The Feels This Week: Culture Milestones For Mental Health
It’s exactly a month since I hit publish on the last ‘The Feels This Week’ post so I wonder if I should call this The Feels This Month. But oh, what an unhopeful name to assume that I’ll only have a handful of these sought out feels in a month. Like the last post, this one is also a rare moment of spontaeneity I allow myself. No editing, no re-reading, no polishing, SEO etc. Here goes what’s been giving me the delicious thrills of emotion in the past week.
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You know when a line just pops into your head out of nowhere? Today that line was
I yaman EEENDYUNN. From the Bombay city.
I was pretty sure it was sung by the guy who did Chok There, a song that had us xennial kids thrilled to see a desi guy on the phoren channel of MTV. I couldn’t remember his name but what is the internet for other than to answer, “What’s this thing I’m thinking of, with that guy whose name I can’t remember, you know the one I mean”.
Turns out, he didn’t sing it. It was a duo called Noble Savages and as soon as I spotted the woman’s face in the thumbnail, I knew I had contact. The song took me in two simultaneous directions, which is why it goes on this list.
One, a nostalgia fall of course. Not so much the song itself but how I thought at the time. I thought she was too masculine, deliberately aggressive. Look at past me, internalising so much judgement and pointless gendering. The second, happier, the future but the future of this song which zapped me back to my present.
Sitting right here in 2025, realising that she’s wearing the exact same outfit that I have on while listening to the song. Random thin teeshirt, oversized shirt folded at the sleeves flapping about and super loose trousers.
I’m very cool now. And it reminds me of a much younger friend who remarked,
“You keep saying you were not a cool kid when you were in college. But I’ve seen your photographs. What you were wearing is the height of fashion now.”
Ah well, the nice thing about being ahead of the times is you get to grow more comfortably smug with age.
I had a vague memory of the song’s accent really grating on me back then. Oddly it doesn’t disturb me as much now. Not to say that ‘NRI accents’ don’t set my teeth on edge. I should do a post about this but there are layers of code-switching and confusion I smell in the uneven emphases and pronunciations. This song isn’t quite as much. Maybe the code-switching has gotten harder in defiance or fear?
It gave me some peace in the friendship I’ve just ended with an NRI friend whose recent trip to India was a vomitorium of dissatisfaction, money-flashing and racist insults about Indians. There is deep inner conflict there, unresolved shame and a desperate loss of identity. And with that, I zoom back to what she’s singing. People have no love, people have no shame, people have no culture, only need a name. I yaman EEENDYUNN. All of us, girl, all of us.
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I found revival in the Kala Ghoda Art Festival this year. It resulted in a post so big, I sliced it up into two, one of which is already up on the blog. It’s still bringing me thrills, chills and inspiration. And I went on a book buying spree, the way I once did, swimming through blurbs on impulse, being a social butterfly among book covers and having intense fleeting emotional reactions to authors and their conversations.
Kalpana Swaminathan felt like she was created to hook this exact me. She actually turned in her seat and interrupted something I was saying about the previous event. She wasn’t telling me to shush or showing off an intelligent point of view. She was adding to the conversation, making it richer. Twenty minutes later, my companion in a hushed voice said,
“You know that lady who spoke to you? She’s one of the panellists!”
Now imagine that. I caught a fleeting glimpse of her teeshirt as she took her seat. And it said, ‘Irony: The opposite of Wrinkly’. I wondered if she realised how funny that was considering she was the oldest person on stage, iron curls et al. How presumptously ageist of me. She blew the entire library away with her wit.
Still cynical, I wasn’t expecting quite as much from her book. She had after all been described as ‘the Indian Agatha Christie’. I’d like to meet the person who coined that term and pull their nose. It’s quite ridiculous. Lalli, her female detective character and (I like to think) the page version of her is so much bigger, better than that. I’m savouring this book as I am this feeling of absolute awe-filled admiration I have. Do you know how long it has been since I experienced that on a page? And even longer in person!
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Narcissistically, my favorite creative pieces are ones that make me want to create too. And here’s what I did while the panel drew us into their journeys in the ‘Murder, She Wrote’ discussion at David Sassoon Library on 1 Feb, 2025. I’ve been making a diffident return to this first of all my creative pursuits. I was an intrepid drawer as a kid, all books covered in sketches everywhere. I got away with it as long as my marks kept the adults satisfied. With more senior classes, came more ‘advanced’ things like paints in Art class as well as a diminishing of the importance of this subject. Paint & colours had so many more rules all of them ending with,
“Ramya, you have no patience. Look what a mess you made. Why didn’t you wait for the first colour to dry? Why did you have to splash beyond the lines? Why so many colours? Look at your face and clothes!”
📸: LizzyBeth
In the later years, painting would become my recourse in the throes of abusive relationships. It will always be that adult, stabilising activity for me. But the pencil? That’s an old childhood friend from the days when smudges on skin and paper and everywhere else didn’t matter and everything was play, all of it was right now. I’ve been trying to recapture that absolute ease of flight (which is how it feels in my mind when my hand is racing over paper) but I’ve been drawing more like a painter – considered, diffident strokes, much erasure and pondering.
But probably exhilerated by the people on stage, my mind took a leap into the wild unknown. And this happened.
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I’ve written about the Khandaan podcast before. Today was a return of sorts since having exhausted the 90s cinema episodes, I thought there would be nothing else there for me. Their latest episode is part of a series examining 80s Bollywood moments. Karz, what a great film to kick off a better idea!
They touched on something I had forgotten – the vanity and age anxiety of Kamini (Simi Garewal). The movie handled the psychosexual dynamics of the older Kamini and the younger Monty’s romance with unusual subtlety. The Khandaan trio remarked that her storyline involves her need to feel desirable as she ages and how she is punished for this.
It made me wonder how much of this was entwined in the already murkey journey of my biggest relationship. It did after all begin, when he called me a Cougar. That doesn’t hurt me now. If anything, it eases the clouds of confusion I still carry about why a lover would also carry such hatred. Well, these are feels too.
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I got lazy and cheated a bit now. I asked ChatGPT to look through my blog and find thematically related posts. And it came up with this gem of an earlier magical Kala Ghoda Art Festival experience in the same location. The post even mentions other things that would go on to feature heavily in my emotional life (and some in this post!) including younger men.
I hope you find magic in your hard-earned rewards and resolution in the painful pinpricks. February is as yet young. And as my post says,
Now I’m feminist. Now I’m chick-lit. Now I’m just confused! At least I’m almost normal.