{"id":602,"date":"2016-04-07T09:07:23","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T09:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=602"},"modified":"2016-04-07T09:07:23","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T09:07:23","slug":"shilpa-shetty-oxford-dictionary-little-women-animal-farm-george-orwell-hunter-s-thompson-tom-wolfe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=602","title":{"rendered":"Dear Shilpa, Worry Not. We All Fake Read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">D<\/span>ear Shilpa Shetty,\n\nI\u2019m here to tell you that it\u2019s okay that you have never read <\/p><em>Animal Farm. <\/em>I\u2019m also here to tell you that it\u2019s perfectly okay to have faked reading it.\n\nFaking it is an important part of the world we live in and everyone who took you down <a href=\"http:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-in-india\/shilpa-shetty-animal-farm-in-text-books-comment-twitter-troll-4399680\/\" target=\"_blank\">yesterday<\/a> has at one point or another faked stuff in their lives. I have too. Pretty much all my life. I\u2019ve never faked an orgasm, but I fake knowing and reading things all the time. Here are some highlights from My Life As a Faker.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\n\n<strong>Age 10\n<\/strong>My best friend, her bitchy school friend, and I went to a lending library. I was 10 and twitchy. They were 13 and older and worldly. What did I have on my side? I read tons and had a killer vocab. If there was one place in the world I should have ruled, it should have been the library but here\u2019s what happened.\n\nBitchy School Friend: My brother and I love Louis L\u2019Amour. I really should get him a couple of new ones.\n\nFaker Me: Oh! I love her.\n\nBitchy School Friend (now with disgust): Louis L\u2019Amour is a man! They are cowboy novels!<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\n\n<strong>Age 14\n<\/strong>I\u2019m walking home from a yoga class with my neighbour. It is\u00a0a cool morning and we are\u00a0silent. Until she starts giggling. What, I ask. \u201cHeeheeehee, when we were trying shirshasana, someone farted. Did you hear?\u201d Sure, I\u2019d heard. It was me. Did she know it was me? I think she did.\n\nI could have confessed then. I never did.\n\nShilpa, do you judge people who fart when doing yoga? I bet you don\u2019t. I bet you don\u2019t even pretend you didn\u2019t hear. I bet you only giggle.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\n\n<strong>Age 23\n<\/strong>I\u2019m in a study group for post-modernist theory. Every week someone makes a joke about the sex lives of ML men. I have to ask someone what ML means and he says Marxist-Leninist. His face is twitching. I have a little bit of a thing for him but that ends there. Obviously, I never tell him or anyone in the group that I\u2019d never, ever read Marx. Not even an annotated version.\n\nAt 25, I am in another study group that meets once a month. I have a job and am trying to push my intellectual horizons. I still haven\u2019t read Marx. I tell everyone else, all young academics, that I haven\u2019t read most of the things they know inside out. What does it matter, we are all here to read Foucault, my friend, who introduced me to the group, and others say kindly to me. Someone starts talking about Walter Benjamin one day. She stops mid-sentence and turns to me.\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\">In the long, endless conversations of pseudos at parties, I am mostly silent.<\/blockquote>\n\u201cDo you know about the Frankfurt School,\u201d she asks with a hint of apology.\n\n\u201cOf course,\u201d I can\u2019t stop myself. I catch the eye of the friend, who&#8217;d introduced me to the group. She probably knows I don\u2019t know Frankfurt School from <em>farsan<\/em>. It\u2019s too late to ask, do you mean Frankfinn School for air hostesses, hahahaha, and move on. That group would have laughed. Maybe.\n\nIn the long, endless conversations of pseudos at parties, I am mostly silent. I usually feel a bit lost, but this one time I was hoping to get an impressive sentence or two when I\u2019ve a chance. Then when I open my mouth I realise I\u2019ve confused the author they were discussing. Who confuses Hunter S Thompson, with Tom Wolfe? \u00a0I do. I\u2019ve often been the pseudo at parties.\n\n<strong>Age 28\n<\/strong>An American writer doing long-form work in India visits my boss. My boss introduces him to me. I mention a New York Times long-form piece, set in India, that sounds like something he\u2019d be interested in. I complain in a semi-charming way about the piece and say, \u201cI like the pictures best.\u201d My boss looks like she wants to jump out of the window. The visitor starts howling with laughter. Here\u2019s the thing. I had only read the blurbs, headline, and of course looked at the pictures. He had written the piece.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\n\n<strong>Age 30\n<\/strong>An annoying British girl tells me about what she did in her gap year. (If you can have a gap year when you are 29.) \u201cI don\u2019t know if you know this Slovenian philosopher, but I spent a year helping him on a documentary about cinema.\u201d\n\nAngrez ki aulaad, I think to myself. \u201cOh you mean \u017di\u017eek,\u201d I ask casually.\n\nAnnoying British Girl, caught in the act of being a racist, condescending piggy, practically keels over in apology. I play cool and I\u2019ve never even read \u017di\u017eek.\n\nSometimes I get away with it, Shilpa. My career in faking it seems like a big #fail, but sometimes I do get away with it. You didn\u2019t get away with it. Not this time. \u00a0But don\u2019t give up.\n\nFaking it is our moral right in this world. A world in which you are expected to be ready with snarky 140-character reactions for every fucking piece of news, where Oxford Dictionaries has to struggle to keep updating itself with Urban Dictionary, where more longlists and shortlists are announced in literature than ever before. Where you\u2019re expected to have quotes and lyrics ready on hand when Castro or Cohen decide to die. The world is filled with relentlessly cool people doing relentlessly cool things and that\u2019s the way it\u2019s going to be. Bet those who are laughing can\u2019t do a shirshasana. Certainly not without farting.\n\nLove,\nMistress at Faking It\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who confuses Hunter S Thompson, with Tom Wolfe?  I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":603,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[1114,1115,1116,1117,1118,1119,1120,1121,1122,1123,1124,1125,1126],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-animal-farm","tag-castro","tag-fidel-castro","tag-george-orwell","tag-hunter-s-thompson","tag-karl-marx","tag-leonard-cohen","tag-little-women","tag-marxist-leninist","tag-oxford-dictionary","tag-shilpa-shetty","tag-tom-wolfe","tag-zizek"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Dear Shilpa, Worry Not. We All Fake Read<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Who confuses Hunter S Thompson, with Tom Wolfe? I do.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=602\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dear Shilpa, Worry Not. We All Fake Read\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Who confuses Hunter S Thompson, with Tom Wolfe? 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