Dislike 👎

Someone asked me recently the kind of people I dislike. I’d never really thought about that. But upon encountering the question, I decided to muse on it. So I thought about the people I do not like and I had an epiphany then, which was so simple yet I'd never considered it a unifying factor among the people I dislike. Which is not surprising because I don't normally spend my time thinking about people I dislike. In any case, the grand epiphany was this, that I deeply dislike people who fixate on problems!

It's not so much how we solve problems. I just don’t like people who see problems instead of thinking about the possibility of solutions. Not all problems have solutions. And we don’t often have the answers. But it is a failing in personality, in my opinion, when people don’t care how problems get solved and fixate instead on the problems. More often than not, these are the people who would immediately look for someone or something to blame. That is the main reason I don’t like them.

You can solve 99 of the problems for people and yet they’ll find a reason to blame you for the 1 problem you couldn’t solve for them. Which might actually be out of your powers. Sometimes, the “out of powers” are, in fact, Natural and would require you to be God to solve them. It still won’t absolve you from blame. If people want to blame you, they will.

I deeply dislike these people.

In contrast, I find myself very favourably disposed to people who think of solutions. Sometimes the solutions they come up with do not work. Sometimes they’re actually funny. But I deeply appreciate the effort and the character trait. And funnily enough, even the “stupid” suggestions can be part of the Answer, when you can cross them off the list of possible solutions. By a process of methodical elimination of things that won’t work, you can actually reach the Solution! A basis for collective wisdom, I suppose. A very democratic trait. Perhaps one of the best traits of democracy – collective wisdom.

So there you go. It would not have occurred to me to voluntarily make a mental list of people I dislike just to find a common feature among them. And on thinking about them and finding the common ground, I realise I was smiling. They’re horrible people. It would just be the thing that as varied personalities as they have, that they do indeed have a unifying factor.

My Salary

Confessions Of A Shopaholic had a lovely green scarf in it. I have one as well, having been inspired by that movie. I don’t often wear scarves so for the most part it served as a reminder when I am spending too much. But these days I have a spare room and I don’t see the green scarf a lot so it has not been doing its job as a Shopaholic Reminder very well.

Most of my spending, you realise, is online. I have the main sites on a neat little folder and I spend many happy minutes every day on the folder, buying things I don’t immediately need but want and yet once it’s on my cart, grow to want it more and more till I start to need it. Very toxic. But there you go.

I didn’t use to be like this. I used to never buy anything other than books and food. I wore boy sweaters for the longest time because my dad never understood the difference between girl sweaters and boy sweaters. I wore my mother’s designs because fashion didn’t matter to me. Actually, that’s not wholly true. I fell in love with Princess Diana of Wales as many others also did, and often took the coffee table book with me to the seamstress and told her to make the exact same dress as hers. Mizo seamstresses are very talented!

Lately, I’ve been buying a lot. I have a lot of the same shit in different colours as well because even though I can be a bit of an online shopaholic, I still am basic and I like what I like. I have the exact same sweater design in about 5 different patterns. I also have two unused personalized notebooks because they’re pretty. I also have a bucketful of shampoo, conditioners and shower gels because they’re so pretty. I also have bottles of orange and citrus based oils and lotions because they smell pretty and also the bottles are so pretty. You get the idea.

But most of these I can rationalize because they come cheap online. Or at least a good % slashed off of their MRPs. And a lot of them are brand names. And you can’t often get them in Mizoram, and certainly not outside Aizawl. And I am never posted in Aizawl. 

I wore my favourite puan on the Republic Day celebrations, 2025. It is black but with three distinct patterns. It has pretty flowers, siniar style and then some weird computer blur pattern. I fell in love with it the very first time I saw it back in 2014 when I joined service and became a salaried woman. I gazed at it, ran my fingers through it and fucking sighed. It cost 7500 bucks. In 2014. That was steep! I spent so much time agonizing over it that my mother said: Just buy it, you have your own money now, spend it; you’ll always regret not owning it.

My mother is a wise woman. I paid 7500 for this puan back in 2014 but I have always loved it and it remains a favourite and its beauty has never dwindled in my eyes. I loved it then and I love it today. I realise I am weirdly loyal to what I love and hardly ever budge until the trust is irrevocably broken. And puan doesn't break trust. My mother also unintentionally taught me another lesson at the time: if you like something, go for it; you’ll always regret not going for what you want.

It’s a very wise advice and one I’ve followed ever since. They have made for interesting times. I also bought a gorgeous ceramic pink flower tea-set with one of my first few salaries. I love it still. 

No regrets, man.

Oof Ka Jingieid

We just called it that Khasi song. No one knew what it meant. But no Millenial in Mizoram cared. We all sang along, making up nonsense words. At least we got the tune right. We bobbed along. In college, I asked Amebari to translate the song for me. She did. I don’t remember it. It honestly did not matter much. I am told it was big in Nagaland too at the time. Nagas and Mizo tend to have similar taste in a lot of things. It felt like every single Naga owned laptop in Delhi in the 00s had Michael M Sailo’s Pari Zun. I actually first heard Senhri Parmawi by Mami Varte from a Naga house party. They made me listen and write down the lyrics. And then they fed me bastenga pork for my troubles.

There’s just something about music that wakes up something in you, seemingly effortlessly. Music has such power it can affect moods. This is a topic for another day, so let’s put a pin on it. I saw a IG reel of Oof Ka Jingieid recently is what made me think of the foreign songs I love that I don’t understand but most importantly, don’t need to understand to enjoy. A lot of Shakira songs, for example. I know all the words to the Spanish Laundry Service songs and I know exactly none per cent of Spanish.

Oof Ka Jingieid, right?

My thoughts are spilling out and I need to write them down. I just figure it might be fun to pick some of the foreign language songs I adore.

Mori No Chiisana Resutoran

Food related reels brought the song to my attention. It sounded Japanese to me; just some quality to it. I began scanning the comment sections whenever a reel played it and realised that like me, there were others who liked the song and were also searching for it. Someone finally was nice enough to do us the service. 

The song was called Mori No Chiisana Resutoran by Aoi Teshima. Japanese. I was right. Vindication! (For my ears having the ability to feel a language I don’t even speak).

Spotify had it so I often played it till I gradually got the tune right. And one random day, I Googled the translated lyrics! It was the sweetest, cutest shit. 

Scanning the lyrics, I realised it contained 5 English words – restaurant, violin, flute, cello and viola. I did not catch any of them. I mean one was in the very title itself so that one I got but sort of glossed over. I listened to it properly and there it was “violin, flute, cello, viola”!

My ears could pick out that the song was Japanese but also at the same time couldn’t pick the English words out of it. That was interesting. Selective hearing? Interesting topic in itself. Lowkey humbling.

Secondly, it made me wonder: if a Mizo song contained those same English words pronounced in as heavy an accent, whether it would be celebrated or ridiculed. I am not entirely sure, even now.

Thirdly, as with most things Japanese, there was just that aggressively kawaii element to the song. The Japanese dedicate so much of themselves to making things beautiful, even with broken things. Sometimes I think what makes Japanese art and culture seem so deep, to me at least, is how sincere they always seem. We all try to create beauty and we do do that. In our own ways. My gentle critique for my own society is that we might be the tiniest bit overly obsessed with Image over Substance. With Japanese idea of art and beauty, even the pretty packaging has substance to it. Just check out reels of Japanese gift wrappers. Dear lawd.

Anyway. Such an aggressively cute song and for me, always thought provoking.

Con Te Partiro

Never had a song stunned me so hard as Con Te Partiro by Andrea Bocelli on my very first listen. I am not deep in music so I’ve never really paid too much attention to any arrangements. I’ve also never listened to Opera. All I knew (pretty much know, as in the present tense) of Opera was the one that the cartoon person sang just before Cartoon Network blew up in a TNT (the bomb) blast at 9PM and TNT (the channel) started.

So I was really surprised to hear this wonderful music that spoke to my soul. I didn’t even know what song it was. I guessed Italian because… Opera. Also Andrea Bocelli was an Italian name. And then Sarah Brightman began singing some of the song in English and I realized, Oh okay it’s something to do with lovers saying goodbye. I never bothered to learn what the Italian part meant. I was well into about 3 years of having loved the song before I Googled what the words were and what they meant.

I like the lyrics. It’s just that it is not that important to me. I don’t know what about the song speaks to me so deeply that it is a visceral part of me appreciating music. 

To say I like this song is an understatement. I don’t really listen to any other Andrea Bocelli song. Or Sarah Brightman, come to that. Or even more opera. Opera pop? Ballad? I don’t really know the genre. I just know I don’t listen to tenors like Bocelli very much. My taste in music is, as a boy once told me, simpler than complex. I like what I like. And I like Con Te Partiro.

The majesty of this song moves me and makes me want to cry from the beauty. It has always been this way. Years of listening to this song and it is still the same. And it has taught me to listen for arrangements.

Music, no? Damn.

He Melo No Lilo

Sometimes animated movies go really hard in their soundtracks. Shrek, for example. Or Tarzan. Their soundtracks have no business being that good or that timeless. But there we go. Lilo & Stitch is another. That funny little ohana celebrating cartoon introduced me to a few Elvis Presley songs. Which I appreciate. And am grateful for.

But it also introduced me to He Melo No Lilo. Ugh, I love this song. It is so whimsical and so melancholy and, just in essence, so tribal. Like all the foreign songs I like, I don’t really care about its lyrics. It is the music that touches me.

I always have high admiration for how dedicated successful people are when they do things. I think it’s the basis for success that ought to be appreciated. There are many different ways to succeed, to be sure. C’est la vie. But the ones that truly last have been by people who have been dedicated to their art. In whichever form.

He Melo No Lilo is one of those songs that will transcend language barriers because it is that good. Like the Tarzan and Shrek soundtracks. You’d think less dedicated people would just dismiss it as kids’ movies and hence there was no need to create such deep art. But these people poured their soul into their music. There are no misses in Tarzan and Shrek soundtracks. They are always that good. And has stood the test of time. Years later, the tracklist is still a no skip. 

Dedication. What a lesson to learn from a fun little kiddie song.

Quelques Mots D’amour

Serendipity. What a lovely word. And exactly how I came by this song.

A woman told my mother that she was opening a second-hand clothes bale and she required her children to buy at least one T-shirt. Each. So we looked through the pile. I found a huge dirty-orange T-shirt with some French words written on it. I’d taken one class of French back in high school is how I recognized the language. Which piqued my curiosity because it was followed by, in much diminutive letters, “whispered in French”. I Googled the words. 

To my surprise, it was not just a phrase but a song title. To my pleasant surprise, the song was incredible!

Quelques Mots D’amour has never fallen off of my Spotify downloaded music since. Downloaded because you never know when the internet is going to abandon you. I do that with a lot of my media platforms, I realise.

Anyway, Serendipity. Life happens to you when you least expect it. My first kiss was serendipitous; that was fun. Meenu’s grandfather sent her a book which I borrowed when I was bored is how Serendipity introduced me to Harry Potter; I remain a Potterhead years later. I discovered Billie Piper was an actress and decided to check out one of her works is how I serendipitously discovered Doctor Who; I happily am a committed Whovian.

Life is funny that way. On a random day, with your mind slightly distracted and a few Election related tabs open in the background, you discover Quelques Mots D’amour. 

Whispered, I might add, in French.

NB:

It would be entirely remiss of me to write this without mentioning the marvellous Ngurthangvela covers of English songs. I once spent a Christmas in Delhi with Priscilla and we listened to his renditions of Cotton Fields, I Feel Lonely, Bacardi Blast and Hotel California in endless repeats. They made us happy. They’re not particularly good by any measurable standards of music but on the entertainment value, they rank high. I’m not entirely sure if he knows the words he is singing either. A lot of people will mention “backs free” and “breaks fee”; that is already well known. And oft repeated. But it behooves me to mention that when he sings “You Ree the one only…” in I Feel Lonely, the actual lyrics is “You’re the one and only”; that one took some time for me to figure out.

To quote Dumbledore, “Ah music. A magic beyond all we do here!” At Hogwarts, of course. Home to magic. And music, apparently.

Social Capital

Bhavna Ma’am taught Pierre Bourdieu to the class. She explained it well and it stuck. But at the time, I was not that concerned because I had no idea how much it would explain so many things in adult life. Nor how much it would reverberate in my brain as the years passed.

The Social Capital of it all, I mean.

Social capital is perceived capital. It is symbolic. But as all symbols go, its significance and worth rest on how other people view it. View it, yes, and more importantly, value it.

In my own life, I have had the privilege of being an officer’s kid. And in Mizoram, to have grown up and based in Aizawl. I don’t know how far other people also acknowledge their own entitlement and advantages by the virtue of their birth very much in their own lives but in mine, I know it has, in so many cases, shaped the way people view me. First impressions, at least. The rest, unfortunately, is up to me.

There is a leg up that I have that a lot of people don’t have. It is easier to float through life if people assume that you are worth it. If they deem you unworthy later, that was on you. But if you have to start anything with people thinking you might not be enough, it is very difficult to change their perspectives. 

In my own life, I have experienced this for myself in North India. There, street urchins would look at you and catcall you. Chinky! Momo! Ching Chong! I mean… they were not even subtle about it. People just assumed you were not worth shit just because you were from the Northeast. You had to be twice as good as other people, as they say, to be considered half as good as them. They usually say that about women in “men’s fields” but it applies here too. As with all prejudices.

You learn to live with it, of course, either ways, easy and tough. The easy part is undemanding. Well, duh. But if you’re self-aware, it is sometimes difficult to accept when you notice this negative inequality of treatment meted out to people, especially people you actually are fond of. Or even if you’re not fond of, if you’re aware of the disparity, worth for worth, it just makes you uncomfortable.

You do build your own social capital, of course. It is very possible. People with little to no social backgrounds break out, develop incredible PR, mold impressive Images and build up their own Inheritance. But where you start out is so important. As Paris Hilton would say, tongue firmly in cheek, the first step to being an heiress is to choose your genes. 

You can’t argue with that.

Not Ready To Make Nice

I’m old enough to remember when the Dixie Chicks got cancelled. 

2003 had George W. Bush as POTUS. There was a joke going on that when he visited India, he referred to the “mountains of Delhi” and that snarkily amused DU kids no end. I don’t even know if it was a real quote. It is possible, I guess. I have no real reference. On the other hand, Dubyaman was around and it could be from there, some sort of comic exaggeration. I don’t really remember. I just remember the snickering. And the art. Dubyaman was gold.

I do remember that when Dixie Chicks said they didn’t support the Iraq war and that they were ashamed that Bush was from Texas, as were they, they got cancelled. They got death threats. They got their music paraphernalia mutilated and burnt and destroyed.  That was to symbolically kill their art. 

But I guess art doesn’t die like that.

Artists die. A lot of them even kill themselves. They tend to be very delicate. One of the most poignant ones get highlighted and put into songs that live on long after the artists die. Like Vincent van Gogh, forever immortalized in the song Vincent (Starry Night) by Don Mc Lean, with the haunting line: 

     You took your life as lovers often do

     But I could have told you, Vincent

     This world was never meant 

     For one as beautiful as you.

Oof. Right in the feels. Just in case Van Gogh’s art somehow doesn’t survive, I’m guessing this song will. It just needs someone to remember it. Or even think about Marilyn Monroe with Elton John’s beautiful tribute in Candle In The Wind:

     And it seems to me you lived your life

     Like a candle in the wind

     Never knowing who to cling to

     When the rain set in

     And I would've liked to know you

     But I was just a kid

     Your candle burned out long before

     Your legend ever did

Which, as we know, worked again for Diana, Princess of Wales, with a few minor changes:

     And it seems to me you lived your life

     Like a candle in the wind:

     Never fading with the sunset 

     When the rain set in.

     And your footsteps will always fall here, 

     Among England's greenest hills;

     Your candle's burned out long before

     Your legend ever will.

How do people do this? Artists have the ability to take on other people’s pain and make it their own. The fucked up bit is that they tend to pass that on. I guess that’s good. In a way. They find the ways to help you express yourself in ways you cannot. And they can find the ways to make other people understand that feeling. That’s incredible power.

Across art forms, artists have always provided platforms for people to share their different lives and experiences. I am always endlessly amazed.

Thank God for art. Right?!

It is so strange to be able to understand situations you would never find yourself in. But you find your humanity in fiction sometimes! How weird is that? Or you could travel through the world, lost in a book. You can even understand languages from snippets across different art – the written word, as song lyrics, as titles to painting and sculptures, movie quotes. Endless ways of expression. 

Sometimes the artists share their soul and their lives with you. Taylor Swift is famous for that. Her entire empire depends on her story-telling, especially the ones that cover her own life. Dolly Parton and Shania Twain did something of the opposite earlier. Jolene is supposed to be just a figment of her imagination. From This Moment On was supposedly written during a football game and she was bored. 

And then there was the Dixie Chicks. Not Ready To Make Nice was angry right from the first note. There was pain there in that first twang of strings. Natalie’s voice gets stronger and angrier all the time, even with the little cheek in verse 3. By the time she got to the Bridge, her pain was gushing out, bleeding and raw, like angry red slashes. Even the violin was angry. I don’t know how to explain it but I’ve never heard angrier violin as that short violin solo. The vocals turned more melodic and softer again by the end, but it was still stubborn and unrepentant. 

Damn, that was a good song.

Is it bad that I am glad they got cancelled for some time? All things considered, I mean. They got vindicated with a vengeance again, after all. And going strong. And we got wonderful music. For people not ready to make nice. Yet.

Priyanka Chopra

With a net worth of $80 million, Priyanka Chopra, the brand, is impressive! I didn’t know quite how rich she was, so I had to Google it. Which I did because I like how she is doing being rich.

She is so obviously delighting in her wealth. It’s fun checking out her IG page. She’s always at some fancy pants event or location, posing for pictures and looking gorgeous. 

What I like best about it is that she doesn’t seem to take things for granted. She’s always showing off her family, her brand, her work, her vacations, her life. When you’ve been rich for a long time and you’re as well-travelled as she is, I imagine it would be easy to be disenchanted. But she doesn’t appear to be such. She always seems to be marveling at the things she is seeing, the clothes and jewelry and makeup she is wearing, the people she is meeting, the events she is attending, the experiences she is having. Even the things she seems to do all the time. Like celebrity parties.

I get that she is an actor and she is promoting a Lifestyle. I don’t necessarily consider myself a fan of hers and I'm not sure I agree with a lot of her choices. But it is really cool to look at her wow-ing over all these hobnobbing rather than appear disillusioned. I am a born cynic but perhaps because I am such, I like seeing people obviously enjoy things.

Come to that, it is a pet peeve of mine to see people appear jaundiced over other people having fun and/or experiencing new things. I notice this sometimes. Even with things as common place as, say, flying. Sure some people might have grown up flying here and there but some others fly for the first time as adults. And sometimes I watch these people look all judgy at these first-timers like royalty judging peasants or something. Like people being excited and/or nervous over things was indicative of them being uncultured or less refined than they are. It’s true of restaurant experiences too sometimes. Or pool parties. Or fancy booze. All of us are ‘fancier than’ but also ‘less than’ compared with others.

With PC, a lot of these shit must be old hat for her, especially modelling events, because she’s been doing this since she was 17. But she never looks bored. She always looks like she’s appreciative of where she is.

I like this about her. There are a lot of celebrities who know how to be rich, in my opinion. Enya comes to mind – living in a castle with cats. Shania Twain is another – do the glam tour and then retire to Geneva and ride horses and walk around barefoot and shit. Just more lowkey than PC. PC appears not to be a homely type of person so her sharing the things her money is buying her and still getting excited over them is nice to see. You don’t need to rub it in people’s faces that you’re rich and pretty, but I don’t get that vibe from her IG, just a lot of excitement.

I wish for more people to relish the things they get to do.

Professionalism

Once during a particularly lonely night in NIFM Faridabad, angry over an exam I didn’t particularly want to pass, frustrated over choices I made that were incredibly stupid, and above all, unable to sleep because of all the anxiety, I decided to play a movie as white noise while I tried to study.

I played Mean Girls.

I figured it was a nice movie, there were no surprises there, the dialogue is sparkling and witty, the delivery is sharp and on point. Just nice. A feel good movie. So I stared into my material and had the movie playing in the background on my laptop.

I have watched and re-watched Mean Girls many times but I remember this re-watch particularly well because it was that night that made me appreciate how professional some people were in the art of film-making. I could tell exactly which scenes were playing from the audio alone. The little dramatic changes were magnified. I didn’t need to watch it to know when the acts shifted from the little music and sounds. I stopped studying and made it a game of my own to not watch it at all but just absorb the movie aurally.

Ever since that night, I have been sensitized to this aspect of film-making: how some films deserve to win all the accolades and positive criticisms because they are just so good. People think it is the camera quality, the high definition visuals, the budget, the premise, the pretty people and everything else. But while these bits are important and eye-catching, they are actually a very superficial part of what makes a film good.

I remember watching Psycho one time. That movie was made in 1960. I didn’t like the movie at all because I’m not a fan of horror/thriller as a genre but I loved the movie at the same time because dear lawd, that was quality filmmaking! The angles made sense, the characters played their parts, the whole thing was designed to titillate your senses the way the director wanted to. It was captivating. 

See, in the end, your senses require more than pretty clothes and pretty faces. The direction that actors get make so much difference. I notice this with Britney Spears and Taylor Swift a ton; they’re awkward and weird when they face the camera on their own but under proper direction, they are simply magic. Or Robert Pattinson in Twillight versus everything else he is in!

I don’t really know film-making so I don’t know what goes on and what needs to go down. But of the little I have managed to learn to notice on my own, the end visuals really is honestly the least of it all. Authenticity of script in terms of both story-line and dialogue, easter eggs, costumes, expressions of actors, audio and (my gawd) the background audio of it all, the soundtrack – I mean, think My Heart Will Go On and Titanic! – the minor characters, location scouting, angles of camera… 

Everything is quite interesting if it is done right. I’m not even interested in film-making but when even I can figure out how impressive these things are, I wonder what else gets done and what needs to get done. It should be very interesting. Maybe I should talk to Tenzin one of these days and get her opinion on it all. Now there’s a mental note for me.

In any case, I passed the exam, so all’s well that ends well, I guess.

NB: I am watching Squid Game 2 at the moment so it's too soon to comment and Spoilers still apply I guess but they used Con Te Partiro in ep 1! 'What's Operatic Pop doing in Squid Game?' I thought. But as it turned out, it made sense. It worked! How?! Ugh. Brilliant filmmaking.