I have often wondered whether we understand the responsibility that comes with being trusted.

We talk so much about the courage it takes to be vulnerable. We tell people to open up, to speak their truth, to stop carrying everything alone. And perhaps we should. But somewhere in that conversation, we forget to talk about the other side of vulnerability: what happens when someone chooses us as the person they can finally be vulnerable with.

That, too, is a responsibility.

Charles Feltman, in The Thin Book of Trust, defines trust as “choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” Brené Brown later brought this definition into her own work on trust, describing it as one of the most beautiful definitions she had encountered. Feltman also describes distrust as “the feeling that what we have shared with someone, when it is important to us, is not safe with them”.

I think there is something profound in that distinction. Because when someone tells you about the thing they are ashamed of, the person they still miss, the mistake they cannot forgive themselves for, the fear they hide behind their confidence, or the part of their life that doesn’t fit the version everyone else knows, they are giving you an unusual kind of power.

You now know where they are soft…. And what you do with that knowledge says far more about you than it does about them. We often think of vulnerability as a disclosure, so that when I tell you something personal, it means that we are intimate. But intimacy does not work this way. You can know everything about me, and I know everything about you, and still feel like strangers. We can talk to each other every evening about our childhoods, our families, our heartaches, and our dreams, yet not share trust. Trust is not given through the volume of information that we share; it is created by the action that is taken with that information after it is entrusted to you.

If you notice, that is why some of the deepest relationships in our lives are not necessarily the ones where we speak the most. They are the ones where we know that what we say will not become ammunition later. Where our worst day will not be used to define us. Where something we confessed during a moment of weakness will not suddenly appear in an argument six months later. Where our vulnerability doesn’t become gossip, entertainment, leverage or a convenient explanation for why we are difficult to love.

There is something sacred about a person who knows exactly where you are broken and doesn’t press there simply because they can. And perhaps this is where the idea of closeness becomes more complicated. We often assume that closeness is measured by access. How often do we speak? How much do we know about each other? Have we met each other’s families? Do we tell each other everything?

But real closeness may have less to do with access and more to do with safety. I can tell you everything and still not feel safe with you. And I can tell you very little and still know, with a strange certainty, that if the world fell apart tomorrow, you would not make me explain why I was falling apart before offering me a place to sit.

Brené Brown's work is particularly useful here because she treats vulnerability and trust as things that require boundaries, rather than as invitations to disclose everything to everyone. In her BRAVING framework, trust is broken down into seven observable elements: Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault, Integrity, Nonjudgment, and Generosity. The framework is especially relevant to vulnerability because its “Vault” element is about keeping confidences and not sharing information that isn't ours to share. In other words, trust isn't created simply by how intensely two people open up to each other; it is built through the small, repeated behaviours that show whether what we entrust to someone is actually safe with them.

That distinction matters because we sometimes confuse being emotionally open with being emotionally available to everyone. They are not the same thing. Sometimes we overshare with people we barely know because strangers can feel strangely safe. There are no expectations yet. No history. No consequences. You tell someone your entire life story during a three-hour conversation because you know you may never see them again. And somehow, that can feel easier than telling the person who has been standing beside you for years.

Then there are people we trust because they feel familiar, even though familiarity is not always evidence of safety. And then there are the people we don’t tell anything to because someone else did. This is one of the sadder consequences of being hurt. Betrayal rarely remains confined to the person who betrayed us. It changes the way we interpret everyone who comes after them. One person breaks the promise of keeping something safe, and suddenly we start keeping everything safe from everyone.

We become excellent at withholding. We call it privacy. We call it independence. We tell ourselves that we have simply matured and learned not to expect too much from people. But sometimes it is just an old wound wearing the clothes of wisdom.

The tragedy is that our past experiences can make us suspicious of the very people who have done nothing to deserve our suspicion. We may sit across from someone who has shown up consistently, respected our boundaries, remembered the small things, protected our name in rooms we weren’t in, and never once used our vulnerability against us, and still hesitate to let them come closer.

Meanwhile, we may find ourselves telling everything to someone who gives us intensity instead of intimacy. And intensity can be deceptive. A person asking you deeply personal questions on the second day of knowing you may make you feel extraordinarily seen. But being curious about your wounds is not the same as being capable of caring for them. Sometimes people want access to our vulnerability because it makes them feel close to us. But closeness is not measured by how much of someone else’s private world you can enter. It is measured by whether you know how to behave once you are inside.

Some things are given to us only because the other person believed they would be safe in our hands. And perhaps this is why betrayal hurts so much, because they changed the meaning of the moment in which we trusted them.

They take a memory that once meant I felt safe with you and turn it into I was foolish for feeling safe with you. That is a much deeper wound. The next person arrives innocent, but we meet them with evidence collected from somebody else’s crime.

They say, “You can tell me.”

And some part of us remembers the last person who said the same thing.

They say, “I won’t judge you.”

And we remember the person who promised that before judging us anyway.

They say, “This stays between us.”

And suddenly we are no longer hearing their words. We are hearing an old conversation with someone else. This is how the past enters relationships that had nothing to do with it. We become guarded because someone from our past taught us that safety can disappear without warning. And yet, the answer isn’t to build higher walls. It is to become better at recognizing doors. Not everyone deserves the same version of us.

There are people who deserve our opinions, but not our wounds. People who deserve our company, but not our history. People who deserve our laughter, but not our deepest fears. And then, occasionally, there are those rare people with whom we don’t have to calculate any of this.

We simply know… We know because they have shown us… through small acts repeated over time. They listen without turning everything into themselves. They don’t rush to fix what you are saying. They don’t compete with your pain. They don’t make your vulnerability about their importance in your life. They don’t demand access simply because they care about you. And perhaps most importantly, they don’t punish you for having boundaries. That is where real closeness begins.

Not with, “Tell me everything.”

But with, “You can tell me when you’re ready.”

There is a world of difference between those two sentences. One demands intimacy. The other creates safety for it. And this is perhaps where we need to rethink what we mean when we say that someone is “close” to us. And being known is one of the fundamental human desires. To have someone see the parts of you that are complicated and unfinished and contradictory, and remain. That is a different kind of closeness. It cannot be manufactured through constant conversation or forced through confession. It grows slowly, almost invisibly, through consistency and the hundred little moments in which someone proves that your trust was not misplaced.

We should also stop judging ourselves so harshly for having trusted the wrong people. Sometimes we learn who someone is only after we give them something precious. There is no perfect formula for identifying trustworthy people in advance. Trust always contains some uncertainty. The point isn’t to eliminate the risk. The point is to learn how to recognize where the risk is worth taking… To give a little, and watch what happens… To share something small, and notice whether it remains safe… To allow someone to earn another piece of you… And then another… And another… Until one day you realize you are no longer carefully measuring what you say because someone became trustworthy. And when someone finally walks through that door with our permission, they should understand that they haven’t merely been given information. They have been given responsibility.

Because when someone trusts you with the parts of themselves they don’t show the world, the most important question isn’t: How much do I know about them now? It is: Can I be trusted with what I now know? That is the real measure of closeness.

At the end of the day, the most beautiful relationships are the ones where both people eventually realize the same thing: I don’t have to hide from you. And equally important: I don’t have to be afraid of what you’ll do with the things I finally stopped hiding.

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I had never watched a Kannada film before Dia, and I went into it knowing almost nothing about the film, which, in hindsight, was probably the best way to watch it and this is something I watched during COVID times. Dia, directed by K. S. Ashoka, is a film about loneliness, hesitation, grief, second chances, family, friendship, timing, and the strange cruelty of life when it refuses to follow the plans we make for it. What was new to me with this movie was experiencing the story through Dia’s eyes. As a man watching it, I found myself thinking about how differently women can experience love, fear, relationships and even the simplest decisions.

Dia is an introvert, and the film spends a considerable amount of time inside her head: the conversations she imagines, the things she wants to say but doesn’t, the sentences she rehearses before saying them, the hesitation that makes even expressing affection feel like an enormous act of courage. There is something painfully familiar about that, regardless of gender, but seeing it through a woman’s perspective made me notice how much emotional labour can happen silently, especially when society expects women to constantly understand, adjust, wait and make sense of situations that they didn’t create in the first place.

Dia first falls in love with Rohit, a senior from college, and even that love grows through glances, imagination and all the little things that happen when you like someone but don’t quite know what to do with that feeling. And perhaps that is why the heartbreak hits differently when tragedy takes Rohit away. Dia is forced to confront something that most of us eventually learn in one form or another: grief doesn’t arrive with instructions, and moving on isn’t the same thing as forgetting.

She eventually meets Adi, a completely different kind of person — open where she is reserved, spontaneous where she overthinks, someone who seems to believe that life is full of “surprises and miracles.” Dia, meanwhile, has already learnt the other side of the equation: “life is full of problems and pain.” Those two ideas almost become the film's emotional argument. Is life something we endure, or something we continue to believe in despite everything that happens to us?

What I particularly liked about Dia is that it doesn’t treat her relationships as simple choices between two men. There is a tendency in romantic cinema to turn the woman into a prize and the men into contestants, but Dia spends more time showing us what happens inside her when life keeps changing the question. Rohit represents the love she once thought she had lost forever. Adi represents the possibility of beginning again. And Dia is caught somewhere between memory and possibility, between the person she was and the person she is slowly becoming. That becomes especially interesting from a man’s perspective because it makes you think about how easily we sometimes expect women to “move on,” as if emotions follow the same logic as a calendar. We say things like, “You have to move on,” “You have to choose,” “You have to be practical,” without necessarily understanding what it costs the person making that choice. Dia understands that life doesn’t always give you clean choices. Sometimes every option carries a little bit of heartbreak.

And then there is the ending. If you haven’t watched Dia, stop reading here. Seriously. I knew absolutely nothing about the climax, and I think that made the experience considerably more devastating. The ending has been abrupt, unexpected and heartbreaking, and that is probably the simplest way to put it. Adi, undone by guilt after his mother dies alone while he is away seeing Dia one last time, walks to that same railway crossing where Dia once tried to take her own life. Dia realizes what he intends to do and runs to find him, reaching him just as a train approaches. He turns toward her voice, and the train hits him. That is the film. But what really hurts isn’t merely the tragedy itself. It is the idea that sometimes two people can love each other genuinely and still not get to live the life they imagined. Sometimes timing is cruel. Sometimes circumstances are cruel. And sometimes life doesn’t care how sincere your love was.

There is also something beautifully symbolic about one of Adi’s little moments in the film, when he loses one slipper from a moving train and throws away the other, saying, “What good will one slipper do?” The line sounds almost silly when you hear it, but by the time the film ends, it carries a completely different weight. Maybe that is what Dia is ultimately trying to say: we spend our lives looking for our other half, believing that finding the right person will somehow make everything complete, but life has its own ideas about who stays, who leaves and who arrives too late.

I started Dia thinking I was watching my first Kannada love story. I finished it thinking about how little control we actually have over the stories we call our lives. We make plans, we fall in love, we lose people, we meet someone new, we begin to heal, and just when we think we finally understand where the road is taking us, life takes a completely different turn. Maybe that is why Adi’s philosophy and Dia’s pessimism both feel true. Life is full of problems and pain. It is also full of surprises and miracles. And sometimes, heartbreakingly, it is both at the same time.

All Image credits - IMDB

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Masaan is set on the ghats of Varanasi, where the Ganga carries away both diyas and dead bodies in the same breath, where life and death are not opposites but neighbours who share a wall. The film tells two stories that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Devi, played by Richa Chadha, is caught in a hotel room with a boy who dies suddenly, and a corrupt policeman turns her shame into a slow, grinding blackmail. A consensual moment becomes public humiliation. The police extort her father, society judges her, and she is made to feel as if she has sinned simply by wanting love. Her father, played by Sanjay Mishra with heartbreaking restraint, is a frightened man trying to protect his daughter with whatever dignity he has left. That is the philosophical layer of Masaan: love is not always powerful enough to protect us from social structures.

The second story revolves around Deepak, played by Vicky Kaushal, a boy from the Dom community, born into the work of burning bodies, who falls in love with Shaalu, an upper-caste girl played by Shweta Tripathi. Their romance grows through poetry, awkward smiles, and shared silences. Then comes the song that feels like a memory (my all-time favorite)… Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai…Mai kisi pul sa thartharaata hu…(You pass through me like a train; I tremble like a bridge beneath it.) The song uses the image of a train passing and a bridge trembling underneath it, and if you have ever loved someone you were not supposed to love, you know exactly what that trembling feels like. It is a metaphor for every love that exists on borrowed time, every love that has to be quiet because the world outside is too loud with its own rules. It plays during the gentlest, most aching part of the film, the courtship between Deepak and Shaalu, two young people trying to build something soft in a world that has already decided they do not belong together. Watching Deepak watch Shaalu, watching the awkward, disbelieving happiness on his face, you understand that Masaan is asking whether tenderness can survive at all in a place that has been trained for generations to see people as categories instead of hearts.

Two stories, one about desire punished by a system, the other about desire attempting to survive one. Both are about the weight that society hands you at birth and asks you to carry as if it were your own choice.

What makes Masaan so philosophically rich is how it treats death as a kind of witness. Deepak’s family burns bodies for a living, and there is a devastating irony in a boy who tends to other people’s grief every single day, and then has to carry his own grief completely alone, because his caste will not let the world see him as someone worthy of love. The film asks a question: if the fire does not care whether the body was rich or poor, touched or untouchable, then why do the living insist on drawing those same lines among themselves? There is a kind of stripped-down honesty in that image of the pyre, everyone eventually reduced to the same ash, and yet the story around us keeps pretending that some ash matters more than other ash.

The way the two stories meet is the most unconventional and, to me, the most beautiful choice the film makes. They meet through grief itself, through a boatman’s boat, through the same river, through a ring that gets lost and found and passed hand to hand like fate deciding it still has something to say. By the end, Devi and Deepak, two strangers who never really knew each other, sit together on the water where the Ganga meets the Yamuna, at the Sangam, the confluence. Two rivers becoming one, two people carrying separate sorrows that somehow rhyme with each other. It is such an aching ending with no resolution wrapped in a bow, just two people who have survived their own version of the same wound, sitting side by side and finally, for a moment, allowing themselves to hope. Varun Grover’s writing never spells things out. It trusts silence, it trusts the space between a father’s disappointment and his daughter’s shame, it trusts the way a boy closes his fist around a memory he cannot say out loud. That restraint is why every small moment in Masaan lands like something enormous.

The film’s title means cremation ground. But the irony is that Masaan is one of the most life-affirming films ever made. It tells us that human beings are constantly burning… through grief, caste, shame, memory, and loss… yet from those ashes emerges the faint, stubborn urge to begin again.

So when Deepak asks, “ये दुःख काहे खत्म नहीं होता बे?” (Why does this sorrow never end?), the film answers: Sorrow does not end… We learn to flow with it, the way the Ganga flows past every pyre, carrying both ashes and the possibility of another dawn.

All image credits - IMDB

Masaan streaming now on JioHotstar

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Asur begins like a crime thriller, but within a few episodes it becomes something far more difficult to categorize. Set against the haunting backdrop of Varanasi, the series pulls us into a world where forensic science collides with mythology, where psychological trauma hides behind ritualistic murders, and where every clue seems to point not just toward a killer, but toward a deeper question about human nature itself. What fascinated me most was how the show never treated mythology as a decorative layer; it used it as a lens to explore obsession, morality, intelligence, faith, and the darkness that can exist within ordinary people. Even before the larger twists unfold, the atmosphere makes it clear that this is not merely a story about solving crimes… it is a story about understanding the forces that shape the human mind.

The story begins in Varanasi, a city where every street feels connected to history, death, rebirth, and spirituality. From the very first episode, the atmosphere tells us that this is not going to be a conventional police procedural. We meet Dhananjay Rajpoot (Arshad Warsi), a brilliant forensic expert who has distanced himself from the CBI, and Nikhil Nair (Barun Sobti), his former student who still carries both admiration and unresolved emotional baggage toward his mentor.

A ritualistic murder pulls them back together. At first, the investigation seems like a serial killer case. But as the clues begin to connect with Hindu mythology and the concept of the Asura (demons), the show slowly reveals that the murders are not random acts of violence. They are messages.

And it is during this phase that the series delivers one of its most important lines: “Samanya manushya ka simit gyan, use apne se pare dekhne nahi deta.” (Limited knowledge prevents an ordinary person from seeing beyond himself)

This is when the investigators are struggling to understand the deeper pattern behind the crimes. The killer is not merely hiding evidence; he is exploiting the limitations of human perception. Science sees one layer, faith sees another, and the truth exists somewhere in between.

As the case grows darker, Asur begins to blur the line between morality and circumstance. Dhananjay, despite being the sharpest mind in the room, is deeply flawed. Nikhil is compassionate but emotionally fragile. The show is not presenting anyone as purely heroic.

In a crucial moment, Dhananjay reflects on human nature: “Insaan ko kabhi puri tarah se samjha nahi jaa sakta… kyunki badalte rehna insaan ki fitrat hai.” (A human being can never be fully understood, because change is human nature). It becomes the emotional foundation of the series. Every major character is changing—through guilt, loss, obsession, humiliation, or fear. The investigation is no longer only about catching a criminal; it is about understanding how darkness slowly enters a person’s life.

The brilliance of Season 1 is that mythology is never used as decoration. The references to Kaliyuga, Kali, Kalki, destruction, and rebirth are woven directly into the killer’s worldview. He believes society has become irredeemably corrupt and that destruction is a form of purification. During one of the most haunting stretches of the season, the show gives us a dialogue that feels as if it has emerged from an ancient scripture: “Anant andhkaar hi param satya hai, lagaav hi peeda hai, karuna hi krurta aur ant hi prarambh.” (Infinite darkness is the ultimate truth; attachment is suffering; compassion is cruelty; and every ending is a beginning.)

The context makes this line terrifying. It is not spoken by a wise sage seeking enlightenment. It is part of a mindset that has embraced nihilism. The killer has transformed philosophical ideas into justification for violence. That is what makes Asur so unsettling: it shows how intelligence and ideology can become more dangerous than rage.

As the murders become more personal, the relationship between Dhananjay and Nikhil takes center stage. Their mentor-student bond carries years of admiration, disappointment, and unresolved pain. The emotional tension between them is as gripping as the mystery itself. At one point, when hope begins to feel fragile, the series delivers another devastating observation: “Umeed sirf intezaar karati hai, sachchai nahi badalti.” (Hope only makes you wait; it does not change the truth). This line lands with enormous emotional weight because the characters are desperately searching for a way to undo past mistakes. But Asur keeps reminding us that truth is indifferent to our wishes.

When Season 1 ends, it leaves behind more than suspense. It leaves behind a question: Can evil survive even after the person behind it is gone? That question becomes the bridge to Season 2, and this is where Asur accomplishes something extraordinary. Instead of repeating the same mythology-based thriller, it expands into the world of technology, data, surveillance, and artificial intelligence.

The transition feels completely natural because the first season had already established that ideas are contagious. Season 2 simply asks what happens when those ideas gain access to digital systems capable of influencing millions of people.

In this context, the Mahabharata reference becomes incredibly powerful: “Bhavishya ka gyaan toh Shree Krishna ko bhi tha, par kya woh yudh ke vinash ko rok paaye the?” (Even Lord Krishna knew the future, but could he prevent the destruction of war?) The show uses this line to connect ancient wisdom with modern technological anxiety. Knowledge does not guarantee control. Prediction does not guarantee prevention. AI can process information, but it cannot automatically save humanity from its own impulses.

As the second season progresses, the fear becomes larger than any individual killer. The real threat is the combination of human darkness and technological amplification. Mythology explains the darkness; psychology explains its origins; technology explains its scale. And that is why the blend between Season 1 and Season 2 works so beautifully. The first season asks, “What is an Asur?” The second asks, “What happens when the Asur learns to use the modern world?”

By the final episodes, I realized that Asur was never just about murders, codes, rituals, or investigations. Those are the surface elements. Beneath them lies a meditation on civilization itself. It asks whether intelligence without wisdom becomes dangerous. Whether faith without compassion becomes destructive. Whether technology without ethics becomes terrifying. And above all, it asks whether the battle between deva and asura is not happening in some mythical past, but inside every human mind.

For me, Asur is one of the rare Indian shows where every dialogue feels earned by the story. The lines do not exist to sound profound; they emerge from the characters, the investigation, and the themes. Arshad Warsi brings weariness, brilliance, and emotional depth to Dhananjay. Barun Sobti gives Nikhil a vulnerability that makes the psychological conflict deeply human. The writing trusts the audience enough to combine forensic science, mythology, philosophy, and AI without simplifying any of them. And perhaps that is the highest compliment I can give any piece of storytelling: it did not end when the episode ended. It continued inside my mind, and I am still remembering this show years after watching it and still considering it the best watch of my life.

In India, both Asur: Welcome to Your Dark Side (Season 1) and Asur: Rise of the Dark Side (Season 2) are currently available to stream on JioHotstar

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The story begins with Leela (Madhoo) getting separated from her group in the chaos of Kashi and meeting Madhavan Maash (Indrans), a retired schoolteacher who becomes her unexpected companion. On the surface, very little happens. They walk, talk, search, wait, and spend time together. But beneath those simple moments, the film is discussing something much deeper: how many people reach the second half of life without ever feeling truly noticed.

One of the most beautiful ideas in the film is that not every meaningful relationship needs a label. The bond between Leela and Maash grows through small acts of helping, listening, waiting, remembering, and fulfilling tiny wishes that others may consider insignificant. The title itself becomes the philosophy of the film: small small wishes. The movie seems to suggest that people break because their small joys go unaddressed for years.

There is a recurring emotional rhythm in the film in which Leela slowly opens up, and Maash responds with patience rather than advice. These conversations are not written like movie dialogues and rather feel like two tired adults speaking honestly after carrying their burdens in silence for too long. The film understands that healing often begins when someone listens without trying to fix us.

Another point that I liked is the contrast between spirituality and human connection. Varanasi is usually shown in cinema as a place where people search for God, liberation, or meaning. Here, the film shifts the perspective. Leela may have come to Kashi for a spiritual journey, but what changes her is not a ritual; it is kindness. The director has spoken about wanting to capture the deeper essence of Kashi through the stories of ordinary people, and that intention is visible throughout the film.

The movie also speaks about aging with dignity. Both characters carry the weight of years. There is loneliness, regret, and the feeling that some dreams are now too late, but the film dont treat older people as people whose emotional lives are over. It gives them curiosity, vulnerability, humor, embarrassment, and hope. That is rare.

What I appreciated most is the film’s simple perspective on happiness. It suggests that a meaningful life may consist of very ordinary things like someone waiting for you… someone remembering what you said… someone helping you when you are lost… someone making space for your small wishes… and someone seeing you not as a responsibility, but as a person.

Madhoo delivers one of her most restrained performances in years. She communicates exhaustion, hesitation, and gradual emotional thawing with very little exaggeration. Indrans is extraordinary as Madhavan Maash; his kindness never feels cinematic or heroic. He plays the character with such humility that even his silence carries emotion. Together, they create a relationship that feels lived-in rather than performed.

And then there is the music. The songs and background score do not push the emotions; they just support the story. In a film built on pauses, glances, and unfinished thoughts, the music becomes the bridge between what the characters say and what they cannot say.

Chinna Chinna Asai is ultimately a film about finding meaning in gentle human presence. The movie might feel slow for people, but that’s exactly how life is for many and hence demands a patient viewing experience. It tells us that many adults are walking through crowded cities carrying invisible loneliness, and sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do for another person is simply this: help them feel less lost.

Watch Chinna Chinna Aasai on JioHotstar

Watching the current protests in Delhi, led largely by students over the exam paper leak issue and the demand for the education minister's resignation, I find myself comparing the two moments. The anger feels real, and the cause is legitimate. Students have genuine grievances about how competitive exams are being run and how their futures are affected by administrative failures. The current protest didn't start as a political campaign. It began as satire aimed at a judge's remark about unemployed youth, and within days the Cockroach Janta Party's page had crossed 20 million followers, more than any registered political party in the country. That kind of organic reach shows the frustration was already there, waiting for a symbol. Wangchuk's hunger strike gave the movement a moral anchor that people, including senior citizens and social groups outside the student base, could rally around.

But somewhere along the way, it feels like the protest has picked up passengers who weren't part of the original journey. When a student-led cause starts sharing space with unrelated political slogans and personalities, it risks turning into something people can dismiss as a circus rather than take seriously as a student movement. Over the following weeks, the protest at Jantar Mantar started drawing a much wider crowd than students alone. Climate activists, transparency campaigners, opposition MPs, Left politicians, farmer leaders and media personalities all joined in, each carrying their own baggage into a space that started out being about paper leaks and exam accountability. Some critics have gone as far as suggesting the movement's founder's past political links mean it may not be as spontaneous as it looks. Whether or not that's true, the optics of a growing guest list make it easier for outsiders to see a single-issue protest as something broader and messier than it started out as. And then there's Wangchuk himself. He spent more than 20 days on hunger strike before being forcibly taken to a hospital, an image that has already outlived the news cycle around the paper leaks that started this. Whatever one's politics, watching a protest's most recognisable face become a bigger story than its actual demand is worth noticing.

Both sides of this exist at once. The scale, the sustained energy and the willingness of students to keep showing up despite police barricades are real strengths. So is the risk that too many hands, however well-meaning, can dilute a demand that started out simple. Nirbhaya’s protest worked because nobody could hijack a sentence that direct: make this country safer for women. That’s the model worth holding onto.

Youth movements don’t need politicians to define their cause. They need politicians to get out of the way and let the demand stay exactly as sharp as the day it was born. The moment a student protest becomes a stage for someone else’s career, someone else’s party, or someone else’s reel, it stops belonging to the people who actually have something at stake. Politicians, of any party, should be grounded enough to know the difference between supporting a cause and standing in front of it. The students know what they’re asking for. Everyone else’s job is to listen, not to lead.

Apparently, I was supposed to have a crush in every tuition class, a secret relationship my parents never found out about, a “we need to talk” breakup, a guitar phase despite having zero musical talent, and at least one dramatic quote in my Orkut status.

Instead, I was calculating how many tuition batches I could teach after school.

The moment I finished 12th, I started earning because it was simply what needed to be done. Somewhere between teaching school kids and worrying about responsibilities, my dating life submitted its resignation letter without informing me.

Today people ask, “How many relationships did you have before marriage?”

Brother... I barely had free evenings.

Teenagers now have the concept of sleepovers… Meetups… and can say that “I need space.”

We had “Come home before the street lights turn on.”, “Why do you need to meet? Didn’t you see them in school?” and “We didn’t even have our own cupboard.”

People today complain that relationships have become complicated. I don’t know. Back then, the biggest complication was convincing your friend to call your crush’s landline and disconnect after hearing her father’s voice. That itself required military-level planning.

The internet existed, technically. The cyber café had only two purposes.

Officially, you went there to check board exam results.

Unofficially...Well... Let’s just say every cyber café owner knew why teenage guys suddenly wanted Cabin No. 4 with the curtains. History should remember these unsung businessmen.

Our parents also belonged to a different operating system.

We took actual beatings from our parents. Not the gentle “I’m disappointed in you” modern parenting technique. Actual, physical, “get the chappal” beatings.

Today’s parenting books say, “Validate your child’s emotions.”

Our parents preferred, “I’ll give you something real to cry about.”

And somehow... I don’t even know how... we still grew up believing they loved us. At that time it felt unfair. Now that I’m older, I understand the intention behind most of it. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t have parenting podcasts or Instagram reels telling them what gentle parenting looked like. They were trying to raise decent human beings with whatever they knew.

Their methods? Questionable.

Their intentions? Mostly solid.

I come from a matriarchal setup, so growing up, my mother made every decision. Every single one. Budget, discipline, whether we were visiting relatives, whether a particular uncle was allowed to speak to us directly. My father was basically a well-loved department head who reported upward.

So when I got older and started hearing about “patriarchy” and “feminism” as this big battle, I was genuinely confused, like someone explaining a foreign currency to me. In my house, the matriarchy was not a theory; it was the operating system. My brother and I started cooking, cleaning, and doing household chores the moment we hit our teenage years (without knowing that it was progressive) because Amma said so, and Amma’s word was law, constitution, and supreme court combined.

Here’s the comparison I keep coming back to. Sometimes I feel our generation has fewer choices, fewer distractions and definitely fewer opinions.

You studied… worked… contributed to the family… got scolded… recovered… repeated the cycle.

Today, everything needs a label. Every disagreement is a red flag. Every inconvenience is trauma. Every relationship requires a podcast to explain why it exists.

I’m still trying to understand who made something as simple as caring for another person sound like an advanced engineering course. I’m not suggesting that my family represents the reality of every household. It doesn’t. Every family is shaped by its own circumstances, culture, personalities, and power dynamics. Mine just happened to be one where authority wore a saree, carried a bunch of house keys, and could silence an entire room with one look. Growing up with that experience naturally influenced how I looked at conversations around patriarchy and gender roles. As I grew older, I realized that my upbringing was just one version of countless realities that exist side by side. That’s probably why I’m cautious whenever any discussion tries to fit every family or individual into the same template. Some homes are deeply patriarchal, some are matriarchal, many are somewhere in between, and most are far too nuanced to fit neatly into labels. Real life is rarely as tidy as our online debates; it is usually much messier, much more layered, and far more interesting.

Oddly enough... I don’t feel cheated. I feel like I belong to the last generation that grew up before life became content. And if I had one wish... I’d like to visit one of those old cyber cafés again. Purely to check the exam results, of course. 😉😉

Then you look at what’s actually happening between two people, and the picture falls apart.

The vocabulary got richer. The relationships got flimsier.

Ghosting, Breadcrumbing, Situationship, Orbiting, Benching… Ghostlighting, where someone disappears and then comes back acting like nothing happened. Ten years ago, half of these words didn’t exist because the behaviors they describe weren’t common enough to need a name. Now there’s a whole glossary, because the behaviors became common enough to need one.

And the situationship, that undefined middle zone with all the intimacy of a relationship and none of the accountability, isn’t a side effect. It’s becoming the default starting point. One writer summed it up about as well as anyone: it’s “A situationship is emotional trauma in a gift box”, which is funnier and sadder the longer you sit with it.

Love, Brie

situationships vs casual dating explained

It’s come to my attention that modern daters do not know the difference between a situationship and casual dating…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Brianne Hogan

Here’s the part that gets me. A situationship exists specifically so nobody has to have the hard conversation. If you were never officially anything, you don’t owe the other person a real conversation about why you’re leaving. You can just go quiet. Compare that to how much courage it used to take a person to even ask someone out, sit through an awkward first date, or have “the talk” about exclusivity. We didn’t get braver about intimacy. We built an entire social structure designed to help us avoid it.

Divorce is rising exactly where people were supposed to be freer

If ghosting culture is the story of people avoiding commitment, divorce is the story of what happens after people commit anyway and it still doesn’t hold. In India specifically, urban divorce rates have climbed roughly 30 to 40 percent over the past decade, with women initiating a large majority of filings in cities. That’s not a marginal shift. It’s a structural one, and it lines up with the exact demographic that was supposed to be entering marriage more informed, more independent, and more capable of choosing well than any generation before it.

The uncomfortable read here isn’t that people are becoming more selfish. It’s that the tools we associate with progress, financial independence, more choice, more awareness of what a healthy relationship should look like, haven’t actually translated into people staying, communicating, or working through hard seasons together. If anything, they’ve made leaving easier than repairing.

The courage to kill, but not to talk

Everything above is about two partners avoiding honesty with each other. There’s a different, far more serious pattern running alongside it, and it deserves its own space rather than being folded into the ghosting conversation, because the mechanism and the stakes aren’t comparable. This isn’t about people going quiet on each other. It’s about people who couldn’t say “I don’t want this marriage” or “I’m involved with someone else,” and chose murder instead of that conversation.

A few cases from the past year have dominated Indian news for exactly this reason. In the Raja Raghuvanshi case, police allege that his wife, Sonam Raghuvanshi, conspired with a man she was involved with to have Raja killed during their honeymoon in Meghalaya, reportedly after hiring contract killers. A 790-page chargesheet filed by Meghalaya Police alleges the plot involved three separate failed attempts before Raja was killed.

The Lohagad Fort case is even harder to sit with. Twenty-year-old Siya Goyal and her alleged lover Chetan Chaudhary are accused of pushing her fiance, Ketan Agarwal, off a cliff during what looked like a birthday trek, weeks before their planned wedding. According to police, one of the accused told investigators that Siya didn’t want to call off the engagement and elope instead, because she felt that would bring disrespect to her family. So instead, prosecutors allege, she chose to have him killed. A trip to Bali just days earlier had already been cancelled after Ketan’s passport mysteriously went missing, which investigators are now examining as a possible earlier attempt.

In Manesar, near Gurugram, police allege that a 25-year-old man named Ankit shot his newlywed wife dead inside his girlfriend’s rented room, roughly three months into the marriage, after being with the girlfriend for nearly three years before the wedding. Investigators say the two had planned it together, down to buying the firearm weeks in advance, and fled toward Nepal afterward before being caught. A man who could have just told his family he didn’t want the marriage, or asked for a divorce, allegedly chose to have his wife killed instead, so he could stay with the woman he actually wanted to be with.

It’s what happens when someone decides that ending a relationship honestly, even one they no longer want, is somehow costlier than staging a murder. Outlook India’s coverage of the Raghuvanshi and Lohagad Fort cases points out that investigators keep finding the same pattern: someone felt cornered into a marriage or engagement they didn’t want, and conspiracy was the way out. The Manesar case runs the same pattern from the other direction, a husband unwilling to end a marriage the ordinary way. This isn’t a story about one gender being more capable of honesty than the other. It’s the same failure showing up regardless of who’s doing it.

“Body count zero” and the impossible standard

And then there’s the discourse that made me want to write this in the first place. Somewhere in the last year, a recurring genre of viral posts started arguing the opposite of what you’d expect from a supposedly sex-positive, judgment-free generation: that a partner with zero prior partners is itself a red flag and suspicious.

Sit with how strange that is. We’ve spent a decade insisting nobody should be shamed for their romantic or sexual past. And now there’s a genuine strain of online opinion that treats having no past at all as a character defect, evidence that something is wrong with you, rather than just a fact about your life. It’s not really about inclusivity anymore. It’s a new scoreboard, just running in the opposite direction from the old one.

That’s the thing that convinces me this isn’t really about becoming more open-minded at all. We didn’t remove the judgment. We just moved which behavior gets judged. People are still being sorted, ranked, and disqualified over their romantic history, whether that history is too full or too empty. The judgment didn’t go away. It got rebranded as a preference.

So what’s actually going on

My honest read is that we’ve confused vocabulary for maturity. Knowing the word “gaslighting” doesn’t mean you’ve learned to have a hard conversation. Knowing what a “situationship” is doesn’t mean you’ve gotten better at asking for what you want. And being fluent in therapy language doesn’t mean a family has actually learned to accept a daughter’s or son’s choices instead of punishing them for it.

What’s actually changed is that we have more ways to avoid confrontation than any generation before us. We can mute someone instead of breaking up with them. We can define a relationship as “just vibes” so nobody has to be accountable for how it ends. And in the places where that avoidance isn’t an option, where family, caste, or community demands an answer, some people are still choosing violence over honesty.

Millennials took their time getting into relationships because they were figuring out careers and independence first (not to boast about them). That patience got mocked as slowness. But it’s starting to look like the last generation that still expected a conversation before an ending. Whatever comes after them seems to be optimizing for the opposite: fewer conversations, faster exits, and just enough new vocabulary to make it all sound like progress.

It isn’t. It’s just avoidance with better branding.

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If you are still here, you have either watched it or you do not care about spoilers. Let's go.

I was late to watch this movie. Honestly, weeks late.

The trailer was enough to make me realise this was going to be a sad story rooted in Partition. I usually stay away from movies with heavy themes, especially anything tied to war or Partition, simply because I cannot process all of that with my emotional brain. I watch a trailer like that, and some part of me closes a door because I know exactly how it will sit in my chest for days afterward, and I am not always ready to carry that.

But my friend wanted to watch it. And on top of that, Imtiaz Ali was directing it, and Imtiaz Ali has built his entire career on balancing heavy emotion with warmth, humour, and an almost musical lightness. So I went in trusting that combination more than I trusted myself.

I am glad I did. This is not a film that uses Partition as set dressing for a tragedy. It uses one old man’s fading memory as a doorway into a wound that an entire generation was taught to never speak about out loud.

The Setup: An Old Man Who Refuses to Let Go

The film centers on Naseeruddin Shah’s character Keenu, a ninety-five-year-old man living out his final days with advanced dementia and a body that is shutting down. Keenu spends most of his waking hours muttering what sounds like nonsense to his family, fixated on getting back to his ancestral home in Sargodha, a city that is now in Pakistan. His grandson Nirvair, played by Diljit Dosanjh, becomes the one trying to piece together what his grandfather is actually saying.

That single setup does so much work. A man who has spent decades as a distant, difficult, often cold father figure suddenly becomes someone whose mind is unraveling backward into a part of his life nobody in his family ever knew existed. The disease that is taking his coherence away is the same disease that is finally permitting him to remember.

It is such a quietly devastating idea. The thing that destroys his present gives him back his past.

Theme One: Memory as Both Prison and Escape

A lot of Partition films treat memory as something tragic that simply needs to be honoured. This one treats memory as something the protagonist actively chose to bury, because remembering was too dangerous to survival.

Young Keenu, in 1947, does not take the coming Partition seriously. He brushes off the warning signs with the kind of naive logic that feels painfully familiar even today, the idea that people who have lived together for generations could never actually be split apart by lines drawn on paper. He uses his romance with a girl named Afsana almost like a shield, a way of refusing to look at the unrest building around him. He partitions his love away from the truth of what is coming, long before the actual border does it for him.

That is the tragic irony at the center of the film. He thinks his love story exists outside of politics. It does not. Nothing did, for anyone, in 1947.

By the time the violence catches up to him, the cost is so enormous that the only way the young Keenu can survive it is by sealing that entire chapter of his life away. Not just the heartbreak, but his entire capacity to love openly again. That is why the older Keenu became the kind of father who never showed warmth to his own children. He did not redact a memory. He redacted a part of himself.

Theme Two: Survival Guilt and the Cost of Staying Alive

There is a version of this story that could have turned Keenu into a revolutionary, a man so radicalised by the brutality around him that grief turns into vengeance. Imtiaz Ali deliberately does not go there. Keenu is not given that kind of dramatic, almost cinematic escape from pain. He does not get closure. He does not get revenge. He gets decades of an ordinary life that he has to live while carrying something unspeakable underneath it.

That distinction matters so much to me. Most of us, in our own much smaller heartbreaks, do not get neat closure either. We get the rest of our lives, and we figure out how to carry the weight while doing the laundry, going to work, and raising children who have no idea why we flinch at certain things.

Theme Three: Generational Silence

One of the powerful threads in the film is how little the children and grandchildren actually know about what their elders lived through. Nirvair is essentially decoding his grandfather’s life in real time, piecing together fragments because nobody ever sat the family down and explained it properly.

This felt achingly true to how a lot of Partition history actually exists in Indian and Pakistani households even today. So many families carry this kind of silence, because it was too painful to be spoken about casually at the dinner table. The trauma gets inherited as mood, as distance, as unexplained rules and unexplained anger, even before it ever gets inherited as an actual story.

The film argues that this silence has a cost. Keenu’s inability to talk about his past did not protect his family from his pain. It just meant they grew up confused by a father they could not understand, instead of growing up informed by a father whose pain made sense to them.

Theme Four: Closure is sometimes a gift you give yourself

The way the film resolves Keenu's arc is genuinely one of the most tender things I have seen in a while. Without spoiling the exact mechanics of it, the film essentially argues that some people cannot die in peace until they get closure on the one thing they left unfinished. And sometimes that closure does not come from fixing the past; it comes from finally being allowed to stop carrying it. The ending leans into something almost spiritual rather than literal, and the message underneath it is that healing does not always require the other person to physically show up. Sometimes you have to construct the closure yourself, in your head, in your heart, wherever you can find it, because life will not always cooperate and hand it to you on a plate. And finally, there is this almost whispered moment near the climax where old Keenu, in his hallucinated vision, essentially asks for permission to finally leave this world. It sounds like such a small ask when you write it down like that, but in the context of everything he has been holding onto for seventy-eight years, it is one of the heaviest lines in the entire film.

A few lines that are going to live in my head for a while

I will be honest, I am not going to type out exact dialogue here because that is not really something I can lift word for word, but a few moments and the spirit behind certain lines genuinely stuck with me.

There is an early moment where young Keenu, still naive and in love, brushes off the looming threat of Partition with this almost arrogant innocence, basically scoffing at the idea that people of different faiths could ever actually be split apart by politics. It is such a gut punch in hindsight, because you the audience, already know exactly how wrong he is going to be proven, and watching his face later in the film carry that same disbelief decades later is brutal.

Then there is the titular promise itself, “Main vaapas aaunga...” that means I will return. Such a simple sentence, and the entire emotional architecture of the film is built on top of it. By the time you understand the full weight of what that promise cost both of them, just hearing the phrase again near the end absolutely flattens you.

Then Imtiaz Ali shifts gears and explores what love and commitment mean in today’s world through the characters of Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) and Kaveri (Banita Sandhu). There’s a beautiful conversation where Kaveri asks, “Kahan milta hai aisa pyaar?” (”Where does one find a love like that?”) and Nirvair replies, “Yeh milta nahi hai aisa pyaar... yeh hota hai hamare andar.” (”You don’t find a love like that. It already exists within us.”) That, for me, is the soul of the film. Imtiaz Ali suggests that love isn’t something we stumble upon while searching the world. It already exists within us, and the right person simply gives it a direction. The conversation doesn’t stop there. Kaveri then wonders, “Koi mere liye kabhi aisa feel karega?” (”Will someone ever feel this deeply for me?”), to which Nirvair responds, “Kya main kabhi kisi ke liye feel kar sakta hoon?” (”Will I ever be able to feel this deeply for someone?”). I loved this exchange because it perfectly captures the emotional dilemma of our generation. We’re no longer just anxious about whether someone will love us wholeheartedly. We’re equally uncertain whether we’re capable of loving another person with that same depth, patience, and conviction. It feels like Imtiaz Ali is holding up a mirror to modern relationships, where our biggest fear isn’t rejection but emotional incapacity itself.

Image Credits - All images are taken from the IMDB page of the movie

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I have thought about this for a while now, and I want to lay out why that question, however casually it is asked, deserves to be questioned right back.

Marriage was never meant to be a monopoly on connection.

Start with the logic of the thing. A spouse can be your best friend, your favorite person, your safest harbor, and still not be the only person who can understand you. We don’t expect one friend to be your therapist, your travel companion, your cooking buddy, and your sounding board for work stress, all at once. We accept, without argument, that people hold different kinds of value in different relationships. Yet the moment that “different kind of value” comes from someone of the opposite gender, we suddenly demand that a spouse provide all of it, exclusively, forever.

That is a form of isolation, dressed up as devotion.

I know what comes next, because I have heard it myself: if your spouse isn’t “enough,” then why marry them at all? That deserves a real answer because there is a kernel of truth in it. Marriage is, in part, a decision to make one person your primary partner, the one you build a life, a home, and a future with. That commitment is real, and pretending it isn’t would be dishonest.

But primary doesn’t mean exhaustive. Choosing one person as your life partner is not the same as expecting that person to single-handedly meet every social, intellectual, and emotional need you will ever have, for the rest of your life. Most marriages already function this way in practice. People keep their own friend circles, mentors, hobby groups, even long-time travel buddies, and nobody questions whether the marriage is lacking. The doubt tends to surface only when the friend happens to be of the opposite gender, and that pattern is worth noticing. It suggests the real discomfort is about who the friendship is with.

So maybe the sharper question isn’t “why marry someone who isn’t everything to you.” It’s “why do we only start measuring a marriage’s completeness the moment gender enters the picture, and stay silent about it otherwise.”

And to be clear, none of this is a way of saying “go find your needs elsewhere” or making a case for extramarital affairs. A friend isn’t a stand-in for a spouse, and wanting one isn’t code for wanting something more. The instinct to read every outside friendship as evidence of a gap in the marriage is exactly the lens I’m arguing against. Companionship and infidelity are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is how we ended up here in the first place.

And practically speaking, a partner cannot be everything. They didn’t grow up where you did. They don’t always share your specific hobby, your old college humor, your particular professional world. A friend who happens to be a man or a woman fills a gap that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with being a whole, social human being. Asking someone to give that up “because you’re married now” doesn’t protect the marriage. It just shrinks the person inside it.

The age-gap rule nobody can explain.

Here is where it gets even stranger. Somewhere along the way, a second rule appeared: fine, maybe friendship is acceptable, but only within an approved age bracket. Reach outside it, especially toward someone younger, close to your child’s age, and the assumption shifts instantly from “friend” to “predator” or “midlife crisis,” depending on gender.

Nobody can point to where this rule was written. It wasn’t legislated, it wasn’t researched, it was absorbed, the way most social norms are, from gossip, from soap operas, from a thousand small comments that calcified into “common sense.” And once you ask who actually gets to decide this cutoff, the answer falls apart fast. Is it five years’ difference? Ten? Does it change if the friendship started at work versus online? Nobody can say, because there isn’t a real standard. There is only discomfort, retrofitted into a rule so it sounds principled instead of personal.

The “hi” that becomes a referendum on character.

This is the part that troubles me most. I have watched posts, comments, and threads where a complete stranger sends a one-line “Hi” to someone, and within hours it is being dissected publicly: his intentions, her marital status, what kind of person sends that, what kind of person replies. A two-word message becomes a character trial.

A greeting carries no verifiable intent. It can be boredom, politeness, genuine interest, a wrong number, or yes, sometimes (or let’s say most of the time) a bad-faith opener. The problem is that we have started treating the worst-case interpretation as the default one, and broadcasting that interpretation as if it were fact. Online, this is made worse by context collapse: a screenshot strips away tone, history, and relationship, and an audience that knows none of the people involved gets to vote on their morality anyway.

The part I won’t wave away.

I want to be fair here, because the impulse behind all this judgement isn’t manufactured from nothing. Creeps exist. Boundary-crossing exists. Plenty of people, often but not only men, have used “just being friendly” as cover for something manipulative, and plenty of people have been burned badly enough that their guard makes sense. Harassment is real, infidelity is real, and the caution that grew out of real harm deserves respect, not mockery.

But a real pattern of bad behavior by some does not license a blanket suspicion of everyone who resembles them on paper. A pattern tells you to stay alert. It does not tell you that a stranger’s hello, or a married friend’s coffee with a colleague, has already revealed a hidden character flaw. We can hold both truths at once: caution is wise, and reflexive condemnation of every opposite-gender interaction is not the same thing as caution. One protects people. The other just punishes ordinary social life for the sins of a few.

So who is actually setting these norms?

Mostly, it isn’t any one authority. It’s culture absorbing old anxieties about fidelity and ownership, then dressing them up as concern. It’s social media rewarding outrage over context. It’s our own discomfort, sometimes, projected outward as a rule for someone else to follow. Very little of it is about actual evidence of harm in the specific case being judged.

Where I land.

A marriage is strengthened by trust between the two people in it, not by surveillance from everyone around it. If a husband and wife are secure and honest with each other, a friendship outside that marriage isn’t a threat, it’s just one more thread in a full life. The people best positioned to judge whether a friendship is appropriate are the two people in the marriage, not an audience that has never met either of them.

None of this means throw caution away. Stay aware, trust your instincts about specific people, and talk openly with your partner about who matters to you and why. But let’s stop outsourcing that judgement to strangers with opinions about a “hi,” and stop pretending a number on a calendar tells us anything reliable about anyone’s character.

Friendship doesn’t end at the altar. It shouldn’t have to.

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"Why is the moon following us?"

"It's making sure we reach home."

"Why do birds fly in a V?"

"So the one in front doesn't get lonely."

Years later, I realized he was making up half the answers.

One evening, I asked him, "Why didn't you ever buy a house you always wanted?"

He shrugged… "I already had something better."

"What?"

"You."

I laughed.

"That's such a dad answer."

He laughed too… Years passed… I got busy… Calls became shorter… Visits became fewer.

One day, while cleaning an old cupboard, I found a tiny plastic watch. It had a broken strap and faded cartoon stickers. I remembered crying for it in a market because every other kid had one.

I remembered wearing it for barely a week. But on the back, in his handwriting, were three words: “My son's first watch."

He remembered the things I forgot. 🥺😭 He celebrated moments I didn't know were important.

Now as a father i’m also realising that's what fathers do. They quietly collect pieces of your life while you rush through it… And one day, when you're old enough to understand love, you realize it was never loud.

The man who always said, "Message me when you reach."… The man who pretended he wasn't tired so you could dream a little bigger.

You wake up, make tea, smile at the people you love, and somewhere underneath it all, there’s this silent storm that keeps looping. That’s where I’ve been for a while.

The corporate world isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. AI is here, budgets are being “restructured,” and what that often really means is that people like us… people who’ve built our careers carefully, year after year… are being made to feel like we might suddenly be too expensive. It’s a bitter kind of irony. Your salary creeps up in small steps, while school fees for kids, groceries, rent, interest on EMIs, and the everyday cost of keeping a family steady rise so fast it feels like the finish line is moving on purpose.

So your mind starts roaming. What if I tried something of my own?? What if there’s another way?? For a moment, the idea of building something that’s yours feels like taking a full breath again. Then reality steps in. The money you’d need to start. The uncertainty of keeping it afloat. The truth that you don’t fully know how to run a business, especially not right now… and not in an economy that seems to punish risk. That little idea that felt exciting on Tuesday is gone by Thursday, because the numbers don’t add up, and the bravery didn’t stay.

And still, you show up. You sit at the dinner table. You ask how their day went. You laugh at the right moments. Because the people around you are everything, and you won’t trade their sense of safety for what’s spiraling inside you… not even for one evening.

Maybe they sense something… they catch the silent storm in your eyes before you pull yourself back. But there is a scale to this, an internal weight that even the people closest to you cannot fully measure. It is not that they do not care. It is that this particular kind of anxiety lives in a very specific place, one shaped by where you come from, what you do not have behind you, the absence of a safety net that some people never even think about because they have never needed to.

I am not alone in this, and I know that. Across office parks and kitchen tables and long commutes, people are carrying the same sense of fear. But knowing that does not always make it lighter. Because at the end of the day, your version of this weight is yours alone, built from your specific life, your specific gaps, your specific love for people you cannot afford to let down.

I am writing this not because I have answers. I am writing this because holding it silently was starting to feel like its own kind of cost.

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Netflix’s latest K-drama Teach You a Lesson is set in South Korea. But if you are from India and you work in a school, or studied in one, or have a child in one, you will recognise every single scene. The show is built on a crisis that is not Korean. It is ours too.

The show follows the Educational Rights Protection Bureau, a fictional South Korean government unit staffed by ex-commandos sent into schools where bullying, parental entitlement, and the collapse of teacher authority have spiralled beyond institutional control. A former special forces officer walks into classrooms that have become battlegrounds and walks out having delivered a very different kind of lesson. The show is gripping, propulsive, and often deeply cathartic. But underneath every choreographed confrontation is a question that hits uncomfortably close to home: when a society stops protecting its teachers and its vulnerable students, who will?

A note before we go further. This piece discusses specific storylines and plot points from Teach You a Lesson in detail. If you are planning to watch the show and want to go in fresh, please bookmark this and come back after you have finished. For everyone who wants to read about the themes and issues the show raises, or for those who just want to know what the conversation is about, welcome, and please do read on.

“These Days, Teachers Have No Respect Left in the Classroom”

That line, from the show’s own synopsis, could have been pulled from any staffroom conversation in India today.

We need to talk about something that has been happening with very little public conversation. The relationship between teachers, students, and parents in Indian schools has been fracturing for years. And we have been too polite, too deferential, and too distracted to say it out loud.

In Teach You a Lesson, the show opens with a student who is being systematically bullied by the son of a powerful political figure. The entire school administration looks away because his father has power. The principal shuffles paperwork. The teachers are afraid. And a good kid watching his best friend being destroyed daily is told, in every way that matters, that the system will not help him.

Tell me that does not sound familiar.

Think about the Class 12 topper in a Delhi school whose teacher gave extra time to a weaker student before the boards. The parent of the topper found out, made a video, uploaded it, and the teacher faced a departmental inquiry within 48 hours. Or the government school teacher in Rajasthan who failed a student for copying in an exam. The student’s family arrived the next morning with a group of men and was beaten in the staffroom.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the texture of what teaching has become.

The Influencer Arc: This Happened in Kerala

The most talked-about storyline in the show involves a student with 600,000 social media followers. She posts a deliberately edited video that makes her homeroom teacher appear to be harassing a student. The clip spreads. The teacher is doxxed. His family is targeted online. He dies by suicide before anyone bothers to verify whether the video was real.

The next teacher assigned to her class describes her experience this way: “My heart races every time she lifts her phone.”

In 2023, a teacher in Kerala was captured in a clipped, decontextualized video of a classroom interaction that went viral on Instagram and YouTube within hours. She was framed as abusive. She was suspended before the full video, which showed a completely different picture, was reviewed. She was reinstated eventually. Her name had already been destroyed.

This is not a Korean story. This is the story of what happens when a phone camera, a motivated student, and a willing social media mob can end a career faster than any review board.

The show’s dialogue for this arc is quietly devastating. When teacher finally finds the courage to confront the student, she says: “I’m sorry, everyone. I shouldn’t have let things get this far, but I’m going to fix it. From now on, I will make you answer me, look at the board and listen to my lessons. If you do something wrong, I will discipline you every single time.”

And then she adds the line that every teacher in India deserves to say without fear of a WhatsApp group being mobilised against them: “A teacher has a responsibility to guide their students in the right direction.”

That line is not radical. It is the most basic description of what a teacher is supposed to do. The fact that saying it now feels like an act of courage is the problem.

What About the Bullied Child?

The show does not just diagnose systems. It shows you what the collapse costs a child.

Gyeong-min watches his closest friend leap from the school rooftop because the bullying had become unbearable and no one came. He spends the rest of the series carrying the weight of having survived something his friend did not.

In India, we do not talk about this enough. The National Crime Records Bureau data on student suicides is grim and underreported. Bullying is rarely listed as a contributing cause, because schools have little incentive to record it that way. But counselors and mental health workers in urban schools will tell you quietly: sustained, systematic bullying, the kind the show depicts, leaves marks that last years. The child who was isolated from their friend group in Class 7. The one who ate lunch alone for two years because a more popular student decided they were the target. The one who changed schools twice and still carried the same anxiety into the new classroom.

The show dramatises this with emotional honesty. The Bureau’s mission, as stated by Minister Choi Gang-seok, is not simply punishment. It is to ensure that no child ever has to feel what Gyeong-min felt: completely abandoned by every adult who was supposed to protect him.

Teacher attrition in government schools is often discussed in terms of salary and infrastructure. Those are real problems. But there is another kind of attrition that does not show up in transfer statistics: the teacher who is still showing up but has stopped believing it matters. The one who used to prepare lesson plans with care and now reads from the textbook because every time she tried something different, a parent complained. The one who used to call struggling students aside after class and now does not, because the last time she did, the parent said she was humiliating their child.

This is the slow erosion of education that no policy paper captures. Teach You a Lesson understands it intuitively. The show’s Inspector Na Hwa-jin has a line that summarises his entire philosophy, and it is one that every parent of a bullied child in India wishes they could staple to the principal’s door: “People are people. Politics is politics. Teachers are teachers. A teacher who is afraid of their student cannot be an effective teacher.”

What Could Actually Change Things?

The show’s solution, to send ex-commandos to punch school bullies, is a fantasy and a deliberately provocative one. The series itself acknowledges that violence is not justice. It is catharsis dressed as justice, and the distinction matters.

So what would actually work in India?

Legal protection for teachers. South Korea passed stronger teacher protection legislation following a string of high-profile educator suicides. India’s NEP 2020 speaks warmly about teacher empowerment but offers no meaningful protection from social media harassment, false complaints, or the mob dynamics that can destroy a teacher’s career overnight. A clear legal framework, one where filing a false complaint against a teacher has actual consequences, would be a starting point.

Accountability for parents, not just students. We have spent decades building student rights frameworks and almost no time building parent accountability frameworks. If a parent mobilises a mob against a teacher, or files a demonstrably false complaint, there must be a consequence. The absence of consequence is an invitation.

Real counsellors in every school. Not a guidance teacher who also teaches maths. A trained mental health professional whose only job is to notice the Gyeong-min in the classroom before he breaks. India’s student-to-counsellor ratio in most government schools is effectively infinite. This is not a minor gap. It is the gap through which children fall.

Restorative justice over punishment culture. Countries like New Zealand and Canada have shown that structured dialogue between bullies, victims, and communities reduces repeat offending more effectively than suspension. Punishment tells a child what they cannot do. Restorative justice asks them to understand what they did and to whom. The second approach is harder and slower and far more likely to produce a permanent change.

Treating the phone as a policy problem, not a parenting problem. The weaponisation of social media inside schools, a student filming a teacher, editing the clip, uploading it, and watching the mob do the rest, requires explicit, enforceable school policy. Several countries have moved toward phone-free classrooms. India’s schools, caught between parental demands for connectivity and the chaos that connectivity enables, have largely avoided the decision. That avoidance is a choice with consequences.

The Lesson We Keep Refusing to Learn

Teach You a Lesson is not a perfect drama. In its later episodes, it becomes more interested in delivering satisfaction than in delivering insight. But in its honest moments, it is a deeply sad show about the cost of institutional failure: on children who needed protection and did not get it, on teachers who needed support and were abandoned, and on the quiet majority of parents who are doing their best inside a system that rewards the loudest, most aggressive voice in the room.

When we watch Na Hwa-jin walk into a school and restore order with his fists, we are not really rooting for violence. We are rooting for someone to finally show up. We are rooting for the moment when a child being tormented in a classroom looks up and sees an adult who is not afraid, who is not checking which parent has political connections, who is not calculating the risk to their own career. We are rooting for the adult in the room to be an adult.

That hunger, the hunger for someone to just show up and say enough, is not a Korean feeling. It lives in every staffroom in Mumbai and Chennai and Patna and Shillong where a teacher is staring at her phone before school, wondering if today is the day the video goes up. It lives in every home where a parent is trying to figure out why their child stopped wanting to go to school. It lives in every classroom where a child is sitting in silence, hoping that this year the teacher will notice.

The show just drew it in vivid colour, gave it subtitles, and put it on a global screen.

The question now is not whether we recognise it. Clearly we do. The question is whether we are willing to do something harder than watch: to build a school system where no child has to wait for a fictional commando to rescue them, because the adults who were always supposed to be there finally are.

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AK laughed. “Benches? Lonely? They don’t even have feelings.”

“But maybe they do,” Mira said, patting the wooden seat beside her. “Every day they wait for someone to sit. Sometimes people come, sometimes they don’t. Isn’t that a little like us?”

AK tilted his head. “Hmm… So, you’re saying benches are patient friends?”

“Exactly!” Mira grinned. “They don’t complain if you leave… They don’t mind if you’re silent...”

AK leaned back, looking at the sky. “That’s kind of sweet. Maybe we should be more like benches… steady, welcoming, and not in a rush.”

Mira nodded. “Yes. I guess benches aren’t lonely at all. They’re just happy to be there, waiting for the next story to sit down.”

The two of them sat in silence for a while, listening to the birds. The bench didn’t say a word, but somehow, it felt like it was smiling.

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I was born here. And like most people who grow up in small towns, I left. For education, for work, for a life that slowly stretched further and further from where it began. But no matter how many years passed or how many cities I lived in, there was always something pulling me back. Not just to family. To Her.

Her, being Azhikulangara Bhagavathy, The goddess at the center of our town, our lives, and honestly, our identity.

For readers unfamiliar with Hindu traditions in Kerala, let me give you some context. Bhagavathy is a form of the Divine Mother, a goddess of immense power and fierce grace. She is considered the protector of the land and its people. She is the one you go to when you have exhausted every other option, and also the one you go to first, before anything important begins.

Azhikulangara Bhagavathy is our version of her. Our protector. The one this town was built around.

The Sree Azhikulangara Bhagavathy Temple sits in Mudappallur in the Vandazhi village of Palakkad district. It is believed that the presiding deity was originally brought here from the Kallekkulangara Bhagavathi Temple, during the reign of the Palakkattussery Raja, a local king who ruled this region centuries ago. She chose to be here. And she has been here ever since.

Now here is where things get extraordinary.

Every year, starting at the end of the Malayalam month of Meena (around late March or early April), something called Kalamezhuthu begins at the temple. This is a ritualistic art form that is almost impossible to describe without seeing it. Skilled artists, specifically from a community called the Kallattu Kuruppanmar, draw intricate, large-scale portraits of the goddess on the floor using only colored powders made from natural materials, rice, turmeric, charcoal, and dried petals. Every line is drawn by hand. Every detail is deliberate. It takes extraordinary skill and extraordinary devotion.

This continues for 41 days.

At the end of the 41 days, the artwork is ceremonially erased. The whole point was never to preserve it. It was the act of making it that was the offering.

I have watched this as a child without fully understanding it. Coming back as an adult, it hit me differently. There is something profoundly human about creating something beautiful knowing it will be destroyed. It teaches you something about impermanence that no book really can.

Mudappallur Vela: The Day the Town Becomes a Festival

If Kalamezhuthu is the soul of the celebration, the Vela is its heartbeat.

Vela, in Malayalam, simply means “festival.” The Mudappallur Vela falls on the eighth day of Edavam, a Malayalam month that typically lands in late May (mostly on May 22). The festivities continue on the ninth day with Ezhunellippu, a ceremonial procession of the deity, and on the tenth day with Thalpolli, a ritual where women carry offerings in a festive procession.

On Vela day itself, the town transforms completely. People who left Mudappallur years ago, some decades ago, come back for this. The festival is famous for Kanniyar Kali, a traditional ritualistic dance performed by men in elaborate costumes and face paint, enacting stories of the goddess. It is raw, powerful, and unlike anything you would see in a concert hall or a theatre. Then there are the elephants, adorned in gold caparisons, moving in slow procession while Thayambaka fills the air. Thayambaka is a percussion ensemble built around the chenda, a cylindrical drum, and when a master performs it, it does not just fill your ears, it fills your chest.

Standing in that thick crowd always triggers this rush of memory for me. I remember being a little kid, tightly holding my father’s hand, straining my neck just to catch a glimpse of those lit-up elephants. The noise back then was so massive that you stopped trying to process it and just let it wash over you. Years later, standing in that exact same crowd as an adult, the magic hadn't faded one bit. I felt the exact same thrill, the same goosebumps. Honestly, it feels less like a rigid religious ritual and more like a divine, high-energy concert, and I am not even exaggerating.

If you ever find yourself in the Palakkad district of Kerala, especially in May, I want you to consider stepping away from the popular itineraries for one day. You can be anyone and from anywhere near here to feel what that place holds.

You just need to show up. Some goddesses wait for you to come home. Ours is one of them.

This video was recorded by my cousin. Just change the orientation of this video and feel the vibes :)

Disclaimer: The historical details in this post are drawn from a combination of my personal knowledge growing up in Mudappallur and online sources I referenced while writing. Information around the temple’s origins and history may be incomplete or imprecise, as formal documentation is limited. Please read this as a personal narrative rather than a historical record.

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Be strong. Provide. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Don’t need.

No one handed him a manual. They handed him a role. And the cruelest part? He accepted it, because what else do you do when the entire universe assumes you were built for carrying weight and not for being held?

We talk about men a lot these days. In posts, in comment sections, in arguments that run until 2am on Twitter threads. We’ve made “men” a category, a punchline, a social experiment. Men are trash, we say. And maybe… Maybe a lot of them are… The world has enough evidence…

But I keep thinking about the other one. The one who doesn’t make it into the thread. The one who is sitting somewhere right now, in some crowded room, in some middle-class Indian household, or some college hostel, who cannot look a woman in the eye without rehearsing the interaction three times in his headfirst.

That man exists… He is real… And we never write about him…

Think about what we ask of Indian men specifically. We ask them to be providers before they are people. We ask them to have career clarity at 21, to have answers at 24, to have a house by 30. We watch them crack open under the weight of that and then we call it ego. We call it pride. We rarely call it what it actually is, which is someone who was never taught that he was allowed to not know.

He watched his father do it... Swallow the exhaustion... Come home silent… Go to work silent. Die a little bit every year inside the silence. And the son, watching, thought, this is what being a man looks like. No one corrected him. No one sat him down and said, you don’t have to do this.

So, he kept going. He kept going when he wanted to quit his engineering degree because he genuinely hated it. He kept going when the girl he liked moved on and he had no one to tell because men don’t talk about that kind of thing, do they? He kept going when his dream, whatever soft quiet thing it was, a poem, a painting, a song he wanted to write, got filed away somewhere under “not practical.”

And then he is in public, and someone is talking, and he has something to say, that comes from a place he has never been able to name. But he stays quiet because he has learned that no one is particularly interested. That his feelings are either invisible or threatening. That there is no middle ground where a man can simply be soft and be taken seriously.

He goes home. Opens his phone. Sees another post about how men need to do better. And he thinks, yes, maybe. And then he thinks, but where do I even start? Who is talking to me? Who is reaching for me?

No one….

I know what some of you are already typing. This is patriarchy. Men built this system. They can dismantle it.

And I want to sit with that for a moment, because it deserves more than a dismissal.

Yes. Patriarchy is real. It has crushed women in ways that are documented, generational, and still bleeding. That is not up for debate here.

But here is the thing about a system. It does not only crush the people at the bottom. It also eats the people it supposedly crowns. The man who was told he is the provider, the protector, the one who must never break, was not handed a throne. He was handed a cage with better lighting. He did not design it. He was born into it, the same way everyone else was, and he has been performing his assigned role with the same quiet desperation.

Patriarchy told women they were too emotional to lead. It told men they were too male to feel. Both are lies. Both cause damage. And the man who was never allowed to cry at his own father’s funeral, who laughed it off because that is what strong men do, he is not the winner of that system. He is just a different kind of its victim.

You cannot liberate half of humanity and call the other half the enemy. That is not liberation. That is just a different arrangement of the same cruelty. The conversation has to be big enough for his suffering too, not instead of hers, not above it, but alongside it, because pain does not run on a hierarchy and neither does healing.

I know the frustrated men… I’ve met the angry ones… I’ve seen men who don’t respect women, who don’t respect other men, who carry resentment like a second skeleton under their skin. That is real. That causes real damage to real people.

But I also know the other kind. The man who cries in the bathroom because it is the only room with a lock. The man who gives and gives and gives and never once thinks he is allowed to ask. The man who genuinely, deeply, wants to be better, wants to be kind, wants to be present, but has never been shown what that looks like in a body that looks like his.

That man is not a myth. He is your brother. Your friend who never calls first but always picks up. Your colleague who laughs too loudly at meetings because that is the only way he knows how to connect. He is standing right there, and we keep looking through him.

The love he needed was not romantic. Not always. It was simpler than that. It was someone asking, once, without agenda: how are you actually doing? And meaning it. And waiting for the answer.

It was a world that did not assume the worst of him when he walked into a room. It was the permission, just once, to say I don’t know without someone treating it as failure. It was being seen as a person before being seen as a function.

He never got that. Most of them never did. And they are not saints for it. They are just people, trying to make sense of an instruction manual written entirely in obligation.

This is not a defense of men who harm. This is not a counter-argument to every woman who has been failed, dismissed, or hurt. Both truths live together without canceling each other out.

This is just a small light held up for the man who has been doing everything right by the world’s standards and still feels like he is disappearing. Who has been caring quietly for everyone and has not once been cared for back. Who has swallowed so many of his own dreams that he has forgotten what his own hunger feels like.

This one is for him.

If this reached someone who needed it, share it with that quiet man in your life who never asks for anything. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is simply say: I see you…

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The next day, he reaches on time.

And for the first time, he notices the chai isn’t really that great. Too sweet… slightly overboiled. He had never paid attention before. He stands there anyway…

A minute passes. Then two. Someone else comes… orders… leaves. The chai guy glances at him like he’s waiting for a decision. He nods, gets one, and stays…

Five minutes now… He almost leaves…

Then she shows up, a little out of breath, phone still in her hand like she walked out mid-scroll. She slows down when she sees him, like she wasn’t expecting him to still be there.

“Late meeting?” he asks. Casual. Like this is a normal conversation they’ve always had.

“Yeah,” she says, still catching her breath. “You?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

There’s a small pause, like they’ve stepped into a version of this moment they hadn’t rehearsed. She orders her chai. This time, they stand next to each other instead of that comfortable half-distance they used to keep. Not close enough to notice, but close enough to feel.

“I thought you left,” she says, eyes still on the stall.

“I almost did,” he replies.

Another pause. Softer this time.

“Why didn’t you?” she asks, like she didn’t mean to say it out loud.

He takes a moment, just enough to be honest without making it heavy.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Felt like something was… incomplete.”

She smiles at that but doesn’t look at him. The chai guy calls out her cup. She takes it, blows on it once, and then, almost as an afterthought, asks, “Same time tomorrow?”

He nods, a little too quickly. “Yeah.”

They don’t say anything after that. They just stand there, sipping chai, not rushing back this time.

And for the first time, it isn’t about the break, or the timing, or even the chai.

It’s just… them.

Same place.

Same time.

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What strikes you from the very first frame is the film’s commitment to treating ordinary life as worthy of a lens. A Muslim funeral in a tight-knit neighbourhood. Two households welcoming newborns on the same day. A child named Hashir stepping into responsibility before he even knows what the word means, caring for a baby brother while learning to navigate a world that doesn’t pause for grief. Before a single joke lands, before the chaos of adolescence takes over, the film quietly tells you what it is really about: the weight we carry, and who we carry it with.

The philosophical backbone of Vaazha 2 is not stated loudly. It is embedded in the texture of small moments. When Hashir’s father passes away and the boy is too young to fully comprehend the scale of that loss, the film doesn’t manufacture a breakdown. It lets the confusion breathe. It understands something most films forget: grief, especially in the young, doesn’t always look like grief. Sometimes it looks like getting back on a bike, cracking a joke, or going to school the next Monday. The film honours that. It lets boys be boys, allows them the space to make their mistakes, and simply tells them that we’re all in this together. That is a deceptively simple idea. But it is also one of the most philosophically radical things a film aimed at young people can do, because it resists the urge to fix the characters and instead chooses to accompany them.

This is where the film’s central argument takes shape. Vaazha 2 is not, at its core, a story about redemption. It is a story about accompaniment. The difference matters. Redemption suggests a destination, a point at which you become clean, corrected, resolved. Accompaniment says something harder and truer: I am with you regardless of where this goes. The “6th Mile” moment is the film crystallizing this idea into something you can hold. Two friends, separated by 12 miles, choose to meet exactly halfway. Not because either had to. But because meeting halfway is what the bond demands. Distance becomes irrelevant when the relationship is real. It is a quietly profound statement about how love actually functions, not as a grand gesture at the finish line, but as a consistent, inconvenient, unglamorous choice made at the midpoint.

The film then extends this logic to the loneliness of migration, and here it earns the deepest part of its emotional weight. It paints a realistic picture of Malayali youth and their unrealistic expectations of moving abroad. In one scene, images of a tuition centre in Kerala are intercut with images of a strikingly similar college in London, and when two of the boys struggle to find a single paracetamol tablet in the UK, the Malayali dream of migrating gets a much-needed reality check. There is a heartbreak in that image that goes beyond comedy. You leave your people to build a better life, only to find that the architecture of loneliness looks exactly the same in a foreign country. Through the lens of these mischievous boys, the film captures how most of life is not a happy story but one filled with struggles, where friendship becomes the glue that holds everything together.

What director Savin S.A. and writer Vipin Das understand, which so many films get wrong, is that the most dangerous kind of loneliness is not the absence of people. It is being surrounded by people who don’t know your actual story. The boys in Vaazha 2 know each other’s actual stories. The stupid decisions, the near-misses, the private shames. Rather than justifying toxicity, the movie embraces self-realization and looks at its characters with genuine empathy. That generosity extends to the older characters too, the parents and teachers who failed in their own ways. Even in places where it could easily have sounded like a lecture, the film allows its older characters to remind us that they too were once just as screwed up.

The film is also doing something quietly subversive with the idea of masculinity. Boys in Indian cinema are usually given two modes: tough and triumphant, or broken and redeemed. Vaazha 2 offers a third option: uncertain, embarrassed, tender, and still showing up. The scene where a character delivers lines we conventionally associate with women in breakup scenes, but this time as an act of male self-awareness, is a small moment with a large implication. Feeling things deeply, saying them out loud, needing people, none of this is coded here as weakness. It is coded as the whole point.

Alphonse Puthren’s police character becomes the film’s quiet moral compass, and his conversations with parents and teachers about understanding children, not just educating them, hit with surprising force. That word, understanding, is doing a lot of work in Vaazha 2. Not evaluating. Not correcting. Understanding. There is a philosophy of childhood embedded in this film that argues, with some conviction, that most of what we call failure in young people is simply the result of never having been truly understood by the adults around them.

And so Vaazha 2 leaves you with something that feels less like a movie lesson and more like a quiet conviction. Home is not a place. It is the accumulation of people who have watched you make your worst choices and decided to stay anyway. It is not about never falling. It is about having someone who knows where you fell and still calls to check if you’ve eaten.

The “vaazha” boys were never useless. They were just waiting for someone to meet them at the 6th Mile.

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I liked the post. I meant it. I was happy for him.

But somewhere between liking it and putting my phone down, something shifted. I looked around my own room. Same room I’d been in for years. Nothing had changed. But suddenly it felt like it was asking me something.

That’s how comparison works. It just needs one good day that belongs to someone else.

I was home for a few days. One evening, after dinner, my parents and I were sitting in that particular silence that families fall into when nothing needs to be said but something clearly does. I don’t know what opened the door, but I walked through it.

“Everyone around me seems to be doing so much better,” I said. “Better jobs. Bigger houses. More sorted. I feel like I’m always one step behind.”

My mother didn’t rush to comfort me. She asked, “Better than what?”

I didn’t have a clean answer.

“Just better. More put together. Like they figured something out that I haven’t.”

My father was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “We had a neighbor when you were young. Very successful man. Big car. Owned property. Everyone in the colony respected him.” A pause. “He told me once that his biggest regret was never learning how to sit still. He had built everything but had no idea what to do with a free afternoon.”

He let that land before continuing.

“The people you’re comparing yourself to are probably comparing themselves to someone else. That chain doesn’t end anywhere. It just keeps moving the finish line.”

My mother added something softer, but it hit harder.

“Comparison only works when you’re looking at the surface of someone else’s life and the inside of your own. You see their result and your process. It will always feel unfair. Because it is.”

Then she said something I wasn’t ready for.

“We’ve watched you since the beginning. We know what you’ve carried. The things that didn’t work out. The years you quietly started over. You never brought those up like they were worth mentioning. But they are. That’s also who you are. And no one else’s milestone can touch that.”

Before we called it a night, my father asked me one question.

“When you imagine being where they are, what exactly do you feel? Relief? Or just less invisible?”

I didn’t answer. But the answer was already there. It wasn’t their life I wanted. I just wanted to feel like mine was enough. And that is a completely different problem. One that no promotion is solving. One that no house or title or number in a bank account has ever actually solved for anyone. Because that kind of hunger doesn’t come from lacking things. It comes from not yet having made peace with the life you’re already inside.

That’s the part nobody puts on LinkedIn.

We spend years building a life and very little time deciding if it belongs to us or to everyone watching.

My parents didn’t fix anything that evening. They never do, not directly. But there’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from being seen by people who knew you before you became whatever you are performing right now. People who watched you fall and get up so many times that they no longer find it remarkable. Because to them, that was always just who you are.

I left that conversation without answers. But I left asking a better question.

Not “why am I behind?” but “behind what, exactly, and says who?”

That question doesn’t have a comfortable answer. But it’s an honest one. And sometimes honesty is the only ground solid enough to stand on.

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In all my years, I can count the birthdays that actually meant something on one hand. Maybe four, five at best. The rest were either quiet formalities or days I let pass without making anything of them, for reasons that don’t matter anymore. After a point you just stop expecting birthdays to feel like anything. You normalize the ordinary and move on.

This year broke that pattern. Quietly, completely.

, Amisha, Shadvali, . I found them on Substack. It started the way these things usually do, comments, notes, a little community warmth around each other’s writing. And then slowly, without anyone announcing it, they became the people I actually call on when life gets heavy or confusing or worth celebrating. You don’t see that shift happening. One day you just realize these are your people.

This birthday, they showed up. Not with just a wish but with actual effort. The kind that costs time and thought and something personal. Got this amazing book, which was not just in wish-list for me, but for my wife too.

Then came an HTML file. Proper web dev work, which happens to be my job. These people built something for my birthday. Who does that. I kept asking myself that. Who sits down and actually builds something. I asked them how much time they invested in making it. “We used AI,” they said, cheekily. And I laughed. But here’s the thing, I didn’t care. Because the idea was theirs. The intention was theirs. And honestly, the way it came together, it felt like even the AI wanted to wish me. Like it was in on it too. That’s the part that got me. Not the code, not the design. The fact that someone thought, let’s do this for him.

And then the PDF arrived. From . I opened it not knowing what to expect and I just... stayed with it for a long time. It wasn’t a grand gesture. It was words. Careful, close, honest words that felt like they came from someone who had actually been paying attention. Not to the version of me I put out there, but to something quieter underneath it. I don’t know how to explain what that does to a person. When someone sees you clearly and then takes the time to write it down, there’s a specific kind of fullness that comes with that. I felt it. And yeah, we talk less than we should (that’s what I felt after reading that post) :)

A few months ago, when we were planning a surprise for one of us, I joked that my birthday is last in the queue and the only thing I want is for all of us to be together. Said it like a throwaway line. They didn’t treat it like one. Almost everyone came through.

Some of these people have never met me in person. Let that sit for a second.

Material things blur with time. But I will remember this birthday. I will remember that people who found me through words on a screen spent their time, their thought, their money, to make one day feel like it counted. That kind of effort doesn’t come from obligation. It comes from something real.

Grateful for what Substack quietly made possible here. It gave me people I didn’t know I needed.