Personal Essays

• On writing but not publishing

  Aug 1

  I must admit this is a strange feeling. As a blogger and then a social media person, I have always been in the habit of writing to publish. Whenever I… more ›

• On living with loss

  May 10

  Last week found me observing the fourth anniversary of my best friend’s death. We lost him to Covid at the height of the second wave. It still feels like he… more ›

• Be like Vibheeshan

  Apr 13

  It is said that the Ramayana forms the moral backbone of Indian society. But that theory doesn’t hold up on many fronts. For example, Ravan has a better reputation among… more ›

• The Songs of the North

  Apr 3

  I live in a small town on the east coast of India. If I close my eyes and sit quietly around 5am, I will hear the songs of birds, the… more ›

• The strange thing about strange things

  Feb 28

  A huge part of speculative and imaginative literature, especially its genre variants, is that strange things happen. But another part of it is that many of these strange things are… more ›

• Names have power

  Feb 27

  As someone who gets more than his share of Hindutva trolls, I learned some time ago the problem with calling Right Wing trolls names like monsters and maniacs. The problem… more ›

• The Age of Common Sense

  Feb 14

  My father recently went to a school reunion. Everyone there, like him, was in their seventies. Some had back problems, some had their joints giving up, some had diabetes ruining… more ›

• Parenthood and Perfection

  Feb 13

  I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.… more ›

• I had 300K followers on Instagram when I shut it down

  Feb 11

  This is the story of where social media fame took me, and how I broke free from its pressures. For better or worse, we have all come to define our… more ›

• Fuck Authenticity

  Nov 21

  I think we have made too much out of ‘authenticity’. In fact, we may have made more out of it than we should have. We are told to be authentic… more ›