A talk about people and the world

What is Barsaat?

Barsaat is a Substack blog about life, feelings, philosophy, people and so much more. The common thread which connects every article is the perspective of a 21-year-old woman observing the world and sharing her insightful vision with the readers. She brings everyone into her mind and states her thoughts without faltering. Wit, talent and kindness are only some of her qualities.

For each question, we will be analysing and exploring a different essay. To read them in full, here’s where to find them: https://barsaat.substack.com/. Thank you Sagarika Srivastava for this interview and for being such an incredible author.

Why did you call your blog Barsaat?

My name means daughter of the sea. I’ve always liked bodies of water and proximity to them, but I thought that maybe it would be too pretentious to name my blog after the sea. My next favourite source of water is the rain, so I chose Barsaat. It means rain in Hindi, which is my native language.

Starting from the questions raised in your essay Watching my dog dream, do you think people can learn how to love? What happens when you realize that it is not possible to save someone from the nightmares they have within themselves?

I believe that love is innate inside every person but learning how to wield it is another matter entirely. Not everyone gets the chance to use the ability to love, due to different causes like their upbringing or the environment. Fundamentally love is at the core of all of us, but if it’s not expressed, it gets twisted and bastardised into something evil.

I want to differentiate between love, as the emotion, and loving, as the action. The feeling is already there, it cannot be created, it exists. As much as I believe that people are masters of their own destiny, I don’t think that you can alter someone else’s path. If the individual is not acting to save themselves from their metaphorical or actual nightmares, then possibly the act of saving can’t happen. A lot of times people say that they want to be saved, but they don’t want it: what they want is to be understood. You cannot save someone from who they are, especially if their issues are of their own creation. If you fix someone, you’ll take their identity away, and who wants to have their identity taken away? The more you try to go against someone’s nature, the more badly they’ll react. Maybe you should just understand instead, and if it’s incompatible with you, walk away.

In People watching at Art Central you reflect on how middle-class aspirationalism may lead to cultural capitalism. In the 1850s, the Boston Brahmins sought exclusivity; nowadays, fast fashion wants to lure more people into buying its products. How can we reverse this process and live in a “happy middle”?

I don’t think it can be reversed. As long as capitalism exists, there will be processes of economic, social and cultural distinction.

For a long time, the dominant cultural view was that of loud luxury, for instance bags with big logos. Brands created higher social value for the customer. This is something that the philosopher Baudrillard talks about in Simulacra and simulation.

Since more people started getting more purchasing power, the trend has shifted to quiet luxury, where you need even more inside knowledge to be able to identify which brands will make you look expensive, but only to a very exclusive group of people. It’s like a secret signal for members of an inner society.

Luxury has been streamlined into a narrower pool of cultural hierarchy. The differentiation is going to create different subcultures. Have you seen how Dostoevsky got suddenly so popular? It’s because everyone wanted to say that they’ve read him. So, it’s going to be a fascinating process to watch as it evolves, because the differentiation can get narrower but also wider, like in this literary case. If you trace it back to medieval history, it’s like the invention of the printing press, so I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.

Your essay The ethics of writing about a lover describes the tendency of using personal matters in books or films. After analysing this process’ ethics, particularly regarding the muses’ inability to defend themselves when being publicly exposed, where would you draw the line between commodification and integrity?

In contemporary times, what art isn’t commercial?

Let’s take the example of a musician. Even if you are pouring your soul into every single song, you’re still going to get the thousands of CDs made in Chinese factories by people working minimum wage and your studio label is still going to use capitalistic marketing processes to get you number one on the charts. No matter how distilled the purity of your artistic intentions, commodification is inescapable.

Another aspect of commodification is that the muse, someone who inspires the piece of art, acquires a so-called commodity fetish. In Marx’s theory, the commodity fetish is the symbolic value that the product acquires with no regard to the origin of the product. It’s inevitable for the muse to acquire that fetish because, as far as the audience is concerned, the muse is not considered a real person. The clash occurs when there is an acknowledgment that the person is real: if the muse is a negative inspiration for their sins in the art, the person pays in real life. I don’t want to point fingers but for example Taylor Swift’s ex boyfriends are still getting death threats after ten years. In the eyes of the audience, they are inevitably connected with the fetish that they acquired in the songs. To sum up my answer, I think it’s inevitable and there’s nothing one can do about it except to mask the muse.

The Guiltiest Girl in the World is a very reflective and sensitive text. The paragraph that struck me the most was the one where you argue that guilt stems from the need to let ourselves believe that we have a choice in a devastated world. Apart from guilt and religion, are there other ways to do so?

Capitalism. Pulling yourself up from the bootstrap and creating a better life for your family: these are some of the greatest sources of inspiration to people to exercise agency. But if I think about it on a more social level, it’s not really a choice. It’s more like: if you give in to capitalism, then you’ll have a higher income and become part of the middle class. It’s a very neoliberal message. The truth is that it does happen, money is a very comforting thing. So having professional aspirations is a way for people to act with purpose, because they are told that through this they can improve their world – not the world, but their world.

Anna Baracco