A Book Review (ish)

 Everybody loves a sad story. This is by no means a revolutionary idea – it is actually the foundation on which the entire discipline of literary studies stands (vis a vis Aristotle, keyword: catharsis). Long before I took Eng.Lit as my major and then quit reading like it was a bad habit, I (too) spent all my days devouring any and all forms of media that was guaranteed to make me cry, and it wasn't very long before the teen trauma-hunter that I was, discovered that there were few other forms of fiction that could compete with Holocaust Fiction in so reliably letting you open the floodgates. As a discerning young connoisseur of all things sad, nothing excited me more than a blurb which said “set in the 1940s”. What’s not to like? Terrifyingly dire and hopeless situations which the protagonists are almost never expected to survive? Check! Lots of potential for heartbreak, forbidden romances and tragic endings? Check and check! Hundred percent guaranteed results every single time! 

Now,  I don’t think this makes me any more masochistic or sadistic than the next person; the best way I could describe the feeling I got reading these books is that it’s something akin to sitting inside a warm, cozy room while it rains outside. As a teenager in the 21st century, I was both temporarily and spatially located too far from the scene of the crime (so to speak) to ever consider it as anything but really sad stuff that happened to a bunch of people who lived way before the thought of me ever existed in the universe. And so, I sought out books from all the vantage points in the war – from little Jewish girls who lived and died in their attics to prisoners who escaped from concentration camps, soldiers from both sides who fell in love with the wrong person, who died in various scenic locations all over Europe ( places which I bookmarked to visit one day, when I’m richer). In 2019  when I was still sitting in a comfy little armchair in an idyllic town on the Southern coast of India where nothing ever happened, inside the nice bubble that my parents had made for me, everything was fiction. 

And then Covid happened, I ran out of interest in staying in bed all day with a book and took to staying in bed all day with a phone instead. I stopped reading almost completely, and the innumerable books I once devoured trickled down to a measly three or four each year, most of which were prescribed in my syllabus. 

Enter 2025: the year of possibilities. I make a vision board, I write down a solid little TBR list. And on top of the list, I put down this one novel I’ve had in my list since before I quit. With no idea what awaited me, I dived in. 500 or so odd pages and an entire day's worth of reading later, I’m…worried. Something has changed, something is very wrong somewhere. 

Doerr (Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer winning author of ‘All The Light We Cannot See’) does his job wonderfully. The parallel storylines of the two protagonists converge beautifully, and all the parts come together to make the full picture without being too contrived ( which is extremely important to me personally). And in my capacity as an expert of all things sad, I could see the tragedy coming from miles away – it's literally why I picked it out — but it still made me cry, which is a huge win. 

So what was wrong? 

As it turns out, pre 2019 and post 2020 me are two very different people,  as was the world around me. Someone on Twitter put it best; it's like the world has undergone a mass psychosis post Covid, with almost every major country in the world moving silently towards far-right politics, and neo-fascist modes of leadership. Up until maybe five years ago, neo-Nazi discourse on mainstream social media (or any media, for that matter) would have been considered unimaginable. But the richest man in the world thought it okay to give the Sieg Heil from the world's most publicised platform – TWICE – just days before he made the decision to withhold welfare and medical aid from the poorest people in a country to which he barely belongs. People are rounded up on false charges and flown out of the country, while concentration camps, sorry, detention centres are being built as we speak. Closer home, things are probably worse, and have been that way for some time now. Most recently though, people of a certain denomination were being hounded to display their religion visibly so certain other denominations may avoid or target them. The parallels really write themselves at this point. Oh and of course, there’s the issue of the millions of children and babies beheaded live in front of the whole world with apparently no consequences. 

What was wrong was that I wasn’t standing inside the cozy room anymore; I was out there, in the rain and storm, watching helplessly as a tornado raged its way closer and closer to me, tearing everything in its path to bits. 

I could go on, but I’m sure you get it. Everyone does. It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that the energy in the world has shifted for the worse, much worse, since the turn of the decade. If history is any indicator… I don't know how to end that sentence without sounding like a doomerist, if I already haven’t proved that I am exactly that. A therapist would tell you to be where your feet are, so that’s what I will do. I look around. I’m still sitting in a snug little armchair in an idyllic town where nothing ever happens. And I’m fine. 

Until of course, the next time I open my eyes and check my phone. 

POEMS IN CAPTIVITY

1. On Days Like These

There are a million lives I want to live

In shapeless, colourless dreams 

That dance on the edge of my mind, 

Tantalizing, taunting, tormenting.  

I try to grasp, I clutch at ghosts

Of victories past and losses foretold,

I try to tell them, how the sparkles fell off

That my shiny new dress is now dirty and torn. 

Which way do I go? In the rain-soaked bed of weeds 

My wheels are rotting

With my branches full of dried-up flowers,

I stand forgotten. 

On days like these I cannot stand 

the thought of all this Potential, 

--so much of it I could choke--

Snaking round my throat, 

My necklace of rope, my prisoners' chains;

My hangman's noose, my strait jacket collar.

The gunpowder to my grenade of a brain.  

Oh yes, on days like these, my head feels like an explosive, 

Timed to go off on the right command. 

Just waiting to shatter and splatter 

my remains all around me--

vehemently, vengefully, violently-- 

Like a pumpkin thrown from a third-floor window;

And on the way out, 

If I stain my mother's best clothes, 

I'm sorry in advance. 

Homecoming and A Room of One's Own

Of late, returning home has begun to feel less of a homecoming than a mere stopover; a railway station Waiting Room on your way to somewhere, a petrol pump rest-stop you visit amidst of a long road trip. The visits are usually quick, unsurprising, and occur only at extremely necessary points on the way. You aren't there permanently -- not anymore -- you're always on your way, always headed somewhere else. "Ah back from ____ I see, when you did arrive when are you going back?" A pauseless question delivered in a single breath, most often. You're allowed to be permanent anywhere but here, my neighbours' quizzical faces seemed to imply. "On Christmas break from college, uncle". Yes my exams are over, aunty". "Sem starts next week". The array of stock responses I keep in my armory to satisfy the inquirer. Except now, I've run out of semesters and examinations to run back to; my verbal ammunition has run dry. 

*  *  *

I remember leaving for Chennai like it was yesterday, crying in the car, the first time it hit me that this was the last time I was leaving with all these beds and buckets, that once the car left the gates I wouldn't be coming back home to stay the way I used to. Oh, there would be returns of course. Homecomings, long-anticipated yet short-lived vacation days, semester breaks, Christmas breaks. Course-endings. But any more visits I made would be just that: visits. Short, temporary breaks that jutted in between actual, real, Life happening elsewhere, in big confusing cities far, -- in all senses -- far away from the overgrown weeds and broken down old swing in my backyard. I suppose I should call it my parents' backyard now. From hereon after, I would always be expected to go back to wherever it was that I'd come from, carrying rucksacks full of laundry and gifts. Better yet, I'd one day be asked to go off even farther with huge, permanent suitcases that could carry my whole life's weight easily; with fewer and fewer "callbacks" each year, I'd then transform into a true visitor in every sense of the word. Ah, the unique privilege of the girl child in this country. 

*  *  *

 So, when I started 'making over' my bedroom at home, the inevitable question arose in me: Why? Why bother? Why buy all those posters from Amazon, why put up those plants in the window, why unpack your usual three travelling bags when you're probably gonna have to wrap it all back up in a month or two's time? Why spend hours organizing my numerous journals and diaries and class-trip souvenirs and old birthday trinkets when my mum would have no idea what to do with them once I was no longer around to explain each one's significance in painstaking detail? 

*  *  * 

Nonetheless, I persisted. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, said Woolf in 1929. My dreams of book-writing notwithstanding, this woman is entirely happy having just the room alone, if not for fiction's sake then for the sake of her own sanity. And so, here's to my (at least at the moment of publication) wonderfully transient room -- I'll remember you fondly from some faraway steel bed and rickety wooden table-and-chair set-up I'll be calling My Room in the as yet unnamed city that I end up in soon enough.

                                             

The Subtle Art of Rotting: Part One

A few days ago, I had the sobering realization that there probably would not be any great art of lasting interest produced from our generation – we simply do not have the free time or opportunity for boredom enough for that. But where is all this time going? The day still has 24 hours to its name as far I’m aware. Me, for instance, I wake up at 6.45 every morning.  I'm in class by 8.30. I leave college by 1.30 and I go to sleep at around 12.00AM on average, later most days. Now try to keep up as I attempt some pretty complicated mathematical calculations here. From 1.30 PM in the afternoon to 1.30 AM at midnight (I lied when I said 12.00, hehe), how do I occupy these round 12 hours of “free” time? This is uncharted territory, ladies and gentlemen. I haven't ever given much thought to this question, in fact I’ve turned all my energy into not thinking about this question for well over twelve months now. So. I reach home. I take the time to unwind from a day of hard work – sitting still in a classroom and trying to pay my wandering attention to a lecture or two. Much like a demon trying to straighten the tail of the dog from that folktale, this often proves to be a futile exercise. Once back home, I open Instagram by default. Sometimes recently, I find my fingers performing this task even two turns ahead of my house. I cannot even keep my attention on the simple task of walking and observing, can’t listen to my own thoughts for more than 10 minutes at a time. 

If we are to believe the dominant discourse on social media, the only purpose I should be using Instagram for is to catch up with my friends and share updates about my life. But as any social media user can tell you, this is the bare minimum and often rarely what we open our apps for. Seeing my friends updates takes but a few measly minutes of my time. There's still the lion’s share of my free 12 hours remaining, stretching ahead like a vast and empty (and unscheduled) ocean. I scroll down. This is my first pitfall, where I make my first mistake, a mistake I have committed willingly over and over a million times, every day since that fateful day sometime in 2019 when I was first bought a cellphone to take with me to college. When Zuckerberg invented Facebook with the intention of keeping in contact with your faraway forgotten friends, he didn't mention, didn't know probably, that a mere ten years down the lane, 20-somethings from a tiny Indian corner of the globe would find themselves extremely invested in people making Swedish bread half a hemisphere away. I watch, I scroll. 

Keep scrolling, don't stop. These apps are designed with that aim in mind, you know. I check the time now. I have a million things to get done. My To-do list has featured the same overflowing items since Monday, and it's almost Friday. But it's only 3 o clock… Soon my eyes become tired. I somehow find the energy to close Instagram. But my mind craves for more, more colour, more sound, more distraction more everything– the only thing I want less of, is me and my own thoughts. A minute alone with my own self is enough to produce that all too familiar feeling of queasiness, the nausea that comes with the guilt of knowing that you have wasted precious hours of your day when you had SO MUCH to get done. You know, something similar to that queasy feeling in your stomach when you’ve indulged in too much oily food. An intellectual bloating, so to speak. You find that you can't breathe. You need something, anything, to get as far as possible from your stifling thoughts, the rising panic and guilt in your chest that leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. You start regretting, you’ve done something bad, you shouldn’t have wasted so much time. Oh and your head hurts…you cannot think straight. You feel as though someone’s covered your whole brain in wool, nothing’s sharp anymore, nothing works anymore. 

Oh you try. You have tried. You've been trying since two months into Covid season when the Dalgona coffee and the daily carom games with your family got old and you found yourself scarfing down entire seasons of never-ending American tv shows like popcorn. Since you found yourself waking up from a deep slumber one day and you simply weren’t…all quite there as you were before.  By now you're used to the headaches, the nausea, the guilt, the eyestrain – the mind boggling effort it takes to focus on something other than Netflix, the absolute inability to read books when you were devouring entire classics at age 13 – you wonder where that girl went and deep inside you mourn her death because you know she won’t be coming back. Where did that brain which solved entire trigonometric equations in record time go? You don't have the answer, you can't be bothered to dive beneath the layer of superfluous thoughts and search the archives of your subconscious for the answer buried deep within. So you ignore the uncomfortable feeling – it’s all too easy to forget it. All you gotta do is open another app and see what other people are thinking. 

         

And so you’ve tried and you’ve failed to get out, escape. App timers, Pomodoro methods, digital wellbeing hacks– you just increase the app timer and keep watching. Sometimes it hits you that the lost art of our generation is the ability, no, the talent, to simply sit with our discomfort. Sometimes the discomfiting thought that you’re well past the point of caring about your own slow mental death pokes through the layers of comfort shows and comfort food you eat to feel better. But it is almost immediately smothered by the opening of yet another app full of colour and sound loud enough to drown out the occurrence of another thought.

(to be contd)

To Defer or Not To Defer

 Reader, I hope you’ll forgive me for the long break. I’ve been experiencing that terrible condition they call writer’s block. Here’s hoping that I’ve made it out safely. 

After much deliberation, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of people in this world – the kind who believe in sacrifice, hard work, determination, self improvement etc, basically, the deferment of pleasure – and the kind who do first think later, that is, the Epicurean people. And although I would love to categorize myself as part of the former, I am old (and self aware) enough to realize that I am unfortunately a platinum card holding member of the latter. However, both groups do come with their own sets of boons and banes, some boon-ier and some bane-ier than the rest. Allow me to elaborate. 

You see both kinds of people all around you – I like to think that there are more of my people here than others, but maybe that’s just me seeing what I want to see. You know them, you’ve seen them, maybe you are them; In the former category we have the gym bros, the vegan/health food creators, the self help gurus, the life coaches…the list goes on. And in the opposing team we have the equal and opposite forces of people who make it a philosophy taking life easy. For each gym bro who starts his day at 5 AM, there’s a faux therapist who’ll tell you that it's okay to sleep in, maybe for days on end because it's what you need to heal. For every self help guru there are a hundred TikTok girlies who embrace bed rot culture as a quirky trend (do not even get me started on that!), for every dietician asking you to count calories there are black-gloved chefs who melt cheese all over their food like there's no tomorrow. No tomorrow...this of course is the watchword of the day. You have your #YOLO and your “Live While We’re Young” car bumper stickers to tell you that you need to seize the moment and enjoy life before it's gone. This is not a bad idea per se, in fact I would argue that it’s an excellent philosophy to live by, mainly because it is the one which has led me so far and justified all the bad decisions I made along the way (AND the sole perpetrator behind 1000s of rupees of Swiggy Orders). But what happens when there is a tomorrow and you have to live to face the consequences of your YOLO actions? Then again what if there is indeed no tomorrow? 

You might be wondering where I’m going with this. Excellent question, not sure if I know yet. As Michael Scott said, sometimes I start a sentence and hope I find it along the way.

But don’t leave just yet, I’m sure I’m building up to something here. Where were we? Ah yes, no tomorrow. With the state of the world being as it is, is it even worth my while to cut sugar for two weeks just to see if my skin clears up and my memory improves? What if all this dieting culture and health-freak lifestyle turns out to be in vain one day when the world as we know it does not exist and food as we know it becomes a thing of the past. I don’t wanna have to wake up one day when all we have are pills for sustenance and regret not eating that shawarma when I had the chance! 

It all boils down to one single question in the end: do I indeed cut sugar for two weeks or I choose happiness? (Did I write all this nonsense just because I don't want to skip on my daily post-lunch dessert? Yes, yes I did.)

The very glaringly obvious error in all this – have you spotted it yet, Reader? – is that I haven’t yet factored in a major quotient in the equation. Regret. The word pulls up memories of nights spent tossing and turning wondering why I didn’t do that sooner, why I did this, why I had to eat an entire packet of chips at once because now my stomach hurts and other, similarly deep philosophical musings. Regret, or shall I say an unhealthy, bordering-on-manic fear of regret rules my life. Maybe it's because I have been known to let myself down a lot of the time. See I’m not great at this whole decision making schtick. I blank out and freeze in the face of the smallest decisions – because I’m terrified of regretting not taking the other path. Robert Frost ain’t got nothin’ on me, sistah*. Just today I was at the clothing store for an hour turning two options of skirts over and over in my hands while the extremely patient sales assistant waited (and waited). It took my mum via video call and three other akkas to get me to finally pick a colour and free my helper from me. All so I don’t regret.

Turn the word over in your head ladies and gentlemen. Regret regret regret. I regret. I regret not planning out a clear path for my future in high school. I regret taking a course which did not challenge me (at least initially). I regret wasting time not writing my project on time. All of us at some time would have gone through these very emotions I believe. Remember the night you sat up all night trying to read from three books at once because you didn't bother studying when you had the time? The heart wrenching regret you felt when you saw the syllabus? Remember? Or that time you didn’t go out with your friends on a night out because you were “tired” and now they have all posted long lines of Instagram stories and you aren’t a part of it? Regret.

Regret works in strange ways. You might make the decision (read: impulse) to “prioritize your happiness” now and face the consequences later, go with the flow, see where it takes ya, take it easy. But what happens when you wake up one day, having taken it too easy and realise your life is just…empty. Nothing. A rudderless ship with no direction, no shore in sight. Where do you go now? What do you do? What. Do. You. Do. No seriously, I want to know. Asking for a friend, of course.

Anywayyyy… I guess what I’m asking here is: do you live now, regret later or sacrifice now and reap the rewards later? Any proper adult worth his or her salt would ask, nay, beg you, to choose the latter. Study harder, child, you'll regret it later. Be mindful of your health, they’ll say, you'll regret it later. But what they don't see is that both options are basically two sides of the same coin. Both involve an equal amount of giving up and feeling bad. Your only choice lies in choosing whether that happens now or later, later or now. (Free will thus an illusion, hence proved. More on that later). Sooner or later, it's either x - y = 0 and y - x  =  0 (Math students you are asked to please look away). Inversible and equal. Whichever comes first, the result stays the same. Or does it? Which one’s harder? Seeing your friends go for a movie and hang out while you stay at home burning the midnight oil? Or having money and a career and the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing at the right time? Having a ton of memories to look back upon when you’re old, or enjoying the benefits of all that hard work in your old age? But what if you die tomorrow and you aren't there to enjoy the benefits, what then? What if you live and fall into debt because you YOLO-ed too close to the sun?? Retirement funds or everlasting loans? Eat an ice cream after lunch everyday or not trudge the halls of the diabetes clinic daily in your forties ( or earlier at this rate).Which one is it? Discipline or fun? Happiness now or happiness later? To defer or not to defer? 

  

Yours in perpetual, never-ending crises, 

Sneha Dominic. 

* A reference to ‘The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost,

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;”

Who Am I, Again?

 “I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.”

 - Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. 

Have you ever had that feeling when you read something written by a writer who lived decades (even centuries) before you were born but somehow it feels like they took a screenshot of your mind and used it as a reference for their work? (You may take a breath now, sorry*). I’m sure you must know what I’m talking about - when writers just know how to put the unnameable into words in a way that makes you feel so… seen. This is exactly how I felt when I came across this Sylvia Plath quote on my Pinterest feed. I then went on to download the entire 700 or so pages of her unabridged journals and made it through at least a hundred of them before I had to stop. It was uncanny…the lady wrote things I was thinking way before I had even thunk them! I was even prompted for a minute to stop this whole business of blogging itself because what could I come up with that she hadn’t already felt and written about? How did a long-dead writer know me better than I knew myself? Did I have no original experience at all in my 22 years of living? Were my precious diary entries just diluted mirages of Sylvia Plath’s journal, was I just Sylvia Plath from Wish? Whew. A lot of questions to which I have no answers, and some of which I’m sure warrant no answers. Considering changing this blog to a daily Plath fan page (since I apparently have nothing new to say anyway), 

Yours in existential crises, 

?

*According to Pico Iyer’s “In Praise of the Humble Comma”, a sentence without a comma is like a road without road signs; it makes for very breathless reading (and dangerous driving, of course). “The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma.”

. 

To Dust We Return?

/CONTD/

You see, each time I walk out of eco class I walk out with the conviction that the world is on an irreversible path to ending in a blaze of fire, storms, or floods, and that too in our lifetime. These are not just the unfounded conspiracies of a paranoid doomsayer but actual projections made by scientists who insist on putting it all into tiny readable essays that PG students have to learn and then lose sleep at night (not based off of personal experience in any way, cough cough). And then there's Twitter. Opening the app these days has become something of a Herculean task – I would not recommend it for the faint-hearted. “Microplastics found in every human placenta tested in study”: A Guardian headline from two days ago. “Of all cancers, colorectal cancers will take the lives of most people under 50 by 2030”. Oof. 

If you are wondering how all of these are connected, I would ask you to come join one of our classes and see for yourself. In fact, I’m pretty sure some of our prescribed essays should be carrying some sort of trigger warning in them at this rate. Even if I were to stay off of Twitter (which I'm sure some of you might be suggesting I do), things have come to such a state that nowhere am I free from being reminded of the earth's impending doom. I kid, of course, but it is very difficult to be expected to get up every day and work hard to survive in a system engineered to benefit but a few – the ones in power, the global elite, the 1%, whatever you want to call them –  who have constructed the world in such a way that there is no turning back now. The global warming crisis that makes it unthinkable for me to walk from Heber gate to my house two roads away without an umbrella, the adultered food we all eat that cause daily gastric catastrophes, our poisoned air, poisoned water, poisoned land…these are all the consequences of a social structure that is deeply flawed at its core. No matter how many soggy paper straws we fish out of our drinks or the amount of uncomfortable recyclable tote bags we carry, the fact exists that the world around us – our world – is being systematically destroyed by forces far outside our control and at a pace we cannot fathom. And no amount of environmental protests or green drives are enough to bring about change at the level needed. 

(If I sound too much like this guy, know that it is only because I pay attention in class)

"From dust you came and to dust you shall return" 

Yet another tweet I saw the other day referenced The Guardian article on microplastics by humourously picturing the archeologists of the future (if there is indeed a future) growing horrified as they discover plastics in human bones. I could not help but wonder whether all of our biodegradable/nonbiodegradable fads, clean-up drives and recycling projects would be in vain one day in the foreseeable future, when the human body itself becomes a nonbiodegradable object, harmful to the very soil we’re born on, the very “dust” we’re supposed to return to in the end.

A heavy thought to end on, huh? In my very short blogging journey so far, I have tried not to end my posts on a negative note, but there are days when one cannot help but wonder what our future will look like, what we can do to prevent it, or perhaps the biggest question of all, whether there is anything we can do about it.