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Then she gave no fucks. Not even one. And she lived happily ever after.

The end.

Today

Your Plants Need Fresh Air.

@cityofwomen did an interesting questionnaire on their Instagram account about Unsolicited Advice, something all of us have been at the receiving end of. The title advice of this post was the last one I remember receiving: "Your plants need fresh air". This by a house guest who walked into my studio; she was going through a bad phase in her life and had tearfully asked me to have her over for two nights. During her stay I got quite a lot of unsolicited advice from her but this particular one was memorable for its absurdity, uttered as it was in my leafy studio with windows left wide open during the day. When I recall this moment I also associate it with the whiff of something burning.

 Unsolicited advice is almost always the by product of Envy and the desire for control. When I read the answers to @cityofwomen question about unsolicited advice, most of the advice was to "get married" or "have a child" or "have another child". What makes its presence strongly felt  in such advice is a staggering lack of imagination over the decades, not to mention the stagnation of thinking i.e. The sole purpose of a woman's existence is to be a breeder and caretaker.

Unsolicited advice carries with it an undertone of disapproval, thereby diminishing from a position of implied superiority - I have the right to tell you what I think you ought to do because I know more than you. It almost always leaves a stain of humiliation and the advice can be given precisely in order to do that - I envy you, I am uncomfortable with some aspect of you (your body, your freedom, your success) therefore let me try and control you by bringing you down a notch or two by telling you what is best for you, or as in the case of my former friend, let me shit all over your house, your life and your gesture of friendship, thereby dousing my own discomfort at my insecurity.

I have to resort to that very thing I cautioned against in this post - advice giving, because I have seen it once too often among women as a kind of point scoring. The biggest irony shows itself when women who decide they are Feminists resort to doling unsolicited advice to do so. Before you clamor for equality and accuse men of "mansplaining", do consider giving your female friends  basic respect, dignity  and acceptance of their choices during your interactions with them. Be married, grow your child, but do it without crapping all over my life by giving me advice on how to grow my plants and being rude in so many other ways. You cannot undo your choices so accept it instead of getting consumed by hate and envy and the need to resort to petty one-upmanship because you resent my autonomy. As women, let's start with each other, Shut Up with the unsolicited advice.

Lockdown Life

So Much Beauty

Matera at 5.30 am, shrouded in mist, slowly revealed itself to me layer by layer. My camera became an intrusion into something sacred so I kept it aside as it was useless trying to capture what I saw anyway. Here was probably the most powerful and memorable moment I will ever experience in my life: Me alone in the world with the force of nature making its presence felt so strongly and serenely around me as a living breathing entity. This was God. 
I was thankful over and over and over again that I was alone, that I had been blessed with this privilege of being alone, and then I simply stood there in humility experiencing this phenomenon that I had been blessed in this lifetime to see.

Matera, every step of the way, every turn of the head, so much beauty.

#matera

Matera Journal

You can also watch this video on Youtube here

 #matera
#traveljournal

4 Leaves

This is the third 4 leaf Clover I've found in my lifetime. In the first two finds the fourth leaf was either shrivelled or bitten off. This third attempt I have hit a bullseye with every one of the four leaves large, robust and perfect. I am happy :-) 

And the pot itself below, the pot full of butterflies.

Bologna

I have now learnt that in any trip to Italy, a visit to Bologna is imperative and it should come last. If you put Bologna somewhere in the beginning of your itinerary, the rest of the food you eat in all other places will simply never ever compare and it can kind of dampen your trip because whatever you eat anywhere else, however good it is claimed to be, you will keep thinking, "Ah but this tasted so much better in Bologna!".

While the names of a lot of Italian food is familiar to me, I would not have had a very good idea what it really was or how it should be eaten, so I booked a rather expensive food tour with a 5 star rating and rave reviews and caught an early train from Rome to be in Bologna on time. When I landed at Bologna at 8am, I went to a café and ordered a Mortadella sandwich and a coffee, and that was my first taste of Bologna mortadella and it was so exquisite and so good that had I not enlisted for a food tour I would have eaten another.

Bologna has all the things that I love - deep, warm hues of red, pink and orange, arches and of course I needlessly say it again, the best food ever.  (I would rate the food we get in India as very good, as good as any you will get anywhere in Italy, except for Bologna which is a class apart, a small glimpse of what food in heaven must taste like if we do our good deeds to get there).

The food tour was an excellent one where I got a taste of everything I needed to taste including perfect al dente Spaghetti, different cheeses with balsamic vinegar, a slice of horse meat, wines and the best of all, Gelato at a place called Santo Stefano where I died and went to heaven and would have happily stayed there. No other Gelato will equal what I ate at that place.

After the food tour I wandered through the arched alleys, basking in the warm hues and then stopping for more coffee and desserts, each one a small masterpiece. How lucky are people who are born and live in Bologna and who have their lives revolving around the food there. It was with some reluctance that I caught my train back to Rome all the while fervently promising myself that I would return to Bologna once more.

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#bologna #italy

The Roman Neighbourhood

These are some of the stately buildings in the neighbourhood where I stayed in Rome. It gave me my happiest memories to wander around here alone staring at these homes and then stopping to have an Americano at the corner café and anonymously watching the rest of the world go by through the window. It was relaxing and lovely.

In the fullness of time I will go to Rome again, I will stay at Trastevere and make better memories than the last.
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Postscript November 2023: Redoing Rome
#rome, #trastevere