Harper Gets Fannish

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

Blood Pheasant (Ithaginis cruentus), males, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes, Laojun Mountain, Lijiang, China

they met at some sort of fundraiser or event and she strikes up a conversation with him, and at the end of the night she oh so subtly asks if he wants to grab dinner (food at tthe event sucked) to finish their conversation about the technical differences between mens and womens professional hockey, an offer shane takes very literally because he's very invested now and actually enjoying this conversation, and at the time has very firmly drawn the line in his head that there is absolutely nothing possibly romantic about hockey.

when her teammates ask her how the night went the victorie player is like "he was really nice, listened intently to everything i had to say, laughed at my jokes, paid for dinner, didn't tell me about how much more difficult mens hockey is. he treated me like the best conversation partner he's had in a while. he's gay. he just doesn't know it yet."

it becomes a thing that anytime the montreal mens and womens teams are at an event together, all the women love talking to shane, and his teammates (who don't know about the not-date because he's never mentioned it) tease him about how he's such a ladies man and he should ask one of them out, they'd definitely say yes. meanwhile the victories all like him because he's actively not hitting on them or talking over them and he really just wants to talk about hockey.

like they're so used to every conversation with an nhl player ending his him disrespecting the pwhl in some way and acting like they should be impressed he's a professional athlete (like they aren't professional athletes too!!) meanwhile shane starts conversations with "so i watched the documentary you recommended on the first womens olympic hockey team and-"

and then there’s shane. our socially awkward baby dealing with the weight of being the "future" for every asian kid who dreams of pro hockey. he has to be the perfect, polite golden boy to be respected, while ilya is pigeonholed as the "partying bad boy." they’re both being used as tropes while they’re just two isolated kids trying to survive the pressure of living up to the world's expectations

so ilya is sitting there drowning, masking his panic with faux-bravado, and then the STUTTER.

the normally chirping asshole phenom stutters, and in two seconds flat, shane helps. BUT THE FACT THAT SHANE ASKS FIRST?? he doesn't steamroll ilya; he looks at him and asks if it’s okay to speak for him. it’s the first time someone has offered ilya a hand instead of a leash. i am physically SOFT.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

This review of a documentary about her and the other prolific session players of the 60s music scene gets the distortions across quite well - lots of session players, industry standard practices leaving them all off the record labels, mom in classic clothes or not. The stuff about no one knowing she worked on these hits runs into the fact that she wrote about it herself. The music historians digging out contract numbers did happen - because there was an extensive and very public controversy between Kaye and fans of a different session player, the late James Jamerson, over who had contributed to which records.

The "$55 per session for ten thousand sessions" thing is the most obviously false bit of the post - you think her fee stayed the same between 1957 and 1973? I think it's probably taken from a standard AFM union rate for Motown sessions at some point in the period. But I'll note as a baseline that $55 a session for ten thousand sessions is $550,000. In early 1960s money that's roughly six million dollars today. Not huge bucks for a long career, but it roughly lines up with her saying in the documentary that at her peak she was earning more than the president.

but he's joining the MLH and she's going to college in Ottawa, so they end up breaking up after all and they're both devastated because that's their best friend and it's weird now. I don't think they talk much or even at all for Shane's rookie year, and this really sucks for him because he's having these new experiences with hockey and sex and the one person he would have talked to is Jessica, who he should not want to still be friends with because no girl wants her boyfriend to still talk to his ex girlfriend, and eventually he'll get a new girlfriend, someday.

then the Metros get booted out of the playoffs, the whole rooftop confrontation at the awards in vegas, and then the summer passes, and he's just got back to Montreal from the cottage when he gets a knock on the door, and there is Jessica, holding the strap to a duffel bag with tears in her eyes saying she has no where else to go, her parents kicked her out. she's gay, Shane. they hate that she's gay more than they love her. he thinks about telling her he's been with boys too, but it's really just Rozanov and that's not going anywhere, so he hugs her and chickens out on telling her they're more alike than they thought, because he's not gay.

she's a full time art student on scholarship and doesn't have a job, of course he lets her stay with him for as long as she needs, and they fall back into their best friendship easily. and when she does get a job she transfers colleges to the university in Montreal, and she starts making noises about finding her own place, but Shane realizes he didn't like living alone. so, they just keep being roommates.

his parents and teammates are so happy for him getting a girlfriend, and he can't find a way to tell them it's not like that without explaining why. so he doesn't. but they keep trying to get Jessica to team events, and Jackie wants her in the WAGs chat, and eventually Shane invites her to dinner with them and says look, please do me a solid and pretend to be my girlfriend. and of course she's like Shane just get a girlfriend why do I have to pretend. and, well, there's really no way out but to explain that he doesn't want one, and he thinks he's gay? cue a panic attack because holy shit Jessica he can't be gay.

ThreeLeaf ☘️

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

Mother of pearl decorated ewer, Gujarat, India, circa 1570-1620