Columns

REDDY | God is an Ocean

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I was obsessed with gods when I was a kid. I was raised detachedly as a Hindu, in which we had our own in-house puja every few months, went to the temple even less often and still ate beef when we had a hankering. I viewed my participation in Hinduism as an infrequent chore, but entertained a curious fascination with Hindu mythology. I devoured every edition of a comic book series that transformed the timeless and boundless sagas into picturized, bite-sized narratives. I took to the task of printing out pictures of gods, framing them and placing them somewhere in the house to bolster the divinity of our family.

Columns

REDDY | Lost in the Closet

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For a long time since then I projected my insecurities on others. I felt like the only true way for me to be gay was to be unapologetically “fierce.” I acted and appeared as a stereotypical gay man and cut out anyone who I felt wasn’t with that. I began to see homophobia where it wasn’t. It took some hard looks in the mirror to see that me at my “fiercest” was me at my most repressed, most pretending to be something I’m not in blind pursuit of something that I thought I should be.

Cornell

REDDY | Mindful Resistance

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Jiddu Krishnamurthy was a prominent figure in eastern Indian wisdom throughout the 20th century. He believes everything, including all life, is interconnected. He would likely recoil at “eastern Indian wisdom” because it demarcates specific arbitrary groups. “Eastern,” “Indian” and the like. Social psychology tells us that as an in-group becomes more mobilized and tight-knit, the atmosphere is increasingly  ripe for conflict with out-groups — individuals seek out similarities and in turn segregate differences.

Columns

REDDY | The Drug Rhetoric Monster

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The scariest film I have ever seen. I had only lived for seven years when I watched it but thirteen years and dozens of horror movies later, most of which rattled me to my core, The Boy Who Was Swallowed by the Drug Monster still checks out. Vince Jackson’s parents are getting a divorce. He befriends a miscreant who lets him borrow his “magic pipe” (pot) so he can feel better. Eventually, the miscreant says Vince must start coughing up, so he starts stealing money from his parents to keep getting high.

Columns

REDDY | Things Happen

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“Everything happens for a reason.” This is a mantra I repeat to myself whenever my world is shaken. It’s a recitation I do with foresight, knowing it will help to eventually make clear the vast improvements the simple passage of time can create. I’m not there yet, but I hope to be soon. But, everything happens for a reason. Whatever happened was in the past, and in some way, it could have been for the best.

affirmative action

REDDY | Why Affirmative Action is Necessary

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Everyone has dreams, and a college degree has always been seen as a crucial means to reaching them. As a result, more people than ever are trying to obtain higher education, and they have good reason to believe that the quality and prestige of the college they attend can have a significant impact on the quality and prestige of the work they do after graduation. Controversy arises when it’s deemed that certain groups of people have an unfair advantage in the admissions process. I have listened to engineers — male engineers — lament the school’s allegedly lower standards for female applicants. They had to work extremely hard to gain acceptance to Cornell’s engineering program, while others, they claim, just “walked in” because they “have vaginas.” Despite the misogyny conveyed by this language, however, unqualified girls in engineering are the least of our concerns, when one considers the apparent injustice done when black and Latinx applicants with credentials inferior to those of white applicants are given what those white applicants deem preferential treatment in college admissions.

Columns

REDDY | The State of Emotion

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The United States of America is currently “The Divided States of America” according to TIME. How did we get here? Part of it has to do with emotion. Much has been made about the role of emotions in the most recent presidential election. They played an important role in shaping a massive populist movement headlined by Donald Trump, one that underscored the need to retain some semblance of a ‘greater’ American past in which its foundational promise as a nation to be open-minded and big-hearted is not made.

Columns

REDDY | President Clinton and Her Husband Bill

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Chandler’s boss made a joke in a Friends episode referencing a possibility that many Americans have been waiting to witness for quite some time: Hillary Clinton as President of the United States, becoming the first woman to wield the title ‘leader of the free world.’ He said “I strongly believe that we should all support President Clinton — and her husband Bill.” It was based on the premise that Hillary was overstepping her role as First Lady, to the point of essentially doing her husband’s job. She was out of her place. Although the tasteless joke was made by a schmuck and Chandler only laughed to avoid any conflict, it did touch on how sexism can affect a powerful woman. Pundits have speculated over the multitude of reasons for the election outcome in the past few weeks. Conservative commentators have been quick to argue that any effects of sexism were cancelled out by Hillary’s status as an elite.

Columns

REDDY | A Little Less Masala

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Getting to India is the struggle. With each year that passes, my parents renew their interest in travelling back to the country they spent the first half of their lives in. They have nostalgia for practically everything they used to do; my mom missed sampling the seemingly endless supply of street food along MG road in Bangalore, and my dad missed playing cricket at his agricultural college he attended in Coimbatore, amongst a million other memories they formed during a time fondly recalled as ‘the days before the kids were born.’

India pleaded with my parents to make arrangements for a return every year, and without fail, the travel agent listing the hefty costs of such an endeavor as well as the complaints of how incredibly busy my sister and I were with middle and high school responsibilities answered. Excitement was always tempered, but never lost. A trip to the decent Indian buffet alleviated any case of home-homesickness, followed with what has now become a staple in my house: a viewing of a Bollywood film.

Columns

REDDY | Chameleon

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I have been a research assistant for the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, now known as the Youth, Risk and Opportunity lab, for a few years now. One of the projects I worked on last year was transcribing interviews. The interviews were conducted to clarify the course of one’s relationship with NSSI throughout one’s life as it relates to the trans-theoretical model. This model reflects an individual’s readiness to act on incorporating a healthier behavior into their lives, which in the cases of these individuals would be working towards ending their engagement in NSSI. The interviews themselves were of many perspectives.