Everything. And I mean it.

You. Your parents. Your friendships. Your body. The house you currently call home. The problems consuming half your brain. Even the version of yourself reading this sentence will eventually disappear.

The person sitting across from you will one day become a memory, or you will become one for them. Your parents will not always answer the phone. Friends who once knew everything about your life will scatter across cities, countries, marriages, children and responsibilities. The face you criticise in the mirror will acquire lines you would probably beg to have back someday.

Even your current misery has an expiry date.

So why are we so frightened of experiencing life fully?

You tell someone how you feel and they may say, “I don’t feel the same.” You build something and watch it fail. You trust the wrong person. You take the flight and discover the city was overrated. You fall in love with someone you eventually wish you hadn’t.

So what?

You have already survived school embarrassments that once felt fatal, friendships you thought would last forever, jobs you believed would define you, and people whose absence once seemed impossible to imagine.

Perhaps we misunderstand loss because we assume value requires permanence.

A sunset lasts minutes. A great meal disappears while you are eating it. Childhood ends without asking permission. Some friendships belong to one particular version of you. Some loves end and still permanently alter the architecture of your heart.

Why should their ending cancel their existence?

The timer is running anyway.

And I suspect that when we eventually look backwards, many of our deepest regrets will come from hesitation rather than heartbreak. The conversation repeatedly postponed. The father you meant to sit with longer. The flight never booked. The person you never asked out. The ridiculous idea kept inside your head because you were waiting for confidence to appear first.

It probably won’t.

So reach harder for whatever you genuinely want while it is still within reach.

Because temporary does not mean meaningless.

Sometimes the fact that you cannot keep something is exactly why you should hold it properly while you can.

You know why?

Because pain and vastness are made of the same element: water.

A tear is a small ocean leaving the body, and the ocean is an old tear that learned how to stay. Both come from depth, both are full of memories, and both know what it means to hold storms while still reflecting light when the sky clears.

Scientifically, of course, their salt comes from completely different processes. Tears contain electrolytes because our bodies need them whereas the sea accumulated its salts through geological processes over immense stretches of time.

But poetry has never required chemistry to surrender its facts. Sometimes two completely different truths can meet inside the same metaphor.

Maybe that is why crying near the sea feels like coming home to something.

Imagine sitting alone on a beach after losing someone you loved. Your eyes are wet, the wind keeps pushing your hair around, waves keep breaking a few metres away, and for once nobody is asking, “Are you okay?”

What would you even answer?

Perhaps suffering becomes slightly easier to understand when we stop treating it as an interruption to life and accept that it belongs to being alive.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this from circumstances far darker than most of us can imagine. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that even when suffering cannot be avoided, human beings retain some freedom in how they respond to it.

Perhaps tears are part of that response.

We spend so much of adulthood learning how to hide them. A child falls, cries furiously for five minutes, wipes their face and goes back to chasing a ball. An adult loses a parent, a relationship, a friendship, a dream, sometimes an entire version of the future they had imagined, and someone tells them, “Be strong.”

What does that even mean?

Why did strength become synonymous with dryness?

There is a strange tenderness hidden in crying. The salt rising in your eyes is evidence that something mattered enough to disturb you. That you are still soft enough to be moved, and open to a world capable of touching places inside you that you thought had become unreachable.

Maybe the ocean understands this better than we do.

It never mistakes stillness for strength.

It retreats, returns and crashes against rocks. It changes coastlines slowly. It holds shipwrecks at the bottom while sunlight dances on its surface. Somewhere inside the same ocean, there can be a storm violent enough to destroy a city and, thousands of kilometres away, water gentle enough for a child to dip her feet into.

Human beings contain contradictions like that too.

You can grieve and laugh on the same evening. You can miss someone terribly and still continue living without them. You can carry wounds that never completely disappear and still build a beautiful life around them.

Perhaps healing was never supposed to mean becoming untouched again.

Maybe it means becoming more like water.

Allowing yourself to retreat when you must, return when you can, change shape without losing yourself, and continue moving even while carrying entire shipwrecks somewhere inside you.

So cry when you need to.

Then flow.

The ocean does.

I call it a weakness because pretense takes you places - at home, with relatives, and colleagues, definitely with chappu bosses. All you need is a little fake smile here, a little forced agreement there, a little “you are absolutely right, sir” at the right moment, and suddenly the doors open. That’s because people like those who make them feel comfortable. They reward those who confirm their greatness. They trust those who do not disturb the shallowness of their ego.

And I get it.

The world runs on some amount of acting. Family functions need acting. Office meetings need acting. Society needs acting. Everyone knows the script. You need to praise the powerful, laugh at the bad joke and stay silent when the room is wrong. My dad calls it maturity, diplomacy and sometimes even “samajhdari.” His experience makes it sound like a bitter truth.

But I wonder what happens to the person inside you when you keep being in agreement with things your soul rejects?

That is where I struggle.

I listen, understand, believe in being respectful, and polite with everyone. But if I feel someone is being shallow, disrespectful, manipulative, or intellectually dishonest, I find it hard to take it like a saint and act like sugar. Instead, I go silent, or have facial expressions that have judgement written all over them. Yet, if I speak or write, I cut through BS like a swiss knife and people hate it.

Maybe that has cost me.

Maybe I would have grown faster in certain offices if I knew how to flatter better. Maybe I would have survived certain bosses if I had mastered the ancient corporate art of nodding with dead eyes. Maybe I would have been more acceptable if I had learned to become smaller in the presence of insecure people.

But then again, what is the cost of being accepted everywhere?

A line by Maya Angelou stays with me: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I think the same applies to ourselves. When your own nature keeps showing you who you are, believe it too.

Maybe my inability to pretend is a weakness in a world addicted to masks.

But it is also my spine.

And I would rather walk slowly with my spine intact than reach quickly by bending into shapes I cannot respect.

This sounds obvious, which is probably why it’s so easy to ignore. Most people don’t reject it outright. They just silently make exceptions for the people they don’t want to lose. I did that for years. I kept adjusting the definition of love so it could include behavior that didn’t feel like love at all.

The problem is that reality doesn’t bend just because your attachment does.

If someone consistently hurts you, what you are experiencing is not love in any useful sense of the word. It may include attachment, dependency, history, or even moments of genuine care. But the defining property of love is not intensity but consideration in the most default sense possible.

This doesn’t mean they never mess up. People do. But when they do, there is friction inside them about it. They notice, adjust and make a visible attempt to reduce the chance of hurting you again. If that feedback loop is missing, then whatever they feel, it is not operating as love.

What makes this hard to accept is that you can have a long list of evidence that seems to contradict it. Good memories are powerful. They make you think the harm must be an exception. So you start doing silent translation work. You reinterpret sharp words as stress. You downgrade repeated patterns into isolated incidents. You begin editing reality in small ways so that it remains livable.

Over time, this becomes a habit. You stop asking “is this okay?” and start asking “how can I make this feel okay?”

That shift is expensive. You pay for it with self-respect, but not all at once. It’s gradual. It begins with small compromises. Then letting something go here, excusing something there. Nothing feels catastrophic in the moment, which is why it accumulates.

Another reason it’s difficult is that people who hurt you are not entirely bad. If they were, leaving would be easy. Instead, they are inconsistent. Sometimes kind, mostly careless. That inconsistency creates hope, and hope is what keeps you invested long after the evidence has turned.

But you don’t realize that inconsistency is not a sign of depth. It’s a sign of unreliability.

If someone can see that their actions hurt you and continues without meaningful change, then you are not being treated as something irreplaceable but as something that will stay.

That distinction matters. Because love tends to protect what it values. It is naturally conservative with the things it doesn’t want to lose. If there is no instinct to protect you from avoidable harm, then you are not being held with care, regardless of what they say.

A useful test is this: can you remember how they speak to you when nothing external is forcing them to be kind, and does that version of them feel safe to recall? If your own memories make you tense, that’s data. It’s more reliable than their explanations.

People often say love is complicated. In practice, the core of it isn’t. It becomes complicated when you try to include behavior that contradicts it.

The people who love you make it easier to be yourself, and not harder. They reduce friction in your life, and not increase it. You don’t need to decode them to feel secure.

And importantly, you don’t have to convince yourself that what hurts you is actually love.

They will always choose between you and something that serves them more, and the choice is usually quicker than you would like to believe. They leave their families when the city across the world starts paying better. They leave their friends when the friendship stops fitting the new version of themselves they are auditioning for. They leave their partners for someone they met secretly on a dating app in September, and they will tell you it was complicated when it was actually quite simple.

They cheat because they wanted to and the wanting felt larger than the promise. They lie because the truth would have cost them something, and they had decided, somewhere in the calculus of their own calculations, that you were the cheaper bill to pay. And once they have left, they will forget everything you have done for them with a speed that is almost impressive, the way the Indian middle class forgets a politician’s promise the morning after the election, and wedding guest forgets the name of the bride’s cousin by the time they finish their dessert. I think the forgetting is not malicious but administrative. You just have been moved to a different folder of their memory, the one marked archive, and they will visit that folder roughly never.

I am writing this from experience. Because I have had so many people in my life who called me their friend, family, who used the warm vocabulary of permanence and meant about as much by it as one means by a horoscope read aloud over morning breakfast. And yet when the moment of choosing came, and the moment of choosing always comes, they chose, and what they chose was not me. They let me go with great tenderness sometimes, with explanations that sounded almost convincing, and with apologies that came punctually and meant little. The vocabulary was always lovely but the behaviour was always the same. Years of showing up for someone reduced to a polite “it had to happen someday” sent on a Sunday afternoon, the digital equivalent of a man tipping his hat as he steals your wallet.

There is a line attributed to Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I used to think this was about strangers. But it took me years to understand that it was actually about the people closest to us, the ones we have given the benefit of every doubt, the ones whose patterns we have been politely refusing to read because reading them would require us to act on what we have read. We are, all of us, excellent at being our own defence lawyers when it comes to the people we love. We could acquit a serial offender if the offender happened to be the friend who once helped us move flats in 2019.

History does not get tired of confirming this either. The friends Caesar trusted were the ones holding the knives. The brothers in the Mahabharata fought each other harder than they ever fought outsiders. Every empire that fell, fell from the inside first. The lesson keeps being offered and we keep declining to learn it because learning it is unbearable. To accept that the people we love are capable of choosing themselves over us is to accept a kind of loneliness that the species seems wired to refuse, and so we keep telling ourselves the kinder story, the one where they meant well, where it was circumstance, where we think it will be different next time with someone else. It rarely is. The next someone else is usually just the previous someone else with a different haircut and slightly better vocab.

But the truth, the one that finally sets you free if you can hold it without bitterness, is that most people will choose themselves, and you must let them go anyway, and you must also stop being surprised. Save the surprise for the special ones who choose you back. They exist and are worth the wait. Build your life around them, and let the rest of the world do what the rest of the world has always done: be the bitch it has always been, smiling at your wedding, missing your funeral, and remembering you only when it needs something.

Let them.

Ravi Varma was a genius, of course. Nobody sensible can deny that. He took gods out of temple walls, Sanskrit imagination, royal courts, and manuscript traditions, and placed them inside the homes of ordinary Indians through oleographs and calendar prints. His Lakshmi, Saraswati, Damayanti, Shakuntala, Yashoda and Krishna (which fetched Rs 167.2 crore at Saffronart, reportedly the highest-valued Indian artwork ever sold at auction), Sita, and Arjuna shaped how millions began to visualise divinity. That tells us his cultural power has survived even market logic.

But genius does not erase controversy. In 1895, his printer faced obscenity charges in Bombay High Court for oleographs like Ashtabhuja Devi, accused of offending public morality by bringing sensuality, flesh, and European realism into sacred Hindu imagery. Traditionalists objected because gods and goddesses were being pulled into the grammar of the body. The divine had acquired skin, gaze, waist, breast, drape, and desire.

There is a serious case to be made that this humanization was itself a form of devotion, that Varma was not secularizing the sacred so much as democratizing access to it. Temple sculpture had always carried the erotic and the divine in the same stone. Khajuraho existed. The Nataraja was already a body in motion. What Varma did was translate that ancient comfort with embodied divinity into the visual language of a colonized modernity, putting it on paper cheap enough for a clerk’s household to afford. His Lakshmi was not a desecration. She was the goddess finally entering the drawing room of a people who had been made to feel their own traditions were primitive.

But that argument, however honest, does not close the other question. Because the pattern since Varma has not been one of consistent artistic courage. It has been selective. M.F. Husain painted nude Hindu goddesses across decades and was celebrated in the same institutional circles that would have never commissioned, exhibited, or defended an equivalent provocation aimed at Islam or Christianity. When Husain was finally prosecuted and chose exile, the liberal consensus mourned the artist while refusing to examine the asymmetry. The question is not whether Husain had the right to paint what he painted. The question is whether that right was ever evenly distributed, and whether the people defending it were defending a principle or a preference.

This is where the Varma inheritance becomes complicated. He opened a door. But the door, it turns out, only swings one way in contemporary India. The Hindu sacred became the space where artists demonstrated their freedom. Other faiths became the space where they demonstrated their judgment.

Raja Ravi Varma should be studied fully. As artist, modernist, democratizer, provocateur, and also as a man whose art opened a door India still has not closed - and has never been asked to open equally.

We can celebrate the painting.

We can also ask what was painted over.

And we can ask who decided which walls were safe to touch.

“See?” you’d say. “You’re overprotective.”

“Selective,” I’d correct.

You’d smile at that, the kind of smile that begins in the corner of your mouth before it fully lights your face. Then we’d walk a little more, our pace unhurried, the kind of pace people keep when they secretly wish the road would lengthen for them.

After a few steps, you’d ask again, softer this time,
“But really… why?”

I’d think for a moment.

“Because when I hold your hand,” I’d say slowly, “everything else feels slightly more manageable. Time feels non-existent. Silences feel fuller. Roads feel shorter. And the world feels safer. Even my thoughts stop running so fast.”

You wouldn’t respond immediately. You’d just hold my hand a little tighter, almost unconsciously. And I would feel it, that small tightening, that instinctive answer your body gives before your mouth does.

Then you’d glance at me and ask, “That’s all?”

I’d smile.
“No.”

“No?”

“No. There’s more.”

“Of course there is,” you’d murmur.

“There always is with you,” I’d say. “I hold your hand because I like the way it changes me. I become calmer. Less scattered. Less busy trying to outrun my own mind. With your hand in mine, even waiting at a red light feels like part of the evening and not an interruption to it.”

You’d look ahead then, pretending to focus on the road, but your face would already have softened.

“And also,” I’d continue, “because love sometimes needs somewhere to go. Somewhere simple, ordinary enough to survive the weight of what it means. Holding your hand feels like that. Like love choosing a small, human shape.”

You’d laugh under your breath.
“You make everything sound bigger than it is.”

“Only because you make small things feel important,” I’d say.

That would quiet you again. We’d keep walking under streetlights just beginning to glow. The sky above us would still be holding the last trace of blue. Somewhere nearby, someone would open a bottle of Diet Coke, and the fizz would rise sharp and bright in the silence. You’d hear it and grin.

“Now I want one,” I’d say.

“You always want one.”

“That’s because Diet Coke understands me.”

“I thought I did.”

I’d look at you sideways.
“Sometimes.”

And then, because I know you well enough by now, I’d squeeze your hand once, lightly. You’d squeeze back, and there’d be a pulse of affection moving from one palm to another.

After a while, your voice would turn softer.

“What if I let go first?” you’d ask, almost casually, though I’d know the question was carrying more than it admitted.

I’d take a breath before answering.

“Then I’d still remember the shape of your hand,” I’d say. “Some people leave echoes in places words can’t reach. I think you’d remain in my palm for a long time.”

You’d stop walking for half a second at that, just enough for me to feel the pause travel through our joined hands. Then you’d start again, slower now.

“That’s unfair,” you’d whisper.

“Why?”

“Because how is anyone supposed to argue with that?”

“You still will,” I’d say.

“I definitely will.”

“I know.”

And that would make you laugh, properly this time, the kind of laugh that bends slightly at the waist and makes me feel absurdly proud of having caused it.

By then, the evening would have deepened. Shop shutters half down. Streetlights steady. The city turning intimate in the way only Indian evenings do, with light spilling from windows, utensils clinking in kitchens, and the smell of dinner drifting into the open air. We would walk through all of it with our hands still joined, as we had silently built a room of our own inside the ordinary world.

Then you’d say, almost like you were talking to the road ahead,
“Okay. Then don’t let go too easily.”

I’d look at you for a moment before answering.

“I wouldn’t,” I’d say. “Not of something that feels this much like home.”

And you wouldn’t say anything after that. You’d just move a little closer as we walk, your shoulder brushing mine, your hand still in my hand, evening stretching ahead of us like it had understood what it was being asked to hold.

Let it take its own time. Like the sun that rises every morning without rushing the night away. Like a mother carries a child 9 slow months before the first cry. Like rain gathers in clouds long before the earth feels its touch. Because everything worthy of love takes its own sweet time to become.

Even beneath the visible - in the soil, where no one applauds, the roots wrestle through stone and shadow. It looks like nothing is happening yet every struggle is a rehearsal for becoming.

You keep checking the ground, impatient, whispering, “When will it happen for me?” You scroll through other lives, comparing gardens. But a seed doesn’t bloom faster because of envy. It blooms because it never stopped believing in its own season.

Look around.

The river does not question the mountain it must cut through, it just keeps flowing until rock becomes song. The bird doesn’t sing because it’s heard but because its chest cannot hold the silence any longer. The tree doesn’t mourn the leaves it’s lost but because knows they had to fall for spring to return.

So why do we rush what is being written in the language of time? Why do we chase love before we learn to be gentle with ourselves, chase success before we understand joy, chase healing before we’ve forgiven what hurt us?

Rumi said, “Patience is not sitting and waiting. It is foreseeing.” Maybe patience is how life teaches faith - that what is meant for you has already chosen its hour, already found the sunlight with your name on it.

And when your moment comes, you won’t need to justify it. The bloom won’t explain why it took so long. It will simply open: radiant, ready, and true.

So let it bloom.

Not because others are watching.

But because your soul finally remembers -

it was never late.