I'm Constantly Torn Between The Unconditional Responsibility Of Taking Care, And The Insatiable Desire
I'm constantly torn between the unconditional responsibility of taking care, and the insatiable desire to be taken care of.
Which I personally think is a confusing space to be in.
More Posts from Lyrebird-sings
You know those moments when you're left alone with your thoughts and you let them wander, and then suddenly you feel this tug in your mind? Like you know if you let your thoughts go any further now, you'll fall into a deep spiral that you don't quite know how to come out of? You quickly think of something else or, get up and start walking or do just about anything to just get away from it
It comes out of nowhere and leaves you so scared
How do you stop having these moments..
there will be a moment when you realize you are more grown up than your parents are. this is the loss of childhood, my love. it is when you’re standing in the kitchen and one of your parents is screaming about something and you recognize: you will let them win the fight not because you are wrong, but simply because you know that they will keep shouting unless you drop the subject. you expect them to have childish understandings of things. they will hold onto their concept of the world as if it was not a changing thing. they must be right, and they must be somehow more right than you, always, in everything. their idea of control is so necessary to who they are that you just let it go.
this is the moment. you are 11 or 17 or 21. and you realize that you’re more mature than they ever were.
and in some odd, sad way, this frees you. where they have stagnated, you continue.
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul *
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux *
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote *
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman *
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan *
Why I Write - George Orwell *
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland *
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag *
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag *
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo *
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall *
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon *
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls *
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato *
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae *
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom *
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore *
The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert *
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson *
All By Myself - Martha Bailey *
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History) *
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History) *
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar *
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based *
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman *
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha *
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way *
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs *
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield *
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu *
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman *
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal *
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad *
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin *
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream *
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter) *
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales) *
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales) *
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas *
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries) *
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell *
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard *
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia *
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
Words, words, words 👑
I'll call this piece,
"I'm simping real hard for Aurora"
There is a singer from Norway by the name of Aurora. She is 25 years old and often forgets her shoes. She doesn't like to hug and she sometime likes to eat baby porridge - but only if it rains.
The moon, the stars, and mother earth are her muses, and she likes to call herself a mere vessel, through which the music flows.
She says that each time she writes a song, she loses a part of herself, and so it has to be worth it.
She likes being barefoot, and I'm starting to think she "forgets" her shoes by design.
I Would like to meet her someday, not on stage and certainly not in the streets.
Heaven knows how it will seem, two mad women on the middle of the road, and one of them barefoot.
One day should the stars allow, I would like to meet her in the woods.
And should the trees and the winds feel kind, they will sing for us as we dance.
Alone and barefoot, and unapologetically ourselves.