Mae govannen! Welcome, fellow traveler. I intend to use this space as a running journal containing ideas, field notes and essays on a variety of themes t...
Nasir Molla drags the last of these wooden crates out into the yard. The stars peek between the lilypads in the dark. The Eastern sky is ablaze - it will remain orange for two more weeks, and then everything will go quiet. The bells in the Hanuman mandir. The bellows in the flour mill. The sound of kirtan at the crack of dawn. In the creek some of our kin will sleep, their bloated bellies rising…
And it's your whole existence. That's it. The delicate balance of this world rests on this one gambit. I don't mean your life, no. That would be too small a price, and frankly a damn shame. I do not intend to place a cost on your life. I do not intend to measure all your musical evenings and sunny walks against the extractive goal of being somebody. You already are somebody. Take this assurance…
Curiosity is not an act. It is a character trait. And it can be cultivated, often with steps more straightforward than another markdown third-brain or a convoluted bookmarking setup tied up with a host of water-chugging LLMs. Grab your water bottle instead and read on - let me share some of my own observations on what works. I am no savant, but I know a thing or two about curiosity. When I was 11,…
I always know when it's time to stop walking. When it's almost twilight, but not quite, on that faint green borderline between birdsong and sleep, I stop and look. At something, anything, as intently as I can. It's a habit that has lived in my bones all my life. An affinity for the liminal blue yonder between all certainties of life and death. Something pulls my feet along and then almost on the…
If you ever find yourself walking down the mall road in Darjeeling on a sunny afternoon in December, turn back and walk up the slope until you reach the old Post office building. A huge mall stands towering over its delicate walls and hastily renovated brickwork now. Just beside the board that says "heritage building", an old Lepcha woman ambles up through the deluge of jackets and perfume with a…
When I speak, I must first kill the source. I'm fishing by a pond in the dusk, I'm staring at dragonflies against a slowly darkening sky. I see the grey creeping up and the blues leaving in the turtles' wake. And I feel I must speak of this. How else can this beauty be witnessed? I am lonely, perhaps the loneliest creature alive at this moment. I've always been thus. And when this singular thought…
We've heard this before, and we'll hear it again. Where this goes south, however, is when we stop focusing on "Policy" and fixate ourselves on dissecting the "nerds". Who is a nerd? Does it bite? And so on, until the question loses relevance and we, the plebs, are confined into our little pits of never-ending doom. Congratulations? The lingua franca of an evolving economy is policy. From the…
Growing up in a small town, I always believed Apple to be the pinnacle of tech. If you owned a mac, you were an elite programmer or businessman by default. Of course, this was exactly as per Apple's marketing plan, and this subliminal messaging was hidden in every clean corner and metallic texture. Every design was deliberate in hitting that contemporary collective subconscious realm that yearned…
When I was 16, I wanted to become an astronaut someday. A year later, I wanted to leave everything and become a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission Order. Something radical had happened to myself, and it never subsided. I have fallen miserably short of both those goals, and the intervening year has now expanded into a terribly short-sighted life of agony and loneliness. And I want to speak of it, for…
There are two wolves inside. And each one claws at your skin, each one tries to better the other in a perennial fight. Each one, a stab at the macabre sense of doom hiding in the disguise of pragmatism. A blue flag dangling from a rotten mango branch in the summer. A tired heron losing to the sun in the dying light. This great war is our last war against everything. All the geopolitical tension…