I used to be a better writer

Gone Feminist Cliche

There is a specific joy to watching a pirated movie, filtered through the response of some anonymous audience. Much as I crave the clarity of special effects in my mostest RGB clarity (even if I lack an animal’s infrared vision abilities) there are times when a strange instinct combined with okay-I-just-can’t-wait makes me go for the cam print. Guess the latter is true for everybody who does this especially those nutjobs who seem to make a living out of trolling in caps and commenting on PirateBay torrents. FUCK *^% Y NO GRADING FOR VIDEO AND AUDIO? And some benign idiot actually does this grading on 10 once in a while. The gift economy ain’t polite, lets be very clear on that. (“Motherfucker, why are you being so rude. Its just a lousy cam print” was another ironic gem.)

I succumbed after reading Elif Batuman’s and another review of Gone Girl, perhaps Richard Brody and an Amanda Dobbins. It seems the white world and the white feminist world really care about this film and book, and so I got curious. Both sided with Rosamund Pike, whom I was sort of glad to see is not just a good girl but actually has a solid hefty evil side. One that seems just hazy and petty initially but becomes quite monstrous by the end. Batuman at least tries to say that the girl ain’t to blame because look how she put herself into this small box for love, marriage and a certain kind of life. Marriage itself is abduction. Are these girls, the successful girl played by Rosamund Pike who voluntarily gave up her career, sank her money into her husband’s bar, went to live with him in small town America, and the Emma Watsons who give speeches at a terribly young age to the UN assembly on women’s rights – are these feminism’s new mascots? I guess they were ushered in by the likes of Sheryl Sandberg.

Something about this is disconcerting. Its like a take-over within feminism itself, it was not and never had been about girls like this, I want to protest naively. I know that suddenly pretty girls, smart girls, all-rounder girls are the ones that we are supposed to also back, but it was more about the girls who buck the trend. Who seem relatable, who have problems like the rest of us. But then again, there was something about Obvious Child that turned me off in the first five minutes, so maybe the relatable girl is not the thing.

Maybe it is about the non-white girl and feminism was supposed to center around that, instead it went and settled on championing the rights of Pike and Watson. But against what and against who – possibly against celebrity stalkers and lives they had chosen themselves. In the first half hour of the hazy pirate print of Gone Girl, Affleck"s snarky twin sister (his feminine relatable side??) says first that even if she hates Pike she wouldn’t want something bad to happen to her. Within seconds of this she also says, but if someone has kidnapped Pike they would just bring her back.

I hear the audience’s first audible reaction then, their snorts echoing in the pirate print. I had been told by the New York Times that Pike is the heroine, that her voluntarily chosen stifling life in small town America should make me connect to her in the same way that Simone de Beavoir did to burkha clad women in the Islamic world, and it should make me want to save her. But it just isn’t the same as Virginia Woolf’s world sinking into itself, cinematically caught in that moment when the waters in the motel room rise and drown Julianne Moore in The Hours. Feminism seems to need to shake down their metaphorical heroines, the old ones can’t just be re-worn as a vintage dress. Pike left me cold, as much as Watson did. Oddly Affleck doesn’t seem so bad, when he is coming down the stairs, his beer belly hanging inside his shirt, and alongside him is his allegedly ordinary wife in what seems like a Chanel dress, who could make your eyes hurt with her physical perfection.

Sorry, this ain’t working. Even I want her to die and even I said fucking bitch when she came back from being gone.

Their Earnestness of Being Not Important, or my In-chooch-ience

One word could sum her up, unreconstructed (there is a specific giggly pleasure to driving someone to google in the first line of describing them). Much as she espoused a politics of mid-range radicalness, she imposed a relation of work and reciprocity that felt like I had turned the corner and met my neighbourhood Aunty. Except my neighbourhood Aunty would not perhaps pointlessly and repeatedly nitpick about the politics of an ex-comrade of hers, but maybe she would have done the same about the pressed creases made by the woman who irons her clothes. So meet Doctor Aunty Politico, she offers beef and beer and saving the world by bitching.

Strangely, in spite of my relatively strong interest in the people that she was often talking about, my well of interest in what she had to say would run dry quite soon. How can so-and-so do this-and-this? Really, yawn. But let me pretend an interest, because ‘we’ must ‘work’ ‘together’. Like hell. There were meetings where my eyes glazed over at moments when I fondly remembered how much easier it had been to come to this government health clinic and to meet people on my own.

It still amazes me that for a bunch of people allegedly volunteering at a medical clinic, how often everyone referred to it as work. It wasn’t the appointments with district officers, the meetings with babus and all these accouterments of work that were bothersome, as the pointless glaze of work over everything giving it an importance that this didn’t deserve. Can you work tomorrow? I am working on this. We could work on a report. I had a huge desire to laugh in everyone’s face at that point, why don’t they work on their pointless lives instead. Its not like our work had actually changed a single thing, we should call it muck or cook or peel and spare ourselves.

But lets see who is around here, there is the student (a dingbat of a pre-man whose only upstanding quality seemed to be his ability to do this work) and he was her ‘boyfriend’ (shudder – the last time he showed signs of an inner life was while accidentally humming an 80s Hindi song). There was the unemployable cheeky bastard who truly should only stick to lovemaking, and then there was her who seemingly got and flung jobs but never seemed to actually have any. Then there were others who occasionally appeared - the savarna couple that she had bitched out and might never come back. And then the few people who turned up for the meetings who actually lived in the area surrounding the clinic. Their thoughts and views were opaque to us, as we were probably to them. Occasionally something flashed across, but mostly we stayed politely unknowable to each other while doing this work together.

Oddly, even with my own bare minimum relation to having a job, I was the only one here that probably understood the strangeness of what work actually is, it is not politics, it is not desire, it’s a bit like fill-in-the-blanks. And maybe to a large extent I resented the lack of imagination of everyone around me to make everything work, but did I mention my insouciance. Which is my new favourite word, maybe because it also buries within itself chooch, a word for vagina in Hindi. Drearily I wonder how I drifted from a repressed office where a Brahmin was getting too much talk-time and control, to these meetings in which I was surrounded by joyless note-taking non-Brahmins. The common factor being the feeling of can-I-kill-myself.

Partially this has to be my fault, tired and infuriated by being repeatedly asked to dump what I want to say in academic foundue, it had seemed easier to retreat to a corner here and be more silent than talkative, let the waves of others’ pettiness wash over you. The only price I had to pay for my insouciant lounging was to listen to her sometimes, so why should I object to being giving a ringside view to the engrossing charms of unimportance?

Nawazu

He can't fathom the difference between food and air. In his throat are two pipes, but he doesnt know how to send the right stuff down which pipe and this is the reason that his life will be shorter. It seems almost fortunate, this kind of yummy misreading of the world. Does this also mean that the air tastes like chocolate covered fruit to him sometimes? Can air actually carry all that he needs, are there useful nutrients just freely floating around in the breeze, enough carbs, proteins, enough pottassium that he is now low on. The fault is not his misreading, his hopeful discrepancy, that food is as easily available as air, that what fills his lungs is real and meaningful and not illusive. The fault is that the world is not how he imagines it, the fault is ours.