#40: The End is always the Beginning

life updates, happy stuff, and all the recommendations!

Dear reader,

It’s been a crazy couple of months. Summer camps, workshops, wellness routines, socialising, mapping out end-of-year goals - managing your life can feel like taming a hurricane sometimes. As September breathes her way into our lives, I feel relaxed - like the world is coming into its natural order again. My studio will fill up with adult students, the weather will turn from sweltering to humid to cool, and before I know it, the year will be over (when I say I think into the future, I really really mean it).

Given that propensity of mine, it’s always a source of comfort to find people who take it upon themselves to hold space for relaxation. Sometimes that’s through yoga, other times just with friends who have a giant heart, good wine and a soft couch. That’s all you need on days when it feels like the world wants to watch you drown, right?

August has been a tough month for India and its women - within the country and diaspora. Amid the awful criminal cases we’ve been seeing in the news, and the ongoing Hema Report fiasco, it’s hard to look ahead with brightness when monsters walk among us without fear or consequence. Fortunately or unfortunately, women persist. We keep going, we keep fighting, we keep calling things out, despite everything.

I keep coming back to joy - as activism, as priority, and as radical resistance. When you live with a stress-based disease like I do, joy can often be the difference between a night of corticosteroids and a good night’s sleep. And that difference has its own ripple effect - so protecting my own sheer delight is serious stuff. Posting covers on YouTube, trying out makeup tutorials, catching up with college friends and making silly jokes are way more essential than you’d think! In fact, sometimes they help literally make the world a better place: like Coldplay, who are powering their tour with kinetic dancefloors AKA literally running the show off of their fans’ joy. It powers not just the stage and music, but the entire crew too. How cool is that?

Excellent storytelling is another way of escape - and I’ve been strictly keeping time aside to let myself run free in other worlds. Discipline equals freedom, right? So here are my recs for you:

Through the Woods by Emily Correll is a wonderful little selection of horror stories to warm you up for the upcoming spooky season, while We Are Lady Parts has been an absolute pleasure to watch on TV. Centered around an all-female Muslim punk band in the UK, it caught a lot of flak for a Malala Yousufzai themed song (where Malala herself featured) - but like a famous Miss Lauper once said, girls just wanna have fun. I find the characters relatable, complex and fun - which is not a combination you find often with PoC storylines.

Another watch of note is Polite Society, which felt like my middle school brain came alive and turned into a film - so 5 stars for oddly specific representation there! Both Polite Society and We Are Lady Parts were created by Nida Manzoor - so there’s a name to look out for.

An extra blast from the past for kids who grew up on E-Junior in the UAE like I did: King Arthur’s Disasters is a show that

1. was hilarious to me as a seven year old

2. simultaneously got me very familiar with tales of Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, and of course, King Arthur without any intense literature.

Episodes are up on YouTube, of all places, and they’ve been a great nostalgic watch too.

For a more mellow (and mature) evening, say one with a soft couch, warm lighting and good wine - there’s this live performance by Australian I-genuinely-don’t-know-what-genre-this-is band Glass Beams. And for days when you want to face all the wounds, a recent watch has been The Take’s video on Eldest Daughter Syndrome - featuring the one and only Kate Sharma. (Kanthony from Bridgerton’s Season 2 are probably the only fictional couple who will ever make it to my vision board, just sayin’.)

Sending you not-so-naive optimism and a bit of wholehearted trust on the side,

Kaav.