Metropolitan Diary
Or: how I learnt to stop worrying and love the comment section
The internet is a cesspool of hate, bigotry, outdated hot takes, the occasional decent meme, and deluded Federer fans—"he's like fifty, but I'm sure he'll win another slam" (source: I am one). Despite this, I don't mind the internet. What I do mind is the comment section.
I hate the comment section. Every time I come across one, every single drop of blood in my veins boils with fury. I hate it the way Pol Pot hated people with glasses. If the internet is the hell from Dante's inferno (some would argue the 'if' is unnecessary), the comment section would be its ninth circle.
I'm not quite sure why I loathe it so much. Perhaps it is the cocktail of anonymity and the feeling of an obligation to voice one's opinion that people have before writing a comment that sets me off. Who knows. Either way, my resentment towards it was so severe that I strayed away from it completely. No more comments for me. Please and thank you. If I wanted to read the same old, beaten, 'funny' one-liner again I would open my family whatsapp group.
And then I came across the Metropolitan diary. It changed everything.
I'm not sure if others have ever felt this, but I for one get a rush from reading someone's diary. A diary has the most personal, raw, and vulnerable parts of the writer's life, and the middle-aged nosy aunty who lives in my brain loves reading it. Every juicy detail.
The Metropolitan diary in the New York Times has stories about life in the city. Normal, mundane stories. Not something that the nosy aunty would find interesting. And yet, I love it.
People who live in large metros always speak about the abstract concept known as the 'energy of the city'. I've never understood it, but that's what I associated with every big city. As most abstract concepts are, this too is horseshit. And the Metropolitan diary calls it out.
Life in a big city isn't about having an enormous apartment and spending every waking moment of your life in a coffee shop with your friends because apparently none of you have jobs. That's hollywood. Real-life is different. It's the story of a haircut, of a person you met on the subway. It's about that time when a stranger helped you or that time when you got stuck in the rain.
This is what the Metropolitan diary does so well. It doesn't try to romanticize the city, it just tells the stories of the people that make the city, the way they are. And that is romantic enough.
The little doodles above the stories genuinely put you in the person's story. My childhood was completely different from the person who wrote about it. I mean, he grew up literally across the world from me. But that one doodle of the three kids playing tells me that, maybe it wasn't that different.
It was love at first sight for me. I don't know how I came across it, and I don't want to know. I'm just glad I did. The first time I read it, I had a smile across my face. I'd never seen anything like it before. Then, I saw it. The dreaded comment section. I don't know what masochistic pleasure I was going to get out of making myself suffer, but I clicked on it.
Is there a phrase that expresses the superlative of 'pleasantly surprised? If there is, I would use it here. The comments were other people sharing their stories. No one was trying to one-up anyone. It was just people and their experiences. Some recent, some from fifty years ago.
This communal aspect of the diary is what makes it even better. You don't just get to read a few selected stories, you get to share yours too. You get to read about how the city has changed, and yet it’s still the same. The old deli might not be there anymore, or the chirpy shopkeeper. But their stories go on.
We remain fixated on the big buildings of the big bad city. And we forget about the people living in those big buildings. The metropolitan diary is different. You go beyond the artificial and interact in the most human way possible by sharing stories.
I still don't particularly like the comment section. But, every Monday, I like it a little more.
A special thank you to Devangee and Neel for reminding me that grammar exists.
Love the diary part, feel like an aunty now. It's more like you gave words to my longtime thought. :)