01 - Arbitrary names and missed celebrations
Welcome to this mildly revamped version of the newsletter you're used to receiving once a month. It's 99% the same thing, much like Zara changing its logo, this update is quite redundant. I find naming things close to impossible, it's like getting a tattoo. I need to find something that I won't loathe in a month. How does one even do that? How do people name their children? HOW? I had a few names in mind, three of which were Japanese words I learned in my daily lessons. A year from now I may not be too impressed with my this is a cat level of Japanese vocabulary. This name is simple and leaves space to change things around. The dissatisfaction hasn't crept in yet so I think we're good to go.
⭐️ Hi, I'm Sachi and this is Currents, a newsletter about cool things I discovered online peppered in between essays. If you'd like to unsubscribe, click the link at the bottom.
Celebrations
I ate one of the best ukadiche modaks (a steamed sweet with a rice flour exterior and a jaggery + coconut filling) I have ever eaten last week. It was at a tiny family run eatery in Jambhulpada, 2 hours away from Mumbai.
It was Ganpati season (or as Instagram calls it it’s Ganpati szn), an 11 day festival full of cheer, tasty food, and bad Bollywood music played out louder than it should be. The modak is at the center of this festival’s culinary delights. Ganesh Chaturthi starts the chain of festivals and smaller celebrations that ends with Diwali. As a kid, that meant school work crammed between a string of holidays. There was something to look forward to every month. Months of good food and anticipated family time. Unfortunately, festivities were the collateral damage of covid-19 precautions. Community celebrations of any sort took a big hit. They aren’t essential in a way groceries are but their absence feels like a gaping void in life as we know it. This is a small ode to those delights.
Some of my best memories involve walking around from one community hosted Ganpati to another collecting sweets and dry fruit along the way. Community Ganpatis are the best because a lot of people have chipped in in some way to build it up. A few bigger setups include live shows enacting mythological stories. These shows have moving figures with dramatic sounds, lighting and changing backdrops. As a kid, my mum, my sister, and I would wait in a long queue for an admission ticket to a show that in those days was the coolest thing ever. That was one way mum got us to remember our gods and their stories. It reminds me of a large unfinished carved stone panel in Ellora of the Ramayana. Many centuries ago, mothers like mine would tell their children what happened to our gods and what they have to teach us. The older I got, the less I cared about what Gods did in their spare time but my appreciation for Ganpati shows remained, even though I barely visited any. If a community didn’t have the budget for an elaborate show, they would install an exquisitely painted backdrop. All sorts of artistry would emerge from regular people at this time of the year. There was a sharp drop in the number of community Ganpatis, and a sharper drop in the scale of the ones that were organized in 2020 and 2021. People lost their jobs, materials continued to be expensive and gathering wasn’t safe anymore. Suddenly everyone around you was perceived as a potential threat. While I understand that this is inevitable, I miss the revelry that followed when people came together to make something wonderful. I miss the generosity of people who would give you more sweets than what you could fit in your palm and smile warmly at you.
Since last year everyone has had to keep their Ganpati visits to a minimum. It was tradition to visit all your friends who hosted a Ganpati. You would hop from house to house and eat a very similar bunch of snacks but you’d do it anyway. Your friend’s mother would always ask you if you’re on a diet because you haven’t had three helpings of some snack. You’re not on a diet, you’ve had the same thingamajig numerous times in the same day but you don’t say that. You think in chiwda now. You grin and hope she forgets. Once she accepts your unwillingness to gorge on snacks, she’ll ask you how you are. Motherly affection with a side of modaks is always welcome. It is inevitably followed by a discussion about what you do for work with your friend’s father and/or uncle. Depending on the family’s sense of humor I will say I am the unscrupulous agent of capitalism that’s the reason you impulsively buy things online OR I’m the one who gives small businesses a fighting chance by building their brand and help them clamor for attention better than others. It may seem repetitive but it doesn’t matter. You’re let into their inside jokes for that day. You feel like you’re a part of your friend’s family, what more can one ask for? Okay fine, I’ll have another helping of that kachori. Bring it on. There were no unwanted kachoris in my plate this year. The stomach is thankful but the heart is wistful.
Our family would head over to Wadala once a year for a 60 second long aarti for an enormous gold cladded community Ganpati. This Ganpati is two floors high and carries a gold modak the size of my face. (This has been shut for the past two years too) My route is always planned out. I start with depositing my slippers at the entrance, going to the left for veggie pakodas, wadas, and occasionally some cold juice to space it out. I plan my visit to the snack stalls with immense focus. It may seem like I’m there for the food. Who am I kidding? I am there for the food. I then wait for our turn to wrap up the aarti and head to the dining room. I then polish an authentic Konkani meal off a banana leaf. You should know I’m a very slow eater. Banana leaf meals don’t indulge my slowness. It’s a tricky dance of eating things before they roll off your leaf and constantly separating different dishes so incompatible ones don’t mix. (Everything tastes great together, my constant separation is more my need for order than something needed to eat food off a banana leaf) I miss it. I miss the fried eggplant from Wadala even though I’m not a fan of eggplants in general. I miss it all. Why did I ever take those fried eggplants for granted? I would recoil from any eggplant I tried to fry at home.
It’s a similar story with our visits to Ramkrishna Mission for Navratri. The idol there has sharp, alert looking eyes painting in a local Bengali style. I have always found the ceremony fascinating to look at. I enjoy chanting even though I don’t quite know what the words mean because the end is usually followed by a packet of neither too soft nor too crunchy sweet boondi. I follow this packet of delight up with well seasoned crispy fried eggplant, small pots of mishti doi, rasgulla and at least one gulab jamun. As we amble to the exit, we pass by stalls selling handmade and hand painted things which we end up buying like candy or gum at a supermarket cash register. A person satiated and delighted with a belly full of goodies is probably the best target for any purchases.
Navratri also brings with it a set of pre-decided colours one wears on each of the 9 days. I never followed this but I loved seeing people in trains and on streets unusually colour coordinated. It’s the only time when the sight of a passing train feels a festive error which feels like it is carrying marigolds instead of people. People would be in a collectively better mood. While I don’t miss any of the loud music from these festivals, I do miss the dancing be it by participating or by watching the dancing from afar. The loss of skill in my neighbourhood community dance seem centrifugal. Us amateurs would dance in the outermost circle while the more skilled dancers would be in the center ecstatically twirling in gravity defying ellipses mid-air. How do they do that??
Christmas revelry was largely absent last year too. There were no decorations on the streets. Damian, the furniture store known for its yearly ornate Christmas displays was dark and empty in 2020. We drop by every year as a family to see what they put up. Storefronts were bare. There was no kebab demolishing or phirni gobbling happening on the street before Eid. I ordered sheer khurma ice cream home, but how is that ever supposed to make up for all the delicacies I ate every year? I can order things or even attempt to cook them but will it ever match the food people have cooked for generations?
The first half of the year is calm and largely festival free. The second half is when the absence of these little things start to feel like a phantom limb. I miss it all. I miss smiling at other happy strangers, goddamnit. I’m smiling underneath my mask, can you see it? I miss experiencing a festival beyond the confines of a screen. I miss the way the textures, smell, and colours change in a street almost overnight. I miss other people. I (very evidently) miss the food and small conversations with the hawkers.
While I was tempted to write about the other ways community spirit is trying to be built, I’ll end it at waiting with some optimism for the public joys of life to be back. May we never take public and shared joys for granted.
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⭐️ A wonderful poem by Ellen Bass reminding us to pick ourselves up and enjoy life again.
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📖 BOOKS
⭐️ Recursion by Blake Crouch (Sci Fi Thriller) - This book gripped me with its tentacles right from the start. I can’t describe it without giving you spoilers so I’ll avoid it as much as I can. A condition called False Memory Syndrome (FMS) breaks out which causes people to have vivd memories of two or more lives to the point that people can't differentiate which one is real. Barry Sutton is a detective trying to figure out what's happening till he gets caught in the factors and people causing FMS. At one point, the very fabric of reality begins to change with people's collective memories. Nobody knows what's true anymore. *plays dramatic music* This would make an excellent movie.
⭐️ Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (Non Fiction) - The premise is that most of will most likely get four thousand weeks to live, more or less depending on your luck. Burkeman is a self professed productivity geek till covid-19 and life itself made him rethink things. He realized that the world of productivity hacks missed the truly important questions about life. There is only so much you can do. You can’t do it all no matter what you do. You can’t be a digital nomad and experience the closeness of a community built over decades. You can’t be good at everything you attempt, you simply can’t. Burkeman suggests letting it sink in because once you’re past how limiting it is, you can see how freeing it is.
Four Thousand Week talks about being realistic about what you can achieve in the time you have, how to ask the right questions about what's important to you, how to add things that add joy to your life and questioning what makes a life well lived.
Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid Menon (Non Fiction) - Alok Vaid-Menon's take on how the gender binary hurts us all and how a more fluid take on gender identity isn't an attack on men and women.
(Currently reading) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Historical Fiction) - This is an intergenerational novel spanning decades taking you from Busan, Korea to Osaka, Japan. A lot of what happens in this book takes place when Japan annexed Korea, a part of history I was sadly unaware of.
(Recently shelved) For The Love of Men : From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank (Non Fiction) - Not a fan of Plank's style of writing but I read it anyway. It's on hold for now. Most of the stats are about American men only, which is disappointing. There is some information about Scandinavian countries peppered in, as usual, to show the wold how they are somehow doing it all right.
💻 SHORT READS
I loved Pallavi Aiyar's essays on the complicated relationship in India between native languages and English and India's relationship with a national language. She's an excellent writer and I enjoy her well-crafted newsletter very much.
Tangled Tongues : Nations and their Languages
👾 COOL THINGS FOUND ONLINE
Helsinki Complaints Choir - What a chucklefest!
City Roads - a site that renders every road in a city
Literature Map - a place to find writers similar to ones you like that other readers are exploring. It's like a tourist map for writers.
Peak Maps - drawing ridge lines for the elevation levels of any place on the planet.
Little Big World - Little Big World turns the most beautiful, interesting and awkward locations on earth into adorable miniature models using tilt-shift photography with spectacular drone cinematography and amazing time lapses. Visit locations around the world in a way you’ve never seen it before. (Copied the bio from the channel)
River Runner - visualized journey of a raindrop anywhere in the USA. Super cool project.
The Decay of Pop Culture by Filip Hodas.
2021 iPhone Photography Awards.
1000 Dreams - 1000 stories by 1000 refugees, changing the narrative of refugees through storytelling.
🎧 PODCASTS
The Man Enough Podcast - how good is this podcast? The premise is fantastic and I like what I've heard so far. These are two episodes I listened to fully and enjoyed.
+ Alok Vaid-Menon : The Urgent Need for Compassion
+ Emily Baldoni : The Invisible Work of Women
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Until next month.
Warmly,
Sachi