Of meltdowns that come without warning

I wrote this post back in May, towards the end of one of the most terrifying periods of my life. I wrote it, decided not to post it, and life went on.

***************

In my last year of college, there was this day I was supposed to present to the class on something. I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember the room, and the visual of my classmates sitting in one row, my favourite professor in her wheelchair, and me standing off on the side, holding my notes in my hand. For some reason, before I was to begin, the professor had started talking about the day her father died. And as she spoke, in her trademark matter of fact way,  every single girl in the room started sobbing, except me. I stood there, wondering I wasn't crying like everyone else.

She finally turned to me, rolled her eyes, and complimented me for not crying like everyone else. And indicated I should begin. I started speaking, stopped, took a deep breath, started again, and then turned around, faced the wall, and sobbed my heart out, while my professor clucked exasperatedly behind me.

***************

Four years ago, the day after the garage incident, I walked into work, and went straight to a conference room to join my work BFF for our weekly call with our counterparts from a partner organization. The call had already started when I entered, so I gave a cheery "Hi!" as I sat down. Someone asked me a question, I started speaking, stopped, took a deep breath, started again, and somehow kept going. The call ended, and as I started gathering my things, my BFF looked at me and said, "ok, what's wrong?"

***************

That morning in May, a few months ago, we had a call with a team I hadn't spoken with in a few weeks. I listed out my agenda, and then before we could dive into the first issue, one of my coworkers piped up saying - before we start, just one other thing. Is your family okay? 

I'd been living a nightmare for close to a month at that point, waking up every morning in terror, wondering what new names I'd hear that day. The weekends were the hardest, because there wasn't even work to distract me from my constant doomscrolling.

And at some point in the previous two weeks, a memo had gone out across America - check in on your Indian friends and coworkers. But somehow, this was the first time someone had done it on a public forum like this. So far, I'd gotten texts or messages, or been asked during one-on-one calls, all of which was appreciated and relatively easier to handle. But being asked on a call like this, while still appreciated, was just a bit startling. But I gave what had become my standard response to all of these inquiries, and kept going.

And then that afternoon, I had about ten minutes between calls, and decided to use it to glance at twitter a bit. I had consciously not looked at worldometers all day, due to some Big. Meetings. in the morning. But since I had ten minutes, I opened twitter, and this was the first tweet I saw.

BREAKING: India has reported over 414,433 new coronavirus cases, the highest of any country since the pandemic began, and 3,920 new deaths.

— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) May 6, 2021

414,000 new cases. Almost 4,000 new deaths. And you know those numbers were woefully, and criminally, undercounted and underreported.

I saw this tweet, and dialed into my call, which was going to be my boss, her peers, and their boss. Started saying I was going to share my screen for the discussion, at which point it was helpfully pointed out I was on mute. I managed to unmute, share my screen, and started laying out what we needed to accomplish. And then it happened.

I started speaking, stopped, took a deep breath, started again, and the tears came gushing out. I kept presenting, speaking over everyone who was trying to say something, pretending like there's nothing strange whatsoever about a woman talking about aligning on a baseline forecast while she has tears streaming down her face. My coworkers on the call, bless them, realised I wanted to just get through it, and let me. I got IMs, some during, some after the call. Every single one of them telling to stop apologising for my meltdown.

I stopped apologising, but I really wished my brain would give me some indication of a forthcoming meltdown going forward.

***************

Things got better after that. They got much worse first, but they got better. The one person I was most terrified for during that period thankfully got through the summer, and is now mom to the cutest baby in the world. We all know there's another wave coming, but no one knows when. 

I don't know why I'm finally posting this now, but for whoever is reading this, I do hope you and your loved ones are safe, and getting through this crazy time in history as best as you can.

On a show I really wanted to like, but couldn't

For a while now, I've been wanting to watch more Indian TV, but it felt like everything that was being recommended to be was too gory for my tastes. I mean, I'm just never going to watch Mirzapur, y'all. Even if it has both Ali Fazal* and Vikrant Massey**. 

But I did watch Made in Heaven last year, and thought it was fantastic. And then after being beaten over the head about Family Man, especially after the new season dropped, I decided to give it a go.

I really liked the first season, even though I thought it could have done more to be a little more balanced in how the grievances of a community can lead to certain decisions. But it was well written, well acted, gripping, and ended on a cliffhanger that meant I had to keep going into Season 2.

And boy, was I irritated by Season 2. So here, for your reading pleasure (all three of you) is everything I didn't like, plus some stuff I did.

{{Mandatory spoiler alert for those who haven't watched the show yet, and intend to at some point}}

Let's start with the good stuff, actually.

• The aerial shots of Delhi! Absolutely gorgeous. Almost all the shots throughout the show were gorgeous in general, but obvs my heart lies with Delhi the mostest. There were two in particular - one of all of Connaught Place, and another of the buildings around Raj Path - that if anyone can get hold of for me, I will be eternally grateful.
• Dhriti and Atharv. Specifically, the actors who played those two. Pitch perfect, and so very delightful. Every scene with them, especially Atharv, was just a joy to watch.
• JK. I started out disliking him right off the bat, because if you're a guy who tries to flirt with the new recruit on her first day because she's female, you get a huge black mark in my book. However, his character arc was probably one of the best on the show.
• The most randomly delightful*** thing about Season 2, however, had to be Sambit's relationship with tea. The scene where he's pouring tea for everyone and it runs out by the time he's able to pour for himself, the scene where he pours it and then has to take a call, and then ruins it by soaking his Parle G for too long, and the scene where he turns down the offer of tea altogether because he's so stressed. *chef's kiss*

But then.

I went into the show knowing the two things that a lot of people were upset about. And both of them were a doozy.

• When you've studied psychology, and half your closest friends work in mental health, you can't not find the therapist they showed to be utterly terrible. For a show that depicted Suchi to be a psychology professional, who worked on an app for mental health, you'd think they would have at least bothered to get the actual showcasing of therapy to be a little better.
• And then there was the brownface. Look, I can be superficial in my media consumption. I don't always get upset by things like brownface. I should, but I don't. But this time. It wasn't just that they did it, when they didn't need to, it was also that they did so obviously and badly. Every frikkin' scene with Raji had her skin practically shining because the makeup was so very over the top. 
• And I have to admit, I also found Raji's character pretty annoying. How much of that was caused by the colouring, versus the other way around, I'm not sure. But it was like they couldn't decide if her facial expressions were supposed to be constantly worried and nervous, or steel-faced and resolved. Her expressions kept flip-flopping between the two, often in the same scene, and ended up distracting me way too much. 

Sundry other thoughts:

• Why, oh why, is there a rule that there can be only one competent woman per season of a show? Zoya was one the best parts of the first season, because it was quite refreshing to see a woman come into a job and just get the job done. Also I was coming close to shipping her and Milind. But then she's gone from Season 2 (and eventually so was Milind, which was just gutting), and while Umayal was just as delightful, it's just so frustrating to watch shows do this all the time.
• I have to admit, I came close to shipping Raji and Shahid a bit. Very Romeo and Juliet, that relationship seemed.
• Do rebels make a lot of money somehow? Those homes in London and Normandy were fan-CY.
• It was very unclear for most of the show, to me at least, what exactly Sri's family knew about his job. By the end, it seemed like Suchi did know the truth, but that made her reactions even more bizarre. Yes, you can be upset about how much time he gives to the job, and how it takes away from family life, but not once in the entire show did she seem to express any concern or curiosity about his safety. He constantly made reference to paperwork, even when he was travelling to other cities, but she clearly seemed to know more towards the end, and it was just all very disorienting.
• Also, Sri was just an ass in the second season. Yes, I get that Indian men must never express feelings or show emotions or talk to therapists about their private life, and all that jazz. I didn't have a problem with any of that being depicted, I got the character. But the man's daughter was kidnapped, almost killed, and covered in blood. He hands her off to a co-worker to go after a terrorist - said coworker, by the way, was right next to him in the next scene, so who on earth took Dhriti to the hospital I don't know - and was far more concerned about the terrorist's death impacting the mission than what he had tried to do to this daughter. Maybe I'm just not patriotic enough, but that's just a level of assholery I can't deal with. The man showed more concern and actually asked more questions about JK's condition than he did about his daughter.
• And finally, I'm sure this show was very realistic and all. In which case, maybe our country needs to invest in some bulletproof outfits for its investigative agencies? It kind of seemed like these people landed in shootouts fairly routinely; some sort of protective gear might help? Just a thought.

I think the reason I'm irritated enough to type out a whole post about this show is that it had so much potential. The cast was mostly excellent, the storylines were gripping, and the writing was close to being really, really good. But I got too irritated by the little things, which ended up adding up to getting in the way of a lot of the positives.

*who apparently doesn't show up in the search results if you search for "mirzapur cast"?

**who was conspicuously missing from the season 2 trailers I saw, which led to text a friend asking - "look I'm never going to watch this show, tell me if he's gone." Her non-answer was answer enough.

*** delight/delightful is my word of the day, apparently.

On a temperamental music player

Like a billion other people on this planet, I've been living a nightmare for close to a month now, waking up every morning in terror, wondering what new names I'll hear today. The weekends have been the hardest, because all I have then is my constant doomscrolling. For the most part, workdays have been easier, because work is a distraction. But yesterday was tougher than usual, and I wrote a whole depressing post about it, and then decided I'm not ready to send it out into the world yet. So it's sitting in my drafts, hoping to see the light of day some months down the line.

So let's talk about something a little more cheerful, 'kay?

We gifted Baba a Bose radio/CD player for his 50th birthday. Well, I say we, but it was Mamma really. And at some point during the past decade that I've been gone, that went kaput, and they bought a new one. Except, as I discovered during my sojourn last year, this new one has a bit of a personality. 

It took me a while to realise that it wasn't my parents turning it on everyday at a very high volume, to a radio channel none of us listen to. It came on randomly everyday at the same time, all by itself, blaring loudly. If the radio happened to be on, and you were listening to a different channel, it would actually switch to whatever that infernal preset channel was. So I decided* to fix it. Since no one knew where the user manual was, I turned to Joi Baba Googlenath, and figured out how to change the alarm settings.

My parents like listening to the English music shows that still come on AIR FM Rainbow** at 12 pm and 6pm, so I went in and set alarms for it to come on everyday at those times, at a far more reasonable volume. Everyone was happy, and I actually won*** Daughter of the Year for a change.

Cut to six months later.

One of my coping mechanisms for the past month has been to have a daily call with the parents, instead of our usual 2-3 times a week. Depending on my meeting schedule (and the father's bridge calendar obvs), I call them either at 8am while making my chai, or at lunch time. And for a few days running, I was getting irritated at how rude they were being, turning on the TV at abnormally loud levels while I'm on the phone with them. 

As it turns out, they were doing no such thing. Their temperamental Bose system took advantage of my departure to change the alarm settings all by itself, and has gone back to turning on at a strange time at a strange volume on a strange channel. And since I'm not there to fix it again, my parents' new approach is to wait till a minute before it comes on, and call out to each other - "the radio's about to come on! go stand near it so you can turn it off!"

Be amused by the little things you guys, because the next time I'm home, I'm going to have to Google how to fix the damn alarm settings all over again.

* Mayyyyyybe less "decided to", and more "was prodded into"

** No, YOU try typing, saying or thinking AIR FM Rainbow without that blessed jingle playing in your head

*** versus just running unopposed

On lockdown rituals

 A year ago, the world went into lockdown. I was in India, on what was supposed to be a ten day vacation, and what had turned into a two-week quarantine. My flights back had been cancelled, my work had gone remote, and so I had decided to stay back - for what I thought at the time would be a few weeks.

That first month, all of us started doing all these zoom calls, with different groups of friends. We caught up with more people in that one month than we had in a year. Those fizzled out after a while, when we realised this wasn't ending any time soon.

But one sustained, and has continued.

My father used to play bridge with his friends when he was in college. Over the years, he didn't keep up with the game, save during the occasional getaway they did once every few years. A couple of his friends have stayed connected to the game, at varying levels of interest. So at some point during those early zoom calls, someone suggested hey, why don't we all start playing bridge online?

So this group of 60-something men, all with varying levels of comfort with technology, sitting in different countries and continents, started playing bridge online. Four times a week, without fail. 

My mother and I watched, first with amusement, then with some consternation, as our daily schedules began to revolve around his bridge calendar. Meals, shows being binged, evening walks or drives, calls with the brother and SIL - they were all planned so that the bridge was not impacted.

A few months later, he discovered that another friend has a whole other group of online bridge players, and he asked to get in on that. So suddenly, he was playing every day, and was beginning to juggle these two groups of fellow players. The mother meanwhile started texting with the wives of his college gang, with debate over whether an intervention was required as yet.

It got to the point where we ended up creating a shared Google calendar, the parents and I. He faithfully goes in every week and enters his upcoming games, and we have continued planning everything else around them. Even now, being back in the US for three months, while my parents and I do try and do a call a few times a week while I'm having breakfast and they're having dinner, I check the calendar before calling him, because God forbid I call in the middle of a game.

With his college gang, a fair amount of drama has taken place of the past year of bridge. They started by having video chat on at the same time, which some people found very distracting, tried doing just audio calls for a while (some people didn't like that either), and now just do text chat apparently. Some people in his college gang seem to be a problem child, and are a source of great personal amusement to me, because they very much remind me of certain problem children the gal pals and I have had to deal with in our own time.

The father, being a diplomatic sort of chap, will never overtly bad mouth this person, even to me. But he lets drop enough hints for us to catch on when things are more cray cray than usual. I understand there was a huge brouhaha between this problem child and another friend a few weeks ago, bigger and more dramatic than usual, leading to friend leaving the group I think? And said friend has refused to play with problem child anymore, so I think they have now split into two groups, and alternate between the two who had a fight?

This morning, they called me while I was making my chai and toast, and they were prepping dinner. And the conversation began like this:

"Your gift arrived! Trust you to think of this!"

"Hain? I haven't ordered my gift yet?"

"Then who sent him this book on Bridge?"

Apparently someone has sent him a gift for his upcoming birthday, but we don't know who. So that's a puzzle we have to solve. 

For the next hour, we ate, we chatted, I rolled my eyes only a couple of times. After a while, I started hinting that we should end the call. 

"Why, are we boring you? Do you have things to do? What time is it? Oh GOSH, it's 8.30! I have bridge in half an hour! Ok bye!"

If ever there was a year to review...

The last time I did my annual flashback post, it was because Friend of the Blog Who Now Goes By a New Name I Cannot Remember had texted me on Jan 2 to ask me about it. 2020 was the kind of year where she texted me about it on December 12. 

In hindsight, not doing this post for 2019, which by my standards, was a very eventful year, but doing it for the batshit craziness that was 2020 seems in keeping with both the batshit craziness of 2020 and the complete erraticness of this blog in general. Ergo, drumroll...

1. What did you do in 2020 that you’d never done before?

I mean, where does one begin? Attended weddings and funerals virtually? Collected unemployment? Lived through a pandemic? Did not see anyone other than my parents for nearly two months (or was it three)? Made apple cider from scratch?


2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I honestly don't remember if I made any last year. Of the ones I make almost every year - I did cook more, and I actually did cook more Bengali food this year. Which is to say I made four Bengali dishes, one of which I was asked to make a few more times.

Technically I wrote about the same amount I did in 2019, but most of it was on yet another blog I started, meant to be more journal-ly, and which (shocker) I didn't follow through with after less then two months.


3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Nope.


4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes. 


5. What places did you visit?

LOL. 

An overnight work trip to NYC. Then in March, the Doha and Delhi airports, two days in Kolkata, and then ten months in Gurugram.



6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?

Umm. 



7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The week of March 7-13 March is pretty well etched in my brain, since it's when both the world and things in my life began to explode. As is May 25.

November 7 was pretty memorable too.


8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Getting through ten months of living with my parents without them killing me for being a brat.



9. What was your biggest failure?

Turning into a brat once it was clear I was back in my parents' home for the foreseeable future.



10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Well I had a bad fever as soon as I landed in India which led to me being quarantined for a week just in case it was anything more than just a fever. 

And then I burned my arm the day after the US elections, which was fun too.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Listen, most of my purchases this year have been clothes so that I had things to wear beyond the ten days' worth of clothes I had brought with me.


12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Allow me to be cheesy here and say all the frontline workers across the world who are goddamn heroes. And I absolutely include all delivery folks in that category.


13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and/or depressed?

I mean, I'm so sick of the two political parties that are currently governing the two countries I call home that my answer to this question almost never changes.


14. Where did most of your money go?

Well, I was furloughed for six months this year, so it's more a question of not having much money to begin with.


15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

The original agenda for my March visit was pretty damn exciting, none of which happened obvs.



16. What song will always remind you of 2020?

I can't think of anything.



17. Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

I honestly don't know. It's been a tough year, but it could have been so much worse. So neither, really, I think.

Whenever I have felt like things are getting too much, I've almost immediately also felt a tremendous amount of guilt. So many others had had it so much worse that whining about the relatively minor annoyances has made me just feel guilty.

18. Thinner or fatter?

Thinner. Turns out having ghar ka khana regularly, made from scratch instead of from canned or frozen goods, is good for you?



19. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Improved my mind. Written.



20. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Bickered. Been a brat.



21. How will you be spending Christmas?

I spent it wearing red nail polish and my Christmas earrings, sulking because I couldn't do any of my usual Christmas food and drink traditions, and drinking spiced apple cider that I made from scratch.



22. Did you fall in love in 2020?

We were in a freaking pandemic, you guys.



23. How many one-night stands?

See #22 above.



24. What was your favourite TV programme?

Technically I watched most of Schitt's Creek in 2019, but I didn't do this post last year, and I watched Season 6 in 2020, so I'm going to include this. 

Both seasons of Dead to Me were fantastic, as was Criminal (UK). I also finally got around to watching Made in Heaven, and absolutely loved it. 

Avenue 5 and Season 1 of Miracle Workers were also really funny.



25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

You know, surprisingly, I don't think so.


26. What was the best book you read?

I think I read, like, five books that weren't Nora Roberts or Lucy Parker or the Bridgerton books which were sent to me the day after Christmas and which I spent the last week of the year going through (and liked more than the show, even though the show was hilariously delicious).

AnyWAY, among those five books were the first two books by Gytha Lodge, which I raced through in less than a week, and ended up pre-ordering the third book due out this year as well.



27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Somehow, I had only ever seen one video from the A R Rahman concert that Berklee College put on in 2014. The entire playlist was discovered somewhere at the beginning of lockdown, and I spent more than a month constantly playing it on loop.



28. What did you want and get?

Usually, my mental answer to #29 is more time in India, more time with family. That certainly happened in 2020!



29. What did you want and not get?

I dunno, freedom of movement?



30. What was your favourite film of this year?

The one good thing about 2020 is that I actually watched movies that weren't MCU releases. And so there were a lot of favourites. 

Just Mercy.

Bareilly ki Barfi (I know, I know, but I just hadn't gotten around to it)

Chintu ka Birthday. Axone. House Arrest. Choked. Raat Akeli Hain. Gunjan Saxena.

Soul.

But I think Ludo and Cargo were really my top two of the year.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I spent it in quarantine, in my old bedroom, getting to see no one other than my poor dad who had to put up with my whininess.



32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Not getting furloughed. Being able to drive, even if I wasn't going anywhere.



33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?

Go to myntra.com --> find cheapest items that fit my criteria and can be returned if they don't fit --> buy



34. What kept you sane?

Knowing that if anything did happen to my family through this pandemic, I was here, with them.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Huge crush was developed on Varun Grover in early 2020. Pretty sure some friends muted my texts because of this.



36. What political issue stirred you the most?

December 2019/Spring of 2020 was spent fuming over the CAA in India. Summer and fall were spent obsessing over the US elections.



37. Who did you miss?

I was with the people I'm usually missing =)



38. Who was the best new person you met?

Did I even meet anyone new?



39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020.

I think this year really clarified the people who are important to me, and who I'm important to. Keeping in touch during a pandemic does that, I think

I've really, really gotten used to living alone.

All I really need in life is a couch, Wifi, and an Android device.



40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Is there a song that can sum up 2020?