Internalised misogynists are villains & gender traitors so let’s stop calling them victims. Being ‘just a housewife’ is a choice that she chose to pay for with servitude to patriarchy. She throws other women under the bus for it. Millions of women run homes, raise kids & earn because they have to.

I’ve gone back to my copy of this volume now and in the next few weeks, y’all are going to experience my PMS and general ire in terms of kollivay pey, mudmudiya-gudgudiya and ksuids. You can thank or blame @blaftrakesh.bsky.social.

Woke up laughing about this.

Fastner and Larson

Slightly increase a band: The Artist Formerly Known As Crown Prince

Slightly increase a band Masala Women

Slightly increase a band Canons and Botanical Gardens

Slightly increase a band: In The House Boys

Slightly increase a band: Menarea

I’ve eaten my first chaat of the year. The first in six months since I was hospitalised. My doctor gave me an all-clear today. Panipuri is truly a mood.

When you don’t see the point in gossip, dislike tearing people down and are trying to stop dumping, what’s left to say on social media?

Attended a book discussion about ‘It Ends With Us’ awhile ago. One woman bragged about how she would never let a man do this to her. Reading ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ now & crying over how vile pick-me’s keep violence against women going.

WTF is ‘vogueish’?

Fun fact: I once drew a grater. Funner fact: The model was a a baby grater that can’t be used to grate anything (not even babies).

Came out for a solo meal. Found a place that has one table occupied by two young men. I love that they aren’t demanding my attention in that way men do without even talking to you. They also seem to really enjoy each other’s company without either being a couple or bonding over harassing a woman.

Isn’t all smoking a literal performance? Nobody smokes alone until they’ve hit rock bottom (meaning they were always supposed to only smoke for validation). Such a nonsense habit.

I always loved the ichchadari naagin myth.

Literally a country of white Europeans who massacred the indigenous tribes, then stole black African people to be slave labour. The only threat this country has ever faced is their wealthy racism being slightly questioned.

What do you call an Indian cult of Claude LLM? Claude ke bal. (Don't @ me.)

Ate bread for breakfast yesterday and the day just felt so much harder. Weather more oppressive, feeling energised but unable to actually move through the day. What we eat impacts our mental health so much.

Watching ‘Anxious People’ (Netflix, Swedish) makes me realise how different a person I’d be if I lived in a bitterly cold, grey-weathered place. I would be severely depressed and never even realise it. I’d think that it was just the way I was, as would people around me.

Why the eff would I want to have ‘something casual’ with a bald, paunchy guy who shoots his main profile picture with a visible toilet in the background and dirty clothes/tiles and also wants ‘no drama type women’? I wish this was weirdlyspecific but it’s nauseatinglygeneral.

Reconnecting with the other ‘building kids’ that I grew up with. It’s surreal talking to people who knew me when I was not even a fraction of a full person. And they weren’t either.

Hey, Anxious People is a limited series on Netflix in Swedish. As of the Freidrich Bachman book. Also, really glad it isn’t Hollywoodised like that travesty of an AppleTV Brie Larsen Lessons in Chemistry shit.

I’m tired of coloniser views of the world, of the Jewish pity party, of white woman in peril stories, of insidious religious propaganda, of the Hindi-Hindu narrative of my country. Mercifully for me, the world is full of books about and by other people.

I would have made an awful man. I’d have been really good at masculining. Ergo, awful man.

The world is full of ugly things. All that I see as beauty, is inside me.

Is there a Tamil equivalent to the Marathi ‘aga’? As in, aga teh hote na, ho, teych ga.

An elderly building security guard got beaten up in the middle of the day, cut on his face and bleeding. Couldn’t go to the cops and why? The perpetrator was his own son. This country is breeding filth.

I found this in a secondhand bookshop which may be the only places that keep books that fit my Mumbai shelves. I miss these covers too. The catch? The n-word shows up on page 16. There is no escaping reality even in the best of books.

It’s a bloody fool thing to ask someone who’s come out of the hospital, “Isn’t it very expensive?” At least I value my health much more than you, you chain-smoking bypass surgery jerk.

“Women are inferior.” - my grandpa when I was 10. “I want to thank this child for giving me her blood, when I should have been the one gifting her things.” - same grandpa fighting cancer, when I was 19. It takes a brave man to fight fire & cancer. A much braver man to admit that he was wrong.

Bengal has succumbed. TN chose fandom politics over hate politics, but by a narrow margin. Only Keralam stands as this country’s last hope for sanity.

I’ve learnt to read outdoors (not an easy task when you live in crowded, dusty, humid country where nobody will leave a lone woman alone).

I feel a tangible surge of queasiness now when I re-engage with groups that have been unsafe for me. The instincts get strong as the gut and liver heal.

I have unraveled many times. It is a familiar experience. The difference this time was, I was able to track it. And with that, I could respool myself in.

It would help if every time someone said that’s not okay, they weren’t slapped with accusations of antisemitism. Muslims, black and Hispanic people in the West don’t get to shut people down by pointing out Islamophobia and racism.

And our man is posing for reels which is the desi version of live and let die but be quiet with the woke liberal stuff.

This month I have tasted tender coconut with naga chilli ice cream at Natural’s and also tamarind ice cream at Apsara. This is tropical island summer’ing done right.

Stumbled onto a bookshop conversation between GenZers. One promised if friend liked Gone Girl, she’d like Ayn Rand. My eyebrow raising must have been very loud because they asked if I’d read Rand and if the books weren’t good. I said they were rites of passage for a reader.

One way to reduce emotional labour (and protect mental health) is to remember that most men are not interested in women’s answers. They ask questions to prove social nicety and sometimes as a destabilising tactic.

I truly LOATHE being called 'bro'. Gen-Z has stumbled onto the most annoying way to being the ghastly next generation. And it’s not even original. We Xennials were calling each other Bro in the 80s. At least in the Catlik neighborhoods I frequented. Talk about co-opting.

We keep having coming out conversations. Told a close friend today about my mental illnesses. I slid it in casually in an even more casual story about why I sketch without using mental or illness. She did a double-take and said “You have anxiety?” That’s how I knew to trust her and say more.

People, not understanding someone does not automatically make you autistic. If everyone was neurodivergent, all of us would be neurotypical. That’s how science works. Don’t be an ass and self-diagnose yourself using Instagram & ChatGPT.

Apple devices get slower with every update. What counter-intuitive logic is this?

Young women are walking around wearing F*ck Patriarchy teeshirts and young men are grinning at them saying okay but who is patriarchy. The world is never going to be better.

May you who block traffic on main road with your drunken baraatis and destroy the rare spots of quiet in this city, at 7 in the evening enjoy your (or your partner’s) erectile dysfunction. Shubh ED vivah.

Starting to think men are just dumb. Indifference means anger to them. Telling a dude I’m working and will reply later but to please go ahead and message and he says I don’t mind, take your time to open up, don’t be formal. Idiot.

Take a look back at history at men who claimed to love their wives. And count how many pregnancies they made these women go through. No one willingly goes through pregnancies and labour 10 (or more times). The body is not made for that kind of brutal use.

Why will desi dudes learn Spanish, Italian or German? Because that’s what some other people speak. How about the same consideration extended to South India? Or even well, Maharashtra? Mumbai is not the capital of UP.