Interview meme redux

[raven]

Interview meme time.

deathbyshinies asked:

1. If you could design a fifth house for Hogwarts, what would its characteristics be? Would you be in it?

Ah! I don't know. Let's see: Gryffindors are brave, but foolhardy; Ravenclaws, intellectual but occasionally dull; Hufflepuffs, hard-working but unexceptional; and Slytherins are ambitious but ruthless. That's the standard, isn't it.

I suspect I wouldn't add a fifth, if I could. I'd make it so you could tick none of the above, or move between them as you saw fit; after all, you're only eleven when sorted. It doesn't make sense that you could grow into another sort of person, or a person who wanted to resist categorisation.

2. If you were a member of Starfleet, what would your job description be?

You know, I have never have wanted to join Starfleet, even if it did exist. It seems too much like hard work. I'd love to be one of the diplomats the Enterprise ferries around, though, like Sarek and Lwaxana Troi. All the fun, plus better clothes.

3. You wouldn't be at Oxford in the 1920s... so what would your life be like if you were alive then?

This is a really good question, and I have to say I don't know the answer. Had I been born into the same family in the 1920s - well, I wouldn't have been. My parents have a mixed-caste marriage, which was much much less common in those days; also it's hard to figure out how they could have met. Still, playing along, had I been born into my father's family during the 1900s, so I'd be my current age round about 1923, well (it's easier to do with my father's family, who have lived in Delhi for several generations - my mother's family history stops around 1947).

Well, I want to say that I'd have been one of the young people who were fighting for freedom at that time; I want to say that I'd have been one of the young people involved with the Congress and the satyagraha movements. Only, I'm a woman, and I would have been then, too, and... it didn't work like that.

4. Tell me about the best party you've ever been to.

You were there, Ms. deathbyshinies! In all my time at Oxford I went to a lot of truly fabulous parties, but my favourite was my twenty-first birthday party, which was a joint party for sebastienne, deepbluemermaid, magic_doors as well as deathbyshinies and me. We took over pridehouse and nearly every friend I've ever had in Oxford was there, we danced around the kitchen to the Indelicates and drank a lot of gin, and by three in the morning we had sunk into a state of eternal mellow. Also I was dressed as la fée verte, I am so classy. Seriously, though, it stands out in my memory as a perfect slice of time.

5. Three reasons why acting is more fun than writing. Three reasons why writing is more fun than acting.

Acting is more fun because fundamentally, it's not a solitary experience the way writing it is! You can bounce off other people when you act. You can do it as a party piece, if requested. And if you're me, and not very good at it all, it's good for you to occasionally do stuff you know you're terrible at, because you can relax and not worry about how well you're doing it.

Writing is more fun than acting.... oh, how do I even begin. Writing is something you can do just for you, and never show anyone, and take quiet, jealous pleasure in. You can write at any time, in any place; it can be a secret you carry around in your head. And again, if you're me: writing is coming home to a house where you know which drawer the spoons are kept in; you can lift a pen, or your hands over the keys, and have the rest of your life's uncertaintities and insecurities drift away, because... you know what to do. At long last, you know what to do.

jacinthsong asked:

1. You are only allowed to use two shades of eyeshadow for the next month. Which are they?

Oh, you're an evil, evil woman. Well, my absolute favourite for day use is a gorgeous No. 7 shimmery purple that they don't make any more, and while I suspect it isn't designed for wearing in the day I really like it; it's a kind of dull-but-eyecatching glitter. So there's one, and if during this month of pain and woe I went out anywhere, I would probably use Urban Decay Heavy Metal in Baked, which is a heavy golden bronze colour that works well as even dust, or, which is more like me, as straight-up eyeliner.

2. You are offered the chance to spend a week anywhere in India - on your own or with company - with living expenses paid. The conditions: it has to be somewhere you have never visited before, and you have to stay more or less in that area (like, you can make day trips to other places) for the whole week. Where do you go?

Oooh. This is a really difficult question, but after a lot of thought, I think the area around Srinagar and the Dal Lake. The political climate is never perfect, but this is my fantasy, so! I want to sttay in a houseboat on the lake, and drift around the floating gardens, and maybe if I have the energy go and look at the bazaars and waterfalls around about. I've always wanted to go, but it's quite a difficult thing, logistically. One day.

(If you have read Haroun and the Sea of Stories - and if you haven't, why haven't you - this is the Dull Lake in the story, and Srinagar is rather a lot like Kahani.)

3. You are offered the chance to spend a week anywhere in the UK - on your own or with company - with living expenses paid. The conditions: it has to be somewhere you have never visited before, and you have to stay more or less in that area (like, you can make day trips to other places) for the whole week. Where do you go?

Oooh! This is difficult, too! I have been to London and Manchester and Edinburgh and Shetland and many other places in the UKwhere I would like to spend a week.

So, um. I think I would like to visit Aviemore, at the right type of year, and ski downhill into trees and wander around cheerfully and look at the scenery.

4. If you had to convey and/or explain your love for Star Trek to someone who didn't know anything about it in fifteen words or fewer, what would you say?

Oh god. Er. It's not new life or new civlisations; it's us. It's silly, optimistic, and it makes you care.

Seventeen words, that'll do.

5. What South Asian (or British Asian, etc) writer/singer/blogger/other personage do you really, really wish more people knew about and could flap over with you?

I'm not really surprised not many people over here have heard of Russell Peters, as he's Canadian, but he's brilliant. My cousin S and spent a lot of evenings a few years ago watching this, saying "guilty!" and giggling inanely at each other.

And yiskah asked:

1. Where do you see yourself, career-wise, in ten years?

Over a civilised dinner of chilli tofu recently, I was telling jacinthsong that I always thought I would be something really cool when I grew up. Unspecified but really cool, like a rock star or a fighter pilot only something girls in glasses can do and cooler.

This feeling persisted right through the first year of my degree, and some of the way into the second. Then I realised I didn't want to be an academic, I didn't want to be a politician, and (surprisingly!) I probably didn't want to be a journalist. Admittedly I still didn't want to be an accountant, or an actuary, or a management consultant (still don't know what one of those is) but possibly it was time for a major rethink of project me.

Now I am a lawyer, and more and more I suspect this was the right career path for me. In ten years' time, if I follow the strict path of career progression that people are supposed to, I would hope to be seven or eight years post-qualification and looking at making partner somewhere, maybe. But I have to admit, that doesn't greatly appeal right now. My major interest is not so much legal practice - although I do like that much more than expected - nor legal academia (see above re: don't want to be an academic!), but the interestingly blurry area in between, the area of drafting, policy, consolidation and law reform. This is why I'm doing the Masters, by the way; to establish on my CV something more than "converted-to-law-did-training-contract-got-a-mortgage-the-end". My absolute dream job would be to work for the Law Commission on one of the big projects, like the one the new Equality Act 2010 represents. The Act doesn't actually do very much that's new; it does, however, consolidate well over a hundred previous pieces of primary, secondary and European legislation, and I love the idea that one day I could do that - look at the whole messy body of enacted legislation and bring order to the chaos.

But we shall see, I guess. I never was cool.

2. What do you think attracts you to your specific fandoms?

Honestly, I have absolutely no bloody idea. Inter alia, I've been really, really, really into: a show about interdimensional transport through a very large piece of costume jewellery; a show about army doctors; a book about witchcraft and wizardry; a show about vampires and the people who kill them; a show about a nine-hundred-year-old teenage runaway; a show about a man having a nervous breakdown mid-performance-of-Hamlet; a musical about people living in the moment; a show about a show that is sometimes peripherally about sports; and Star Trek.

Er. I like television. I also like spaceships, and people who live in a world that is peculiarly-sharply defined - whether by magic or the fact they're in deep space or the fact they work for an off-the-wall theatre company. I gave up analysing it a while back, and left it as: I write stories, right, sometimes they're about things you've heard of.

3. (I know I should know this but) you were at Oxford as an undergraduate, right? What was the best and worst thing about the experience?

Yes, I was! The worst thing about the experience was: it gave me a lot of assumptions about how the world is that it's taken a long time to cast off. At Oxford, you cannot fail. You cannot get anything wrong. You cannot have a bash at something just to see how it goes. You have to say all the right things and be fiercely anti-orthodox; you have to do every extra-curricular activity going and spend all your time in the library; you have to fit in and you have to be a total maverick, you have to, you have to, you cannot sit still and you can never sleep. Obviously this is not all the university's fault - it does tend to attract people, myself included, with these sorts of expectations of themselves, but it normalises them. Eight-week terms, endless reading lists, other people who are doing just the same thing so you never see what a weirdly fucked-up worldview it gives you... yeah, they're not good. Brookes, and as a preliminary assessment, Cornell, are much better at offering you guidance on being an actual grown-up - on how to sleep eight hours a night, work consistently and sensibly over long periods of time, how to accommodate your disabilities if you have any, how to make friends and do fun stuff with them, how to function as a part of the rest of the world.

The best thing about the experience is the flipside of the above: that heady feeling of this is the time, this is the place, these are the people, this is a unique, never-to-be-repeated experience. I loved my subject and felt like I couldn't be anywhere better to read it (I did mostly-philosophy at Balliol, so this is probably true!), I loved the people I met, I did the extra reading and acted in plays and took French lessons and went out dancing and ate incredible quantities of dessert and soaked in the sun gleaming off the architecture and fell in love for the first time. For all I never slept and was always stressed out, I was gloriously, deliriously happy for nearly all my time there, and it's something I'll never forget.

4. Can you ever see yourself living in India for any stretch of time?

It is something I want to do at some point. I want to use my Hindi every day, go to the temple every week, see my family more than once a year. Every time I've visited as an adult, I've been more and more taken with the idea - I want to spend some time laying a real claim to my language, my religion, my history, I want to be around people who look like me.

And when I've done that - when I can watch the evening news in Hindi, and say more than a couple of words in Bengali, and catch an auto without having to think about it, and go a year without wearing a jumper - I want to come home. I was born, raised and educated in England, and I value my freedom too much to let it go.

5. What's the best book you've ever read?

This is a cruel question. I mean, I can tell you the best chick-lit I've ever read (Bridget Jones's Diary - still not bested, I think, and I do pay quite a lot of attention to the genre), the best book of classical philosophy I've ever read (Mill, On Liberty), the best book by a brown author I've read (Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, the best poetry I've read (Adrienne Rich, From An Atlas of a Difficult World), the best book of feminist jurisprudence I've read (Catherine McKinnon, Towards A Feminist Theory of the State), the best science-fiction I've read (Doomsday Book, Connie Willis), the best fantasy I've ever read (Night Watch, Terry Pratchett), the best YA fiction I've read (Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel and sequels)...

...you get it.

My favourite book is Three Men In A Boat. I offer this without comment on whether it's the best.

I am not offering up questions for the moment - I will when I'm not meant to be revising, honest! - but I'm perfectly willing to be asked any other things you might wish to know about me, or about anything I've mentioned here.

I really, really should do some work now.

Comments

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

He's so great. I will pin you down and show you the rest sometime. :)