capture-create

what am I even doing drawing temples, writing strategy language for government, supposed economic development, tiger safari, bamboo training centres - trivial -

tough conditions , tough women , tough relationships

Desi alice in wonderland

A story of a family blown around a country and then across the world by the forces of history, colonial powers and politics. It is intense, it really puts the country of Vietnam in perspective.

I can’t imagine how from that war torn state, it turned to the aesthetic-vlog Vietnam of today..

This is beautiful and so inspiring

Can’t remember the first time I read a full physical novel in one day. It goes from a small village in Kerala to Mumbai to Bihar to Vietnam to Hong Kong to Germany to China to Paris to Morocco and around and back and around.

It made me ponder.

Such a mobile family, the one I would dream of having - they have a huge riverside house to go back to - whatever changes, it’s there

My family and families around me probably chose stability since it was snatched from us.

Something about the nomadic tribe tag we have, upon reading the restlessness of this family, realised I couldn’t relate to it. Is it just an outdated tag? ( But also, what am I thinking about? Every cousin is out there in different continents. I am the one at home. Delhi nana family seems like the closest to these people - probably equally fucked up the kids turned out there didn't they... don't judge, don't judge)

Read/heard a set of novels - Asian females grappling with life and thoughts in the West - so relatable in some ways and not at all in others.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou is an academic coming to senses about the ridiculous racism around her. Funny and understandable, but also made me worry for the naivety of the character.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is a gossipy annoying white lady but you can tell it's the Asian origin author's frustrations written out.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a couple of migrants designing a life from scratch in a Western city, coming up with rituals and trying to forge community having left their original ones behind. I enjoyed it, captures the desperation of being in early 30s I see around me, to establish new roots and permanencies in a flux-full life.

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, by contrast, is going to the west alone and figuring out where you've come from. Relatable int hat sense, in the ways the main character felt isolated yet exoticized (in some ways, not all.)

Heard this over many days and nights on the BorrowBox app. The lost glory of Asia but the current residual richness of Europe that allows for nice public libraries.

Book was Enjoyable. Old English man reading in British accent was soothing until he would try to do an accent of the Asians and be annoying!

I didn’t start the book expecting to read about the birth of religions in the Middle East but it was good. Fascinating stuff, I knew vaguely about before but more colours filled in and more conceptual structures drawn around it now.

I wish all the places mentioned were as easy to visit; and peaceful like the European ones mentioned are. They won’t be that curated either. I like wondering what Uzbekistan and Baghdad and Mongolia would be like if the winds never changed direction and the bustling metropolises of the world were still somewhere here. Is that where people from India would travel for their masters?

I stumbled upon the audiobook on Borrow Box. I spent the last week listening to a Rushdie novel that trudged on and on, but this I heard in a day! Very enjoyable.

Noo is very cool and I aspire to be like her. Have an idea for a project, move to an unknown place for 3 months, and write a book so cool - it's informative and illustrative, I have a real picture of these streets and places in my head, so honest, about what she sees and emotions while she does her interviews and about how these lonely creepy African men treat her. Her intrigue, amusement and discomfort comes across in the writing. The Guangzhou city's chaotic yet highly effective wholesale markets made me think of Chandni chowk and Nehru place and agglomerations in India. I imagine them at an exponential scale. I wonder how I'd be treated if I walk around those streets and shops. I liked her reading the audiobook herself too, with the adaptive accents and notes. I hate clubs, but when she described the non-white cosmopolitan nature of one in Wuhan, I felt like I want to be there to see that. It reminded me of spending that half day in Istanbul with mum, thinking about the sheet variety of brown people of the world - something we never actually think about. The book also reminded me that I want to read the book -Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy - The stuff I came across during my masters or around that time, thoroughly intriguing but I never got back to. I will also read/listen to the history of Asia I think, I know nothing beyond India and Pakistan.

What a lovely coincidence too, when I had 20-30 mins left of the book a post-crossing card arrived for me from a man Guangzhou! What a great card too - a home-map of China - with that bear in the bathtub and that panda on his study table, like I was when it came.