Weeknotes - 2025-W15
Cover image for 2025-W15
I think the best part of this week for me, was reading Desperately seeking Shah Rukh. The book is outstanding in the way it uses a Bollywood icon as cover, to talk about the deep rooted problems with women empowerment in India. Every chapter had a TIL moment. I’m almost done with the book, but I think this is one that I will keep going back to, whenever folks tell me that we’re living in a “more equal society” or that “women are much better off now (emphasis on the much)” or that “the pay gap is not real”. To all those folks, I feel like personally buying one copy of this book just to shove it in their face asking them to educate themselves. The point is very clear. We live in a tremendously unequal society. While I am glad that many men around me see this, and have begun the journey to do and be better, there is no denying the fact that this is going to take many generations to be different enough to say that the status quo has shifted.
As I write this, I can practically hear my GCPP professors over my shoulder saying “We must define these in terms of better & worse and not good & bad”. Yes, that is true. We are better, but how many more instances of better do we need to move the needle far enough to say that we are closer to good?
I found this sentence from the book to sadly and beautifully sum up what I was feeling:
“Let me be clear — there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None. Within each class and caste bracket, women fall far behind men. All the data on gender in India, despite progress since Independence, confirms that our country is profoundly unequal and that the gap between male and female achievement and access to resources continues to grow”
I’m just so grateful to Prasanna that she picked this up, and told me to, too. What a masterpiece. Take a bow, Shrayana 🙇🏾
In other great stuff that happened this week, Prasanna finished up her first commission since her father passed away. I have nothing to say except that I had such a mix of feelings when I saw the end result. It has taken her a LOT of work to get here. There have been many workshops and one-on-one sessions where the participant has told Prasanna that her teaching has helped them wade through a very difficult time in their lives. Its so surreal to see that now, her art has played a pivotal role in helping her heal too.
The fact that the work was a nameplate done for dear friends, made the experience all the more beautiful. So go and show your support to this wonderful woman, share her story perhaps.
Wounded as she may be, she has taken that pain and channelled it into making great art. She’s a fucking beast.
We were introduced to this really nice place called House of Idlies by a friend and it was such a great meal. Its just the simple TN stuff, but just well executed and with a lot of variations. Definitely going back here to try more of their stuff.
I’ve had a very hard time with bookmarking since I got out of Pinboard and I have just been saving everything to telegram saved messages. But that’s not searchable in ways I want and I cannot collaborate with friends when we are working together on something.
This week I tried out Raindrop after finding it through Sathya’s Wot I Read section on his blog. And it looks really good - great integration on the phone to quickly bookmark and great collaboration features as well. I think I’m going to stick to this for a while. Let’s see how it goes.
Tomorrow is the Tamil Puthandu and it was a mandatory “parents’ day” where we visited Prasanna’s folks to celebrate and have great food. While uncle and Prasanna caught up with each other and had dis/agreements with the TV running in the background, aunty and I would be in the kitchen and I’d be helping her make her amazing vades. Then we’d all sit down for lunch and uncle and I would dine on banana leaves where he’d meticulously serve sugar and keep a cut banana on the top left before he’d clap his hands signalling that the floor was open, for us to begin our yearly thulp.
So much has changed in just one year. Sometimes it all feels so unfair. I miss him.