I Answer Your Questions; You Won't Ever Ask Anything Ever Again. 😇
You may have filled out my Q&A survey from yore...
Hello all! Welcome to the last post of Only Child for the year. I’m capping 2021 with a series of answers to some of the questions I got in this survey. Send me some more questions for me to chew on next year!
Favorite food? Particularly favorite non-processed food.
Easily masala dosa. Look at it.
LOOK AT IT.
I f**king said look at it!!!!
A South Indian staple, masala dosa is when you fry a lentil-rice batter with oil until it becomes a crispy, savory crepe, and then you fill it up with spiced potatoes. Usually, you eat it with sambar, a spicy lentil stew, and chutneys, which are pastes made by blending certain vegetables and spices. It’s just so hearty and full of flavor! Plus, after you eat 500 of them, you become immortal. Ha! Take that, God.
Friendship in your 20s
How do you make new friends in your 20s? How do you maintain old friendships amidst the chaos of jobs, moving, and apocalyptic world events?
Well this is a big question because, for one, friendship is such a critical yet glossed over component of life. We don’t really talk about what friendship means with any sort of direction. We don’t have a very strict definition of friendship, nor do we explore what it means in the way that we do of, say, love or parenthood. The word can mean many different types of relationships; sometimes, a friend is a childhood mainstay whose personality changes you’ve kept a consistent, affectionate pulse on. Other times, a friend is someone whose core values powerfully align with your own. And yet again, other times, a friend is a coworker who likes the same beer as you. Aparna and I tackled this in this post as well as this one, particularly regarding the second part of this question about old friendships, but there’s still so much more to say.
Onto the first part of your question. I’ve made most of my friends in my 20s through second-degree connections. Meaning, most of my new friends started off as friends-of-friends, coworkers, or fellow writing workshop attendees. I don’t think any of my most meaningful friendships have come out of striking up conversation with a random person at a bar or on the subway (though the thought of doing that is still rather tempting). With that, one of the things I learned is important when making friends is, much like when dating, to strike when the iron is hot. When you meet someone you think is cool at a party or something, don’t wait for the next time to “run into them” to get their contact information. Just tell them you think they’re cool and want to hang out later; otherwise, you may very well never see them again.
Of course, this kind of advice applies pretty pointedly to city life, where there are so many people around that you have to grab the ones you like before they flutter away. So let me answer more generally. The easiest way to make friends with somebody is to share a context with them. Think classmates, coworkers, co-volunteers, teammates, cooking partners, or roommates. You’re tackling the same challenge with someone else, so you naturally feel a camaraderie with them. It’s the “side-by-side” element. The opposite of this might be the kind of friend that you see once every month or so just to catch up with them. Catching up is nice, but if there’s no background to your friendship, it can just feel like an interview, like you’re transmitting fragments of your life to one another, hoping something will stick.
So, to make good quality friends in your 20s, you need to build up a solid set of contexts in your life. Which means you need to figure out who you are and how you like to spend your time, which are extremely easy and trivial things to do. Plan activities whenever you can. Cook with your roommates, start volunteering on weekends, have board game nights with your curling team, attend a music festival with your coworkers, etc. Pounce on your friends of friends and include them in your future plans. Get to know them both one-on-one and as part of a group. Once those get rolling, you can rinse and repeat to make sure y’all continue to enjoy each other’s company.
What languages do you speak?
English! Haha okay fine. I can speak littlest tidbits of Telugu, Tamil, and French. With Telugu, my mother tongue, I pretty much can only express indignation or scolding, as that’s what I heard the most growing up, and with Tamil, my father tongue and the language whose movies we watched the most of growing up, I can mostly just quote comedy sketches. I can understand both languages a little more than I can speak them, though. And I enjoy them a lot. They’re pleasant to the ears and convey different attitudes and moods than English does. It’s hard to describe…but I honestly kind of enjoy gatekeeping that feeling. 😈
Growing Up Religious
Are you religious? How has it changed over time? What was it like (or is like, if you're still religious) being in a religious minority?
A complicated question! I would say 1) Not so much, 2) quite a lot, and 3) confusing. Let me explain.
I grew up in a rather religious Hindu household. Every evening, I went downstairs to our basement shrine to pray with my mom. She’d offer a small serving of food she’d just cooked to God as prasadam, and after we finished praying, we’d go upstairs and eat. I went to Sunday school most of my childhood, and eventually, my mom started her own Sunday school that I helped teach during the hormonal turbulence of my late middle school and early high school years. There were even a few occasions when we traveled to India specifically to fulfill religious customs, like performing the sacred thread ceremony, after which I went downstairs to our shrine every morning to meditate on a specific mantra before getting a ride to school. Through these customs, both large + infrequent and small + regular, Hinduism became intertwined with my life. I couldn’t really conceive of a way to live without it.
Around college was when I began to veer away from it. I was away from home and so wasn’t anchored to those rituals in the way I was used to. It was in equal parts liberating and confusing. A large part of my identity—a concept I rarely thought of at that age—was suddenly ripped away. I filled in the gaps left behind with aimless partying, mostly. When I visited home, I’d pray with my mom like before, and there was a comfort in it, sure, but it wasn’t something that stayed with me outside the home. This is something I think many Indian kids (maybe even just American non-Christians in general) can relate to: this association that their religion is something sort of secretive and precious, something just for the home shrine or the temple, a collection of unendorsed behaviors that they can never really explain to someone who isn’t familiar, and whose unfamiliarity they can’t explain to their parents.
I’d say that after I graduated and evened out a little bit, personality-wise, I learned that I’m largely a man of faith. I wouldn’t say I’m religious, nor would I say I’m anti-Hindu. What I mean is that I’m the kind of person that searches for deeper meaning in things, and I easily fall in love with the beauty that a larger context provides. I’m not sure whether I am this way naturally or because I received Hinduism planted so many spiritual ideas in me at an early age. I love feeling like I’m just a small part of some gargantuan organic machination of the universe; never have I really felt like my life was meaningless as I zoomed out and away from it, just more beautifully inconsequential, and thus freeing. I may not jive with the ritualistic aspects of Hinduism, but I do love its teaching and philosophies, its mythologies, its artwork. One day, per my mom’s request and my own interest, I’ll read The Bhagavad Gita, the forerunner of Hindu philosophical texts. Maybe this is a part of growing older, and everyone else who grew up religious feels the same way: maybe there’s a pipeline of general religiously-ritualistic to spiritually-inclined kids that I’m just one example of. And then, maybe I’ll return to my ritualistic roots to find some grounding in my increasingly turbulent adult life. I’m not sure! Curious to know what y’all think.
Some Parting Words For The Year
I’ll keep it brief. This has been a challenging year for many. It’s also been the best year of my life. I say that not to brag, but to inspire. A year ago, I don’t think I could’ve imagined myself in the emotional and mental state that I’m in today. I’ve gone through a lot this year. Relationships, jobs, writing projects, health issues. So much has changed. I’m one of those nutcases that romanticizes the passage of time, often looking back on the past with unprovoked sentiment, but there is a reason for that: when I think back to the end of 2020, I can’t really relate to the person I was back then. It’s like thinking of high school memories—some of them feel like they belong to someone else entirely. And so there’s a bittersweetness to growing through another year, to shedding layers of dead skin and becoming a little more yourself. There’s a bittersweetness, and there’s a relief, too. A beauty, almost.
Cheers to that. ❤️
Things Of Note
Just another reminder that I’m still selling my essay collections :) order a copy here!
This standup bit by South Indian comedian Kenny Sebastian about why dosas are amazing. Very important.
This recipe for thumbprint cookies that I followed. A little sloppy, but it’s all good. (Cue the slow and bleak transformation of this once-scrappy newsletter into a soulless collection of cookbook snippets🤢 )
This profile of Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy in Succession in The New Yorker, which everybody my age with (a friend who has) an HBO subscription has read and gushed over.
Great insight: "The easiest way to make friends with somebody is to share a context with them...so build up a solid set of contexts in your life." Thanks for this!