curating a reading list before I conclude my Ph.D.

This summer’s trip to India rescued me from a lamentable collapse that I feared I would be fated to live with for the rest of my days. In those few months, I found my former self who lived for and loved intellectual conjecture, artistic ideations, and theoretical discussions with the hope that it would amount to some elegant ideals. Reading, which was such an integral part of my identity ever since the tender age of six, came back to me—almost magically. I was however not as lucky in terms of literary creativity and kept myself limited to lengthy journal entries. But by the end of it, I did decide to curate a reading list that I would try to get through as I got through the last leg of my dissertation. So here it is:

1. The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

2. The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell

3. Pleasures and Regrets by Marcel Proust

4. The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš

5. On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason

6. Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel

7. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

8. Eye Level by Jenny Xie

9. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko 

10. For Strasbourg by Jaques Derrida

11. Outlive by Peter Attia

12. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

13. Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku

14. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
    
    

A screenshot of my Apple Books Library.

notes after a year

This website began as a documenting project of my days during the pandemic but almost instantly fell into disuse. A few days ago, I received an email regarding the auto-renewal of this domain name. That is when I brought back my energies to this space. After nearly a year of inactivity here, I wonder if it should remain just what I had initially intended it to be. Even after an entire year has run by, the pandemic is far from over. Perhaps, I should accord a new fate to this website, but I have no clarity on the same. Given the desultory nature that this space has taken and my inability to find its raison d’etre, I think I will let it grow without much thought. For now, here’s an update on 2020 since the time I stopped writing here:

1. I flew back to India last June after buying an over-expensive ticket and quarantined in Le Meridien in Connaught Place. I was fortunate to be in a room with a glass wall that overlooked the Parliament and the Rashtrapati Niwas. Especially at night, when the colored lights were turned on, I could serenely gaze at the changing colors after I finished my online classes on Zoom.

2. My parents have moved to a new place where my father is teaching in the capacity of an emeritus professor. Let us just say I currently live in a tech-savvy campus in the middle of the countryside and am completely cut off from the rest of the world. When I crave ice cream, I have to drive 18 kilometers one-way.

3. It’s incredibly hard to find dark beer in India. Especially German, Belgian and Japanese dark beer that I adore. I haven’t tasted Erdinger Dunkel for around 10 months now. Hunting for dark beer here is a daunting expedition that is wrought with disappointments. I have however found two places that occasionally stock up Feldschlösschen Dresden dark beer. Feldschlösschen is my latest and most precious beer discovery so far. The other beers that I discovered here and liked so far are Crafty Monk of Belgian origin and Birra Moretti of Italian heritage.

4. I began avidly writing my journal after half a year of no writing. I still write, almost every day. I ended up buying three Tomoe River notebooks from a small Istanbul-based leather company called Galen Leather.

5. Verve magazine reached out to me and I reviewed an art show and interviewed the galleries that organized it. The piece can be found here.

6. I have submitted a paper to Milton Quarterly and it has been 5 months since then. I have not heard back from them. I shall wait for another month before dropping them an email.

7. I became friends with Jude Chao also known as Fiddy Snails who has been my skincare savior since 2014 and bought a lot of skincare. I paid a lot of duties too. I realize that I am very bad at saving up. I need to learn to save and invest my money.

8. I bought an instant camera and then went on to buy an analog camera for Christmas and then New Year’s. They’ve been christened “Kubrick” and “Andrei” respectively. My film reels are languishing in my fridge since I have barely had any opportunity to use them.

9. Around the end of 2020, I started investing in stocks.

10. I began reading books that are unrelated to my Ph.D. My favorites so far being Naomi and Quicksand, both by Junichiro Tanizaki. I bought so many books that I am certain that I am good to go for at least a few months.

11. I discovered that my university ID gives me off-campus access to wonderful online electronic resource platforms like Kanopy, Audio Ciné, and Criterion On Demand.

12. I passed my primary qualifying exam after churning out 4500 words in 4 hours on Zoom followed by a 2-hour oral examination.

13. I finally got a new supervisor after a year of not having one.

14. One of my closest childhood friends got married in February 2021. I finally made a trip to her city and attended her wedding.

15. I got stitches for the very first time. It was a painful and surreal experience. I hope the scar fades away sooner than later.

16. Around the end of February 2021, I started investing in cryptocurrency. It’s been a chaotic journey but I have made small gains and I ardently hope that they aren’t temporary.

17. By now, I’ve watched too many K-dramas and have finished watching all the new seasons of the big Anime releases of last winter. Currently following the 5th season of the Anime called Boku No Hero Academia and Vincenzo which is a K-drama. I am now shifting my focus to films.

18. Have bought The Criterion Channel subscription on the 1st of April, 2021, and have been watching a film a day. Been uploading my online movie logbook regularly here. Will buy a Mubi subscription soon.

19. Have proposed an exclusive film club model to an English professor on campus. I hope the institute gives it a green signal. I would love to watch movies on a projector. I am also considering buying a projector for my home in case the film club proposition goes to naught.

20. Currently editing my 4th Ph.D. thesis draft. I hope to finish it in the next one hour and go back to reading Time Within Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

notes on underground aerial voyages

1:45 a.m.

As I sit here in my room, I go through my phone gallery and recall all the times last year when I had secretly boarded flights and flown all the way back to New Delhi, sometimes every 20 days. In 2019, I had made a total of 4 round trips to India and all of them were taken before August with the first 3 taken on the sly. Things people do for love and in love can be quite astonishing. In retrospect, I marvel at how I managed to evade my parents’ scrutiny, complete my coursework in my first year of Ph.D., and pass my secondary qualifying exam.

( 1 ) January 26, 2019 to February 10, 2019

The first trip was borne out of a grayscale immensity of thunderstorms and gunmetal clouds. I waited, my eyes darting every few minutes to the digital clock hanging in the waiting area of London International Airport…

The plane is nearly two hours late. It is a small aircraft, nothing like the Boeings that I have been familiar with. I sit next to the window and a very handsome older man with salt and pepper hair sits beside me. We begin talking as the plane takes off. He works for 3M and is from Montreal. He asks me where I am originally from and I tell him I am Indian, already smiling because I know he’s going to be very surprised. “You look Eurasian!” He is not the first to mistake my nationality and ethnic make-up.

When I arrive at Toronto Pearson Airport, I am informed that my flight to Munich left 20 minutes prior to my landing. I am panicking. My entire journey to New Delhi was supposed to be 18 hours long. I go to the help-desk and frantically whine and demand a contingency plan while furnishing the attendant with a medical emergency back home which demands my presence. I don’t have any check-in baggage—just a cabin bag and a carry-on. Quite melodramatically, I am reluctantly put on a plane to Heathrow at the stroke of midnight.

Heathrow Airport is enormous and I somehow end up getting a van instead of the shuttle to take me to my terminal. I am glad I will be reaching directly instead of being subjected to shuttle detours. Weary with everything until this point, I become careless. At security, I lose a beautiful earring. It is alright. I had bought it during the Black Friday sale.

It is an 8-hour layover and so I decide to call him up. He appears on video. He is sitting in his favorite Beer Cafe outlet already celebrating my arrival. I ask him if he is drinking Erdinger Dunkel. He shakes his head and says, “It’s our beer. We’ll drink it together.”

Eventually, my conversation with him ends and I make my way to the smoking room. It is an uninsulated, cagey room made of grills exposing me to the grayness of the original London. I can feel the chilly, moist breeze make its way between my clothes as I take out a cigarette. For the lack of a lighter, I approach two British men in their late twenties or early thirties. One of them hands me the lighter and I make small talk with them as we all smoke together. They are going to Sri Lanka to be a part of a boating and forest exploration where they won’t be connected to the world in any way. I smoke away and tell them that it certainly sounds thrilling.

I go back inside to wait where I befriend a British woman of Spanish descent and then an Italian man who is tapping away on his laptop. The Italian man tells me he met his wife on a mountain trip he took with his friends. His flight, like the woman earlier, is before mine. He leans down to hug me and I receive my first la bise. I am pleasantly startled and hastily return the courtesy before he walks away. At last, I take my flight finally and fall asleep once again.

The plane lands after what feels like a test of my patience and I walk out after immigration, enervated but relieved, to be greeted by the blinding Delhi sun and him. It is the Indian Republic Day. It took me 3 days and many stories to finally make it home. I have arrived.

( 2 ) March 4, 2019 to March 24, 2019

I am on the Greyhound bus to Toronto Pearson Airport. Not risking a connecting flight from London. Everything is in order. I breathe a sigh of relief as I board my flight. The air hostess apologizes for not having enough cabin space for my carry-on. I reassure her that I am tiny and I like to keep my carry-on under the seat of the passenger in front of me. I get a call from my house-mate. I tell her that I am about to take off and that I’d be grateful if she could take my corrected undergraduate assignments to my office. The plane is airborne and I see the CN Tower jutting into the tilted skyline—Canada’s obelisk of modernity. As I put my phone on flight mode, I shelve my academic responsibilities and sink into this 14-hour flight.

( 3 ) Airport Impressions

— Amsterdam Airport has become like a second home to me. I like the size. It is compact enough to go from one end to the other. I love to buy airport snacks. The regulars are chocolate milk, granola bars, and chocolates.

— Another sojourn in Heathrow Airport comprised sleeping through the night to board the flight scheduled for the next morning. Waking up at 5 in the morning resulted in sampling the limited beer that the terminal offered. On his recommendation, I settled for Island Record IPA.

— On yet another layover in Munich Airport, I ended up buying a small, roundish, and extremely adorable Shaun the Schaff for him. A mother and son duo sat opposite me while I admired the undeniable adorableness of Shaun the Schaff. The woman was half grieving and reprimanding her son. Until the very end, the teenage boy did not meet her gaze or respond. He was as silent as I was. Finally, he murmured some words of reconciliation and I decided to drop my spectatorship and grab a free mineral water bottle.

— My favorite airport is the Frankfurt Airport. It is big and very aesthetically designed and decorated. Whenever I come to Frankfurt, my heart is filled with an artistic sophistication and industrial grittiness. It is like a 24/7 art gallery of sorts. What I distinctly remember are the white ceiling lamp shades, twisted up like lambent, giant flat noodles.

( 4 ) Inflight Memories

I have usually chosen to sit by the window on every flight that I have taken. There is something spectacular about watching the sunrise or sunset in the sky. I love how the diffuse sky radiation colors the expanse of milky clouds reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting. Sometimes I see cities laid out like a sprawling, transparent organism complete with pulsating lights and luminous capillaries—an iridescent clash with the astral opalescence. I am flying over the Atlantic Ocean and I remember Tennyson’s short “The Eagle” that a professor had recited in my second year of undergraduate—

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

( 5 ) Inertia

Catching an early morning connecting flight after an overnight stay like the one I took in Heathrow is perhaps one of my most singularly surreal experiences. Time becomes a distended and independent entity transcending human reason and traversing the territory of the Kantian sublime. People mill in the Airport unremittingly from all over the world. It is where all these disparate time-zones coalesce to form a space that is cut off from the rest of the world populated by people who are only focused on hopping onto another tangential time-zone. The Airport becomes a piece of prismatic, blossoming thread art. Exhaustion shackles my mind but I wander in this miniature floating world, knowing that it is like a dazed dream cradling me through this inertia of ceaseless motion. I am a thread finding its way out of the weave.

Airborne, March 5, 2019

of lockdown, sleeplessness, and appetites

Sunday 3 a.m.

It has been a while since Canada went into lockdown and I have lost count of how many days it has been. Hours of sleep have been reduced and disturbed while a strange assortment of appetites have surged. My nights have become my days and vice versa, as I wake up with sunlight blanking down on my face. The parched skin of my heels and sides of my feet crackle with slight electricity. It is a ravenous thirst for attention, a symbol of daily neglect, and in more prosaic terms, a result of the thermostat quaffing the moisture in my room all throughout the winter.

I apply some luxurious foot cream from L’Occitane which fails with flying colors and so, I humbly turn to my home-made concoction— my grandmother’s recipe that my mother had conveyed to me on phone, “One portion glycerin to two portions of distilled rose water. Adding a few drops of lemon is even better, but do so with a separate and smaller quantity or it will go bad.” The potion is magical as my feet are now plump and glossy. I am suddenly, but not surprisingly, overwhelmed with hiraeth. I want to go back to India. I have been wanting to for over a month now. But India has closed its international borders even to its own citizens with no news of reparation flights. I feel stranded as my air ticket languishes in silence.

My appetite for all things Indian have reached an all-time high. At night, I spend my time curating playlists and experimenting with Indian food. Lately, I have been watching Bollywood movies made in the 1980s and ’90s and consuming their rhyming dialogues and colourful sets complete with their more than frequent bursts of unrelated song and dance sequences with an ardor that is akin to a love-lorn lover. Every day I FaceTime my friend who is trapped in NYC and spend hours with her making food, talking about the contained life we all are leading, our desire to fly back to India until the point we have nothing to really talk about. The presence of someone who feels almost exactly the same way I do because of being in a very similar predicament is comforting. She is working on her paper on Omkara and I am munching on chocolate-dipped pretzels as I type.

I am cheating my daily 24 hour fast tonight but I think I have earned it as yesterday was perhaps the most productive day of my life in the last two months. I applied for a graduate students’ emergency bursary and replied to my supervisor’s email. I went out to collect mail and I was greeted by a pleasantly sunny and balmy afternoon and received my new VISA debit card. I had thrown away my first debit card back in September 2018 because it was cyan in color and felt flimsy and cheap. I distinctly remember that it did not work at the Tim Horton’s in the University Community Center and I decided that it was a frail plastic play card of sorts that one would perhaps receive with promotional bank mail. I also very clearly remember removing it from my wallet and disposing it in the waste bin. For almost two years I lived thinking that my client card is my debit card.

It is 5:32 a.m. now. My productivity comes in short, halted bursts. I am distracted. The black-capped chickadee is singing outside my room. I long for my home in India. Many years ago in Aurobindo Market in New Delhi, I chose a stuffed black-capped chickadee because of its fluffy appearance and the beautiful chirp it emitted when I pressed its chest. I pine for the arid Delhi summers with the sun beating down my head and the nearness of everything. I yearn for touch as I fold and unfold my legs under myself and try my best to evoke the comforting sense of tactility. I want to be enveloped by a beloved.

This global lockdown is lonely. And this barely scratches the surface of all those problematic things that have been exposed or created because of this pandemic. It is truly a new era of containment, loss, and aborted desires, and so I am going to go back to reading Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky. Here’s hoping that I find some gloriously twisted beauty just like the Russians always have in the face of the direst times.

my notes from Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky, p 16-17