“I’m Legally Dead In Nine Different Star Systems.”

👏🏾Education 👏🏾is 👏🏾a 👏🏾right,👏🏾 not👏🏾 a👏🏾 service 👏🏾

Pass along and use the shit out of them

Sometimes I think that I could be the beautiful sword wielding girl with a dark past then I have the misfortune of remembering that I'm a fucking nerd who uses books as escapism.

AM I THE ONLY ONE GETTING ACHILLES AND PATROCLUS VIBES FROM NETFLIX'S YOUNG ROYALS?

it's just me? ok

I wanted to write. What about? No idea.

I have so many stuff going on right now that I don't really know what to do.

For instance, the impending question, how do you know if you like someone in a romantic way?

This is lame, I know, but I've never *ever* had a crush on someone who is not a fictional character or an unreachable celebrity, and I'm having a real hard time separating my feelings, for I still have this stubbornness regarding our only being friends.

I think about him a lot, not too much, but he's constantly on my mind. What's worse, is that I haven't seen him properly for months, the day I saw him and chatted for two minutes three weeks ago not counting.

He went to a different high school, and at first, we continued chatting every day, never going as far as to phone one another . Then we grew apart, he stopped answering to my texts and I stopped trying to contact him, sure that he wouldn't answer. I texted him on his birthday, and after a curt greeting and a thank you, we didn't speak for a month.

I texted him first. I was lonely and sad because it was the anniversary of my grandmother's death, and I gave in tothe urge of texting him. He answered, thankfully, and we happily chatted for a week before he ignored me again.

It hurts a lot. It hurts when I think of how close we were and how he dismissed our friendship, continued texting a friend of mine who be wasn't that close with and focused entirely on his new girlfriend. It hurt that he had a new girlfriend, even if I had had no problems with the last one, but honestly, that had been over a year ago so I couldn't be sure if I actually felt jealous or anything.

Am I jealous?

I don't know. I've never even met her!

But even if we aren't close anymore...It just hurts, ok?

I don't know what else to write, and this is quite out of my usual style, so yeah, signing off,

A girl who knows very little about love.

The story is as always; heroes and villains, good vs evil. And there, between the black and white there’s you, the grey.

You are the information broker known as Delphi, neutral to both parties and able to assist either. You are known for having all the info, which can only be acquired with the right price. Some secrets cost just money, but the most valuable ones can only be paid with another secret of equal or higher value.

One day, in the middle of a great conflict, the hero meets with you, and asks you the key question. You warn them of the high price, because you are not sure if their secrets will pay it. The hero just grins, leans in and whispers.

You instinctively know that the secret they just told you is of even greater importance than the info they wanted. Shocked to the core, you numbly tell them what they came to know, and they grin, full of mischief and say:

“We’ll be seeing a lot of each other, from now on, Delphi.”

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

no because when everything everywhere all at once said “‘alone I’m useless’ ‘everyone’s useless alone. good thing we’re not alone.’” and “in another life, i would have loved to have just done laundry and taxes with you” and “you think i am naive. i’ve been alive just as many years as you. this [love] is how i fight” and “of all the places i could be, I just want to be here with you” and-

Christmas Prompts

• Person A trying to set up the tree for Christmas but Person B has to pick Person A up for them to put ornaments on the tree because they’re so short.

• Person A getting frustrated when wrapping presents while Person B being able to quickly wrap beautiful presents and A being absolutely amazed and jealous.

• Person A being sad when they weren’t able to buy a real tree to decorate for Christmas so Person B buys a little bonsai tree for them to decorate, even though it’s only a foot tall.

• Person A and B decorating their house/apartment together and when Person A goes to another room to grab some more ornaments they hear Person B yell. When they rush back into the room they see Person B has somehow tangled themself into the Christmas lights and fell over.

• Person A waking up on Christmas morning and being confused to find only one small box under the tree. Person B acts like everything is normal and convinces Person A to open it and when they open it they just see a note and an engagement ring.

Being an organ donor, when you pass on you can watch the lives of those people who have received you. You just so happen to have been the donor to both a super hero and their villain. 

we need more movies about incredibly weird erotically charged toxic relationships between women. it’s so goddamn dire out here man