A Requiem for a Song Bird

This is a piece I wrote in a graduate-level public health course in February 2017.


I have been thinking a lot about George Michael recently. He died alone on Christmas Day in his home just outside of London (“George Michael,” 2016). His body is still with the police (“George Michael,” 2017). They determined that he died of heart failure and that it was not suspicious, but they are still conducting additional tests (Reed, 2016). I don’t know what they are looking for, but I have a feeling it may have to do with substance abuse. He was only 53 years old (Pareles, 2016).

My earliest memories are of one of my older brothers dancing and singing in front of the television to George Michael’s Wham! era music videos. This was in the early 1980s when the singer was still a teenager. He went on to become one of the most famous (and stylish!) singers in the world. I genuinely loved his voice and spent many years singing along to his recordings. Since the late 1990s, however, he became known less for his music than for his run-ins with the law. He was arrested for a “lewd act” in a male public bathroom in Beverly Hills in 1998 and subsequently came out as a gay man (Lyttle, 1998). In 2010, he spent four weeks in prison for crashing his car into a shop while under the influence (Swash, 2010). In the decade before his death, he became reclusive and suffered a series of health problems, particularly an episode that resulted in hospitalization and near death (Walker, 2011).

George Michael was one of the most sought-after sex symbols of his generation. He struggled with his sexuality, however, and hid it under a veil of super-charged heterosexuality. He began to seek out sex with strangers while still in his teens (Newman, 2016), and as an adult, wallowed in depression during the AIDS epidemic in which he lost a much-loved secret boyfriend (Moore, 2016). In his words, he suffered from “grief and self-abuse” for most of his life (Newman, 2016).

So I found it interesting to read a 2015 report on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) website about the incidence of substance abuse and mental illness in sexual minorities (Medley et al, 2015). This was the first time they used sexuality as a variable in examining these issues (“SAMHSA report,” 2016). According to the report (Medley et al, 2015), sexual minorities are more likely than those in the sexual majority to use illicit drugs, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol. Further, they are more likely to have substance abuse disorders and mental illnesses, and according to other material on the website, also more likely to experience issues such as heart disease, cancer, and even violence (“Top health issues,” 2012). Given how I feel like I am grieving for George Michael, this hurt.

I was also reminded of a project I am working on with a professor in my department about gay athletes in the United States. The project uses interviews to gather data, and I have heard one elderly gay athlete talk about how some closeted gay men use drugs like amyl nitrate in order to get through having sex with a woman. It’s upsetting – it’s not fair to have to live like that. As if life isn’t difficult enough.

I am currently taking a gender studies course, and I’m learning about the androcentric nature of science and society. Also, in this public health course, we have learned that the way our society is organized is bad for some people’s health (California Newsreel, 2014). With researchers now paying attention to the role of sexuality in health, they may find that our heteronormative institutions have been setting up sexual minorities to die early and to have a poor quality of life until then. I feel that the slides on racism that we saw earlier in the semester could help us understand how that happens (Jones, 2000). SAMHSA even has a dedicated page for LGBT health on its website (“Behavioral Health Equity,” 2016).

George Michael, however, is still dead. That will not change no matter how much I want him to be alive and out in the world somewhere. It hurts, and I’m surprised by how much. I mean, I’m a media scholar, and I understand that people can form bonds with other people in the media, both real and fictitious. That probably happened with me somewhere over the years. My earliest memories of him are of a young, fashionable song bird, and really, all I ever wanted for him was to enjoy his life and be happy, the way I would wish for an older sibling, a cool uncle, or my own child. Maybe the way our society is set up made that impossible for him. Maybe all it could offer someone of his sexual orientation was a path of substance abuse and mental illness. It could have been different. And we will never know.

Rest in peace, dear, dear friend. I’m so sorry that I could not take care of you.

References

Behavioral Health Equity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) (2016, November 9). Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/behavioral-health-equity/lgbt

California Newsreel. (2014, October 22). UNNATURAL CAUSES – Trailer. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBkOYMCAro&list=PLayHb3ehfKbfxdMAmIkFm2wlRikR4Ka6f

George Michael: Coroner yet to release singer’s body a month after his death. (2017, January 28). news.com.au. Retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/george-michael-coroner-yet-to-release-singers-body-a-month-after-his-death/news-story/c03ca7a2fb727c2e3976c7d481ac90ec

George Michael: Pop superstar dies at 53. (2016, December 26). BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38432862

Jones, C. (2000). The impacts of racism on health [PowerPoint slides]. Harvard School of Public Health. Retrieved from https://blackboard.sc.edu/courses/1/PUBH700-J50-SPRING-2017/content/_10122663_1/camara%20jones.ppt

Lyttle, J. (1998, April 8). George Michael arrested over `lewd act'. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/george-michael-arrested-over-lewd-act-1155246.html

Medley, G., Lipari, R. N., Bose, J., Cribb, D. S., Kroutil, L. A., & McHenry, G. (2016). Sexual orientation and estimates of adult substance use and mental health: Results from the 2015 national survey on drug use and health. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015.pdf

Moore, J. (2016, December 26). GQ. Retrieved from http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/george-michael-interview

Newman, V. (2016, December 26). Sex, drugs and self-destruction: The dark side of George Michael he couldn't fight. Mirror. Retrieved from http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/sex-drugs-self-destruction-dark-9515044

Pareles, J. (December 25, 2016). George Michael, pop superstar, is dead at 53. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/arts/music/george-michael-dead.html?_r=0

Reed, R. (2016, December 30). Autopsy: George Michael's Cause of Death 'Inconclusive'. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/autopsy-george-michaels-cause-of-death-inconclusive-w458442

SAMHSA report shows higher rates of substance use and mental illness among sexual minority adults. (2016, October 11). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/201610110100

Swash, R. (2010, July 6). George Michael arrested after crashing car into shop. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/06/george-michael-arrested

Top health issues for LGBT populations [PowerPoint slides]. (2012). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//SMA12-4684/SMA12-4684.ppt

Walker, P. (2011, December 23). George Michael gives tearful account of near-death pneumonia ordeal. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/23/george-michael-reveals-pneumonia-ordeal

My Friend the Astronaut

It's 2012, and Sunita Williams is making headlines in India. She is an astronaut with NASA and is going to be heading back out to space. She is also of Indian origin from her father's side.

I heard about her on TV a few hours ago here in Muscat, Oman. All the Indian news channels are talking about her.

And I suddenly miss Kalpana Chawla. Do you remember her?

It was 16 years ago in 1996 when the world first heard of Kalpana Chawla. I was 15, and it was such a huge deal for me as a young Indian school kid in Oman to hear about a female Indian astronaut. There were no Indian news channels in those days, but I did rip out stories about her from a youth magazine I used to subscribe to. How amazing was she! In those days I almost used to live in an alternate universe where the Star Trek world was real, and here was an Indian girl like me who was going into space. The final frontier! From NASA! As far as I was concerned, NASA was the real world's Starfleet Academy, and I had a crazy amount of respect for that. I had another Trekkie friend in high school who had a thing for Mr. Spock (I was a Kirk girl myself), and all I ever heard her say was that she was going to grow up and work at NASA too. It felt nice to have one of our own - brown skin, black hair, black eyes, a name that didn't sound like Smith or Sarah - out there, someone who was actually going to see the final frontier my Trekkie friends and I were always obsessing about.

The next time I heard about Kalpana Chawla was many years later in 2003. I was 22 years old and emotional-light-years away as an undergraduate student in my final semester at the Oklahoma State University out there on the American Prairie. A tragedy had occurred, and the Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated - along with everyone on board - over several miles in Texas while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. From what I remember, it was because of a faulty heat-resistant tile on the body of the shuttle. The shuttle had burned up and fallen apart out there in the next state in a region only 4 hours away from where I was. And Kalpana Chawla had been on board.

The American news channels had carried stories about the Columbia crew for days. One of them told a story about Kalpana, about how she had felt while looking at the Earth through a window from inside the Columbia while in space. She had seen her own reflection looking back at her, and she had been able to see the Earth in her eyes. And she had said that the Earth had looked so beautiful and so calm and quiet out there in space, and that if everyone could see what she had seen, that no one would fight each other anymore.

I miss her today. I've never had any real-life role models, never really looked up to anyone particularly while growing up, but she had felt like someone I had known. Her smiling pictures in her astronaut suit, the ones from NASA with the American flag watching over her from behind almost like it had her back, those pictures felt like she had been smiling at me. Like she knew me too. She had kind eyes. She looked like a nice, normal person. Kalpana my friend. I miss her today.

Why Chris Left Marxism

"Trotsky had a sound materialist critique that enabled him to be prescient, not all of the time by any means, but impressively so on some occasions. And he certainly had a sense - expressed in his emotional essay Literature and Revolution - of the unquenched yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent. For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical  and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer a guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

An Ordinary Miracle

"Mother Teresa died in 1997. On the first anniversary of her death, two nuns in the Bengali village of Raigunj claim to have strapped an aluminium medal of the departed (a medal that had supposedly been in contact with her dead body) to the abdomen of a woman named Monica Besra. This woman, who was said to be suffering from a large uterine tumour, was thereupon quite cured of it. It will be noticed that Monica is a Catholic girl's name not very common in Bengal, and thus that probably the patient and certainly the nuns were already Mother Teresa fans. This definition would not cover Dr. Manju Murshed, the superintendent of the local hospital, nor Dr. TK Biswas and his gynecologist colleague Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. All three came forward to say that Mrs. Besra had been suffering from tuberculosis and an ovarian growth, and had been successfully treated for both afflications. Dr. Murshed was particularly annoyed at the numerous calls he had received from Mother Teresa's order, the "Missionaries of Charity", pressing him to say that the cure had been miraculous. The patient herself did not make a very impressive interview subject, talking at high speed because, as she put it, she "might otherwise forget" and begging to be excused questions because she might have to "remember". Her own husband, a man named Selku Murmu, broke silence after a while to say that his wife had been cured by ordinary, regular medical treatment."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A Miracle at Mother Teresa's

"I had already helped expose one of the "miracles" connected with the work of this woman. The man who originally made her famous was a distinguished if rather silly British evangelist (later a Catholic) named Malcolm Muggeridge. It was his BBC documentary, Something Beautiful for God, which launched the "Mother Teresa" brand on the world in 1969. The cameraman for this film was a man named Ken Macmillan, who had won high praise for his work on Lord Clark's great art history series, Civilisation. His understanding of colour and lighting was of a high order. Here is the story as Muggeridge told it, in the book that accompanied the film:

[Mother Teresa's] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused...I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.

He concluded that

This is precisely what miracles are for - to reveal the inner reality of God's outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle...I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.

He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:

During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, "Ah well, it's very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?" And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, "Well, we may as well have a go." So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, "That's amazing. That's extraordinary." And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy." And three or four days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: "We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle."

"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

The Wheel in the Sky

It's funny when life starts coming full circle, or sometimes circle upon circle upon circle. I wonder if it means something when that happens. I wonder if that means that you're zeroing in on something, like the way a predator swoops around its prey in swiftly shrinking circles, like the way a man can't help but linger in ever-closing circles around the woman who has bewitched his senses before he dares to reach out and touch her. Like you've just completed one huge revolution around your own personal sun. We all have our own suns that we orbit around our whole lives, suns that keep us anchored, that power us, that provide us our point of reference in a very dark and unmapped universe. Sometimes other objects get in the way and cast shadows on us, and we lose sight of our sun, the source of our warmth, the memory of what we once knew to be true when we first set out on our journey. Sometimes our orbits take us far, far away from our suns, and we start to feel cold and frightened, off course, lost. We begin to feel the presence of our sun less and less as where we are on our invisible orbit makes us feel colder and darker. We forget what we believed in in the beginning and why we do anything that we do. But whether we know it or not, we are still on our orbit. Our sun - even if we can't see it anymore - still holds us in its gravitational pull, and if we just hold on, we will inevitably swing back towards our sun and behold it again at the same point where we first started our journey from. We will be in two places and at two points in time at once. What is place and time in a universe where there is no up or down or sunrise or sunset? But we will have returned to something, except we will have changed, we will have seen things, we will have been places, and we will be able to acknowledge our journey and renew our belief in the sun that drives us before we set off on yet another revolution.

It was almost a year ago, at the same time this year, that I felt like I'd been there before, except not. Not really deja vu, but like I was there and somewhere else at the same time. Two places, two times at once. How do you plot that on a space versus time graph? 'There' was NDTV in New Delhi in 2011. I was interning in the first of a series of departments, and that particular month, I was at the internet news desk, which was basically 3 PCs on one side of a long cubicle. On the other side was a very excited internet sports desk. It was a special time for them - the cricket World Cup was on. It only came around once every 4 years, and this time, it may as well have been the Olympics because an IndoPak semi-final was on the cards. At the Mohali stadium in Punjab, right across the border from Pakistan. Patriotism was rising a little bit everyday around the country, much like the mercury in everyone's thermometers. The air even began to smell a little bit more greenwhiteandsaffron. Stick your tongue out and you could taste those colours in the gray Delhi breeze. People around the country were planning to take an off from work, officially or unofficially, on the day of the match, and everybody knew that their bosses would understand. No real work that could be avoided would happen that day anyway. It's just the way. Indians are funny like that. They snap and snarl at and often steal from each other every single day of their lives, but a national level cricket match whips up the long-muffed-out symbolism of their freedom fighters. The ghosts of the khhaadi heroes and heroines start wandering India's streets. It's like the whole country becomes a television rerun of 'Gandhi'. A defiant salt march, anyone? This age that I live in, the age that I am of, is an age where most young people have no cause to offer their youth to, where they mindlessly swing between desk jobs and fast food and bad postures. To such a generation, the promise of an impending IndoPak match, with the possibility of their mostly crumbly country winning its first World Cup final in twenty years, flicks on a light on their usually expressionless faces. With every passing day that brought the semi-final closer, that light grew brighter. It reminded me of the general mood in the United States around the 2008 presidential election. I was living in a Republican state where you didn't dare show too much support for the Democratic candidate, but the day after Obama became the first black president and brought the Conservative hold on the White House and the world to an end, one couldn't walk down the street without meeting the knowing glance of someone wearing a half-smile as if you shared some underground secret, like you weren't alone, like you won, like you had contributed just by being alive. Like it meant something.

So there I was quite firmly, almost 30 years old and at NDTV, but I was also somewhere else. That other place was 12 years ago. I was 15 kilos lighter and in Lucknow with my mother in our old crumbly home in our mouldy moholla. I had finished 12th grade and was in the country for my university entrance exams. It was that period in every modern student's life where when you think of the future you don't really see anything at all, just a vague blackness extending into forever. Que sera sera, what will I be? A doctor, an engineer? In architecture, biotechnology, genetics, hotel management? Papa kehte hain bara naam karega...

It was 1999, but it was the Lucknawi summer from every year before. Life had slowed down, and the desert 'loo' winds from Rajasthan were swirling about like bodyless jinns in our ancient alleys. The mangoes in Barabanki were ripening. The Kargil war was on in Kashmir. Ajmal Jami's footage from the border made it to our rented-for-the-summer TV. He was making Barkha Dutt famous. I'd follow the story on NDTV everyday. I remember how the body of one army boy from Lucknow made it back to town and how the roads were blocked off for the mourners that showed up for the boy from their city who'd died for his country. They wouldn't let his family grieve alone. The World Cup was also on that summer. I remember an IndoPak match that I'd got excited about. I'd watched it on TV with my mother even. I don't care for sports at all, but I always enjoy an IndoPak cricket match. India had ended up winning that match, and I had leapt up in all my 18-year-old glory as someone set off celebatory firecrackers on Victoria 'Tooria' Street outside. My cousins who lived a couple of houses down from us had announced a few days earlier that they would offer extra prayer rakaats to Allah so that India would win the match. Maybe Allah had listened to them. Our generation was different. We were Muslims but we had been born and raised as Indians. We felt no affinity for the Pakistani cricket team. It felt good to know for sure which side you were on, even when some identities threatened to make things confusing, even if just for others. Like it did for me and other Muslims in another hemisphere in the years that were to follow.

But here I was back again, 12 years later at NDTV in New Delhi. Ajmal Jami was now on my Facebook friends list. I had even spoken to him a few times about that Kargil footage I had seen in 1999. Back then, Dilli really had been far, a monster city that swallowed the mild Lucknawis who dared. In another few months, I would fly to America and make a life there for almost 10 years. Back then, I could not have known that, many countries and so much living later, not only would I dare to return to India, but that this time I would be sitting inside the NDTV office, talking to the man whose footage I had seen in that warm room in a moholla that time and even I have forgotten. I even saw Barkha Dutt at the NDTV office a few times. She's a lot taller in person. Amazonian even. I was in two places, two times at once. In 2011, an IndoPak World Cup match was around the corner. India won that match. India went on to win the final against Sri Lanka and brought home the trophy for the first time since 1983. Somewhere 12 years ago, I leapt as firecrackers went off on Tooria Street.

Magar yeh toh koi na jaane ke meri manzil hai kahaan...

My salvation army

I was feeling helpless and alone. The way you do when you're slumming all alone in a new city and don't yet feel confident about yourself. Especially when you're from a religious minority and it kind of shows in how you look and the way you talk.

The call had come sometime in the first few months of the NDTV broadcast training programme in New Delhi. It was from a family friend I had known for a brief period in my childhood long ago in Muscat, Oman. She was now married and settled in Lucknow but was in Delhi for her mother's cancer treatment. She had been bringing her mother, whom I had known for a longer period of time in Muscat but had not met in years, to Delhi regularly for treatment. Every week from Lucknow, which was 6 hours away by train one-way.

Aunty needed blood. In the next few hours. Her daughter wanted me to get the word out somehow about her mother's blood type. My blood wasn't the correct type, and I didn't really know anyone in Delhi. Except the young kids who were in training with me, but I didn't know them well enough to ask for their blood. How does one approach someone for blood? I didn't know what to do. I felt helpless and alone.

I've heard stories of people, particularly in India, refusing to donate blood to people they know, friends or respected elders even, just because they were of a different religion or caste. When the time came, they would draw that line. These were often-repeated urban legends from the motherland that would make their way to the diaspora overseas, particularly during times of ethnic tensions. I heard these growing up outside of India.

I was the only Muslim in training at NDTV. I felt self-conscious about it anyway. It was one of the reasons why, after the phone call, I suddenly felt helpless and alone, and why Delhi felt extra empty and foreign.

I hung up the phone. Three of my closest friends at the NDTV media institute crowded up to me and asked me what the matter was. I told them. Turned out that two of them had blood of the very type that was needed. I didn't even get to ask them to donate, they volunteered the minute they found out which blood type it was. They were ready to leave for the hospital immediately. I would've only needed one person to come along, but both my friends with the required blood type decided to go with me. The third friend wanted to come along anyway.

All three of my friends were born and raised Hindus. Bengali, Gujarati, and Rajasthani. The cancer-stricken lady I knew for a while in a past life was a Muslim. They didn't know her, yet they offered her their blood without even being asked. They offered a part of their own personal bodies. They never even let me get to asking them.

Newton's Apple: an Ode to Science

"It is no more crazy than a dog finding a rainbow. Dogs are colourblind, Gretchen. They don't see colour. Just like we don't see time. We can feel it, we can feel it passing, but we can't see it. It's just like a blur. It's like we're riding in a supersonic train and the world is just blowing by, but imagine if we could stop that train, eh, Gretchen? Imagine if we could stop that train, get out, look around, and see time for what it really is? A universe, a world, a thing as unimaginable as colour to a dog, and as real, as tangible as that chair you're sitting in. Now if we could see it like that, really look at it, then maybe we could see the flaws as well as the form. And that's it; it's that simple. That's all I discovered. I'm just a...a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I'm that dog who saw a rainbow, only none of the other dogs believed me."

- Stuart, "Kate & Leopold"

It happened sometime during the sound class at the NDTV Media Institute. Most of the 40-something apprentices had zoned out because of the technical nature of the subject, probably PTSD-ing over memories of science classes in school. An unfortunate phenomenon because if explained properly - enthusiastically - scientific principle has the ability to suddenly click and come flinging itself at you, wrapping itself around you over and over until you feel like a mummy helplessly sealed in all the possibilities that have suddenly revealed themselves to you. But most students never get to that point. Most students are turned away from science because they were not presented the science of possibility, the science of heroic vision, the science of revolution. Unfortunate, so unfortunate. Because that click when scientific principle dawns on you, really dawns on you, feels like the moment of shock when you realise that you are in love and you can't do anything about the psychedelic colours that are rotating in your eyes. Everybody knows that falling in love, requited or not, is one of life's greatest experiences. One has not lived if one has not loved with wonder and amazement, their mouths hanging open, their sight having long set out on the journey into the far, far distance. Imagine how much a person misses when one does not fall, really helplessly head-first fall, in love. That is exactly the experience a student who is not presented the real juice of science is deprived of.

The sound engineer who had been addressing us was obviously not one of those students. He was supposed to teach us about microphones but had digressed to the aesthetic quality of sound. He had started talking faster and faster, and his eyes had started sparkling. This was a man caught in the throes of reciting poetry about his beloved.

He had already told us that the human ear could only hear a very narrow range of sound. Human beings were only able to hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. This is not a measure of how loud the sound is. He made us listen to sounds that were close to 20 Hz and also to 20,000 Hz, and we could barely hear them because they were on the very edges of our ears' hearing abilities. He made us listen to sounds that were off our hearing scale, and we couldn't hear them at all. But the sound was there. Just because you couldn't hear it didn't mean that it didn't exist. It was propagating itself all around us, the waves were probably hitting our eardrums, but because our ears were not built to register sound waves of that frequency, we couldn't even detect its existence. That was a mildly frightening experience.

But everyone knows that dogs can hear sounds that human beings can't. But they can't
see colour like we can. Our perception of light is also determined by what our eyes have been built to detect on the electromagnetic spectrum. Along that spectrum, which to our knowledge is infinite, human eyes can only see a very narrow range, specifically 790 terahertz (blue), 400 terahertz (red), and all the colours in between. It is just EM radiation, and the part our eyes can detect we call light. The ultraviolent radiation and infrared radiation right on the edges of the visible light spectrum? It's there, but we can't see it. Because our sight, like our hearing sense, is very, very limited.

And so it happened, right in the middle of sound class. I was sitting in the front row, my eyes (unlike most of the rest of the class) glued to the sound engineer who was still caught up in the embrace of his love for sound. My mind was uncharacteristically quiet, but that often happens when I'm looking at passion playing out before my eyes.

And suddenly something exploded in my face. It had happened. Scientific principle had clicked. And shaken my insides quite violently.

I looked around. No one had noticed. The class was still slump over. The sound engineer was still going at it. But I would never be the same again.

If our senses are so limited, what makes us think that our understanding of everything isn't? What makes us think that only what we can see or touch or feel is real, and that everything else cannot be? Maybe there are more colours, maybe there are more sounds. We know for a fact that there are and that other living beings around us can sense them. Will you let a dog convince you that there is no such thing as green? Or a painting? Will you let a dog laugh at the senselessness of a Rubic's cube or deny you the rainbow you can see right in front of you? Can you even imagine what existence feels like to a dog? To a fish? To someone with a differently-abled brain and sensory organs? Some creatures can detect electric fields, tell direction based on the Earth's magnetic field (an inbuilt compass!), they can even see in what you think is the dark. Some can see UV and IR radiation the way you and I can see pink. What would you do if you could suddenly see the radio waves around you when you couldn't see them before? What if you could see them in the sky? What would they look like? A new colour? What if you could see them going right through you when you couldn't see them before? Do feelings have a colour? Do they have a sound, or even a temperature, a scent, a texture, a flavour? They say animals can smell fear. How about memories, intentions, intuition, or even sex?

Maybe there are many other ways to exist that we not only live in passive oblivion of but that we actively and sometimes violently deny. And why? Because we cannot detect them? That is like trying to measure time with a ruler. And we don't even know what time is. We don't even know if it exists. We assume it exists because we see change around us. If there is no change, then there is no time? Does change cause time? Is time merely a by-product of change? Bacteria exists not only around us but inside of us. What else may be existing, and in what form, around us? Inside us?

That's what I got from just being introduced to the audible sound spectrum. 20 Hz - 20 kHz. Just a numerical range to the eye, but all the things it could mean... Just one small fact that didn't mean anything by itself, but like a seed that's been planted invisible into fertile soil, it burst out into new life when the conditions were right. When the time was right. Just because you couldn't see it before doesn't mean it wasn't there, waiting, the whole time.

Cancerians

"I was a success story - for the moment. But if I got sick again, I would no longer be a success story, and the truth was, at times I was still as scared and anxious as a patient. What if the cancer came back? Each time I visited a hospital I had an uneasy reaction. The first thing that struck me was the smell. If I did a smell test I could find a hospital with my eyes closed: disinfectant, medicine, bad cafeteria food, and recycled air through old vents, stale and artificial. And the lighting: a leaky radiant, it made everyone look pale, like they didn't have quite enough blood in their bodies. The sounds were artificial and grating: the squeak of the nurses' rubber-soled shoes, the sound of the hospital mattresses. A hospital mattress is covered with plastic, and I remembered how it felt and sounded as I shifted in the bed, the crackle of the covering beneath me, every time I moved, crackle, crackle, wrinkle, wrinkle.

These are the odors and sensations and images that all cancer patients carry with them no matter how far removed they are from the disease, and they are so traumatic, so concentrated, that they can bring about reactions years afterward.

Some people even get physically ill when they encounter sights or smells that remind them of illness. There was a story in the New England Journal of Medicine: a woman was treated for breast cancer with very arduous chemo, and she suffered violent bouts of nausea. Five years later, she was walking in a mall when she ran into her oncologist, the doctor who had treated her. She threw up. So that's how cancer stays with you. And it has stayed with me."

- Lance Armstrong, "Every Second Counts"

You heard it here first

I saw a UFO when I was in school.

At least that's what I think it was. I was 12-14 years old and in the middle of a lesson in my classroom in Muscat, Oman. Our windows that year had a view of the highway piercing through the rocky al Hajar mountains in the distance. The bright blue waters of the Persian Gulf lay unseen on the other side. That day the sky was the way the local newspapers predicted it to be the whole year round - clear to partly cloudy.

I don't remember what subject we had that period. I remember the teacher going on with the lesson and my classmates silently making (or passing) notes. I was seated at my desk in the front of the class, my upper body leaning over the wooden top, my face cradled in the palm of one hand as I looked on at the teacher with an expression of teenage boredom.

My eyes left the teacher and wandered over to the nearest window. Far in the distance, an object that looked exactly like a flying saucer was hovering above the mountains in the baby blue Omani sky. The UFO didn't move, it just stayed in that one spot for the whole 5 seconds I kept looking at it. I was still leaning over my desk, and my face was still cradled in the palm of my hand.

I shifted my gaze across the classroom and then moved it back over to the window. The UFO was gone. The mountains, the highway, the tiny cars zipping along the highway looked deceptively innocent.

My deja vu

Within these gates, I am never grown. Within this perimeter, the world cannot follow me. This is the only place where I can visit the past, for nomatter how the people within its hallways come and go, the hallways themselves remain the same. They say that people leave a part of themselves in every place they have ever been. The air here is thick with mirages from the past, and walking through the grounds can sometimes feel like walking under water, with layers and layers of old livings blanketing you into slow motion. If you touched the walls, looked out a window, you'd see all that had happened there before you, all of it at once, like video that's been exposed many times over.

Some people believe that time doesn't exist in a linear fashion, like a single train track that the carriage of one's life can only move forward on just once, never to find that track again. Some believe that time is like a TV set, a single location where all channels, with each channel being a thread of time, are streaming through at the same time, all happening at the same time. All one has to do is choose the channel, the reality, that one wants to be a part of.

As I stood in my old school's senior library, handing over an autographed copy of my very first book to the librarian who used to be in-charge of the middle school library when I was a student, the library became the TV set, and I began to feel dizzy as the channel I was in, the present time, began to fade in and out of other channels. Each blink of my eyes put me into a different channel. But who was changing the channel? Why was I existing across channels? Was I not a part of any one channel? Blink, the librarian was flipping through my new book. Blink, I was waiting for the librarian to issue me my book before the bell rang for my next period. Blink, the librarian was congratulating me on getting my first book published. Blink, my classmates were trying their best to keep their voices down and not annoy the librarian. Blink, all the students around me looked like all the classmates I'd ever had.

Blink, I smiled as the librarian finally issued the book to me. Blink, I smiled as the librarian told me he'd keep my book out on display.

"For men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Clash of Civilisations, Jr.

It was 1999, and I was explaining my family background to an American girl in our residence hall in Oklahoma, USA.

"My mother has written books and poems in Urdu, and her father was a journalist and a freedom fighter. My own dad quotes Victorian English poetry at the drop of a hat, and I think the only thing he doesn't think twice about before spending money on it is books. All in all, seems like literary pursuits are our family tradition."

The White girl's eyes grew large.

"Wow!" she said. "And I thought you said your family was religious!"

She may as well have said "black is white". My mind drew a blank as I realised that some basic assumption of a common ground was amiss in this interaction of ours. I failed to grasp the girl's implication that religion and intellect were mutually exclusive. How did the presence, the choice of one completely eliminate that of the other?

That was my first encounter with the Western divorce between spirituality and academics. I encountered this notion repeatedly during the 10 years I spent in North America in every realm of life - education, politics, art, life & death. The very idea seemed to be the unspoken rule of modern Western civilisation; people were willing to kill and be killed for it. The air was thick with an invisible assumption I would have to decipher on my own. Over time I traced its origins back to the rebellion of Europe against its Church, rebellions also known as the Renaissance and Reformation movements. The battle between science and the spirit had begun...

...purely a European phenomenon though. For instance, secularism in America means the complete absence of religion from public life. If you are religious, then you are pathetically unevolved. In India, secularism implies the noisy coexistence of all ways of life as long as no one's stepping on anyone else's toes. But if you're an atheist, then there's something fundamentally wrong with you.

I was raised in a Muslim household. My journalist grandfather was also a Mufti, a lifelong scholar of Islam. We are religious - we believe in one unseen Deity. We also study languages and various sciences. We are avid book readers and spend our days discussing politics, art, literature, and theology. Through the faithful observation of science, we want to relish the creation of a God whose first word to His last prophet was 'iqra' - 'read'.

Read in the name of your Lord and Cherisher who created.
Created man from a mere clot of blood.
Read and your Lord is the most generous.
The One who taught the use of the pen.
Taught man what he knew not.

- The Holy Quran (96:1-5)

Of course, none of this occurred to my 18-year-old self back then. At that moment 10 years ago, two college girls stood facing each other, the East and the West, miscommunicating once again.

Frankenfood

Multi-national corporations are trying to bring genetically-modified (GM) foods to India. But what does that mean? Let Mahesh Bhatt fill you in in 30 minutes.

Poison on the Platter from Jeffrey Smith on Vimeo.

Do you realise?

As 2009 draws to an end, and people all over the world prepare their party itinerary for the new year celebrations, let us remember that:

- the Gregorian calendar has only been around since the 16th century
- there were innumerable calenders all over the world before the Gregorian one
- there are many, many other calendars that are still being used today
- human beings have relied not only on the sun but the moon, constellations, planets, seasons, natural disasters, and reigns of kings to mark time periods
- calendars rely on at least one external object to relatively define the passage of time
- your age says more about the number of times your planet has revolved around the sun with you on it rather than anything about you
- even time, as people define it, is a relative concept

Reminds me of a seance transcript I once read where the medium repeatedly failed to get an answer from the channeled entity regarding dates and how long it had lived. The entity seemed to have answers for everything except the time-based questions. It would go silent, or ask for clarifications, like it could just not get its...head around the concept.

This is not about believing in ghosts. This is about accepting that you are not the authority on everything, that your view of life is limited to your very localised circumstances. Even the religions of the world simplify Creation for you in a version that you may understand, asking you to just trust, have faith in the actual reality that cannot be fathomed right now with your limited senses. Understand the limitations of what you think you know as an absolute fact. Unlearn what you have been told, every single bit of it, so you can really begin to see the true message. Unlearn that blue is for boys and pink is for girls - colours are merely light vibrations. Unlearn that chiseled or hairless or tall is all that's acceptable - it's just what you've been fed. Unlearn that summer means June and winter means December - there is no such thing really as a month. When you touch a table, a tree, another person, yourself, do you think they're all solid? They're not. They are all made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of protons, electrons, neutrons, which are further made of smaller particles that only differ from each other in the way they behave. But your skin, your eyes, your every sense tells you that the table, the tree, the other person, yourself are solid. So are you going to believe everything your 5 senses tell you?

Unlearn the stereotypes. Unlearn it all, challenge what you define yourself by. Do it if you have the courage to discover what is absolute, what is universal. Undo all the conditioning and break free. Everything you know right now is someone else's opinion. You can't even be sure of what you have seen. Don't you see, I mean really feel in some strange place inside? The only thing you can be sure of is that you can't be sure of anything at all.

Beauty and Brains - watch out Sarah Palin!

O-M-G.

Let me just say that my heart completely melts into a soggy estrogenic mess while gazing upon the gloriousness that is the profile of Pakistani ex-cricketer Imran Khan.

And then I read this. Not only was I super-surprised - nay, stunned - that Imran Khan, super heart-throb and hazaaron dilon ki dhadkan, has such deep thoughts about these very intellectual things, but that his article actually reflects my opinions and experiences so much that it very well could've been written by me. Just goes to prove that we're soulmates (or involved in a Vulcan mind-meld).

But on a serious note, I'm very impressed. And surprised! This is Imran Khan we're talking about. Pretty boy and media darling. Who woulda thunk it?

Gary, is that you?

Something totally weird happened to me today. I was standing in line at the downtown Subway when this guy wheeled his bike in. He parked it in the corner of the store and stood next to me in line. One look at him and all sorts of bells and whistles went off in me. He looked like a grown-up version of this guy I'd mentioned in my book, Beardless Muslim (currently on the backburner for the want of some major overhauls). Check out the excerpt:

"I had this Astronomy class my freshman year at college. While I may not remember the workings of the Hubble telescope or why the opponents of the Big Bang Theory think it’s absolute bosh, I can never forget this particular incident.

There was this guy in my class. He was probably the same age I was, as was the rest of the class. We were all in this thing called ‘college’ together, trying to figure out exactly why we were in this Astronomy class when our degree sheet clearly stated our major as ‘undeclared’. I wish I could remember this particular fellow’s name, but let’s just call him Gary. I really don’t want to keep referring to him as the ‘boy’, ‘fellow’, ‘guy’, or any other nouns I might have to creatively come up with just because I forgot the bloke’s name.

Let me tell you what Gary looked like. He was a white boy of average height, very pale with the most curiously creepy light grayish-blue eyes I have ever seen. Remember, I’m from India where eyes besides the brown/black variety only rarely arise due to complicated genetic mutations. I’d noticed before that he was always dressed in black and that the friends he used to attend the class with were also always in black. Their hair was even blacker than mine! Sometimes they went ahead with the whole bondage theme and donned chains and other assorted metal devices. Once I noticed that Gary had black nail-polish on, which made me quite jealous because I had never been allowed to wear any sort of nail-polish myself. After my guttural reaction of envy, the fact that he was a male and that males traditionally don’t paint their nails occurred to me. Before I had time to get over that, I saw him come to class wearing a black cape. But it was not Halloween. Maybe some other American festival…?

Upon innocently asking one of my American friends about these strange new things I was seeing, I discovered that Gary and his friends were evil Goths, devil worshippers, spawns of Satan. Hey, I didn’t have anything personal against the guy.

So one day I showed up to my Astronomy class wearing shalwar qameez, a totally Indian outfit. It was no big deal, I wear those things quite a bit, and I was happily wrapped up in the feel of home. The class went ahead as usual, no surprises there. Fifty minutes passed by in a shot and as the professor dismissed the class with the promise of impending homework, the class ended as the students folded down those inconveniently tiny writing desks back down to our pseudo-movie-theater chairs. I had no idea what was about to happen in the next few minutes.

Gary raced and weaved through the swarm of clueless freshman like the Flash and tapped me on the shoulder. I can’t quite remember but I don’t think I’d really spoken to him before. He was in another class of mine that semester – Freshman Orientation (yes, that’s a real class they charge tuition for). In any case, I was pleasantly surprised when he stopped me at the end of that class.

“Hey, are you from India?”

My stomach went all aflutter the way it usually does when someone takes an interest in my ethnicity right out of the blue. It’s quite a matter of pride, really.

“Why, yes!” I chirped.

“Are you Muslim?”

My heart leapt!

“Yes, I am!”

I was totally not expecting what he said next.

“So is it true that when you’re fighting the enemies of Islam, like jihad, and if you’re doing good things for your religion, you keep collecting so many points from God, and once you die and get to Heaven, you get to have sex with so many virgins?”

Uhhhh.

That was one of the most traumatizing events in my life. How can I be so sure? The fact that I generally have a great memory but today, I cannot for the life of me recall what happened once he posed me that unforgettable question. All I can remember is that I was so stunned that I didn’t know what to say. The next thing I remember is that I was back in my dorm room yammering away about the incident to my brother who’d been in the country since the early 90s.

Here I was, a fresh 18-year-old, looking at life with rose-tinted glasses, unbelievably naïve, thoroughly delighted that someone had recognized my ethnic background because of the clothes I was wearing, and expecting him to pose me a wonderfully intellectual question that I could answer with all of my innate wisdom and patience. Enlightenment is a wonderful thing. Buddha got enlightened, and look where that took him.

But despite all my interest in comparative religion, world philosophy, and a college education that had just begun, I was stunned. I don’t think my parents covered this aspect of my religious training. All I’d heard was that Heaven was overflowing with rivers of milk and honey, all the pets you could ever want (I’m a cat person myself), your friends and loved ones that you’d met in your lifetime, palaces made of gold and silver studded with gems, rainbows, even chocolate if that’s what I wanted. I don’t think anyone’d ever mentioned virgins to me before.

Collecting points from God, eh? That would make for a sweet video game. And just when you’d thought we’d left Gary behind…

The week after the episode from Astronomy class, I was busy trying to pay full-attention to the professor during the Freshman Orientation class. I think he was talking about the art facilities we had on campus. Gary noticed me sitting in the front row (I’m one of those front-row-benchers you’d love to hate), and he scooted up to the vacant chair right next to me.

Gary had a slithery quality, the way he talked and moved, you’d think he was sneaky. And his eyes didn’t help his case. There was always something about him that made me feel uncomfortable, maybe it was the way he’d talk, like as if he was telling you a secret, even if he was only telling you his name. Or maybe it was just the whole sex-and-virgin issue he wanted addressed the week before.

Anyway, I was usually very quiet during Freshman Orientation class, mostly because I was the only non-white person there and the other students that shared the class with me just didn’t know what to say to me. So they played safe, and decided never to say anything to me at all, except this one time when we were all supposed to interview someone from another country as part of an assignment, and guess who got asked.

But I digress. So Gary sat up next to me…nay, slithered up to me, splat in the middle of the professor’s lecture about our fine and diverse art resources. He (Gary, not the professor) shifted the chair closer up to me and leaned in to my side as I froze in recollection of the Gary-related episode from only the week before.

“Hey,” he hushed.

Oh crap, I thought.

“So why are Indian sculptures so erotic?” he asked.

“It’s art,” I stubbornly replied, neither one of us taking our eyes off of the professor who blissfully went on with his lecture. Dude, arts gratia artis. You don’t trivialize art. It is an insult to creative inspiration to trivialize it to something to simple as sex, drugs, or rock-and-roll (sorry, Buddy Holly, but you know it’s true).

“So what’s Indian music like?”

I decided to give myself the liberty of a second to adjust to this shift on conversation.

“I’m not musically trained,” I hissed, “but we have the same basic stuff as Western Music. You have do-re-mi, we have sa-re-ga.”

“Sing it for me.”

Alice once said, “curiouser and curiouser”. That day in 1999, Khadija thought “weirder and weirder”. I desperately wanted the conversation to end, and so I decided to forgo any protests and comply with his ‘request’. I mean, come on, we were in the middle of a lecture. Who belts out a tune in the middle of a lecture? This was Freshman Orientation, not Music 101. But I just wanted this encounter to be over, and anyway, I’ve long since forgiven myself for what I did next, and I don’t care for your judgment.

I sang.

For Gary.

“Sa re ga ma pa dha ni sa”.

For the musically inclined amongst us, you may sing this in tune to ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’. You may sing it just to put yourself in my shoes as well.

That day I realized two things. One, that it is incredibly hard to whisper a tune. Two, Gary didn’t really bring out the best in me.""

Was this Gary, this tall dude standing next to me with the dusty dark brown hair with a generous mad flop of white? I mean, maybe he was too old? He had sideburns too. Wait, let me sneak a quick look at his eyes. I can never forget that diluted grey. I didn't bother. Not that I'd be able to look at them anyway. From what I remember, those eyes always scared me to death, their gaze just sleepily lingering too long.

So I turned and blabbed - "did you go to OSU?" He turned and gazed at me for a second just too long. It's not him, I thought. And then he said, "yeah". He had me going there for a second; I thought he was going to say no.

"Did you take an Astronomy class?" I asked. He paused for a second, and then rolled on with his forever sleepy drawl, "...yes."

That did it for me. "You were in my class!" I blurted. I'm sure Gary'd never had someone recognise him from random events 9 years ago. I know because he said so. He said I had a great memory.

We caught up over the next 10 minutes. As we struggled with our soggy sandwiches, I learned the following about Gary who looked like he had abandoned his curious ways for business-casual suburbia:

1. his name is Brian (and now I remember him telling me his name during Freshman Orientation)
2. he probably asked me all those weird questions because he'd been reading about Hinduism in those days
3. he's a software engineer in downtown
4. he is married and has two daughters, Mia age 2 years and 10 months and Gabriella aged 10 months
5. he left OSU a long time ago and finished up at community college in 2007

Brian finished his sandwich and rose to say goodbye. Then, as if I needed more proof of his identity, he slithered away from the table and rode out on his bike. His slither had become less pronounced and heavier, like an older bear more firm in his step, but a quiet shadow-like movement all the same. Looking at him, you would've never thought that he'd once worn black nailpolish. He melted out of the restaurant, and with that, ended the weirdest encounter I've had since...well, since Astronomy class.

Hello Myers, hello Briggs

I am an INFJ. What are you? Take the free test and leave me a comment about your personality type.

For more information about the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), click here. You can get more information about the individual MBTI personality types by scrolling down to the 'Type dynamics and development' section and clicking on the relevant personality types in the 'The Sixteen Types' table on the right-hand-side.

For all you psych majors

I have been conducting my own personal Pavlovian investigation regarding a hard candy related incident. You know when people keep a pile of candy at their desk at the office for folks to enjoy? Well the administrative assistant at my office started doing just that a few months ago, and I had no idea why I'd feel so delighted everytime I tried one of the butterscotch candies. I got slightly addicted to them and I had a feeling I had had this candy before, but I just could not figure it out. It made me nuts. What was it that I felt everytime the butterscotch lapped up with my saliva in my mouth into apparently happy blocked out memories? It felt like repressed previous incarnation memories that they show on TV. For months this black hole in my memory bothered me. Then one day, as it usually is with these things, I suddenly remembered. Twenty years ago my family was visiting Lahore, Pakistan, for my dad's youngest sister's wedding. There I met one of my dad's maternal uncles. I've met him only that one trip, but it was sufficient for me to give him the name 'toffee waale dada' (the grandpa with the candy). A tall man with a white moustache, he'd be swarmed by children wherever he went because of his candy stash. He'd always, always, always have this delicious hard candy for the children. I remember it was as addictive as a drug. I'd never been able to find candy that tasted exactly the same until twenty years later in Tulsa, Okla-frikkin-homa.

So that's what it was. I'd forgotten the taste of the candy and only remembered the wonderful grandchildlike happiness it brought me at the age of 7. That feeling was triggered back into the foreground of my mind when I experienced the same taste again. What a completely involuntary reaction. I didn't even know why I was feeling what I was feeling. It's like my mind has a, well, mind of its own.

Babykillers

The preference for male children over female in India is no secret. In 1970, my mother shared the same maternity ward with another woman who had given birth to a daughter. The young woman was completely terrified about what her family and inlaws would think. My mother remembers that this woman's family and inlaws did not celebrate the birth. In fact, they were disappointed in the woman, and looking at their behaviour, you would've thought that there had been a death in the family. Of course, it is the woman that gets blamed for the sex of the child too.

This is utter rubbish and completely unacceptable for a culture that long worshipped the feminine as the ultimate manifestation of the sacred forces of the universe. Education, education, education is the answer to all problems. Reminds me of an instance when I was 17 in India on my summer hols. An aunt of mine was chatting with another lady about some poor woman who kept giving birth to daughters and was harassed by her inlaws because of it. I had studied the details of sex determination via genetics in 12th grade, and I could not help announcing 'but it's her husband that determines the sex of the babies!' I mean it's like blaming the oven for not turning out cookies after you yourself put in the ingredients for a cake. I got even more annoyed when my aunt and her friend, women well into their 40s and beyond, giggled and blushed at my unmentionable opinion.

These are things that must be addressed to all men and women, to all boys and girls. It's not a joke. Not any one gender is better than the other; they are meant to live in harmony, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I like both cookies and cakes quite fine. They've both got sugar, maybe not spice, but definitely everything nice.

SPFfing it up

Do you know what your SPF level is?