That dream didn’t fade. It got strangled in broad daylight while half the country clapped along to the soundtrack of “Sabka Saath” that somehow always meant someone else’s throat.

Communal incidents jumped from around 600 a year in the late UPA years to over a thousand a year under this government, according to the numbers that still leak out of official data. Cow-related lynchings? Over 300 documented cases between 2014 and 2024. People beaten or killed because someone decided their diet or their cattle made them less Indian. Hate speech cases exploded. Anti-conversion laws spread to a dozen states, turning interfaith relationships into potential criminal cases. The Citizenship Amendment Act carved out a fast track for everyone except Muslims. Bulldozers became policy tools in places like Uttar Pradesh, dropping on homes that just happened to belong to the wrong people after a riot or a rumor. Delhi 2020 dozens dead, mostly Muslim, while the cameras rolled and the police looked busy elsewhere. No Muslim in the central cabinet. Representation in Parliament down.

They call it “cultural renaissance.” I call it turning the neighborhood into a permanent suspicion machine. The friends who never asked about my caste or religion? Now the air itself asks. Constantly.

and ykh nothing says “future ready” like rewriting the past and breaking the present. NCERT textbooks quietly dropped Mughal chapters, soft-pedaled inconvenient violence, and pumped up the saffron filter. The National Education Policy arrived with big talk about “Indian knowledge systems” while the actual budget share for education stayed stuck in the low single digits. Paper leaks became a seasonal festival. NEET, recruitment exams, the whole circus. Thousands of students watching years of grinding evaporate because someone sold the questions on the dark web. In 2026 the pressure finally got loud enough that the education minister had to walk. Universities turned into loyalty tests. Dissenting students got the anti-terror treatment. Rankings slipped. Private players moved in. Public education for the kids who actually need it got thinner while the ideology got thicker.

The promise was two crore a year. Reality was youth unemployment that still makes the official numbers look like creative writing, manufacturing stuck in the same share of GDP it had a decade ago, and a “Make in India” that mostly made billionaires richer. (if yk yk )Demonetisation turned cash into a joke and small businesses into casualties. Farm laws tried to hand agriculture to the market gods and had to be walked back after months of tractors and tear gas. COVID oxygen shortages, migrant workers walking home, excess deaths that the official story still prefers not to count too carefully. Inequality soared. A handful of industrialists got the red carpet (we know how ;))the rest got lectures about national duty.

Press freedom ranking tanked. Sedition and new criminal codes got busy. Freedom of religion and expression measures in independent datasets show sharp drops relative to where India was headed before 2014. One recent study using synthetic controls basically said the country is poorer and less free than it would have been without this particular experiment. The response from the usual quarters? Attack the methodology. Never mind the lived experience.

I know the counter-script by heart. GDP numbers. Digital payments. Highways. Vaccines. “But what about Congress?” Sure. Congress had its scams and silences. That does not give anyone a free pass to turn the republic into a permanent Hindu majoritarian mood board while calling it development. The sunlight that used to feel like a hug now feels like interrogation lights. Friends still exist, but the questions hang in the air even when no one says them out loud. Caste and religion stopped being private background noise and became public sorting mechanisms.

My Indian dream was never about perfection. It was about the possibility that we could be messy together without someone deciding who belongs more.

I miss the India where I actually felt like I belonged, not as a temporary guest who had to prove loyalty every fucking day, but as someone whose presence didn’t need an asterisk. The version where walking into a room didn’t come with a silent scan for your surname, your festival calendar, or whether your food might offend someone’s sacred cow. I miss the careless belonging that let me exist without performing patriotism on demand, without wondering if today’s news cycle would turn my neighbours into suspects or my friends into strangers who suddenly cared about bloodlines. That feeling got ripped out and replaced with a constant low-grade panic, and the rage sits in my chest like undigested glass. they took the one thing that made this chaotic country feel like home and turn it into a loyalty test with no passing score for people like me. I miss belonging so hard it hurts, and the fact that they made that ordinary human need feel radical is the part that makes me want to scream until the sunlight itself remembers what it used to do.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And for some reason, every time the song spoke about you, I thought of my father.

Not a boyfriend. Not a lover. Not some imaginary person I’d spend my life looking for.

My dad.

Because Tere Bin is so easily heard as a romantic song. The language of longing, the idea that nobody else quite compares, the searching, the wanting, the feeling that there is one particular person who has somehow become impossible to replace, all of it sounds like the vocabulary of romantic love.

But I was sitting there listening to it and thinking,

Oh.

This is my father.

And then every line started making a completely different kind of sense.

There is something very particular about loving your father. I don’t think we talk about it enough. We talk endlessly about mothers and the softness of motherhood, about childhood memories and being held and being cared for. Fathers tend to get reduced to a few things: provider, protector, disciplinarian, the person who says no when Mum has already said yes.

But your father can also just be your person.

The person you look for in a room.

The person you want to tell something to when something really good happens.

The person whose opinion somehow matters even when you pretend it doesn’t.

The person whose presence you don’t notice because it has always been there.

When someone has always been there, you don’t think of them as someone you could lose. You think of them as part of the scenery of your life.

Like the walls of your house. Like your own name. Like the road home. Permanent. Forever there. Your safe place to run back to.

“Tere bin sanu sohaniya koi hor nayo labhna”

And I think about my dad.

Because I could probably meet thousands of people in my lifetime.

I’d travel. I’d study. I’d move cities. I’d meet people much smarter than me, funnier than me, more successful than me.

There would be people who would teach me things he never could. People who would understand parts of me he doesn’t. People I would love deeply.

And still, none of them would be my father.

Not because he is objectively the best person I’ve ever met.

It’s because nobody else has been my father. Nobody else has occupied that particular place in my life. Nobody else has been there since before I even knew what it meant to have a “someone.”

Before I had opinions.

Before I had ambitions.

Before I knew what kind of person I wanted to become.

Before I could even understand what love was.

He was already there.

“Jo de ve rooh nu sakunn chuke jo nakhra mera”

who will tolerate my moods, my ridiculousness, my stubbornness, my dramatic little complaints, and somehow still be the person asking whether you’ve eaten.

My father.

The older I get, the more I realise how much of parental love is just quietly putting up with you.

You don’t always deserve the patience.

You don’t always notice it.

You certainly don’t always thank them for it.

But it’s there.

“sakuun” it’s the peace of being completely unpolished around someone.

You don’t have to perform.

You don’t have to be impressive.

You can just be yourself ,including the annoying parts.

And they still know how to make you feel at home.

“Haasya see mein ehasaas ajeeb

Par too naee see haasya”

This is what made me think about all the things I don’t know about my father.

Because when you’re a child, your parents are just your parents.

You don’t really think about the fact that they have entire inner worlds that existed before you.

They have worries they never told you about.

Things they were afraid of.

Things they regretted.

Things they wanted and never got.

People they loved.

Versions of themselves that you’ve never met.

You see your father as your father.

You don’t always stop to ask what was happening inside him while he was raising you.

And that’s why this next part feels so intimate

“Dil vich tere jo raaj see

Mainoo too kyu naee dasya”

There was a secret in your heart. Why didn’t you tell me?

growing older and finally beginning to see your parents as people.

Not just Dad.

A person who had a childhood, who had dreams, who was once someone’s son,

who has probably carried things quietly because he thought that was what being a father meant.

And suddenly you want to know.

What were you scared of?

What did you want when you were twenty?

What did you think your life would look like?

Who broke your heart?

What did you dream about before you had children?

What did you give up?

What did you never tell anyone?

There are so many things about our parents that we don’t ask until we’re old enough to understand that they’re people too.

And sometimes, by the time we’re old enough to ask, we realise how much time we’ve already spent assuming we’d always have more.

“Tere bin sanu eh raaj kise ho nayo dasna”

I think every person has things that belong to particular relationships.

There are things I can tell a friend that I could never tell my father.

There are things I can tell my mother that I wouldn’t tell anyone else.

There are things I might someday tell a partner.

And then there are things that somehow belong only to the relationship I have with my father.

Not because he’s the only person I can talk to.

But because he’s my father.

The history is different.

The language is different.

The person I am when I’m with him is partly made from all the years we’ve already lived together.

And if he weren’t there, nobody else could simply step into that conversation.

Not because they wouldn’t listen.

Because they weren’t there for the life that created the secret.

“Tere bin peed da elaaj kise vaid kolo nahin labhna”

some absences cannot be cured by replacement. I sit with this line everytime something goes south in my life, everytime i sit on the stairs spiraling about life.

You can’t find another person and ask them to occupy the same space. You don’t find a new father. You don’t find someone else who has known you since before you knew yourself. You don’t find another person with your exact history.

You will just  learn how to carry the absence.

You can go everywhere.

You can meet everyone.

You can build an entirely different life.

And still, there can be one person for whom there is simply no substitute.

“Koyi mangada mere see samaa

Koyi hunda soorat te fida

Koyi mangada meri see vafaa

Naa koyi mangada meri bala”

Someone wants my time. Someone is taken by my appearance. Someone wants my  loyalty. Someone likes me for the jokes that i crack, some like me for the maths i do, some want me because they know id be there, But nobody asks for my bala

this might be the most father-like thing in the entire song.

Because as I grow older, i realise that almost every relationship comes with some kind of exchange.

Someone wants your time.

Someone wants your attention.

Someone wants your affection.

Someone wants your loyalty.

Someone wants you to understand them.

And none of that is necessarily bad. That’s just what relationships are. We give things to each other. We need things from each other.

But a father’s concern can be strangely different.

He doesn’t need me to be interesting, beautiful, successful, he doesn’t even need me to agree with him.

He just wants me to be okay.

my bala.

my well-being.

my life going in the right direction.

The kind of concern that doesn’t always announce itself as affection. Sometimes it sounds like where are you? Sometimes it sounds like call me when you reach. Sometimes it sounds like don’t do that, it’s not safe. Sometimes it also looks like him watching my iphone on his find my iphone.

And when you’re younger, you can find it suffocating.

You think, I know what I’m doing.

And maybe you do.

But one day you understand that someone was worrying about your bala before you even knew how to worry about yourself.

a very difficult kind of love to replace.

“Tere bin hor naa kise maangani meri ya bhalaa

Tere bin hor naa kise kerani dhoop vich chha”

If not you then nobody would ask how i’m, if not yiu then , nobody else makes shade for me in the sun.

Making shade for me in the sun.

he doesn’t talk about  stopping the sun.

neither about making the world disappear.

Just standing there and making it a little easier for me to bear.

That’s what my father feels like to me.

He can’t protect me from everything. He can’t make every bad thing disappear. He can’t make every decision for me.

But there is something comforting about knowing that if the world gets too hot, there is someone who will instinctively try to make some shade.

And perhaps that’s what protection actually is.

Not a life without difficulty.

Just the knowledge that when difficulty comes, somebody will stand beside you.

And then the song returns:

“Tere bin sanu sohaniya koyi hor nayo labhna

Jo de ve rooh nu sakunn chuke jo nakhra mera”

And by this point, I don’t hear it as romantic at all.

I hear a child , even a grown child ,saying

I’ve met people. I’ve seen the world. I’ll continue to meet people. But nobody is going to be you.

Nobody else will have your exact patience.

Nobody else will worry about my bala.

Nobody else will make shade for me in exactly the way you do.

Nobody else will know my nakhra.

Nobody else will understand the history behind my silences.

Nobody else will know all the versions of me that existed before I became who I am now.

And that’s when I understood why I had thought of my father the very first time I heard this song.

I hadn’t known who Rabbi Shergill was singing about.

I hadn’t known the story.

I hadn’t even known that I was supposed to hear a father in it.

But somehow, I did.

that got me thinking, that maybe this is how i’ll find my father even in the next life, i’ll just know where he’s and become his daughter again (a threat 😡💗)

some kinds of love that your brain recognises before you have the words for them.

And when I heard Tere Bin, mine recognised my father.

you know smth very strange about finding out that an artist meant something almost exactly the way you had instinctively heard it.

Much later, I found out that Rabbi Shergill had actually written the song for his father.

And I just sat there for a second.

Because I had listened to this song without knowing anything about its origin.

I hadn’t heard an explanation first and then tried to relate it to my own life.

I’d already found my father inside it.

Before I knew.

That was the part that got me.

I wasn’t listening to the song thinking, Oh, this is about a father, so I’ll think about mine.

It was the other way around.

I heard the song.

And my mind went to my father.

Then I found out what it was actually about.

And suddenly the whole thing felt personal.

Like I’d understood something without knowing I was understanding it.

Ithink that’s why Tere Bin has stayed with me.

Not because it is a song about losing someone.

For me, it is a song about recognising someone while they’re still here.

About realising that the person whose presence you take for granted is actually irreplaceable.

About noticing the things you normally dismiss as ordinary.

The questions. The lectures. The concern. The patience. The shade. The bala. The nakhra.

The strange little language two people build after spending a lifetime knowing each other.

And maybe that is what I want to do with my father while I still can.

Not wait until I’m forced to miss him to realise how much I loved having him around.

I want to see the world. I want to grow up.

I want to become someone entirely my own.

I want to go places he hasn’t gone.

I want to know people he doesn’t know.

I want to have stories he wasn’t there for.

But I also want to come back. I also want to be on those strange streets of some different place and argue about how waking up at 5am would not change my life at all.

I want to call him and tell him about everything. I want to sit beside him without saying anything.

I want to know him not just as my father, but as the person he was before I existed.

Because the older I get, the more I understand that my father existed before me.

And somehow, that makes me love him even more.

no matter how independent I become, there will always be one part of me that remembers what it was like to be small and know that my father was somewhere nearby. And maybe that part of me will never completely grow up.

Maybe that’s okay.

Maybe adulthood isn’t about outgrowing the people who raised you.

Maybe it’s about becoming independent enough to realise that you don’t need someone to survive and still choosing, every day, to love them.

To call them.

To visit them.

To listen.

To take the picture.

To sit for five extra minutes.

To ask them questions you never thought to ask before.

To say thank you while there is still someone there to hear it.

So now when I hear Tere Bin, I don’t hear a man singing to a lover.

I hear someone who has looked at an enormous world and still found one person impossible to replace.

one day I’ll probably live a life that looks nothing like the one I have now.

And he’ll still be somewhere in the foundation of it.

In the way I speak.

In the things I believe.

In the things I worry about.

In the things I find funny.

In the stories I tell.

In the person I become.

maybe carrying legacy means keeping each other alive, in the ways nobody would understand.

On 20 July they tried to walk to Parliament. The place that is supposed to belong to them. The police answered with iron, gas, and wood. Barricades slammed shut. Lathis came down on skulls. Tear gas poured into young lungs. Videos of blood running down faces, girls dragged by the hair, kids gasping on the ground. Some said pellets. Some said sticks studded with nails. Hospitals filled with the usual Indian democracy tax:-broken heads, cracked ribs, bruised bodies. The police claimed stones flew the other way and their men got hurt too. Fine. Both can be true. But the force was not measured. It was personal. It was meant to teach a lesson: stay in your lane, children.

Then the minister finally quit. A few promises got muttered. The tents came down. The kids scattered. The machine shrugged and moved on.

And while all that was happening, the Prime Minister was busy making reels. Soft light. Selfie camera. “Thank you, friends.” Three hundred million views. A shiny new record. He told his entire cabinet to start pumping out Instagram content so they could “connect with the youth.” The same youth whose blood was still drying on the streets a short drive away. The same youth he was thanking for their “insightful suggestions” while their friends sat in hospital beds with bandaged heads.

That is not governance. That is performance art with a body count.

Assam was drowning at the same time. Dozens dead. Lakhs washed out of their homes. Fields ruined. The Centre sent teams and money and air drops. The CM thanked the PM for phone calls. Phone calls. While the reels kept rolling. No one at the top felt the need to stand in the mud. Just remote concern and another vertical video of gratitude for the algorithm.

Manipur still carries its open wounds from years of slaughter. Camps that never empty. Families that never go home. Occasional blasts and ambushes to remind everyone the peace is paper-thin. Packages get announced. Visits get scheduled. The dead stay dead. Kashmir sits in its own managed silence, statehood still a polite fiction, security the only language spoken with any fluency, another attack here and there to keep the tension humming.

This is the pattern. Students get batons for asking why their futures keep getting stolen. Flood victims get remote updates. Old ethnic bloodbaths get managed into quiet despair. And the man at the top finds endless hours to perfect his feed.

They built those barricades to keep the noise out. They used the force to make sure the kids never forget who holds the stick. History will not care about the iron or the gas. It will remember the reason the kids stood there in the first place: a country that keeps failing its young, then acts shocked when they refuse to die quietly.

The reels will fade. The blood will not.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And yet, somehow, it still struggles with one of the most basic responsibilities of a modern state, conducting an examination without it becoming tomorrow’s headline.

How?

Every year, nearly two million teenagers, most of them just 17 or 18 years old, are told that one exam will decide everything. Their sleep, their friendships, their mental health, their relationship with their parents, sometimes even their self-worth, all become collateral damage in the name of “merit.”

Then the paper leaks.The exam gets cancelled.The investigation begins.A few low-level arrests are made.Politicians promise reform.And everyone moves on.

Except the students.

Because they’re the only ones who don’t get a second chance at being seventeen.

The funniest part? They call this a meritocracy.Merit? How do you measure merit when someone already has tomorrow’s paper today? How do you preach “hard work always wins” when the system itself cannot guarantee a level playing field?

Students are expected to be perfect. The government apparently isn’t, and coaching mafias make it worse. Promising the same Air 1 to every student taking admission.

When an entire parallel education industry worth thousands of crores exists simply because regular schooling isn’t enough to crack a national examination, that’s not proof of competition.

That’s proof of institutional failure. Coaching was supposed to be optional.

Instead, it’s become the unofficial Class 13.

If clearing one government exam practically requires years of expensive coaching, then the exam isn’t just testing knowledge anymore. It’s testing access.

Access to money. Access to cities. Access to better teachers. Access to privilege. We keep pretending it’s equal because everyone writes the same paper. That’s like making everyone run the same race after giving some participants bicycles.

Look at the coaching prices, how is this fair?

Parents work hard and get their children enrolled into these coachings just to see their child dead? either literal or emotional, because paper was leaked?

In any ways, how’s this price fair? taking this amount of money and delivering peanuts? lecturing how self study is the only way? Ykw, i agree, self study is the only way then why’d you charge amount this crazy knowing half the population would give this fees by taking loans.

“paper leak” has become less of a scandal and more of an annual season. students again question whether merit actually means anything if the integrity of the exam itself is under suspicion.

The tragedy doesn’t end when the exam does.

Every year, stories emerge of students who break under the unimaginable pressure surrounding NEET. Some lose hope. Some lose their lives. this situation should force government to ask itself a difficult question, what kind of education system are we building if teenagers see death before they see a future?

These are seventeen and eighteen-year-olds children. Bacche bhagwan ka roop hote hain to the point where ab bacche seedha bhagwan ke paas hi jaa rahe hain.

And apparently they’re old enough to memorise the Krebs cycle, but somehow the govt with people so much of experience can’t conduct an examination without failure?

On June 26, while outrage over the NEET controversy was still dominating public conversation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted birthday wishes for Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, praising his “commendable efforts” and contributions to education.

Commendable EFFORTS? why can’t i see it then? why couldn’t those kids who died didn’t see it? how can you praise someone and completely ignore the kids dying, the children crying, parents losing everything, and somehow people still find ways to defend it and blame it on students for being weak.

This isn’t about wishing someone a happy birthday. It’s about priorities. And oh my god it’s so clear that citizens and “youth” isn’t the priority.

When lakhs of students are questioning the credibility of one of the country’s most important examinations, people expect reassurance, accountability, and empathy from those in power. Instead, they got congratulations.

Governments don’t lose credibility because people criticize them.

They lose credibility when they appear more comfortable celebrating themselves than confronting crises that affect millions of young Indians.

We want someone to acknowledge our anger and pain, someone to see us more than voting banks, our parents more than just tax payers but humans.

Reality isn’t flashy insta reels and songs where bollywood actors dance chanting your name,you cannot PR your way out of a credibility crisis.

(anybody who thinks criticising govt is being anti nationalist, it isn’t, infact right now it’s not even criticism against govt it’s just helplessness)

entirely.

How many special people change?

The question loops in my head like a scratched record. I’ve carried it for years, tucked between the ribs, humming along with Liam’s snarl. Back then, the answer felt personal in a way I couldn’t name. Friends who once shared crayons and secrets in nursery corners turned into architects of small, precise cruelties. The kind that start with whispers and end with you standing alone at recess, wondering what invisible mark you carried that made people flinch. Special? Different?Strange?

The words land heavy when you’re small.

But the song didn’t pity me. It didn’t offer comfort either. It just roared forward, faster than a cannonball, daring you to keep up. Where were you while we were getting high? Getting high on what, exactly? High on the stubborn refusal to let the ground swallow you whole? High on the daydream that somewhere out there was a version of life that didn’t require you to shrink yourself to fit?

I grew up in that tension. The slow walk down the hall, heart hammering, pretending the stares didn’t burn. Then the music hits and suddenly you’re supersonic, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Oasis never pretended to be wise. They were messy, loud, contradictory, exactly like the feeling of being twelve and realizing the rules were never fair to begin with.

Years later, the same question echoes harder. How many lives are livin’ strange?

I’ve watched people I thought were permanent fixtures drift into versions of themselves I barely recognize. The ones who swore they’d never change course suddenly steering hard left into safer harbors. And me? I’ve done my own share of pivoting. There was a stretch where the path looked straight.textbooks stacked like bricks, exams that felt like they’d decide your entire worth. dreams pressed against something quieter, more restless,the pull toward numbers that danced differently, and the invisible threads that hold the world’s spinning together. Doors slammed shut one after another. Options narrowed like corridors in a dream that won’t end. You stand there, caught between what you were supposed to chase and what keeps calling from the edges.

The landslide doesn’t ask permission. It just moves.

Someday you will find me, caught beneath it. In a champagne supernova in the sky.

There’s something mystical in that image, isn’t there? Not religious exactly, but cosmic. The idea that your wreckage could be beautiful,explosive, sparkling, briefly lighting up the dark. I’ve felt it in the quiet hours after decisions that looked like failures from the outside. When the “someday” feels both inevitable and impossibly far. You wipe the tear away, tell yourself the dreamer never dies, and keep walking. Slowly. Then faster. Cannonball velocity, even if your legs feel leaden.

The Gallaghers get it. Ride or die through the chaos, the fights, the ego, the brilliance that refuses to be tamed. Their music never aged into polite nostalgia for me. It stayed feral. Every re-listen pulls up new ghosts, late nights wondering why the world keeps spinning when so much inside feels cracked. People chasing summer escapes while you and I live and die in the thick of it, asking why, why, why.

‘Cause people believe that they’re gonna get away for the summer…

But summers end. And then what? You’re still here, humming the same chorus, watching new versions of old betrayals play out on bigger stages. Careers shift. Identities fracture and reform. The “special people” keep changing,sometimes into strangers, sometimes into sharper, truer shapes. You wonder how many are living strange lives parallel to yours, nursing the same quiet astonishments.

I don’t have clean answers. That’s the point of the song, I think. It doesn’t resolve. It builds, peaks in that glorious, ridiculous na-na-na refrain, and leaves you suspended. High. The repetition at the end “We were gettin’ high” feels less like celebration and more like ritual. Acknowledging the altered state of simply persisting when the ground keeps moving.

There’s power in that persistence. In carrying the dyslexia of the soul,the places where words and expectations don’t line up neatly,into something that still sings. In choosing the supernova over the safe landing. In believing, against every closed door and whispered cruelty, that the dreamer keeps dreaming.

So here I am, years past twelve, still walking that hall. Sometimes slow, sometimes cannonball. Still caught beneath the landslide, but looking up at the champagne sky anyway. The world’s still spinning ‘round. We don’t know why.

But fuck it. We’re getting high on the not-knowing.

i saw a news headline about supply disruptions in the Middle East sent oil prices into a violent, jagged swing. Options that looked fairly priced at 9 a.m. were suddenly worthless or insanely valuable by lunch. The quants around me weren’t panicking; they were calmly adjusting their delta hedges using models built on stochastic calculus. That day stuck with me. Markets don’t move in smooth, predictable lines. They jump, they drift, they get hit by random shocks. If you want to price risk properly or hedge a book that actually survives reality, you need the math that speaks that language.
So let’s talk about stochastic calculus, ✨ the tool that lets us model uncertainty itself, not just averages ✨

The Problem with Regular Calculus in Finance
Most of us start with ordinary calculus,
derivatives, integrals, the works. It’s fantastic for physics problems where things follow nice, deterministic paths. Drop a ball off a building, account for gravity and air resistance, and you can predict where it lands with scary precision.
Markets don’t work like that.
Stock prices, interest rates, FX rates, they’re noisy, path-dependent, and full of randomness. A 2% move today might be followed by a 5% gap tomorrow for reasons that look random even in hindsight. If you try to use regular calculus on something like geometric Brownian motion (the basic workhorse model for stock prices), you run into trouble because the paths are nowhere differentiable in the classical sense. The “derivative” doesn’t exist the way you learned in school.
That’s where stochastic calculus comes in. It gives us rules for dealing with processes that have both a predictable drift and a random diffusion component.

Brownian Motion ✨ The Heart of the Noise ✨
At the core is Brownian motion, named after Robert Brown but really formalized by Norbert Wiener. Think of it as the mathematical version of a drunkard’s walk, but in continuous time. The increments are independent, normally distributed, and the variance grows linearly with time.
In finance, we usually work with geometric Brownian motion for asset prices:
dS = μ S dt + σ S dW
Here S is the stock price, μ is the expected return (drift), σ is the volatility, and dW is the increment of a Wiener process (the random shi).
If you’ve never seen this before, don’t worry. The key point is that the change in price has two parts, one that grows smoothly with time, and another that gets shocked by random noise scaled by volatility.
This isn’t some abstract theory. It’s why volatility scales with the square root of time, why at-the-money options have vega that behaves in certain ways, and why long-term forecasts have huge confidence intervals.
Ito’s Lemma: The Chain Rule for Randomness
The real game-changer is Kiyoshi Ito’s lemma. It’s the stochastic version of the chain rule, and once you get it, a lot of quant finance clicks into place.
Suppose you have a function f(t, S) of time and the stock price. In regular calculus, df = (∂f/∂t) dt + (∂f/∂S) dS + (1/2)(∂²f/∂S²)(dS)² + higher terms.
But in stochastic calculus, because (dW)² = dt (in the mean square limit), the second-order term doesn’t vanish. That extra (1/2) σ² S² (∂²f/∂S²) dt term is crucial.
This is how Black and Scholes derived their famous option pricing formula. They set up a portfolio with the option and the underlying stock, applied Ito’s lemma to the option price, and then chose the hedge ratio that eliminated the random dW term. What was left was a deterministic PDE that they could solve.
No Ito, no closed-form Black-Scholes. It’s that fundamental.

Why Finance Actually Needs This Stuff
You might be thinking: “Okay, but can’t I just use Monte Carlo or trees?” Sure, for some things. But stochastic calculus gives you~
•  Analytical insight: Closed-form solutions or at least good approximations that tell you how prices should behave.
•  Hedging theory: The mathematics of dynamic replication.
•  Risk management: Proper treatment of volatility surfaces, local vol, stochastic vol models (Heston, anyone?).
•  Term structure modeling: Hull-White, HJM, Libor Market Model,all built on this foundation.
Take interest rates. The short rate doesn’t follow a simple random walk. Vasicek, CIR, and more sophisticated models use stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to capture mean reversion, which regular time-series models often miss in continuous time.
Or consider exotic options,barrier options, Asians, lookbacks. Pricing and hedging these without stochastic calculus is painful at best, impossible at worst.

An Example
Commodity Trading
natural gas contracts. Gas storage facilities have real operational constraints,injecting or withdrawing at certain rates, seasonal patterns, weather shocks. The forward curve is wildly contango or backwardation depending on the season.
Modeling the spread options or storage valuation required a two-factor stochastic model: one for the spot price (mean-reverting) and another for the long-term equilibrium level. Using Ito’s lemma on the value function let us derive optimal injection/withdrawal thresholds. The traders who understood the math (even at a high level) consistently outperformed those who just “felt” the market. The difference showed up in basis risk and carry costs.
That’s stochastic calculus in the wild,😜 not abstract pricing, but actual operational decisions.

here are some books reccs that shaped how I think about this, beyond the usual suspects:
•  J. Michael Steele’s “Stochastic Calculus and Financial Applications” ,It’s rigorous but has excellent intuition. The treatment of Girsanov’s theorem and change of measure is particularly clean. I still pull it off the shelf when I need to remember why equivalent martingale measures matter for pricing.
•  Robert Merton’s “Continuous-Time Finance” – A classic collection of his papers. Reading the original derivations gives you a feel for how someone with deep economic intuition approached the math, rather than the other way around.
•  Darrell Duffie’s “Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory” – More advanced, but the early chapters on Ito processes and security markets are gold. It’s what I recommend to people who already know basic stochastic calculus and want the economic why.
•  For a more applied, almost practitioner-oriented take, check out Paul Wilmott’s “Derivatives” series (especially the older editions). He’s opinionated, sometimes cranky, but shows where the models break and how real traders think.

The Philosophical Point
Stochastic calculus forces you to see is that in finance, perfect prediction is impossible, but you can get the distribution of outcomes right and hedge accordingly. It’s the mathematics of “I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I know how to survive most of the possibilities.”
That mindset,probabilistic rather than deterministic,is what separates decent risk management from the kind that blows up spectacularly every few years.
Markets are adaptive, participants are strategic, and new information arrives continuously. Stochastic calculus, for all its limitations (and there are many,fat tails, jumps, liquidity issues), gives us a coherent framework to think about these things rather than pretending everything is a simple regression.

The song came on after another one of his tracks, and suddenly I felt that familiar ache opening up inside me again. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t scream or shatter things. It just sits there, heavy in your chest, making everything feel farther away than it is.

I kept thinking about what a soft life must feel like.

What would it feel like to stop bracing for impact all the time? To stop waiting for people to turn cruel the second you disappoint them? To make mistakes without feeling like love could be taken away from you because of them? To be held gently instead of handled carefully, like something temporary?

“Oh, to see without my eyes

The first time that you kissed me…”

That line ruins me every single time.

The whole song feels like mourning something you never even got to have. Like grieving a tenderness that only exists in flashes,in songs, in dreams, in the way certain people look at you for half a second before reality returns.

And the worst part is that I know exactly what I’m longing for, even though I’ve never really had it.

This song isn’t about any boy I’ve talked to or almost loved. It isn’t about late-night drives or blurry conversations or trying to convince myself somebody cared more than they actually did. It’s about something much hollow than that. Something emptier.

It’s about how badly I want to be loved without fear attached to it.

I want to be soft without feeling stupid for it.

I want someone who doesn’t punish tenderness. Someone who doesn’t make me feel like love is a performance I have to keep earning over and over again. I want to stop feeling embarrassed for needing reassurance. I want to stop acting colder than I really am just to survive people.

I want to fall apart a little without feeling guilty for it.

“How much sorrow can I take?”

That line has been sitting inside me for days now. Quietly. Constantly.

Because I really don’t know anymore.

Some people carry sadness so long it starts dissolving into them. It leaks into the way they sleep, the way they speak, the way they love. It becomes part of the atmosphere around them. I think that’s what’s happened to me. The sorrow has stopped feeling temporary. It’s everywhere now. In my chest. In my voice. In the silence after people leave.

I give so much of myself to people, and somehow I still end up feeling invisible afterwards. Like I was only ever meant to be a place people rested for a while before choosing somewhere else to stay.

“Like Hephaestion, who died

Alexander’s lover

Now my riverbed has dried

Shall I find no other?”

That part feels unbearable.

Like being emptied out completely. Like loving until there’s nothing left in you but exhaustion. Sometimes I genuinely wonder if there’s something wrong with the way I love. Maybe I love too openly. Maybe I hand people pieces of myself they never asked for, hoping they’ll finally decide to keep one.

But they don’t.

And after enough disappointment, you start becoming haunted by your own hope. You start feeling foolish for still wanting softness after everything has taught you not to expect it.

Still, somehow, the song never feels bitter.

That’s what hurts the most.

Even in all that grief, Sufjan sings like love is still sacred. Like the ache itself means something. Like there’s holiness in longing this deeply for another person, even when it leaves you devastated.

“Blessed be the mystery of love.”

Every time he says it, it sounds less like a statement and more like a prayer whispered by someone trying very hard not to lose faith.

I think that’s why I keep replaying the song.

Because somewhere in it, I feel understood in a way real life rarely allows. Like somebody else once carried this exact loneliness inside them and survived long enough to turn it into something beautiful.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find the kind of love I keep aching for. The kind where I can unclench for once. The kind where I don’t have to shrink myself or harden myself or prepare myself to be abandoned. The kind where I can breathe normally around another person and not feel afraid the entire time.

Maybe some people are simply born reaching for a softness they never fully get to touch.

But for a few minutes, when this song is playing in the dark and the world finally goes quiet around me, it almost feels possible.

And lately, “almost” has been the closest thing to hope I have left.

“I’d be cooler, I’d be smarter

Probably be a better daughter…”

God, that one always stings. I spent three years killing myself to become a doctor because that’s what everyone wanted. Late nights, 48-hour study sessions, weight dropping from 45 kg to 37 kg, anxiety pills, no life outside those books. My parents are genuinely the best people. They gave me every luxury, every opportunity, and I still turned out to be their rebellious kid who ran away 27 days before the exam. I chose economics instead. I hope I was a better daughter. I hope I was more obedient, less chaotic. Sometimes I think I’m their karma.

The song keeps going and it gets even more personal.

“I’d jump in a pool without thinking twice

Take off my shirt like one of the guys

I would throw on some jeans, not know the size

Walk out the door and not wanna cry”

I can’t do any of that. I still can’t wear white or yellow because I think they look ugly on me. I hate my legs so skirts are out of the question. I always cover my arms because they feel wrong. I’ve spent hours in front of the mirror picking outfits before sneaking out to meet someone in his car, before parties, before anything. I dyed my hair blue in 9th grade and purple in 12th grade, probably trying to change something, anything, so I wouldn’t have to look at the same reflection.

And then the chorus wrecks me every time:

“If I lived in a house with no mirrors

Where the walls didn’t talk back at me

Maybe I’d dream a bit bigger

If there was nothin’ to see

If I lived in a house with no mirrors

Where the walls didn’t pick me apart

Maybe my skin would be thicker”

I wish I could live in a house like that. Where the mirror doesn’t scream at me the second I wake up. Where the walls don’t pick apart my arms, my legs, my skin, my everything. Maybe then I wouldn’t spend so much energy trying to hide.

The intimate lines hit even harder:

“I’d have sex with all the lights on

And I wouldn’t pull away from his touch

If he said I was pretty I’d think that I was”

Every single time. Whether it was those drunk, high nights in the car with the city lights blurring outside, or the late-night chats and sexting with that sweet leftist guy who talks economics and politics like it’s poetry , I still can’t take compliments. I pull away. I don’t believe it. Even when someone says I’m pretty, something inside me immediately argues back. The mirror trained me too well.

I wonder what I’d be like without all this noise. Would I sleep better? Would I dream bigger now that economics actually feels like breathing? Would I walk out the door without wanting to cry? Would I let someone touch me without shrinking?

Sometimes after listening to this song I feel sad for the version of me that’s still stuck in that house full of mirrors.

And honestly? I’m not even mad. I’m obsessed. Because once you sit with this idea for five minutes, everything starts to feel… possible. Like the universe isn’t some cold, random accident ,it’s a cosmic Russian doll of black holes birthing baby universes.

So let me freak out about this with you properly.

The Core Idea (and the Guy Who Started It All)

The main champion of this is physicist Nikodem Popławski. Back in 2010 (and he’s kept refining it ever since), he showed that if you add something called torsion to Einstein’s general relativity,basically a “twist” in spacetime that comes from the spin of particles,then when matter collapses into a black hole, it doesn’t crush down to an infinite-density singularity. Instead, torsion acts like a repulsive force at insane densities. The collapse bounces. And on the other side of the event horizon, you get a brand-new, expanding universe.

In his words (from papers like “Universe in a black hole with spin and torsion”), every black hole in our universe could be spitting out its own baby cosmos on the inside. Which means our Big Bang? It wasn’t the beginning of everything. It was the bounce inside a black hole that already existed in a parent universe.

This is called Black Hole Cosmology (BHC). And it’s wild because it solves a bunch of headaches in standard cosmology without inventing new stuff:

•  No true singularity (physics doesn’t break).

•  Explains why our universe is so flat and homogeneous.

•  Gives a natural origin for inflation (the crazy fast early expansion).

•  Turns the black hole information paradox into “the info just went to the baby universe next door.”

As of 2025, this isn’t some fringe Reddit theory anymore. A team at the University of Portsmouth just dropped a paper in Physical Review D (June 2025) called the “Black Hole Universe” model. They argue the Big Bang was actually a gravitational collapse followed by a bounce inside a massive black hole in a larger cosmos. Same vibe, grounded in known physics.

There’s also Lior Shamir’s 2025 work looking at galaxy rotation directions from JWST data. He found a weird asymmetry in clockwise vs. counterclockwise spins, which could hint that the whole observable universe is rotating ,exactly what you’d expect if we’re inside a spinning parent black hole.

Okay, But the Math,Let’s Actually Look at It

Here’s the part that always gets me. Take the Schwarzschild radius ,the size of the event horizon for a black hole of mass M:

r_s = 2GM / c^2

Now plug in the estimated mass of everything in the observable universe (M ≈ 8.8 × 10^52 kg or whatever the latest number is). You get a Schwarzschild radius that’s weirdly close to the actual radius of the observable universe.

More precisely, the Hubble radius (roughly the size of the observable universe) is

R_H = c / H_0

where H_0 is the Hubble constant. And it turns out that for a flat universe (which ours is, within measurement error),

r_s ≈ R_H

That equality isn’t some wild coincidence,it’s actually a mathematical consequence of spatial flatness in the Friedmann equations. But still. The numbers line up too neatly. People have been pointing this out for years, and it keeps feeling like the universe is whispering, “Yeah… maybe.”

Popławski’s torsion version takes it further: the interior of the black hole becomes a closed, almost flat, homogeneous universe that expands just like ours does. No magic required.

Why This Theory Hits Different for Me

I’m not a physicist. I chose economics after running away from three years of medical entrance hell (48-hour study marathons, anxiety pills, the whole suffocating thing). But this idea feels personal in the strangest way.

There’s something about the thought that our whole reality could be the inside of something that looks like an end from the outside. A black hole is the ultimate “point of no return” to anyone watching from afar. But inside? It’s birth. Expansion. Life. Possibility.

It makes the universe feel,alive. Like every black hole we see out there isn’t a grave ,it’s a womb. Universes making universes making universes, forever.

And yeah, it’s probably not proven. Some physicists roll their eyes and say it’s untestable (you can’t exactly step outside our event horizon). But the math works. The recent papers keep adding pieces. And every time JWST drops another “wait, that black hole formed way too early” headline, I’m back here spiraling.

Sometimes I catch myself staring at the night sky and thinking: what if the cosmic microwave background is just the echo of the bounce? What if dark energy is leftover torsion playing out on the largest scales? What if we’re not at the end of anything,we’re right in the middle of someone else’s collapse turning into expansion?

It’s the kind of thought that makes you feel tiny and infinite at the same time.

So Are We?

I don’t know. But I want to believe it’s at least on the table. Because if it’s true, then every time we feel trapped or crushed by something bigger than us, the universe is out there proving that collapse can become creation.

Stand up on the table, change your view, and run toward the unknown, right?

That scene where Neil’s father stands there, cold and certain, forcing his son into medicine… I felt it in my bones. My parents never screamed at me or locked me in a room. They just wanted it. Everyone around me wanted it. The doctor tag. The respect. The “beti doctor banegi” whispers at every family gathering. And for three years I tried to become that girl. Three brutal years.

I studied until my eyes burned. Forty-eight-hour stretches with no sleep, no food, no life. My weight crashed from 45 kg to 37 kg. I was swallowing anxiety pills like they were breaths. No friends, no laughter, just page after page of never-ending syllabus that felt like it was burying me alive. I was suffocated. Death didn’t scare me anymore , it felt like the only door that would actually open.

Then, 27 days before the exam, I was sitting at my desk, staring at that same thick medical book I’d carried like a punishment for years. The “doctor tag,” the big ego that was supposed to come with it , suddenly it all looked like a cage I’d built with my own hands. I closed the book. I stood up. And I ran.

I ran as far as I could from medicine, from the pressure, from the version of me everyone had already decided I should be. I chose economics instead. And the whole time, one sentence kept pounding in my head like a heartbeat:

Neil would be proud of me.

Because when Neil couldn’t take it anymore, when he chose the only freedom he could find, I saw myself in him. I thought I was heading for the same end. I really believed it. But I didn’t. I ran before the final act. I stood up on my own table, changed my view, found my path, and ran straight towards it.

Now I’m here studying economics and it feels like breathing. Real breathing. The kind where your chest actually expands and the air tastes sweet. Not the shallow, panicked gasps I lived on for three years. My parents are okay with it now. They’re even proud. That still surprises me sometimes.

I’m sad that Neil couldn’t save himself. That part still aches. But he saved me. He looked me dead in the eyes through the screen and whispered, “Carpe diem. Seize the day.” So I did.

If you’re sitting there right now, drowning in someone else’s dream, the syllabus, the expectations, the weight that’s slowly crushing you,I

Stand up on the table.

Change your view.

Find your path.

And run towards it.

Because Neil would be proud of you too.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to take a step back, so everytime it feels like something is not for you, run, save yourself and then write a substack where you normalise that everytime trying to be a winner in everyone’s eyes might be losing yourself, so sometimes you should let the world call you a loser while you live your best life.

The opening lines already got me. “I know that the bar closes at 11 / But I hope you never finish that beer.” That quiet desperation when you don’t want the night (or the conversation) to end. I’ve never had the exact bar moment, but I’ve had nights where time felt like it was running out and I just wanted one more message, one more voice note, one more stupid joke about Indian politics or some random economic theory that somehow turned flirty.

Then she hits with “You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven’ / And I know why he wrote them / Now that you’re standing right here.” I smiled at that because the guy who’s been in and out of my life for years once suggested I watch Dead Poets Society. He didn’t push it hard, just mentioned it casually like it was something that might click for me. I haven’t told him yet that it did,that whole “we stay alive for poetry, beauty, romance, love” thing. It’s not that I’m suddenly quoting Whitman or anything, but it felt sweet. Like he sees a softer side under all the leftist debates and world news rants we used to have. He’s the sweetest guy I’ve talked to, hands down. The humour, the way conversations about economics could somehow slide into something deeper, equal parts hot and connected,it was easy with him. Even if we’ve never actually met.The chorus is where it really punched me in the stomach though.

“One night I was bored in bed / And stalked you on the internet / It’s feminine intuition / ’Cause I always had a vision of us standing like this.”

I don’t do the full internet stalking thing she describes, but the paranoia? Oh yeah. That “I’m paranoid I made you up” line ,that’s me. I overthink everything. Did I read too much into that one reply? Was that joke flirty or just friendly? Is this whole thing even real or did my brain build him up because the talks felt so good? And then the anxiety hits like a left hook to the gut: “You’re so, so pretty, boy / I feel like I might throw up.”

But the part that actually made my chest tight was remembering that other guy. The one I used to sneak out for. I’d slip out of the house late, meet him in his car, and we’d drive around a bit, do things i wasn’t allowed to, wasn’t given permission to do. That was the first time I ever went out properly high and drunk, watching the night lights blur while the city felt wide open. I felt so alive in those moments,heart racing, music loud, everything a little hazy and electric. No deep talks about politics or economics, just pure chaos and closeness. that rush of “this is happening right now.”

This song captures both sides somehow. The dreamy online connection that lives in your head for years, and the messy, real-life nights where you actually feel your pulse in your throat.

Then there’s the bridge: “Pisces and a Gemini / But I think we might go really nice together / If you let me stay the night / Well, I think I might just have to stay forever.”

I’m a Scorpio, so none of that applies directly, and honestly I don’t even believe in astrology ,it’s just fun to throw around sometimes. But the vibe? Wanting to throw caution out and say yeah, maybe we could work. Maybe this could be more than late-night chats or stolen hours in a car. I keep thinking about wanting to travel France someday with my person,Eurostar, Paris, all of it. The song has that “have you ever been to Japan, or taken that Eurostar to France?” energy, and it makes me laugh because I’ve been dropping my own version of hints without actually dropping them. I talk a lot when I’m into someone, but I don’t do the obvious “hold my hand” moves. I just keep the conversation going and hope.

.most of this is just me replaying old messages and wondering. The on-and-off for years, the way it never quite landed in real life,it stings a bit listening to Olivia be so hopeful about the beginning stages. But every line still feels way too relatable. The “let’s go steady, let’s go out / And tell the whole damn world how” part? God, part of me wants that chaotic commitment energy. The “kiss me and I might drop dead” mix of excitement and pure terror.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s why the song is stuck in my head. It’s not just a cute crush song,it’s that messy space where you feel most alive but you’re also low-key scared you’ll ruin it or that it was never real to begin with. Olivia’s singing about Versailles angels and bathroom lines at parties, and I’m over here connecting it to late-night car makeouts, political debates that turned soft, and dreams of slow walks in some European city with the right person.

If you’re in that weird headspace too ,half daydreaming, half overthinking, carrying little memories that won’t quit ,give “drop dead” a listen. It might make you feel seen in the most embarrassing, butterflies-and-nausea kind of way.

Has a new song ever hit too close to whatever complicated thing you’re carrying right now?

I’m probably just going to keep replaying the bridge and pretending I’m not reading way too much into everything, as usual.

Until next time.

I laughed. Of course I laughed. That’s what we do. We file the moment away like a receipt we’ll never claim.

My anger is the most honest thing about me. It arrived while I was brushing my teeth and staring at the mirror, wondering why the girl looking back seemed to be daring me to say it out loud. I’ve spent most of my life learning the opposite lesson. Be approachable. Be digestible. Be the kind of woman people can swallow without water. The instructions arrive from every direction,mothers, magazines, boyfriends, bosses, the algorithm that knows I once searched “how to look less intimidating in meetings.” Softness is the uniform. Anything sharper gets sent to the tailor for alterations.

And God, they are thorough tailors.

I grew up in a world where women wearing skirts were called slut but they were much happier than the woman covering their face, and whe i’d ask them “aapko gussa nahi aati? aapki life ka control kisi aadmi ne leliya” they’d reply “it’s not worth the energy, men are like that”voice low and melodic, as if rage were a utility bill they couldn’t afford. I watched them prune themselves the way other women prune roses, snip, snip, until only the polite buds remain. By the time I was old enough to notice, those soft women  had become the most palatable women in our zip code. Everyone loved them. they hated it quietly, the way you hate a song that follows you into every room.

I tried to inherit the trick. i tried being quiet, laughing, no no, not laughing, GIGGLING, i tried talking softly, looking down shyly, tried laughing at rape jokes, at misogynistic comments. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be the difficult one. The world already has enough difficult women, but god, i couldn’t, i became the difficult woman, i slapped back harder, laughed louder, became that “teekhi zubaan” unknowingly, like ive been carrying rage of every woman whose anger was drenched in the kadhai she was making puri for men, rage of every draupadi who didn’t have any krishna to save her.

The first time my anger refused to stay folded, I was 18 and working a summer internship at a publishing house that paid in exposure and passive-aggressive Post-its. A manuscript I’d spent weeks editing came back covered in tracked changes from a man who had never read the book. He’d replaced every instance of “she” with “the girl” and written in the margin, Make her softer. I stared at that note until the words lost their shape. Then I walked into his office, placed the manuscript on his desk like a murder weapon, and said,quietly, because I was still learning, “She isn’t soft. She’s furious. That’s the entire point.”

He blinked. “We’re selling a romance, not a manifesto.”

I quit two weeks later. Not because I’m brave, but because the anger had finally spoken in full sentences and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard it. That was the moment I understood,the pressure to be palatable isn’t just about manners. It’s about pruning. Society looks at a young woman the way a gardener looks at a wild rosebush,lovely potential, but those thorns have got to go. We are encouraged to bloom in neat rows, petals facing the sun, roots trimmed so they don’t disturb the lawn. The fire that makes us grow sideways or upward or at all is treated like an invasive species.

I see it everywhere now that I’m old enough to have friends who are also old enough to be exhausted by it. There’s the friend who smiles through her boyfriend’s third “joke” about her weight because she’s been told that pointing it out makes her “sensitive.” There’s the colleague who swallows her rage when a client calls her “sweetheart” for the fourth time in a meeting, then cries in the bathroom because she’s afraid crying at her desk would be even worse. There’s me, at twenty, deleting three drafts of an email that began “With all due respect” and ended “go to hell” before sending the version that began “Hi team!”

The pruning happens so early we don’t notice the shears. Little girls are praised for sharing, for waiting their turn, for using their “inside voices” even when the thing happening outside is unfair. By the time we reach our early twenties the habit is muscle memory. We soften our voices, our faces, our ambitions. We say “I’m fine” the way other people say “I love you” automatically, because it keeps the peace. Meanwhile the fire keeps burning in the basement, throwing strange shadows on the walls. It’s honest because it doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care if you like it. It simply is.

I’m learning, slowly, that this fire isn’t the opposite of femininity. It’s the part they forgot to mention in the brochures. Traditional femininity sells us the idea that we are sugar and spice and everything that won’t stain the carpet. But look at the women we actually remember from history,the ones who changed things. They weren’t palatable. They were inconvenient. They raised their voices at the exact moment someone told them to lower them. Anger, for them, was the sound of the self refusing to be edited.

Mine isn’t revolutionary. I’m not storming barricades. I’m just a twenty-something who sometimes wants to scream when a man explains my own job to me, or when a friend cancels plans because “he’s in a mood,” or when I catch myself apologizing to a door for bumping into it. The anger is specific and ordinary and relentless. It shows up when I’m told my ambition is “intense” or my silence is “brooding” or my laugh is “too loud for a girl.” It shows up when I realize I’ve spent years curating a personality that would fit neatly inside someone else’s idea of acceptable.

And here’s the part I’m still practicing: I don’t want to prune it anymore.

That doesn’t mean I walk around snarling. It means I’ve stopped translating my rage into nicer languages. When a date tells me he prefers women who “don’t take things too seriously,” I no longer laugh and change the subject. I say, “Then we’re probably not a match,” and let the silence stretch until it becomes someone else’s problem. When a boss asks me to “be a team player” by absorbing extra work without extra pay, I name the imbalance instead of swallowing it. The words taste metallic at first, like blood from a bitten tongue. But they stay honest.

I’m twenty. I still catch myself softening my edges out of habit. I still delete emails and rewrite texts and practice my “approachable” face in the mirror before Zoom calls. The difference is I notice now. I notice when the pruning shears come out,mine or anyone else’s,and I’m starting to put them down. Not because I’m angry all the time, but because I’m finally willing to be honest some of the time.

And honesty, it turns out, looks a lot like fire.

It isn’t pretty. It doesn’t photograph well. It definitely doesn’t trend. But it’s mine, and it’s the truest thing I have left after years of trying to be everyone else’s idea of digestible.

If you’re in your early twenties and you feel it too,that low, steady burn under the smile you’ve been holding since puberty,don’t let them tell you it’s ugly. Don’t let them tell you it makes you less of a woman. It’s the part of you that still knows what you’re worth before anyone else gets a chance to mark it down.

Keep it.

Water it.

Let it grow sideways and wild if it wants to.

The garden will survive.

Look at this photo. Four grown men on a stage, mics in hand, grinning like they just invented funny. Munawar Faruqui waving like a discount Shah Rukh, Kaviraj serving permanent side-eye, Harsh Gujral side-eyeing the audience harder than his own material, and Samay Raina cackling like he just got away with murder. This isn’t a comedy show. This is a support group for men who think “punching down on women” is peak satire.

And India can’t get enough.

these four aren’t “edgy.” They’re not “bold.” They’re lazy, low-effort, woman-hating hacks who built empires on the same recycled garbage that every insecure uncle WhatsApp-forwards at 2 a.m. Their entire brand is misogyny with a microphone. And we lap it up because apparently “dark humor” now means “let’s make rape culture sound like a punchline.”

Kaviraj Singh, the self-appointed “Bill Burr of India” who clearly studied comedy at the School of Incels and Buffalo Memes. His greatest hits include calling female influencers “randi” (yes, that slur) because “randi is a profession, guys… sex worker ko Hindi mein randi kehte hain. Halaanki saare log inhe randi nahi kehte, kai log influencer bhi kehte hain.” Real original. Then he drops this gem 😍Jungle ki koi bhains feminist nahi hui aaj tak.😍 Women are buffaloes who exist to “nurture” because they’re “born with a food-making machine on their bodies.” (Translation: boobs = your only purpose, ladies.) Car breaks down? Woman calls husband, man calls mechanic. Because apparently feminism died the day the first tire went flat. This isn’t comedy. This is 19th-century village logic wearing a hoodie and charging ticket prices.

Harsh Gujral, the man who turned “6000 mein Russian aa jaati hai” into a national catchphrase. You know the one ,the “joke” that reduced Russian women to cheap, available sex objects for drunk Indian bros on a budget. It’s been repeated so many times it inspired real-life harassment of actual Russian tourists. Harsh’s entire vibe is nonstop swearing and cheap misogyny dressed up as “roast.” Women sacrifice? Nah, that’s just their job. Men sacrifice? Heroic. His sets are what happens when a man discovers cuss words and never evolves past them.

Samay Raina, the chaos gremlin who turned “India’s Got Latent” into a national embarrassment seminar on how to objectify women while pretending it’s “just dark humor.” Body count questions on stage. Guests casually asking contestants about parental sex fantasies. The whole show normalized “kya body count hai?” like it was casual chit-chat. When the NCW came knocking, Samay had to issue a written apology for the sexist circus he hosted. But sure, keep calling it “edgy.” This is the same guy whose fanbase thrives on maa-behen gaali when anyone calls him out. Rape culture? Nah bro, it’s just a “joke.” and don’t even get me started on his “roast” of Kusha Kapila on Pretty Good Roast Show,the one that crossed every line and still gets defended as “just bants.” He called her a gold-digger, sneered that “family is when you stay with a husband” (because apparently a divorced woman has no family, no identity, no worth), and then dropped the cherry on top,joked about her dog staying with her ex so the poor guy could have “at least one bitch in his life.” Dehumanising doesn’t begin to cover it. It was vile, personal, and dripping with the kind of casual cruelty that treats a woman’s divorce and pain like fresh meat for the crowd to chew on. Kusha called it out, blocked him, and rightly so,but the boys club just shrugged and moved on to the next target. Disgusting. Straight-up predatory “humor” that normalizes kicking a woman when she’s already down.

And Munawar Faruqui? He’s the polished face of the crew ,sharp roasts, Bigg Boss winner, massive following. But he swims in the same toxic pond. When his boys get heat, he shows up in solidarity reels. The pattern is clear,roast women mercilessly, objectify, degrade, normalize the worst impulses of the male gaze ,then act shocked when society calls it out.

the delicious, vomit-inducing irony these clowns love to ignore,the second the backlash hits and their precious careers wobble, suddenly MUMMYY enters the chat. Samay Raina’s latest special “Still Alive” has him breaking down on stage about a video call with his mom during the Latent controversy. “She was crying, I was crying.” Aww, how sweet. The same man whose content treats women like disposable props suddenly needs us to remember he has a mother. Harsh and the rest pull the same card when convenient “Maa ki izzat” becomes sacred the moment their own izzat is on the line. Funny how the women they spend their careers shitting on suddenly deserve respect when it’s “their”mom.

This isn’t comedy. This is therapy for men who lost the ability to talk to women without reducing them to holes, baby-makers, or “randi.” It’s not “free speech.” It’s free therapy for the kind of guy who thinks feminism is the reason he can’t get laid. And India’s obsession with them says more about us than them. We reward this garbage because it validates the quiet, ugly parts of our culture we don’t want to fix ,the casual disrespect, the body-shaming, the rape jokes disguised as “bants.”

So keep buying tickets, keep sharing clips, keep calling it “just jokes.” Just don’t act surprised when your daughter grows up in a world where men learned that degrading women is the easiest way to get laughs, likes, and lakhs.

These comedians. They’re disease. They’re the people feeding into rape culture.

every time this kind of "content" floods my feed, I feel so suffocated even with oxygen all around me. The air itself turns thick and poisonous, like the casual misogyny in every punchline is stealing the breath from my lungs. We're supposed to laugh along, scroll past, stay silent - while the boys club high-fives itself for

"killing it." But it's choking us. Slowly.

Deliberately.

so ladies, keep choosing the bear until such men and their fans  don’t stop.

NEET itself. What a brilliant invention. Take millions of wide-eyed teenagers who dared to dream of becoming doctors, shove them into a pressure cooker for two years, and then reduce their entire future to one three-hour circus where a single misplaced bubble can send your rank from “future saviour” to “please try again next year, loser.” The exam is so fair and transparent that states keep discovering fresh leaks like they’re hunting Easter eggs. But sure, keep telling kids that merit will prevail while the guy whose uncle knows someone in the right office is already warming up a seat in a “prestigious” private college.

And the coaching industry? Oh, they’re not parasites. They’re visionaries. These fine establishments charge fees that could fund a small startup, promise “guaranteed selection” with the confidence of a street astrologer, and then proceed to suck the soul out of children faster than a bad Bollywood plot twist. Sleep? Optional. Mental health? For weaklings. Actual understanding of biology? Secondary to memorising 47 different ways to draw the same damn diagram. If these coaching factories were any more efficient at crushing spirits, they’d be rebranded as government torture departments.

THE GRANDDD PRIZE ✨ medical colleges ✨ . Specifically, the MBBS factories that everyone sacrifices goats to get into. You’d think once you clear the NEET gauntlet, things would improve. Silly you. Welcome to ragging season, where senior “brothers and sisters” (read: glorified bullies with superiority complexes) turn freshers into unpaid servants, errand boys, and emotional punching bags under the noble guise of “building character.” Because nothing builds a future doctor’s empathy quite like being forced to sing the national anthem at 3 AM while being called names that would make a sailor blush. Reports of extreme ragging keep surfacing, yet the authorities respond with the speed and enthusiasm of a sloth on vacation. “It’s just tradition,” they say, as if tradition excuses turning impressionable 18-year-olds into nervous wrecks before they’ve even touched a cadaver.

And the safety of doctors? Please. India treats its doctors like disposable tissue paper. You slave through five and a half years of brutal academics, survive ragging that would qualify as hazing in any sane country, endure internships where you’re worked like a donkey on minimal sleep, and then step into a hospital where patients’ families might assault you if the outcome isn’t a miracle. Zero security, abysmal pay in many government setups, endless bureaucracy, and a public that swings between “doctors are gods” and “all doctors are greedy butchers” depending on the day’s headlines. But hey, at least the society page will call you a “healer” while you’re dodging chairs thrown in the OPD.

The real kicker? The entire pyramid is built on the illusion that suffering equals excellence. Colleges charge obscene management quotas and “donation” seats that make a mockery of the word “merit.” Private med schools are basically real estate ventures with a side hustle in medical education,labs that look like they were stocked in 1995, faculty who phone it in, and infrastructure that screams “we spent the budget on the marketing brochure.” Yet parents still mortgage houses and sell land because “beta doctor banega.” Meanwhile, the kid is quietly googling “easiest way to exit MBBS” by the end of first year.

Let’s not forget the exams inside medical college. Ridiculous doesn’t even begin to cover it. Theory papers that demand you regurgitate textbooks verbatim, practicals where examiners play god with your viva marks based on how much you flatter them, and a system so rigid that one bad internal assessment can haunt your final percentage like a vengeful ex. All this while you’re expected to develop clinical skills in overcrowded wards with equipment that belongs in a museum. The hypocrisy is delicious: we produce “doctors” who can write 20-page answers on the pathophysiology of a disease but freeze when faced with a real patient because they spent more time cramming than actually seeing cases.

NEET and its ecosystem aren’t broken,they’re working exactly as designed. They filter out the passionate and reward the ones who can endure prolonged mental and financial torture. The real winners aren’t the brightest; they’re the ones with the thickest skin, deepest pockets, or best connections. The rest either break, burn out, or become the very cynical doctors the system complains about later.

So to every parent pushing their child into this meat grinder,maybe ask yourself why you’re willing to sacrifice your kid’s teenage years and mental peace for a degree that comes with more trauma than training. To the aspirants still grinding, you’re not lazy if you’re questioning this circus. Wanting a sane life doesn’t make you a failure. And to NEET itself,congratulations, you magnificent bastard. You’ve managed to turn the noble dream of healing into an industrial-scale anxiety machine that benefits coaching barons, corrupt administrators, and colleges laughing all the way to the bank.

The system doesn’t need reform. It needs a mercy killing. Until then, keep watching bright young minds get fed into the NEET sausage factory, emerging as either jaded professionals or cautionary tales. India deserves better doctors. Right now, it’s mostly producing survivors of one of the most creatively cruel education scams ever invented.

and we’re all still clapping.

(also it rage baits me how if you want to pursue your interest in STEM you either become a doctor or an engineer cz rest of the courses either don’t exist or have 0 employment)

we are very good at worship.

we light lamps, we dress up little girls as goddesses, we touch their feet, we call them devi for a day and feel spiritually accomplished.

and then the next morning, the same country logs back into itself.

and nothing changes.

what do you even call a country that knows how to worship women but not how to let them exist?

because reverence here is seasonal.

violence is not.

you say “respect women” like it’s a value.

but harassment is a routine.

it’s so normal that girls don’t even narrate it anymore, they just… adjust.

don’t go there.

don’t wear that.

don’t stay out late.

don’t argue.

don’t react.

it’s not advice.

it’s survival protocol.

and everyone knows it.

mothers know it.

fathers know it.

friends know it.

the police know it.

men know it.

that’s the worst part.

we watched what happened in Manipur and something in the country cracked open.

women stripped, paraded, turned into spectacle , and the video travelled faster than outrage.

people watched.

shared.

debated.

as if dignity is something you can pause, rewind, analyse.

as if horror becomes less horrifying when it’s buffered at 720p.

and some made fun, they laughed, waited for the video to get on the porn sites, as if tears of a woman never matter, as if our dignity is something MEN HAVE THE RIGHT OVER.

and then you hear about a 4-year-old in Ghaziabad.

four.

you don’t even have language for that kind of cruelty.

there is no ideology, no politics, no justification that can sit next to that and not look monstrous.

and yet it happens.

again.

and again.

and again.

and not even a month passed by when it happened in,

Bihar.

a woman assaulted, humiliated, paraded.

not in secret.

not hidden.

in public.

in front of people.

and the instinct wasn’t to stop it.

it was to film it.

to witness violence not as something to interrupt, but as something to capture.

like content.

like proof.

like we need evidence that we have become this numb.

or for men to watch it over again and get ego boost, she cried, kept saying “bhaiya” , BHAIYA, a word with so much of weight, as someone who has an older brother to me “bhaiya” has always been that magical word that would solve everything.

and somewhere else, another story.

a doctor. a mother. a woman who did everything “right.”

studied. worked. existed within the rules.

and still wasn’t safe.

because safety here is not about what you do.

it’s about what men decide to do to you.

this is what the country looks like when you stop romanticising it.

it is bleeding.

not metaphorically.

not poetically.

actually.

through headlines that repeat themselves with different names.

through bodies that keep becoming sites of power, anger, control.

through silence that follows every outrage cycle.

and then someone will say,

“not all men.”

irrelevant.

because it’s enough men.

enough to make fear a default setting.

enough to make women calculate every movement.

enough to make “normal life” feel like a series of risk assessments.

what does it say about a place where girls learn caution before confidence?

where they memorise escape routes before they memorise dreams?

where marriage is sold as safety but doesn’t guarantee it?

because let’s talk about that too.

marriage.

the institution that is supposed to protect, legitimise, stabilise.

and yet, inside it, there are violences we don’t even fully acknowledge.

because calling it out would mean admitting that the problem is not just “outside.”

it’s inside homes.

inside relationships.

inside structures we defend the most.

when consent disappears after marriage, what do you call it?

when a woman’s body is treated as entitlement, what do you call it?

we hesitate.

we dilute.

we avoid the word.

because the word forces accountability.

and accountability is inconvenient.

so instead, we keep celebrating.

festivals.

traditions.

symbols.

we build narratives where women are powerful, divine, untouchable.

and then we build realities where they are anything but.

there is something deeply violent about that contrast.

about telling women they are goddesses while refusing to treat them like humans.

because goddesses don’t ask for rights.

humans do.

and maybe that’s the real issue.

not that we don’t respect women.

but that we prefer them as symbols.

easier to worship.

harder to listen to.

this is not about one state.

not one incident.

not one headline.

this is a pattern.

and patterns don’t break with outrage alone.

they break with discomfort.

with accountability.

with refusing to normalise what has been normal for too long.

for a country that celebrates Navaratri twice a year,

we should be asking ourselves a simpler question,

what happens on the other 363 days?

because that is the real country.

not the one with lights and prayers.

the one with fear and silence.

and until that changes,

every celebration will feel like a contradiction

we have simply learned

to live with.

And then there is the version of economics that actually runs the world.

That one smells like money. Not metaphorically (RARE FOR ME TO MEAN THINGS LITERALLY). Literally. Old notes, new notes, the quiet panic of not having enough, the louder panic of having too much to lose.

Somewhere between those two versions, someone decided economics is about “allocation of scarce resources.”

That is adorable.

Economics is the raw study of how humans chase money,who catches it, who gets crushed by it, and how entire systems are built so the chase never really ends. Everything else is decoration.

You can read Principles of Economics and be told that individuals respond to incentives. Which sounds harmless until you realise incentives are just dressed-up bribes.

You want people to work more? Pay them more.

You want them to stop doing something? Tax it.

You want them to quietly accept inequality? Convince them it’s temporary.

Incentives are gravity in economics. Invisible, constant, unforgiving.

And that’s where physics walks in, Physics doesn't get invited to these conversations (just like me😔), but it crashes anyway. Because economics isn't merely like physics. It's physics with particles that have egos, insecurities, and lawyers.

In physics, objects move according to forces. In economics, people move according to incentives. Replace mass with money, replace force with desire, and suddenly the equations start to look familiar.

Take momentum.

In physics, momentum is mass times velocity. The heavier something is, the harder it is to stop.

In economics? Wealth behaves the same way.

Money has momentum.

Once it starts moving, it keeps moving ,often in the same direction, often towards the same people. The rich don’t just have more money. They have money that moves faster, compounds harder, resists interruption.

You don’t need a formula for that. You just need to look around.

Or read Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where he politely (very politely) explains that returns on capital tend to exceed economic growth.

Translation: money makes money faster than people make money.

Momentum.

Then there’s entropy.

Physics tells you that systems naturally move towards disorder unless energy is added.

Economics says the same thing but charges you for the lesson.

Left alone, markets do not become fair. They become efficient at concentrating advantage. Wealth pools. Opportunities cluster. Inequality widens , not because someone planned it like a villain monologue, but because systems drift.

Entropy, but with balance sheets.

Which is why governments step in, taxes appear, regulations exist ,not out of kindness, but because unchecked systems don’t stabilise themselves.

They spiral.

And then someone writes a book about it.

The Wealth of Nations gets quoted a lot for the “invisible hand,” which people love because it sounds mystical, almost benevolent. Like markets are guided by some cosmic fairness.

They forget that Adam Smith also wrote about moral sentiments, about the need for restraint, about the fact that humans are not just profit machines.

But of course, we kept the invisible hand and ignored the conscience.

Because conscience does not scale.

Money does.

And that’s the real experiment economics keeps running.

Not on paper. On people.

How far can you push productivity?

How much can you extract before someone notices?

How do you convince entire populations that stability is success, even when mobility is dead?

You call it growth.

You call it development.

You call it opportunity.

But underneath, it’s all variations of the same question-

How do you get more money to move, and who gets to stand in its path?

Even behavioral economics, the slightly more self-aware cousin ,doesn’t escape this.

Thinking, Fast and Slow tells you that humans are irrational, biased, predictable in their unpredictability. Which sounds like liberation until you realise it just means markets have more ways to predict you than you have to understand yourself.

You don’t choose. You’re nudged.

You don’t decide. You’re framed.

You don’t even notice half of it.

r > g.

Returns on capital tend to outrun the economy itself. it isn't some villainous plot. It's arithmetic with human behavior baked in: returns on capital often outrun overall economic growth, so existing wealth pulls ahead unless something interrupts it. Critics rightly point out diminishing returns, risk, housing effects, and policy responses can blunt this, but the tendency is real and uncomfortable.

Money has momentum, and the rich don’t just have more of it ,their money works harder and lasts longer. A poor man’s paycheck is peanuts, it hits once, then disappears on rent, groceries, and impulsive “I deserve this” bullshit. A rich man’s capital?It compounds while he sleeps, snowballs through investments, and keeps thrusting forward even when the economy goes soft. Once wealth gets moving, good luck stopping it. Physics says mass × velocity. Economics says old money × time. Same brutal equation.

And yet, at the center of all this complexity, all these models, all these theories dressed in math and confidence

there is still just money.

Earning it.

Keeping it.

Multiplying it.

Losing it.

Economics does not exist without that obsession.

Strip away the graphs, the jargon, the polite academic tone, and you’re left with something almost embarrassingly simple:

People want money.

They will rearrange their lives for it. Their values. Their time. Their relationships. Entire countries will restructure themselves around it, call it reform, and hope no one reads the fine print.

And the irony?

The same people who insist economics is a “social science” will defend it with the rigidity of physics when challenged.

As if markets are natural laws. As if outcomes are inevitable. As if inequality is just… how things settle.

But physics doesn’t moralise.

Economics pretends not to.

That’s the difference.

When a system fails in physics, it collapses. Clean. Observable. Indisputable.

When a system fails in economics, it gets rebranded.

Recession becomes correction.

Exploitation becomes efficiency.

Stagnation becomes stability.

And suddenly, you’re not questioning the system. You’re adjusting to it.

Because that’s what good economic agents do.

They adapt,They optimise,They earn.

So yes, economics is the science of earning money.

Not because textbooks say so.

But because everything else it claims to be eventually bends towards that one function.

Growth? For what.

Policy? For whom.

Markets? To do what.

Follow the answers long enough and they all collapse into the same direction.

Money, Moving, Accumulating, Escaping.

And people ,very rational, very irrational people ,trying to catch up with it, control it, become it, or at least not be crushed by it.

Physics gives you laws.

Economics gives you systems that behave like laws until they don’t.

And in that gap,very human gap

is where the real subject begins.

Not in equilibrium.

Not in theory.

But in the quiet, constant, slightly desperate act of earning.

And calling it a science.

let’s break down the fancy terms we hide behind-

inflation? your money shrinking.

interest rates? the price of borrowing money.

GDP? how much money is moving around.

markets? people collectively guessing where money will go next.

even development economics is asking

how do we increase incomes?

how do we make people less poor?

how do we change the flow of money so it lands differently?

it’s always money,just wearing different clothes.

and there’s something almost funny about how seriously we take it.

like entire classrooms full of people solving models about “perfect competition” while sitting in a world where monopolies are very much alive and sending emails.

or talking about “rational agents” as if anyone has ever been rational after seeing a stock go up 200%.

or pretending that markets are efficient when half the time they are just there like those broken fairy lights in your room.

economics is this strange mix of precision and delusion.

it wants to be physics.

it behaves like psychology.

and at its core, it’s just a very sophisticated way of saying:

people want money.

people do things for money.

people justify things because of money.

and yet, saying “economics is just the science of earning money” feels almost offensive in academic spaces.

too crude. too reductionist.

as if the discipline would lose its dignity if we admitted its obsession.

but maybe that’s the point.

maybe economics tries so hard to sound neutral because money is not neutral.

it carries power,control,access.

it decides who gets options and who gets told to be grateful for survival.

so instead of saying this is about money, we say this is about allocation.

instead of saying this is about power, we say this is about efficiency.

instead of saying this is about who wins, we say this is about growth.

it’s cleaner that way.

less uncomfortable.

but step outside the textbooks for a second.

look at exam pressure.

look at career choices.

look at how quickly passion bends in front of salary packages.

people don’t say “i want to maximise my utility function.”

they say “i need to earn.”

they say “i want stability.”

they say “i don’t want to struggle.”

and suddenly, economics stops being theoretical.

it becomes painfully personal.

so yes.

economics is complex.

it has history, philosophy, mathematics, psychology stitched into it.

it has debates that span centuries and models that can break your brain at 3am.

but underneath all of it, quietly, and consistently

it is about money.

earning it,keeping it,growing it,fighting over it.

pretending it doesn’t matter while reorganising your entire life around it.

economics is not the science of scarcity.

it is the science of desire slamming into limitation, with money as the universal translator and battlefield.

everything else is just how nicely you choose to say it.

Not gracefully. Not in the way people write about softness like it’s silk. I mean the kind of crying that makes your face feel unfamiliar. The kind where your eyes stay swollen even after you’ve technically stopped. Like your body didn’t get the memo that the moment is over.

And the worst part is I can’t even point to one thing and say, this is why.

It’s just the world.

It’s headlines that don’t feel like headlines. It’s words that shouldn’t exist in the same sentence as “human.” It’s the quiet, horrifying normalcy of things that should have ended centuries ago but somehow learned how to modernise themselves.

And I sit here, in my room, completely untouched by it in any direct, measurable way

and still, it feels like something inside me is constantly breaking.

People talk about empathy like it’s a virtue. Like it’s a soft, glowing thing. Like it makes you kind, makes you warm, makes you someone people want to be around.

I don’t think they’re talking about this kind.

This isn’t softness.

This is sitting on the floor because your body refuses to hold itself upright after reading about something that happened to someone who doesn’t know your name, who doesn’t live in your country, who is not connected to you in any way that the world would consider valid.

And yet your chest reacts like it’s personal.

Like it belongs to you.

Like you’ve lost something.

I don’t think people understand how violent empathy can be.

It doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t check if you’re capable of carrying it that day. It doesn’t care if you have an exam, or a deadline, or a life that requires you to function.

It just enters.

And suddenly you’re not just yourself anymore.

You’re holding fragments of other people’s pain like they were handed to you accidentally and now nobody is coming back to take them.

I’ve spent the last week feeling like that.

Like I’m carrying something that has no place inside me but refuses to leave.

And it’s exhausting in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

Because it’s not physical tiredness.

It’s the kind that sits behind your eyes. The kind that makes everything feel a little heavier, a little slower. The kind that turns even small joys into something you feel guilty about.

How do you laugh when you know what’s happening somewhere else.

How do you eat normally when you’ve read things that make your stomach turn.

How do you just… continue.

People will say, you can’t let it affect you this much.

But that sentence assumes there’s a switch.

There isn’t.

It’s not a decision. It’s a reaction.

It’s your body refusing to treat suffering like information.

It’s your mind refusing to categorise pain as something distant and unrelated.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

Because empathy like this doesn’t make you useful.

It doesn’t solve anything.

It doesn’t save anyone.

It just makes you feel everything at a volume that is impossible to regulate.

Softness, when people talk about it, sounds beautiful.

They make it sound like kindness, like warmth, like gentle smiles and understanding conversations.

They don’t talk about this version.

The one where softness turns into something almost unbearable.

Where it doesn’t just make you care,it makes you collapse.

Where you don’t just feel bad,you grieve.

You grieve like you’ve lost someone.

Like you’ve buried something.

Like your body is processing a loss that technically isn’t yours.

And that’s the part that confuses me the most.

Because if it’s not mine, why does it feel like this.

Why does my chest tighten like I’m the one who experienced it.

Why do my eyes burn like I’ve been crying over something personal.

Why does my body not understand distance.

There’s something deeply unfair about it.

The world creates horrors at a scale that is impossible to comprehend, and then expects people to carry on as if they are just… facts.

Just news.

Just updates.

But some of us don’t process it like that.

Some of us read it and it stays.

It lingers.

It turns into something that doesn’t leave even after you close the screen.

And I don’t think that’s something to romanticise.

There is nothing aesthetic about this.

Nothing poetic about waking up and realising your first thought is still heavy.

Nothing beautiful about crying over people you will never meet.

It doesn’t make you deep.

It doesn’t make you special.

It just makes you tired.

And a little angry.

Because the same world that praises empathy is the one that keeps producing things that demand it.

It tells you to care.

And then gives you more and more to care about until caring becomes unbearable.

I don’t know what the right way to exist is.

To feel less feels wrong.

To feel this much feels unsustainable.

So you just… exist in between.

Trying to function.

Trying to not let it swallow you whole.

Trying to remind yourself that even if you feel everything, you are still just one person with a body that has limits.

But some days, like this week, it doesn’t feel like that’s enough.

It just feels like too much empathy

in a world that has learned how to create too much pain.

in a world full of hatred that it created “bombs” to assert dominance, to kill, to protect.

in a world where an “underage girl” gets raped and not a CHILD.

i will wakeup tomorrow, and might feel better, maybe my next week will go with meeting deadlines, but the world will continue, children will die, people will suffer, and no amount of tears will ever be able to help.

this is how revolutions usually begin with poor timing and absolutely no logistical support.

The problem is that I am currently in the ocean eating fish.

This is not metaphorical. It is also entirely metaphorical. I am nowhere near an ocean. I am rotting in my bed like a philosophical potato, but the brain insists on staging marine documentaries at dawn. The mind does this thing where it drags you to dramatic locations while your body hasn’t moved an inch.

So here I am.

In the ocean.

Eating fish.

And announcing moral decisions.

The fish look offended.

One of them, I swear, is wearing glasses and whispering to the others, this girl looks like someone who takes serious life decisions when she’s sleep deprived .

But that’s the problem with moral awakenings at 6 a.m. they arrive, like toast that popped out of the toaster too early. You are still foggy. Your blanket is still warm. Your phone is at 3% battery. And suddenly your brain is like,

we should rethink the entire ethics of food consumption.

I am not qualified for this conversation.

Five minutes ago I was dreaming about waffles.

But the brain persists. It loves big declarations before sunrise.

Today we will become a better person.

Today we will drink water.

Today we will stop eating animals.

Meanwhile the body is lying there like a dead starfish thinking:

girl you didn’t even brush your teeth yet.

The ocean around me is suspiciously calm.

The fish are swimming past like tiny lawyers collecting evidence. They are probably writing essays about me.

[BUT OMG WHAT IS A MOSQUITO DOING IN MY OCEAN]

sighs

ignores it

anyways where were we,

yes, so,

Human attempts vegetarianism while actively chewing fish.

One fish swims closer and stares directly into my soul.

It is a very judgemental fish.

I panic.

I say listen this is temporary.

He does not care.

Fish have seen empires collapse. They are unimpressed by 6 a.m. identity crises.

I start explaining anyway because humans are very good at explaining nonsense.

You see, I say, it’s not about you specifically.

It’s about morality. Ethics. Planetary responsibility. Spiritual alignment. Protein alternatives. Instagram reels with sad piano music.

The fish blinks.

Actually fish don’t blink but in my mind he definitely does.

He swims away.

That’s fair.

Meanwhile,my alarm goes off for the third time. I ignore it. My room is still dark. My blanket smells faintly like last night’s bad decisions. The ceiling fan spins like it’s been thinking about philosophy longer than I have.

The ocean is still here though.

And I am still eating fish.

This is the strange thing about the human brain , it holds contradictions like loose change in its pocket.

You can want to become morally pure while simultaneously craving butter chicken.

You can talk about compassion while eating chips in bed like a defeated raccoon.

You can decide to change your life before sunrise and then fall asleep again.

The fish are circling me now.

I think they’re forming a committee.

One of them is probably writing the minutes.

6:03 a.m. “Human declares vegetarianism”

6:04 a.m. “Human continues eating fishl”

Honestly? Iconic behaviour.

The ocean is getting louder.

Maybe it’s just my alarm again.

Maybe it’s the brain doing that thing where it throws big existential questions at you while you are still horizontal.

Because that’s when the mind gets dramatic.

When the world is quiet.

When the sky hasn’t decided what colour it wants to be yet.

When you’re not in an ocean.

When you’re just in bed.

Rotting.

Thinking about fish.

Thinking about ethics.

Thinking about how strange it is that the human brain can stage entire philosophical crises before brushing its teeth.

It’s 6 a.m.

I am still not vegetarian.

The fish are still judging me.

And I am still in my bed, nowhere near an ocean, staring at the ceiling like it might have answers.

It doesn’t.

But the fish definitely think they do.

Humans have too many responsibilities.

Humans have passwords. Humans have taxes. Humans have unread emails that start with “just circling back.” Humans wake up and willingly participate in society. Absolutely deranged behaviour.

So I opted out.

I am a unicorn now.

This feels correct for about four minutes.

Unicorns have excellent branding. Sparkle economy. Zero LinkedIn presence. Nobody expects a unicorn to “network.” If a unicorn ignores your text for three weeks you simply assume it was frolicking in a forest. Beautiful system.

But then I remember something deeply inconvenient.

Unicorns live in forests.

Forests contain insects.

So actually never mind.

I am a dolphin.

This is better.

Dolphins are sleek. Dolphins are mysterious. Dolphins have the kind of social life where everyone is constantly jumping out of water for no reason and nobody questions it. Imagine doing that at a networking event. Just suddenly leaping six feet in the air mid-conversation.

“Nice to meet you, Raj from Deloitte-”

launches into the sky

Iconic.

Also dolphins communicate in squeaks, which is honestly how most meetings sound anyway.

But dolphins have a reputation.

Scientists keep publishing papers every few years like “dolphins are extremely intelligent but also deeply chaotic.”

And I think wow.

Finally a species that understands vibes.

But the problem with being a dolphin is that eventually someone asks a question.

“Hey doll, are you fine?”

And suddenly the entire illusion collapses.

Because dolphins are not supposed to hesitate.

Dolphins do not sit there buffering like a youtube video.

But humans do.

Humans say “yeah I’m fine” while their brain is basically a browser with 97 tabs open and one of them is playing music but nobody knows which one.

So now I am confused again.

Maybe I am not a unicorn.

Maybe I am not a dolphin.

Maybe I am just a girl with a brain that occasionally runs five personality simulations at once like a malfunctioning video game.

One minute you are a mystical forest creature.

Next minute you are a marine mammal.

Next minute you are staring at your ceiling wondering why your brain just asked you if you are okay in the third person.

Hey doll, are you fine.

Who is doll.

Why are we talking like this.

Why is the brain suddenly narrating itself like a mildly unstable friend.

This is the problem with consciousness.

Nobody prepared us for how weird it is.

You wake up one day and realize you are a cluster of thoughts inside a skeleton that drinks coffee and pretends to understand taxes.

Of course the brain escapes sometimes.

Of course it says,

I am a unicorn.

No wait.

I am a dolphin.

No wait.

Hey doll are you fine.

It’s less of an identity crisis and more of a brain trying on costumes in the dressing room of existence.

The unicorn costume is glittery.

The dolphin costume is aerodynamic.

The human costume unfortunately comes with anxiety and student loans.

So naturally the brain keeps returning things to the rack.

Meanwhile the world outside is doing normal things like sunrise and traffic and people brushing their teeth like responsible mammals.

here I am.

Part unicorn.

Part dolphin.

Part slightly unhinged narrator asking myself questions.

Hey doll.

Are you fine.

Honestly?

Define fine.

If fine means fully stable and functioning then absolutely not.

If fine means alive, thinking weird thoughts, occasionally laughing at the absurdity of existence while pretending to be a normal person

Then yeah.

Probably.

Also the dolphin is back.

And the unicorn refuses to leave.

They’re both sitting in my brain like roommates who don’t pay rent.

One of them is squeaking.

One of them is sparkling.

And the human part of me is just standing there holding coffee like

this is why nobody should give consciousness unlimited imagination.

Some friendships begin with a handshake.

Some begin with a dramatic confession.

Ours began, I think, with a mutual sense that something somewhere was about to go wrong.

Not catastrophically wrong. Just wrong enough.

A message left on read for too long.

A tone in someone’s voice that didn’t belong there yesterday.

The faint emotional equivalent of a lizard on the wall there, unmoving, slightly suspicious.

That is our spidey sense.

Not the heroic Marvel kind. No radioactive spiders, no skyscrapers, no morally righteous monologues about power and responsibility. Our version is much less cinematic and far more practical: anxiety and intuition holding hands like two slightly unhinged siblings.

My best friend and I can detect emotional shifts the way dogs hear distant thunder.

A room gets quiet.

Someone lies slightly too smoothly.

A plan feels off by three millimetres.

We both look at each other like two conspiracy theorists who accidentally discovered the same conspiracy at the same time.

“Did you feel that?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay good, I thought I was insane.”

This is the foundation of our friendship.

Not trust.

Not loyalty.

Just two people constantly scanning the emotional Wi-Fi for suspicious signals.

But let’s be clear about something.

If a stranger offered him a masala dosa in exchange for my location, he would sell me in approximately six seconds.

Seven if the dosa looked slightly mid.

Friendship has limits. Masala dosa does not.

I know this. He knows this. We’ve openly acknowledged this fact. There’s a kind of honesty in friendships where betrayal is hypothetical but very realistically priced.

He’s not wrong.

This is the kind of moral philosophy our friendship runs on.

And yet.

For someone who would absolutely sell me for South Indian carbohydrates, he panics in the most suspiciously nonchalant way whenever I lose weight.

Not loudly. Never dramatically.

He doesn’t say, are you okay?

That would be too direct.

Instead it’s little things.

“You look… thinner.”

Pause.

“Are you eating?”

Which is an insane question because at that exact moment I’m probably holding a waffle.

But he asks it anyway, like a man casually checking if a building is still structurally sound.

Then he changes the subject.

But the spidey sense is loud.

Because the thing about our shared anxiety-intuition hybrid system is that it works both ways. I can hear the concern behind the fake casualness the same way he can hear the lie behind my “yeah I’m fine.”

Friendships like this operate on subtext.

No one says the real sentence.

We just circle it like two detectives around a body.

Our spidey sense is not always useful.

Sometimes it just makes us deeply suspicious of things that are probably normal.

A slightly delayed reply?

“Something’s wrong.”

Someone being too nice?

“That’s weird.”

A compliment?

“Are they manipulating us?”

You see the problem.

But occasionally,rarely,it’s accurate in a way that makes you pause.

Like when we both instantly know a person is bad news without any evidence.

Or when one of us says, “This situation feels off,” and three weeks later everything collapses exactly the way we predicted.

Not because we’re psychic.

Just because anxiety is basically pattern recognition on steroids.

Our brains are constantly connecting dots that might not even exist.

Sometimes we look like geniuses.

Sometimes we look like lunatics.

Statistically it balances out.

But the real magic of the shared spidey sense isn’t prediction.

It’s translation.

Because the world is full of people who don’t speak Anxiety as a language.

They hear you say “something feels off” and they respond with logic.

“Why?”

“What proof?”

“You’re overthinking.”

Which might be true.

But proof comes later. Intuition comes first.

With him I don’t have to translate.

I can just say,

“I have a bad feeling.”

And he’ll nod like a war veteran who recognises the sound of incoming artillery.

“Yeah,” he’ll say.

“I felt that too.”

No interrogation.

No analysis.

Just acknowledgement.

And weirdly, that makes the anxiety quieter.

Sometimes I think friendships are less about compatibility and more about shared neurological glitches.

Some people bond over music.

Some over hobbies.

Some over politics.

We bonded over the constant sense that something somewhere is mildly suspicious.

It’s comforting.

Not in the soft, romanticised way movies portray friendship.

More like having a co-conspirator in the emotional intelligence underground.

Two people sitting in a room silently detecting vibes.

Also, to be honest

Most of our so-called “spidey sense moments” are just us being dramatic.

A delayed text becomes a political scandal.

A bad day becomes an existential crisis.

A minor inconvenience becomes a full-scale philosophical debate about the meaning of life.

But somehow the chaos works.

Maybe because we both understand that anxiety isn’t always a problem to solve. Sometimes it’s just background noise you acknowledge and keep moving with.

Like a smoke alarm that goes off when you make toast.

Annoying, but technically functioning.

If someone asked me what holds our friendship together, I wouldn’t say loyalty.

Because, again, masala dosa.

I wouldn’t say shared interests either.

I’d say it’s this strange emotional radar we both carry.

The ability to notice tiny shifts in the air.

The instinct to check on each other without making it a scene.

The quiet understanding that sometimes a joke is just a joke, and sometimes it’s a distress signal wearing sunglasses.

Our spidey sense.

And somehow, weirdly, the reason I know I’m not navigating the world alone.

Even if, hypothetically speaking, a really good dosa enters the equation