#22// polar adventures and K-dramas

towards a better year

Dear Reader,
How are you? I have put up Christmas decorations (finally!), so the house does look a bit more cheerful though the heart is deep in gloom (yikes! I blame such filmy, dramatic dialogues on an overdose of Korean dramas). Talking about decorations, one of the best parts of my day is to make a cup of tea and cozy up with the Christmas lights lighting up a slightly dark room and watch something (yes, it is often a K-drama) in the evening. I don’t think it is cold in my part of the world—incredibly hot to be honest—but the nights are lovely and cool and just the right kind to spend deep in thoughts. I have also been having a string of failed experiments, like rocky rava laddoo that my uncle described as ‘rice’, and today morning’s kozhukatta which looked and tasted alright, but there’s definitely lots of roooooom for improvement. These things look so easy when others make them. Enough of me, here are some wonderful things for you.
 

Read

This month I indulged in Alex Bell’s The Polar Bear Explorer’s Club, a perfect book for cosy, winter nights. Stella is an explorer but apparently girls can’t be explorers according to the club rules. (One of the rules of the club being all members should groom their moustache and beard, btw; so we really needn't take these rules that seriously). Well, she manages to get her way into the expedition. And then tumbles onto a polar adventure through the Icelands with her three friends—Shay, the Captain’s son and a Wolf Whisperer, Beanie, a darling boy who states facts at the most inappropriate places, and Ethan, a magician and sea explorer who seems to be a selfish bully but has scars of his own. I really enjoyed the whole adventure; there’s always something to catch you by surprise, be it frosties who invite you to tea and cake only to feast on your fingers at night, carnivorous cabbages or outlaw hideouts that can be arrived at via a rainbow (which feels like fizzy sherbet btw). There’s magic, unicorns, magicked polar beans, snow globe penguins and all the wonderful things that’ll transport you into a cold, frosty, fun adventure. I will be following the other books in the series, probably on audio on Scribd because I am running out of physical space. I loved the stellar group of friends and I can’t wait to see what more adventures they hurl themselves into.

Watch

Nothing gets better for a holiday watch than a lovely K-drama. I’ve got you covered with all the best Korean dramas of 2020. Craving for a romance between star crossed lovers or a man-for-hire who might steal your heart or a penpal situation gone wrong in matters of heart or a dash of dark fairytales—this list is gonna fulfill all your needs.
 
 

What’s new?

I wrote a book list for Vogue India featuring the best books to read according to your mood of 2020. There’s a literary mystery that grows deeper to the core, loud women, and wedding plans, whether you miss travelling or feel fed up with pandemic cooking.

Bake

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it out yet but this recipe for carrot halwa cake (My Annoying Opinions) looks too good to miss.

 

Amazing Links

- Personal essay : The Ghost on the Zoom Call (Judy Bolton-Fasman, Catapult)
“Including my mother, we inhabit seven squares. At the beginning of each Zoom session, my mother asks who we are.”

 - Why we sigh (Shayla Love, Vice)
"There’s a reason why you’re sighing the way you’re sighing."
- The eco-yogi slumlords of Brooklyn (Bridget Read, The Cut)
 - Are we morally obligated to meditate (Sigal Samuel, The Vox)
 
 - The rich kids who want to tear down capitalism (Zöe Beery, The NYT)
“Because her adoptive family’s wealth originated in land ownership and slavery, she donates to anti-racist groups and will soon begin making low-interest loans to Black-owned businesses. “The money I’m living on was made from exploiting people that look like me, so I see my giving as reparations,” she (adopted from India by a white family) said.”


Food:
- A long read on the history of custard powder (Sharanya Deepak, Fifty two)
From an English chemist to YouTube cooks via refugees from Rawalpindi, how custard changed India’s sweet tooth

- Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An Ode to Anime’s Best Cooking Scenes (Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Serious Eats)
"The medium takes the most attractive and appetizing aspects of food and enhances them: Every soft pudding has an irresistible luster, and each heaping bowl of noodles is wreathed in just the right amount of steam."


Social media & tech:
- Lots of food for thought in 'A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive'; about Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine (Max Read, Book Forum)
"The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation."
 
- We need to start holding publishing houses to account for how they market ‘feminist’ influencers—Slumflower vs Florence Given (Moya Lothian McLean, gal-dem)
 “Trying to be the perfect activist, trying to have the perfect caption, the perfect comeback, the perfect analysis on this situation that hasn’t even happened 24 hours ago. It’s a lot.
Imagine being a 20-something who suddenly commands a massive audience that, every day, tells you how amazing you are, how innovative, how you’ve changed their lives. Until one day you wake up and suddenly you’re persona non grata for some half-baked take you tweeted out on the toilet. What does that do to a person’s individual growth?"
 
- Like our society, Instagram is biased against women of color (Salma El-Wardany, Refinery 29)
- This long personal essay about Instagram. (Dayna Tortorici, n+1 mag)
“Everything on Instagram was like that. Once you found out about it, it was just another thing.”

Time & pandemic:
This beautiful essay about the pandemic unmooring us from time — ‘Wasn’t it winter just yesterday?’ (Katherine May, The New York Times)
"Many winters have come all at once. But within these winters, there is the seed of something necessary. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. As we grow older, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. Each time we endure the cycle, we learn from the previous round, and we do a few things better. This is how wisdom is made."

For books — new, classics, translations, indie press titles — and movies,
Sign up for TWO months of FREE Scribd using my Invite Link. 

This might be the last newsletter of the year. Hence the long list of links for you to read and bookmark. You might notice a link or two from an older edition of the newsletter too.

I wish you all the joy, happiness and peace that the world can offer. Also fingers crossed this is the last of the terrible years that we see in our lives. Hope 2021 brings with it happiness and wonderful memories. I cannot wait to go outside without fear!
 
PS: I will be asking on Twitter and Insta about personal book recommendations, if you are into gifting books to others (or to yourself). In case you feel too shy to reply on either, feel free to send me an email over the next week writing about what kind of book you are looking for (My hands are tied for non fic and poetry), and I’ll try my best to match you with a great read.

Also, THANK YOU for the support you've given for the newsletter. I am forever grateful :)
 
See you next year,
Resh x


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