chekhov's rifle

Be careful, you are not in Wonderland. I’ve heard the strange madness long growing in your soul. But you are fortunate in your ignorance, in your isolation. You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose—lest we die, unbloomed.

[tellywoodtrash]

I don't mean to offend you, but do you dislike North Indians? We are not that bad also. (*sings kya itna bura hu main maa?.... in the background*)

*snorting at the gaana* Draamebaaz. 😆😆😆

Warning: Impassioned rant incoming. But you asked, so… 😗😗😗

Of course I don’t just outright dislike ALL North Indians unilaterally. But I *do* resent the suffocating hegemony that the North imposes on “desi culture”. You know, how the run-of-the-mill “Indian” is seen as fair, vegetarian and Hindi speaking. What about South India? The north east? Bengal and Odisha? WE HERE TOO! 🙋🏾🙋🏾🙋🏾 We’re all Indians too! But the overwhelming perception is that the North is mainly “India”, while the rest of the country are just hangers-on/afterthoughts. In the matter of entertainment, I especially HATE that Bollywood is recognized world-wide as “Indian cinema” while all the other industries that are churning out INFINITELY SUPERIOR CONTENT ON A REGULAR BASIS are marginalized as ~~~regional cinema and doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. There’s a general disinterest and unwillingness to explore outside of Bollywood. Whereas every “Indian” is expected to understand Hindi and know/keep up with Bollywood. 🙄🙄🙄

Forget recognition and appreciation, when was the last time any other regions got ACCURATE, if ANY, representation in mainstream Bollywood/Tellywood itself? Nope, it’s all stereotypical caricatures mired in terrible accents and nonsensical regional mishmashes. But greaaaaaat care is taken to ensure authenticity in portrayal of the North Indian regions. You’d never see Garba dancing in a movie set in Punjab. You wouldn’t see people speaking in a Haryanvi accent and eating Daal Baati Churma if a show was set in Lucknow. But you *will* see Kathakali and Mohiniyattam dancers in a movie that’s set in Tamil Nadu/Odissi dancers in a movie based in Calcutta. All South Indians seem to be on a strictttttt vegetarian diet (pls note that the south indian states are the LEADERS in meat consumption in the country) of idli-sambaar (every time someone pronounces it “saaambur”, i lose 6 years off my lifespan 😫😫😫) or bizarre noodle-yogurt concoctions (WTF???? 🤢🤢🤢) when not breaking into Carnatic music and impromptu Bharatnatyam steps every now and then. Oh, and not to forget the constant punctuation of every sentence with “aiyyo!“ 😒😒😒 A National Award winner like Dhanush is derided as looking like a “rikshawaala”, while the most pedestrian-looking of North Indians with a six pack (and of course, a rich and famous daddy) can become a Bollywood hero, finding marginal to immense success. Consummate actors like Mohanlal and Mamootty (also MULTIPLE National Award winners!!!!) are ridiculed by North Indian masses for being chubby and looking like “uncles”, while bloody Salman Khan (ALSO IN HIS 50s, AND TRUST ME, IT FUCKING SHOWS) gets 300 crores on the first weekend for just showing his expressionless mug on the screen (don’t even get me started on how he just stands there like a fucking lump of goondha hua atta in Swag Se Swagat. LIKE, AT LEAST PUT IN *SOME* EFFORT FOR YOUR MONEY MAN!!!!!??!!!!!) Priyanka Chopra is chosen to don yellow-face to portray Mary Kom, because most of the North Indian public won’t come to theatres to watch an actual Manipuri actress play her. Imran Khan, Shraddha Kapoor, and Alia Bhatt are cast as Tam-Brahms and Preity Zinta is being shoved in my face as a Malayali. The biggest South Indian successes are taken and churned into shoddyass remakes, because not only do North Indians not wanna watch anyone but the Khans and Kapoors and Kumars, but there’s also the general attitude of “Arre yaaar, who will watch all this with subtitles and all???? 😑😑😑” The inherent regionalism and racism of it allllllllllll is just maddening to me.

Coming to personal experience, most North Indians I’ve met have a benevolently ignorant (if not downright derisive) attitude towards South Indians and the culture. If I had a rupee for every time I was called a “Madraasi” growing up, I’d be rich enough to be a damn Oberoi. When informed that Kerala is actually a whole different state, and also, not all Malayalis are “Malabaris”, the response is mostly “ehhhh, same difference, na?” (Similar to how North East Indians are largely seen as one single unit of “Chinese” people who happen to live within Indian borders.) I’ve had friends repeatedly ask me to translate Kannada/Telugu/Tamil for them, and being perplexed when told that those are actually entirely different languages from the one I speak. I’ve heard North Indians regularly complain that Tamilians in CHENNAI only speak Tamil and don’t understand Hindi. (Like ????? 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 If you’re coming to visit/live here, make an effort to learn the local language instead of the other way round????? We don’t come to Delhi/Mumbai/Jaipur and speak to the autowaalas and shopkeepers there in OUR languages and then get mad that they don’t understand us????) From what I’ve noticed, there seems to be an innate unwillingness on the part of North Indians to acknowledge and educate themselves on the regions of the country that are equally, if not more diverse than the north (there are over 10 different regional dialects within Malayalam itself!!!!! I’m sure there are even more in Tamil!) while simultaneously placing the expectation on all others to just “know” things about North India and its culture. I don’t see any difference in this attitude of North Indians when compared to white people who think all brown people (whether they be Latinx, Middle Eastern or from the Indian Subcontinent) hail from one single, monolithic culture.

And thus therefore thence, the general resentment and side-eyeing towards North Indians on my part. It’s nothing personal, just frustration that’s built up from all these years of fuckery I’ve experienced. 🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️If you’re a culturally educated North Indian who doesn’t behave like the above, then obviously I have no issues. If you happen to be among those who have (perhaps/mostly unknowingly) behaved this way, then I’d urge you to take an interest and learn more about your own country’s diversity. There’s a whole treasure trove of unexplored and underrated cultures, that have infinitely more to them than just the inaccurate nonsense the mainstream North Indian media propagates! ✨✨✨✨

[quotethat]

“Lust is so inadequate. And loving exhausts me.”

– Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters  (via mirroir)

[leiathoughts]

laters changes belators

The overarching emotions are hurt and insult.

I feel like a Geertz symbol which is subject to all the meanings applied to it - no doubt as a product of living - but that which surface and one by one try to assert their hegemony in the face of major life decisions. Somehow no one is understanding that I perceive myself too, I analyse meticulously; no one is understanding that not playing with my 5-year-old cousin is symptomatic of dispossessing a desire to help others learn. They don’t know me where I reside the most and the best - in school. Where I have created Music and The Universe, where I have helped friends, in the quiet where I have experienced revelations and willed others to feel them too, never been inserted into my personal vision of perfect education, not even then, just: most perfect.

Can it be that I am the delusional one? What if I am - I do admit to that possibility, don’t I? And so I am willing to try. Fucking disgusting that my family disparages teaching, highlighting problems that plague every profession as reason; even worse that they are so incurably servile, as in Chekhov, to the one who is most educated, most eloquent: my dad. My mum in her own family - both ways the rest are so eager to assimilate and align, without their own reasons. Echoes only. Disgusting that they are prey to the horrible elitist mindset that respect must be counted in dollars. How hurtful it is to hear the true extent of their faithlessness suddenly come to light - that I can’t HANDLE any of these emotional demands or physical constraints. The austerity that is carried forth to her based on the same principle, of: this is not what I know of you. 

What does it matter? When you chose your lives no one was breathing down your neck; There is no stable essence of an “I; You followed suit from your application. 

[porcelain-engine]

@three-0fspades​ Here’s some book of poetry that I have read in the past five years (w/ a few suggestions that I love and ppl should read too! Citizen by Claudia Rankine (can’t stress enough how crucial her work is!) Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong Animals in that Country by Margaret Atwood (this may be out of print ) Life on Mars by Tracey K. Smith Jenny We are all Find by Jenny Zhang Picasso’s Tears by Wong May Everyone Here Cecily Iddings Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by Biance Stone Odalisque in Pieces by Carmen Gimenez Smith Human Dark With Sugar by Brenda Shaugnessy Sorrow Arrow by Emily Kendal Fry Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman Failure and I Bury the Body by Sasha West Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros (this book made me want to be a poet!) Money Shot by Rae Armantrout Thunderbird by Jane Miller Last Sext by Melissa Broder Literally anything by Alice Notley My Private Property by Mary Ruffle What Is Amazing by Heather Crystel Directed by Desire: The Collected Works of June Jordan Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patrica Lockwood …..this list is obviously quite short and mainly american poets and I got tired of typing…if u buy these books (and I can tell u which on the list are) from a small press please BUY THEM FROM THE PRESS NOT AMAZON. These presses are the ppl who are bringing u the good cutting edge shit more often than not. They need ur $$$$$$.

[leiathoughts]

aphorisms on afterwards

I am scared of the product of this narcissistic notion of metamorphosis — that it will be mediocre, rendering the process meaningless. The future is now means that we are valued for our possibility not our achievements (or is this the value of all achievements: their promise) It does not matter if I have created, if I cannot create the same way for ever again?

Is it pretentious now to wonder of meaning?

I have convinced myself it is the striving for perfection. Naturally, failing to attain it can the act of striving be enough? But some attempts are more elegant than others. A hierarchy of attempts! -- but futile because Mozart died a beggar, and Hitler has never not gotten his way apart from his testicle defect. Futile because for 2 months straight in my striving I ceased to be happy while those who had given up were free? Even if retribution or reward necessarily arrives in the appendix, futile for the religious because to reach heaven they have to deny the only material life; futile for atheists because having gorged themselves on life they die without hope. A holy self-denial is consistent because it is done in anticipation of total absolution of such desires. But then again if the passage to eternal life automatically shaves those off, why bother? And does liberation herald happiness? What are we if removed from our needs, vulgarity that allows beauty, excesses, shortcomings, desires: dead. 

Everyone wants to maximise their existences so everyone is a consequentialist. The deferral into another life was an eternal penance and excuse before it was ever imbued with morality. I can’t seem to deny that god existed but I can affirm my indifference to his ostensible purported way.

So, I will accept all that overlaps, but not attribute it to Christianity; anyway, I know myself, my conflict-centredness, the general horror. Catholicism will not accept all of my depravity, which I still want for myself.

I too was born with the tremendous desire to revere something but she has always been a woman. 

[leiathoughts]

1241

[fifteenthcenturygirl]

Если б вы так, как я, любили, вы бы убили любовь. If you had loved as I had loved, You would murder love. -Vladimir Mayakovsky

[leiathoughts]

“I don’t like my singing voice” / I lived on the sound.

[leiathoughts]

visions fugitives

I always imagined perfection to be an edge. Not to exist within the boundary of some contained sphere of happiness, never that explicit, or immersive - like Plath who cannot escape the melancholy even of an immaculate state; for me the cusp, the brink overlooking— is fundamental. “Lost and left behind” is a line I’d used to describe the discard: function(al) dinners dead-lines that sad Durkheim disconnect and rush hours…

all obscured with this detachment, the buildings still sharp to the eye but inconsequential like a vague apprehension. The planes flying overhead in their exact intervals and filling our ears with tremendous shock each time. How we kissed at that edge fringing the unreal sky, the changing sea.

[leiathoughts]

inexhaustible unexhustives (poetry index)

Late Summer by Jennifer Grotz

Premonitions by Carol Ann Duffy

Daddy 

Medusa

Leaving Early

Sheep In Fog

Lady Lazarus

Wuthering Heights

I Am Vertical 

Cut

The Munich Mannequins

The Moon and The Yew Tree 

Elm by Sylvia Plath

Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Against Still Life by Margaret Atwood

Some Foreign Letters by Anne Sexton

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Winter Syntax by Billy Collins

Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot

Nighttime Fires by Regina Barrecca

The Stags by Kathleen Jamie

[leiathoughts]

10/5 concert thoughts

Cover you crystal eyes, and let your colours bleed and blend with mine.

I don’t think I have been as musically and emotionally alive as during the concert by Of Monsters And Men last night. I've always denied Music’s ability to fill me completely (and as a result, fulfil me), but now I understand that I had just never come into contact with an experience of Music that has. How temporary that breath of newness and completion was; and yet, how transformative—

Maybe, also, because it was inseparable from the literature of a song.  “Just let me go we’ll meet again soon” /“And I run from wolves tearing into me without teeth” / “Can we chase the fire away” is just as necessary as the manner (melody, harmony, texture, metre, rhythm) they exist in. And because these variables are so arbitrary: dependent on both manner of conveyance and reception, the live element was fundamental. I only understood through the language of syncretic dynamism. And I understood fully in my own particularistic way.

It also becomes so shocking to think that we as people, artists, a society, are privy to the talent and creation of others. I was allowed to partake in the materialisation of Art I have already memorised by heart — created inevitably, and yet anew; I was there to witness the emerging coherence of a composite vision How wonderful is that?! It is actually unbelievable. 

I feel so goddamn alive and ready. 

[leiathoughts]

on creating art

How is it possible that we are able to create Art? We, crude, vulgar, contradictory, conflict-centred beings - 

From which Art is separate from and yet undeniably inseparable. It embodies the grace that we do not; it is the result of sensitivities unknown, un-excavated, suddenly pouring forth through a channel barely accessible to our own understanding, and yet temporarily wrought (for as long as the piece is in creation), yielding magnificence. And inevitably, also our own insensitivities, our own vulgarity — maybe, in inscribing it into silence, blankness, movement, we are pardoned, even redeemed.

The things that I have created validate my existence. The cycle of repetition and transient touching-and-relinquishing I have influenced in this singular way: the externalisation of something intrinsic, (and even then not completely or perfectly so), the abandon of it into a larger universe. Other eyes have seen other ears have heard...I will leave this, for the issue of whether communality is worth anything, an issue I am not concerned with today.

Today it is how we are capable of this contradiction. If you are a humanist of the highest order, if you are a human it is necessary to believe in the inheritance of both sins and triumphs of the entire race of people unlinked to you except by a faint connection of blood, genetics, unreal yet tangible…

It is necessary to understand Mozart as you understand yourself. He was childish, foolish, irresponsible; how did he write? What compelled him to, from where did that ability originate? 

It fails to logically follow. How can we create something so immediately greater than us? Even God could not. Art is an anomaly, (and yet necessary, and yet a priori, and yet felt, and yet universal, and yet-

).

[leiathoughts]

Cartography, (2015/2016)