The title and picture inspired by my friend Muralidharan Sridharan. These musings are about the way in which Covid-19 has changed my life, and what may be yet to come
Learning to manage expectations. Is an important thing and usually difficult. This actually is a process that we have to deal with constantly. I was at a place yesterday and I walked into the room at the hotel “expecting” a set of things. I think I had managed my expectation adequately and everything in the room seemed like what I expected it to be. Things were not perfect – and they usually never are – but it was as I thought it would be. That made the space good – that it did not violate my expectations. These expectations are ours, the room never said that you can expect this from the room. It is us, with what we see, what we read, what we experience, we create these expectations. In the case of a room at a hotel, the matter is temporary, and one forgets soon and moves on. But expectations are about everything. If we do not have expectations then we have come to a point of despair in life where one enters the vacuum of a listless monotony where hope has disappeared and we have desce
I am not a feminist. But. I get annoyed whenever patriarchy raises its ugly head and wants to put women down. And you are saying, not again, but hear out a person who is seeing it in the World he lives in. This is not theory, or politics, it is hard core real. Where does it say that women – daughters, mothers, wives – need to answer to the male counterpart for everything the woman does? I know it is a stupid question to ask, and some male readers will shudder to see a World where they have lost control on their daughters, sisters and most importantly their significant others. The worst crime – the woman that they “own” have another male they rely on. But they need to “wake up and smell the coffee.” I have bondhus who are doing amazing things with their lives, only to be dragged down by a male-dominated system which wants them to conform to the imagined World of the male. In my personal life, I have tried to resist this impulse. A bondhu explained this really well. The person asked how
I went to watch a show. But found a community. As some of you know my son is a performer. He is in an act called “Grim Duplicity.” As the name suggests, it is all about death, the Grim part of the name is a direct reference to the Grim Reaper – the classic image of skeletal Death walking in a dark robe with the scythe in hand reaping souls. Thus, the Grim Duplicity is made up of two people, my son who plays the music of death and his partner who vocalizes death. Covid had stopped their lives temporarily, and now with venues opening up, they are performing. I spent part of the weekend to see their show. The performance was in a club called The Hollywood Comedy. Positioned on Melrose in the town of Hollywood – the club is intimate and popular to a special set of people who are not audiences but a community. And that is the community I found. A group of people, all young, going about their creative lives, entertaining each other, and supporting each other. The show became incidental to wh
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