Girls

I finally caught up with Season 5. [Spoiler Ahead, read at your own discretion]

V happened to walk in on me watching the epic fight between Adam and Jessa. “Is this where you learn your drama?” he said, or something to that effect. “No, I’m dramatic because I’m like these people,” I said. “Angsty.”

Girls, for all its crazy, presents the ideal of kind of friendship – where people drift but tey come back, sliding into bed next to their sleeping friend with the confidence that they will be accepted.

On the other hand, Girls presents some unrealistically narcissistic people. In one scene, Shoshana is in a bar with her new boyfriend and a guest, and she has some earth-shattering epiphany, and while her boyfriend is in the loo tells the other girl, “I have to go home” and leaves. This might have been excusable as a once in a lifetime thing but this happens on this show with alarming frequency. People decide they are in the midst of some emotional upheaval and just have to leave. No matter how dramatic I am, I think waiting and explaining why you have to leave is essential.

Back to friendship though, at one point Adam accuses Jessa of siding with Hannah even though Hannah is selfish blah blah blah. And Jessa says, “Yes, that is what friendship is.” That is, friendship doesn’t mean always liking the person you’re friends with. This was an important insight for me.

 

Facebook and friends

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. I read articles posted by people, I post articles I’ve read, I comment and respond to comments. It’s a source of news but also of thinking points.

However, since my recent spate of meltdowns, I’ve been rethinking my online engagement, specifically on Facebook. I got embroiled in a couple of comment threads that left me feeling upset. I decided that it was time to stop wasting emotional energy on these online discussions and cut back on Facebook. So for what feels like a (couple of?) weeks, I did not post anything and did not comment anywhere. However, I’m incapable of entirely detaching, so I did ‘like’ posts I find interesting. This is a tacit way of sharing them without inviting discussion with me further, or expecting further engagement.

I know I can’t attribute my better frame of mind entirely to this, but I think it helped. What I realise now is that Facebook is not just about active posting and commenting and the resulting positive or negative engagement, but also about energy wasted waiting for that engagement in the form of ‘likes’ or whatever. It’s not that I sit around gasping for the first like, far from it, but every time there is one you get a notification and then you react subliminally, much more so to a comment. This is the case even with the blog, but somehow, I find that – thanks to you, awesome readers – the blog discussions are more chilled out and I can detach more easily. Facebook ironically is more public because I have a range of people who actually know me and can directly impact my life on there, colleagues from work for example.

It has also made me realise that while I smart from people being snarky to me on Facebook, I can’t hand on heart say I’ve never done the same either. So when, and it’s a when not an if, I do get back into the game, I will be very careful to be scrupulously polite when commenting, even with friends. And also to cut down on commenting. This I have mixed feelings about because part of the joy of Facebook is being able to have discussions that one might not always have in “real” life with people interested in similar topics. On Facebook, if you don’t give, you don’t get. People who find Facebook boring rarely do anything on it beside lurk, and so possibly the algorithms don’t work in their favour. Nevertheless, starting a discussion means continuing one and I have to think about whether I have the energy for that. Maybe one a week, and one post a day?

Chungking Mansion

Chungking Mansion is the little India of Hong Kong. It is a warren of shops selling desi stuff, little restaurants with desi food, electronics shops and some Chinese related things. The upper floors house various guesthouses of varying degrees of shadiness. Apart from desi folk, the place also attracts African traders.

Yesterday, we went for dinner to Sedequi Halal Mess. We decided to pay a visit to the Indian store and order some stuff, including mangoes. Since I didn’t want to cart the mangoes up to dinner, the lady at the counter kept it for me and I said I would return at 9 pm before the shop closed. That lady is a story in herself – she is usually surly and according to one of the men who runs the shop “a bit crack” but yesterday she was bright and cheerful and putting forward her best sales pitch for the mangoes. She even allowed me to exchange mangoes from one box to another.

So we went up to dinner and the place was full because I think yesterday was the first day of Ramzan and people were breaking their fast. Also, there is like one waiter and people seemed to just push their way through and take a seat instead of waiting to be seated. Luckily V saw what was happening and did the same and we got a table pretty quick. The food, however, took ages to come. There was like a half hour interval between things. So I realised that I would have to go fetch my mangoes or the shop would close.

Now, the lift in Chungking Mansions is another thing. There was a crowd of people waiting so when two paavam looking desi guys took the stairs, I followed them. Now, this is not something to be generally done, and what happened was that on some floor, they veered off and the staircase basically ended, but it didn’t look like the ground floor. I went into the lift lobby and asked the haaji guy waiting there if it was the ground floor. After some confusion, I realised I was on the third floor, but the door led out to a podium that allowed one to change to other blocks. I went back to the lobby and the man said, “Take the lift. It’s the safest.” That gave me pause, but I stood there. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a Chinese hostel owner I presumed arguing with a possibly Filipino tourist: “You are talking too much,” he said aggressively. The Filipino guy didn’t get the hint/threat and kept arguing for a room with less noise.

The lift came and I went and collected my mangoes. On the way up, I could choose the less crowded odd number lift and walk one floor down – but I was leery of taking the silent but menacing stairs again – or take the even floor lift to the sixth floor where I needed to go even though there were four people in the line already and I knew the lift was small. I chose the even number lift, and soon an older desi man and a young Chinese girl came and stood behind me. There was a shop right next to us, and she asked: “Should we buy some fruit?” “Later,” he said. “I’ve ordered food and someone is making a pizza.” They were a strange pair, and I immediately concluded that she was a sex worker.

When the lift came, not only did I get in, but the two behind me and I was shoved up against the Filipino guys behind me. I clutched my mangoes and considered whether i should hold them defensively behind me or in front of me, and decided I’d rather have a barricade between my boobs and my countryman than my ass and the Filipino. Just as the lift was closing, the Indian guy puts his hand out and stops the lift to allow this sardar to get in. It was as packed in there as a Bombay local, except I wasn’t in a ladies compartment. Then, the man stuck his hand out again and the sardar who got in decided to exchange places with another sardar. Only when that guy got in, the lift wouldn’t move because he was too heavy. So he got out and the original sardar got in again. But now the lift wouldn’t move either. Finally, the Chinese security guard shouted, “one person out, one person out” and the original sardar had to get out grumbling. So we all had a bit more breathing room.

The reached hit the 5th floor and I got out and dashed back to the mess, only to find that in the 20 minutes I’d been gone only one lassi had been brought to our table. The food when it eventually arrived was yummy if oily. I’m still dreaming of the kebabs.

For an elegy to Chungking Mansion, watch Wong Kar Wai’s film of the same name.

Troubling the binary

In philosophy, it has been pointed out how Western language, culture and myths rest on a series of binaries – black/white, male/female/, good/bad, soul/body, mind/matter etc. Jacques Derrida pointed out that what is insidious about these binaries is that one term is also negative  or devalued. Feminists have pointed out how the devalued term is often associated with the feminine.

On the one hand, consciousness rests on a separation of the self from the other. To understand something one has to understand what it is not. Or so we are told. One of the philosophical questions I’ve been preoccupied with is whether there are cultures that do not think in binaries. While Eastern cultures, like Indian and Chinese philosophy are better in this regard, when you can to originary stories, you are back at binaries.

The other day I was reading one of those Mr Men books to Nene (my kids love these books although I sometimes have problems with their messages, this is again one of those instances when I cannot find it in me to censor my kids’ choices). The book was about a guy called Mr Dizzy, which is a polite way of calling him Mr Stupid, because his defining quality was that he answered basic questions wrong.

For example, “what is the opposite of black?” “Pink,” said Mr Dizzy, and everyone laughed.

“So what is the opposite of black” I asked Nene.

He paused. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Nothing.”

I was about to say “white” and then stopped myself. I realised that my child had broken the binary. Or rather, that he did not think in binaries. That is was possible to not think in binaries. The opposite of black could be anything or nothing. It was not necessary for there to be an opposite at all.

I suddenly realised that thinking in binaries is not natural or instinctive. Or at least not universal. Like everything else, we learn it and we internalise it and then we say it was always there.