced she is in matters of fashion-to-be, that during the moments of trendsetting, her fellows consider her to be a mad hatter, a kind of a modern day mohamed-bin-tughlaq, visionary, yet misunderstood.
anyway, to prove that medusa is not bullshitting as usual, she will present her case point by point.

Point one: The curious case of the pants with their crotch at their knees


Everyone knows what Medusa is talking about, because everyone has either owned/ worn/ or at least seen someone wear them- they are Harem pants!

But when in the 11th std., in the year 1998-99, Medusa used to wear a pair of black and white striped ones to college, her pater and her sister used to cringe at the mere sight of it, begging her to change into something more suitable, and not quite baggy. being the visionary that she is, medusa never obliged, and ten years down the line, the same sister is now begging for Harem pants!

does medusa gloat? no she doesn't, because her revolutionary vision doesn't stop with this single instance!

Point two: The case of the black nail polish!


When in college, Medusa and the one who taught her to smoke, discovered the joys of black nail polish- and how did the revolutionary left-leaning intellectuals inhabiting the canteen make fun of them? reared on safe browns and pale pinks, black was beyond their imaginary, it destabilized the norms of beauty and desirablity- and what more proof of the historicity of such norms, than the fact that black nail polish is now, a decade later, flaunted by the sexiest heroines ever?


Point three: CHICK LIT!


So, while in M Phil, she had to explain to the omniscient supervisor of hers what chick lit meant, and how there was an Indian version of it that she was interested in looking at.
Now in her Ph D, everyone is either working on it, has read one or the other, and in some cases, is even writing it! Didn't Medusa know that angst over love, fat and shopping will eventually bring in even those with the unbearable lightness of being?

So, what do the above mentioned three things prove?
Not merely that Medusa is ahead of her time, but that for their own good, the people of the world should recognize her as such, not simply to boost her ego, but also to prepare themselves for the years and fashion to come.

Hot tip for the next decade: waist chain!

slight nagging thought brought on by the statistician: the gap between medusa's pioneering acts of fashion and when the rest of the world finally catches up with her seems to be decreasing. form 13 years to 10, and in the case of chick lit- only 3. if this continues, will medusa one day follow fashion trends and not set them?

What is the need to speak for Arundhati Roy?

Medusa does not want to have to defend Arundhati Roy- and there are two reasons for it. One: she is perfectly capable of defending herself (just take a look at the impassioned note from Kashmir after the first rumours of sedition charges started- and ignore the overtly sappy nature of the thing); second: Medusa does not always agree with her.

In fact, more than disagreeing, as someone who is constantly trying to figure out the meaning of what is it to be an academic and an activist, an intellectual and a participant in mass movements, Medusa finds Roy's positions to be more often than not, disconcerting. She is like the Shahrukh Khan of people's movements: lending her star presence to movements while not being organically connected to any of them. She has been to Narmada, to Nandigram, and now, to Kashmir.

Given that, being an organic intellectual, is not the sine qua non for having an opinion, and expressing it. And if you are as beautiful, articulate, and famous as Roy is, it at times becomes a moral imperative to express it, because if you do it, it makes news. Prime time, English daily news.

And that is what makes it imperative on the Delhi High court to cry for charges of sedition. It gets quickly sidelined that they implicate Geelani- one who has been talking about Kashmir for ever, and one who gets the shoe thrown at him, as well. Roy makes the headline, and both her supporters and detractors cry themselves hoarse. As a fellow curly- haired person medusa is stunned at the comicality of it all- after all "sedition"? Is this the same Indian state whose fervent attempts to decolonize its past, nevertheless provides it with a blinkered vision where colonial laws are good while it keeps out the "deviants"?

The "Sesh Kotha" by Suman Mitra in the latest issue of Desh advises the readers that "It is best for Democracy to ignore them (the likes of Roy)". The page-long article compares Roy to Jane Fonda who was "rightly" ignored by Richard Nixon when she kept on protesting against the Vietnam war. By conflating Kashmir with Vietnam, and the Indian government with Nixon, the writer make his ideological underpinnings clear; but he leaves medusa wondering, why is it so easy for the champions of the nation-state, of textbook-ish understanding of democracy and the supposed anti-fundamentalists to be so righteous all the time? Who answers for the fundamentalism of self-righteousness: both in Roy and her detractors like the one just mentioned?

Reading and reflecting on the fat studies reader- one

Medusa has always been fat. Ever since she can remember, visitng shoe stores and shops that sell clothes have always been the stuff that nightmares are made of. While the polite Marwari shopkeepers would tell her parents that since “baby is healthy, she needs a size bigger than the others of her age”, the not-so-polite Bengali ones will tell her parents that fat children need clothes that fit older kids.

As a result she always wore frocks that reached her ankles, and jeans that had to be rolled up ten times.

Shoes were something else. She remembers walking down the length and breadth of College Street with mater, looking for a pair of shoes that will fit her, and coming up with zilch. Mater screaming and shouting, humiliated by the shoe-store assistants who would either take one look at her feet and claim that they did not have her size, or try and wrestle her feet into impossibly small pairs and insist that they fit.

So, consider medusa’s amazement when she recently went back to photos of herself when she was at school. She saw a young girl who was no-fatter and no-thinner than most of her peers, a very active young girl who used to dance and debate, take part in every damn thing that happened at school, found the time to study and fall in love repeatedly, play games and often win races, and fill notebooks with gibberishes of an average teenager’s life.

So what happened? How did this active young girl make herself believe that she was the fattest of everyone she knew?

At this ripe old age, medusa has been advised by all medical practitioners, starting from the GP to the gynecologist, the endocrinologist and the dermatologist that she needs to lose weight, ASAP. The first thing that most people say to her when they meet her is either “you’ve lost so much weight” or “have you put on a bit of weight”?

But do they know of the conspiracy that they are part of, that is driven by the multi million dollar weight loss industries and pharmaceutical companies, that tend to look at fat as merely a health hazard and not a fact of life?

Have they ever heard of “Health at Every Size”? Truth be told, Medusa hadn’t either till this day, but now that she is reading the Fat Studies reader, many more such awesome things are waiting to be found out.

So, more on this, as Medusa continues to find out fascinating stuff.

Jobless In Bombay day 3

Medusa's in Bombay, supposedly looking after little sister. but weirdest things do happen, little sister seems to have become capable of looking after herself, feeding herself, reaching work on time and even commute in a strange city. and she seems to be doing it all with a lot more confidence than medusa, when medusa does venture out of the sanctuary that her friend's place affords her.

the little that she's seen of Bombay, marks it as a city of apartment buildings and shops. obviously, there must be houses and other things, but apartment buildings, in all kinds of shapes and sizes crowd her vision when she looks out of the 5th floor flat in Andheri where her friend stays. the 11th floor flat at Marol where her sister is, is nestled between similar flats on all sides, and sister claims that the only view she gets from her office at Malad is one of apartment blocks.

funny thing is, medusa doesn't like houses. ideally she would love to live in a hostel/ hotel type arrangement, where if the light bulb is fused you can go to the technical section and get them to fix it, where the cleaning of bathrooms and corridors are done by others without you having to open the door for them, or even having to buy cleaning supplies, where the only thing she needs to care about is whether privacy is guaranteed once she shuts the door.
think about it, you don't have to go beyond the next couple of rooms for friends. food or company; in a hostel, people are awake almost at all hours, and such close proximity of people ensures that you have computer wizards, film collectors and ace chefs close at hand.

yes, this is medusa's wishful longing for life at the university, even though she hated it and thought that she had grown beyond it, while she was here full-time, but now that she comes for fleeting visits and fully immerses herself in the process of discussing anything and everything, along with the likelihood of bitching about people, she never wants to go back.