Prose before hos

Don't think about him. Repeat to yourself. 

At 5:22 am, find yourself telling an acquaintance from Tinder you'd never meet how he's wronged you. Hear the acquaintance give you rock solid advice, 

"Block him."

Repeat to yourself, you'll block him. 

Repeat to the acquaintance, you'll block him. 

Do no such thing. Just say it in your head. 

The thought is so daunting you'd prefer going to sleep than pandering to those ideas any further. 

Ignore him for two days. Every time the notification tab lights up, hope it's him and when it's not, take your aggression out on three other guys who are vying for your attention. 

What is the point? No wait, you don't care about him. This is your narrative. 

Find yourself flirting back at the stranger after his sixth attempt. Tell yourself he's not that bad. You can totally be kind and allow him a shot. 

Wake up next morning, assuming you're not on my sleep cycle of sleeping for 3 hours in the day out of 21, and feel horrible for flirting back with the guy you don't give a flying fuck about. 

Notification tab lights up. Eyes widen. 

"Why don't you apply for this job?"

Fuck no, never. I don't want to do this crap for pittance. Don't bother replying cause it's not helpful job opening and it's not him who texted. 

Open his Instagram. See the last remains of your happiness in binaries on his profile. Wonder if you're beyond help and that there's no hope for you. 

No wait, you need to workout. 

Drink water. You haven't had water since 2 am last night and it's 7:22 pm. 

Go back to your profile. See how he will potentially see your profile again, if he does.

"Block him."

Yeah, okay, I'll block him. It's not like he's doing anything that needs blocking. 

Talk to 6 other people in the span of two hours to feel something. Anything. 

Make small talk. Make a few jokes. You've got it, people are laughing. 

Flirt with the guy from the last night? No. You don't want to give him ideas, especially when you don't have any. 

Drink water, that felt good. 

Stare at yourself in the mirror. 

Wonder what he'll think of the body the way it looks now as opposed to what he's seen. 

Forget him. He doesn't matter. 

Watch a film with 5 other friends. 

Laugh after days and feel something in your bones. Should drink some more water. 

Sneak a few texts to one of the many friends on the side. Bitch about one of the many passing dumb comments.

For fifteen odd minutes, actually forget him. 

Bid your goodnights and goodbyes and pick up your phone.

Three notifications. 

Ugh, stop talking to me about dumb things. 

One unread message. From him.

"hey"

I think my most underrated memory from the grad school has to be a candid discussion of a certain professor being invited for Saif-Kareena's wedding.

The said professor is in good terms with Apa and I don't know how this came out to the students but man, watching a video of Kareena and Saif romancing from their peak in Tashan just reminded me of that happening.

On the contrary, I remember the time where another professor lost this shit on a guy from our class (now a huge, upcoming influencer himself) on how mocking Kabir Khan's new release (of whatever it was back in the day, some Tiger film) was extremely pathetic on part of this classmate. That he should achieve something of equal stature to comment such nonsense.

Talk about bad valuations and a bad memory.

Much like any teenager, Snobster is a peculiar prick. She hates the exclamation in titles and yet goes ahead and does that to herself. She also hates talking/writing in the third person but here we are.

13 long years of somewhat journalling life and letting everyone around me jump at it.


22 May 2007, a day I celebrate annually, doing the things I love. I write, I get some cake and then maybe have a good dinner.

I don't think I'm going to follow the entire ritual, largely cause the circumstances around me won't allow the fanfare, but also the Delhi Police isn't exactly rushing to supply a whole cream cheese frosted cake, complete with "Welcome to the teens!" as icing on the top. I may have clocked in thirteen years of writing and apparently being dramatic and outlandish, but hey, I have to be authentic to my preferences. Even if it means I'm annoying people and waking them up from their slumber to engage with me.

The merriment is a bit on the down-low also cause I may have taken the vows I made to myself a tad bit seriously. When I said,

Here's to the last year of us being a baby. And to the last of me being cushy.
I can't wait to fuck things up, royally. 

I didn't quite realize what I was signing up for. Sure, it was dramatic and yes, I have been truly out there with my promise but it's been a hard year. I lost a publication deal, a chance to be in a book with whole author credit. I lost a job. I found myself grieving for people who hurt me and continued doing that, I found myself exposed to everything I held true to my self falling apart. If I think about this time last year, I had an average job and was living a seemingly average life. Today, I have less than half of that, after a rollercoaster ride year with highs being higher than I'd ever been and lows showing me the cracks within me. I had a nervous breakdown a week after my last blog anniversary, I've been through a course of anti-depressants. I have cried more than I ever did in my life and then found solace in people who I never thought would make it. 

As I write this, we have entered the fourth phase of lockdown. In 2007, if someone had told us that we'd be nabbed at home at a gunpoint of a virus scare, I'd have told them to get off the internet chain mail spam.

But, here we are.

A friend and I both agree on the instance that there are multiple hot takes on the lockdown. There's a whole Anne Frank vibe with people in art, outside of art practicing hobbies and art forms and marking a day each. There are business entrepreneurs using infantile art to raise money. Confession: I placed a bid on a few and won myself a whole piece (it's not bad looking, thank you).

My point being, just as much as there is this entire sitch, there are those many hot takes, a sort of background noise to it.

Terms being added to our conversations including apps and software that help us perform better remotely. I don't mean food or grocery delivery but things like being recited bedtime stories in the absence of inspiration as you otherwise had for your child among others.

There is the personal end of things. Dealing with the lockdown. Reeling under the lockdown. I'm yet to meet one person who's not personally burnt atleast half a dozen bridges during this time.

If Dolphins returned to Italy then closer home, fuckbois are trying to score brownie points with women they'd never hoped to talk to.

There is an acute sense of disenchantment with existing relationships, inability to form new relationships, and then the audacity to curate new situations and budding relationships to walk into this lockdown with. I've been guilty of all. I've forged seemingly surreal new connections, been called out one too many times on being negligent and hurtful with people in my life and then seemingly been told to shut my face by people close to me, not one, many.

In a way, it brought up a huge void here, on this page.

What do I write about when people close to me tell me I'm effectively a ball of a make-believe world, with a little sense of understanding, and I have a problem understanding communication, authority, and boundary.

With the number of allegations I've come to live with, I've had to effectively take time off from taking my time off. I've been asked to be empathic and give people leeway when I haven't been on the receiving end of it, from those who I expected to love and kindness from.

The real pandemic has been on communication and our ability to express with gestures, actions, and words. Somehow, with the absence of our ability to do the former, the latter can't withstand the burden of carrying our lives with other people. I've found myself getting short with people I adore to bits knowingly and otherwise. I've also felt a total lockdown in people expressing their true emotions in this.

Effectively, I've found myself locked in a room of sarcasm, pity, unsolicited advice, and then reality checks all at once. There have been days when these revelations happened all at once and then on the other where they took time to simmer and come as backhanded insults.

Effectively, I've learned what a terrible excuse of a human being I am. I've also in turn given it to people. Neither of the situations has been helpful, to say the least. I'm also not proud of not having taken the higher road of silence, taking it in.

I'm after all a fucking human. I am prone to mistakes. I do things. I am responsible for the faltering. I do them again. Falter again. There are times I walk into a puddle of quicksand unknowingly and then on other occasions, I feel I'm pushed into it.

It's not a conducive or healthy environment to be in. What's more worrying is the aftermath of if and when this is over.

In the last week, my biggest learning is not about relationships but friendships. Apparently, you can read into years of knowing someone incorrectly, as something which is only seemingly in your head. God save us from daydreaming anything then.

Maybe this is a conspiracy theorists' job on how we should imagine our lives to be. There's a fine line between living and dreaming. If I have imagined a whole friendship, who is to say if I'm being gaslight or should I be allowed the privilege of free-thinking ever again?

If the last time, I wrote about my father and our complexities, this time it's my closest friends calling me out on my crap.

Admittedly, there's a lot. This is why friendships exist (among other things). We live through each other's idiosyncracies and we lighten those up and we hold them tight when they need us.

I feel I have overburdened people and they have underwhelmed me. It's a two way street of non-consensual activity. If they found my actions abhorring, I found their reactions appalling.

No one is to say that I'm not at fault. Perhaps, the whole fault is mine that I have constructed these notions of friendships in my head. Maybe, it's all me, as I'm being gaslight.

But god forbid, it's not me, the irreversible damage of second-guessing the one thing I know well, has been done.

In between questioning what's sacred and the bonds we all believed are unbreakable, the virus has questioned not only the world but also the way we think. It's accelerated and amplified our thoughts and reactions into effective results.

I could live with a bad friendship for years without making a fuss. Today, I find myself incapable of doing that. If I do as much as a point in the direction of a problem, I get a sharply worded response, which is, to be fair, an activity of equal action and reaction. Empathy is a construct of the world we inhabited in pre-COVID times.

I've been a strong believer in friends being support systems and especially true for me. I value my friendships close to my heart, I go all out for it. Until well, now, that the virus has left me questioning my own set of beliefs and principles.

Between media capital restructuring, changing world and societal interactions, layoffs, deaths, disasters, and the inability to cope up with our solitary self, our friendships are at stake.

I fucking hate COVID, motherfucking reality checker.

I've been doing a writing thing with this person, we'll call him K.

We also don't know if he wants to be identified here yet, hence, we'll assign him a name conducive to me.

K's a rather gifted writer himself. He's criminally talented and, if anything, puts the fear of God in me when we do our thing.

What's the thing, you ask?

Right.

K and I have been writing 'newsletters' to each other for a bit now. It's not been a month, and honestly, if something like this lasts a month, I'd consider sending these to a publisher. K, if you're reading this, I'll split profits, I swear.

I'd tell you more but it's so incredibly personal that I also don't want to share this with anyone.

I don't know if he'll feel violated or what but this has been raw, intimate, and every bit wholesome.

For over a month, I'd been in my bed, sulking and playing silly games. Somehow, this exercise is the only thing I look forward to in my day and our writing routine has set me back to some disciplined life. Where I know, I have to write by a certain hour.

Years ago, I recall, someone close to me at the time had said, how I made him want to be a better man.

I'm finally able to pay that compliment back and take it forward. K, makes me want to be a better person, a better writer, and certainly someone who feels motivated enough to do something, anything.

I have been seeing people around me who have absolutely given up and then there are those who are struggling. To be able to have some discipline in writing and then keeping it up, it truly takes a person to do that.

Because I've neglected this page and I don't want to, here's one whole letter that I wrote. Feel free to skim, skip, or ignore.




-----

Isn't this what everyone on Tinder's all about, always?

I recall reading about a list of what not to write in your bio as a man by BuzzFeed years ago. 4/20 was on it.

Maybe, the BuzzFeed writer hates the date. Or dates that end in a cloud of smoke in a park, sitting on grass and staring at the sky together.

Heh, bad pun.

It's too bad that I'm taking my daily quota of writing elsewhere. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll see it someday. If not, it's a secret as good as all the ones I've kept away from this page.


Although knowing me, it'll be exactly a week from now until everyone knows what's up and where's all that writing going. 

A few nights ago, I found myself angrily responding on a long thread where people were dissecting one of my many guilty pleasure films. Now, there's nothing that irks me more than people debating and critiquing those few subjects I've spent my time, money and youth studying it all. This includes Philosophy, the Indian cable TV from the 90s onwards, the internet as a virtual space to interact viz a vis films, pop culture and so on.

Here's a fun fact, I've seen Kuch Kuch Hota Hai/KKHH (1998; dir Karan Johar) 64 times between age 8-10. I stopped counting after age 12.

You can then imagine my frustration to see dumbfucks write 100+ comments trashing on Kajol from KKHH. Only my favourite character in the film.

During my stint with Cinema Studies degree programme between film school and grad school, we were constantly discouraged to use narrative analysis in any way whatsoever. I'll take my personal experience over the years of bad dating/relationship patterns and attempt to address this, something that's irked me beyond belief.

For the uninitiated, if Michael Scott is "Beyoncé, always", then I'm "Kajol, always" from this film. Never the Rani Mukherjee who dies or that annoying kid who enjoys singing and dancing or Farida Jalal imposing Bhakti rituals on the family. I can't be Anupam Kher either cause he's possibly cleared the NET to be the principal at St. Xavier's College and we all know I haven't cleared that one wretched exam yet.

That makes my friend from the last post on the blog as Rifat Bi cause she's always the recipient of "Mera pehla pyaar adhoora reh gaya, Rifat Bi." Maybe, I should start calling her Rifat Bi here.

Imagine my surprise when I defended that thread and got shat on. People were hell-bent on shitting on Anjali/Kajol under lots of dumb arguments including how she could never muster the courage to tell the guy she loves until he took matters in his hand, eight years, one daughter and a dead wife later.



Here's why I think Anjali, Kajol's character is a freaking rockstar in the film and that everyone who thinks otherwise can go suck balls.

1) She had ZERO fucks to give. To the point, she left her college degree mid-way to ghost the shit out of the guy who practically leads her on and acted out on his dick's first stimuli.

Okay, I see why this can be problematic for a lot of people. He didn't owe her a damn thing, and yes, it is true, she never did verbalize her feelings to him and vice versa. He didn't owe her a relationship, they hadn't hooked up ever or even close to potentially hooking up.

However, the difference is, she made that effort to go to him to confess. As she proceeded to do what she intended on doing, he had a whole verbal vomit and told her he loves that new girl.

Good on you Rahul/Shah Rukh Khan. You fell for a person and told your friend, great.
Now here's the snitch. Did she in return owe you a damn thing, especially to be in your life from that or any point onwards? I think not.

In life, often in friendship/relationships, if one person takes a step without involving the other and only steps in to inform, it's on the other person to decide the further course of action between them. In this case, if Rahul/Shah Rukh Khan decided to seal the deal with the new girl, it's on Anjali/Kajol to take a fucking call on how their rest of the life/relationship should look like.

To ensure she doesn't interfere nor does she play the second fiddle, she leaves. She leaves her fucking degree, college, her best friend/guy she's in love with and decides to change her life. Good on you, fren.

2) During Act II, she doesn't give in to the circumstances. 

Let's be real. If I was tutoring the child of a man I'd once been in love with, I'd either put her at the back of every class or be detached to the point of no interaction. Anjali/Kajol here is graceful, even after she finds out the parents of the annoying kid is a no couple no other than her former love and her backstabbing friend; she acts with great restraint. She repeats that just the same when Rahul/Shah Rukh Khan physically shows up to disrupt a harmless Summer vacation shindig.

Unresolved feelings of 8 years are met on a basketball court over a competitive match followed by a song and dance number. Followed by yet another intimate rendezvous between the friends. What does she do?

She proceeds to go back to get married. She doesn't succumb. However, yes, she feels a lot. You can fucking see her upset. But then again, she sulks and she's unhappy possibly cause she'd not been laid in a long time. A good head by Aman/Salman Khan would have fixed it. Not rushing into a marriage. I'm fucking certain on this.

This is followed by that douche showing up at her wedding. She definitely didn't need drama at her wedding, especially since she was abandoned at the college fest years ago for a new girl. She also didn't need drama at her last Summer Camp. She fucking needed her peace, that's all.

3) She owed no answers to anyone, least of all the audience.

Let's rewind and keep her perspective central.
She's a hard worker in college, plays basketball, dotes on her friend and is there for him pretty much always.

In return, she gets half-assed friendship in the form of a dude who's constantly belittling her (men who think otherwise are the ones who do the same in their platonic friendships IMO). He thinks she's a worthy opponent in sports and life but when it comes to a relationship, he'd rather be with someone who touches a chord with his family, aka go to a temple looking like a damsel. He would rather confess his life to a stranger he met a week ago than a friend of so many years.

Does this guy of all the people deserve to know why she left unannounced? Absolutely not. You can't come back when you want to and expect the other person to accept you with open arms. You can't belittle people constantly and hope they'll be there for you. There's a tipping point. She had hers. People have theirs. There's no shame in admitting/knowing that.

Again, I get the reverse, that is, it's not on Rahul/Shah Rukh Khan to be with someone he's not in love with and that is totally fair. But then, in the same fairness, we must allow Anjali/Kajol, the space to grieve, move on and make her own decisions including the difficult ones.

What she did was mad, but it called for it. Mad real circumstances of your friend who you're in love with, in a relationship with the new five feet something in town who plays the electric guitar without plugging it in an amp. I've never hated Tina/Rani Mukherjee more in my life.

4) Rahul/Shah Rukh Khan used his dick and not the brain to make a decision.

He consistently lived and acted at the moment. From the get-go when he's trying to chat up Soniya/Monia/whatever random stranger in the college he's peddling the friendship band to followed by Tina/Rani Mukherjee. He never thought of anyone and any other being besides him. That whole monologue of respecting four women? That's a testament to this theory. He respects a fictional entity, his mother, his girlfriend. Not his friends, not his support system.

You can't possibly stand up for a person who allows his friend to get-away and doesn't take it upon him to find her or even try to do that.

This is the dude who was emotionally dependent on his best friend and has the balls to abandon her just as much the minute he finds the first girl who likes him back to give him a head.

We also see his feelings change towards this woman the minute she plays basketball wearing a Saree. The woman kicked his ass for years in an androgynous outfit but no, the minute she has her bellybutton on display in a nude saree (a lit erotica extension someday), he jumps at it.

Prick.

This is possibly the worst of my writing and thought process all put together as I proceeded to chew my nails out after god knows how many years but this was a much-needed rant for everyone who believes the villain is the woman who decides to take her life in her hands. Fuck the woman, it could be a man but nobody whoever stands to correct the wrongdoings in their own life by others can ever be wrong.

If someone's wronged you and you want to avenge, go for it. That's also why I love Gangs of Wasseypur (2012; dir: Anurag Kashyap). A Karan Johar film can be an Anurag Kashyap level revenge drama if you have the eye to see it. If you don't, then it'll continue to be an Archies comics romance set in a fictional world for the non-cinema studies plebs.

If you're a woman who's been personally victimized by pyaar dosti hai narrative and have had to live through it, my condolences. It's a conspiracy by all fuck boys to use you as an emotional doormat and wipe their hands off any and all responsibilities they have towards you and their friendship/relationship with you. If they can't do your friendship right, they don't deserve to have you. The last thing we all need is random strangers defending the no-good fuck boy.