Ok So Why Am I Such A Hopeless Romantic But At The Same Time, When Something Vaguely Possibly Romantic

“You will be the spell breaker You will be the peacemaker. Go to the land where no one treads And find the path that never ends Keep your wits, and if you’re stern Your people’s freedom you will earn.

You will find what is protected In the harsh lands neglected The item that you seek will -“

The seer collapses forward onto their table, stone dead, their prophecy unfinished. What will bring peace to your people? You don’t know. But at least you know where to start looking.

all i do is yearn, read books, chug coffee, talk shit, cry and have panic attacks

Poetic Quotes #1

'Cause I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage.

Enemies to lovers romance is the journey from sweetheart (derogatory) to sweetheart (affectionate)

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

can’t stop thinking about percy’s claiming scene now let me hold on a second.

we have this child, who has barely just escaped death by a hellhound, seemingly being healed by water. the girl who kinda-sort-of-hates-him knows full well what is happening. his wounds heal. she mutters about how she didn’t want this to happen. this could only mean one thing. poseidon, they whisper. and sure enough, just above his head, is a holographic figure of a trident.

ngl i have chiron’s line memorized by now lol.

“earthshaker, stormbringer, father of horses. hail perseus jackson, son of the sea god.”

and it’s just beautiful imagery, because everyone bows to him. everyone, as in, even the ares kids who had just tried to kill him. and it hits different if you think about how technically, percy jackson is a sea prince. it hits different when you realize that in canon, no other demigod got this treatment. maybe it was because few children of poseidon existed in comparison to zeus, or that poseidon is seen as a more elemental and primordial god, therefore is shown more respect. it hits different when you realize that percy becomes a figure of respect and dignity.

whatever the case, this scene FUCKS ME UP. annabeth bows down, chiron bows down, luke bows down, clarisse bows down…and meanwhile, the kid in question is scared out of his goddamn mind. he just thinks: why are they treating me this way? i don’t want this power. i don’t want this attention. i don’t want respect. because, here’s the thing—he’s not used to it.

but from then on…percy will be treated this way, like royalty, bc technically he is. his father is the ruler of the seas, and the ocean has always been feared, has always been respected and admired. and not only that, but he grows into that power. it’s so interesting to see this little boy who was just told, in the most dramatic way possible, who his father is—and then see a dramatic change in his character during botl when he wants more power as he cleans the horse stables in texas and realizes that the sea was inside of him all this time. that he is unrestrained. it’s so interesting to go from a little boy who wants nothing to do with his dad and his powers to a 16 year-old who sinks his sword into the williamsburg bridge and causes it to split in half. like his father did in athens. he commands armies, becomes his father’s son as he screams out when he realizes that michael yew is nowhere to be found, and so, with that scream, he makes the ground shake. he unleashes that power with titans, with gods, with monsters. and he cannot be stopped from then on, when he realizes that it’s inside him, that he has no choice but to want it. even if it scares him, at first.

so that claiming scene creates, in my mind, this domino effect on percy and his link to the ocean. to his father.

earthshaker, stormbringer…it all comes full circle. and the next time a group of demigods bow down to him, i can assure you that he’ll accept it, grimly. because what choice does he have? he is poseidon’s mortal son, and still he makes the ground shake and the seas rise to his command. he is the camp leader—but each day that his powers grow, everyone questions if he’s truly half human in the first place, or if he maybe belongs to the sea, as his father’s lieutenant like zeus had suggested in the first place.

and it all👏starts👏with👏that👏claiming👏scene

“In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

no more cold and calculating i want warm and calculating. i want characters who use deductive reasoning to figure out whether their friend would like a wool or cotton quilt based off of their lifestyle, career, hobbies, and habits. i want "your nails are often chipped because you work for a law firm as a typist for this company which notoriously underbudgets their IT department, so ive bought you a keyboard cover that will not only prevent manicure damage but is also sensory friendly because I know you dislike certain clicking noises". i want characters who figure out their friends entire schedules and social battery levels just by examining who only use that info to know when the best time is to hang out with them. i want characters who create elaborate, supervillain level schemes just to get their hands on some collectible they know their best friend wants. most of all i want characters who do not use intelligence and reasoning skills as a reason to be cruel but as a means to be kind

“Say what you want, but I’m proud of how badly I managed to screw up.”

Write a love story between a very optimistic, happy-go-lucky funeral director and a depressed, negative wedding planner