It was an arranged marriage but my mom did everything she could to get out of it. But my dad was quite persistent as were her parents and they ended up married and moved to Delhi where dad worked 1/

https://twitter.com/theistinthought/status/1861541129356771669

But mom just couldn't reconcile with marrying dad and she asked for a divorce. Dad demanded to know why.

Mom revealed that she had been in a relationship earlier with an activist and planned to elope with him.

But tragedy had struck. 2/

Ok I'll try. My kid is half-white half-indian and I make every effort to have her be connected to all of her heritage. My husband's heritage is people from the revolutionary War to refugees in ww2 so there should be a lot to draw from 1/

https://twitter.com/summerpard/status/1858134124348793324

But there isn't any way any of that heritage has been passed down in tangible ways to my husband.
Folks left their church, ones in a church aren't in the same tradition as their ancestors were. The Thanksgiving recipes are from 70s cookbooks. Holiday traditions are whatever 2/

I'm this guy. I was told for years that I HAD to be on meds if I wanted to lead a normal life after an ADHD diagnosis (and debilitating consequences for years).

I found another way. I'm very surprised few others have hit on it 🧵

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1837257391139664039

I had a nervous breakdown with pandemic, global remote work, new baby and a new home. Therapist was stumped, psychiatrist wanted me to be on a cocktail of meds. I didn't want to as I'd previously become s*ic*dal on meds.
Then my whole family got Covid.

Good thread, i came to similar conclusions, especially after reading Brain Energy by @ChrisPalmerMD.

Thing is though, food and other lifestyle changes are only the beginning. A very important beginning, though.

https://twitter.com/carmenleelau/status/1754746832402674130

Nearly a decade ago, I got an ADHD diagnosis. That capped a decade and a half of never feeling happy, never being able to relate to anyone else's experience of mental health, and generally struggling through basic life stuff.

Didn't want to go on meds though.

I'm reading "Drink - The Intimate Relationship Between Women And Alcohol".

I read a lot about addiction, though I don't have any susbtance issues, because it feels like it's key to understanding my own mental health and figuring out how to protect kids from this. 🧵 One big takeaway for me is: Alcoholism prevalence increases when alcohol is normalized, even considered what makes someone wealthy and classy, or a vital part of celebrations and the celebratory aesthetic.

Mm okay let's go into some detail here. Hemachandra Kanungo Das was an Anushilan Samiti member from Midnapore. He designed the Calcutta flag while protesting against the Carlyle circular which said colleges getting govt funding would be liable for protests by their students.

https://twitter.com/greatbong/status/1663119066402525185

He was undertaking revolutionary activities under the leadership of Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh. While trying to assassinate the governor of Bengal unsuccessfully, he realized guns could only take you so far. They needed bombs. So he sold his house and went to Paris.

You don't need to dress up anything about Savarkar to imply he was great. Just present facts. Unless you add flying elephants, the facts of the revolutionaries' acts are often more unbelievable than anything your imagination can come up with.

https://twitter.com/chandrachurg/status/1662832805506879493

Like he wrote a book that was banned (proscribed) even before it was released.

People in the British Parliament were debating his newspaper columns.

His escape and rearrest became international issues that impacted British-French relations.

He met Lenin and Mustafa Kemal

These folks will do literally everything to make the best kids except give employees parental leave, or take time off during pregnancy, or work less and spend time with their children.

archive.ph/IheJc So much of this is so stupid. Musk is on the spectrum and is 50+, wouldn't his kids all have a very high chance of being on the spectrum? How then is any of this going to be "genetically superior".

Oh fucking hell. The stuff you come across while reading history closely.

Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki went to Muzaffarpur to assassinate Magistrate Kingsford, who was known for cruel and unjust sentences, especially on the Jugantar revolutionaries. 1/n Khudiram was caught alive. Prafulla shot himself to avoid capture.

Instead of having Khudiram identify his body in Muzaffarpur, they decapitated Prafulla and sent his head to Calcutta to be identified.

I cannot even deal with reading about British inhumanity and cruelty.

Reading @jennettemccurdy's memoir and I'm feeling terrible at the part where she is known as a child star for crying on cue. She uses every tragic possibility to cry, until she feels disconnected and dead inside to all then sadness.

Everyone failed this poor child. Her agent says "I got another studio saying "so tell me about the girl who cries".

Imagine the coldness of the business.

I need to take so many breaks while reading this book.

Okay! I got thinking about what a Desi Forrest Gump movie should be like, and I suddenly wrote a whole movie synopsys. Let's goooooo Forrest is born in what's now Bangladesh in the 60s. Family's been reduced to just him and his mom. Jenny is the girl next door with a large family.

Forrest's school has the ballot boxes for the 1970 Pakistan elections. Some goofy thing he does leads to Mujibur Rahman winning

I'm reading Jugalbandi by @vinay_sitapati and right from the prologue, I'm finding it hard to read. The author is so extremely deracinated, it's like reading a book about India written by a Westerner.

The sensibility is tiresomely late 90s NDTV. I thought we were over that. You know recently when @SreenivasanJain "discovered" that in restaurants on highways, drivers eat for free, and was so amazed and self-congratulatory at knowing this fact about the chota-mota folk? This is that attitude, but for 550 pages.

Here's hoping the research is worth it

Okay I really wanted to like SpaceMOMs. Bought the movie on Amazon. But dude, you had a good story and interesting characters, why let them all down with such a shoddy screenplay and dialogues! The scenes and dialogues seem straight out of a stage play. At high school level. People don't talk like that.

Fun fact: in India, we pay premium to learn at schools that tell us our culture and heritage is worthless and we are imbeciles who need to be educated out of it.

And we even call ourselves proud alumni of such institutions.

https://twitter.com/brettachapman/status/1384276159274250247

I'm not kidding. The number of times my teachers had me erase my bindi can easily amount to a few thousand. My mom would send me back to school with a bigger bindi. I thought she was being difficult. Now I realize the magnitude of her rebellion and am proud of her.

I watched Serpent, and I can't shake the feeling it's this weird "Christianity triumphs" kinda subtle propaganda.

When they show Charles Sobhraj's house in Mumbai, it's filled with lots of Hindu iconography and prints of gods and goddesses. Which seems forced in. Because you see, the Juliette character could scarcely be Hindu. And Sobhraj was baptized as a catholic and took up the name Charles.

Juliette/Chantal was from a conservative Christian household. Doubt she'd decorate her houses with murtis.

Okay I'm extremely sleep deprived, so why not start some Twitter drama on this fine Monday morning.

Hot take: Vinay Sitapati is a deracinated, colonized fella who shouldn't be writing about the topics he writes about.

I will elaborate. So mind, I haven't read his books. I want to read Jugalbandi but it isn't yet available on the Kindle store in the US. It seems like he's researched the crap out of his topics. I'm not going to dispute his research chops. BUT

There's another angle too. Americanism is aspirational for most Indians, but those with engineering backgrounds manage to get to America much easier than those with humanities degrees even from top colleges. And what's more, 1/

https://twitter.com/vjgtweets/status/1306297593337577474

Those of us who work a few years at Infy and then go to the US don't even act like our stint in a major US city such a big deal, and horrors, even choose to come back home after a few years because we prefer our life in India.
And we go to burning man like a tourist 2/

We now see how a book is banned even before release. A certain British gentleman seems responsible for this.

This is not new.

It happened before in 1907.

An Indian wrote a history book.
Brits banned it even before it released.

That Indian? Veer Savarkar.

#bloomsburyindia It's funny to me because I'm writing the chapters about how Savarkar tried to get his book published but found it impossible as the British empire threatened and scared every publisher.

The modus operandi hasn't changed in 113 years. #bloomsburyindia

1. husband not a vassal of the marathas
2. ears can't handle that much weight
3. no looted family wealth through generations to draw from.
4. not getting paid by the british to stay put and not revolution.
5. i don't care for 19th century mughal beauty standards.

https://twitter.com/IndiaArtHistory/status/1280990203444727808

One thing I'm coming to realize is the mughal economy was very palace-based. like they just used the wealth on themselves. didn't start many new institutions of learning, didn't invest in new tech, didn't improve soft power relations with neighboring kingdoms.

Okay. It's #Savarkar_Jayanti. #Savarkar's birth anniversary. We all know he went to Kalapani. But do we know WHY?

I'm writing a novel based off of those events, so I've been extensively reading on them. A thread: In 1905, India was in the throes of British rule. The Indian National Congress was nothing more than an old dudes club where they passed pointless resolutions on everything.

Three of its members disagreed. Lala lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal. Lal-Bal-Pal.