I love this world.

I mean that earnestly, unironically, in a way that sometimes embarrasses me. I love the way morning light falls across a room I've seen a thousand times and somehow still catch as if for the first time. I love that there are songs I haven't heard yet, cities I haven't walked through, people out there right now becoming exactly who they're meant to be. I love being twenty one and alive at the same time as all of it.

And then, almost without warning, I feel impossibly small.

It happens in random moments: scrolling too long, taking a walk with my headphones on, sitting in a class full of people who all seem to know exactly where they're going. A thought will surface, something I actually care about, an idea that feels like mine. And right behind it comes the other voice: who do you think you are?

Because here's the thing that gets me every time. Every person whose name we still say out loud. They started exactly where I am. Before he was Elvis, he was just a boy in Tupelo with a guitar and a feeling he couldn't explain. Before Taylor Swift was a name that fills stadiums, she was fourteen with a notebook, writing songs nobody asked her to write. Kubrick had one shot he wanted to get right before he had a filmography. Audrey Hepburn had one audition before she had a career nobody could look away from.Bhagat Singh had one conviction before he had a movement. Lincoln had one letter, one speech, one decision to stand up in a room where it would have been easier to sit down.

All of them, at some point, were just a person with a thought. Nothing had happened yet. Nothing was guaranteed. They hadn't been anointed as great. They were just quietly, privately, maybe even a little embarrassingly certain about something small, before anyone else was.

That's the part I keep circling back to….. Because if that's all it takes, if greatness really does start as one unremarkable, unproven idea sitting in someone's chest, then why does mine feel so flimsy in comparison??!?!?!!

Why does it feel like their leap of faith was made of something sturdier than mine, like they were given a heavier rope to hold onto before they jumped?

I think, if I'm honest, it's because we only ever meet these people after…….

We meet Elvis after the hips and the voice and the legend. We meet Taylor after the eras and the arenas. We meet the directors after the retrospectives, the authors after the syllabus has already decided they matter. We never get to sit next to them on the day the idea first showed up, small and uncertain, with absolutely no evidence yet that it was worth anything at all. If we had, I don't think it would have looked golden. I think it would have looked exactly like EVERYYYYYY idea I've ever had and doubted. Ordinary, unproven, easy to talk yourself out of.

So maybe the question I keep asking, does my idea carry the same weight as theirs did, isn't actually answerable. Not yet. Maybe it's not even the right question. Because weight isn't something an idea has on its own. It's something that gets added to it, slowly, by every small, unglamorous choice to keep showing up for it anyway. Their ideas weren't born heavy. They were MADE heavy. It happened through the years, by the doubt they walked through instead of around, by choosing, again and again, to bet on the small and uncertain thing.

I don't know yet if what I'm carrying is anything close to what they carried.

I don't think anyone gets to know that in advance. But here's what feels true tonight, sitting with this feeling instead of running from it: I get to find out. That's NOT nothing!!!!!!! That's not small.

Most people never get the chance to even ask the question: whether their one thought is worth a leap. I get to ask it. I get to be twenty one, feeling too small for the world and too in love with it to stay quiet, and I get to try anyway!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not because I know it'll turn into something. But because the only real difference between me and everyone whose name we remember is that they didn't wait to feel ready before they found out.

Maybe that's the whole privilege of it. Not the certainty. Just the trying💕💓💞🎀🌷

xoxoxoxo

I live as though bound by invisible chains, forged from memories no one else can see.

The world urges me to leave, to move on, as though the heart obeys the same logic as the feet. But how does one walk away when the person they are fleeing has become the only destination they have ever known? Every road I take, every dream I dare to build, every version of my future somehow bends itself back toward you. I resent that.

I resent that I have unknowingly built an entire universe whose sun is someone who no longer shines for me.

I feel like a marionette suspended by threads I cannot sever, rehearsing an endless performance in the desperate hope that somewhere, somehow, your eyes might still find the stage. The cruelest part is knowing that the audience I perform for has long since left the theatre.

How effortlessly you disappeared. How gracefully you erased me from your story. Did it not wound you? Did my absence settle so gently upon your life that you scarcely noticed its weight? The space I once occupied within you has, I imagine, been reclaimed by quieter things, shrinking with every sunrise until it became indistinguishable from emptiness. Yet within me, you remain colossal. You eclipse every horizon.

Tell me, how does one forget the person who has become the architecture of every thought? I cannot remember what my mind sounded like before it echoed with your name.

You inhabit every silence, every ordinary moment, every fleeting thought. You are most present precisely when you are nowhere to be found.

Why is forgetting so effortless for you, and so impossible for me? Why does your freedom arrive so naturally while mine remains forever postponed?

Sometimes I wish I had never crossed paths with you at all. I ache to remember the person I was before my life became divided into a before and an after. Before every joy carried the shadow of your absence. Before every decision became an unconscious attempt to find my way back to someone who had already chosen another direction. I long to remember what it felt like to awaken without grief waiting faithfully beside me.

More than anything, I miss the simple miracle of feeling ordinary.

I want my life back. I want sovereignty over my own heart again. It terrifies me that the climate of my entire emotional world is dictated by someone who no longer thinks of me when morning comes.

You have become indifferent where I remained devoted, glacial where I remained aflame. Perhaps the deepest wound is not that you stopped loving me, but that I surrendered so much of myself to someone capable of carrying my absence with such unbearable ease.

It fills me with a quiet, consuming fury to know that someone so unmoved by my existence still possesses the power to move every part of mine.

https://youtu.be/wjHgiSx0RNQ?si=U2WOBr0bbHJL6vu8

It was a cozy Sunday evening, my sister and I were trying to make thai curry from a recipe we got off reels, my dogs were asleep, watching us from a distance. I wasn’t trying to have a moment. I just put something on, just because. A Bill Evans record, Waltz for Debby, recommended by someone on the internet whose taste I trusted. I sat down. I meant to do other things.

I didn’t move for twenty minutes.

I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds. Jazz girl discovers jazz, calls it life changing. But what happened that night wasn’t me falling in love with a genre. It was me realizing I had been overhearing a conversation the whole time and only just now understood that the people talking were actually listening to each other.

Most music talks at you. There’s a voice, a message, a feeling it wants you to receive. That’s not a criticism. A lot of the music I love works exactly this way. But jazz does something different. When Bill Evans plays a phrase and bassist Scott LaFaro responds to it, that response is not scripted. LaFaro heard something and answered it. The piano then adjusts. The conversation continues. You are not the audience for this exchange. You are overhearing it, which is a completely different thing.

This is what I mean when I say jazz doesn’t perform. It’s too busy talking to someone else to worry about how it looks.

There’s a concept in good conversation called “tracking,” which is the idea that you’re not just waiting for your turn to speak, you’re actually following what the other person is saying and letting it change what you were going to say next. Most people are bad at this. Most music is bad at this. Jazz, structurally, cannot be bad at this. The musicians are required to track each other in real time or the whole thing falls apart.

I started noticing how rare that felt. To be in a conversation where someone was genuinely following you, not just nodding. Where what you said actually affected what came back to you. I could count those conversations on one hand.

Go listen to “Freddie Freeloader” from Kind of Blue. Don’t read about it first. Just play it. At some point Miles Davis goes quiet, completely silent, and the piano fills in, and then Miles comes back in slightly differently than you’d expect. He heard what the piano did in his absence and he responded to it. He let himself be changed by the two seconds he wasn’t playing.

I think about that a lot. The idea that real listening means you come back different. That a good conversation leaves a mark on what you say next.

I don’t know what I’m working through exactly. I think I spent a long time in friendships and in my own head performing rather than talking. Saying interesting things instead of true ones. Being entertaining rather than honest. Jazz made me notice the difference, the way you sometimes notice something for the first time even though it was always there.

There’s a Miles Davis quote that lives in my head now, “It takes a long time to play like yourself.”

I used to think that was about music.

The record ended that night and I sat there in the quiet for a while. Not thinking, really. Just noticing that I felt less alone than I had an hour ago.

You know that feeling? When you talk to someone and you walk away feeling like your brain just stretched a little? I’ve been obsessed with figuring out what it is about certain people that does that.

So I made a list. A real one. Not “they’re kind” and “they have a good sense of humor.” Anyone can say that. I mean the actual, specific, harder-to-name things. The ones you feel before you can articulate them.

Here we go.

They hold their beliefs loosely.

This is the one I keep coming back to. They have convictions, real ones, but there’s no ego threaded through them. When you show them something that contradicts what they thought, they don’t get defensive. They get interested. And I think that’s because they’ve detached their identity from their opinions, which is genuinely rare and genuinely hard. Changing your mind for them isn’t a defeat. It’s almost like a relief. Like oh, good, now I know something truer than I did before.

They sit with not knowing.

Most people are terrified of the gap between question and answer. They rush to fill it with whatever certainty is nearby. The best people I’ve met are completely comfortable saying “I don’t know” and actually meaning it, not as a placeholder, but as a real resting place. They treat ambiguity like somewhere worth staying for a while. That comfort is so attractive to me because it means they’ve stopped performing intelligence and started actually practicing it.

They make other people feel more intelligent.

Not by simplifying themselves. By asking the right questions and actually listening to the answers. You finish a conversation with them and you feel sharper than when you started. They drew something out of you. They gave you the conditions to think better than you normally do. That’s not a small thing. That’s a kind of gift.

They have a theory of other people.

Meaning, they habitually wonder about the interior life behind behavior. When someone acts badly, their first instinct isn’t judgment. It’s curiosity. They ask “what is going on for them?” before they ask “what is wrong with them?” I think this is maybe the root of almost every other good quality. If you genuinely believe that people have rich, complicated inner lives that you can’t see, you become automatically more patient, more forgiving, more interested. You become almost incapable of casual cruelty because cruelty requires flattening someone, and you can’t do that when you’re always imagining their depth.

They carry their wounds without weaponizing them.

This one’s delicate. They’ve clearly been through things. You can tell. But they haven’t built their entire personality around it. They haven’t turned their pain into a reason to preemptively hurt people, or a shield they hold up to avoid being known. They’ve metabolized enough of their history that it made them deeper instead of harder. I find this so beautiful and honestly so difficult. It’s one of the quietest forms of strength I know.

They take ideas seriously across all sources.

A good insight from a teenager lands the same way as one from a tenured professor. A line from a film hits as hard as a passage from a book they assigned in school. They don’t rank the container over the content. This means they’re constantly finding things other people miss, because they didn’t dismiss the source before hearing the idea. Wisdom is where you find it. They actually believe that.

They resist the seduction of simple narratives.

The world is constantly offering us clean villains and tidy explanations. It feels so good to accept them. The best people I know are suspicious of that feeling. When a story is too neat, too satisfying, they lean in and squint. They’d rather live with the uncomfortable, textured, contradictory truth than settle for the satisfying myth. This makes them harder to manipulate, harder to radicalize, and honestly just more interesting to talk to.

They have a long moral memory.

They remember what they said they cared about, and they try to actually live by it. Not for an audience, not when it’s convenient, but consistently and privately. I think about this one a lot because I think so much public morality is basically performance. These people do the right thing when no one is watching, not because they’re saints, but because they’ve thought seriously about who they want to be and they’re quietly held to it.

They know the difference between solitude and loneliness.

They can be alone without collapsing. Silence doesn’t frighten them. They have a real relationship with their own mind, not always a comfortable one, but a genuine one. There’s a whole inner conversation happening that they tend to. And I think that’s where almost all of their depth comes from. You can’t pour from an empty well. You also can’t be truly present with someone else if you’ve never learned to be present with yourself.

They feel outrage at distant injustice.

Their moral concern doesn’t stop at the edge of their personal experience. They’re disturbed by suffering they will never directly see, that will never affect them, that they can’t fix. That’s real. That’s empathy that hasn’t been conditioned into convenience. I think about how easy it is to just... not feel things that don’t touch your life. And I think about how rare and precious it is when someone refuses to do that.

They give attention as an act of love.

Full, actual attention. Not half-listening while composing their reply. Not glancing at their phone. When they look at you, you feel it. You feel seen in a way that doesn’t happen very often, and it stays with you. I genuinely think this is becoming one of the rarest things a person can offer another person. The ability to be truly, quietly, completely here. No performance of listening. Just presence.

They protect other people’s dignity instinctively.

They notice when someone is being embarrassed in a room and they move toward it. Subtly. Without making it about themselves. They redirect, they absorb, they shift the energy. You often don’t even realize they did it. I think this is one of the most quietly heroic things a person can do in ordinary life. There’s no glory in it. It’s just goodness operating below the surface, on behalf of someone who needed it.

They notice what goes unnoticed.

The person who didn’t laugh at the joke. The one whose energy shifted in the middle of a conversation. The pause that meant something. They have this peripheral awareness that isn’t surveillance, it’s care. It’s love paying attention. And because they notice, they respond. Not always with words. Sometimes just with a look that says I see that, I see you.

They don’t need the last word.

A disagreement can end without resolution and they’re fine. Their sense of self isn’t brittle enough to require winning every conversation. There is something so deeply secure about this, so unshowy, that I find it almost more attractive than intelligence. It means they’re not in conversation with you to confirm themselves. They’re in conversation with you to actually think.

They are genuinely curious about people who are nothing like them.

Not in a condescending way, not as a social project, but actually drawn in. Different worldviews feel interesting rather than threatening. They leave conversations with strangers having learned something they couldn’t have predicted. I think this is what keeps people alive in some essential way. The moment you stop being curious about people who are different from you, you’ve started shrinking.

They are fully present in a way that isn’t practiced.

Not because they meditate (maybe they do, I don’t know), but because they’ve genuinely stopped being mentally elsewhere all the time. When they’re with you, they’re there. The conversation isn’t competing with their own internal monologue about what they should be doing or what happened earlier. This kind of presence is so rare now that when you encounter it, it almost feels like being touched.

They understand that most cruelty is pain.

They’ve thought enough about human behavior to know that people who wound others are usually bleeding themselves. This doesn’t make them naive or without limits. They still protect themselves. But it takes the venom of personal offense out of their response. They don’t take cruelty personally because they know it almost never actually is.

They make the unspoken speakable.

This might be the rarest one on this entire list. When there’s tension in a room, something everyone is feeling and no one is saying, they name it. Calmly, without drama, without making it about themselves. And the room breathes. This takes a specific kind of courage combined with a specific kind of emotional intelligence, and I genuinely don’t think most people ever develop it. The ones who have it are almost irreplaceable.

They have a private inner life they actually tend to.

A question they’ve been sitting with for years. A book they return to. Long walks where they’re not listening to anything. They don’t outsource all of their inner processing to other people or to content. There’s a whole conversation happening inside them that they take seriously. This is where the depth comes from that you notice when you talk to them.

They don’t perform generosity.

They just do generous things. No announcement. No lingering for the reaction. No quiet scorekeeping. They give and then they move on. You often don’t realize what they did until later, and by then they’ve already forgotten about it. The invisibility is the point. Real generosity doesn’t need a witness.

They take beauty seriously as a form of knowledge.

A piece of music that breaks something open in them. A sentence that stops them. A view that makes them feel small in the good way. They don’t treat being moved as mere sensation. They treat it as information. They believe that aesthetic experience is telling you something true about the world and they follow that. They let things in.

They have thought seriously about death.

Not morbidly. Honestly. They’ve reckoned with the fact that this ends, that everyone they love will end, that time is actually limited and not in an abstract motivational-poster way. And they’ve let that land. It changed what they pay attention to. You can feel it in how they’re not wasting themselves on things that don’t matter to them. Not perfectly. But directionally.

They are embarrassed by their former selves in the right way.

Not with self-loathing or shame spirals. But with this gentle, almost fond recognition that they used to be smaller, more certain, more careless. They look back and see real change without needing to condemn who they were to justify who they are now. That backward embarrassment is actually evidence of growth. It means something genuinely moved.

They carry joy like a responsibility.

This is the one I want to end on because I think about it the most. They understand, somewhere underneath everything, that being genuinely alive, curious, warm, present, is something they owe the world a little. Not performed happiness. Not toxic positivity. A real commitment to not going through life half-asleep. Their aliveness makes other people feel more alive. And I think that might be the most important thing a person can do.

I think what ties all of them together is this: they’ve chosen depth over comfort, again and again, in small invisible ways. They decided to actually feel things. To actually think. To actually show up. And somehow, mysteriously, that makes them the most comforting people to be around.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole list.

I blame a YouTube rabbit hole. One minute I was watching a reel about monsoon floods in Assam, the next I was three hours deep into a documentary about melting Arctic ice, crying at 1am like the fate of a polar bear was somehow my personal responsibility. Which, it turns out, it kind of is. We all kind of are.

But here’s the thing that really got under my skin, not the usual “use metal straws” content. It was this: some of the world’s greenest, most environmentally celebrated countries are also the ones selling us the oil that’s burning everything down.

Let’s talk about it.

Norway: The Glow-Up Nation With a Very Dirty Secret

Norway is basically the Ranbir Kapoor of climate politics. Charming, put-together, everyone loves him at the awards show. And then you dig a little deeper.

Here’s what Norway will tell you about itself: 98% of its electricity comes from renewables (mostly hydropower). It has one of the highest EV adoption rates in the world. Its carbon tax has been running since 1991. The Climate Change Performance Index consistently ranks it among the top nations on earth for environmental action. Genuinely impressive stuff.

Here’s what Norway won’t put in the brochure: it is the fifth largest exporter of crude oil in the world. It supplies roughly a quarter of all of Europe’s natural gas. And in 2024, Norwegian gas exports hit record numbers in six out of twelve months, partly because Europe was scrambling to replace Russian energy after the Ukraine war. Climate Action Tracker noted that the emissions Norway “exports” through its oil and gas are more than ten times higher than its total domestic emissions. Ten times. Let that sit.

An analyst at EUObserver put it perfectly: it’s like a drug baron who supplies his users while funding drug-related charities. Oslo plays climate champion while ramping up new drilling in the Barents Sea. And in April 2025, when Norway released its national climate plan, Oil Change International called it “hypocrisy dressed up as climate leadership” because the government refused to even plan for a decline in oil and gas production.

Norway gets to keep its clean, green reputation because the smoke happens elsewhere. In someone else’s lungs. Someone else’s city. Someone else’s country.

Saudi Arabia: The Plot Twist

Okay, Saudi Arabia funding solar projects sounds like the setup to a joke. But it’s real, and it’s genuinely complicated.

Under Vision 2030, Crown Prince MBS’s big plan to stop being a one-trick oil pony, Saudi Arabia has gone absolutely feral with renewable energy investment. They’re building NEOM, a $500 billion futuristic city in the desert meant to run entirely on wind and solar. They awarded 4.5 gigawatts of new solar and wind projects in late 2025 alone. Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, literally co-invested $8.3 billion into renewables. CNN reported that Saudi Arabia broke into the global top 10 for new annual solar installations for the first time in 2025.

But here’s the twist that a CNN piece on this laid out so clearly it made me put my phone down: a major reason Saudi Arabia is going solar at home is so they can free up oil to sell abroad. Burning oil domestically is inefficient and unprofitable. Switch the country to solar, and you can pump more crude onto the global market instead. Going green at home to sell more fossil fuels internationally. That’s not an energy transition. That’s a business strategy.

Saudi Arabia’s overall climate policies are still rated “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker. The country remains one of the worst performers on the Climate Change Performance Index, right next to Iran and the UAE. The solar panels are real. The commitment to actually phasing out oil? Nowhere in sight.

So What’s Actually Going On Here?

There’s a term for this: carbon laundering. You clean up your own backyard, take all the credit, and quietly shovel the dirty stuff next door. Norway measures its emissions from inside its borders, and by that measure, it’s doing great. The gigatons of CO2 that get released when Europe burns Norwegian gas? Not Norway’s problem, officially.

This matters because the whole architecture of international climate accountability is built on this domestic-only logic. The Paris Agreement asks countries to report what happens within their borders. Exported emissions, the carbon footprint of what you sell, largely don’t count against you. It’s a loophole so big you could sail an oil tanker through it, which, coincidentally, Norway does regularly.

And Where Does India Sit in All This?

Here’s the uncomfortable part. We love to (rightfully) point out that the rich world created this mess, industrialised for 200 years on coal and oil and then turned around to tell developing nations to grow “cleanly.” That’s a real and valid critique. India emits a fraction of what the US or EU has historically emitted per capita. Climate justice is a real thing.

But we also import nearly 90% of our crude oil. Our energy in 2025 was still about 89% from fossil fuels. India is projected to lead global oil demand growth over the next decade, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report. Our oil imports could go from 87% dependency now to 92% by 2035. We are buying the product that Norway and Saudi Arabia are selling. We are the market that makes their hypocrisy profitable.

This doesn’t cancel the historical injustice argument. But it does mean that the conversation is messier than “rich countries bad, we’re victims.” We’re participants in the same system. And we’re going to suffer its consequences more than almost anyone: the floods, the heatwaves, the water crisis. Cities like Chennai have already had day-zero water moments. Delhi’s air quality is a well-documented disaster. This is not an abstract future problem for us. It’s already here.

The Inconvenient Question

If Norway is allowed to be a “climate leader” while exporting ten times its domestic emissions in oil and gas, what does “climate leadership” even mean? If Saudi Arabia can get solar brownie points while simultaneously planning to pump crude well into the 2050s, are we just measuring the wrong things?

I think we are. The current system rewards what countries do inside their borders and ignores what they sell to the rest of the world. It’s a measurement problem masquerading as a morality problem.

The actual question is simpler and harder: who is making money off the continued burning of fossil fuels, and why are we letting them write the rules of what counts as “green”?

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built entirely on oil money, is worth over a trillion dollars. It’s one of the largest in the world. A significant chunk of that fund is now invested in renewable energy companies.

Make it make sense.

What To Do With This Information

I’m not going to tell you to stop buying things or calculate your carbon footprint down to your chai. That kind of individual guilt framing is, as the journalist David Roberts has argued, largely a successful PR campaign by the fossil fuel industry to make this feel like your personal failing rather than a systemic one.

But I do think awareness matters. Knowing that “green” rankings are gamed. Knowing that exported emissions are a real thing that disappears from official accounting. Knowing that the country selling you oil and the country wearing a green halo at COP30 might be the same country.

Because if we don’t understand how the system is rigged, we can’t push for it to be fixed. And as Indians, living on a subcontinent that is going to absorb some of the worst climate impacts on earth, the Himalayan glacier melt, the intensifying cyclones, the monsoon disruption, we probably have more skin in this game than most.

I came late to caring about this. But I’m here now.

As someone who is an avid, borderline obsessive over television soaps like The Summer I Turned Pretty, anything with longing and a good soundtrack and beautiful people making terrible decisions for love, it was obvious that I was going to love Off Campus.

What’s not to love? A cast with insane chemistry, a storyline that walks the perfect line between grey and golden, and a music selection that makes you feel like your own life deserves a cinematic score. But somewhere around episode four, I noticed something. I wasn’t just watching the show. I was feeling it, deeply, almost embarrassingly so. And I like things that make me feel a lot. That’s the whole point. But yesterday, I decided to actually look at why. Why does a fictional hockey player make grown women rearrange their schedules? Why does a fake dating plotline hit like something personal? Why, neurologically and historically and culturally, does this keep working on us?

That’s when I found the science. And wow.

The Dopamine Isn’t in the Kiss. It’s in the Almost.

Here’s what nobody tells you about dopamine: it doesn’t spike when you get what you want. It spikes in anticipation of getting it.

Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz mapped this in the 1990s, reward neurons fire hardest not at the moment of reward, but at the cue that predicts the reward is coming. The almost touch. The held eye contact. The moment where you can feel it about to happen.

Off Campus, based on Elle Kennedy’s The Deal and built around the slow burn between Hannah Wells, a quietly brilliant music major who hates hockey, and Garrett Graham, Briar University’s star center who desperately needs to pass his ethics exam, is essentially a dopamine delivery machine disguised as a streaming show. The fake-dating setup is not a lazy trope. It is a neurological trap, and a genius one. Because when you place two people in a constructed intimacy…a deal, a performance, a lie told to everyone else; you are giving the brain the prediction cue over and over again. You know they’re going to fall for each other. The brain knows. And it is losing its mind in anticipation, episode after episode, refusing to look away.

Creator Louisa Levy structured the episodes like novel chapters, each one ending on a hook just before the emotional payoff. That’s not an accident. That is someone who understands, consciously or not, that the gap between wanting and having is where we live. The show weaponizes that gap. And we hand ourselves over to it willingly.

Mirror Neurons: You’re Not Watching Hannah. You Are Hannah.

Here’s something cool about neurons: the same neurons that fired when a macaque reached for food also fired when the macaque watched another animal reach for food. Your brain doesn’t cleanly distinguish between doing and witnessing. It rehearses both.

Applied to fiction, this is staggering. When Hannah Wells sits across from Garrett at a and feels the specific, unbearable awareness of someone looking at you like you are worth looking at, your mirror neurons are not observing that feeling from a distance. They are running the same program. You are not watching a girl fall in love with a hockey player. You are, neurologically, falling in love with a hockey player. The emotion is real. The biochemistry is real. The only thing that isn’t real is Garrett Graham.

This is why “it’s just escapism” has always been the wrong frame. Escapism implies going somewhere else, checking out, leaving. What the show actually produces is a second life running in parallel, an emotional experience with full neurological weight, at zero personal cost. You get the longing without the vulnerability. The warmth without the risk. The intimacy without having to be known.

The Female Psyche, the American Dream, and the Man Who Was Built for Her

Let’s go deeper, because the neuroscience is only half the story.

There is a version of Garrett Graham that has never existed in real life and probably never will. He is not just handsome and athletic. He is emotionally present. He notices Hannah, not her body first, but her. He shows up. He makes her feel like the smartest, most interesting person in the room, and he does this without making her shrink. He is dominant but not threatening. Confident but not arrogant enough to stop listening. He cries exactly once, in private, about his father, and it makes him more attractive, not less.

He was written by a woman, for women. And the character who emerged is not a portrait of a real man. He is a portrait of what women have been quietly, persistently asking for, sometimes in their journals, sometimes in group chats, sometimes just in the way they describe what they want and watch people’s eyes glaze over because it sounds too simple: I want someone who is here. Who is emotionally legible. Whose interest in me does not have to be decoded like ancient scripture.

This matters more when you understand the landscape a lot of women…particularly younger women, are actually navigating. Emotional unavailability dressed up as mystery. Digital intimacy that evaporates in person. Men who were never taught to articulate want, or warmth, or fear. Into that absence, Garrett Graham walks, and he is fluent. He knows what he feels. He says it eventually. He does not make Hannah guess.

For women who grew up in cultures that romanticized the chase, the hot-and-cold, the emotionally unavailable man who just needed the right girl ,Garrett is almost disorienting. He is the counter-programming. And the brain, starved of a particular kind of recognition, floods.

The Safe Container: Cortisol as a Feature, Not a Bug

There is a concept in psychology called the “safe container”, a bounded space in which intense emotion can be felt without real world consequence. So is the novel. So is the show that you know, because the genre promises it, will end with the two of them together.

Off Campus stresses you out. The breakup, their separation.Your cortisol rises. Your chest gets tight. This is not a metaphor, this is a measurable physiological stress response to a fiction you are choosing to consume.

And then it resolves.YAY.

Because the HEA, the Happily Ever After, is not sentimentality. It is the genre’s contract, its iron law, the promise that makes every dark moment survivable. The resolution triggers a dopamine-serotonin cocktail that your body experiences as relief. As warmth. As something very close to joy.

What you have just done, without knowing it, is run an emotional simulation. You have practiced surviving the fear of losing someone. You have rehearsed hope following despair. Women who read and watch high volumes of romance are not retreating from emotional complexity, they are training for it. The genre is a gymnasium for the affective nervous system.

The Oxytocin Problem (Or: Why The Guys Feel Like Someone You Actually Know)

Oxytocin……. sometimes lazily called “the love hormone” is released through physical touch, yes, but also through perceived emotional intimacy. Through feeling known. Through warmth that feels directed at you. Parasocial relationships, the attachments we form to characters, to celebrities, to people who do not know we exist, trigger measurable oxytocin responses in the brain.

This is why the group chat about Off Campus does not feel embarrassing to the people in it. Neurochemically, it isn’t. Hannah and Garrett are not abstract. They have weight. The brain has processed them as real bonds, not because it has been fooled, but because it is doing something quite sophisticated: extracting emotional nutrition from a narrative the way it might extract it from a lived experience.

And the shared ritual of watching, of talking about it, of losing your mind together, that is its own oxytocin event. The show becomes social infrastructure. A shared emotional language. A low-stakes way to articulate what you actually want from love without the terrifying vulnerability of admitting it directly.

The Capitalism of Longing: A Brief History of Selling Women Their Own Desires Back to Them

It would be incomplete to talk about all of this without acknowledging the machine behind it.

The romance industry is not a recent phenomenon. It is one of the most consistently profitable publishing and entertainment sectors in history, and its primary consumer has always been women. In the 1970s and 80s, the Harlequin romance novel created a subscription model for desire. Women received books in the mail, monthly, like a vitamin for something the rest of culture was not providing. The industry understood something that literary culture refused to: women’s inner emotional lives were an enormous and largely unserved market.

BookTok: the ecosystem through which Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus novels found their massive contemporary audience, is a direct descendant of that tradition. Women recommending books to women. Women articulating what they want in a story with a precision and passion that the mainstream has always found slightly embarrassing. Prime Video did not create the audience for Off Campus. The audience created themselves, over years, through a digital oral tradition, and Prime Video showed up with a budget.

The show hit number one worldwide within 48 hours of its release on May 13, 2026, not because of marketing, but because a community of women had already decided it mattered. The capitalism here is interesting: for once, the machine did not manufacture the desire. It simply followed the women who already had it.

So What Are We Really Saying When We Say We Love This Show?

We are saying: I want to feel a lot. I want a story that takes my emotional capacity seriously. I want to watch a woman who is smart and guarded and musical and a little afraid, choose, slowly, to be known, and to have that choice be met with someone who does not flinch.

We are saying: the love I have imagined deserves a narrative, a score, eight episodes structured like chapters, and an insane amount of chemistry between two people who look at each other like that.

We are saying, with every rewatch and every group chat message and every TikTok of that scene: I know this feeling. I recognize it. I have felt this, or I have wanted to…andddd it is not a small thing, and I refuse to be embarrassed by how much I care.

The science just confirms what we already knew. The brain is not being tricked by Off Campus. It is doing exactly what brains evolved to do, finding the experiences that matter, rehearsing the feelings that are worth having, and bonding, fiercely and without apology, with the stories that finally bother to show up for us.

if you made it till here, here’s a picture of my favorite scene from the show

Let me set the scene. it is 10pm. I am in bed. I have Alix Earle open in one tab, Madelynn Cline in another, and I am telling myself I am just “doing research.” twenty minutes later I have added three things to my cart and I am genuinely convinced that a butter yellow linen co ord is a personality trait I need to have by Thursday.

this is not a hypothetical. this is a Tuesday.

I have watched enough Tinx, enough Matilda Djerf, enough Get Ready With Me videos to have developed what I can only describe as a parasocial relationship with my own wishlist. I don’t just want things. I want them because someone with great lighting and a really good ring light made them look like the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking.

The Rhode phone case was not a phone case. It was a lifestyle. It was the kind of girl I was going to become once I had it. I have it now. I am the same girl.

And look, I am not going to pretend I don't know what's happening when I'm doing it. I know. I have media literacy. I have read about manufactured desire. I know that when Alix posts about her Stanley it has already been seeded two months in advance and I am a node in a marketing funnel. I know all of this. I bought the Stanley anyway. and then when the Owala girlies started talking I bought that too because apparently I needed two water bottles with different personalities.

the trend cycle is not your friend, babe

here is what nobody says out loud in the fashion content space: the micro-trend cycle is designed to make your existing wardrobe feel wrong. not worn out. not broken. just aesthetically incorrect. last season’s beige linen is not good beige linen anymore, it’s the wrong shade of beige. butter yellow is in. sage is out. coastal grandmother had a moment. now we’re doing something called “quiet luxury” which apparently means expensive clothes that look like they’re trying very hard not to look expensive.

the Miu Miu sunglasses are a great example of this. I want them because I genuinely loved them, I want to be clear about that. but I also want them because I had absorbed approximately 400 hours of content in which women with those exact frames looked like they had figured something out about life that I had not. that is not a purchase. that is a vibe transfer I paid for.

what I’m actually trying to learn

I want to be honest here because I think a lot of “I quit fast fashion” content is written by people who have already arrived at a place of enlightened minimalism and are now gently guiding you from above. I have not arrived anywhere. I am in transit. I still want things constantly. the difference is I am now making myself wait.

the thing that actually shifted something for me was not a documentary (though The True Cost will rearrange your organs, watch it). it was looking at my wardrobe and genuinely not being able to tell you where half of it came from. not the brand. not the reason I bought it. not a single memory attached to it. it was just stuff. a lot of beige and butter-adjacent stuff that I had convinced myself was a considered aesthetic and was actually just whatever was trending the month I had money.

clothes are supposed to last longer than a season. shoes are supposed to last longer than a trend. this is not a radical statement but it genuinely felt like one when I first let myself sit with it, because I had been operating as if the opposite were true. as if something being “of the moment” was itself the point.

“I’m not trying to become a capsule wardrobe person overnight. I’m just trying to stop buying things because someone pretty had them in good lighting.”

the influencer problem (it’s complicated)

I still watch the content. I want to be upfront about that. I am not going to pretend I am now only consuming slow fashion content by women who make their own linen in Portugal. Alix is still on my feed. Matilda’s lookbooks still make me feel a feeling. Tinx said one thing about a pair of loafers and I immediately looked them up.

but I think there’s something worth saying about how these creators are also just people doing a job inside a system that profits from you buying things. they didn’t invent trend culture. they didn’t invent the dopamine hit of an unboxing. they are operating inside the same machinery we are, just from a different position in it. the anger, when it comes, is better directed at the system than the girl who made you want the phone case. she wanted the phone case too, probably.

what I’m working on is watching the content and feeling the want and then just... sitting with it for a while. not buying immediately. not adding to cart the second the serotonin hits. letting the craving be a craving and not an instruction.

why this actually matters

okay I know this has been mostly me being self-deprecating, but I want to end on something real for a second. because overconsumption isn’t just a personal aesthetic problem. it has an actual body count, and a lot of that body count is in countries like ours.

India is both one of the largest producers of textiles in the world and one of the largest recipients of fast fashion waste. the fashion industry produces around 100 billion garments a year, generates 92 million tonnes of textile waste, and the average fast fashion item is worn maybe seven times before it’s thrown out. the clothes you donate to that bin outside the mall, the ones that feel virtuous to discard? a significant portion ends up in landfills in the Global South. we are downstream of a system that extracts labour from us and then dumps its excess back on us, and somehow we’re the ones being sold the trend cycle like it’s aspirational.

the awareness piece isn’t about guilt. I cannot stress this enough. guilt is useless, guilt makes you freeze, guilt makes you buy something to feel better which is deeply ironic. the awareness piece is about understanding that every purchase is a small vote for a system, and right now most of us are voting on autopilot because a pretty girl with good lighting told us to.

some Indian brands worth actually knowing

and yes, there are options closer to home that aren’t Zara with a pashmina thrown on top. I just genuinely think they deserve more noise than they get. No Nasties out of Goa is 100% organic cotton and Fair Trade certified, and has been doing this long before sustainability became a trend in itself. Doodlage, based in Delhi, works entirely with fabric waste from export houses and makes genuinely cool stuff out of what would have been thrown away. Okhai, which is a Tata initiative, works with tribal and rural women artisans and does the kind of block print and handwork you can actually trace back to a real person. The Summer House makes sustainable basics in handloom and works directly with weavers, the kind of pieces that look right every season rather than just this one. and if you haven’t looked into secondhand yet, Vintage Wallah is a great place to start because the most sustainable thing you can buy is something that already exists.

I am still figuring this out. I don’t have a capsule wardrobe. I have a wardrobe with a capsule wardrobe living inside it and a lot of butter yellow surrounding it on all sides. but I’m paying attention now. to what I buy, to where it comes from, to whether I actually want it or just want to want it. that’s the whole thing. just pay attention. the trend cycle will keep going with or without you. you are allowed to step to the side of it for a minute and ask if any of this is actually yours.

Okay so picture this; you’re standing in the British Museum. you’ve paid like £0 entry because they at least have the audacity to make it free. and you’re looking at this absolutely stunning bronze Nataraja , Shiva mid dance, cosmic fire in his hands, the whole universe in his pose. it’s breathtaking. it genuinely is.

and then you read the little placard next to it.

“Hindu idol. South India, c. 11th century. Acquired 1909.”

Acquired. Acquired. ACQUIRED. That is the most polite euphemism for theft in the English language and I will not be taking questions.

But here’s the thing that actually broke my brain when I started thinking about it: the theft is the obvious part. the part we talk about. the real violence , the quieter, more insidious one…is what happens to the object once it’s in there. it’s not just that the Nataraja is in London. it’s that the Nataraja is now an artifact. a specimen. a curiosity behind glass, stripped of its context, its ritual, its living relationship with the people who made it sacred.

it went from being something people actively prayed to, danced in front of, brought flowers to, to being something people take Instagram reels in front of. and somehow that transformation is never in the placard.

the gaze problem, or: who is the implied visitor?

Here’s a thought experiment. walk into any major Western museum… the V&A, the Louvre, the Met; and look at how the Indian collection is presented. what’s the framing? it’s almost always one of three things: spiritual mysticism, exotic craftsmanship, or ancient civilisation (with an implied “but look how far they’ve come” undertone that I will not be entertaining).

BUT what you almost never get is: here is an object from a living tradition. here is what the people who made this actually believed about it. here is what was lost when it was taken. here is the community that still considers this sacred and has been asking for it back for decades.

The “implied visitor” of these museums is, was, and has largely remained: a Western, educated, secular person who approaches these objects with aesthetic curiosity. not devotion. not grief. not political rage. curiosity. the kind of detached appreciation that only works when the object has been successfully separated from its living context.

and here’s the uncomfortable part, when we go to these museums, we’re often unconsciously inhabiting that same gaze. we’ve been trained to. we learned to look at our own heritage through the lens of “isn’t this fascinating” instead of “this is mine and it was taken.”

but wait. it gets worse at home

I know what you’re thinking. okay Aarya, colonial museums are bad, we know, but at least our museums here in India are better right?

babes. I say this with love. have you been to the National Museum in Delhi?

the colonial gaze didn’t just stay in London. we internalised it. our own post-independence museum infrastructure was built largely on the framework the British left behind, the Archaeological Survey of India, the curatorial categories, the very idea of what counts as “art” worth preserving vs what’s just “folk” or “craft.” (notice how “folk” always seems to mean things made by lower castes and tribal communities? interesting that.)

the Mughal miniatures are in the “Islamic art” section. the Deccani bronzes are under “South Indian religious sculpture.” the living traditions these objects come from are nowhere in the building. there’s no map from the object to the community. there’s no acknowledgment that some of these communities are still here, still making, still practicing.

so what do we actually do with this

I’m not going to pretend I have a clean policy answer. this is a substack, not a UN resolution. but here’s what I do think:

The repatriation debate is important but it’s not the whole conversation. because even if every single object came back tomorrow, and they won’t, but hypothetically, we’d still need to reckon with the question of how they’d be displayed. what story gets told. whose expertise is centred. whether communities are consulted or just thanked in a press release.

there are museums doing this differently. the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams museum in Andhra approaches sacred objects as part of a living tradition, not a dead one. some community archives and local cultural institutions in Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Kerala are building models where curation happens from within. it’s not perfect. but it’s different.

the question isn’t just “give it back.” it’s “and then what?” what does it mean to display an object in a way that doesn’t strip it of its context? what does it mean to let communities be the authors of their own heritage, not just the subjects of someone else’s?

next time you’re in a museum, here or abroad… I want you to notice the placard. not just what it says, but what it doesn’t say. who it’s written for. what it assumes you already know, and what it assumes you don’t need to know.

the gaze is always there. the question is whether you’re aware you’re standing in it.

if this made you think,

share it with someone who also stood in front of a British Museum placard and felt something they couldn’t quite name. that feeling has a name. we’re just learning the vocabulary.

There’s something quietly devastating about opening your phone at 6 am and knowing, without asking, the emotional temperature of thirty people you haven’t spoken to in months. That an acquaintance is grieving. That someone you used to be close to is rebuilding. That a person you barely know just had the best night of their life, and you watched it happen through a rectangle in your hand, uninvited, in real time. No conversation required. No vulnerability exchanged. Just a story, a post, a location tag, and suddenly you’re holding information you never consented to carry.

We talk about social media making us disconnected, and yeah, sure, that’s true, but I think that framing actually undersells the problem. The issue isn’t that we’re disconnected. It’s that we’re over-connected in a way that human psychology was never architected to handle. We weren’t built for this volume. Not emotionally, not neurologically, not socially.

Anthropologists will tell you that for most of human history, the average person maintained meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people. Dunbar’s number. Your village, essentially. You knew their faces, their rhythms, their drama. You knew who was feuding with whom and whose harvest failed. But that knowledge was earned through proximity, through time, through the slow accumulation of shared experience. You didn’t just open an app and receive it.

Now we have thousands of followers, and we are expected to be normal about it….

The thing nobody talks about enough is what social saturation does to attraction specifically. And I mean attraction in the broadest sense possible, romantic, platonic, intellectual, the pull you feel toward a person when they interest you. That pull used to require space to generate. Not absence, people get that wrong all the time, but genuine space. The kind where you don’t know yet. Where there’s still something to discover.

Think about how you used to get to know someone before all of this. You’d notice things. Slowly. The way they ordered coffee. What they got weirdly passionate about at dinner. A habit that would only surface after you’d spent enough time together for their performance of themselves to relax. There was an unfolding. And the unfolding was the point. The attraction lived there, in the gradual, in the not-yet-knowing.

That process has been fundamentally disrupted and we’re all just walking around pretending it hasn’t.

Now you talk to someone for the first time, and you already know their top artists, their situational political opinions, how they react when they’re annoyed, what they looked like in 2019, and probably something vaguely traumatic they disclosed during a vulnerable era of posting. You arrive already full. There’s nothing left to discover because they’ve already pre-disclosed everything, not to you specifically, but to the internet, which you are currently a part of. The mystery doesn’t just get solved early. It gets pre-empted entirely.

Somewhere along the way, we confused intimacy with immediacy, and I think that confusion is actually ruining us.

Intimacy is a slow construction. It’s what happens when someone sees an unannounced imperfection, not one you captioned thoughtfully, but one that just appears, accidentally, because you’ve been around each other long enough for your guard to drop. It’s the laugh that’s embarrassing and weird. The opinion they’re almost ashamed of. The fear they mention once, offhandedly, and then never bring up again, but you remember. That’s intimacy. It accrues. It compounds.

Immediacy is just access. And we’ve mistaken access for closeness in a way that I think is making genuine closeness feel kind of impossible.

When everything is pre-disclosed, when your attachment style is literally in your bio, when you post your therapy breakthroughs and your childhood wounds and your hot takes on your own emotional unavailability, you’re not being intimate. You’re broadcasting. And broadcasting, by definition, is not intimate. It’s the opposite. It’s performed vulnerability, which is almost a contradiction in terms, because vulnerability is only vulnerable when it’s given specifically, to someone who has earned it, in a context that makes it mean something.

I want to be careful here because I’m not making a “phones bad, go touch grass” argument. That take is boring and also I am extremely chronically online and would never survive 1873. What I’m actually pointing at is something more structural, which is that the architecture of social media is fundamentally at odds with the architecture of human intimacy, and nobody warned us about that before we all signed up.

The platforms are designed around disclosure. More sharing, more engagement, more access, more connection, theoretically. But human psychology is built around selective disclosure. Around the idea that what you choose to reveal, to whom, and when, is precisely what makes revelation meaningful. The whole value of someone telling you something is that they’re telling you. Not their 12,000 followers and also you.

When everything is ambient, when I can just absorb your life by scrolling, the act of you telling me something loses its social weight. You can’t give me something I already have.

The saddest part of all this, and I do think it’s genuinely sad, is that we’re becoming less legible to each other even as we become more transparent. You’d think more information would mean better understanding. But that’s not how people work. People are not information sets. You don’t understand someone by accumulating data points about them. You understand them through time, through context, through being in the room when they react to something unexpected, through the texture of repeated experience.

What we have now is a lot of content about people, and very little experience of them. And content about a person is not the same as knowing them. But it can trick you into thinking it is. Which might be the most insidious thing about all of it. You finish someone’s substack and you feel like you get them. You watch their stories for six months and you feel a familiarity that isn’t mutual and isn’t earned. It’s parasocial in the clinical sense, and we’ve normalized it so completely that we now apply the same logic to people we actually know.

We consume our real relationships the same way we consume strangers. And then we wonder why nothing feels intimate anymore.

I think what I’m grieving, when I think about all of this, is the specific pleasure of slow discovery. Of learning one small thing at a time. The attraction that grows in the pauses, in what hasn’t been said yet, in the version of a person that only appears after the performance drops. That’s still technically possible. But it requires a deliberate resistance to a system that is actively working against it, and most people are not equipped for that resistance because most people don’t even know they need it.

We got socially saturated before we had language for what was being lost. And now we’re all just a little too full, a little too knowing, a little too seen by people who don’t actually know us at all, reaching through our screens for the kind of intimacy that only grows in the quiet, in the space between updates, in the things that don’t get posted because some things are still, somehow, just for us.

I have been sitting with Rana Safvi’s account of the Begums of Bhopal for three days now and I keep returning to the same feeling. Not admiration exactly. Something closer to fury at how close we came to not knowing any of this at all. Four successive women rulers. A century of continuous female governance over a significant princely state. And the way this tends to get framed even today, when it gets mentioned at all, is as a charming anomaly. An exception. A curiosity.

It was not an anomaly. It was a system. And the reason it reads as anomaly is entirely about whose hand was holding the pen when the record got made.

This is what I want to write about today. Not the famous names. Not the ones who made it into the chapter heading because their visibility became too large to edit out. The ones underneath. The translators who made the treaties possible. The women managing correspondence that their husbands signed. The poet-saints whose devotional verses restructured the social fabric of entire regions and who are remembered, when they are remembered, primarily as inspiring rather than as thinkers. The structural invisibility of women in history is not an absence of women from history. It is a failure of the recording apparatus to recognise certain kinds of power as power at all.

History did not forget these women. It never learned to see them as the kind of people history happens to. That is a different problem with a different solution.

The three ways you disappear from the record

The first is reclassification. What you did gets renamed as something lesser. Translation becomes assistance. Political management becomes wifely support. Running the correspondence of a diplomatic mission becomes accompanying your husband. The activity is acknowledged. The agency is removed. You remain in the footnote as a presence rather than in the chapter as an actor.

The second is adjacency collapse. Your historical survival depends entirely on the man you were adjacent to. If he is remembered you get a footnote. If he is forgotten you vanish with him. Your significance was never recorded independently so it cannot survive independently. The woman who shaped a treaty through her translation work exists in the historical record only as long as the treaty is interesting to historians, and then only as context for the negotiator who signed it.

The third is the naturalisation of skill. A woman who spoke five languages was not considered a remarkable linguist. She was considered accomplished for a woman. A woman who managed a vast estate’s administrative correspondence was not considered an administrator. She was considered capable. The moment competence is framed as natural rather than earned, it stops registering as competence. It becomes background. And background does not get chapters written about it.

What makes the Indian context specifically interesting is that these three mechanisms operated simultaneously with a fourth one that is somewhat unique: the deliberate colonial project of reclassifying Indian women’s power as either exceptional or as evidence of social disorder requiring reform. The Begums of Bhopal were remarkable despite their tradition according to the colonial framing. The possibility that their tradition was precisely what produced them was not a framing the administration found convenient.

When you read these accounts carefully you start noticing a specific kind of sentence. A sentence that contains a woman doing something consequential and then immediately pivots to the man she was doing it for or beside or in service of. The grammar of historical attribution has a built-in redirect.

Daughters of the Sun by Ira Mukhoty does something that I find genuinely methodologically interesting in response to this. She reads the gaps as evidence. The silence around certain women in certain periods is itself data about what was being suppressed or simply not considered worth recording. This is not speculation. It is the same interpretive move that archaeologists make when they note the deliberate absence of something from a site. Absence has a shape. The shape tells you something.

The question I am sitting with is what happens when you apply this method to texts I grew up with. The Mahabharata has Draupadi, who is one of the most complex political actors in the entire epic and is routinely reduced to her suffering. It has Kunti, who makes strategic decisions of enormous consequence that the text records but does not frame as strategic. It has Gandhari, whose curse carries more geopolitical weight than most battles in the war, and who is remembered primarily as the blindfolded wife. Every one of these women is doing something the text records as significant and frames as personal. The personal was political. The text just would not say so directly.

Why this is not just a feminist argument

I want to be careful here because I think reducing this to representation politics misses the more important point. This is not primarily about fairness to women across time, though that matters. It is about the accuracy of our historical understanding. If women were operating as consequential political actors and the record systematically reclassified their actions as support rather than substance, then our picture of how decisions got made is wrong. Not incomplete. Wrong. We are misattributing causation. We are identifying the wrong people as the agents of change.

This means every conclusion we draw from the historical record about leadership, about governance, about how power worked in pre-colonial India is at minimum questionable and at maximum inverted. The Begums of Bhopal governing effectively for a century is not evidence that women can govern. It is evidence that governance was already structured to include and cultivate female political capacity in ways the colonial historiography was constitutionally unable to recognise.

That is a much bigger claim. And it is the one I think the books I am reading are quietly building toward without always stating directly. The record is not missing women. The record is missing its own blind spots. Those are different problems and they require different solutions.

Where I am going with this

I do not have a clean conclusion yet. I am still in the middle of the reading and the margin notes are genuinely out of hand. But here is what I think I am moving toward.

The decolonisation of Indian historical knowledge and the recovery of women’s place in that history are not separate projects. They are the same project. The colonial recording apparatus that decided what counted as significant political action was the same apparatus that could not see women as political actors. The categories were built together. They have to be dismantled together.

And the reason this feels urgent to me right now, in 2026, is not nostalgia. It is that we are still using those categories. The way we talk about Indian women’s empowerment as something that needs to be introduced into tradition rather than recovered from it. The way we frame ambitious Indian women as departing from their inheritance rather than continuing a lineage that was always there. The way the Begums of Bhopal get framed as exceptions rather than evidence.

We Have Been Reading Our Own History Wrong. And Yes, That’s a Colonial Problem.

Okay so here is something that genuinely kept me up at 2am last week. I was reading a paper by a European Indologist from the 1880s who was describing the Vedic social system, and the entire framing was basically: “these poor people didn’t have real philosophy, just ritual superstition.” And it hit me. This is where a lot of what I was taught in school quietly borrowed from. Not directly. But the lens. The lens was there.

This is what decolonising knowledge actually means. Not burning history books. Not pretending the British never came. It means sitting with a text, any text, and asking: who framed this, for what audience, and what were they trying to prove?

The original sin: when classification became truth

When the East India Company needed to govern a subcontinent it did not understand, it hired people to translate and categorise Indian law, religion, and society. This sounds reasonable. The results were not. William Jones, Max Mueller, and their circle did genuinely remarkable philological work. They also made choices. They decided Sanskrit was a language of priests, not thought. They decided Hinduism was a religion in the Protestant sense, with one holy book, one set of beliefs, one orthodoxy. They decided caste was the organising logic of all Hindu life.

None of these things were entirely false. All of them were enormously reductive. And then those reductions got exported back into Indian education, Indian law, and eventually Indian self-understanding. When Indians started writing about themselves in the 19th century, many of them were unconsciously using colonial categories to describe pre-colonial realities. This is the trap that Romila Thapar, whatever her political biases, actually identifies correctly: historiography is never neutral.

The issue is not just what they got wrong. The issue is the scale of epistemic confidence with which they got it wrong. Mueller was writing about the “true meaning” of the Rigveda without having visited India once. Jones declared Sanskrit grammar superior to Greek and Latin in the same breath that he decided Vedic religion was primitive animism. The Orientalist project was simultaneously admiring and condescending, and that combination was very effective at disabling indigenous intellectual self-confidence.

Hinduism is not Christianity with different gods. This is not a hot take.

Here is the most consequential error the colonial framing produced. It forced Hinduism into a comparative religion framework that was built entirely around Christian assumptions. There must be a founder. There must be a creed. There must be orthodoxy and heresy. There must be a Church structure. There must be a holy book that is scripture in the biblical sense.

So suddenly the Vedas became “the Hindu Bible,” Brahmin priests became “the Hindu clergy,” and village goddesses and local traditions became “folk religion” as opposed to “real” Hinduism. This split is completely artificial. The Puranic traditions, the Shaiva Agamas, the Vaishnava Sampradayas, the Shakta tantric lineages, the Smarta synthesis, none of these fit a single hierarchical structure because there was never one to begin with. That was not a deficiency. That was the point.

When you understand this, a lot of modern Hindu identity debates look different. The endless argument about whether Hinduism is monotheistic or polytheistic? Colonial question. The anxiety about whether our traditions are “scientific”? Colonial anxiety. The impulse to present Yoga as purely spiritual and not physical, or purely physical and not spiritual, depending on what Western audience you are performing for? Colonial performance.

"Asking whether Hinduism is polytheistic is like asking whether a river is wet. The question reveals more about the asker than the river."

The geopolitics of whose version of your past gets funded

Here is the 2026 update on this conversation that I do not see discussed enough. Academic Indology is still overwhelmingly based in Western institutions. The chairs, the journals, the citation networks. This is not a conspiracy. It is just how academic capital works. But it has real consequences for which questions get asked and which get funding.

The Aryan Migration Theory debate is a good example. Genetics is genuinely shifting the conversation and the last five years of ancient DNA work from sites like Rakhigarhi has complicated the simple “Aryans came from the steppe” story considerably. But the interesting thing is how resistant certain institutional camps are to updating their models. Partly because the models are genuinely complex and the genetics is not conclusive either way. But partly because careers were built on particular frameworks.

Meanwhile, Indian researchers working on archaeoastronomy, on Saraswati river basin dating, on epigraphy from South Indian temple traditions, often struggle to get published in high-impact Western journals because their methodologies challenge foundational assumptions of the field. This is not unique to Indology. It happens in African history, in Mesoamerican archaeology, across the board wherever the geographic centre of the subject does not match the institutional centre of the discipline.

The decolonisation project here is not about kicking out Western scholars. It is about building enough intellectual infrastructure within India that the questions being asked are not entirely determined by which funding bodies exist and which journals are gate-kept. IITGN has been doing interesting work. Some of the work coming out of IIT Kharagpur on Vedic Mathematics as actual mathematics rather than nationalist nostalgia is genuinely surprising. This matters.

How to actually re-read

Practically speaking, here is what this looks like. When you pick up the Arthashastra, read it first as a text produced by a specific political context, not as evidence for whether Indians were “advanced.” When you read about the Mughal court, try to find sources that are not either Akbar-hagiography or Aurangzeb-villainy. Both extremes are usually serving a contemporary political argument rather than a historical one.

When you engage with Dharmashastra texts that make you uncomfortable, and some of them will, do not do either of the colonial things: do not pretend they say something they do not, and do not read them as if they were constitutional documents with binding force on all Hindus throughout time. They were texts produced by specific communities, in specific contexts, for specific purposes. So was Leviticus. So was the Corpus Juris Civilis. Context is not excuse-making. Context is history.

Read the critics too. Ambedkar’s “Riddles in Hinduism” is uncomfortable in exactly the ways it is supposed to be. So is Periyar. So is Phule. These are internal voices, not external attackers. A tradition that cannot metabolise internal critique is not strong. It is fragile. Hindu civilisation has survived four thousand years of intense intellectual pressure. It can survive Phule.

"Civilisational confidence is not the same as civilisational defensiveness. One reads everything. The other refuses to."

The gen Z angle on this, and I will land here, is that our generation is actually very well positioned to do this work!!!!

We are not carrying the specific post-Partition, Cold War era anxieties that made the previous generation either defensively nationalist or aggressively Westernised. We can be rooted and curious at the same time. We can love Carnatic music and also listen to Hindustani and also have opinions about post-structuralism. These are not contradictions.

The internet has also, genuinely, democratised access to primary sources in ways that matter. The GRETIL database has Sanskrit texts online. The Digital Library of India has manuscripts. Twitter, for all its chaos, has Indologists and historians having public arguments that used to happen only in conference rooms. You can read the actual debates now.

What this moment asks of us is intellectual seriousness without intellectual anxiety. Read widely. Sit with discomfort. Do not outsource your conclusions about your own tradition to either Penguin Books or to WhatsApp forwards. Both are epistemically lazy. Your inheritance is not a museum exhibit to be either protected behind glass or torn down by someone else’s agenda. It is a living thing that has always been argued over, always been revised, always been in conversation with the world.

The Upanishads end with “iti.” Here, the matter stands. Not resolved. Standing. That is a different relationship with conclusion than we usually expect. Maybe that is where we should start.

Hinduism looks at the infinite and refuses to blink. It does not simplify the divine to make it approachable. It says: here are a thousand forms, pick the one that speaks to you, knowing they are all the same thing and none of them are the whole thing.

There is a version of the 18th century that gets sold to us in candlelit costume dramas: elegant people saying elegant things in elegant rooms. They bow. They curtsy. They address each other with the formality of diplomats and the restraint of monks. It’s all very aesthetically pleasing, and it is also, to use the technical term, a complete lie. What you’re watching is not civility. What you’re watching is a surveillance system wearing a wig.

Politeness, as it functioned in the long 18th century and into the Victorian age, was never really about making people feel comfortable. It was about making certain people feel legible, controllable, and rankable inside a social order that depended on everyone knowing their place. The genius of it, the truly breathtaking audacity of it, was that it convinced people to police themselves. Why post guards when you can convince the prisoners that the bars are decorative?

The factory floor of feeling

Let’s start with the conduct books, because nothing reveals ideology quite like the literature designed to produce it. Works like The Whole Duty of a Woman or Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education read less like etiquette guides and more like operating manuals for a particular kind of human being: docile, agreeable, legible, and this part is critical, perpetually afraid of social death. The anxiety these books cultivated was the point. An anxious woman is a manageable woman. A man terrified of appearing low-born will spend his whole life performing acceptable-ness rather than questioning why acceptable-ness was defined by people who already had the money.

This is not a subtle subtext, by the way.

Lord Chesterfield’s famous Letters to His Son, essentially a father’s multi volume project to turn his child into a human social exploit, spells it out with a candor that should make any modern reader’s eye twitch. “The scholar without good-breeding is a pedant,” Chesterfield writes. Translation: intelligence without the right surface presentation counts for nothing. You must be legible to the people who matter. You must perform correctly. The content of your inner life is, frankly, your own embarrassing problem.

Emma Woodhouse is not a villain. She’s what the system produces at its most successful: a woman with excellent manners, excellent taste, and such a thorough internalization of social hierarchy that she genuinely cannot see Harriet Smith as a full person rather than a project. Her cruelty is always polite. Her condescension is always gracious. When she humiliates Miss Bates at Box Hill, making a cutting joke under the guise of wit, the horror is not that she was rude. The horror is that she was playing by the rules, and the rules permitted it. Politeness didn’t protect Miss Bates. Politeness gave Emma the vocabulary and the social cover to wound her.

Class in a costume

What politeness actually did, its primary structural function, was to encode class distinctions into behavior so that they felt natural, inevitable, and frankly the person’s own fault if they got them wrong. This is the move. This is the trick. If your exclusion from society is framed not as “you are poor” but as “you do not know how to behave,” then the problem is located inside you, in your character, your refinement, your effort. The system washes its hands.

Samuel Richardson understood this better than almost anyone. Pamela (1740), ostensibly a novel about a virtuous servant girl resisting her employer’s attempts to assault her, is also, reading it with any kind of sociological squint, a document about how the performance of virtue became currency. Pamela survives not just through moral integrity but through her meticulous management of her own image. She writes letters. She maintains a narrative of herself. She is essentially doing early modern personal branding, and her reward is getting to marry into the class that was trying to destroy her. The message the novel encodes, whether Richardson meant it or not: if you perform goodness correctly enough, the system will absorb you. The system itself is not questioned.

The Victorians made it worse, obviously

If the 18th century invented politeness as soft infrastructure for class control, the Victorians industrialized it. The explosion of etiquette literature in the 19th century, guidebooks for every conceivable social situation, from how to address an envelope to how long to leave a calling card, reflects a society that was genuinely panicking about social mobility and needed the codes to become more elaborate, more specialized, and more exclusionary in proportion to the threat that people might actually move between classes.

The gloves are doing a lot of work in a Victorian novel, is what I’m saying. A woman’s glove behavior, when she removes them, how she holds them, whether she offers her hand, is not accessory description. It is class positioning in real time. Dickens knows this. Wilkie Collins knows this. George Eliot, who was excluded from respectable society herself for most of her adult life, knows this with a particular intimacy that comes through in every social scene she writes with her characteristic ferocity wrapped in perfect observational prose.

So what do we do with this?

The reason this matters, why any of this 18th-century etiquette archaeology is worth your time right now, is that the mechanism is not historical. The specific codes change. The powdered wigs are gone. The calling cards are gone. The particular terror of being seen using the wrong fork at a dinner party has mostly faded. But the underlying logic, that certain behaviors signal belonging, that belonging is managed through legibility to existing power, that the burden of performing correctly falls hardest on those with the least to lose if they get it wrong, that logic is in absolutely rude health.

Every time someone’s accent, vocabulary, or cultural reference is read as a proxy for their intelligence or worth, Chesterfield wins. Every time “professionalism” turns out to mean the communication style of whoever already had institutional power, Chesterfield wins. The lesson of 18th-century literature is not that people were more formal then. The lesson is that formality was never neutral, and neither is its contemporary equivalent, whatever name we give it.

The people who wrote the etiquette books were not trying to make society nicer. They were trying to make power invisible by disguising it as good taste. The novelists, Austen, Richardson, Fielding, Eliot, Collins, were taking notes. Not to celebrate the system. To show you exactly how it worked, so that anyone paying attention could see the seams.

You’re paying attention now. That’s the whole point.

There’s this thing that happens when you reread a book you loved at sixteen. The words are identical. The plot hasn’t moved. But somehow you’re reading an entirely different novel. Elizabeth Bennet, who once felt like pure wish fulfillment, witty, beloved, vindicated, now reads as someone almost unbearably defensive. Mr. Darcy, who felt like the romantic ideal, now feels like a project somebody took on. The book didn’t change. You did. And that gap between the text and your reading of it? That’s the whole thing. That’s what I want to talk about.

We spend a genuinely embarrassing amount of energy trying to get to the truth of situations. The truth of what someone meant when they said that. The truth of whether we made the right call. The truth of who we are, actually, underneath everything. And I’m not saying truth doesn’t exist — I’m saying we never get raw access to it. What we get, every single time, is a version of it that has already been processed through a mind that arrived with its whole history packed in a suitcase.

Austen knew before the neuroscientists did

Jane Austen is probably the sharpest theorist of perception we have in the English literary canon, and I will die on this hill in comfortable shoes.

Pride and Prejudice is not, despite its reputation, a love story about two people who figure each other out. It’s a story about two people who misread each other comprehensively, for three quarters of the book, because they’re each seeing through a lens they don’t know they’re wearing. Elizabeth thinks she’s perceptive — she literally prides herself on it. She thinks her first impressions are insights. What Austen shows, with surgical patience, is that Elizabeth’s “perception” is actually pattern-matching against her own emotional needs. She reads Wickham as charming because she wants someone to be charming. She reads Darcy as arrogant because she wants someone to be the villain after he embarrassed her.

The plot only moves when both characters experience something close to ego death. Darcy’s letter. Elizabeth reading it and having to sit with the possibility that she was wrong — not just a little wrong, but structurally wrong, wrong in the way you’re wrong when the whole framework was off. That scene isn’t romantic. It’s genuinely uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of realizing your narrator has been unreliable and that narrator is you.

Austen doesn’t resolve this by giving Elizabeth some magical access to objective truth afterward. She resolves it by showing Elizabeth become more careful. More humble about her own readings. Less certain that the story she’s telling herself about a person is the person.

That’s the lesson. Not see people clearly. But know that you’re always seeing through something.

What the brain is actually doing

Here is where I have to bring in what cognitive science has been quietly establishing for decades, because it reframes everything.

Your brain is not a camera. It is not passively recording what’s out there. It is… and this is the part people resist, primarily a prediction machine. Before sensory information even fully arrives, your brain has already generated a hypothesis about what it’s going to be. What you experience as perception is mostly your brain confirming or updating its prediction, not receiving some neutral input.

Karl Friston’s work on predictive processing, Anil Seth’s research on what he calls the “controlled hallucination” of consciousness, these converge on something unsettling: the world you move through every day is, in a technically meaningful sense, a model your brain is running. Your expectations shape what you see. Your history shapes what you expect. And almost none of this is happening consciously.

This isn’t a metaphor or a self-help reframe. It’s the actual architecture. When you walk into a room you’ve been in before, you’re not perceiving it fresh. You’re perceiving it through a dense overlay of memory, association, and prediction. The room you see is partly constructed.

And then add language on top of that. Because once you name something; once you apply a concept!!!!! you have further organized the raw information into a category that came pre-loaded with implications. You don’t experience “a tense conversation.” You experience something, and your mind reaches for the label “tense,” and then that label imports everything you’ve ever associated with tension. The experience and the interpretation collapse into each other so fast that by the time you’re aware of them, they’re one thing.

The social layer makes it worse, or more interesting, depending on your mood

When we’re talking to other people, we’re not just dealing with our own interpretive filters. We’re dealing with theirs, and we’re dealing with the fact that they’re interpreting our interpretation, and we’re picking up on that and adjusting, and they’re picking up on our adjustment.

Communication theory has a useful framing here: you can’t not communicate. Silence communicates. The choice of which word communicates. The speed of your reply communicates. And all of that is being decoded by someone who is themselves running their own prediction model, filtered through their own history, their own emotional state, their own stakes in the conversation.

This is why two people can have the same conversation and walk away with completely different accounts of what happened, and neither of them is lying. They’re reporting accurately from inside their own constructed experience. The fight isn’t about the facts. It’s about the interpretations, which felt like facts.

Austen knew this too, obviously. Emma is almost entirely structured around the horror of being confidently wrong. Emma Woodhouse believes she is helping. She is not helping. She is projecting her own narrative onto everyone around her, and when reality finally forces its way through, it’s devastating in proportion to how airtight her certainty was.

So what do you do with this

I want to be honest that this realization can go two ways.

One version of this awareness becomes an excuse. Well, everything is interpretation, so my interpretation is just as valid as anyone else’s, so I don’t have to update anything ever. That’s not what I’m advocating. If everything is a lens, some lenses are still more distorting than others. Humility about your own perception is not the same as relativism. You can know you’re seeing through something and still work to see more clearly — by seeking information that challenges your predictions, by staying curious when your reading of someone feels too neat, by noticing when you’re emotionally invested in a particular interpretation.

The other version, the one that I think is actually useful: is that it liberates you from the exhausting project of trying to establish some final, authoritative account of any situation. You were in a relationship and it ended and you will never fully know what it was, because it was different from inside each of you. A friendship cooled and you don’t know exactly when or why, because the tipping point existed in a space between two sets of perceptions. You made a choice and you’ll never know if it was objectively right, because objectively right doesn’t have the access to your particular subjective conditions that you need it to have.

None of this is cause for nihilism. It’s cause for a particular kind of gentleness, with yourself and with other people. The person who hurt you was operating from inside their own interpreted reality. So were you, when you hurt someone. That doesn’t dissolve accountability, but it does make the project of understanding each other feel less like a courtroom and more like translation between two languages that don’t have perfect equivalents.

Back to Austen, briefly, because she earned it

What makes Austen still feel alive is that she wrote about this before we had the neuroscience to name it. She built entire novels around the drama of perception, around characters whose growth is measured not by external events but by how they come to see differently. Elizabeth doesn’t get Darcy because the plot delivers him to her. She gets him because she becomes someone capable of seeing him.

The reread is different because you’re different. You’ve accumulated more data, more hurt, more context. Your prediction model has been updated. The novel didn’t contain a better or worse reading waiting to be unlocked, it met you where you were, both times.

That’s kind of beautiful, actually. And a little terrifying. And pretty much exactly what being a person is.

If you made it this far, thank you for staying. I think about this stuff constantly …the gap between what’s happening and what we think is happening, how much of “knowing someone” is just sustained, collaborative interpretation. If any of this resonated or you think I’m completely off base, I genuinely want to hear it.

We like to believe that time moves forward.

It is a comforting belief. It suggests direction. It suggests that things leave us, that moments pass, that what is over is truly over. The clock reinforces this illusion with quiet authority, ticking forward with a certainty that feels almost moral.

But the mind does not obey clocks.

It lingers where it should have left. It returns where it has no reason to go back. It distorts duration. A single afternoon can expand into something almost infinite, while entire years collapse into a blur that feels suspiciously empty. If time were truly linear, memory would behave. It does not.

Literature has always known this, long before we had language for it.

Writers like Virginia Woolf understood that a day is never just a day. In Mrs Dalloway, time appears to move forward, marked by the steady tolling of Big Ben, but internally it fractures. The present moment is constantly interrupted by recollection, by emotion, by something unresolved that refuses to stay in the past. The characters do not experience time as sequence. They experience it as accumulation.

And that is the unsettling part. The present is never pure. It is layered with everything that came before it.

Similarly, Marcel Proust collapses years into a single sensory instant. A taste, something as trivial as a madeleine dipped in tea, becomes a portal. Not metaphorically, but almost violently. The past does not return in order. It arrives all at once, uninvited and complete. It suggests that time is not something we move through, but something that exists within us, waiting for the right trigger to reassemble itself.

If this is true, then the idea of “moving on” begins to feel a little naive.

What we call the past is not behind us. It is embedded. It resurfaces unpredictably, sometimes tender, sometimes intrusive. It does not ask for permission. It does not respect chronology.

The philosopher Henri Bergson described this as durée, a kind of lived time that cannot be divided into neat units. It flows. It stretches. It contracts. It is felt rather than measured. Clocks, in this sense, are not reflections of time. They are simplifications of it. Useful, yes. Accurate, not quite.

There is something almost unsettling about admitting this. Linear time gives us structure. It allows us to believe in progress, in before and after, in the idea that we are becoming something different from who we once were. It makes life feel like a narrative with direction, with chapters that close and do not reopen.

But real experience is not so obedient.

We repeat. We revisit. We circle back to versions of ourselves we thought we had outgrown. Sometimes, without realizing it, we are still reacting to something that happened years ago. A conversation, a glance, a moment that lasted only seconds but somehow never ended.

Even now, in a hyper digital world, this nonlinearity is impossible to ignore. Old photographs resurface. Messages reappear. Algorithms remind us of who we were on this exact day, years ago, as if time itself were mocking the idea of distance. It becomes clear that we do not move forward in any clean sense. We accumulate.

And perhaps literature feels so intimate, so uncomfortably accurate, because it refuses to lie about this.

Writers like Kafka strip time of its reassuring structure altogether. In his work, time feels suspended, almost irrelevant. There is no clear progression, no satisfying resolution. Only a lingering sense of being trapped within something that does not advance in the way it should. It mirrors a quiet anxiety that is difficult to articulate, the sense that life is happening, yet not quite moving.

So what, then, is time?

It is not a straight line. That much becomes difficult to defend. It is not even a perfect circle, endlessly repeating. That would be too neat.

It is something messier. Something layered. A kind of internal architecture built out of memory, sensation, and perception. We do not leave moments behind. We carry them, often unconsciously, allowing them to shape how we interpret what comes next.

Maybe this is why certain places feel heavier than they should. Why certain songs seem to hold entire histories within them. Why a random Tuesday can suddenly feel like a return to something you thought you had lost.

Time does not pass. It settles.

And we, mistaking movement for distance, convince ourselves that we are further along than we really are.

Perhaps that is the quiet truth literature has always been trying to reveal. Not that time is deceptive, but that our understanding of it is. That what we call the present is never just now. It is everything, all at once, layered so seamlessly that we rarely stop to notice.

Until something small breaks the illusion.

A smell. A sentence. A memory you did not ask for.

And suddenly, time folds.

Not forward. Not backward.

Just inward.

Existence, to me, has always felt like a standard stream of contradiction,
simultaneously infinite, and yet, utterly insignificant.

I ponder a lot between cosmic importance and cosmic indifference.

Some days, I am convinced that we matter.
That to exist at all is an improbable miracle, that consciousness is the universe folding in on itself, trying to understand its own reflection.

And on other days, I find comfort in the opposite. In the quiet, almost dismissive truth that we live on a floating rock in the middle of nowhere. A grain of sand, suspended in an endlessly indifferent cosmos.Nothing matters.
And strangely, that makes everything slightly more comforting.

There are moments, however, where I feel like I am life experiencing itself, not in a soft or romantic sense but in something far more unsettling. It happens in the quiet instant when the wind moves through my hair and I cannot quite tell where I end and the world begins, or in that sudden, almost jarring awareness that this body is not entirely mine but something I inhabit for a brief stretch of time. It happens when I look into someone’s eyes and recognize not just them, but the same consciousness looking back at itself from a different form, or in those rare silences when thought disappears and all that remains is a raw, unfiltered state of being. Even the ocean does this, not as beauty but as something ancient and indifferent that still feels strangely familiar. In those moments, it does not feel like I exist within the universe, but rather that the universe has condensed itself into this small, fragile point of awareness just to experience what it is like to be here, and that is what makes the contradiction so difficult to hold, because something that feels this vast should not be this temporary.

But then there are moments that make you realize how insignificant you truly are. Moments where the sky stretches too wide above you and you understand, with an almost uncomfortable clarity, that nothing about your existence alters its vastness. When days pass without leaving a mark, when entire versions of people you once were disappear without ceremony, when the world continues uninterrupted by your absence or your presence. It is in the quiet realization that your thoughts, your fears, your carefully constructed sense of importance exist only within the small enclosure of your own mind, while everything beyond it remains indifferent. You begin to see yourself not as something central, but as something incidental, a brief occurrence in an endless sequence of occurrences. And in that awareness, there is a strange kind of silence, one that does not comfort or devastate, but simply reminds you that the universe does not notice.

And perhaps, it never needed to.

I say this often, almost like a ritual, when someone I love is overwhelmed by the small violences of everyday life.

“we live in a floating rock in the middle of nowhere, you’ll be just fine.”

Why are you so stressed? We are, after all, temporary arrangements of atoms pretending permanence.

But then there are moments, almost intrusive, where the narrative shifts, where I no longer feel small but vast, not a fragment of the universe but the universe itself experiencing this particular version of being.

I once came across a Sanskrit aphorism, “अहं ब्रह्मास्मि” (Aham Brahmasmi), which translates to I am Brahmaan, I am the universe, and it unsettled me in the most precise way. Because if that is true, then this contradiction is not a flaw in understanding but the very nature of existence itself. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we are both significant and insignificant, observed and irrelevant, infinite and negligible, until we choose which truth to collapse into, and perhaps we never really do. Perhaps we simply oscillate between cosmic importance and cosmic indifference, between meaning and the fragile myth of it, between being everything and being nothing at all, and maybe that is the point.

Economists talk to economists, historians talk to historians, and political analysts speak in a dialect that sounds suspiciously like PowerPoint.

I have never been very good at staying in one room.

One afternoon I’m reading about the collapse of empires, the next I’m thinking about why instagram trends behave like medieval gossip networks. Somewhere between these intersections of culture is the strange map of how people actually live.

The boundaries between these things have always felt artificial to me. History bleeds into politics, politics shapes culture, culture spills into the internet, and the internet, in its strange and chaotic way, becomes a kind of real-time anthropology of the present. Every meme is a miniature myth. Every viral trend is a rumor spreading through a digital village square.

But the modern world has a deep suspicion of people who wander too widely. We are encouraged to specialize, to choose a lane early and stay there forever. The economist should not talk about literature. The historian should not speculate about internet culture. The political analyst should certainly not try to explain memes.

The amateur, in this system, is treated as a problem.

But the word amateur has always been misunderstood. It comes from the Latin amare, which means, to love.

An amateur is simply someone who studies something out of affection rather than obligation, curiosity rather than credential.

And sometimes curiosity is the better guide.

The amateur mind is not constrained by disciplinary borders. It moves freely between centuries and subjects, looking less for mastery and more for patterns. It asks strange questions: Why do revolutions and internet pile-ons feel structurally similar? Why do certain stories repeat across history, from ancient myths to modern political narratives? Why does a meme sometimes explain human behavior better than a policy paper?

These questions may not belong neatly to any one field. But they belong very much to the world we actually inhabit.

This account is, in some sense, a notebook for that kind of thinking. A place for connecting ideas that are not supposed to be connected.

Not with the authority of an expert.

But with the curiosity of an amateur.

There is, too, a quieter realization that sits beneath all of this.

For a long time, I mistook seriousness for depth. I thought that to move between disciplines, to resist definition, to engage with many things at once, I would have to justify it by being exceptionally good at all of them. As though curiosity required credentials. As though wandering needed to earn its legitimacy through excellence.

But somewhere along the way, that logic began to loosen.

It became clear that the demand to be the best at everything I touched was not a mark of ambition, but a constraint on experience. It turned exploration into performance, and curiosity into a kind of quiet pressure.

Letting go of that expectation changed the texture of everything.

Because life, in its most honest form, is not a resume. It is not a sequence of optimized outcomes or mastered skills, neatly categorized and externally validated. It is, fundamentally, experiential. A series of encounters, fascinations, fleeting obsessions, and half-finished understandings that shape the way we see the world.

To be excellent at something is, of course, a rare and beautiful thing. There is a certain elegance in mastery, a kind of clarity that comes from deep focus and sustained attention.

But not everything we touch is meant to become a domain of expertise.

Some things exist simply to be explored. To be played with. To be engaged in without the weight of consequence or the expectation of proficiency. A book read without analysis. A thought pursued without the need to publish it. A question asked without the pressure of answering it perfectly.

There is a freedom in allowing certain pursuits to remain deliberately unserious.

In recognizing that not every interest must become an identity, and not every curiosity must become a skill.

And perhaps that, too, is part of the amateur’s advantage.

To approach the world not as something to conquer or master, but as something to move through. To notice patterns without needing to own them. To think without always needing to conclude.

To engage, simply because something is interesting.

Because, in the end…..

is it ever that deep?