poets pretend, climates change, humans don't behave
#scurf211: a dirge, a plea, a little something to be
I’ve forever been a bit undecided about referring to my partner as my husband or even my partner. The term husband feels too formal, partner feels too phony — boyfriend is the term that I feel most comfortable calling him. There’s hardly any reasons for this otherwise. So here I am, sitting at the kitchen table, shivering in my boyfriend's hoodie, toes a bit cold, the clock blinking at me a time past 230am on this Wednesday morn. And I am sleepless.
There’s a childlike excitement that sits in the pit of my stomach as I think of some new projects, some new reading, writing, other personal maps that will soon occupy me in entirety. I think of the phony iridescence of work and how it is always supposed to mean something and more often than not ends up meaning nothing. A shapeshifting, slippery morass that hardly resembles its first, foremost self.
There’s a brand new
newsletter sitting in my inbox that I’m yet to read. A couple others too. But mostly I’m keenly waiting to read ’s essay. I’ve been reading his substack since he first started publishing them. I don’t even remember the year. But his essays left a mark on me. Their sense of place, their sense of almost always being about him and his writing life in one way or the other. Going back mentally I can bookmark various of his essays and associate reading them in specific times of my life, in a very specific physical location, on a particular day as the sun shone with that particular slant. And I find that endlessly moving. Just like the many books and movies that’ve made the map of my mind, these are essays are tethered closely to how I bookended good and bad days of my life which now seems like a distant past.I sometimes reread his essays to go back to some places, even if only mentally, to be one with the version of me who first read them “back” in the poetic “then”. It is the same thing with podcasts. I’ve been re-listening to episodes of Mubi’s podcast and also of course 99% Invisible’s to gain back the sense of being in that place where I lived for five years, well, more than five years. Who knew a place could have a hold on you like that! But I think a pandemic, a beautiful living arrangement, an apartment full and made of love, and a partner to share all of this with — these little factors can make a difference.
There is something external and also forced to this exercise of wanting to time travel through a podcast episode or an essay. I listen back to some of my favourite Louisiana Channel interviews and try to recollect the edge of the bed in my unbearable top floor south Delhi apartment in 2020 where I first sat listening to it and how Rachel Cusk’s simple invocation of trusting hard work over talent really won me over. I try to re-read Brandon’s newsletter about walking and finding himself through the winter walks in New York City, along with some flashbacks to his childhood, and I’m immediately transported to the DDA park in my south Delhi area that had held me in its golden womb on that winter afternoon.
Places make us, cities shape us. Delhi, now that I’ve moved physically on from it, was a city full of words for me. Remarkable words, bold experiences, full of challenges. It was the city where I met someone who has come to mean a lot more to me than I ever thought of ascribing meaning to someone. Delhi is also the city living where I found that the future for most of humanity isn’t as bright no matter what the billionaires have us believe. It became the city where I found anchorage, language and purpose to the helplessness I first felt in the winter of 2017 when I was in Pune during the bad air days and a friend had texted me words of dystopia from the city that is now famous for turning radioactive during winter season.
As the years passed, it was in Delhi that I found meaning, made sense of life and buried my toes further into the sands of living. I think that’s what a modern 21st century city does to you — it fills you with a fear so immense and infernal, a terror so profound and existential that you’re jolted awake. I never thought I’d work in climate action, but here I am and still not yet. It’s been more than six years and yet I bite my lips before saying that I work in climate, because there’s so much mumbo jumbo around that kind of a thing these days. Green jobs, blue jobs, climate jobs — the tech bros, the finance wives and the billionaire brigade has shat all over the space.
When I had started off on my first and truly most beloved and magical job in the sustainability, climate space in January 2020 it had been one of the tougher choices I seemed to be making. As someone would callously remark about my career at a party many years later, this was my third career move. I had gone from being a lawyer, to a journalist to now a climate, sustainability public policy professional. No one even knew that this could be a real job. Friends had looked at me strange and weird — a promising writer with a cushy job in a biggish mainstream Indian business newspaper moving to a think tank?! I had steeled up then, wore on that infectious innocent smile and hide behind it. Well, people were just people about it then, they are people about it now.
I was nervous too, but my partner, boyfriend, husband had been by me. Over the years I’ve actually shed skin and lost all of those old friends, but here I am standing still and hard, ploughing cautiously forward in the direction of effort. The effort to make the science behind all this research more and more accessible.
This is a snippet from an insomniac head. A peek into the past, the life, the small decisions that sometimes make up big steps. My choice of career – that seems like an aphorism - how I became a climate campaigner is because I wanted more than anything to protect this beautiful world of ours against the destruction that humanity has unleashed on it through these myriad crises. All I want is a little bit of nourishment for the earth, lesser fires, lesser bad air days, lesser of everything bad. Years start with a pleasantness generally, at times they come with a glimmer of hope too. But the futuristic sounding 2025 has started off on a globally worrisome note and I hope it jolts and shakes even the most casual of naysayers into action.
With that I’ll try to sink my toes inside the blanket again, warm up the tip of the nose and try to fall asleep while reading that latest Sweater Weather essay! Its close to 330am and perhaps we could all do with a Pessoa poem 🍂
love how you capture the mutability of work in a time of crisis and how other people's work can ground us! felt like a very much read this at the right time on a too-hot summer's day in New Zealand contemplating an upcoming change from a secure journalism job to a new city, new possibilities and something else --