A grad student rants on pandemic, research and mental health.

The first week of January 2020 was the first time I had heard of Covid-19. I had just returned to the US from a whirlwind trip back in Indonesia and had a lot on my mind, including my upcoming nuptials which were scheduled for May 2020, the research work I had to get done before the wedding, and of course just general life things. I was excited, nervous and mostly determined to get a ton of work done in the spring semester. Like many others, Covid-19 was just a problem that China was dealing with. I had heard podcasts which talked about the potential impact it could have in our interconnected world and just categorized it in a compartment of my brain used to make small talk.

Research continued as intended for the first 2 months of the year- I was able to get some good data (thankfully) and was hopeful that March and April would be the most productive months. I had scheduled studies to be done in March, and put them on the shared lab calendar. I was keeping up with the news in the US as the virus made its way through Washington state, New York city and then  California issuing a 'shelter in place' order. I think mid- February was when I started realizing that this was turning into a bigger problem that had originally been anticipated. I started obsessively looking into the data. JHU's coronavirus tracker had come online and I would refresh the page once a day to look at the numbers. I started watching YouTube videos which discussed how the spread of the virus was being modelled- a SIR model to begin with, and slowly looking into how migration was going to impact the population that was susceptible. My family Whatsapp group started blowing up with videos of how to prevent Covid-19 (strangest things) which I did my level best to dispel. Thankfully we have some doctors in the family who immediately started dispelling rumors and "Fake News".

In addition to all this, research, mentoring and teaching still continued. I tried my level best to keep my obsession with the fate of the world at bay while doing the work I was supposed to be doing. I tried to stay optimistic in the face of this crisis. Data was collected, animals were trained, reports and manuscripts were submitted. Yet, my refresh rate on https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html increased and I started scouring the web and news for any information. As anyone who has played Plague would know- the news started talking about the disease a lot more, everywhere you turned you only heard the statistics. I started meditating. I googled symptoms. I got more and more worried with every passing day. Productivity decreased.

Soon, New York was hit heavily and as number of cases went up and stay at home and social distancing orders were issued in various states. Spring break was fast arriving and the university discussed potentially going online like some others across the country had already done (kudos to Purdue for quick action!).   Through all this time, I think I was hopeful that eventually this would all disappear (wishful thinking) and I could go back into lab and collect data.

At the end of spring break, Indiana issued stay at home orders (for 2 weeks, which would then be extended for a month). I discussed plans with my advisor about the work from home setup. Discussed expectations during this time. Every day though, the news filled me with dread of what was to come. I think just dealing with the stress made my productivity drop to levels I haven't seen before. I couldn't get out of bed on some days. I would be on Zoom calls with friends but then go back to being sad and lonely. My mental health was definitely taking a hit. I thrive on social interaction, and I was quickly learning that I needed to find a way to survive on it a little lesser.  Through all this, I realized that there were grad students and workers across the globe who were being made to go into lab because they were deemed as "essential" for work they clearly didn't think was essential. It made me thankful for my advisor and the many others who were prioritizing their students' safety over research.

As I reach the end of the rant, here are things I'm hoping to take away from this pandemic:
1. Be kind to yourself and the others that you work with
2. Learn to be happy in your own head. Social isolation has taught me that I need to find joy in my own company.
3. Be thankful for friends and family who continue to support you through everything.
4. Research will find a way to come around- I plan on playing catch up after we can start going back to labs.
5. Find yourself an advisor /boss who understands that mental health is a real thing and not an excuse to not do work.

If you made it to the end of this post, thanks :)

Racial Bias

Today as we were walking down the street, I saw a dark-skinned man and started to wonder aloud about his race. My friend, who heard me, asked why it was that it mattered. My reply was just that I was curious, but there’s so much more to it. I wondered because I was wanted to know whether he was Indian or whether he was a man of African descent. I wondered, because my whole life I have been told to be wary of the black man- by the news, by the books I read, by the media I consume. It’s so ingrained in my mind, that I didn’t even realize it was a thing I did. Whenever I see a black man, I automatically get more cautious. And it’s not just something I do around black people. I see a white man in a pick-up truck and I worry that he’ll be another racist who might scream at me for being a brown person and tell me to go back to my country. I see a man who looks Muslim, and thanks to the news, I am wary of them (which is ironic given that I grew up in a Muslim majority country where everyone I knew was nothing but loving and peaceful!)

What I don’t realize is that I am racist in doing this. Every day I fear that my brother or my boyfriend or my father might be mistaken as a threat to the existence of someone else and might get hurt because of it. This fear came from one attack that happened on Indian man, which ended up in the loss of an innocent life and the pain of another. An entire community felt that fear and pain, just because they were mistaken for another.

We think “Oh, we’re not race X, we can’t be hurt”, but the truth is that everyone gets hurt by the hatred we develop due to these racial biases. We created these divides to conquer, but in today’s world, do we really need to conquer? We are humans. We explore things together, we are one species. Yet we compete. We start competing when we are children, we are told that it’s a survival of the fittest. The meaning of fittest has changed, but the competition has not. Wars have been started due to differences in the color of skin, communities have been enslaved, mistreated and even killed due to these petty things.

Maybe it is time we see that everything we are isn’t just the color of our skin, the words made by our tongue or even the gods we pray to. It’s time we realize that maybe, just maybe, we are all the same inside. Love is what we need in today’s world. Not hate! Love that can show everyone that we are the same, despite our differences. That, it is our differences that should unite us, encourage us to learn about each other. It shouldn’t be about dominating the other! That is messed up.

The change starts from me. From you. From us. I am going to make an active effort to stop doing what I’ve been programmed to do. I am a cautious person, and that might not change, but I probably will try to make myself see things from another’s view. I know that I am but a speck of dirt in this massive universe, but even the smallest electron can make something positive or negative. *Cue Carl Sagan’s Pale blue dot.* 

Kaatru Veliyidai: a story of domestic abuse

When the trailer for Kaatru Veliyidai released, I was so excited. Another beautiful looking movie from Mani Ratnam with music by A.R. Rahman. The perfect combination of talents.  The music came first and it was soul touching and so amazingly melodious; so typical of A.R.R's magic. I watched the promotions, music videos and got more excited.

I couldn't watch the movie in the theaters and I was very sad. So imagine my joy when I finally got a chance to watch the movie. I sat in anticipation to watch this beautiful looking movie and the first few shots were so amazing.

** Spoilers ahead** 

Sadly, as the movie went on, I was thoroughly disappointed. I initially thought it was just VC's arrogance which made me dislike his character. He tells his first girlfriend that he would marry her only after the first child and soon after he rats her out to her dad and gets her sent of to Pune just so that he can pursue Leela, a doctor who's just moved to town.  Soon his misogynistic ways started showing up. It started with a brush off of Leela by telling her that women and men are not equal and that women must be beautiful to join the Air Force. Slowly with every progressing scene, VC humiliates, belittles, and even physically abuses Leela. Each time, he returns with a "Sorry" and "I love you". Leela's friend and admirer once asks her colleague why Leela puts up with him abusing her, to which she says, "it's love". I call bullshit! Love is NOT abuse and belittling. There is a scene in the movie, where he almost gets it. VC admits that his father was abusive to his mother and that he didn't want to be a horrible husband, but funnily enough, in a scene where his pregnant sister in law has gone into labor and his father in the waiting room starts screaming, VC begins yelling at everyone and even snaps at Leela, belittling her in front of his entire family.

Now, Leela, who is a well educated doctor practicing in Kashmir, is simply smitten by VC. She does, to her credit, realize that she is being mistreated. In the beginning, she refuses to leave before a snow storm and when VC tells her that he would slap her and drag her off the mountain when she shows courage and sense by telling him to explain to her why he wants her to do something, rather than threatening her. He seems to understand temporarily, but forgets soon enough. Throughout the movie, you can see her struggle as she realizes she's being abused. She leaves several times, and each time she comes back to VC after he pleads with her for forgiveness. One time she even asks "Why do I keep coming back to you?". Just before the film's climax, she meets VC and tells him that she's leaving Srinagar and him and he yells back that he'll come searching for her (WTF?!) . Leela realizes that he's not good for her. Despite this, at the end of the movie, she welcomes him back with open arms with his child in tow- a child, he BTW wanted her to get rid of when she told him that she was pregnant.

This movie was just filled with WTF moments. Mani Ratnam can not possibly imagine that such a relationship is normal. What's worse, he romanticizes it. He makes it seem that a guy can be as abusive he wants to and he'll still get the girl at the end. The scenes I've mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. There are false promises of marriage, insulting of Leela's parents at, get this, her grandfather's funeral! Scenes that just make you squirm and wonder where the writer who wrote OK Kanmani is!

The movie has its share of great visuals and music, but the fact that the story and the characters were so terribly developed just made me absolutely hate it. It was nice to see a marriage where the bride was almost 8 months pregnant and talk of sex before marriage, but the abuse just stole the spotlight. I wish the movie had been different, that there could've been a redeeming factor, but there was nothing and it just left me feeling miserable that Mani Ratnam, a man whose movies are so popular, could possibly want to normalize an abusive relationship. 

Decisions

As a kid, I always wanted to be an adult. I mean who didn't? I'd see my parents making important decisions and then depending on how things went, they'd either make the best of what was handed to them or try to make a difference. I wanted to do that. I couldn't wait to be an adult. I thought it would be simple... That transition from being a child to an adult. I always imagined that I would wake up one day and know that I'd become an adult. I'd intrinsically know how to make life decisions. My parents and all the other adults I knew made it look so easy.

Being at a precipice makes you realize that maybe it wasn't so easy. There are decisions to be made about everything. They range from something as irrelevant as what I'm going to eat today or wear today, to something as ridiculously large like what am I doing with my life? I see friends from all walks of life. I see them going to parties, getting drunk, getting married, having babies. And I see friends who lose someone they love. They decide how they're going to live their lives. They take lemons and make their own version of the lemonade.

Some decisions are harder to make than others. How do you know that decisions that you make aren't going to come back tomorrow and bite you in the ass? What do you trust to make decisions? The heart or the brain? Some people will tell you to trust the gut. But what makes a decision a good decision? There are always consequences to any decision you make. Everyone always tells you about the consequences. Don't do activity A or you will go through X.  Nobody teaches you how to make a decision. Maybe they should.

Being an adult hasn't been easy so far, but what do I know, I'm still a kid trying to be an adult. At the end of the day, aren't we all? 

Beauty

A friend of mine once told me that I would look nicer if I "lost a little bit of weight and (was) a little fairer". That night I came home and cried for a few hours. There are days when I look at myself in the mirror and I wonder, did I get a new zit, did I gain an extra bit of fat right here. I look under my eyes and I see the eye-bags, the dark circles. I see the little flaws that nobody would care about. Yet I do it. I wear makeup to make myself feel prettier, because my entire life I've been told that fairer skin was prettier. Having my eyes look a certain way would make me more attractive. Wearing a certain shade of lipstick made me look like a "slut". People have issues when I wear make up and when I don't wear make up. There is no pleasing everybody. There's no way that I can just walk out of the house and not be judged for how I look.

I don't always put an effort into what I wear, but when I do, I do it for myself, not because I want you to think I look attractive in photos or in real life. I do it because I feel like when I dress up, I meet the beauty standards society has taught me. I do it because I want to feel pretty. And even though it's for myself, I  find myself conforming to society's expectations of me. I haven't yet learnt to accept my body for what it looks like. I always find myself looking at the fatter parts of my body and feeling conscious about it.

I don't want to nitpick on every single part of me. I want to learn to accept my body for what it is. I don't want to live in a world where I am judged every single day for not meeting your standards of beauty. I want to start living in a world, where the only standard of beauty I am held up to, is my own! 

Dear CatCaller

******
Dear Random Guy on the street, 

No! I am not interested in smiling for you. I just want to get to work on time and get down to helping people live better lives.

Dear Mr. Construction worker, 

If me telling you I'm engaged is the only thing that will stop you from harassing me, then I'll make up a fiancee. Also, thank you for making me feel unsafe on my daily walk to work. You've forced me to look around me for your presence each time I walk past the spot where you called out to me.

Dear Random Guy at the club, 

Yes, I'm a good dancer, but that doesn't mean I have to dance with you. Thanks for calling me a bitch just because I said no!

Dear Other Random guy, 

Atleast try to ask for permission before you decide to press up against me and hold my hips in place. I don't appreciate having your groin pressed up against my backside without even knowing what's going on!
*******

Yes, I am a woman and yes, I have breasts and wide hips. Does that make me attractive? I don't know, maybe it does, and maybe not. However, that does NOT give you the right to make me feel unsafe and vulnerable when I am going about my daily life. It does NOT give you the right to say that you were "complimenting me" and that I should just be humble and accept your "compliment". If your unwanted attention should be considered a compliment, I think I'd rather live life without it.

It has been drilled in my mind, that I should try my best to dress appropriately, I force myself not to wear clothes that come across as "slutty", a term that society has forced on women to prevent her from wearing things she might feel comfortable in. I hear all these stories of rape where a large part of society seems to say, she shouldn't have been wearing that, she asked for it! But who the hell are you to tell a woman what to wear and what not to wear? Why is expected for a woman to dress a certain way when a man could wear anything he wants and not have the same level of scrutiny placed on him? The other day, I saw a couple running on the streets on a rather hot afternoon. They were both shirtless and the woman sported a sports bra while the man was bare chested. A friend of mine looked at me and said, well, that seems inappropriate! I glared at him and wondered out loud why it was OK that the guy could take his shirt off when it got too hot but the girl couldn't? He just mumbled something about societal standards.

Why is it that some men feel they have a right to get away with things like catcalling while women have to either be rebels and do whatever the hell we want to do or cower in the shadows, being afraid of when the next person may come up and "hit on" us. Consent is something that is often lacking in these interactions. My clothes do not imply consent. Only me saying that you could do something is consent!

So, dear CatCaller, the next time you think it's great to compliment me by telling my I have a fine ass or that I would look prettier with a smile on my face, just know that I am a strong, independent woman and you may try to harass me, but I know who I am and I'm not going to give in to the need to be silent!

P.S. The video above  is a perfect explanation of what women go through almost every day :-/ It needs to stop!

Brooklyn: the movie, and how it affected me

2015 was a great year for me. It was a year for new beginnings in a country that I had never been to before. A country that was across the world from the places I had grown up in, the places I had become a young lady in. Watching Brooklyn brought back memories of the fear I went through when I was a first time immigrant. Would I be alright? Would I be able to find a new life for myself? The path I was interested in taking seemed like it would be one that was best for me, but I had no way of knowing for sure.

http://cdn1-www.comingsoon.net/assets/uploads/gallery/brooklyn/poster-43c98278-5831-45e4-9eb0-304617abca97.jpg

It took me time and a few buckets of tears before I felt like I could settle in. There were moments of sadness when nothing felt right and it made me question my decision of leaving behind everything and everyone I loved to come to this strange, unknown place. It was the coldest I had ever been in my life (physically and emotionally). Homesickness. That was what people said it was. They all said it would become normal eventually.

I met people, and slowly but surely, I came out of my little hole. There were times where like the protagonist of the movie, I felt like my body was there but my heart was elsewhere. With time, it moved somewhere in between the Pacific/Atlantic (really depends on which way you want to travel across the globe). There are still times when I pine for my past and wonder what my world would have looked like if I had stayed in Asia.

Maybe going back would show me why I chose to leave in the first place or maybe it would just remind me of reasons I should stay. The movie beautifully captures this conundrum. There are so many things that could possibly hold you back in the past, and your decisions are heavily affected by whether you choose to stay in your past and make your future there or take that risk and move on. Leave your past behind and choose to make a new life for yourself.

Because at the end of the day, despite the homesickness and all the nostalgia, "One day you'll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past, and you'll realize that this is where your life is." When I reflect on what the past year has helped me achieve, it truly makes me realize that this where I would like my future to be. Whether or not that would be possible, remains to be seen.

Overall, I would highly recommend you watch this movie, because almost everyone has a similar story that you can relate to, even if you didn't travel all around the world.

P.S. Saoirse Ronan is so beautiful and has performed extraordinarily well. Your heart breaks with hers and the way she carries you through the movie is simply fantastic.