Gaura Sharma

I'll try anything once

[Apar Gupta @apar1984]

Today as Delhi city coughs due to terrible AQI, we await for Chief Minister Rekha Gupta to own up and take responsibility. Before Diwali, she was urging the Supreme Court to permit firecrackers. Here, as many have already pointed out, "green firecrackers" are an oxymoron and the Delhi Police rarely enforced the time window of 8-10 PM.

While civic apathy has its share of blame, it does not excuse the role of the Delhi Government. The Chief Minister has over the past few months shielded accountability by taking shelter behind the cult of the Prime Minister, religious bombast and blaming the opposition or past Chief Minister.

When will the time start for the Delhi Government to be accountable? It has been in office now for 243 days. Responsibility, first and last, rests with those we elected, specially those who took active steps to encourage air pollution. They must answer.

[emma @emmatranter_]

imo one of the worst things you can do for your art as a woman is over identify with victimhood (even in the face of misogyny etc. you should probably never believe in your total innocence or even see it as aspirational. So much interesting stuff comes from facing our shadow rly

[✒️ @Literariium]

— Virginia Woolf

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

The secret to staying private is not silence. It is noise with no map. You pour the room a bowl of trivia and let them think they are eating your life.

Tell them you hate cilantro. Tell them your first pet was a fish named Tuesday who jumped once at 3:11 and you still feel guilty. Tell them you sleep with one sock on because the other foot runs hot. Tell them you have strong opinions about pencils and grocery store grapes. Let them laugh. Let the sound fill the table. Watch how quickly people relax around harmless secrets.

Meanwhile, keep the door with a key. Do not name the hospital room smell that taught you to speak softly. Do not describe the letter you never mailed because forgiveness in ink felt like theft. Do not hand over your maps. You can love people and still be the librarian who knows which shelves are closed for restoration.

Practice misdirection that is not a lie. Overshare the dumb glitter. Under-share the bones. In the group chat you can narrate the saga of your dying blender and the way it screams like a train. You can post the picture of the burned toast that looks like a country you have never visited. Do not post the verdict from the doctor or the number on the invoice that made you sit on the floor. If someone presses, you can say not now. You can say I am taking care of it. Boundaries are sentences that do not apologize for existing.

Privacy is not hiding. Hiding is fear. Privacy is stewardship. You protect the temperature of the room where your real life cooks. You keep the lid on so the steam does not vanish into gossip. You stir when no one is watching. You season to taste. You invite who has washed their hands.

There is an art to it. In the office kitchen they ask how you are. You give them weather. Slept weird. Coffee strong. Printer cursed my name. They nod. You nod. You both survive the microwave beep. At 12:40 someone lingers. Their eyes look like a chair pulled out in a quiet room. You say one inch deeper. I am tired for a reason. They say do you want me to hold the door or leave you alone. You say hold it. That is how you learn who deserves the keys.

Make an inventory of safe facts. Which sports team you pretend to care about. The exact way you fold a fitted sheet. The green mug that chips at the lip and still wins the morning. Carry these like confetti. Throw them at parties. Let people think you are an open book because you read your adjectives out loud. Meanwhile the nouns stay in the safe.

Do not confuse performance with protection. If you overshare to be adored, the crowd will eat until the bowl is clean and ask for more. If you overshare to create space around what matters, the crowd will get full on crumbs and leave you the meal. Be honest about your motive. Your nervous system knows the difference. One feels like holding your breath for applause. The other feels like breathing through your back.

There are tests that do not look like tests. You hand someone a small truth and watch where they set it down. Do they pocket it for later. Do they polish it into gossip. Do they leave it on the table and sit closer. Trust is a verb that takes notes. When someone keeps your small truth in the room where you left it, you can open a drawer and show them something that breathes.

At 21:18 you walk home through a street that smells like rain on pennies. The phone vibrates. Still coming out. Still spilling. Still confessing every joke like it is penance. You breathe. You type a picture of the sky and write looks dramatic, probably fine. You save the real sentence for the person who knows what your silence means. This is not manipulation. This is accurate distribution of oxygen.

Being a private person does not mean you never answer questions. It means you collect better ones. Ask me why I care about kitchens. Ask me what I learned when the car did not start in winter. Ask me what I stopped buying to afford peace. Ask me where I keep my hands when I am scared.

[dushmanoevsky @chonkychihuahua]

what killed my social anxiety was realising you're allowed a lot of eccentricities if you're not obnoxious about it & generally a nice person

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

[buy Fenestration @Othuke__Umukoro]

Restraint is such an important part of the poetic imagination. I think poems are at their best when they understand restraint. Learn it. Writing in traditional forms helps. Learn from a master like Rhina P. Espaillat.

[Yoon @nicoscosc]

Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics… Without nervous disorder there can be no great artist.

—Dr. du Boulbon in Proust, The Guermantes Way

[𝔽ℙℍ 🇺🇸 SF July 27-Aug 2 @FeralPHunter]

this can be reversed but it starts with the individual
- organize dinners
- get coffee with friends
- plan a party
- see a movie together
- offer to help people move
- volunteer

people are less exposed to social behavior now so their benchmark for whats healthy is broken

[Nostos @NostosLit]

― Rainer Maria Rilke

[sphinx @protosphinx]

Reminder that India’s problem is not corruption but competence.

The bureaucracy lacks competence because genuine expertise comes from experience and application, not rote exams.

China - which also has massive bureaucracy and all the associated ills was able to execute as they learned from Korea and Singapore, which in turn learned from Japan and so on.

The Indian bureaucracy is inept not because they’re corrupt. They’re corrupt because they’re inept.

They have zero infrastructure experience and no neighbours to learn from. Junkets to China and Japan and token tourism doesn’t solve for a culture with zero exposure to high quality first world thinking.

Corruption becomes their default because it is the simplest form of execution

Yet they could gain far more power and influence if the country functioned efficiently and became a global leader.

Real pros pursue power, not money. Money is useless when your sewage systems don’t work and the drinking water is delivered via rickety trucks, when your roads are broken that break your back and they uproot their children and send them abroad for higher ed for a better life.

No bureaucrat or politician enjoys seeing their kids leave but they have no choice. They lack a choice because they are incompetent.

Corruption is easy to solve for. Incompetence is not.

[wally b kleeposting @kleeposting]

The assumption that AI summaries can replace reading books boils down to the misconception that knowledge exists outside of language, instead of in language

[兔兒神 @chenchenwrites]

i write poems so that i don't withdraw from the world. or abandon myself. or lose all hope. or think clumsily. or feel imprecisely. or forget my own gentleness, or the possibiity of it

[Gaura Sharma @GauraSharmaa]

A Phd is quite literally a doctorate. This term was co-opted by healthcare practitioners later. People love to shit on humanities degrees without a clue.

[Gaura Sharma @GauraSharmaa]

I've always said this

[ಬೆಣ್ಣೆ ದೋಸೆ PROPAGANDIST✊🍉 @marxist_huduga]

Mahabharatha is a better epic, better storyline, more depth in characters, the lore behind even the secondary characters goes insane and every character is morally grey, which is more realistic. Ramayana is very binary in its approach to good and evil and it's boring.

[Gaura Sharma @GauraSharmaa]

@apparitionnow Literally me

[Erin Risch Zoutendam @erin_zoutendam]

One of my least fashionable pedagogical opinions is that we should bring back rote memorization in a big way.