Is this how we feel of home? In the tunes of the old artists but always as an ode, never an original anymore, always evoking the feeling of pathos and love at the same time, of eternal and yet fleeting companionship which survives in the heart more than the realities of life, the constant feeling of loss and vehement belonging, together, tearing and healing. Never there, but always clutching to your being like the unease in your throat. Home, a city, people, a person, a few streets, some memories, a house... never there, and yet, always.
Sunday, 12 August 2018
Is this how we feel of home? In the tunes of the old artists but always as an ode, never an original anymore, always evoking the feeling of pathos and love at the same time, of eternal and yet fleeting companionship which survives in the heart more than the realities of life, the constant feeling of loss and vehement belonging, together, tearing and healing. Never there, but always clutching to your being like the unease in your throat. Home, a city, people, a person, a few streets, some memories, a house... never there, and yet, always.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 21:45 0 comments
Saturday, 24 March 2018
Posted by Olive Oyl at 10:44 1 comments
Wednesday, 13 December 2017
Personal/Professional
But of late, teaching made me realize that the personal and the academe are together after all. I saw sentences born out of lack of confidence congeal into inconclusive excuses of conclusions - a common trait among women, persons of color and the marginalized. It reminded me of my own undergraduate days, when I thought a good conclusion to an essay was in a secure summary, or in hiding behind the quotes of someone established in the field. After all, it's already so tough to find one's voice, let alone assert that in print. But more than that, it is so tough to realize that we have our own voice to assert if we want, and our personal can comfortably, beautifully and almost lovingly get entangled with our professional.
As an undergrad, my desire to segregate the personal from what I studied was intentional. I thought I could not exist in the real world if I let too much of the academe (even as I began to increasingly focus upon power relations in our everyday practices) to bleed into my personal life. Turns out, it is so much more liberating to let them freely converse with each other, and become one.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 04:15 1 comments
Sunday, 10 September 2017
This is all that I use you for, a message into nothingness because I am unable to converse with voids that masquerade as familiarity. The familiarity around one is often too similar, and too similarly unaware of what one does. Everyone has a story, everyone's story is different, but no one really reads anymore.
I hate it when the mass of this void tells me to be motivated. It takes immense motivation each single day, fighting against mortality and imminent end, for our our sheer existence to be. How much more motivation should I have left in me to aim for anything more than survival? It did not take me motivation to work towards a PhD. But how much motivation can it possibly take to feel relevant to anyone at all? How much motivation does it take to justify to the world every single day that you are not a leach on the society for not being in a professional course, and even if you were it does not matter and everyone has the right to their choice of life? I guess writing to the void is all that I can, because everything else replies, and each of the replies are of echoes I have heard a thousand times over, never to work, never to mean. Ah the perks of polite society.
Yours.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 12:58 0 comments
Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Last night I dreamt of Manderley
Posted by Olive Oyl at 23:30 0 comments
Wednesday, 1 March 2017
Rants. Because rants are important.
*Faints gracefully into the background, waits to be rescued for enlightenment*
Posted by Olive Oyl at 20:56 0 comments
Saturday, 10 September 2016
Homesickness
I miss Delhi. I am homesick to an extent of missing Delhi, instead of my first home. I made irrevocable ties in the city to last a lifetime. A home or two in a heartbeat.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 03:57 2 comments
Tuesday, 12 July 2016
Writing, with sobriety
When you are writing for a profession, you don't have the liberty of suddenly digressing to Rihanna. You digress only on to Hegel or Heidegger, or some white Western dude. You can throw in a Toni Morrison for diversity, but as far as I knew, Alfred Nobel was pretty a blast of a white dude. You bitch the hell about how some data reeks of male privilege, but you just can't ramble on with your hypotheses without being called a mad philosopher. You have to pause, every once in a while, because short sentences are cuter. You maintain sobriety and somberness. Your words are well thought out. You back it up with evidence, and if a word is not footnoted, you are anxious. If you want to crack a joke about your subject, you cannot footnote it. I mean, you can't say Churchill looks like Mad Eye Moody and get away with it. You just can't pull that off. Dissertation writing is a depressingly sobering experience, where you are grilled into the narrow, small sentences of academic privilege, till you lose your mad, unpunctuated, unpunctured, voice to collective edits.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 01:53 2 comments
Friday, 27 May 2016
I got to know that Saudi Arabia has banned pictures with fluffy cats, and it saddened me. I mean, when life throws you an incomprehensible dissertation, you look forward to that one day when things will change, education will end, and you will be able to put up a profile photo wildly smiling with a fluffy cat that you just rescued off the pavement. (Who abandons fluffy cats in the first place?).
Dissertation blues are real. It is when you suddenly realize that your argument needs to be spruced up, and from there it's an endless chasm where your thought eventually plummets to questioning your intelligence, tenacity, future, life, and even love for the aforementioned feline things - beings that always inspires me to grow a personality at least, if not strikingly glowing intelligence.
I wish my brain functioned more that it does. My life wouldn't be slow, my decision to do things with life would come earlier, and in times of deep pessimism, the future would not look like just an endless wait for things to happen.
Posted by Olive Oyl at 01:56 0 comments