The Summer of Absolutely Nothing

11.

I have realized that in most of popular culture, there are only two broad ways to write about India.

One involves writing about India as it was, the tradition non-anglicized side of it, either set in a different era or in a different place; the former usually more subtle, simple statement of a way of living - like Ruskin Bond, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Khaleid Hosseini (Afghanistan, I know). The latter, rather more exaggerated in some cases - arranged marriages, oiled hair, going abroad for studies - like Chitra Banerjee Divakurni, and countless others who write stories based around ‘being India’, rather than it just being a backdrop.

Then there’s the sort of modern writing, that has come to grow on the shelves like fungus - Ravinder Singh, Chetan Bhagat, who use slang and informal language, talking about the modern life of India with archaic coolness, as though it was a phenomenon as opposed to daily life, mixed up with a hodge-podge of half dead values advocated by uptight elders.

It can basically be summarized from that one scene in Delhi 6, where Sonam travels on the subway and sheds her traditional kurta in favour of spaghetti top and shorts.

I absolutely abhor this kind of writing, seeking to make an idiosyncrasy out of every belief, and a tourist attraction out of every auto-ride, with a story my mother would say was ‘aping America’.

I enjoy reading the first kind of writing a good deal; old-time India fascinates me. However, it is not something I can emulate. My largely bereft of tradition upbringing, due to the love marriage between different cultures and the petering out of both said cultures, means that I can write about India only from a semi-tourist perspective.

I perhaps can write about India the way Murakami writes about Japan - the fact that it is Japan doesn’t make a big difference.

My school is possibly the only point of heritage in my life. A ‘tambrahm’ school, to comply with the Tunglish jargon, I stuck out like a sore thumb when I first joined in seventh, my lack of knowledge of Tamil immediately alienating me and making me the butt of all jokes.

Initially I found their differing values stifling, the way they crept up in daily life in ways that had nothing to do with religion. The marked partition between girls and boys, the curious friendships between the two governed by a long set of rules and regulations which I never quite got the hang of, but which definitely had nothing to with being open-hearted and outspoken (I was honestly like that then). I was also (and admittedly still am) not much of a girl, which didn’t help my case, where there seemed to be a semi-formal female stereotype to conform too.

Thankfully as time passed, I realized that this attitude lurked only in some nooks and crannies, and I had the misfortune to get stuck in said cranny when I joined. In the rest of the school, a largely-watered down and more accepting version of this attitude existed, with plenty of good intermingled in it. At the risk of sounding like a cliche American high school movie, I found a place for myself, and a small but close group of friends; in some ways I suspect it is my life’s destiny to be an outcast.

Casting aside this tinge of bitterness which seems to inevitably creep into all my writing, I left my school a largely happy person (she existed, once) who found it difficult to hug or hold hands with boys, and other boundaries of proximity, which I fondly consider its legacy.

The outpouring of sentiment I feel for what I have seen of Chennai, through the lens of my school, can be understood in reading the following essay of mine (written for sadly mercenary reasons, an audition for content writing for a start-up):

Being a localite, I can unfortunately provide none of the fascinating 'outsider's perspective' on the city that many other students can provide. I am all but born and brought up here (the technicality being that I was born elsewhere).