Zara Meerza

“Without my grandfather’s contribution to agriculture reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips,” one personal ad from the London Review of Books in 2002 reads. “While you think about that, I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.” Personals like this one may feel like a relic—Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji, New York’s mayor and his wife, met on Hinge, after all—but love and lust have been satisfied by column inches since the 1800s.

Zara Meerza digs into a grim obsession. It started at the Brooklyn birthday party of a dubious literary critic, an event where a sizable portion of the guests were cancelled men. From authors to journalists to podcasters, it was a who’s who of fallen Twitter stars crammed into a Park Slope bar garden, drinking beer and talking about themselves. As a plus-one of a friend looking for a new job, I assumed it would be an anthropological affair.

Since March, filmmaker Juhi Sharma has been grounded in Chennai, India, where she's been working remotely on the post-production of The Vinyl Records: Destroy Phallus Oppression, a feature documentary about India's only feminist punk rock band. It was on a trip home to shoot that the implications of the pandemic started to strike from all directions—loss of income, travel cancellations, and attempting to cover rent in New York while unable to return due to lockdown.