'Cause Pigs can Fly

I was at an event recently where they spent a whole lot of time speaking about the evil LGBT+ brainwashing kids are apparently subjected to these days. The hate and misinformation they kept spewing made me leave the event midway. Since that event, I've had a couple of conversations on this topic. It's interesting, you know, because we point out that movies and books have a lot of LGBT+ content now. That we are surrounded by it. Choking on it. You can't go anywhere without having to 'deal with' something or the other that is queer. But here's what people forget or seem to not realise. We are also surrounded by a lot of straight content. And not just straight content but a very specific heterosexuality. Since I was in my teens, I've known that I don't want to get married or have kids. A lot of people think that these are things you come to accept as you get older and realise that you have no real prospects, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, yo...

One of the last dishes my grandmother made me before she died were panipol pancakes. I called her from office craving it and that evening, came home to a plate of delicious panipol pancakes. Love is about giving, right? But the asking that certain loves allow you to do? We rarely talk about it. I'm not someone who finds it easy to ask for help, for favours, for things. But Athamma wasn't someone I felt any hesitation with. I wanted panipol pancakes, so I asked for it, and I got it. Sometimes, it is that simple. Since her death, I've started making pol toffee for Avurudu. She always made them; light pink, melt-in-your-mouth pol toffee. A touch of rose essence, fresh coconut, over an hour of stirring. As kids, when she made toffee, we would gather in the kitchen, pestering her with 'is it ready yet?' questions. If we kept bothering her, she told us, the gonibilla would eat all the toffee. This was enough to keep us away from the kitchen. None of us wanted to take a ri...

Despite it being past my usual bedtime, I don't want to turn my laptop off and go to bed. I've been so tired lately that I could do with all the sleep I could get. And yet, here I am. Why? Because I feel this weird need to write something. But everything I've started writing about has felt so personal... too personal to put out there, even though I don't really share on social media a lot of my more personal writing anymore. But why not? When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I had this blog on a website called Kiwibox. It wasn't shared across social media as such, but the site itself had this community that would read each other's writing and share our thoughts with each other. Back then, I wrote about everything that crossed my mind. The good, the bad, the sad, the embarrassing, it was documented for the world to read. And I felt comfortable doing that, even when people I knew personally read it. But over the years, something changed. A friend recently con...