crocheting, tea logs, playing persona, recent bookstore pick-ups! also desperately awaiting spring 🌿

9.7.22

These are the books I’m reading this semester. I am only taking two courses and still working out a sufficient study schedule. I’ve been debating on taking part in one of the productivity challenges but still I am still on the fence. Either way, I’m excited about this semester. I have plenty of opportunities to work on my writing so I look forward to it. Although this is my last semester in my undergrad it feels more like the starting line.

Ancient Philosophy

Senior Seminar in Philosophy

I think it's rich that when we think of the "medieval ages", the collective imagination pictures castles and knights and jousting and whatnot.

And while, yes, the Middle Ages in England was a culturally significant time, it's also telling how it is only this that is considered emblematic of the period when medieval history is literally when Islam was flourishing all over the world.

From the Golden age of enlightenment with the polymaths in Central Asia, to the resplendent Ottoman Court, not to mention the opulence and luxury of the Mughals in India - you had Muslims basically laying the cornerstones for modernity today. Photography, coffee houses, algebra, hygiene standards - all of these and more were established by Muslims in the middle ages.

But the widespread colonization of our mental landscape encourages us to associate only British/European imagery with this historical period. This is nothing but blatant erasure of our rich and glorious past. That's rich, I tell you.

"I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don’t want to see it."

- Muriel Barbary, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

Follow Diary of A Philosopher for more quotes!

Finished quals last week and submitted my two essays on Monday. It was a wild ride, full of self-doubt, indecision, and anxiety. But it was also a lot of me reminding myself of my vision, worthiness, and intelligence 🥰 Over the past year I feel like I’ve been doing so much to learn how to ground myself and work through my fear and anxiety, and I’m grateful for that bc I was def using those coping mechanisms in full swing lmao.

And omg! My friends are the sweetest, they gave me a crate full of snacks (like fancy jams and breads), handwritten affirmations, and even a lil coloring book! I was fully surprised and felt so seen and supported 🥺💖

Grad school app season post

ft. notes from the 9274993 paper I have read so far and my nightwing mug w my 4th cup of coffee

Don't get me wrong I could read about trophic ecology forever (and hopefully will) but the amount you have to read before you even reach out to potential advisors is crazy bananas

Good luck to everyone else out there in struggle! We'll find our lab homes soon👩‍🔬👨‍🔬❣

do u know any other black gradblrs? also will accept any poc under/grad recs if u have them

@blackamericanist @beena-kasaayi uh .. ??? idk anymore !

i answered a ‘blogs of color’ ask a few months ago and i don’t know who i still have on that list or not, so if you’re mutuals with me and not WHITE .... then reblog / like so anon can see you please ! :-]

scribbling, reading, common-placing, sudoku-ing(?) xx

Normalize being a polymath again and break down current academia that glorifies specializing in niches leaving no space for those of us with multiple interests

Concept: the sky is purple pink and gold right after Maghrib, a temple bell chimes in the distance, the train in the distance echoes off the terrace, where I sit with my cat and watch the stars appear one by one in the velvet sky. I breathe in the scent of night jasmine, I have no external obligations, and I am at peace with the world and myself.

I wanted to show you guys my campus

🌅 MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN 🌅

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

It begins with an ice blue Kahsmiri lake and ice-blue eyes piercing the horizon. The year is 1915, and Aadam Aziz, a Nehru-esque figure, has just returned after finishing his medical studies in Germany. It begins with a foreign-returned, Western-educated youth falling in love with a woman he sees only in fragments through a perforated sheet. Hungering to see her united, whole, and in his possession, he proposes after three years of peering through holes.

This is, in essence, how our freedom struggle began: Western-educated young men returning from overseas, seeing the land with new eyes, and desiring to see "India", which was never really one nation but a cluster of civilisations and histories, Princely states and tribal land holdings, as one united whole. A nation to be born out of multitudes.

There is the clash between Old and New India; all the freshness of promises that India had at Independence - like 1001 magical children born at the first hour of 15 Aug 1947. We see the gradual snuffing out of these promises and different paths that India could have taken, engulfed by our petty realities and, ultimately, the Widow and Emergency. India with her magic and folklore, unreal realities and unreliable narrators.

Even the choice of protagonist, Saleem Sinai, was so interesting to me. Ostensibly born to a Kashmiri (cultural-) Muslim family, with a Hindu mother and a White Christian father, Saleem is the epitome as India's "son". One with lost parentage, mixed parentage, whose roots are always a little severed, a little "alien".

Employing frame narratives like in 1001 Arabian Nights, Saleem spins "his-story" going through all the major points of our freedom struggle and post-Parition events. I saw the influence of Marquez, Dickens, and even Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is Rushdie's greatest love letter to India. It is also an admonition.

Full review on my Instagram @giltedged_reads

Stacks upon stacks

B O O K R E V I E W

Sula is a book about the workings of relationships between women - friends, mothers, daughters, neighbours. I loved how every woman and every relationship is depicted with their own unique features, flaws and cracks all. The ambiguous function of love and how it may be expressed in ways that may not always be ethically proper is depicted with a soft touch. The tensions of race, the changing circumstances through the turn of the century, as well as the building of a community through war, are all portrayed as only Toni Morrison can. Although I felt she was holding herself back while honing her craft here, it felt refreshing to read a book that delved into the world of women, in all its plainness and honesty.