Prose before hos

I looked up my grandmother's name on Google. Other than showing two others by the same name, she was not there. She was nowhere to be found.

I often hold digital footprints of people close to me as their lasting memory. This spectrum is wide, it includes the last spotted on Snapchat location filter to the distance between my Tinder matches and I. Me? I don't do plebian last seen on Whatsapp because you give out just as much as you take in. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not a big fan of what goes around/comes all the way back around regardless of whether Justin Timberlake was at his rugged peak at the time. I'm all for minimal investment and maximum benefit, in this case have the foolishness of control in your hand whilst exploiting the information locally available. Many relationships were nipped in the bud because of digital surveillance and many were forged basis that.

What? Does it sound like I'm Joe Goldberg in confession? Newsflash: we all are.
You can't blame me, as much as you should direct that towards the people putting their brains behind it. We live in a world which encourages us to flirt with the idea of being private while showing us the red flag to let loose.

Show of hands, who here has innocently looked up someone they had no business of looking up?

I know a few who'd be all virgin about it. And that's a big fat lie because surveillance is deep-rooted, intrinsic and a different side to the same coin that this internet today promotes.

Where was I? Yes, my grandmother.

My dear departed grandmother, who was bedridden when I spent my energies using the dial-up connection and waste time on Yahoo Messenger. The Summer after she passed away, all the cool kids at the tuition centre were each other's friends on Hi5. I was one among them; one of the only four people from a batch of one fifty strong kids from my school who were wasting time looking up their 13-14 year old crushes and hoping they'd exchange atleast one testimonial with "I relly llyk yu lollzzzz".

The internet grew up, parallel to me. The only difference?  My grandmother lost on both our teenaged years. She was long gone before digital legacy was a real thing. Maybe, it wasn't big or all over the digital media but I don't recall splashing names of people and writing about them right after their demise. She wasn't around to see me through my Orkut walls being flooded with emoji templates, Myspace music and gifs, and/or my Facebook wall. Heck, she wasn't around to see me with my fancy Motorola cell phone(with an exceptional 5 MB internal space to store photographs, music, ringtone, and videos- the irony). She's lost in the giant pre-digital universe of the noughties. It's like she never existed. It also matters because she only lived to see Reliance's digital telecom revolution with Karlo duniya mutthi me and free Reliance to Reliance phonecalls. She's not wired in to know that Jio is the new Reliance to Reliance and that number portability is a thing. I often sit and wonder how would she react to the new media. To my self-destructive dating patterns, to the terrible decisions, I make with the men I've dated and are yet to date. I don't know and I won't ever know. It's lost in the same space where USB drives are often lost.

To exist is to be on the internet. I think, therefore I am on the internet.
Each year, when people pass away, the internet opens itself to a larger than life column for the obituary. From op-eds to commissioned pieces, to even personal dedications in closed accounts, the idea of safekeeping memories of someone who may or may not have been on social media is carefully sealed and preserved under tight private accounts and digital publications with fervour. It's almost as if the internet reflects the life as a memoir on social media, only to announce the obit as an epilogue and the memorials as the endorsements on the back cover and inlay flap. My grandmother is devoid of such an honour, of this digital afterlife. It's not a big deal. For all you know, she'd have shat on it. But knowing her, she'd have loved to be the centre of attention. For her, everything was a big deal. I probably get the sense of making things larger than life from her. The dramatization of every banal occurence and making it into an event was all her. It upsets me to think, she doesn't exist in this cool space here.

What used to be a fetishistic idea of seeing how one's funeral would look like has now turned to, how will people pay homage to me on social media. Again, I refuse to believe this thought hasn't occurred your mind. Facebook apparently has some settings where you can pass your digital legacy as a will in advance. In the likely event of your mortal life ceasing to exist, that chosen one is offered the right to control your digital profile. So much so for resting in peace.

It was all kinds of heartbreaking to see no valuable result on my grandmother's name. For someone who raised me to be a complete spoilt brat and to pander to my whims and fancies as a child, this is upsetting at all levels.

I can't get myself to type this out for someone who's not with us anymore but here's wishing her a happy birthday. I hope someday I have just as much élan as you did each time when you cut and style your hair on your own.

Years ago, on the morning of a Math exam, I'd picked a fight with my mom. Maybe, it's my mother who picked the fight.

Your guess is as good as mine.

It probably had to do with food. I am convinced there would be no other reason.
By food, I mean forcing milk down my throat. The terrible association I have with school begins with milk. Being forced to chug a glass every morning. A large, steel tumbler, filled till the brim. The taste of milk reminds me of the drudgery that school was.

My grandmother tried making it better by adding tea leaves, and sugar (definitely, a lot more than I needed). This deception often lead to crying, and progressed to throwing fits of anger towards my years as an angst-y teenagers.

Which angst-y teenager began their day drinking milk? Not the kind who'd listen to Nirvana and feel oh, so smug.

I digress, but I vaguely remember this episode. I must have been 7-8 years old. Why I assume this age is because after that, I never quite understood math.

Morning of the math exam; rage of fit over milk. Before stepping out, my mother's last words to me -

"Have a bad day."

I recall, I aced that exam.

Since then, I insisted that my mother wish me a "bad day" before every exam I knew I was going to fail.

Over time, I think it stopped working because despite our best efforts to pass, I continued to fail those exams. In this time, I forgot about this "bad day" episode, rather the details of it.

Years later, instant re-collection happened.

I'm in the office. Inspired by the pep talk of a 21 year old intern on how I should confront and call out the bullshit, I make up my mind to do the same with someone I'd been seeing briefly.

I took the plunge. A few minutes in, his sincerity turned to shamelessness. I called the bullshit out again. In response, I was told -

"Have a good day."

"I will. Thanks."

And so, I did. I had a day I deserved.
No amount of disgust in both those wishes could stop me from having a great fucking day, on both the occasions.

In the list of TIL today, I found out Honeypreet Singh Insan has bought the building where my Play School once existed and I learnt numbers and alphabets.

I also found out that police raided that place earlier yesterday because they had a hunch that Ms. Insan was hiding at the said building. She was, obviously, not found. Much like I wasn't found at my Play School after I joined the Senior Secondary School.


Tell me how your childhood's been crushed again?

I travel unprepared.

Amongst some of the notably stupid things I indulge in, booking tickets a few hour before the flight is one. I've almost, always done that. It's not that Adani adopted me or Kumar Mangalam Birla is funding my travels, but I truly cannot commit to anything- even vacation- for anything over 24 hours in advance and taking forward this stress a month in advance, is not my idea of "having fun".

Yet, here I am. Somewhere high up, in sky or in my head. Or probably both if I'm lucky and alive.



You see, *this* trip was planned about a month ago and the amount of stress it caused me, it could kill an already dead patient due to heart blockage. Let me explain how-

For an ordinary person, a vacation is a way to de-stress, involving being uncomfortable, being adventurous and even for that matter being out of the known and into the wilderness. My idea of vacation is having done triple the amount of research I do, for anything, going over Tumblr, blogs, internet content, magazines like an obsessive maniac just so I could know and potentially have control over any problem I may encounter during my stay. I want to know what colour of the bedsheets I can potentially have when I land in a hotel, and what condiment will the shack serve with the Fried Rice I plan to order for my lunch on the second day. I should see a therapist, but let me complete.

More often than not, these trips are fucking hard on me. I break down in rash, I throw up, I'm sick. All this happens because I'm stressed and more so, because my head is convinced that I need to have it all under control. The potential for stress stems from the shit brewing in my head. The nagging feeling that surrounds me goes like this, "You can't all this fun, something must go wrong" and so I wait. I wait for something to change, a plan to modify, a meal unavailable, a piece of garment I imagined I would buy sold out-all this and more in the span of 5 minutes. I take my research to places unimaginable, including booking hotel to much in advance that I regret for the remaining evening and the time leading to the trip, why did I create that urgency.

Naturally, vacations are stressful because I've been taking them with my friends or myself. I feel the ones where I take myself, I'm far more lackadaisical and composed than the ones which I undertake with my friends. I feel being responsible for myself is okay, not that my friends or partners ever expect me to take care of them while traveling. Because I'm a Type A asshole, and because I'd like to believe I have taken precautions and I'll most likely be having fun, I'm responsible for anything that may go wrong, whether it's controllable by me or been going wrong due to me. Add to this, splitting headache, anxiety, and this sense of doom.

When I was in Eight Grade, my school took us for an ambitious trip to Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. I don't remember much except for dying in the fucking cold in January at night. Those guys had provided us only Jaipuri Razai and let me tell you, it can freeze your balls out. There was camel poop and aloo poori in the five days that we travelled in all permutations and combinations. Despite being all of 13, I vowed to never visit Rajasthan again. I think I broke that twice since, but goddamn not Rajasthan. I don't remember what exactly was so wrong but I do remember taking this idea of no trip to this state whatsoever. A blanket ban.

I remember the dates very well. Before leaving, my grandmother had assisted in packing clothes, in fawning over me. In doing all possibly grandmotherly things one can indulge in. I also remember on two occasions speaking to her on the phone. The second time, she was talking as though she's half asleep. It didn't occur to me, things had gone awry.

When I returned in the end of January, my grandmother was in semi-coma. Delirious, not making sense and definitely not waking up. Now, as an adult I know that the doctors had given up and she wanted to pass away peacefully at home. The adults in the family knew about this some months ago that it was time for her to go.

Back in the day, it didn't occur what went wrong. I'd left her, sick but in her senses and I came back to a corpse on a bed, in that state for three weeks where people would visit us and look grave.

I think about being 13 a lot. About how naive I was and how it helped me to get past that time. I don't think I'd be able to do it today, with the same innocence that I moved past. That's the beauty of being young and stupid. You bypass so many things easily.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, each time I travel, I feel I won't come back to things just as how they are. It makes me crave for banal and stay in banal. It makes me dig routine more than Canadians love Poutine. I actively look forward to days when the five members of my house are doing nothing more inspiring than eating dinner at home and watching TV. You have no idea how fucking nice it is to have "normal" things, as opposed to thousands of people flocking your place in a month to see a dying exhibit. You wouldn't imagine what it's like to be on a vacation and come back to see the entire life change before your eyes.

Which is why, I control situations. If not for others, for myself. I like to take charge and do only those things which I have done and they have paid back in making me least bit happy. Often, the research I do helps me make a better decision when I'm in control, and the vacations that I don't take, help me retain my sanity.

Here I am, floating between land and ether, writing all this and promising how I'll try to be better.

I've no idea how things will be when I return home. If people will continue being okay, if I'll be the same. I can just hope that I don't beat myself too hard for the rest of my life if something goes wrong.

But you know what they say, don't you? If something has to go wrong, it will go wrong. Maybe they'll stop my luggage for bringing 20 pairs of socks, maybe we'll miss our flight, maybe I'll die 30,000 feet in the air. I won't know, and I certainly don't know.

You miss all the shots you don't take and so here am I, a week into being 26. Taking all my shots just as how life presented it to me, with a slice of lemon.

Cheers. 

"How did you celebrate your birthday?"

"I'm going to go to Barbecue Nation for dinner."

"Oh man, every parent I know loves that place."

"Ofcourse, Barbecue Nation is like a 28 year old Hindu Brahmin engineer boy who owns an i10, has an MBA degree from a university abroad and he knows how to talk."

"...Wow."

"Yeah man, all parents lose their mind when Barbecue Nation enters the game and pits itself against other random boys from the hood."

"Dude you're too funny. It's beyond me why can't you find someone."

"My parents will do that now."

"You're okay with arranged marriage?"

"What do I hide from you? I am more than looking forward now."

"Oh."



You can find more of Abhijeet's work here and here. 

I was all of 16- when I first found out what they called me behind my back.

"Baby elephant"

At 16, I definitely had better legs than that adorable thing on the left.

A girl filled that as an entry in response to her "Favourite Pet" in my slam book. Looking back, I barf at the idea that I went to her in the first place to have it filled.

Regardless, I was 16. Weighing 49 kilos- an average of over 9 kilos than most girls in my class. Blessed with a round face, filled cheeks and hair tied in a single braid (pretty much all of the school tenure), I was hardly the size of a baby elephant, my arch nemesis at the time.

I don't quite remember what my reaction was (besides shock). Shock, that they were picking on me for my physical appearance. You see, unlike today, there wasn't quite an outlet for "awareness" and making memes such as "best swimsuit size is whatever the fuck you have" and so on.

I didn't have heavy boobage, or legs or waist. Hell, I'd kill to go back at 16 (but with the boobs please) and be the same person. I truly think the 16-year-old me had the kind of spunk that present 25-year-old (thirty kilos fatter and three cup sizes bigger) doesn't have. I digress but this "baby elephant" instance came to me, as I spiralled back into thinking about how trolls are made.

Last evening, I found out that Writer/Comedienne Supriya Joshi apparently put out a thread in response to the trolls who have been fat-shaming her. If this were an academic piece, addressed to people aged 30 and above, I'd explain every fucking term in my previous sentence. However, since it's my blog, clocking in under 50 fucking views, I feel I have the liberty to move on. She wrote a long thread, addressing her issue against those who reduce her body as a currency into shaming her for what she is/she does. Joshi's thread was absolutely compelling read, especially for someone like me, who's been at the receiving end of it.





To begin with, the problem here at point zero isn't trolls alone. The rhizomatic structure from where these trolls emerge always tend to go towards the can of worms, aka conditioning. You grow up to be a person, a reflection of who you were while growing up, by and large. A mirror image of your parents, of the friends who shaped you (aka the asshole from school who started the "baby elephant" label). You've been in a place where you've learnt to point fingers at anyone with a visibly different shape of body than you all your life. A thread on Twitter, educational creatives on Facebook and Instagram can barely help you. They can probably make you sympathize with them for like 20 seconds or more (depending on how thick in the head you are). The discourse moved from pointing and laughing at you after filling your slam book to trolling people online. Bullies acquired a form in Trolls, where faceless identities can do the same to you, what spineless gits attempted in school/college.

For me, the ordeal ended when I left school. During the college admissions, I was convinced of not wanting to go to a girls college because our convent school was a hell hole, nothing short of penance to live through (despite Jesus dying for our sins). Thankfully, people at college, even at 18 were far more mature than cunts from school. To this day, I don't feel judged for occupying space, when I sit, when I eat or when I walk. Basically, I thank all the people I ever brushed shoulder with at college (and believe me, there were quite a few in the three colleges that I attended) for being fucking normal about how I look.

At 25, I no longer am affected by what people say for me, call me or tell me to my face. The only opinion that matters about my body is mine. So, when three months ago, I looked in the mirror and did actually see a stranger look back, I knew I had to take the matter in my hand. After many trials and errors, I'm now attempting to work on my body, mostly because I don't want to subscribe to the same lifestyle I was living in the last eight years of my tenure at different colleges. I want to be able to go back at where I was when I was 16. Look back at the same body and marvel at it.

The most critical thing in looking back, ofcourse, remains facing my demons. I was once told by a dear friend, that kids who grow up fat and are called names for it are forever fat kids in their head. No matter how much weight they lose, or what they turn out to be professionally or personally, or how many packs of abs they visibly sport, the fact remains that a part of their mental health is forever stunted. Somewhere deep down, I knew she was right.

But as someone who wants to look back at being 16, and wanting to change my life, I need to address these bullies and trolls I've encountered in the process.

As Joshi rightly said, when you call someone fat, there's nothing more than a physical description you're explaining. That's an adjective and that's who they are. More often than not, a fat person is pretty self-aware that they're fat. However, when you call someone a terrible terrible person, you should know there's something off about them. Sometime back, a man I went out with (and was actually beginning to enjoy his company) randomly told me that how any Indian family I aspire to get myself married into, will not "traditionally" accept my presence for how I physically look. However, he did add that atleast my skin colour will work in the favour. Was that man a bully? Probably not. Was he a troll? Hardly so. Was he concerned about what the world truly thinks of people like me, ten-twenty-thirty kilos overweight, obese, chubby, "healthy"? Fuck yeah.

If everything came down to looks, Charles Sobraj would make for Nepal's president and not a terrible fucking individual. However, given his sweltering looks and suave attitude, he would surely make an Indian man and his family truly happy. As for that girl from school, I sincerely wish she comes under a speeding car and breaks her triple chin (oh did I point at the obvious now?) that she proudly sports in all her pictures. Umm, is my favourite animal a giraffe? I don't think so. Not that petty, but still, petty (enough to point my vanity and pitch it against hers, convent school women only understand one language).

You know what they say, being bullied can turn the victims into becoming a bully themselves. Aka the plot of Mean Girls. Or, how I'm not sorry about being the venomous, unapologetic asshole that I am. Thank you, moral science classes. You truly helped my personality in its complete development. 

When I think about Summer, I'm taken back to playing in the park opposite Sehgal market. If you're raising an eyebrow, wondering what sort of royalty am I, then please know that I've nothing to do with the name of that park. Although, I may have been responsible for naming a park with rocky terrain and running field, "Dingdong Park". Yeah, I was twisted even as a child.