On borrowing books

So Medusa has been worrying about this for quite some time now. She reads books, downloads most of them and reads them on the kindle, and then buys some, and buys mostly fiction off the pavement on College Street. But also subscribes to a bookbox that delivers one book of fiction and some overpriced ' bookish goodies' (dramatic rolling of the eye) to her house, every month. So it is not that Medusa doesn't read fiction. But she doesn't borrow them any longer--and the people she knows, do not seem to be doing that either.

When Medusa met the menstrual cup

It was a match made in heaven! (Like other marriages are!!!)

If Medusa is now asked to rank five of her favourite inventions of the recent past, the menstrual cup will easily come out on top. A decade ago Medusa had similarly been amazed by the neatness of a tampon, but had then been deterred by the price and the frequency of replacement, but this, the menstrual cup, has left a love which started at first use, and will last for as long as Medusa will have the agility to fit it in, and the need for one.

Many have written paeans to the menstrual cup (read this and this), and Medusa is longing to join their ranks, by reminding herself that most women in South Asia do not have access to the amount of water it takes to clean a menstrual cup, and definitely not the money to buy. In fact, and this Medusa learnt only this year, apart from torn rags, women use SAND, ASH, PLASTIC and Paper, due to their absorbent properties and their availability -- and here Medusa has been cribbing about her super expensive sanitary pads, available in four kinds of sizes, three kinds of thicknesses, five smells, and a million brands. Medusa heard a lot about the damage to the environment that tonnes of used sanitary napkins and their packaging make- and also just recently heard about the various ways in which rural women are encouraged to use incinerators to burn the used napkins and then to eventually use the ash as fertilizers, but incinerators are in short supply, taboos around menstruation entrenched and multifarious, and napkins difficult to come by.

Most of the month Medusa is happily oblivious of her uterus, but once it starts acting, and it has been acting up off late, it brings all kinds of pains and aches, emotions run high or low, but more than the physical discomfort which Medusa has learnt to bear with copious amount of fluids and pills at the right intervals, the logistics of it all end up being mind boggling.

Would an XL suffice or should she scout the shops of an XXL or even a XXXL? Which shop is likely to have them? How can there be only three XXXL pads in one packet? How much do they cost ? A LOT.  Should she lie down straight or sit up straight? Should she move from a supine to a standing position now or later? Can she turn to her side? Does she need to change her clothes and wash her sheets right away? Will people notice?

Will she have to go to work? Will she go out afterwards? Will those spaces have bathrooms that work? Will there be gaps between classes to change the napkins? Where will she throw them? Can she talk about her discomfort to the people around her? Will they hush her up every time she opens her mouth because, well, just because.

All of these issues haven’t been resolved with a menstrual cup, but most have. It is a one time only investment for many years to come, it completely takes care of the mess and the attendant worries, it needs to be emptied much less frequently, perhaps thrice a day, and once inserted, can more or less be forgotten about. No disposal, mere cleaning with plenty of water, some amount of dexterity with one’s own body and a ten-hourly (on average) access to a clean bathroom.

One needs to have just ONE menstrual cup, it can be washed with water and put right back in, It costs approximately 600/- online, which is one third of what Medusa spent in the past two months, between XXXL and different brands. 

So no wonder, at this ripe old age Medusa is finally waking up to the possibility of that oxymoron, “A happy period”.

For most other people who menstruate, across the world, the menstrual cup remains a near-impossibility. It’s expensive, not easily available, requires a lot of water, a clean place for using it (although for people who do not have a clean toilet at their disposal, what extra hurdle can this pose) and a complete removal of the myriad menstrual taboos that Medusa doesn’t even know about. But even for them, surely, the menstrual cup will make things a wee bit better. So if there are people distributing menstrual cups and educating people about it, you have an eager volunteer here!

Rainy days and Mondays

Always get me down. So goes the song, of perhaps The Carpenters? And of course, when Medusa hears this sad song and thinks of The Carpenters she also remembers that Karen Carpenter died, from anorexia. So there, the sadness in the song makes sense.

And it makes sense in this glorious weather when for once, the people without ACs feel as good about themselves as people with ACs must.

As Medusa sits at her dining table, having discarded her desk since it cannot be cluttered as extensively as the larger table can- she looks out of the window and sees the rain. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and at night. It rains, it pours, it drizzles and the wind blows and it is dark and damp all the time. The opposite houses look dull, the forever-playing-cricket children stay indoors, downstairs, or maybe upstairs, people cook food that smell tasty and sparrows come visit her, seeking shelter.

The streets are more o less perpetually waterlogged, she has nowhere to go, no one to meet and except writing, nothing to do. She loves it, loves it enough to worry about the time when this perfection will end. When she will have to go back to work, when the rains will stop, when the sun will come out and when others will lay claim to this ennui.

But till then, rainy days and Mondays. 

Writing something is better than writing nothing

is the belief that prompts this post.
Medusa has sat in front of the computer for two consecutive days now, without having typed a single, and so, being the procrastinator extraordinaire that she is, she chose to pontificate about writing practices and such like.

In which Medusa proved the body- image theorists wrong.

So all this while, when Medusa had been asked whether she is concerned about women’s body images for her research, she had noncommittally nodded her head, thinking body image to be some sort of a subjective category of how people think of their bodies.

But she was wrong, oh so wrong. Did she know that it is not subjective at all, it is good and true science, calculable and quantifiable at the same time? No she did not.

There are several other things that she found out, in trying to understand this nebulous ‘body image’:

1.   Body image, an important concern in experimental psychology, assumes that a person (and since all the experiments in this context are always carried out on women, here, a woman) should be able to perceive her body objectively and more or less accurately as she would some inanimate object.

(Because bodies are just that- inanimate objects)

2.    Accurate perception means perception in terms of metres, centimetres, inches etc. So basically, if one can look at a book and say that this is six inches long, one should be able to say that her calf is twenty inches wide.

(So, those people who can not objectively perceive lengths etc., can not have a body image?)

3.    ‘Body image’ is usually suffixed with disturbance or problem- it is diagnosable and therefore treatable by a change in individual attitude.

(Yes of course.)

4.    There are complex experiments carried out to diagnose body image disturbance and build generalisations around them. These experiments include: having a woman measure the approximate width of her thigh/ shin/ stomach along with the lengths of a slant of light gradually reducing. Looking at distorted mirrors, or feeling up oneself in front an observer, constitute this very scientific and highly complicated experiment.

(Not something one can easily understand.)

                                                                                                                       

And there’s more, researchers have concluded that there are certain indices of body image dissatisfaction that can tell the experimented-on subject exactly how unhappy she is with her body.

They are:

∞Body image perception index:  perceived size (multiplied by) 100 / real size.

(So, if one thinks one’s waist is 36 inches while in reality it is only 34 inches, then one should be able to calculate exactly how dissatisfied she is.)

∞Body parts satisfaction scale,

∞Body image avoidance questionnaire, etc.

Hence, one could potentially have a negative or a positive body image perception rating, but in this case, both negative and positive would be negative, right? PLUS,  these highly sophisticated researchers have also concluded that almost all women suffer from body image disturbance- in terms of overestimation (i.e. they think they are bigger than they are). Some overestimate the size of certain sections of their bodies, some do so as a whole.

And this is where Medusa was confused. Because to her, the limits of her body are not necessarily limited, bounded by definite boundaries. It varies from day to day, week to week, mostly unnoticed by her. What she does know, however, is this:

If there is a stool or a chair with legs on the floor that she has to pass by, she WILL stub her toe in it.

If there is a door that she has to go through, she WILL graze her arm or her elbow on its side. And kindly note, not on both the sides, this is not about her thinking herself to be thinner than she is, instead, this is about not knowing where she ends and “inanimate” objects start. The liminal state of her hair is another case in point- its ends get caught in her bag, other bodies on her bed find themselves entangled with it, she herself pulls it on occasions, not knowing it to be her hair. She therefore walks about in the world, in an often painful haze of stubs, pricks, pulls, grazes and shoves- trying to navigate between bodies and beings.

If the body image scientists were right, then, Medusa would have thought herself to be bigger than she is, and would have always managed an area of space between the limits of her body and that of another- the spatial version of her body image perception rating: surely something the scientists could scientifically come up with?

The absence of which, coupled with the fact that Medusa DOES NOT THINK SHE IS ANY THINNER, ever (!!!!!), one must conclude, the scientists, despite their scientific experiments, must have been wrong after all.

mother medusa

There were about a hundred answer scripts to correct, two articles to write, one that had been due for two years (bless the editors) and the for-ever-pending thesis. Therefore, as all rational and highly intellectual professionals must also be doing, instead of getting down to work, Medusa took up a hobby.

And like everything else that Medusa takes up (only when there are other much much more pressing things to be done), the first step is usually to buy stuff, i.e., go shopping. So at the end of a long walk from somewhere she should not have gone to (digression here: Medusa likes the whole ‘woman in big city’ sort of exploratory walks that Hollywood films, especially chick flicks often have; makes her feel chick-y, and thin) anyway, she stopped at a shop that seemed to stock paint supplies, and asked for a box of poster paint. And a set of paintbrushes.

The shop had two kinds, one expensive and the other inexpensive, and since Medusa has no illusions regarding her painting prowess, she insisted that the shopkeeper hands over the cheapest set. Instead of doing as he was told, like other nosy middle aged men, he asked, “How well does she paint?” (Well, he was speaking in Bengali and did not use a gendered pronoun, simply asking kyamon aanke, but how on earth does one translate that into English, without resorting to the somewhat incongruous “they”?)

Medusa went dumb for a couple of seconds, not knowing who he was referring to.  And then it registered.

This considerate/ alternately nosy man was asking medusa how well does her son or daughter, the one she must be buying paint and brushes for, draw/ paint. It did not occur to him that Medusa might be buying this stuff for herself. And it did not occur to Medusa that someone might mistake her to be someone’s mother.

And it was incredibly stupid of Medusa. Why didn’t she remember that incident at the shoe store a year ago, when in order to feed her insatiable desire for a pair of ballerinas (you know, the black shoes that Bengali girls wear to school), she walked into a store and asked for them.  The attendant asked her, “How old is she?” Medusa should have said that the shoes are for herself, but then she played along. She said, “Oh, her feet are the same size as mine, so just show me shoes that’ll fit me.”

So you see, Medusa should not be taken aback when people assume she has a child, it keeps on happening. It’s disconcerting at the beginning because the idea of having a child, of being someone’s mother, is NEVER present in Medusa’s mind, is hardly ever alluded to by her friends, at least to her; no longer expected by her mother and is now not a concern of her gynaecologist. The gynaecologist has now written on top of Medusa’s prescription, in bold letters, DOES NOT WANT CHILD. Thereby relieving herself as well as Medusa from the routine litany of “when do you want to get married, when do you plan to have a child.”

But how did Medusa assume that she can conveniently bypass the dominant figurations, as if forgetting about normative womanhood is as good as it ceasing to exist? The world is not inside your head, dear medusa, it’s out there: where women your age are usually married to men, have children, and barely have time to indulge into arty fancies. And just because Medusa does not engage with these facts every day, it does not mean that others do not.

A more interesting question is the following: why didn’t Medusa correct the misconceptions of these men? After all, there is no law against the purchase of seemingly children’s stuff by adults. Thin people often proudly talk about how they bought their t shirt from the kids’ section. Medusa knows a lot of adults, often with progeny of their own, whose entire grown up reading consists of what is designated as teen literature. When they go shopping and someone asks the age of the child, do they make up fictitious daughters like Medusa does?

An interesting conundrum, this.

Medusa explains her behaviour to self thus: attempting to explain would have required more effort and may have generated snide comments. Hence, taking the path of least resistance was not necessarily a bad idea.

There may be couple of other ways out, which won’t make people assume that Medusa may have a child. One: lose tonnes of weight like Medusa’s friend PP did, so that people usually assume that she’s in school and hence unlikely to have a child. Two: cut hair short like before and wear oversized shirts, so that people mistake her to be a fat young boy and hence no one’s mother.

Now, which one’s easier?

On the bus: bodies in the wasteland.

So, there was this one man whose under-belly ( can the word be used to describe the part of the human body, or is it only to be used in sentences like :the underbelly of the society"?) was rubbing on Medusa's bicep. Medusa was trying to cringe further into her seat, but the none-too-thin man on her left sat solidly and stolidly like a rock, so cringing was difficult.

And then there was the other pelvic bone which was poking her shoulder blade. Do remember that the pelvic bone is merely a conjecture, it could have been a phone, a belt buckle, or some other hard thing.

Basically yet another day in the commute to the wasteland. And Medusa was actually thinking about the radically post-modern potentials of such a journey- where the boundaries of the bodies are dissolved, spaces breached, limits compromised.

However, she also felt a knee feeling her leg up, rhythmically. As is her wont, she thought it must be a mistake. And then it happened, again, and again, and again, at regular intervals, till there could be no doubt that this regularity was a matter of design. So she looked to her left, and saw a youngish man holding onto the rails above his head, with both hands, and humping the air in front of him.

Strange though it appeared, the actions had sound logic behind them. By humping the air he ensured that the humping motion continued down his limbs, and his knee in extension humped Medusa's leg. And of course Medusa was disgusted and was trying to figure out the most painful way to hurt, and if possible wound him, but then she saw light.

What if this man was simply carrying out the tenets of Beatriz Preciado's Contra-Sexual Manifesto? Preciado challenges naturalized notions of the body and sexuality that privilege genitals and marginalize the dildo by fetishizing it. She claims that the practitioners of dildotectonics (not an easy science), ought to consider the entire body as a dildoscape, "a living surface where dildos are inscribed and displaced."

So basically, by unleashing the potential of the entire body in as fetishized a manner as dildos are regarded, pleasure ceases to be simply genitally oriented. Isn't that what this man was doing on the bus? His knee became the medium of his pleasure, he radically altered the definition of pleasure, divorced it from reproduction and in general, treated himself to a good time.

Of course, there was the tiny detail that he did not care for Medusa's consent. So Medusa crushed his revolutionary moment, brutally, by bringing her shoes down on his toes, and watched in satisfaction his grimacing retreat.

Bodies of women.

There's a girl who studies in one of the other departments, at work. She's familiar to Medusa, mostly through the praises of her teachers, but also because she is always around whenever Medusa visits that department. She seems sorted, pleasant, is clearly intelligent and studious. All irrelevant. And she has also been threatened with an acid bulb.

For the past couple of years, one of the leaders of the erstwhile ruling students' union (again irrelevant) has been interested in her: an interest that she has politely yet firmly declined, repeatedly. This year, therefore, the young man has renewed his attentions, with the accompanying threat of disfigurement. Her classmates now walk her to the bus stop, she has sought help from her teachers, has spoken to the boy's friends, and is contemplating staying at home, for a long time to come.

Medusa can not even begin to imagine what prompts this young man to act the way he is promising to act, but she can try to comprehend the sense of despair that this girl must be experiencing- a despair shared. Because whether or not one has been at the receiving end of such sensational, headline-grabbing violence, one has gotten used to having one's body brought to the forefront of one's existence. Grabbed and mauled on the roads, in buses, trains; brushed against in the metro and in homes, parties, colleges, workplaces. If she gets ahead in life, she's probably also sleeping with her boss, and if she doesn't, then her cleavage-display has sadly been in vain. Her demands in meetings are expressed too loudly, shrilly, She provokes and is not careful enough- the way to teach her a lesson is to teach her body a lesson.

So, while the girl at work will probably go to the police and complain, and maybe, just maybe, be rid of this young man for good- her experience of her body is unlikely to be any diiferent.

Stopping here seemed too depressing, and so Medusa tried to imagine a situation when she and her friends could talk about the bodies of "masculine" men in a similar manner. They could say, "ooooh, look at his arse, no wonder it got slapped yesterday when he was getting on the bus". Or maybe, "its only natural that all his students would hang on to his words, have you noticed the size of his adam's apple?" And again, "If he did not want me to stare at his belly, why did he wear such a tight shirt?".

Pretty taxing, this imagining.

About a year ago, on her way back from the workplace at the heart of the industrial wasteland, Medusa was sitting next to a student. Medusa had always liked this boy, he was courteous, funny, attentive and regular in classes, and made an attempt to communicate- all virtues that Medusa cherishes more than ever before.

This boy asked Medusa, "Ma'am, why don't you have a talk with the first year girls?"

Medusa: "About what?"

Boy: "Ma'am, they wear jeans to college. Why don't you ask them to stop?"

Medusa, completely flabbergasted and extremely unhappy, on various counts, croaks a reply: "But so do I. In fact, I am wearing jeans right now!!!"

Boy, unfazed: "But that's different."

Medusa, summoning up all the authority that she could muster, tells the boy off. And then continues with her confusion and discomfort, till this piece of news makes her sit up and rethink all her discomfort. Medusa distinctly remembers the time when there was a furore against the comments made by the principal of Asuthosh College, about students needing to wear decent clothes (read, no jeans) and the more recent Muralidhar college one. Incidentally, the reactions to these events, differentiated in time and in space, have been more or less similar- the authorities have been called "traditional", "fundamentalist". "patriarchal", "non-modern", and increasingly, "taliban". 

The thing common about all these reactions is that, they all manage to posit the offending authoritarian group/ person as something distinct from us progressive, modern liberal secular subjects: aberrations, and worse- anachronisms. So, if these offending people/ voices are merely blasts from the past, religious fundamentalists in a secular world, then the swiftness with which they can be relegated to an outside, is amazing. And this outside ensures the comfort with the inside, societies freed of "criminal types", humans freed of beasts. 

In such a scenario, when Medusa seeks to question the ease with which her student censured the clothes worn by his peers, she finds herself unable to posit her student in any of those comfortable categories. His engagement and sensitivity towards contemporary politics and society, and his interaction with peers and teachers, seem perfectly satisfactory- to Medusa. Then what gives him the moral authority to criticise clothes worn by women, and expect his criticism to be ratified by his teacher, who will, in turn, penalise them by bringing the force of her authority to rest upon them? Especially when, this teacher herself is wearing jeans, something he clearly thinks girls should not wear?

However, while he did not comment on Medusa's jeans, in fact treated it as something distinctly different from those of the "first year girls", many others did. Her parents, some guy in the bus, some whispers in the corridors and some other women members of the faculty. Her parents are neither aberrations, nor anachronisms, but they worry about what the PEOPLE will say to her clothes, because they know that discrimination against women on the basis of WHATEVER, is not surprising, shocking yes, but not unexpected. Her parents worry, and her student forces his opinion, because discrimination against women is STRUCTURAL, it is SYSTEMIC, and the longer feminist critique of instances of discrimination and violence fools itself by calling these aberrations, the longer is the road to an end to it? If an end can be thought of, that is.

My body, your body, and the availability of it.

So Medusa was negotiating the crowds and the buses, in front of the busiest railway station of them all. She wasn't looking forward to the long walk home- at a time when everyone was getting out of Calcutta she was trying to walk in, and hence going to be faced with masses of humanity, but still the prospect of the walk made her feel virtuous, because as usual, she had not been exercising, like she ought to, for the benefit of the self and research project.

As she was about to cross the road, a stray hand grabbed her left breast, and then let go. Medusa could not turn around fast enough to conclusively ascertain which balding man it was, but she let out a snarling "fucker" and wondered whether to lash out at the nearest guy, but then decided against it. Instead she crossed the road, hugged one side of the bridge and inched her way forward, thinking about the stray hand.

Its not like she was shocked and exceptionally upset, she was pissed, and also surprised. It had been couple of weeks since she was groped last, and she had managed to not have the thought of being groped upper most in her mind. And also, she was wearing a salwar kameez with a dupatta and the hand did manage to negotiate the dupatta. So much for dressing modestly, appropriately. She was thinking about the dexterity of that stray hand- when did those pair of eyes spot her, when did the hand decide to make a dash for it, and where did the pleasure go to, the loins? If yes, did the man then proceed with an erection? If yes, how long did it last? Longer than the contact with the unknown woman's body, surely?

And then some guy passing her from the opposite side, hit her so hard, she cried out in pain. The small voice in her head chastised her, for once again foolishly walking in the crowd, when she could have easily gotten into a bus. But what about the time when Medusa and her friend were walking on the empty-ish road in front of the university, and a biker hit her friend really hard and zoomed away? Where was the crowd then? And what is the pleasure that people get from hitting unknown women, is it the same pleasure that one gets from grabbing the breast and the bum? Or is it something else? After this pleasure, do the men gloat for the rest of the journey, or do they promptly forget about it, and look for the next person to hit?

Idle questions all. 

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.

hot and bothered

Last night Medusa came back from work all hot and sweaty, fuming and cursing. she had been travelling since three in the afternoon, in what ought to be a pleasant monsoon weather, but instead is blinding, scorching, sweat-inducing summer. medusa cursed all those who never have to trek for ten minutes in the heart of the industrial wasteland, where there is no shade, and only heat, she abused those who do not travel at the back of a "super", which prides itself in travelling at break-neck speed, and therefore filling its occupants with a maximum of iron dust and industrial pollution. not to mention the sun. the blinding, head-aching sun.

and when she reached home, there was no power. presumably because at this unexpected heat wave the use of ACs had gone up again. fat load of good a power cut does. those who had been taking much earned rest after a long day slaving in front of computers at an air conditioned office, having travelled to and fro in air conditioned vehicles, would simply use up some more fossil fuel and keep the AC on.

How will they ever know the the pleasure of having one's own sweat trickle down one's back, making the bed and the pillow soak, when one's hanky gets wetter than an wet tissue, and the gloom cast by the absence of electric light?

Medusa knows that individual actions of eco-friendly-ness will not stop the downward spiral in which the earth's weather seems to have gone. but what is to be done? it seems so bloody hopeless that ranting about the bourgeoisie who take taxis and use ACs brings about more pleasure than harping on and on about nameless-faceless individuals and interests that control corporations.

in the meantime, the temperatures rise. you may control the weather that you live in, but can you control the weather in which your food is grown? and if you can't, then aren't you and medusa in the same sinking boat, and shouldn't you be doing something about it?

Rajneeti= Mahabharata + The Godfather

It seems Nikhat Kazmi said it before Medusa did, but Medusa did figure it out all by herself, and had immense fun figuring out which character in the film corresponds to which one in which epic, because yes, even The Godfather is an epic.

Medusa can name half a dozen people who draw a large part of their insights from the Godfather, the book, and she herself is one of them. She's not going do the rounds of the quotable quotes, instead, talk a bit about how the Godfather parts of the film makes it smarter and catchier than the Mahabharata parts do.

To start with, brothers and in the second generation, cousins fight with each other in their desire to control the politics of a state, one flanked by the Dalit Ajay Devgan, and the other by the so called uncle- Nana Patekar. Most of the cast manages to die, how, Medusa's not too sure about the details, since as soon as she understood someone was going to die (which she did every time, after all she does know her Godfather) she closed her eyes to that condition that makes her afraid of anticipation of violence and misery on screen. In the end, there was the pretty Katrina, now the chief minister of the state, by virtue of being a political widow, and Ranbir Kapoor- the Michael Corleone meets Arjuna.

Some things never change though: Katrina still can not act or do anything to save her life, apart from look pretty, and my gawd, she is pretty. Medusa doesn't figure what the hype was all about though, given that she's doesn't occupy much footage in the film. Manoj Bajpayee continues to be an awesome actor, and its great to see him after so long, as does Nana Patekar. Ajay Devgan does his usual, intense and wronged young man act, while Arjun Rampal looks so young and thin, one wonders what all torture his body and face must have had to go through. ( BUT HE DOES LOOK VERY VERY HOT). Ranbir does what he had to do, look serious and deliver dialogues.

The pleasant surprise was how the director/ screen writer, made Ranbir' American girlfriend play the parts of both Michael's first girl friend and second wife Kay Adams and his Italian wife, Apollonia; making her the only voice of concern/ ethics in the middle of all this plotting and killing, as well as killing her off slightly unnecessarily.

In short, the hall was houseful and the crowd seemed to love it. Medusa liked it, and might as well recommend it.

This post could start fairly predictably, claiming April to be the cruelest month. Except for the fact that April is past, the calendar's well into may, but the summer refuses to become less cruel. So much so, that there is a new word doing the rounds of newspaper weather reports, "discomfort level", calculated on the basis of maximum temperature and relative humidity, and one can say stuff like "yesterday's discomfort level was at 67.5". However, since when did mere numbers manage to sum up experiences?One of medusa's recent favourite songs go something like this:
"Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring,
MY summer wine is really made from all these things"
And you've got to hear it to really feel it, it reminds you of a season that's almost mythical in its vegetable bounty, the fruits and the produce. the bright green leaves coming out after they had all fallen off during the winter.....
Kind of like this
bright, and cheerful.
The reality is however stark! Its filled with itches, heat rashes, acne, sweat and stomach upsets, with loss of appetite, lack of sleep, power cuts, a complete disruption of movement during the daytime, thanks to the sun, and a complete all-consuming desire for the liquid, the cool, the cold, the rain.
fantasies of a sea beachMedusa wants to go somewhere, away from this heat and heart/head ache, where the sun doth shine, but a trifle mildly.

p.s. the photographer suffers in this heat worse than medusa has ever seen anyone suffer, and medusa wishes to take the photographer away, where they'll eat, drink and make merry in the gentle breeze, feel the trickle of cool water in their toes and soak in the rain.