yeahisawthatalready

For the past many months, my obsession with wanting to write consistently, daily and well has resulted in my reading stuff* on the internet like a mad person. What I have learnt from this is: the internet is unfathomably vast. Its vastness is something you cannot really fathom at all. It is so vast, your power to fathom anything at all just falls incredibly short. When I was much younger, I was once told that anything you could possibly conceive of was already there on the internet. If you dig deep enough, you'll find little crevices or caves in which people discuss/believe in the most mindblowing of things. (The thing that has managed to blow my mind the most in the past couple of months is of course Otherkin. But, dear reader, let this not limit your imagination as to how blown your mind can be by the internet.) 

So what began as an every morning adventure to find stuff to read immediately after my newspapers spiraled horribly into an obsessive need to read everything I could possibly lay my hands on that day. I realized how much of a problem it was when four Fridays ago Longreads posted their weekly Top 5 posts, and I had read most of them already. I realized it was a problem when, I would get emails from friends about interesting things they'd read that day or week, and I would have already read it. I realized it was a problem when I was having dinner with some friends and I had read everything they were discussing. 

I realized that the problem wasn't that I had already read it, the problem was that I wasn't sure if I was actually processing anything I was reading. It had has reached a point where I'm reading stuff because I think I need to just read stuff, and not because I want to read stuff. It's almost as if I read it, bookmark it and file it away. For most of what I read, I don't even do what I used to do even two months ago: Make mental notes in the margins, follow up, write about it, wonder what happened of it. None of that at all.

Is it just the curse of the vastness of the internet that leaves me with a mountain of things to read, and not much time to read it with? So many people with such interesting things to say, so many articles and essays that are painstakingly well put together, so many things that people say anyway, so many things that I think I need to know or opinions I need to hear - How can I leave reading these to the accidents of social interactions, emails or drunken dinners? 

But at the same time, what's the point of reading it and then not remembering even seeing it the next time someone brings it up? Just for the joy of "yeah, I saw that already"?

Does anyone else have these problems?

**

*i say "stuff" because i really don't know a more appropriate word for the melange of things people read on the internet

adi parva

by Amruta Patil

My love for Amruta Patil's work is too personal for me to share. Kari spoke to me in ways that I will never speak about. In a tiny corner of my heart live boatmen, disappearing lanes and prickly heartbreaks; panels, dialogues and journeys that have defined entire relationships for me.

But Adi Parva is different from the very beginning. A much grander tale, Patil goes from telling the story of a girl in a city to retelling an epic. While it is still a deeply personal work (a painstaking labour of love), it is not personal in the story but in the telling. And this is where Amruta Patil excels. It has taken me forever to start writing about this book. Mostly because I really don't know where to begin.

How do you write about a book that is so vast in its scope and beautiful in its rendering? How do you write about the possibilities it explores, the mythologies it breaks down, the narratives it builds? How do you talk about storytelling that is about storytelling? How do you ask the questions that it asks? And what is the use of a book without pictures? 

It opens in redness: blood red, vultures and death. 

It opens: "There are somethings your forefathers didn't want you to forget. So they sent the story down through the mouths of the sutradhaar - storytellers who carry the thread. We are an unbroken lineage of storyteller nested within storyteller. When I open my mouth, you can hear the echo of storytellers past. ..."

It opens in poetry and art, and compelling narrative. 

And it effortlessly holds you to it. 

Adi Parva also arrives at a time when there is an immense interest in retelling or reimagining mythology. So many people are doing it, yet not too many of them manage Patil's depth or articulation. And hardly anybody else I have read so far (except two that come to mind immediately) has done it with as much self consciousness of the politics of the work. 

I remember reading Kamala Subramaniam's version of the Mahabharata when I was in school. It remains one of my most favorite versions of the story, but its task seemed much simpler. It told a story we all knew, and asked very few questions of it. (I say "very few" because Subramaniam's treatment of a lot of characters is quite nuanced. Karna, for example, is the real hero of her story and Duryodhana is wronged by almost everyone he loved.) Around the same time, I also read Ashok Banker's version of the Ramayana and I remember being absolutely stunned by it. Here was a man who took another story we all knew and completely changed it around. He asked questions. Wondered how the hell some of the things that happened could have possibly happened. Traced histories. Rewrote characters. Asked questions. Found loopholes. Messed with language. Turned the Ramayana into a fantasy series. He changed how I saw the telling of epics at all. 

Amruta Patil is a different kind of artist and writer. She asks questions not only of how the story is told, but also of how we see it. She asks who sees it and why. She asks how histories shape stories, and how generations reimagine them. And she does this with so much passion. 

And how. 

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Creation is leela. Amusement, play, reverie.