The eternal magic of LIterature

 Today I read a book: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst.

It was eminently readable, and after i finished the book I realized that I had somehow missed or inadvertantly skipped the part which explains the title.

So I looked it up, and was pleasantly surprised to read that this randomly selected book  is quite reputed in the literary world. And the title is from a poem, and puts the spotlight on one scene around which the whole story revolves. So I accidentally got to read an acclaimed book.

I have to agree. My experience with the book was that, in these days of distraction from multiple sources,  I had read the 562 pages at one go. Of course, over two days, and when I was left with no work to do. It was about writers, and the world of publishing, of ageing, of changing times, homophobia and the randomness of fame. 

After I put the book down, and even before I came to know of it being 'literary' I had actually browsed for History of Literature courses online and found one from a reputed University. I intend to enrol in it. So much did the book invoke memories of my college and the excellent lectures I had listened to therein.

I also began my second day with the book by reading a few verses from "The Waste LanD", a poem that I was asked to write about in my entrance exam to my English Course at Stella Maris College. 

I am at cross roads of my life now and this book reminded me how much I had loved being a student of literature before life and its demands swallowed me up. 

Though I may have lost the ability to review the book in a scholarly way, the lines here are my tribute to it as good literature; Literature that makes you want to be in touch with similar excellent works that have attempted to explain life with all its nuances.

Supposedly magical, but just logical: Salary

 Let's praise salary first

It's regular

It pays bills

It makes one respectable

It makes one financially independent

It helps to shop for non-essentials too

it gives a sense of security

BUT 

It can be 

a pain 

 monotonous work 

 non productive

soul crushing if unethical

The real danger however, is in believing that salary aka money can win you love, respect, familial devotion, admiration, credibility and proof of your intelligence and validity.

Tell me you never fell into the trap of believing that money would provide you with one or all of the above.

But the worst part about salary is when you are supposed to get it but it comes very late.

Strange, not logic, yet true

 So I was eating the mud of humiliation...

By the way, why on earth am I a soft target for humiliation? That is a question that I will learn the answer for , sometime in the future, I am sure.

Going back to this particular wallow in the mud of humiliation, my heart was heavy, brain was a bit out of joint and I was in a state of mild paralysis.

Then I started to google something, and Good ole Google suggestions came up with the name of a friend

A fine woman

An upright, outstanding leader

But she had died unexpectedly. 

I had always thought  myself fortunate to have known this person. But she had died suddenly. Seeing the name of my dead friend filled me with a sorrow and this sorrow filled me up so quickly that all the feelings of humiliation was flooded over by it.

I was sad, but no longer unhappy with my situation.

Strange, so illogical, but yes, she had died,  and the shock of this thought wiped the sorrow away from my heart.

Magical Creativity vs lack of it thereof

 Well, I am going to start working on something new.

Exciting Topic

Work that will keep me engrossed

I am ready in front of my laptop.

So, what do I do? I must subconsciously be feeling upset or tensed at the difficulty level and the amount of work.For now I don't start. I become conscious of the noises around me and get annoyed. Worse, all enthusiasm seems to have drained away. Feeling empty and dull.

Rather than start something like going to YouTube for a quick fix of my feelings, I thought I would work on this situation here. 

Updates on whether this helped or not

Did writing this here help? In a way. I went back to You Tube, watched my favourite channel, became happy, opened my work document and started typing. 

Writing and a quick fix after that, helped me to enjoy and at the same time not linger. Good day to anyone reading this.

Money, no magic or even logic about it

What must it feel like to be a leader in a company like Aircel and Reliance Communications that owe thousands of crores (count the zeros, more than 10 I'm sure) to their creditors?

I hated family members who ruined the family economy by overspending and taking loans. They hated me for being boring, unimaginative and casual. This is how my economics works. I keep away from overspenders. There is no such word, right? No such person too, it seems in modern times, you do what you like, leave your creditors high and dry, ruin life as you knew it and ruin it for millions, and never let the poorest of the poor see a better day.

Money has no magic, no logic. It's nothing and it's not even a piece of paper anymore.

Cheers to a new world with no logic and no magic and just numbers with more than  ten zeros

No logic is sometimes, no magic

A young friend of mine asked me to speak on video of how tribal women expressed their shame, fear, stigma, or taboos on menstruation. She wanted to know if they spoke of body shaming or shame on genitalia.

My impressions are as follows:

Initially, we play simple games with the girls. But once we introduce the topic of menstruation, there is a deathly silence. After a session or two, girls belonging to higher castes become vocal, while it takes more time for girls from tribal families to open up. Even then, only girls who are around 16 or 17 speak. Some of the things they say were new to me.Like, they stay in the hostel and their mothers don't know that they started to menstruate. So, I asked them why they never told their mothers because many of them live just a few kms from the hostel.

 She explained how she had gone with a few other friends to the house of one among them. That girl had just begun menstruating.They had decided before hand to help their friend speak to her  mother. The mother welcomed them and offered them tea. They drank tea and chatted for some time, but left without telling her the news.

Why? I asked her. She said that it was like that.When I chanced to go into a very sparcely inhabited jungle, I saw a girl whom I had met in another school. I started talking to  her and then asked her if her mother knew that she got her periods. She told me that her mother had seen her take a sanitary pad that the school had given her. But neither had spoken about it.

Overall, the women, especially the older ones, were happy to talk to us, and shared the trauma of having no one to talk to about their periods and its related issues. 

When I started speaking to boys and men about periods, their response was very positive. One guy told me that he now understood that period blood was important and not dirty. But how could he convince his parents? They would be hurt. I cannot irritate them and go against my parents' wishes. I pointed out that he had been reluctant to talk to me at first. So were a few of his friends. But now they were convinced. He had to convince his parents slowly,  just as I spoke to him. Because it was unnecessary for his children to suffer  in this manner. He had to agree with me.

Menstrual movie magic: Chayilyam

On 26th May, I watched a movie on menstruation , Chayilyam in Malayalam, on Google meet with 52 people. This was organized by an NGO named Safe Active Periods.
It was such a well made movie
As some one commented it depicts strong bonds that make a family in a village special. The determination of the main characters, a recently widowed woman, and her father in law to not buckle under society pressure is inspiring. The movie theme is early menopause,  mental disorder and how religion tries to abuse mental problems
The spotlight also falls on the scary patriarchy that tries to force the mentally afflicted women with a divine status and use her for their own rituals. But the woman and her father in law insist that she is normal. Even the girls parents, who had ostracized her after her marriage, and neglected her following the loss of her husband, are ready to worship her as a Devi, when she is mentally afflicted and feels uncontrollably angry. So the father inlaw coaxes her to go along with the charade till she gets her period, which would convince people around her that she is a woman and not a goddess.

As he is a doctor of traditional medicine, he medicates her to so that her premature menopause is reversed and she gets her periods again. But the end comes abruptly, with the woman destroying all evidence of her period and leaving the village, which was tormenting her in many ways.