1.

The banana plant was decidedly unhappy. For a week, it shed a leaf daily, until it was just a bare stump. Water and manure didn’t help, neither did adjusting its position in the garden for light.

“Leave it,” Hanumantha, our gardener, said in Kannada, waving his hand dismissively. “It will come back.”

I asked him if we should try manure, or dig up the soil in the pot to aerate it.

“No,” he said. “Just leave it alone.”

2.

In June last year, I did the oddly frightening thing of moving back to Bangalore, after almost seventeen years away in Delhi. I’d left when I was eighteen, and so this was meant to feel like a fantasy homecoming.

Nine men from the packers and movers arrived one Saturday morning and, with a kind of vulgar efficiency, wrapped up the things that made up our life.

“Baavan box hai total,” the supervisor announced. Fifty two boxes.

Kitchenware, books, clothes, my box of underused Covid hobby supplies.

“Let’s take the banana plant, no?”

“Come on”.

K was insistent.

He and I had spent the week intermittently litigating what items will be left behind, and what would come with us.

As we’ve learnt, I am quick to discard things that might still have some potential.

It took the men four hours to disassemble our home. When they were done I felt more vulnerable than relieved.

3.

Many mornings, I’d wake up to kids singing their assembly prayer.

Two or three were always wildly out of tune. I’d be amused even before my eyes actually opened. It was a gentle way to meet the day.

Our apartment in Soami Nagar sat between two schools - a high school at the back of the house, and a pre-primary school across from the front. It was the homeliest place I ever lived in.

The living room was from a storybook. It had marigold granite flooring and exposed brick walls painted white, so the room seemed to gather and hold the daylight.

But the centrepiece was this imposing gulmohar tree that protectively flanked the front of the house.

Floor to ceiling accordion windows meant that you walked in and it immediately hit you: this enormous tree, buzzing with life. Like a painting. It changed through the day and through seasons. Crimson in summer, thick with foliage, almost covering the view of the sky in the monsoons, and visited by owls and butterflies and bats and squirrels and grey hornbills.

When we first moved in, my nervous system reacted with fear. I had never lived in a home so beautiful before. The scene was disorientingly idyllic, like a doll house. Almost too good to be true.

Am I “rich people” now?

I have bone china plates and cups and saucers, and they match.

We have a flower uncle deliver fresh flowers weekly.

Did I finally have my shit together?

4.

K and I had high hopes for the banana plant’s Bangalore era.

The city’s famed eternal spring and the red laterite soil would surely suit it better than Delhi’s harsh extremities. My childhood home had an overly eager elakki banana plant. It asked so little of us, and it flourished. It was responsible for both an endless supply of bananas and a persistent monkey problem.

But for weeks, the plant just stood there, awkward and frozen. Change felt lonely and uncomfortable. It was mourning, like me, the gap between expectation and reality. And quietly resisting the work of unearthing and re-rooting.

Three gulmohar trees stand in a line, overlooking Lalbagh lake. They are each twice as established as my Soami Nagar tree, forming a type of expansive roof over a bench I sit on after my run.

This is now my favourite spot in the city.

I’ll do some EFT and watch the sunset.

There’s a jacaranda tree in the distance, right below where the sun dips, like a dab of purple paint in the sunset.The color of the evenings vary each day, but it glows violet and blue and pink. There’s a rosy incandescent light settling over the lake while all the cormorants make their way back to their nests. A group of smaller birds, maybe starlings, perform murmurations across the sky.

I try to take a picture of the scene from my phone, but the result is underwhelming. Nature is always prettier in person. One of those rare things untouched by arrival fallacy.

Spring has finally sprung in Bangalore, and Lalbagh is now a type of higher dimension. In my runs I’ve spotted magnolias, figs, chikoos and cannon ball flowers.

I’m slowly beginning to know the city again through its trees.

The banana plant has sprung a few leaves. It is early romance season again.

In November last year, I made a quiet, half pact with myself to create tolerance for uncertainty.

In some podcast I was listening to while walking around my mother's apartment, I heard Dannagal Young say a certain striking thing about how our brains tend to frantically grasp for closure when faced with uncertainty. It turns out, we're not wired for not knowing - and waiting.

Now this is not a novel idea - the spiritual and artist circuit has long peddled the virtues of embracing the unknown - Rumi, Ram Dass, Eckart Tolle, Pema Chodron, Rupi Kaur (and even Karan freaking Johar I’m pretty sure) have all said it, one way or the other.

But a combination of Young's framing, and my readiness for the message helped me realize that the price for not tolerating uncertainty was steeper than mere misery. It was actively reducing the circumference of my life.

*

Next month, K and I will have been together 6 years. We can now see each other in clear hospital light - the stuff that is solid and sublime, and the stuff we really, really would prefer not to talk about unless we're fighting.

After a particularly rough weekend morning, I escaped to an afternoon to myself - consisting of staring like a ghost at overpriced skincare and ceramics at high end stores, and attempting to read and write at an aggressively air-conditioned cafe.

As I headed out the door, I quickly grabbed my copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves - a book I've had for five-plus years, but have found impenetrable. My friend Z’s fascinating sounding Jungian therapist has referenced this book a lot, and so I decided to try again.

So I settled myself into a seat by a large window, quelled the feminine urge in me to roundhouse kick the man sitting opposite me wearing a cap (you have to trust your intuition when you see a douche), and ordered a latte.

Then I picked up the book, placed a hand on it, closed my eyes, asked it (and my subconscious) what I needed to know, and opened to a random page.

It opened straight to the story of The Skeleton Woman. It's an old Inuit folktale apparently, and it goes like this: A young woman is thrown into the sea and becomes nothing but bones on the ocean floor. Years later, a fisherman accidentally hooks her skeleton while fishing. Completely terrified, he flees to his snowhouse, unknowingly dragging her tangled bones behind him. When he discovers her jumbled skeleton in his home, he eventually moves beyond fear to compassion, untangling and arranging her bones. While he sleeps, she drinks one of his tears and uses his heart as a drum to restore herself. They wake embraced, beginning a relationship of abundance.

I thought about what Clarissa might really mean.

This was a direct personal attack, no question. Because I am the fisherman, running from K's bones. And K is the fisherman, running from mine. We're also both skeleton women. Tangled and dragged and waiting to be seen completely. And terrified and bothered by the sight of the bones.

I'm beginning to think that the price of deep connection is the confronting of this skeleton woman in our partners. And I can't say for sure, but it might even be a sacred privilege, and our life's greatest work to do that job well.

*

Like everyone, I watched The White Lotus and thoroughly enjoyed Mike White's mischievous, profound writing. I thought this season was by far the best of the three, and K was least surprised that I enjoyed his exploration of prayer and spirituality as a means to save us from ourselves.

I initially felt like the weakest link in the show was the three women friendship between Laurie, Jacyln and Kate. The premise that they are catty to each other felt obvious and almost cartoonish. But then I realized that my critique was a cover - this caricature friendship was, at least in part, a mirror - and I was, in fact, triggered.

I've orbited in three-person female friendship constellations for decades - in life and at work - and sometimes they are the same thing.

My oldest friendship trinity has weathered three decades - and that friendship feels like a type of nourishing pond to me. We live in three different cities, and are leading entirely different sorts of lives. But when we meet, (even if online in our newly opened 3 human Book Club), it's instantly like we're characters in some indie film where women actually talk about something besides men and other people. The thirty-year perspective we have on each other's lives gives everything this gorgeous, textured historicity. So to that extent, I'm with Laurie on time.

I'm no longer afraid of any feelings that come up for me in this friendship, because we've been through the wringer since we were barely 15 and we've come out okay. We know in our bones that our love for each other is more than any ephemeral human unpleasantness. Every 'fight' has only served as comedy material months after.

But in others - mostly those that have come together circumstantially, I have to admit that we sometimes perform an unconscious version of friendship. There's an inevitable shock you feel when you note the gap between what we'll say to each other's faces, and what we'll say behind our backs. It is almost violent - it is solidarity as a fashion statement, rather than solidarity for the strength and joy and nobility of it.

I've been both perpetrator and victim in these dynamics. I've smiled and nodded while dying on the inside and I've felt the sting of discovering someone's true opinion after accepting their performance of support. None of us are innocent here, and none of us are villains. We're just caught in a tragic dynamic and we don't know how to stop.

*

All this making space for not knowing has given me at least one gift - a lighter mind. I'm not compulsively meaning-making. And it's like the inside of my mind is experiencing an ambient, pre-surrender.

This weightlessness paired well with the immersive experience of meeting my beautiful baby niece for the first time. Babies are pristine.

Watching my niece navigate a kid's playground with her beginner's mind was a thing of soft sunlight. Words cannot express the innate connection and gentle love I felt for her.

During that same trip, I watched K inhabit a home with his parents. There is a bittersweetness to going back home and witnessing our parents aging. I saw K negotiate this in real time - he was simultaneously more childlike and parental. The inversion of roles has been set.

Something about all this family time made me consider things like the circle of life and the enormous political and economic enterprise that is the act of having children in 2025.

We saw our siblings raise their babies - and we saw how it brings out the best in them - my brother as a girl daddy is a revelation - she's quite literally unearthed a softness in him that is a far cry from his 'Raw is War' days. Love argues that creating life is transcendence itself. Children connect you to continuity. To life's impossible scale—both vast and microscopic. Everyday magic.

But then I also see the daunting relentlessness of parenting. How it's an endless parade of little logistics. Each tedious necessity piling upon the next until they threaten to upend your identity completely—replacing purpose and its pursuit with the potentially mundane mechanics of keeping another human alive.

*

Am I drawing conclusions? I hope not. I’m willing to be surprised.

They were an assortment - gladiolus, geraniums, hibiscus, roses and marigolds. My father worked at a pesticide company then, which meant seeds and floral supplies found their way home as a quiet perk of the job.

My grandmother and our help, Bahadur, collaborated on a laissez faire gardening project. They scattered the seeds in the mud and left the rest to fate. The flowers, unburdened by expectations, flourished.

Then, like something out of a fable, my maternal aunt Raji gifted my mom a set of cane baskets - the kind that were straight out of the Readers' Digest edition of The World's Best Fairy Tales. They looked like they were destined to carry cake, flowers, that type of goodness. So I gathered all the flowers, placed them carefully in the baskets and set out to sell them.

Some people gave me ten paise, others a rupee. There wasn't a sophisticated economics to it. The margins were loose and the markets were unregulated. At its heart, this was a bohemian enterprise.

That evening, my father came home and learnt of the day’s events.

He was mildly horrified.

That I’d asked other people for money was the issue. He didn’t even change out of his work clothes before we went on an apology- and-reimbursement-tour across the neighborhood.

I returned the grand total of eight rupees I’d made from my efforts, and we didn’t even get to take the flowers back. I suppose we were employee minded people. Asking for money felt vaguely dishonorable.

But this post is about flowers. And spring. And all the exquisite, ineffable things that flowers carry inside them - lightness and contentment and a gentle beauty.

In my mother’s apartment complex in Bangalore, the landscapers have done a damn good job of telling flowers exactly where to grow. The flowers don't seem to mind. They, too, are employee minded.

Earlier this week, we took a walk around the complex, taking inventory of all the types of flowers around us.

They are everywhere. Orange marigolds by the car park. Intricately patterned Ixoras in red, white and yellow along the fences. Fuschia pink and sunlight-yellow moss roses in the children’s park. Peacock flowers and bougainvillea lining the passageways. And then entire trees swallowed whole by purple jacarandas and yellow trumpet flowers.

A few weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, I bought K some mauve pink roses from the flower stall at Defence Colony Market. We’d just wrapped up a work meeting, and since we were already there, I picked up some white lilies for S too.

S was convinced that we’d dimension jumped - said I’d done this before, years ago, after another work thing, on another Valentine’s Day, at this exact stall. A moment was looping back on itself.

And I was listening, half there, half drifting somewhere else. Thinking, in that lazy, background way, about the things that have changed and the things that never do.

Mostly, it’s a quiet kind of victory — a relief - to experience these flowers, and love as a type of planetary force rather than an all consuming limerence.

It is spring. And I get the sense that flowers are the point.

I’m letting go of an old, untold resistance, and finally watching all the mainstream movies that everyone was done discussing in 2004.

On a long December plane ride, I watched Forrest Gump and ugly cried. (It’s not me, it's the plane).

I texted my friend from the flight to let him know that he was right and that I should have watched the thing earlier.

And then last Sunday, I watched Good Will Hunting.

The thing about an almost thirty year old movie is that it feels like a time capsule - you sort of vaguely remember it without having quite lived it.

I didn’t know that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were childhood friends.Or that they co-wrote the film. What a gift to create something so beautiful with a friend. Good for them.

But the movie left me unsettled.

I felt a pang of envy toward the sheer privilege of Will’s journey. Two grown, white, privileged and accomplished men fall over themselves to rescue another white man. How novel.It’s a type of mentorship fantasy that feels almost laughably distant in the very practical business era that is 2025.

If you pause enough, you’ll notice problems and people quietly struggling everywhere you look. More willing, earnest support could go around.

I suppose one step in the path to self emancipation, in a world where no one is coming to save you, is to drop the woe is me stuff and help other people if we can. So we offer to edit Z’s resume so he can start an earnest job search, and you sit with N to untangle a web of sad thoughts and map a way forward.

You start a type of pay-it-forward chain and trust that it will circle back, eventually.

The idea is to create an opening for goodness.

*

I was in Bangalore for of the past weeks. A real perk of being in the city is that through the day, you have a heightened awareness of the sky.

The sky feels pulled closer to your face. Through phone calls and walks and the daily hummings of traffic, you’re aware of this kaleidoscopic blue screen above you with clouds floating by and the colors shifting. It’s like a trapeze.

I love to take a nightly post shower walk. It is windy in Bangalore, and you can see the stars. ​​January has been especially celestial. Just yesterday, we witnessed a ‘planet parade,’ with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus aligning in a rare cosmic display. Earlier this month, Venus shone at its brightest, and we watched Venus, Saturn, and the Moon form a perfect straight line.

There’s a quiet homecoming and relief in this. You get the sense that your small, tucked-away apartment life is linked to the grandeur of the universe. Life feels more held together somehow, when you do that.

*

“Is it fun to write every week? What’s the point if it's not fun?”

“Fun? Not always. Sometimes I’m squeamish. I’ll stall. I’ll stare blankly at the cursor. The words fight back.

But it's always satisfying.”

Of late, I’ve been ambivalent about showing up here weekly. It seems my ADHD-hyperfocus is ebbing.

That, and then there’s a certain clear feeling I’m having about writing when I feel moved to, rather than because it's the weekend.

“Is writing still a thing?”

I can understand the question. But it does reek of a certain era in time where writing was considered too sentimental and domestic if you were a woman, and too self absorbed and egotistical if you were a man.

As I see it, writing is the foundation of civilization. If you think of it, writing is everywhere. Especially in 2025. It’s on emails and websites and newsletters and marketing. Even the endless abyss of videos on Youtube and elsewhere really all just start with writing.

I’m thinking about creating without strain and creating with clarity. From a place of quiet, gentle inspiration, rather than from a breathless ‘have to do this’ urgency.

It’s a new year, and I’m changing some things.

Here’s what’s up. I intend to show up here monthly at most and bi-monthly at best, with attempts at more languid, lived-in writing.

I write because I find that it brings me to the truth. And that is often a thing of beauty.

This is part two of a post about the ‘glimmers’ I experienced this past year. Read part one here.

Universe 25: At a recent Shroom Sabha event, someone brought up Universe 25 — a controversial experiment from the 1970s. Researcher John Calhoun created what he called a “rodent utopia,” providing rats with everything they could possibly need: unlimited food, clean water, ample nesting materials, and no predators. Everything, that is, except space.

Calhoun theorized that the absence of physical space would unravel the community, and within four years, it did. The rats stopped mating, stopped nesting, and eventually ceased to exist.

The experiment has faced criticism, with scientists questioning its anthropomorphic conclusions. Still, I can’t help but see it as a metaphor for something larger—a reflection of the post-industrial malaise so many of us carry but struggle to name. It’s the thing that drives us to therapy, mindless shopping sprees, and meticulously planned vacations. A way of life where stepping outside to breathe clean air or see the horizon has become a privilege rather than a given.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m built for these trade-offs. But Universe 25 makes me think maybe no one is. Perhaps the human version of the experiment isn’t just a possibility—it’s already underway.

*

Leave Behinds from Career Almosts: If I were to sum it up simply, a pivotal shift for me in 2024 was thinking less about career milestones and more about what they had distracted me from. This meant tending to my inner world as much as I did to emails, documents, and meetings. It also meant showing up more for my mother and those in my inner circle—and less for hollow social performances.

This shift came quietly and awkwardly, in the aftermath of successive career “almosts.” These near-misses were emotionally draining but ultimately catalytic—they pushed me to confront the consequences of organizing my life entirely around a single pursuit.

I’m still in the process, but it feels like I’ve reclaimed a small but meaningful piece of my identity. A step toward what I see as a longer inner decolonization project. I’ll take it.

*

ADHD and Walking in the World Like You Belong: Earlier this year, after some mid intensity interpersonal drama and serious Reddit research, I decided to seek professional clarity. I underwent a formal ADHD diagnosis. To 0 people’s surprise, the result was positive.

In 2024, and especially in spaces like Substack, this is admittedly a cliched admission. We’re living in what feels like the golden age of neurodivergence. There’s a rich and evolving vocabulary to describe it, endless resources to “hack” your life for it, and even a certain cultural cachet that makes neurodivergence feel almost aspirational.

Still, the diagnosis came with a lot of feelings. It forced me to take inventory of the ways I’ve misunderstood myself and the ways others may have misread me. It also provided insight into why I felt like an alien in most large groups.

Someone close to me said: “You can finally walk around the world like you belong.” It felt like permission.

This Substack started with 456 readers in January and crawled its way to nearly 885 by December. I’m not much for counting heads, but I’ve got to admit—watching this thing grow feels pretty damn good.

Thank you for reading. It means the world to me. Happy new year and much love.

Years are never just one thing. They contain multitudes. A grand spectrum of seeming contradictions together become the dizzying, beautiful and varied thing that is the human experience.

Joy and sorrow. Exhilaration and boredom. Clarity and confusion. These are uniquely human privileges. And they’re ours to hold.

And so my end of year t-shirt quote is to just sit with all of it.

Equally, each year has its ‘glimmers’.

It’s a word I picked up somewhere online, and it stuck. These are small, luminous flashes of meaning. And if you pay attention, they can be paths to living a better life.

Conversations that leave an imprint, art that makes you stop and look again, song lyrics that find you at the right time, and places that remind you that the world is bigger and more alive than you remembered.I’m admittedly uncool and big on that type of thing.

Here is part 1 of a list of my personal glimmers from the year.

And no, they haven’t been ranked. That would mean I’ve missed the point entirely. :)

Looking into vs looking at: I spent my birthday hiking and river drifting through the Daintree Rainforest in Australia. At 180 million years old, the Daintree is a type of cathedral of life. A place so ancient, it defies comprehension.

Our guide, Josh, was a sweet, emotionally attuned dude that said the most cinematic things. At the beginning of the walk, he announced to K and I “You have to look deeply into the forest, and not just at it.”

In less capable hands, this could’ve felt contrived. But Josh said it with such earnestness that it landed like a revelation.

Looking into the forest, as he suggested, brought everything alive. We felt like children walking through a storybook. Like we were granted an audience with something primordial. It wasn’t just trees and vines anymore; the forest was an enchanted world layered with stories and meaning. Josh regaled us with little facts and lore. He pointed out plants that once fed dinosaurs and described how tree kangaroos made their homes in the canopy. It was all so otherworldly, that you sort of felt the enormity of time. And it made our existence small in an undiminishing, liberated type of way.

*

Zone of Interest: In what felt like the most quintessentially Diwali thing to do, I spent the day watching Zone of Interest. And then I watched it again.

The film is set in Auschwitz, but it doesn’t show the camp directly. Instead, it focuses on the daily life of the camp’s commandant and his family, who live in a home right next door.

The house is this brightly lit, meticulous place. It’s a lot like how rich people all over the world today live, with matching bone china plates and hand painted headstands. But its pristine domesticity is jarring.

The genius of the movie is that you’re never once witnessing scenes from the camp directly. It only exists as sensory cues in the background - like a type of ghost - in screams and smoke and smudges of blood in the commandant’s boots. All while his family enjoy their vast garden and pool and elaborate birthday meals.

I couldn't shake the movie. It asked questions about complicity, about the nature of evil, about how easy it is to create worlds where suffering is a sound we tune out, a thing happening “somewhere else.”

This was possibly the starkest commentary on life in 2024 ever.

*

Possibilities: I watched The Last Holiday on a flight recently, and my single line review is that this is a charmingly watchable but decidedly not brilliant 2000s Christmas movie. With a great background score. The type of thing that does not demand much but gives you just enough to sit with.

Queen Latifah plays Georgia Bird, a New Orleans based retail worker who thinks she’s about to die because of a false diagnosis. In a bid to ‘die with zero’, she blows through her savings to take the holiday of a lifetime.

Early in the movie, we’re introduced to her scrapbook, which is titled ‘Possibilities.’ It's a scrapbook of Georgia’s quiet daydreams - recipes she wants to cook and places she’d like to go and men she wants to marry.

In the type of courage that can only come from a closeness to death, she finally pursues all of those aspirations. And I don’t know if it was the mid-air mind state, but it felt like a nudge to dust off my own list of ‘possibilities’ and see which ones I could use some audacity to move toward.

Earlier in the year, K and I finished most of the Designing Your Life workbook by Bill Burnett together. It was an interesting process. It forced us to map out the gap between what we desire and how we’re actually living - it was a kind of litmus test for how aligned our lives are with our values.

Georgia’s scrapbook of Possibilities isn’t revolutionary, but it feels urgent. It’s a somewhat daunting reminder that dreams don’t belong in notebooks forever.

*

I’ll share more next week! What were some of your glimmers from the year?

This week, I learned (without particularly wanting to) that spiders aren't even insects - they're arachnids. This feels like exactly the kind of technical detail that makes perfect sense while completely missing the magic of the thing.

Insects aren't picky about the perfect venue - so you don't need to go far to watch them.

On the balcony I'm currently in are a few meagre-looking pots with plants that look like they are reconsidering their life choices.

There's a black ant that's valiantly hauling the remnants of a dead dragonfly across the concrete floor to a smallish ant hole.

There is something weirdly beautiful about this ant - this tiny fellow probably weighs a few milli grams, but he's carrying out this act with a sense of cosmic conviction.

In his world, at this moment, this is everything.

*

Here are my brief, unscientific notes on insects.

My view is that they run the world. We're just not able to say it loud enough yet.

They timekeep

It's like insects are woven into time. They're physically, viscerally attuned to it.

A cricket knows exactly when to start its evening symphony. A monarch butterfly embarks on thousand-mile journeys using navigational systems we're still trying to understand.

And while we're all fumbling with our clocks twice a year, these tiny timekeepers flow with the real rhythms of the Earth, unbothered by our human attempts to slice time into neat segments.

Makes sense when you remember that they've been around on earth much longer than us.

They understand collective good at a cellular level

Insects have mastered the art of being part of something bigger than themselves. Their existence is transcendent by design.  

Everything they do ripples outward.

Pollinating flowers, breaking down what's dead, feeding everything that moves - they're keeping the whole show running without making a big deal about it. Just millions of tiny beings doing exactly what needs to be done.

And it all adds up to something vast and vital.

They have no social media strategy

I like birds and flowers, but I can also acknowledge that these guys are straight-A show-offs.

Insects just work. They operate in the background, in the spaces between spaces.

A dung beetle will roll its ball of shit uphill with the same quiet dedication at midnight as at noon. Termites are building climate-controlled towers in the savanna that would humble most architects. Paper wasps construct suspended geometric palaces out of spit and wood pulp like it's no big deal.

These guys are the ultimate anti-influencers. They do shit that matters, and we barely even notice.

*

Thanks for reading my completely unsolicited notes on insects.

For now, I shall return to my e-investigation about whether Ramses Prashad was on Love Is Blind for the right reasons (he was not).

The insects, I am sure, have more important things to do.

Needless to say, I am delighted.

Somewhere in the gap between my third and fourth laddoo, I had the fleeting realization that I haven't gotten anyone anything. My giving and receiving ratio is way out of whack.

This isn't about exact reciprocity as much as keeping the flow going. It feels like giving other people things of beauty is a primal way of showing care.

*

If there is an art to gifting, my best friend K is the queen of it. Over the years, I've been the direct beneficiary of K's lovely gifts. But then I've also seen her conduct literal production-scale gifts for all the people in her life.

Last year on my birthday, K put together this book, a collection of all my substack essays, with smartass reviews from all my degenerate friends. This was to celebrate all the writing progress I'd made that year. When I saw it, I was positively dumbstruck.

When we were sixteen, she'd crafted a wall of pictures of all our friends to give to one of our friends on her birthday. She took a whole day to dream it up and then actually put it together. I wish we had pictures.

As I see it, K's gift-giving flows from a place of natural abundance. Where I might experience gift-giving as a somewhat stressful obligation, K approaches it as an artist approaches their canvas - with curiosity, playfulness, and a type of natural creative vitality.

K holds space in her heart for the detailed topography of other people's joy. She's really paying attention.

When she gives, she doesn't just offer objects; she offers evidence of her witnessing. She has mastered the most profound form of generosity: the ability to step outside one's own narrative and inhabit the emotional landscape of another. In a world of 10-minute deliveries (hi Blinkit, I am unfortunately a fan) it's a rare type of attunement.

*

Meanwhile, my own gift-giving history reads like a comedy of errors.

In the early years of our romance, I got my practical and austere husband the following birthday gifts:

• 6 overly nice whiskey glasses.

• Some modernist wall clock that made time itself feel nervous. (The personal touch was a tired joke about time not being real. Sorry.)

• A very nice golf shirt that fit like a theoretical concept.

• Cufflinks that have since entered witness protection.

• Socks with puppies that are miraculously still in circulation.

The poor bastard stood there, overwhelmed, looking like he'd just been asked to explain quantum physics to a room full of kindergartners. When he reacted with less than glee, I was mortified. But over the years I've realized that my efforting was misguided. These were high-quality things that didn't really speak to his heart in any meaningful way. And they were probably more about me than him.

My husband will often buy me small little somethings from the many trips he takes. They're simple, and maybe they aren't always the things that I want, but they're often exactly the thing that I need. Last month, he brought me an object that has single-handedly improved the quality of my life - a six-foot-long, three-pin charger wire that allows me to charge my earbuds, phone and iPad all at once. If this isn't love, I don't know what is.

*

It seems to me that gifts aren't about the gifts themselves. It's about the space of recognition they create. Good gifts say "I see you. I know you. I celebrate exactly who you are." And that's that.

Happy Diwali and all that!

"Oh, I'm Tamil.I grew up in Bangalore. So I speak Kannada too.”

I get this "I can't place you" reaction sometimes. It's seemingly innocuous, but it always catches me off guard.

Until some years ago, I secretly wore this ‘unplaceability’ like a badge of honor - I thought it made me seem like a real enigma.

More recently though, that misplaced pride has given way to an awkward confusion.

It turns out that I can't even place myself.

This struggle to be ‘placed’ hits at the core of a certain strangeness in the postcolonial identity. It’s a peculiar type of linguistic and cultural displacement.

I've wondered if my over-performance of English over the years has contributed to this. It has maybe a led to a type of affectedness in how I express myself. And maybe that affectedness has sunk deep into my bone marrow.

It is both me and not me at the same time.

Language has a way of getting under your skin. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, controversial as it is, is curious. It theorises that languages are paradigm-defining - the way a language conceptualises life can quite literally define how you view life.

Languages conceptualise life relatively differently.

• Take time, for instance. In English, we perceive time as a linear concept - past, present, and future neatly laid out on a timeline. But Mandarin Chinese for one lacks grammatical tenses. Instead, time is often indicated through context or specific time words.

• Or color. In Russian, there's no single word for "blue". Instead, they use "goluboy" for light blue and "siniy" for dark blue. These aren't just shades; they're distinct color categories. Studies have shown that Russian speakers can distinguish between these blues more quickly than English speakers.

• Gender in language adds another layer of complexity. In Hindi, even inanimate objects are gendered. A table is feminine, while a chair is masculine. German goes further, with three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. English, in contrast, is largely gender-neutral for objects.

• Then there's the matter of collective versus individualistic language structures. In Japanese, the word for 'I' changes based on your gender, age, and social status relative to who you're speaking to. The language is built around social relationships and hierarchy.

If we assume the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to be even partially true, it means that each language carves distinct neural pathways, shaping how we categorize experiences, perceive time, assign blame, or even see colors.

It's a dizzying thought. Especially if you speak and think in several languages.

*

My father took a lot of pride in my ability to be highly specific with my choice of words in English.

When I was not even five, he'd tell relatives who'd be confused by my overly anglicized demeanor, "She thinks in English".

My aunt, who was somewhat his sidekick, would agree and exaggerate. "Oh, she even dreams in English."

The unspoken, perhaps unintended lesson there was that my Tamil-ness was not as special.

As a full-grown adult, this tyranny of English continues to reign. Interactions with allegedly native English speakers (and in 2024, who is a native speaker of English anyway?) are sometimes an amusing, heady experience.

"Oh, Indians are so hyperbolic. They use such ornamental English."

You see, even after turning colonization on its head, the power structures are stubborn and don't give way. You have to express yourself in a very particular way. And the particularity is strikingly Western.

In generous moments, and yes I still have them, I sometimes wonder if matters of identity are so serious still. Can I transcend it all by simply being myself? By radically accepting history for how it transpired and taking reality now with a spirit of "everything is exactly as it should be"?

"Oh, but you don't have as much of an accent," someone said to me recently. My ears burnt up like asphalt.

Maybe I worked too hard at neutralizing it.

*

This post was inspired by ’s frank and moving essay, Confessions of An English Teacher from some weeks ago, which I re-read many times.

This is not a diss track on the people in my life. Far from it. My people are funny, supportive, intelligent, and reasonably consistently interesting.

But there's a certain internal incandescence I experience, that is only accessible to me when I'm alone.

My cells exhale, my nerves uncoil, and my gaze settles. I exist more gently in my body. And I'm alive to the feeling of being alive.

Here's my pitch for why spending time alone is the cornerstone of a well-lived life.

The end of social cosplay

We all play roles - in our jobs and homes and friendships. It's possibly how society functions without imploding. But they're ultimately hollow if not grounded in something deeper.

When the spotlight dims and the audience leaves, we encounter what my therapist has called the Capital S self. It is in this space that we can witness the many voices of our own inner world. We become the audience to our internal drama, watching as these parts of ourselves interact, clash, and ultimately seek harmony.

This is where true self-knowledge begins.

We can then finally learn to direct our own lives rather than exist in a state of autopilot.

My life my rules

The pursuit of personal preference is criminally underrated.

When I'm doing a solo thing, I like to practice self-attunement and do my bidding in a very precise way.

On work trips, my joy peaks when I check back into the hotel - I adjust the music, temperature and lighting of the room exactly to my liking. I draw a bath and make tea and watch crap Netflix.

And none of this is up for litigation. This is possibly what honouring ourselves looks like within the confines of late-stage capitalism.

The beginning of creativity 

Ever tried to have an original thought at a networking event? Me neither.

I find that inspiration requires a vacuum, and that solitude provides it that space. Alone time is the petri dish for creativity. 

Lots of creative types regularly expressed the need for alone time, and they’re most certainly on to something.

Improving the quality of connection

Something I'll often tell my mother is that my request for alone time is not a rejection of companionship.

I am not auditioning for a part in an Anton Chekhov story, I’m simply recharging my batteries. This is solitary refinement.

Personally, I find that spending time well alone has made me better at being with other people. There’s an anticipation of connection at the end of solitude, that makes the connection alchemise better.

*

There’s a few things I do that have made alone time most fun:

1. Foraging. I’ll walk to Haus Khas Forest and forage for flowers and leaves and mushrooms. I’ll find IDs for them on iNaturalist. On days that my imagination is doing well, I like to think of myself as a type of time traveller humanity rep, walking through the woods like some type of ascetic. You can wear a weighted vest and turn this into a ruck.

2. Writing Dates. You pick any cafe or park or a cute spot in your house and go there with your choice of writing equipment. This playlist on your earphones. I like to arm myself with prompts that I store as they strike me on my notes app. And I allow myself to write garbage.

3. Breathwork. Very lovely and reviving. You can do it at a workshop. But I also love these videos by Breath with Sandy.

4. A face mask + hot beverage + actually nice movie to end the day.

Do 1 to 3 items on the same day and it’s like a rustic DIY retreat!

How do you like to spend time alone? I’d love to hear.

October feels like permission. The water under the bridge has mostly passed. There's a sense of 'fuck it' in the air, as if the collective consciousness has decided to loosen its belt and kick back. My body is already somewhat in vacation mode, sipping hot water (not taking questions) somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

Here's two cool thoughts I've had recently:

I am not the body, I have a body: I am once again attempting physical fitness. It is only the 782nd time in this lifetime. I am not a gym rat, and in my thirties, I've developed enough self-esteem to not even find that type of persona as aspirational as I once used to.

Traditional fitness narratives often echo colonial thinking: conquer your body, push through pain, dominate your limits. It's all very 19th-century-empire-building when you think about it.

This attempt feels decidedly different, and there's subtext - my friend S who has a Reddit habit recently introduced me to the mostly fascinating r/DimensionJumping subreddit. There are many compelling things the (obviously very normal) people of the subreddit talk about, and at the centre of it is a rejection of a Newtonian worldview. These digital psychonauts are giving Newton the middle finger, arguing that reality isn't as solid as we think. Mind and matter? More like mind mush, apparently.

Now, if we roll with this quantum perspective - and many do - the lines between where I end you begin starts to smudge. It's all just etheric soup.

This fluid, interconnected view of reality has turned my conception of the mind-body-matter relationship on its head. From an exercise perspective, the body becomes a type of cosmic play-doh - a portal for exploration rather than a problem to be solved. This shift from "I am my body" to "I have a body" is cool. It creates space for curiosity, acceptance, and even joy in movement. Exercise is no longer a grueling, willpower-led torture hour. It is transformed into an immersive experience.

Fear Cat and Love Cat: As chief of staff to the Soami Nagar neighbourhood cat cartel, I've observed the dummies quite closely these past years. Mostly, cats seem to have stronger boundaries and more personal charisma than the yappy and silly dogs of our hood. Still, there are variances in how they present.

Our calico female embodies a type of 'fear cat' archetype. She navigates the world with an inherent wariness, her every move calculated and deliberate. When guests arrive, she vanishes like smoke, retreating to the home above us. Two years of daily visits, and she still acts like we're running some kind of feline Bergen Belsen. She approaches her food bowl as if solving a complex geometric puzzle, meticulously gauging the distance between herself and any nearby humans. On rare occasions, she might decide to accept a brief caress, but it's clear that trust is a precious commodity in her world.

Her half-brother (and also one-time boyfriend) was a stark contrast. The personification of "Love Cat", this cat had Shah Rukh Khan energy. He was gregarious and warm. He'd meow endlessly the whole time he was here, and loved being pet. The sight of any human had his tail up and eyes light up. (Too bad that he hasn't been around the hood for over a year, but that’s a story for another day.)

These cats are us. We're likely just hairless, overgrown versions of Fear Cat and Love Cat. Fear Cat is calculating the exact trajectory needed to get from our bed to the fridge without encountering another living soul. And Love Cat is one drink away from narrating our entire life histories to Uber Drivers.

There must be a way to be neither a doormat nor an asshole. Fear makes cowards of us, and shrinks the circumference and energy of our lives. It turns our lives into tight little circles of familiar miseries. A lack of boundaries on the other hand, can disregard our deepest needs.

I suppose I'll find a way to keep my wits about me, while taking the odd chance.

Have a great rest of your week!

I could not be less impressed by a sentence. This is the kind of vapid stuff you'd find printed on a mug in some gift shop in an airport, right next to the "Live, Laugh, Love" throw pillows.

I am hardly patient. I've always been more "are we there yet?" than "enjoy the ride". My mind paces, and my mouth struggles to keep up. My face makes so many expressions it could star in its own silent movie. This is all part of my creative process. It's who I am. Mostly it's a comedy train-wreck. Very rarely, with some luck, it's a small fireworks display.

Some years ago, at the end of an interview for a role I desperately wanted, I asked the hiring manager when they'd like the chosen candidate to start. "Yesterday!" they'd said, with a manic type of chuckle. It was the most 2010's thing ever, but at the time, I thought it was very sexy. For many years, I used the expression "Yesterday!" with the same crazy-eyed delivery, liberally and unapologetically, even when it made absolutely no sense.

I've been thinking about creative patience - mostly in the context of this substack, but also more broadly from the perspective of a type of attitude toward life.

There's this duality in creative pursuits. On the one hand, there's the 70-20-10 rule. The creative's equivalent of throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks. I'm a proponent of bad writing and bad art. Rough drafts are necessary, freeing, and sometimes they'll even sparkle.

But there's also something to be said about the perils of hurried, relentless, hustle culture art - I think it can sometimes lead to a type of creative anaemia.

It strikes me that the moving, tantric, make-you-question-your-existence type of art is a slow burn. I'm thinking of the Hans Zimmer score for Interstellar, for example. I can’t say I know Hans personally, but I'd wager that he didn't whip that up over a weekend fuelled by Red Bull and deadlines. That type of magical work seems to come from a whole other dimension. A plane that you have to teach yourself to access through patient cultivation.

This work is born from a patient dialogue between creator and creation. Over days, weeks and sometimes years, the ache of waiting transforms into creative fuel. Ideas mature, flavors intensify, and the ordinary transcends into the extraordinary.

Consider some other grand masters of patience:

• Leonardo da Vinci took about 14 years to perfect the Mona Lisa smile.

• Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over 12 years, capturing the actual growth of his actors.

• Antoni Gaudí spent 43 years working on the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and it's still not finished.

You get it. Good things take time etc.

NB: This all probably bodes well for the Bangalore Metro, which we can all agree is an experimental, durational art piece.

Have a great week!

These are the opening lines of Uglies, some type of sci-fi thing on Netflix. I could only stomach a few minutes before I tapped out, but the film's dystopian premise stuck. It sets out a world where beauty standards are enforced. A world in which getting plastic surgery and being the perfect size is not merely an outcome of peer pressure - it is a matter of public policy.

Some months ago, at a dinner party I was at, a very sassy girl I know asked me how much my "identity and sense of self" came from my appearance. I was an Anxious Ashwini that night, so I can't quite remember what I said, but the honest answer is that it is more than I can bear to admit.

In my household, the mantra was not "be pretty". It was "be useful". "No substance, only style!" was a common refrain my mother used whenever I spent too much time picking out an outfit. She saw the pursuit of beauty as a pretense. It was essential to her that I backed myself up with big words and good grades. I suspect it is for this reason that I have a hard time admitting that I could, in fact, be vain. My unconscious won't relent.

My favourite Instagram philosopher + shitposter Aishwarya Subramanyam did a whole post about it this week. She always tells the truth and I hate it.

But hey. You probably are too.

Vanity of some type is hardcoded into the social contract. My Silicon Valley-based enemy, Naval Ravikant, calls it "status games". For those of us socialised as women, a big part of this comes from our appearance.

This is not the type of thing that you call out loud. It is unconscious subtext. You can feel it. In a way, society is a giant human zoo where we are all both the spectators and animals. (Side note: I suspect this is why large gatherings are so draining.)

In witnessing others and being witnesses ourselves, we internalize all these sticky concepts about what value is and how valuable we are.

I'll never forget this little prick, let's call him Gopal, who called me a dummi during sports day practice when I was ten. Gopal was in the year above me in school. Dummi is Kannada for fatso. It is a round-sounding word, and like most other phrases in the language, the real sting is in its grating vocal delivery.

He and seven other pre-pubescent assholes laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. To be clear - none of them were Abercrombie & Fitch material themselves.

I've been every size from 'xl waif' to 'wide load'. My body changes with the fucking moon. But no matter the mirror or the scale, I've always felt like that dummi. Gopal's probably a decent guy now, maybe even has kids and a premium account on Big Basket. He'd probably shit himself if he knew I was writing about this on a goddamn substack.

Over the years, I've realized that the appearance mafia runs a sucker's game. And that beneath that sometimes all-consuming, somewhat shameful desire to be pretty is a desire to be seen.

I can't say for sure, but I suspect this isn't merely about seeking attention.

The need to be seen is primal. It is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. This primal longing for recognition and acknowledgment speaks to the very core of our survival instincts and our capacity for connection. In nomadic times, to be unseen by your tribe was to risk abandonment. As the group moved from place to place in search of resources, an overlooked individual faced the terrifying prospect of being left behind. In that world, solitude often meant death. Being noticed was a survival necessity.

These days, the threats are less immediate than our cave-dwelling days, but our need to be seen remains. It shows up in more nuanced, sometimes trivial ways. We chase likes on Instagram, angle for recognition at work, and yearn for genuine understanding in our closest relationships.

When someone says "I feel invisible," my sense is they're not just being dramatic.They’re expressing a pain as old as humanity.

This is oversaid, but offering someone our full attention and genuine recognition is an easy, accessible way to affirm our shared humanity. It is, in its own way, an act of love.

We'd be sitting across the screen from each other. Mid-session, my eyes would glaze over.

"What's coming up for you? Stay with it."

I'd squeeze my eyes shut, keenly concentrating. The pain is coiled up and hidden away from the light of my consciousness. I must let it out before it slithers away and I dissociate.

It usually took a few seconds.

When the tears come, my body heaves. The grief erupts like lava. It spills out of me with an intensity that is as unexpected as it is relieving.

This beautiful, ugly crying happened again last week. My therapist was across the screen, watching quietly. Some weeks ago, we'd decided to bring our four-plus-year therapeutic alliance to a pause. The weight of this decision had only just begun to strike me.

Is this the person who knows me best? Better than family, lovers, and friends? Does she demand less from me than anyone else?

My heart cracks, and it mends.

It is amazing that therapists exist. For me, finding M was like finding water in the desert. But then it is also somewhat sad that the only options for such agenda-less, unconditional support are in the context of a capitalistic transaction.Do I really have to pay someone to care for me in this way?

*

I've said it before - my experience is that therapy is terrifying, enlightening, alienating, and entirely essential work. Four years and a bit in, I'm stunned by the leaps we've made.

Here's a rough distillation of everything I've learned - this is part an ode to my brilliant therapist and part an attempt at tying loose ends. (What can I say, I'm trying to be better at endings.)

*

Healing is not linear: I initially took a (naive) productivity mindset to therapy, expecting to tick off problems like a to-do list. I quickly learned to let that go. The insights come like fireflies - they are bright, brilliant, and fleeting. But you can't catch them all and preserve them in a jar to examine later. They become part of you, changing you in ways you can't always pinpoint.

Still, you can trust that they'll show up. I spoke to an acquaintance after several years last month on the phone, and she paid me the biggest compliment.

"Uthara! Have you realized you don't talk at the speed of light anymore?"

"Yes, and I haven't lost my keys or credit cards in years either! Would you believe it!"

The strength of the therapeutic alliance matters: The single biggest determinant of whether therapy will work for you is whether your therapist and you click. I got lucky - my therapist was the first person I spoke with, and it was an immediate fit. Instead of "Hi X, my name is Y, can we speak?" I wrote her a long, rambling, unselfconscious essay on WhatsApp recounting all of my troubles, and she responded gently and kindly. That was that. Serendipity at service.

Nothing is exactly as it appears:  I thought that what I saw was all there was. As is the surface of the pond was the whole thing. Through years in therapy, I've realized that the lens through which I saw the world directly impacted how I received people, places, and situations. The world, through my eyes, isn't quite the world as it is. It's the world colored, distorted, filtered by me. By my past - every hurt, every joy, every random Tuesday afternoon. And so I could see that it wasn't that my colleague from 2019 was being 'difficult,' I was simply projecting a past story onto them. As we did the work, it was inevitable that the world softened and opened up.

There is no escaping the family heirloom: About two years in, I began to note the recurring motifs in my parents' personal narratives and was struck by how closely they mirrored mine. A little digging and asking around, and I began piecing together what was an elaborate history of particular affectations and ways of being across generations. It turned out that I have my mother's side of the family to thank for an almost neurotic occupation and curiosity with the esoteric and my father's side to thank for my temper, mischief, and love for excess.

Learning about the intergenerational nature of trauma has been eye-opening - this stuff is the ultimate domino effect. I understand now that perhaps the most coveted privilege on earth is being born into a lineage of reasonably well-adjusted humans with healthy attachment styles.  And that the bravest, loneliest thing one can do is to be a black sheep.

Boundaries, Boundaries: Learning to say no without feeling like I've kicked a puppy has been my personal rite of passage. In therapy, we discover that boundaries are not acts of rejection but rather invitations to deeper connection. They are the framework within which intimacy can flourish. By clearly delineating where we end and others begin, we create the space necessary for authentic relating.

*

This is the end of the list. I like lists because they help you make sense of a thing and give it structure. But life isn't quite so neat, and neither is therapy. You have to do the work and then do it over again and again. For now, I pause. But this is all still very TBC.

Much love. Have a great week!

At the outset, I'll readily admit that writing an essay about God as a 35-year-old potentially cool person feels like wearing socks and open-toed sandals to Delhi Gymkhana Club. It feels unfashionable and risky.

The times feel like an unfunny cosmic joke. There is an endless stream of unspeakably horrible events reported from near and far. And scores of incompetent, bloviating tools in positions of high authority preside over these tragedies.

Even though, on net, this is statistically the best time in history to be alive and all that, there's no question that the human experience continues to hold space for far too much violence and depravity.

Where is God in all of this?

Unsurprisingly, God isn't quite a hot topic, at least in the circles I run in, comprising silently disgruntled policy wonks and adjacents. I routinely use the euphemism for God, "The Universe," which is the subject of much comedy in my friend group. "Gwyneth Paltrow lite!" someone said recently. "Eyy, only white women get to Eat, Pray, Love."

I don't know about you, but I'll readily shove a jade egg up my chakras if it makes any of this make sense.

My parents did not subscribe to the Western notion of holidays, hobbies, and interests. In the 1990s, religion and rigorously calendared rituals filled that void for middle-class Indians.

I distinctly remember being furious when my father took us all to ISKCON temple on New Year's Eve for the millennium new year. While my classmates were likely sipping their first illicit beers, I was chanting "Hare Krishna" and wondering if the Y2K end of civilization might actually have been preferable.

When family friends met, it was for religious events. A ceremony to mark the coming of age of my brother (who I can assure you, had not come of age then), and a ceremony to mark Fridays and full moons. We had a puja for everything.

"Functions," as they were called, came to be times with far too much sensory stimuli. Presiding over the events was a coterie of pot-bellied, stern-faced priests, barking orders at the women and children. "Bring me a coconut!" "Where's the donation?" The air was thick with dung coal smoke that could double as tear gas. And there were always too many people cackling about and so much food that it made you want a stomach pump. My mother would refer to these sensory assaults as "kala-kala" - a quaint Tamil word that roughly translates to 'bustling joy' - but to me, all that was bustling was a desire to escape.

So it is no surprise then that my relationship with this thing we call God is somewhat bereft of these religiosities. All that noise and movement did not lend itself to tranquility, faith, or introspection.

Earlier this year, I started doing breathwork - first through a workshop in Delhi, and later by myself at home, with nothing but a YouTube video and my own breath as a guiding tool.

I'll use a little rapé, and set off into a journey of slowly decalcifying my ego. Sometimes, between breath cycles, I'll have pangs of inspired, uplifting thoughts, seemingly out of nowhere.

"That serenity you feel in nature is you."

"Suffuse your writing and creative endeavors with emotion and they will come alive."

"As you heal, she will heal."

"Focus on spirituality, creativity, comedy, and nature."

It's not that any of the above are exceptional profundities. But they come to me suffused with a feeling of such sublime softness and compassion that I am quite literally moved to tears. It strikes me in these moments that the separation that has come to typify the material world is illusory, and that maybe the omnists are on to something when they profess a single transcendent purpose or cause uniting all things or people.

Only a Jungian archetypist can tell if all that exposure to religion early on suffused a type of subconscious willingness to accept that there may be a force that runs through the world, permeating everything.

What I can say for sure though, is that even brief encounters with this “force” is grounding, softening and expanding. It helps me create with abandon, love fiercely and laugh loudly. And generally remember that nothing is that serious or permanent.

It is brat girl summer. Charli XCX has called it.

My mother often says that the collective human consciousness tends to evolve in an upward spiral. Our lived experience can feel repetitive and circular, but we can see the leaps we've made when we step back and look at the big picture.

As of August 2024, the cultural zeitgeist has once again socially sanctioned women to activate their inner Kali, Isis, and Artemis. Not holding back or editing ourselves is fashionable again. It feels like a call to have fun despite it all. We're aiming for respect rather than mere likeability, and I'm equal parts afraid and excited to see what this season brings.

From a distance, I'm half-watching the US elections. Whether Kamala or Trump prevails will be a litmus test for society's readiness to embrace a feminine perspective. Can we finally handle women who know themselves, trust themselves, and are tapped into their feminine flow? At least in one wealthy and culturally influential part of the world, we'll witness how feminine leadership is perceived and valued.

What does it mean to be a brat, really?

I did an internet search of the many circulating takes:

1. Betches, (which, to me anyway, trumps all peer-reviewed journals) describes this in aesthetic terms. They think that the following visuals embody being 'brat':

   • A hand-bedazzled cigarette case

   • A knockoff designer purse from your middle school closet

   • Removable tooth gems

   • Wired headphones that always get tangled

   • Y2K flavored lip gloss that confuses men

   • A stack of rings for your middle finger

   • Makeup wipes regardless of the skincare police's opinions

   • An eye mask and ear plugs to help you sleep in after staying up all night

2. The serious people of Time Magazine wrote some nice sentences:

   "....the artist has reclaimed a pejorative that's historically been used to demean young people and, often, young women."

   "Part of the allure of being a brat in the mold of Charli lies within its embrace of authenticity and defiance of expectations. For the contemporary brat, youth is nothing to be ashamed of and imperfections are proof positive of humanity."

3. The folks at The Guardian offer a more sociological perspective, suggesting that the "brat" phenomenon is a response to societal pressures and expectations placed on women. They argue that embracing the "brat" identity is a form of rebellion against the constant demand for women to be polite and pleasing.

For the record, I am in agreement with all of the above. And my hope is that this acts like a type of forest fire that goes somewhat global and burns through generational musts and shoulds.

I'm probably projecting, but I suspect that there's a particular pain underlying some of this brat girl stuff. It doesn't quite reek of the carefree summer anthems of the past. There's a weight here, an angry recognition that the world can sometimes be scary, unfair, and uncertain.

And this sort of phenomenon can be quietly powerful - because it (somewhat ironically) gives permission for some of this repressed anger and to be felt, processed, and alchemized into things of beauty and power.

I can't help but feel a grudging respect for this "Brat" movement. It's not pretty, it's not polite. It embraces and names the complex and multifaceted nature of modern womanhood.

Sometimes you've got to say fuck it and dance.

The people at a hip bookstore in the area seemed eerily at peace; a tall man ahead of me in the checkout line bought books worth 27,000 rupees while he recounted his entire international travel itinerary for the rest of the year, completely unprompted. (If you must know, he was going to be in Tokyo on Tuesday and then in L.A. on Friday.)

When the cashier announced his bill amount, he guffawed, "Oh my god, I should have bought a scarf!" You could almost hear the internal screams of the underpaid bookstore staff, captive to this man's first-world buffoonery.

I rolled my eyes at the speed of light and left for a cafe next door. There, I ordered a latte priced the GDP of a small village. This whole scene typified the city as I experienced it in that moment - a thin veneer of luxury plastered over crumbling infrastructure.

It was almost 5 pm, and so I walked 15 minutes across to Lodhi Garden, to sit with the nice people at a silent reading club and marinate in silence. Amid the muggy mess, we sat on mats, swatting away flies and reams of sweat. We were all trying to pretend that all was well. That Tolstoy or whatever paperback worked just fine to shield us from the varied assaults on our senses. Then, as if the day needed more surrealism, a man in a white shirt, likely some type of street preacher, singled me out from the crowd. "Do you believe in God?" he asked.

I gave up. I grunted something at the dude, stood up, walked to a bench, and scrolled through my phone instead.

*

Delhi in July is a testament to humanity's stubborn persistence in the face of nature's clear message to fuck off. The air is heavy, wet, and putrid. The outer world and my inner world mirror each other. They are both in an equal state of perish. During such times, my main redeeming quality of seeing the best in people and places dramatically wanes. Nothing impresses me. Not even Season 3 of The Bear moved me more than transiently. My senses are dulled, and I am limited in my capacity to notice beauty.

"It sounds like you need to get back your spark," a friend commented.

"Yes, and your grandmother needs to get her spark back too," I shot back, my irritation bubbling over. The culture in my friend group, formed in our youth, has long accommodated such barbs.

"She does actually," he said. "She's pretty out of it lately."

My friend is right. Despite these damp conditions, I must at least attempt to rediscover my light. So I did as one does in 2024, and turned to podcasts.

I'll admit that nothing quite prepares you for the onslaught of chipper voices telling you that your life is shit because you're not doing enough. Most of the time, podcasts do nothing for me except add to the list of things I must feel guilty about. But I plowed through anyway and have distilled some ideas that don't reek of insincerity:

Here's what I've got:

First, try accomplishing small tasks: This morning, I finally wrote back to Deepchand ji, my Chartered Accountant, who I’d ghosted for weeks. The man is is a saint, and only wants me to file my own taxes. "Here is my form 16 and salary slips," I type, each word feeling like a small act of defiance against my inner sloth. It's not glamorous, it's not going to change the world, but damn if it doesn't feel like a tiny victory.

The lab coats tell us that these small hits of dopamine from accomplishing small tasks is the key to motivation, the recipe for climbing out of life's occasional sinkholes. Maybe they’re on to something.

Second, pursue newness: Dr. Daniela Kaufer, a neurobiologist at UC Berkeley, found that new experiences trigger the release of dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine. This cocktail of chemicals doesn't just make you feel good - it helps your brain form and consolidate memories. It's like seasoning for your neurons. But the lord knows that our routinised, corporate lives allow for little novelty. You cannot easily swim with the sharks. The trick, she says is to start smaller. Apparently there is novel experiences to be had everyday.And they are worth pursuing.

When K first moved to India, and we’d go to a new neighbourhood, I’d be wildly fascinated by how he devoured them. Every little thing was new. Like niche kannada and tamil words and staple pantry ingredients. He got to the bottom of what filter coffee was and what the best type of chicory:coffee ratios tasted like. We’d be two days in a place and he’d know all the nearby streets by rote.

Third, become your own archivist: I’m shocked at the number of adult people that in 2024 continue to recoil from the benefits of journalling. “I dont like this “dear diary” stuff”. I heard someone say recently.

The thing is, this isn’t namby-pamby. You are just an out of touch dweeb. Documenting your authentic experiences, whether through writing or keeping a visual journal is a powerful way to preserve and validate your lived experience. It helps your brain process the memory better - making a type of neural lemonade of life’s lemons if you will. Modern psychologists recognize this type of journaling as a form of cognitive processing therapy. It allows individuals to externalize experiences, find meaning, and candidly, be a bit more charismatic.

***

I will (hopefully!) write to you again next week. May our spirits lift. <3

It’s been three weeks since the June cohort of the workshop began. A group of us meet online for three hours on Saturday mornings, and read and write and listen together.

Last Saturday, made an especially striking remark. “We aren’t here to win the Booker.”

The goal from the workshops, she says, is to tell the stories of our lives, and in doing that, unearth a deeper understanding of our selves. We should expect to knock ourselves out in the process. But that is good thing - both for our writing and our hearts.

Later in the week, I did some google-ing and learned that memoir writing is the cornerstone of narrative therapy, and can lead to significant mental health improvements.

This human from the 1980s, Timothy Wilson, wrote a whole book about it. I haven't read the book - but if you do - tell me what it says so I can just sit on my phone and feel nothing for a while longer.

*

Today's post is, well, three micro-stories from my own goddamn life. These were in response to the following prompt:

"Write about a time you responded to injustice"

I think they're at least a little cute, but if you don't agree, please don't tell me.

Here goes:

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*

"What did you say about my mother?

The sayer of these words was allegedly me. I was four or five, riding in our grey 118 NE. Bahadur, our Nepalese driver, was behind the wheel, and I sat beside him in the front. Child safety seats had not made it as a concept to India in the early 1990's—and truthfully, as I write this, I'm retrospectively mad at all the adults for letting me sit in the second most unsafe seat in the car.

My grandmother and two aunts were amused by my interjection and broke into peals of laughter. Bahadur joined them. They had ostensibly been beefing with my mother and were saying something unkind. Later that evening, they told everyone back home what had happened.  

As on 2024, I can't say for sure that this is how it all went. But in my mother's version, which has stayed mine, she was the archetypal Cinderella. My grandmother and aunts were the wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

It was either an early instance of me standing up against a minor injustice or evidence of premature indoctrination. There's really never a way to know with historical accounts.

*

"But, ma'am, Z didn't do anything wrong. She misses us. This is her school too. I'll talk to her about the dress code, but please allow her to come back next week for Teacher's Day."

"You are all a menace to society," was one of DC's favorite things to say.

As an adult looking back, it is clear to me that she was just projecting.

DC was our fish-faced, dwarfed headmistress, and nearly every kid in school had personally encountered her sourness.  

One time, our friend AJ got her period and asked to sit out of yoga class, writhing in discomfort.

"Oh, as if you're going to bleed to death," DC snapped at her, rolling her eyes. She did not give a single fuck.

Her latest injustice was issuing a unilateral ban on my friend Z, an ex-student, from visiting the school. Z had come in earlier that week, after spending over a year in the Netherlands. Some of that adapting to a new culture showed up in her outfit. She wore a soft pink mini skirt that was far too fashionable and windborne for DC's sensibilities.

DC was unreasonably outraged by shins, breasts, and nice haircuts. She was particularly harsh on us girls, the keeper of our shame certificates.

Like most authorities who issue bans, she wasn't concerned with the impact of her decision on us kids. Z was the glue that held our group together. Seventh-grade friendships were the stuff of sleepovers, crushes, and chocolate cake from Sweet Chariot. Z knew how to live. She would make plans for all of us to go bowling and then get tropical icebergs. Eight thirteen-year-old girls would regularly dress to the nines, wearing eyeshadow and gloss, to unironically hang out at Coffee Day.

When Z's father was transferred to a role abroad, there was collective grief. Her farewell party was a full-scale production—some of us even straightened our hair to go. So when her homecoming was met with such cruelty, it felt like DC had gone too far.

DC quite didn't know what to say. She certainly didn't expected Z to have legal representation. "Okay, she can come back for Teacher's Day. But please tell her to dress decently." It was not a perfect outcome, but at least I'd moved this gorgon enough for her to reconsider the Z ban.

*

We were twenty-something yuppies, working the early ropes of our respective careers at the office of a storied development leader. The office operated like a dark comedy TV show. Our boss had a torrential temperament. She thudded the table in frustration if she didn't like what she heard, and she contradicted herself all the time. The 'morning briefings' were infamous. Full-grown men were routinely abused and denigrated. Sometimes, people would cry. We were expected to be available 24/7, and we routinely worked 16-hour days.

The one positive of all of this was that it unified the rest of us in our grief. We all needed this job to pay the bills and have something to say when people asked what we did.  

She'd often leave the office midday for meetings, and the adrenaline let up as soon as she did. We'd run to the tapri to smoke cigarettes and drink tea. Sometimes, we'd get a bread pakora. Then we'd go back to the office and crack on with our day.

There was always a lot to do and very little room for error. We were pressured, but we had each other's backs. All this went on for a year.

We'd seen reasonable successes and even praise. Despite herself, the boss took a bit of a shine to us. I suppose there was something endearing about our naivety and earnestness.

Then came the comedic time of our annual performance appraisals. "You have done a great job. You, H, and Y are trusted members of this team. For this reason, we award you a 4% increment. You should know that this is much higher than the company average."

The office grapevine, with boundaries loosened by trauma bonding, let up that this was untrue.

That evening, we went to our usual dive bar and had many drinks in silence. And then we plotted to unionize. Liquid courage, if you will. The next day, we did not show up to the office. And we each sent in a note to say we were unavailable for the day. Frantic messages from the boss's executive assistant were left on read.

By two p.m. in the afternoon, we'd each received a calendar invite from the HR Head. By four p.m., we were back at the bar and reading out loud Reddit threads about salary negotiations. By the end of the week, we were each awarded a significant increment and changes to our job titles. We'd shown some gumption, and we got what we deserved.

*

I suppose the personal is political.

Our cat's boyfriend is a fiend. For weeks, he had been sitting like an entitled, lascivious village patriarch at the foot of our bougainvillea creeper, waiting for our cat to join him. Since she got pregnant, there has been no trace of the rascal.

This situation has stirred a deep-seated fear in me for her safety and well-being. I suppose my human heritage carries an ingrained narrative about the vulnerabilities of pregnancy.

This time two years ago, the cat's mother spent a few days lurking outside our kitchen window. She had a surreptitious air. And so K to stood on the kitchen platform to peer down at the cat to see what was happening.

"Oh wow. You won't believe what I'm looking at."

It was two tiny kittens. One of them was the currently pregnant baby, then just born.

The baby cat hasn't grown very big. She's still only as large as a 1-liter water bottle. It amazes me that her tiny body can contain and nurture a whole other life. And the odds are that she'll find a way to release them into the cat distribution system, just as she was.

My cat expert friends tell me that feral cats often find a safe way to birth their babies and care for them until they are about eight weeks old.

"Ferals are more resilient than you think. They know what to do. They just know. You have to give her space and support her from a distance."

In a way, my anthropomorphic fears pale in comparison to the "just knowing" of a cat. This tiny creature does not question her place in the world. She does not need a book about being a parent, nor a nurse, hospital, or the support of an overbearing maternal figure. She just knows.

*

In 2016, I had just moved back to Bangalore to be closer to my mother. It was a time when I did a great job at my job and a terrible job at living. I worked hard and partied harder, which is to say, I was using alcohol to cope. I didn't know what a circadian rhythm was, got crushes on several unsuitable boys, and had no idea where my life was headed. It was all very Bridget Jones.

One morning, on my way to work, I couldn't blink back tears, and I didn't even know why. The cab driver seemed very concerned. He was quiet throughout the ride, but at the end, he said something to me about praying and how that always helped. I half-prayed.

Some weeks later, I requested time off work to prepare for my next giant career leap, a storied Ivy League degree.

I took a month off, booked a GRE appointment, bought a bunch of preparatory material, a notebook, and three uni-ball pens. I began teaching myself math, logic, and English.

But my neurons did not cooperate. I couldn't seem to get good at this, and my mock test scores were atrocious. It was as if my whole body said no. My overwhelm was amplified, and the tears flowed freely.

I remember my mother sitting me in her room, calming me down, and guiding me through a meditation. Part of it included requesting the universe for a sign on my next step.

I woke up the next day to a LinkedIn view by someone at Amazon. Without question, I knew to find his email address from a friend and send him an extended, earnest essay about why I'd be a great fit on his team.

After I hit send, I felt an odd certainty that this would work out.

A day later, I received a response. It took a while—six whole months, to be precise—but I did get the job. It was a great time to join this specific team and company, and there has been no looking back.

*

A review study from some years ago explored the different approaches scientists have used to quantify intuition. They concluded that because intuition assessments depended on self-reporting, they were not, of themselves, dependable.

More recently, there has been a lot of interest in interoception, or an awareness of our body's internal processes, such as the beating of our heart and the clenching of our muscles. Neuroscientists believe that being attuned to our body's physiological signals informs our intuition or "gut feelings."

Personally, I take great comfort in that bone-deep, 'hell-yes' feeling that bubbles up occasionally, seemingly out of nowhere. It seems like we all know when someone makes an insincere comment, or if a street is unsafe to walk in or drive by. And though we're often inclined to dismiss that sort of thing as magical thinking, it could be a form of cognition that helps us make better decisions.  

Do you have cool stories from your life about intuitive nudges? I'd love to hear.

Writing for me is sometimes emotionally strenuous but almost always rewarding. I find that there's a certain inner game to writing a thing — you have to get over yourself and be alive to the world. Neither of these comes easy.

There's a familiar trope about the solitary writer figure — a shadow of a person sitting somberly at cafes and making self-indulgent notes about the world. This person is sometimes me.

It turns out that artistic pursuits are best nurtured in communities. Both my creativity heroes, and Julia Cameron, speak of the value of an artistic cluster of supportive and nurturing humans that create together and show each other their work. These are spaces that offer intentional softness, encouragement, accountability, and inspiration. You'd think this is easy to come by in our regular lives.

For the next few weeks, I aim to reset. As someone suggested at today's workshop, I want to cultivate a beginner's mind and approach writing from a new perspective.

I expect it to be tiresome, humbling, and fun!

*

I wrote an unedited version of this post during one of the six-minute speed-writing sessions we did together.

The prompt was to Make a list of all the things you have forgotten that you want to write about.

Here goes:

The names of all my crushes. Not the boyfriends, because those already received a ton of mental real estate. But the slowly passing, strange, and inexplicable crushes whose names I was too ashamed to say out loud. The crush that I had when I was eight and hoped would grow taller than me when we were adults (he did not), and the one that straight-up scowled at me when I mustered the courage to smile at him. Maybe if I took inventory, I'd learn something useful about myself. Crushes are a type of mirror.

Tennis class. Everything that I didn't like about it, including the coach. But also the things I did like that I missed taking in then. It would rain often, and they'd cancel class. I'd feel a euphoric relief as we'd run to a spot under a giant tamarind tree for cover. The courts were in an orchard, the sky was often blue, and the weather was always great, even at three in the afternoon. I had a much too big red, white, and black 'wind sheeter' that I'd wear afterward. And these wind sheeters, among other things, were a mandatory tennis purchase.

The many items on my mother's grocery list. She'd make these lists on telephone diaries that some bank or the other would send us as a year-end gift. With each passing year, the diaries shrunk in size. She always started with turmeric because there was some odd superstition around that. And then the turmeric-adjacent spices like mustard, fenugreek, cumin, and chilly. She wrote the names of some items in English and some items in English text but in Tamil. Like kurumolaghu for pepper. And vellum for jaggery. An unmissable item was several packets of Sabena - a cheap, everything-cleaning powder we could overuse without guilt. And then Colgate gel and Hamam soap because the marketing worked on my mother so well. Then there was flour and ghee and a whole list of rices. Sona masuri and boiled rice and raw rice and red rice. These would be procured from an entirely different store specialising in 'rice items'. And the damn store was located in a spot with zero parking.

*

It's funny how the small details come rushing back when you let them. Maybe’s there a something there.

Have a great Sunday!