I have always had an unnecessarily complicated relationship with my hair.

Which is a ridiculous sentence to say out loud.

It is hair.

People lose it. Cut it. Colour it. Straighten it. Get bangs they knew in their heart would never work. (All of these people is my best friend btw)

Mine, somehow, became an autobiography.

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When I was a child, my hair was my favourite thing about myself.

Not because somebody told me it was beautiful, although they did. Everybody wanted to touch it. Teachers. Relatives. Random aunties who believed personal boundaries were an urban myth or a mental health issue created by gen z.

It was long, impossibly thick, voluminous, dramatic in the way only children’s hair can be. I fought with my mother every single time she tried tying it up.

I wanted it open.

Always.

I wanted it flying behind me while I ran. I wanted it in every dance performance.

People used to tell me, “Your hair will fall on your face. You won’t be able to dance.”

It never did.

It danced with me.

Looking back, I think my hair made me feel magical long before I understood what confidence even was or what faking it till you make it was.

Then, like most childhood love stories, it changed.

The first heartbreak came when my hair got caught in the ladder of a train berth. A whole patch came out from my scalp. I cried all the way home, for two days straight.

Years later came lice. My mother with my house help, tried every home remedy known to Indian households before finally taking me to get it cut.

I still remember telling my maternal grandfather, “I’m never speaking to your daughter again.”

I cried for days. Not because it looked bad. Because I genuinely believed something irreplaceable had been taken away from me.

Children have a remarkable ability to grieve things adults dismiss.

Then life happened.

PCOS happened.

And somewhere in all of that, my hair and I began changing together.

This thought only came to me a few days ago.

The year I lost my spark, my hair did too.

We have lived strangely parallel lives. Every season I became a little quieter, a little more tired, my hair seemed to follow.

I don’t know whether that’s medically true.

I only know it feels emotionally true.

Sometimes that’s enough.

The strange part is that I never stopped loving my hair.

I just changed the reason.

When I was younger, I kept it open because I thought it made me beautiful.

Today, I keep it open because it hides the parts of me I don’t know how to love yet.

It hides the fullness of my face. The scars. The places my own eyes reach before anybody else’s ever could.

That’s a very different relationship.

One is celebration. The other one is survival.
There is now a dependency, which has made me loose the kindness I initially had towards my hair.

Recently my best friend casually told me, “Your hair doesn’t look that nice today.”

She had absolutely no idea what she had done.

Not because she was cruel, she loves me.
Because she never met the little girl who thought her hair was magic. She only knows the woman who spends fifteen minutes trying to arrange it before leaving the house.

I realised, in that moment, how many people know our coping mechanisms without ever meeting the child that created them.

There has been one beautiful surprise in all this.

Apparently, my hair was never straight.

It is naturally wavy.

Nobody told me. Mostly because nobody knew.

Like so many Indian girls, I spent years brushing waves into frizz and then blaming the frizz for existing.

The internet, of all places, introduced me to my own hair.

Sometimes I think that’s funny. Sometimes I think it’s tragic.

How many parts of ourselves spend years waiting to be identified correctly?

A few months ago I asked a woman something I had been quietly wondering for years.

Why do so many women I admire cut their hair short?

Powerful women. Independent women. Women who seem completely comfortable occupying space.

I expected practical answers. “It’s too hot.” “It’s easier.” “It saves time.”

Instead she looked at me and said, “It felt like my hair was holding me back. Cutting it made me feel more like myself.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that sentence.

Because my experience has been the opposite.

My hair has never held me back.

It has held me together.

Or at least that’s what I’ve convinced myself.

Maybe that’s why the idea of cutting it terrifies me.

Not because I think I’d look bad.

Because I don’t know who I’d be without the curtain I’ve been standing behind for years.

Maybe one day I’ll cut it. Maybe one day it’ll actually be freedom.

But today, I still tell the hairstylist, “Just the ends, please.”

Every single time.

Not because I’m afraid of losing my hair.

Because I’m still afraid of losing the place I’ve been hiding.

I used to think my hair was the thing that made me feel special.

Now I wonder if it has simply been carrying parts of me that I haven’t yet learned to hold on my own.

Maybe that’s what growing up is.

Not watching your hair change.

Watching your relationship with it change.

And slowly trying to remember the little girl who once opened it simply because she thought it looked like freedom.

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I was standing in the washroom of a corporate office.

It was spotless. No tissues thrown everywhere, no abuses on the back of the door.

The sinks were clean. The mirrors were clean. Nothing was broken simply because it wasn't theirs to take care of.

A day before that, I had been in my college washroom. Before that, I spent years in school washrooms. And beneath all of them sits the public toilet, which we seem to treat less as a facility and more as a polite suggestion, preferring every available wall, pole and unsuspecting tree and somehow never quite building a single washroom a woman could bring herself to enter.

If you’ve studied in India, you probably know exactly what I mean.

They looked less like public spaces and more like abandoned crime scenes in low budget films.

And I kept wondering, what changes?

How do the same people who once treated public spaces with complete disregard suddenly become adults who leave office washrooms cleaner than they found them?

Age?

Money?

Education?

No.

Accountability.

The difference isn’t character it’s consequences.

When something belongs to an institution that expects something from you, behaviour changes almost immediately. People behave differently when they know someone will ask a question and it might affect their life.

And then I realised maybe this has very little to do with washrooms.

Maybe it has everything to do with countries.

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People often think corruption destroys democracies.

I don’t think that’s where it begins.

Corruption survives because accountability disappears first.

Once people realise nothing will happen after failure, failure becomes routine.

Take something as ordinary as work.

Imagine an employee who repeatedly misses deadlines, loses important files, insults clients and still receives promotions every year.

The company wouldn’t survive.

Yet somehow, we have accepted exactly this standard from governments. Not perfection. Not miracles. Just… no consequences.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, NEET-UG became one of the clearest examples.

Paper leak allegations. Irregularities. Thousands of students questioning the examination. Months of uncertainty. Families who had spent years preparing. Students falling into depression. Several deaths by suicide were reported in the wider climate of examination stress and uncertainty.

For weeks, students have been protesting across the country. Many people gathered at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. Some went on hunger strike.

Yet the question remained remarkably simple.

Where is accountability?

If an education system collapses under your watch, shouldn’t someone come forward and answer for it?

If not the Education Minister, then who?

If not now, then when?

The same question appears elsewhere.

Former ministers and elected representatives have over the years, made remarks about rape, women’s education, minorities and violence.

Yet political life continues uninterrupted. No resignation. No lasting political cost. Most times not even an apology.

We have become so accustomed to this that we no longer ask the obvious question.

How?

How does public office become the one profession where repeated public failure carries no professional consequences?

Look at another example.

India’s move towards higher ethanol blending in petrol, including E20 fuel, was introduced with long-term environmental and energy-security goals.

Those goals matter. Climate policy matters.

But implementation matters too.

Thousands of vehicle owners worried about compatibility. Mechanics raised concerns. Manufacturers issued advisories. Middle-class families who had spent years saving for one car suddenly found themselves wondering whether policy had been designed with them in mind at all.

If implementation creates lasting problems, accountability cannot disappear simply because the policy sounded noble.

Or take something much larger.

Artificial intelligence data centres consume extraordinary amounts of electricity and water. Communities in parts of the United States have already raised concerns over the strain these facilities place on local water supplies.

As companies search globally for places to expand, India naturally becomes attractive.

Investment sounds exciting. Economic growth sounds exciting. Employment opportunities even more exciting.

But if growth arrives at the cost of already fragile water resources, somebody must answer a very simple question.

Who decided this? On what evidence? Who will be responsible if the long-term consequences prove disastrous?

Development without accountability eventually becomes extraction.

Even something symbolic tells the same story.

When reports emerged of theft and mismanagement of donations at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya now under investigation by a special team public discussion quickly moved toward politics.

Mine returns to the same question. If something happens inside one of the most closely watched public institutions in the country, on the foundation of which a party came to power, who answers?

Because if nobody answers, the institution itself teaches people that answers no longer matter.

And maybe that is what frightens me most.

Not corruption. Not incompetence. Not the lack of care, education and awareness. Those things have existed in every democracy.

What frightens me is the disappearance of embarrassment.

There was a time, not a perfect time but a time, when resignations still meant something. A minister stepping down after failure was understood as respect for public office, just like Lal Bahadur Shastri did after the major Ariyalur train disaster on November 23, 1956, in Tamil Nadu.

Today, resignation feels almost unimaginable. Failure has become something to explain away instead of answer for.

People often ask whether Indian democracy is dying.

I don’t know.

Sometimes I think we ask the wrong question.

Democracy is not elections. Democracy is accountability between elections.

Voting every five years means very little if nothing can happen during the five years in between.

A government is not democratic because it was elected once. It remains democratic only as long as it keeps answering to the people who elected it in the first place.

Which brings me back to that washroom.

It was never about hygiene, it was about behaviour under accountability.

People do not magically become responsible adults. They become responsible when responsibility is expected.

Countries work exactly the same way.

The day failure stops carrying consequences, institutions begin to look exactly like abandoned school washrooms.

I don’t think India’s greatest crisis is corruption.

I think it is the slow normalisation of unaccountability.

And the frightening thing about normalisation is that it never announces itself.

One day you simply wake up in a country where nothing feels shocking anymore.

Not because things became better.

Because you stopped expecting anyone to answer.

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Not just sad.

Not just unfair.

Absurd.

There is something fundamentally illogical about spending years learning the architecture of another human being, their laugh, the way they call your name, the way they make their bite, the way they fall asleep halfway through a film, only for the universe to casually announce that none of it will happen again.

I have never understood how people accept that.

Maybe that’s why I think about death far more than I should.

Sometimes a passing thought about my parents is enough to make my chest physically hurt. Not metaphorically. Literally. My heart aches as though it already knows something my mind refuses to accept.

And yet, strangely, whenever death has actually stood in front of me…

I have almost never believed it.

There is another thought that has lived with me for years.

I’ve heard people say that as we die, the body reaches for the first place it ever learned comfort.

Before we knew language…

before we knew memory…

before we knew who we were…

we knew what it felt like to be held.

Whether every scientist would phrase it exactly that way almost doesn’t matter to me. The image has stayed with me for years. That when everything else begins shutting down, some part of us still remembers where safety first lived.

Maybe that’s why so many stories about people’s final moments circle back to one word.

“Mom.”

I don’t know whether every one of those stories is true.

I only know that they feel emotionally true. That the body, in its final act of remembering, would return to the first person who ever convinced it the world was survivable.

If that isn’t the definition of a core memory, I don’t know what is.

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When my grandmother was in the hospital during COVID, everyone around me understood what was happening before I did.

My father had only just survived weeks on a ventilator.

My grandmother, who had spent every day praying that he would live instead of her, suddenly became the one who wasn’t coming home.

My mother pulled me aside.

She told me my grandmother had died.

I argued.

“No.”

“Stop saying that.”

“She’s fine.”

It took them several minutes to make me believe them.

Looking back, I’ve realised something strange about myself.

I spend ordinary Tuesdays terrified that everyone I love will disappear.

But when the impossible is actually happening my brain refuses to believe it. It simply doesn’t register death as a possibility.

Then something happened that frightened me even more.

For days after my grandmother died… I didn’t miss her.

Not once.

And that terrified me.

I remember thinking, what kind of person doesn’t miss her grandmother?

I convinced myself something inside me had broken.

Maybe I had become cold.

Maybe I had become cruel.

Maybe our complicated relationship had turned me into someone incapable of grieving.

I judged myself much more harshly than I ever judged death.

Months passed.

Nothing.

Until one afternoon.

I had gone to a friend’s house for a class.

I wasn’t particularly excited to be there.

Then her grandmother walked into the room.

She smiled.

She spoke.

She hugged me.

And suddenly… my grandmother was everywhere.

Not because she looked the same.

Because warmth has a language. Some people carry it in exactly the same way.

I spent the entire time trying not to cry.

When I left, she hugged me again.

I somehow made it to the lift before I completely fell apart. I sat on the staircase outside and cried for almost half an hour.

Not because I had just met somebody else’s grandmother.

Because mine had found me there.

Children don’t remember life the way adults think they do.

They remember feelings.

A particular smell.

A hand resting on their forehead.

A laugh from another room.

The way someone tucked them into bed.

The way someone pronounced their name.

A sentence repeated every afternoon.

That is what a core memory has always been to me. Not the biggest day of your life. Just the smallest ordinary moment that quietly teaches your body, this is what love feels like.

Years later, you forget the date.

You forget the clothes.

Sometimes you even forget the conversation.

But your body doesn’t. It remembers the feeling.

Maybe that’s why grief is so strange. Because when someone dies, we don’t really lose the memories.

We lose the possibility of making new ones.

And somehow, that is the wound that never quite learns how to close.

In my family, everyone says my hands are exactly like my grandmother’s.

My father still asks me, sometimes, to hold his hand.

Not because he needs mine.

Because for a second, it feels like he’s holding hers.

The first time I understood that, I quietly placed my own hand against my face. Just to know what she might have felt like again.

For one impossibly small second, I almost did.

Maybe memory isn’t simply the mind looking backwards.

Maybe memory is the body refusing to admit that love can vanish.

Because after everything I’ve lived, I think the body has always understood something the mind spends decades trying to learn.

Love doesn’t disappear.

It moves into gestures. Into voices. Into recipes nobody wrote down. Into the way your father reaches for your hand because it feels like his mother’s. Into the way a stranger’s hug can suddenly become home.

Death ends a life.

Love keeps finding new places to live.

Sometimes in another person’s voice.

Sometimes in their hands.

Sometimes in a hug you never expected to need.

Sometimes inside your own.

And perhaps that’s the closest any of us ever come to defeating death. Not by surviving it. But by carrying our deepest core memories so completely that, even after the people themselves are gone, they continue teaching us what love feels like.

Maybe that’s why I still think about death so often.

Not because I understand it. I don’t. I still think it is one of the cruellest inventions existence has ever produced.

But if love can outlive the people who gave it to us…

perhaps it was never really trying to survive death.

Perhaps it was simply trying to survive us.

a note for my grandmother incase she is listening — you had a hard life and you tried to be better, I would like to believe that. I still miss you on days, I want to call our family in the living room and give them a performance (that tradition disappeared with you), on days I see my father sad, on days I miss a good fight, on days I feel unsupported, on days I miss a good paratha, on days I want unlimited fries, on days I need a grandparent.

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Think about it.

The entire purpose of the word is that there shouldn’t be much of it.

And yet somehow every motivational speaker, every school, every self-help book, every LinkedIn influencer and every second Instagram reel has reached the exact same conclusion:

Be unique.

Which is fascinating.

Because if all eight billion of us are following the same instruction someone has misunderstood the assignment.

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For as long as I can remember, people have told me to build a personality.

Don’t be basic.

Don’t be generic.

Stand out.

Find your niche.

Figure out who you are.

Which sounds like wonderful advice until you look around and realise something slightly inconvenient.

We’ve all chosen the same niche.

The same aesthetics.

The same opinions.

The same clothes.

The same vocabulary.

The same five personality types with slightly different Spotify playlists.

Eight billion people.

Four personalities.

Congratulations.

I don’t actually think this is our fault.

I think we’ve confused identity with branding.

Those are very different things.

Let me start somewhere unfashionable: I don’t think I am important.

I think I am one of the smallest things the universe has ever bothered to make, a speck among eight billion specks, on one planet, in one galaxy, for a very short while. My existence is not a serious matter and I have never managed to treat it as one.

My life is a different thing entirely.

That, I take with complete seriousness. It is the distinction I have quietly organised myself around: my existence is negligible, but my life is a gift. Which is why I’ve never understood why we let everyone else design it. I am not important; what I do with the small, closing window I have been handed is the one thing that is wholly mine to answer for.

So the wish to be unique was never vanity. It was only ever the arithmetic of a short time.

Because I think we arrive here to explore the thing, to find out what this strange, brief life can be made into, how much of it there is, how differently it can be lived. And we have barely begun. We have not come close to the edges of what a single human life can hold. It is the most extraordinary thing any of us will ever be handed.

Which is what makes the sameness feel like such a quiet waste. If all of us insist on the one identical life, the same wants, in the same order, for the same reasons then between eight billion people we will only ever explore a single version of being alive. We were handed the whole range of it and we are choosing, together, to stay in one room.

Before we’re old enough to think, someone has already drawn the map.

Study.

Get a job.

Get married.

Have children.

Be successful.

Buy a house.

Grow old.

Repeat.

Somewhere between all of that, we’re also told,

“Oh, and don’t forget to be yourself.”

Thank you.

Very helpful.

We like pretending “society” is our parents.

It isn’t.

Society upgrades itself every generation.

It just changes platforms.

Earlier it lived in neighbourhood bickering.

Now it has Wi-Fi.

Today, it arrives through algorithms.

It tells us how confidence should look.

What intelligence wears.

How healing speaks.

How productivity wakes up at 5 a.m.

How femininity dresses.

How masculinity behaves.

How artists think.

How readers pose with books.

How travellers take photographs.

How minimalists decorate their homes.

Even individuality now comes with a tutorial.

The funniest part?

We genuinely believe these choices are ours.

“I’ve found my style.”

Have you?

Or did the algorithm simply recommend it often enough?

And before someone misunderstands me,

I’m not saying social media has erased individuality.

I’m saying it has become frighteningly good at selling us pre-packaged versions of it.

You no longer have to become someone.

You can subscribe to someone.

That, to me, is the opposite of personality.

Personality isn’t the collection of things you consume.

It is the collection of things you would still believe if nobody applauded them.

I was reminded of this recently.

There is a concept they pass around in leadership workshops called the lollipop moment. The premise is that you can give someone something small — a sentence, a flicker of belief, the way you hand a child a lollipop at a party and it lodges in them as a core memory long after you have forgotten it by lunch.

It is a corporate way of saying a very ordinary word: kindness.

I have never heard the term. But I have had the moment.

In school we had a dance event and there was a girl who wanted to be in it and could not make herself do it. She had already decided she did not belong on that floor, too unsure, too visible, too much herself in the wrong way.

I was bigger than every girl on the core council and I was up there anyway, doing everything they did and a little more.

So I told her exactly that. I told her the thing she was using to disqualify herself was something I had simply decided not to be disqualified by.

She danced.

At the next event she did not wait to be persuaded; she came on her own and then she came to thank me. I had not noticed I had done anything at all until she said so.

Here is the part I would rather be honest about, because this is precisely where these stories tend to go soft.

I did not do it so she would remember me. I did not do it to feel like a good person.

I did it for a reason far closer to self-interest than to virtue: it lets me believe that someone, somewhere, might one day do the same for me.

That there are people moving through the world without an agenda where I am concerned.

That the place is not, after all, quite as bad as it so often insists on looking.

And maybe that’s where uniqueness actually lives.

Not in aesthetics.

Not in niches.

Not in the books you display.

Not in whether your coffee is artisanal.

Definitely not in whatever personality trend is circulating this week.

It lives in your values.

Your instincts.

The things you choose when nobody is rewarding you for choosing them.

The world has become very good at manufacturing personalities.

It hands us identities already assembled.

Just add headphones, a skincare routine and an opinion about matcha.

But none of those things answer the question.

Who are you when no one is looking?

Who are you when there’s nothing to perform?

Who are you before the algorithm tells you who to become?

Maybe that’s the only version of ourselves worth finding.

Because trends expire.

Algorithms change.

Generations reinvent cool every six months.

But your conscience?

Your curiosity?

Your kindness?

Those have to survive longer than your feed.

Everybody wants to be unique.

Very few people are willing to be different.

And those, I think, are not the same thing.

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I don’t know who I would be without it.

Dance came first.

Before writing. Before research papers. Before I knew what feminism was or had enough emotional vocabulary to explain why my chest hurt sometimes.

Dance taught me how to tell stories before I knew how to speak honestly about my own.

It taught me empathy.

It taught me expression.

It taught me that sometimes your body understands things long before your mind catches up.

I have spent years of my life dancing.

Kathak most deeply.

But also everything else I could get my hands on.

Because dance has never felt optional to me.

Neither has music.

I genuinely do not know how people exist without it.

Music has carried me through grief I couldn’t explain, joy I couldn’t contain and anxiety I couldn’t regulate.

Books taught me how to live other people’s lives.

Cinema taught me how to recognise myself in strangers.

Writing gave me somewhere to place all the things I didn’t know what to do with.

Art has never been entertainment to me.

It has been survival.

Which is why I never thought I would have to question it.

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A few years ago, many of us had what I like to call our billionaire awakening.

The moment you realise what a billion dollars actually means.

Not abstractly.

Practically.

And suddenly, people you admired don’t look quite the same anymore.

Because nobody needs that much money.

Because somewhere along the way, you realise that enormous wealth exists alongside entirely preventable suffering.

Children still starve.

Women still die from preventable causes.

Entire communities continue living without access to necessities.

And yet, some people accumulate enough resources to change thousands of lives over and over again.

The question isn’t whether they earned it.

The question is:

What responsibilities come with having more than anyone could ever need?

I had a similar moment recently.

Only this time, it involved cinema.

I came across a report about a film production requiring an enormous amount of water during shooting.

I don’t even remember which film it was.

I just remember stopping.

Because for the first time in my life, the phrase “big-budget film” stopped sounding impressive.

And started sounding expensive.

Compared to what?

Compared to whom?

I grew up hearing people celebrate production budgets.

This film cost two hundred crores.

That film crossed five hundred crores.

This actor charged this amount.

That action sequence alone cost more than some people will earn in several lifetimes.

We speak about these things with admiration.

As ambition.

As achievement.

As magic.

But suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about the world outside the screen.

About people without clean drinking water.

About children going hungry.

About hospitals without resources.

About the fact that there are communities fighting for survival while we applaud increasingly extravagant spectacles.

And I found myself asking something I never thought I would ask:

How much entertainment is enough? But this is not money given to entertain, it is given for feeding superficiality.

Please understand what I am not saying.

I am not saying art is unnecessary.

I think the opposite.

Stories matter.

Music matters.

Cinema matters.

Art gives us language for things logic cannot reach.

I would not survive in a world without art.

But I also don’t think love should eliminate accountability.

If anything, I think it demands it.

Because the people who care about something most deeply should also be willing to ask difficult questions about it.

And this isn’t just about films.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about art more broadly.

About the way we consume it.

Protect it.

Perform it.

Weaponise it.

I think comedians deserve freedom.

I genuinely do.

Art cannot exist inside cages.

But I also think people confuse freedom with immunity.

If the only thing you can offer the world is misogyny disguised as humour, maybe the problem isn’t censorship.

Maybe the problem is that you aren’t very good at comedy.

I keep coming back to something Javed Akhtar once said:

If you need abuses to make people laugh, perhaps you aren’t actually funny.

And while I don’t agree with every boundary imposed on artists, I do believe that being an artist doesn’t absolve you from being a human being.

Your art is free.

Your ethics still matter.

I think about this when people become insufferable about taste, too.

The way people judge each other’s playlists.

Reading habits.

Favourite films.

As though consuming the “right” art makes you morally superior.

I don’t understand it.

If someone loves pop, let them.

If someone loves classical, wonderful.

If somebody is reading fantasy novels because BookTok convinced them to, I hope they have a fantastic time.

I don’t care.

Because music isn’t a personality test.

Books aren’t merit badges.

Art isn’t a competitive sport.

And maybe this is what I am trying to unlearn.

The idea that loving something means refusing to interrogate it.

Because I don’t think that is love at all.

I think it is loyalty.

And the two are not the same thing.

Love asks more of us.

I love dance enough to acknowledge the ways artistic spaces can wound people.

I love cinema enough to question the excess it celebrates.

I love comedy enough to expect better from comedians.

I love literature enough to refuse elitism around reading.

I love art enough to believe it should remain deeply, radically human.

Perhaps this is the contradiction of being an artist.

You spend your entire life defending the things that save us.

And then one day, you realise that protecting them also means holding them accountable.

Not because you want less art.

Because you want better art.

Kinder art.

More thoughtful art.

Art that remembers the world it exists within.

I don’t know if I have answers.

I don’t know where the ethical line is.

I don’t know how much spectacle is too much spectacle.

I don’t know whether there is a perfect balance between creation and responsibility.

But I do know this:

The things that make us human should never require us to become less humane.

And if art truly is one of humanity’s greatest achievements,

then surely it is strong enough to survive being questioned by the people who love it most.

(A letter to the love of my life )

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This is not one of them.

Because the moment you question parenthood, not parenthood itself but the way society treats it as inevitable, necessary, morally superior, people react as though you have insulted humanity itself.

The institution of family is sacred to most societies.
Children are sacred.
Motherhood is sacred.
“Having your own family” is treated almost like the natural conclusion of adulthood.

And because of that, questioning it feels offensive to people in a way questioning almost anything else does not.

But I have been sitting with this thought for a very long time now and the more I observe the world, the harder it becomes for me to ignore:

Not everybody should become a parent.

And no, I am not talking about laws.
I am not talking about state control.
I am not talking about authoritarian ideas of who is “allowed” to reproduce.

I am talking about culture.

About what we normalize.
What we encourage.
What we romanticize.
What we pressure people into doing without ever asking whether they are emotionally, mentally, financially or morally prepared for it.

Because somewhere along the way, parenthood stopped being treated like a responsibility enormous enough to shape another human being’s entire existence.

It became a milestone. A norm. A life stage.
You grow up.
You marry.
You have children.

As though creating a human life is just another item on adulthood’s checklist.

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And I think one of the biggest reasons this conversation makes people uncomfortable is because it forces us to confront something ugly:

A lot of people have children for deeply selfish reasons.

Because society told them to.
Because they felt lonely.
Because they wanted purpose.
Because they wanted someone to love them unconditionally.
Because babies are cute.
Because “that’s just what people do.”

And somehow, none of these reasons sound alarming socially.

Even though they involve creating an actual human life.

I know a family with nine children.

Nine.

They live in severe poverty.
The father is abusive and alcoholic.
The mother works endlessly.
The older children raise the younger ones.
Nobody has the emotional, financial or physical capacity to properly care for all of them.

And every time I think about them, I keep coming back to the same unbearable thought:

Those children did not deserve the lives they were born into.

And before people rush to call that classist or cruel, let me clarify something very carefully:

Poverty itself does not make someone immoral.

That is exactly why this conversation cannot only be about money.

Because I feel the same way about people who have not worked on themselves emotionally, mentally or morally before becoming parents.

A child is not a self-healing mechanism.
Not relationship therapy.
Not a way to “fix” loneliness.
Not a solution for a failing marriage.
Not proof of maturity.
Not an emotional support system.

Children should not arrive carrying the burden of repairing the adults who created them.

And yet, people do this constantly.

They assume:
“I’ll become more responsible after having a child.”
“The relationship will improve.”
“I’ll finally feel fulfilled.”
“Life will start making sense.”

But a child is not a tool for emotional transformation.

It is an entirely separate human being who will absorb the consequences if that transformation never happens.

So when I say not everybody should become parents, I do not mean only financially.

I mean people unwilling to confront their anger.
Their violence.
Their instability.
Their conditioning.
Their selfishness.
Their inability to nurture safely.

Because biology alone does not make somebody capable of raising another human being well.

But knowingly bringing children into circumstances where neglect, instability, abuse and deprivation are almost guaranteed, while refusing responsibility for the consequences, is not something I know how to romanticize.

Because people love saying:
“Children are blessings.”

But blessings for whom?

Certainly not for the eldest daughter raising siblings she never chose to parent.

Certainly not for the child who starts working before they fully understand childhood.

Certainly not for the teenager who turns to drugs, abuse or desperation because nobody built a stable emotional world around them.

And definitely not for the three-year-old repeatedly getting severely injured because there are simply too many children and too little care.

We keep talking about the “sanctity of life” while ignoring the actual quality of that life once it arrives.

And that hypocrisy has started feeling impossible for me to ignore.

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This is also why I cannot take most “pro-life” rhetoric seriously.

Because most pro-life politics are not actually pro-life.

They are pro-birth.

There is a difference.

If you cared about life, you would care about the woman carrying the pregnancy.
You would care about the child after birth.
You would care about healthcare, education, abuse, hunger, trauma and foster systems.
You would care about whether the child entering the world will actually be safe, loved and supported.

But too often, the concern disappears the moment the child is born.

After that, society returns to individualism.

“Figure it out.”
“You chose this.”
“Every parent struggles.”

As though suffering automatically justifies more suffering.

And nowhere is this more normalized than in cultures where parenting is treated as unquestionable authority.

In countries like India, hitting children is still widely defended as discipline.

People say:
“You’ll understand when you become a parent.”
“How else are we supposed to teach children?”
“We were hit too and we turned out fine.”

But I keep thinking:

Did we?

Or did we simply normalize pain because it was easier than confronting it?

A child is not your emotional punching bag.
Not your unresolved trauma outlet.
Not your ego extension.
Not your retirement plan.
Not your proof of adulthood.

And I genuinely believe this:

Before becoming parents, people should be emotionally stable, financially responsible, mentally aware and willing to confront their own conditioning.

Not perfectly healed.
Not flawless.
Not spiritually enlightened.

Just responsible enough to understand that another human being’s nervous system will partly be built inside the environment they create.

Because children inherit more than genetics.

They inherit fear.
Anger.
Silence.
Gender roles.
Emotional instability.
Unresolved trauma.
Worldviews.
Violence.
Shame.

And if you refuse to work on yourself before bringing a child into the world, there is an overwhelming chance your child will spend adulthood recovering from things they never chose.

And this is the part people hate hearing:

Liking children is not enough reason to have them.

Finding babies adorable is not enough.
Being “good with kids” is not enough.
Wanting a family photo album is not enough.

Children are not emotional support systems.

They are future adults.

Human beings who will one day sit alone with themselves and either feel safe inside their own minds,

or not.

And parents shape an extraordinary amount of that outcome.

What also disturbs me is how aggressively society reacts to people, especially women, who choose not to have children.

Women who do not want motherhood are still treated as suspicious, incomplete, mentally unstable or selfish in many parts of the world.

Because patriarchy has always relied heavily on controlling women through motherhood.

Through reproductive expectations.
Through sacrifice.
Through guilt.
Through the idea that womanhood itself is incomplete without caregiving.

And once you realize that, you start noticing how political reproduction has always been.

Countries panic over declining birth rates not because they suddenly care about women’s fulfillment, but because economies require labor, systems require consumers and states require populations.

Women’s bodies become national conversations the moment birth rates drop.

Suddenly everyone wants to discuss “family values.”

Not unpaid maternal labor.
Not childcare support.
Not violence against women.
Not maternal mental health.

Just birth.

Produce more citizens.
More workers.
More consumers.

And if a woman refuses?

Then suddenly she must be convinced, corrected or psychologically examined.

As though opting out of motherhood is somehow less rational than bringing an unwanted child into the world.

And still, despite everything I have said, this is not an anti-child essay.

It is the opposite.

I think children deserve better than what society currently treats as acceptable parenting.

I think parenting should be approached with more seriousness, more preparation and more humility than almost anything else in life.

Because creating a human being is not casual.

It is not inevitable.

And it is definitely not something everybody is automatically entitled to emotionally succeed at simply because biology allows it.

Some people become extraordinary parents.

Some people should never have become parents at all.

And pretending those two realities are morally identical helps nobody, especially not the children forced to live through the consequences.

I think the real issue is this:

We have normalized childbirth far more than we have normalized accountability.

Everybody asks:
“When are you having children?”

Almost nobody asks:
“Are you emotionally prepared to raise one well?”

And maybe that is the wrong order entirely.

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My therapist took out a sheet of paper and started writing down the roles I occupied.

Who am I as a daughter?

As a sister?

As a friend?

As a partner?

As a student?

As a professional?

And then she paused and asked:

Who are you to yourself?

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I remember thinking that the question felt strangely heavier than all the others combined.

Because I could answer the rest immediately.

I knew how I functioned in relation to other people.

But when every role disappeared, when there was no family, no work, no responsibilities, no expectations, no performance left,

Who remained?

I think about this often now.

Not because I don’t value relationships. I do. Deeply.

But because I’ve realised how dangerous it is to build a life where your entire identity depends on being needed by other people.

Or loved by them.

Or validated by them.

We talk a lot about relationships with others.

Romantic relationships. Family dynamics. Friendships.

People can describe them in extraordinary detail.

They can tell you exactly how someone makes them feel, where the relationship struggles, what they need from it, what they fear losing.

But ask someone about their relationship with themselves and the answers suddenly become vague.

I’ve always taken my relationship with myself very seriously.

Not in a self-help, “love yourself” kind of way.

More like survival.

I understood very early that if I did not build a self that existed independently of everyone around me, I would spend my life emotionally collapsing every time something external shifted.

Because external things always shift.

People change. Relationships strain. Careers fail. Priorities evolve.

Even the people who love you most will sometimes disappoint you.

So who do you become when there is nothing outside of you to hold onto?

I think many people never fully meet themselves.

They meet their roles.

Their usefulness.

Their desirability.

Their productivity.

Their responsibilities.

But not themselves.

And maybe that’s why solitude feels unbearable to so many people.

Because silence removes performance.

It leaves you alone with the person underneath everything else.

I realised recently that I genuinely enjoy my own company.

Not in a “solo dates” kind of way.

I mean genuinely.

I do not feel bored when I am alone. I do not feel incomplete in my own presence.

Sometimes, the only way I can regulate myself, my anxiety, my emotions, my overstimulation, is by returning to myself for a while.

And I think that’s a kind of stability people underestimate.

Because if your entire sense of self depends on external affirmation, then every disagreement feels catastrophic.

Every rejection feels identity-altering.

Every relationship becomes a threat to your emotional survival.

That’s why I think dependency, total dependency, damages relationships more than it strengthens them.

Not because love is bad.

But because no human being should be responsible for holding up your entire identity.

That weight eventually crushes both people.

I keep returning to one question:

If someone you loved fundamentally disagreed with the person you are, would you still know how to stand by yourself?

Or would your entire sense of self collapse with their approval?

I think that question reveals more about identity than anything else.

And maybe that’s why I’ve always been obsessed with the question:

Who am I?

Not rhetorically. Not aesthetically. Not as branding.

As a real question.

Who am I when no role is available to introduce me?

Because personality traits are not identity.

Being creative, emotional, intuitive, ambitious, those describe you, but they are not you.

Roles are not identity either.

Neither are achievements.

So what remains underneath all of it?

I don’t think I fully know yet.

But I think the attempt matters.

The willingness to sit with yourself long enough to find out.

Maybe identity is not something you discover once and keep forever.

Maybe it is something you return to repeatedly, beneath the noise, beneath the expectations, beneath the versions of yourself other people benefit from most.

And maybe the real relationship we spend our entire lives trying to build,

is not with other people.

But with the self we are left alone with at the end of every day.

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I think that might be the reason I started writing this.

Not because I think writing changes the world overnight. It does not. Most systems are too large, too old and too violent to collapse because someone wrote a blog.

But sometimes, the very least we can do for another human being is refuse to let them disappear quietly.

A while ago, somebody who deeply cared about Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi asked me to write about her. Not debate her. Not analyse her politically.

Just tell her story.

And somehow, I found that profoundly human.

Because maybe that is what empathy looks like. Maybe sometimes caring about people simply means refusing to let the world look away from their suffering.

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And lately, I keep thinking about how casually people say things like:

“At least this is not Iran.”

“At least this is not Afghanistan.”

As though women lose their freedoms overnight.

As though authoritarianism arrives dramatically instead of quietly entering institutions one compromise at a time.

As though Bihar’s Education Minister didn’t just preach that women and girls should not get an education.

Iran today is one of the clearest examples of what happens when a state decides a woman’s existence must remain conditional.

Conditional on obedience.

Conditional on modesty.

Conditional on silence.

Conditional on usefulness.

Women in Iran can be arrested for showing their hair in public. The state regulates what they wear, where they can go, what they can study, whether they can travel, how they perform art, who they marry and even how their testimony is valued in court. A woman’s legal testimony is worth half of a man’s. Marital rape is effectively excluded from criminal recognition. Child marriage remains legal under state approval. Women are barred from major positions of judicial and political power while simultaneously being told this structure exists for their own protection.

And somehow the cruelty becomes even more disturbing in its smaller details.

Women who defied mandatory dress codes were reportedly sent to so-called “psychological clinics,” covert detention centres disguised as treatment facilities. Protesters were classified as unstable rather than unheard. The state did not ask why women were resisting. It asked how quickly resistance could be pathologised.

History has always done this to outspoken women.

First they silence them.

Then they mock them.

Then they call them irrational.

Then dangerous.

Then mentally unwell.

The language changes. The structure rarely does.

And still, despite all of this, Iranian women continue resisting in ways that feel almost impossible to comprehend from a distance.

Young women walk unveiled through Tehran streets knowing exactly what consequences may follow. Students strip away symbols of control publicly. Prisoners continue protesting from solitary confinement cells. Mothers raise daughters inside systems designed to shrink them.

And somewhere inside all of this resistance stands Narges Mohammadi.

Not as a symbol.

Not as an abstract activist.

But as a human being who simply refused to stop speaking.

Narges Mohammadi was born into an Iranian Azerbaijani family and studied physics at university. Her activism began early, not through violence or rebellion but through writing articles supporting women’s rights as a student.

That alone was enough to get her arrested.

I think that detail disturbed me more than anything else.

Because there is something horrifying about a state so fragile that a young woman writing becomes threatening to it.

Most people, after imprisonment at such a young age, would probably retreat into safety. They would become quieter. More careful. More afraid.

Narges Mohammadi did not.

She continued writing.

Continued organising.

Continued resisting.

She later joined the Defenders of Human Rights Center led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and eventually became its vice president. She worked with reformist newspapers, wrote political essays, campaigned against the death penalty and documented the psychological destruction caused by solitary confinement in Iranian prisons.

The regime answered her activism with arrests.

Again and again and again.

Since the late 1990s, she has been arrested multiple times, sentenced repeatedly and condemned to years upon years of imprisonment and lashes.

But what struck me most while reading about her life was not only the suffering.

It was what she consciously chose to lose.

She had a husband.

Children.

A family.

A life she could have protected by leaving.

And she did have the option to leave Iran.

She stayed.

That sentence alone feels heavier than most things I have ever written.

She stayed.

Even after years of imprisonment.

Even after solitary confinement.

Even after deteriorating health.

Even after not seeing her children for years.

She chose to keep her family away partly because she feared the regime would use them against her.

I genuinely cannot imagine the emotional violence of that choice.

We speak so casually about courage, as though courage means not being afraid.

But reading about Narges Mohammadi made me think something entirely different.

Maybe courage is not the absence of fear at all.

Maybe courage is simply deciding that fear will not make the decision for you.

Because fear is precisely how authoritarian systems survive.

They convince ordinary people that silence is safer.

That survival is more practical.

That family should come before justice.

That resistance costs too much.

And they are right.

Resistance does cost too much.

Narges Mohammadi paid with years of her life.

With her health.

With separation from her children.

With solitary confinement severe enough to damage her nervous system and heart.

With surgeries.

With physical collapse.

With repeated imprisonment.

And still, even from prison, she continued speaking.

She protested mandatory hijab laws from inside detention.

Refused compliance during medical transfers.

Documented torture.

Advocated for women she knew the world would otherwise forget.

In 2023, while imprisoned, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran.

Her children read her acceptance speech in Oslo because she could not leave prison to read it herself.

I had to stop reading for a moment after that.

Because suddenly she was no longer just a political figure in my head.

She became a mother.

And I think that is what authoritarian systems fear most.

Not loud women.

Not emotional women.

Not rebellious women.

They fear women who continue loving humanity enough to resist even after the world has repeatedly brutalised them for it.

People often ask what difference one person can possibly make against systems this large.

I do not know.

But I know this:

Systems survive through normalization.

Through exhaustion.

Through people slowly accepting what once horrified them.

And sometimes all it takes to interrupt that process is one person refusing to behave as though cruelty is ordinary.

That refusal matters.

Narges Mohammadi may never know most of the people her story reaches. She may never know how many women looked at her life and felt less alone because somebody else also understood rage, fear and resistance.

But maybe that is what meaningful lives look like in the end.

Not perfect lives.

Not easy lives.

Not safe lives.

Just lives that refused to become indifferent to other human beings.

And perhaps that is why oppressive systems fear women like her so deeply.

Because once a woman loses her fear of speaking, it becomes very difficult to convince her she was born only to obey.

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I’ve heard some version of that sentence my entire life.

Nobody likes a quitter.

Quitting is weakness.

You finish what you start.

It sounds like discipline.

It also sounds like something we never really question.

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I remember the first time that idea broke something in me.

I was in middle school, seventh, maybe eighth grade. I don’t remember the exact year, but I remember the feeling with uncomfortable clarity.

My mother called me a loser for quitting something.

It wasn’t said casually. It landed.

And for a child who had built her identity around being responsible, composed, “the good one”, it did something I didn’t know how to process.

So I reacted in the only way I could at that age.

I left.

Not dramatically in the way movies show rebellion.

I just went upstairs. To a roof that wasn’t even ours. Locked myself in. Stayed there for eight hours.

No phone. No charger. No plan.

Just confusion.

It wasn’t anger. Not really.

It was the kind of emotional overload where you don’t even know what you’re trying to prove, you just know something feels deeply wrong.

I remember sending my younger sister to get me some food.

She brought back carrots.

I have never had carrots in my entire life.

It sounds almost absurd now. Slightly funny, even.

But I remember crying the entire time.

Not because I was hurt in that moment but because I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

And the worst part is,

I still think about that confusion.

Because the thing I was called a quitter for was something I had already endured far longer than I should have.

It was dance.

Or more specifically, a place that had taken something I loved and made it unbearable.

Around that time, I was dealing with something no one around me fully understood.

What I now recognise as anxiety, maybe even depression.

Back then, it was dismissed as stomach aches. Mood swings. “Phases.”

So I stayed where I was told to stay.

I continued what I was told to continue.

And slowly, something I loved stopped feeling like mine.

When I finally chose to leave, it wasn’t impulsive.

It was the opposite.

It was what happens when your body, your mind and your capacity all give up before you are allowed to.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to:

At what point does staying stop being strength?

And start becoming damage?

We’ve been taught to see quitting as a moral failure.

As if leaving something automatically means you weren’t strong enough to endure it.

But what if endurance is not the only virtue?

What if recognition is one too?

Because not every space is built for you.

And more importantly, not every space deserves you.

We rarely talk about misalignment.

We talk about hard work. Resilience. Grit.

But we don’t talk about the intelligence it takes to say:

This is not working.

Not because I am weak,

but because this is not where I am meant to be.

There is a difference between difficulty and damage.

Between challenge and erosion.

And if you don’t learn to tell them apart early, you end up staying in places that slowly take things away from you, your interest, your confidence, your sense of self.

All in the name of not being a quitter.

I’m not saying leave the moment something becomes uncomfortable.

Some things require endurance. Some things take time.

But not everything is a test of resilience.

Some things are simply wrong fits.

If you put a doctor in an engineering firm, they won’t fail because they’re incapable.

They’ll fail because they’re misplaced.

And yet, when it comes to people’s lives, we refuse to apply that same logic.

We tell children to adjust.

To stay.

To prove themselves.

Even when they’re quietly falling apart.

And then we act surprised when they lose passion.

When they disengage.

When they stop trying altogether.

I think quitting, in the right context, is not weakness.

It’s clarity.

It’s self-recognition.

It’s the refusal to continue something that is costing you more than it is giving you.

Because if something is truly yours,

you don’t need to be forced to stay.

You return to it.

You fight for it.

You endure it differently.

But not everything is yours.

And learning to walk away from the wrong things is not failure.

It’s the beginning of finding the right ones.

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Networking.

It’s usually described as a matter of confidence, clarity and efficiency, the ability to enter a conversation, make your point, establish value and move on. In theory, it’s just communication with intent.

But the more I observe it, both in others and in myself, the less neutral it starts to feel.

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There is a pattern people often point out, sometimes casually, sometimes as fact: men tend to be better at networking.

I’ve heard this explained in two different ways.

The first is almost observational, men seem more comfortable socialising in professional settings, more at ease with moving between people, initiating conversations and keeping them brief without making them personal.

The second is framed more definitively: that men are simply more efficient. That they have a more natural tendency to enter a conversation, say what needs to be said and leave.

I understand what both explanations are trying to point at.

But I don’t think either of them fully explains what’s actually happening.

Because what we call “networking” is not just the ability to speak.

It is the ability to engage without absorbing.

To enter a conversation with a purpose, extract what is useful and leave without carrying the rest. The success of the interaction is not measured by how deeply it connects, but by how effectively it converts, into information, access or opportunity.

That requires a very specific kind of detachment.

And I don’t think that detachment is evenly distributed.

In my own experience, conversation has never worked like that.

I don’t just register what someone is saying, I register how they are saying it, where they hesitate, what they are not saying. The interaction doesn’t stay at the level of exchange; it expands into interpretation.

And once that layer is visible, it becomes difficult to reduce the conversation back into something purely functional.

So I stay longer than I should. I listen more than I need to. I respond in a way that acknowledges more than just what is being said.

Which is a strength until the context demands something else.

I remember someone describing a situation that made this difference very visible.

She was talking about a friend who could walk into a place, speak to the staff or the owner and walk out knowing exactly how things worked, what was being used, how it was made, details most people wouldn’t even think to ask for.

When she asked how he knew all of that, the answer was simple: he had just asked.

Not researched it. Not looked it up. Just… walked up to someone and started a conversation.

And that struck me, because it isn’t just about curiosity. It’s about ease.

The ease of approaching strangers. The ease of asking without overthinking. The ease of leaving with information without feeling like you’ve crossed a line.

That kind of ease is not evenly available.

In professional spaces, this difference becomes more pronounced.

Efficiency, in this context, is not about depth. It is about selectivity.

It is the ability to decide, quickly and often subconsciously, what matters, what doesn’t and how much of the other person you are willing to engage with.

And more importantly, it is the ability to disengage without consequence.

This is where the gendered dimension becomes harder to ignore.

Not because women are incapable of being direct or strategic, but because the conditions under which interactions take place are not the same.

There are layers of socialisation, being taught to be accommodating, to listen, to maintain relational balance. There are also practical considerations, safety, perception, the constant awareness of how one is being read.

These factors don’t just exist in theory. They shape behaviour in real time.

They determine who we approach, how long we stay, how freely we ask questions and how comfortably we leave.

So when we say that some people are “naturally better” at networking, I think we are collapsing multiple factors into a single trait.

What we are really observing is a combination of:

• comfort with detachment

• freedom of movement in social spaces

• and a learned ability to treat interaction as transactional without feeling conflicted about it

Which brings me back to the contradiction I can’t quite resolve.

I am good at conversations.

But I am not good at networking.

And the more I understand what networking actually demands, the less accidental that feels.

Because the very things that make a conversation feel meaningful to me, attention, responsiveness, depth, are the things I have to selectively suppress in order to make it efficient.

I don’t think this makes networking wrong.

But I don’t think it makes it neutral either.

And until we acknowledge that, we’ll keep mistaking access for ability and conditioning for competence.

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If I could, I would have adopted a child by now and built a life that felt like ours.

But lately, that dream scares me.

Because what if one day, the child I love the most looks at me
and sees distance instead of home?

What if I become someone they have to grow away from?

What if they like the role I fill,
but not the person filling it?

What if I become someone they don’t like to love?

And they hate me.

I don’t think I could survive that twice in one lifetime.

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I have dreaded writing this.

Not because I don’t have something to say, but because I have too much. And none of it arranges itself neatly.

So this might not be clean. It might not be logical. It might just be what it is, messy, emotional, unfinished.

Which feels appropriate.

Because that’s exactly what this is about.

I used to joke, not entirely joking, that I was made to be doomed.

Mechanically formed for pain. Engineered for endurance.

It sounds dramatic when I say it out loud. I know that.

But if you’ve ever been the eldest daughter, you understand the feeling behind it.

Not the words, the weight.

Let me try to explain it without exaggerating it into something it’s not.

It’s not that I don’t love my family.

It’s not that I don’t see the privilege, the warmth, the moments that make it all worth it.

I do.

But loving something and being hurt by it are not opposites.

Sometimes they are the same experience.

Being the eldest daughter is a strange role.

Because no one tells you when it begins.

And no one tells you what exactly you signed up for.

You are just… expected.

Expected to understand more.

Expected to handle more.

Expected to absorb more.

And the most invisible part?

You are expected to do all of this while still being a child.

I think that’s where the anxiety begins.

Not the clinical kind alone, though that too.

But the kind that comes from feeling everything, all the time, at full volume.

Your emotions.

Their emotions.

The tensions in the room.

The things not being said.

It all lands somewhere inside you.

And it doesn’t leave.

Anxiety, for me, feels like this:

Like I am about to die.

My chest tightens. My breath turns shallow. My body goes into a kind of silent panic that doesn’t ask for permission.

People say, “just remind yourself you’ll be okay.”

But that’s the thing.

I know I’ll survive.

And somehow, that makes it worse.

Because surviving means I have to keep carrying it.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness in this.

The kind where you are surrounded by people, deeply connected to them, responsible for them even,

And still feel like there is no space where you are just… held.

Just a child.

Just someone who doesn’t have to understand everything.

There’s also a strange paradox no one talks about.

You spend years becoming something you were never meant to be.

You parent them. Not officially, not by right but in every way that matters.

With your time, your attention, your patience.

With every ounce of love you have.

With everything you learned too early.

You protect. You explain. You absorb.

And then one day, the rules change.

Suddenly, you’re told you’re not the parent.

That you interrupt too much.

That your opinion is not needed.

That your authority was never real to begin with.

And you’re expected to step back.

To give space.

To unlearn the role you were never meant to take, but were never stopped from taking either.

No one tells you how to do that.

No one tells you what to do with all that care you built your identity around.

So you stand there, still loving the same way,

but now, it lands as control. As interference. As something unwanted.

And the part that hurts the most is this:

You built a place in someone’s life you are no longer allowed to occupy.

And you don’t even know when exactly it stopped being yours.

I remember asking my mother once:

Between me and my sister, who was the worse teenager?

She always said it was me.

And for the longest time, it never made sense.

Until one day, it did.

She wasn’t seeing the same version of us.

My sister was a teenager with me.

I was a teenager with my mother.

I was the one who got the anger, the resistance, the resentment, the looks, the hurt, the rawness of growing up.

I was the one expected to handle it.

To manage it.

To understand it.

To be bigger than it.

And somewhere in all of this, a quiet question kept forming:

What about me?

Because I am a child too.

Or at least, I was supposed to be.

No one prepares you for the moment when love starts to feel like responsibility.

When care starts to feel like duty.

When being needed starts to feel like being used, even when no one intends it that way.

And the hardest part?

You start participating in it.

You start telling yourself this is a privilege. A blessing. A role you should be grateful for.

You gaslight yourself into gratitude.

Because the alternative feels like betrayal.

And maybe it is both.

Maybe it is a blessing.

And maybe it is also deeply unfair.

There’s a narrative people like to repeat.

That eldest children grow up strong. Responsible. Independent.

And younger ones get to be softer. Freer.

What they don’t talk about is the cost of that strength.

Because strength, in this case, often just means:

Learning to go without.

Without validation.

Without softness.

Without being seen in the same way.

And you don’t even realize you’ve been going without until one day you stop and think:

When was the last time someone showed up for me the way I show up for them?

There’s also something quietly painful about time.

You tell yourself, this phase will pass.

Teenage years are hard. People grow. Things get better.

But then you realize:

They will grow.

They will become easier.

They will become softer, kinder, more understanding.

But maybe not with you.

Someone else will meet the better version of them.

And you will always be the one who knew them when they were hardest to love.

And again, it sounds selfish when you say it out loud.

But it doesn’t feel selfish when you feel it.

That’s the contradiction of this entire experience.

You love them.

You would choose them again.

You would do it all over again.

And still

It hurts.

Being the eldest daughter is learning how to make everyone feel like a priority.

And slowly realizing you are no one’s.

And the worst part is not even that.

It’s that there are only two ways out of it:

You either distance yourself,

create space, draw boundaries, become someone who doesn’t carry everything.

Or you stay.

And learn to live with the weight.

Both cost you something.

I don’t have a resolution for this.

I don’t have a clean ending or a hopeful takeaway.

I am still in it.

Still figuring out what parts of this I want to keep.

And what parts I need to unlearn.

But I know this much:

Just because something is called a blessing doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

And just because you love deeply doesn’t mean you were meant to carry everything.

If you’ve ever felt this,

You’re not dramatic.

You’re not selfish.

You’re just someone who was asked to grow up a little earlier than they should have.

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Seatbelts weren’t designed for women’s bodies. Menopause is finally being taken seriously. Postpartum depression is being recognised. And most recently, we got a complete anatomical diagram of the clitoris, in March 2026.

And we called that progress.

Because what else do you call it when something finally exists?

But the more I sit with it, the less it feels like advancement. What it reveals is not how far we’ve come, but how long something can be missing without anyone treating it like a loss.

We say women’s issues are “understudied,” but that phrasing is too soft. It suggests oversight, as if half the population being overlooked was accidental, as if it just happened. It didn’t.

Absence like this is structural. Not confined to one field or one mistake, but embedded across medicine, research, policy and design, in the very systems that decide what is worth knowing and therefore, what is worth caring about.

And yet, every time a woman points to that gap, says this is incomplete, this is wrong, this is harming us, she has to push. She has to insist. She has to become what people call too much. Because quiet has never been enough to be taken seriously.

And still, we want to believe people care. We want to believe in the comfort of “not all men,” in systems that eventually correct themselves, in awareness as a form of progress.

But if awareness were enough, we wouldn’t still be discovering our own bodies in 2026.

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There is something else that makes this harder to ignore.

Women are not a minority and yet we live like one, not because we are fewer, but because we are separated. Taught to experience the same systems privately, to process them individually, to negotiate them quietly. What is collective in design becomes personal in experience.

That fragmentation is not accidental. A unified voice is difficult to ignore. So instead, you build a world where women are constantly adjusting, adapting, explaining, softening. You let them feel their anger, but never fully trust it.

The more uncomfortable part is this: even when you begin to see it, you don’t step outside of it.

Because patriarchy is not just something external. It is institutional, yes, but it is also internalised. It exists in the language we use, the choices that feel natural, the instincts we rarely question. It shapes not just the world we live in, but the way we move through it.

I’ve been trying to unlearn for years and I still catch myself thinking in ways that don’t feel like mine. That’s how deep it goes.

Unlearning is not a concept. It is a disruption. It changes how you hear things, how you read things, how you sit in rooms you once felt comfortable in. It makes you notice what others move past. And once you notice it, you don’t get to go back.

This is where people get uncomfortable. Because noticing has consequences.

It makes you difficult. It makes you exhausting. It makes people avoid certain conversations with you, sometimes even people you love.

My sister looks at me sometimes like I’ve taken it too far. Like I’ve made everything political, everything structural, everything about patriarchy.

And maybe I have.

But what do you do when the same pattern keeps repeating itself? In marriage, in religion, in culture, in the smallest, most ordinary behaviours. At what point does it stop being overanalysis and start being recognition?

Because here’s the truth we don’t say out loud enough: not everything we’ve been taught to believe in was built for our freedom. Some of it was built for stability, for order, for containment.

And still, I understand why people hold on to it. Faith keeps people functioning. Hope makes things bearable. Belief gives structure to uncertainty. Not everyone can afford to let that go. Maybe not even me, entirely.

But at the very least, we need to start asking better questions.

Not just: why is this happening?

But: who benefits from this staying this way?

Because if it still takes a woman raising her voice for the world to register her reality, then the problem was never a lack of information.

It was a lack of willingness to see.

And that is not something awareness fixes.

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Not about whether God exists. That has never really interested me the way it seems to interest everyone else. I am not trying to prove or disprove anything. I don’t wake up and measure my life against belief.

If God exists, fine.
If God doesn’t, also fine.

That question does not decide the kind of person I am.

What has been sitting with me instead is something else:

Are religious people optimists?

Or are they something else entirely?

One of my earliest memories of questioning this wasn’t intellectual. It was very simple. I was a child watching my mother pray.

She still does. She prays for everything. For my future, for my safety, for my success. There is something deeply beautiful about that kind of love, the belief that somewhere, something is listening.

But even as a child, a question slipped in.

What makes that power choose her prayer over someone else’s?

Over the prayer of a child who is not asking for a good college, but for survival?

Why does one wish get held with such certainty, while another, far more urgent, remains unanswered?

I didn’t have the language for it then.

I do now.

And the question hasn’t left.

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Recently, I was in a conversation -- one of those conversations that stop being discussions and start feeling like collisions.

At some point, I was told something very simple:

“You just see the bad in the world. You’re negative.”

It was framed like a personality flaw.

But all I had done was point at things that exist.

Violence. Inequality. Fear. The quiet, normalized suffering that people have learned to live with.

And suddenly, acknowledging reality became pessimism.

So I started thinking again.

Is faith optimism?

Because from the outside, it often looks like it.

Faith says:
Things will work out.
There is a plan.
There is meaning.
There is protection.

That sounds like hope.

But the more I sit with it, the more I wonder if that’s the whole truth.

Because I’ve also seen what faith does when it is not gentle.

I’ve seen people refuse to question anything because questioning feels like betrayal. I’ve seen people ignore suffering because it is easier to call it fate. I’ve seen empathy disappear in the name of belief.

And that’s when the question shifts.

Not what do you believe?
But what is your belief doing to you?

I heard something recently that hasn’t left me:

Faith can make you do the most beautiful things in the world.
And it can make you do the worst.

And that’s exactly the problem.

It is not neutral.

It is power.

And power, when driven by fear, is unpredictable.

Because beneath a lot of rigid belief, there is something we don’t talk about enough.

Fear.

The fear of being wrong.
The fear of being punished.
The fear of uncertainty, of what happens after this life, of what happens if there is nothing watching, nothing guiding, nothing waiting.

And fear does something very specific to human beings.

It makes them stop thinking.

Not because they are incapable of thinking, but because thinking becomes dangerous.

Because the moment you question, the entire structure starts to shake.

And so you hold on tighter.

Not to truth.

But to certainty.

And that is where I struggle.

Because I don’t know if I can call that optimism.

Optimism, to me, is the ability to see the world as it is and still believe something can be built within it.

But what I often see is something else.

A kind of comfort that requires looking away.

A kind of hope that survives only if certain questions are never asked.

At the same time, I don’t fully belong on the other side either.

Because I know what pure realism can become.

It can become heavy. It can become exhausting. It can make the world feel like it is only made of damage.

So no, I don’t think the answer is to strip everything down and call it truth.

But I also don’t think the answer is to believe so completely that truth becomes irrelevant.

So maybe this is where I stand, for now.

Not against belief.
Not for it.

Just unwilling to let anything, faith, fear or even logic take away my ability to look at the world honestly.

Because I don’t think the real question is whether religious people are optimists or pessimists.

I think the real question is this:

Does your belief make you more capable of facing reality?

Or does it make reality easier to avoid?

And maybe that’s what I’m trying to protect.

Not an answer.

Just the ability to ask the question without fear.

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I was four when I first noticed it. Then six. Then older. And every time I looked at it, something shifted in me, something I couldn’t name, couldn’t explain, couldn’t reason my way out of.

I forgot about it for years.

Until recently, when I saw it again. And the feeling returned instantly. Not nostalgia. Not grief. Something quieter. More certain.

This sounds like the beginning of a horror story. It isn’t.

If I had to try and articulate the feeling now, still imperfectly, it is this:

A sense of being proud before doing anything worth pride.

A sense of belonging to someone.

And a belief, planted too early to question, that there will always be at least one person in this world who thinks I am worth something.

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The man in the photograph is my maternal grandfather.

He is receiving a national award. He looks dignified, composed, unmistakably certain of himself. Very present.

He is no longer alive.

But if there is one person I will always believe saw something in me before I learned to see it myself— it was him.

He was intellectual, disciplined, ambitious. Honest in a way that was sometimes uncomfortable. Strict in a way that only made sense later. A family man through and through.

To the world, he was formidable. Important. A figure of authority.

To me, he was a bear.

Protective. Soft in private. Fierce about his own.

I called him Picnic, because every Sunday spent with him felt like a holiday, laughter, stories, food, warmth. A pause from everything else.

There was always a strange disconnect for me: how the world saw him versus how I knew him. But I never doubted either version. He was both.

From him, I learned ambition. Stoicism. The quiet confidence of knowing you belong somewhere. The ability to move through the world without apologising for taking up space.

And then there is my maternal grandmother.

A woman I knew for the shortest time, and yet carry closest to my heart.

For years, I cried into an imaginary lap at night, believing it was hers. I remember her bindi. Her presence. Her elegance. Her light. Her joy.

But the image that stays with me most is one I saw later, a photograph of her when she was young. I didn’t recognise her at first. She was holding a drum, dancing freely, abandon in her posture, laughter in her body.

If she were a woman today, she would be the life of every room. The kind of person who brings warmth not through softness alone, but through energy, adventure, invitation.

I think I learned joy from her. Or at least the permission to seek it.

My paternal grandmother, whom I remember clearly, occupies a different space in my heart.

Our memories are bittersweet. There were moments of distance, misunderstandings, things said and unsaid.

And yet—she never hurt me.

Even when I believed she disliked me, she taught me something quietly enduring: that people are always more complex than the version they offer us. That love doesn’t always look the way we expect it to.

I sometimes think my instinct for storytelling came from her, the ability to sit with contradiction.

I also, will always remember, how I always felt her eyes on me, in a aspirational way, like she wanted me to do things, she didn’t get to do.

These are the people I have lost.

And loved.

And still carry.

From my mother, and perhaps through my grandfather, I learned the value of work. Of stability. Of standing on your own feet even when it’s exhausting.

And then there is my father.

A man of principle. Of clarity. Of simplicity, sometimes almost painfully so. He taught me restraint. Integrity. The discipline of showing up even when no one is watching.

We are, by most definitions, a very typical middle-class Indian family. Quiet. Unassuming. Living life without spectacle.

But what we had, and what I now recognise as rare, was space.

Space to question.

Space to disagree.

Space to become.

My rebellion did not come from chaos. It came from security. From being allowed to exist without fear of erasure.

Even my maternal aunt, who taught me the meaning of family not through words, but through consistency. Through showing up. Through presence, even when it’s inconvenient.

I am who I am not because I was exceptionally brave.

But because the people before me made it possible to be.

And that feeling I never learned to name, the one that returns every time I look at that photograph, is perhaps this:

The knowledge that I come from people who mattered.

And the quiet, unsettling possibility that I might have to live up to that.

honestly, that’s all I want to do, live up to that, at least try to, for my sisters and my friends and the future.

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Btw if you by any chance stuck till here, I can’t be more grateful, love.

From the outside, it is often described as one of the most dangerous emotions humans feel. Unstable. Irrational. Destructive.

But at its core, anger is actually very simple.

It is the feeling that something is wrong and that it should not be this way.

I want to talk about anger. Not the kind that appears in everyday life: a mother angry at her child, a girlfriend angry at her boyfriend, someone irritated in traffic.

I want to talk about a different kind of anger. The anger that comes from living in the world as it is today. The anger that comes from watching things unfold around you, politically, economically, ecologically and realizing how much of it feels completely out of your control.

It is the anger that builds when you see injustice repeated so often that it stops shocking people.

And I want to talk about the strange expectation that we must always manage this anger politely.

For generations now, feminists have often been told the same thing: be calm. Be reasonable. Be balanced. Explain your position carefully so that others will listen.

You will often hear women explaining feminism in a very measured way. They say feminism is not about bra-burning anymore. That radical anger belonged to another time, when oppression was more visible, more blatant, more immediate.

But I find myself asking a question.

Who decided it is no longer needed?

Yes, maybe those forms of radical anger were born in a different time. But does that mean the anger itself is outdated? Has the oppression that created it truly disappeared?

Or has it simply become quieter, more disguised, more socially acceptable?

Today the systems may look more polished, more modern, more progressive on the surface. But the intentions behind many of them are not always innocent. In some ways, they may even be clearer now than before.

People are not always ignorant anymore. Sometimes they know exactly what they are doing.

And so I find myself wondering: do we really need to be balanced all the time?

I see videos of women interviewing people on the street. They ask simple questions about equality, about safety, about basic dignity. And sometimes the answers they receive are shocking. Cruel. Dismissive. Laughable.

Yet the interviewer stays calm. She nods. She responds politely. She tries to explain something.

And I admire that patience. I really do.

But part of me wonders how they do it.

How do they hear someone mock the fear women feel when walking home at night, and not feel the urge to say: Do you hear yourself? Do you understand how absurd and cruel that sounds?

How do they not feel that flash of anger? Or moreover how do they stay balanced through that?

Because I feel it all the time.

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Sometimes it appears in the smallest moments. When my sister shows me a video of some influencer with millions of followers laughing about women’s safety. Or another man confidently explaining that he would never allow his girlfriend to speak to another man on a podcast.

And my sister, still young, still trying to understand the world, sometimes says things like: maybe they can change. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way.

And I feel rage rise inside me so quickly that it almost surprises me.

Not at her — never at her. She is still learning. She is still forming her understanding of the world.

But at the fact that this kind of thinking exists so comfortably, so publicly, and so proudly.

And in those moments, I realize that the only reason I control my anger is because I want her to understand. I want her to think critically, not just react emotionally.

So I try to explain things calmly.

But the anger doesn’t disappear.

And that makes me wonder whether we have misunderstood something about anger itself.

We often treat anger as something that must be eliminated. Something embarrassing. Something childish. Something that weakens an argument.

But maybe anger is not always a failure of control.

Because sometimes, anger is not theoretical. It is immediate.

Right now, as I’m writing this, a bill concerning transgender persons has already been passed in the Lok Sabha, a bill that has been widely criticised for failing to truly protect the very community it claims to represent.

Instead of centering dignity, autonomy and self-identification, it introduces structures where identity can be scrutinised, where rights feel conditional and where the lived realities of transgender individuals are once again filtered through systems that have historically excluded them.

This is not a new struggle. It is layered on decades of marginalisation, violence and erasure that most of us will never fully understand.

And yet, here we are again, debating their right to exist with dignity.

At a time when the world is dealing with crises across every level economic, geopolitical, environmental the urgency with which control is exercised over already vulnerable communities feels difficult to ignore.

It feels like a pattern.

Because history has shown us this before:

when it is convenient, attention is redirected

and when it is easy, minorities are made into battlegrounds.

And in the middle of all of this, there are voices that refuse to stay measured.

Voices like Renuka Chowdhury and Jaya Bachchan, women who have stood in public spaces and chosen not to dilute their anger. Who have spoken sharply, loudly and without the politeness that is so often expected.

And I find myself not uncomfortable with that anger, but aligned with it.

Because in moments like these, anger begins to look less like a loss of control,

and more like a refusal to participate in silence.

Because if this doesn’t make us angry,

then what exactly will?

Maybe sometimes anger is simply a sign that you have recognized an injustice clearly enough that pretending to be calm would feel dishonest.

Of course, anger alone cannot build movements. It cannot build laws or institutions or long-term change. History shows that progress usually requires strategy, patience, and negotiation.

But history also shows something else.

Almost every major movement for justice began with people who were angry enough to refuse silence.

Without that anger, people often learn to tolerate things that should never have been tolerated.

So maybe the real question is not whether anger should exist.

Maybe the question is what we do with it.

Do we bury it so deeply that injustice becomes normal?

Or do we allow it to exist, not as blind rage, but as a reminder that some things in the world are still profoundly wrong?

Because sometimes I think the problem today is not that there is too much anger.

It might be that too many people have learned to live without it.

And perhaps that is why, somewhere inside me, I still believe that the world might need a few more of those so-called “bra-burning” women.

Not because destruction is the goal.

But because sometimes anger is the first step toward refusing to accept the world exactly as it is.

This might just be me figuring life out as I go, but one thing I’m certain about is this: I will never shame women or anyone for their anger.

We’ve heard it in a hundred different tones and disguises: she’s always angry, she’s too loud, she needs to calm down. But what if the anger isn’t the problem? What if it’s the response to a world that has refused to listen for far too long?

Sometimes, the shouting is necessary. Because if quiet explanations and polite requests were enough, they would have worked by now.

So maybe it’s time we stop shaming the very people who are trying to make this world more livable for all of us.

And to every strong, confident, outspoken woman today: don’t carry forward this quieter, more insidious form of internalised misogyny. Don’t consciously or unconsciously distance yourself from those who are fighting. Stand with them. Because their anger is not a weakness; it’s often the reason change begins at all and I assure you it’s not easy to be them.

and in no way do I mean we all need to shout, there is a place for everyone, I respect and the world needs everyone who is at least speaking out to make the world a better place in whatever way or form.

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But I am.

Because most of us believe jail is for “other people.”

Criminals. Villains. Monsters. The ones who look guilty even before the verdict. We think jail is a moral destination. A place you arrive at after failing at being a good person.

And we, of course, are good people.

We recycle. We pay taxes. We post stories about justice. We stand in queues. We follow rules we didn’t even write.

So jail feels… far.

Until it doesn’t.

The more I pay attention, the more I notice something uncomfortable: fear of jail is not evenly distributed. It does not sit in everyone’s chest the same way.

Some people live their entire lives never imagining themselves inside a cell. Power cushions them. Influence insulates them. Even allegations feel like public inconvenience, not existential threat.

And then there are others.

Students detained during protests.

Activists booked under sweeping laws.

Journalists questioned for writing.

Survivors who say they feel safer in custody than outside it because at least inside, someone is accountable for their safety.

That sentence alone should haunt us.

cc: pinterest

When prison feels safer than freedom, something is structurally upside down.

This is not about declaring who is guilty or innocent. Courts exist for that. Evidence exists for that.

This is about proximity.

Who grows up believing, “That could never happen to me”?

And who grows up knowing it absolutely could?

We tell ourselves jail is the consequence of bad behaviour.

But history, quiet, inconvenient history, shows it is often the consequence of being inconvenient to power.

History has shown us something else too: power rarely begins by locking people up.

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It begins by shrinking the space where people are allowed to think.

One of the clearest lessons from regimes that slid into authoritarianism is that control is rarely announced loudly at first. It happens quietly, through small shifts. Voices become inconvenient. Questions become suspicious. News becomes selective. And slowly, the institutions that are supposed to question power begin to echo it instead.

Media is one of the most powerful bridges between a society and its own reality. It is how people understand the world beyond their street, their city, their immediate lives. And when that bridge becomes distorted, through propaganda, fear or loyalty to power, something deeper begins to rot.

Films, news channels, public narratives, these are not just entertainment or information. They shape the moral imagination of a country. They tell people who the heroes are, who the villains are and what kind of anger is acceptable.

And when those narratives are manipulated, something dangerous happens: people stop questioning power and start questioning each other.

Another tactic appears quietly alongside it, the creation of a convenient enemy. A community, a religion, a caste, an ideology. Something that can absorb public anger while power remains untouched.

It is an old political trick: give people someone to blame and they will stop asking harder questions.

Questions about accountability.
Questions about justice.
Questions about who actually holds power.

And slowly, people begin to internalise something even more dangerous: the belief that their voices don’t matter.

That protesting is risky.
That asking questions is troublesome.
That silence is safer.

Once that belief settles into the bones of a society, the distance between an ordinary citizen and a prison cell no longer depends only on crime.

Sometimes it depends on whether they choose to speak.

The law is supposed to be blind. But blindness does not guarantee fairness. Sometimes it just guarantees selective sight.

And here’s the part that unsettles me the most:

I used to think the distance between me and jail was my morality.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe the distance is privilege.

Maybe it is visibility.

Maybe it is whether I am ever loud enough to be noticed.

Maybe it is whether what I write one day irritates the wrong person.

The illusion is comforting: “If I stay kind, stay lawful, stay quiet, I will be safe.”

But children have been beaten for demanding rights that already belonged to them. Families have stood against power and paid for it in ways that make prison look like protection.

So again I ask, not dramatically, not theatrically, but honestly:

How far am I from jail?

Not because I plan to commit a crime.

But because I’m beginning to understand that crime and consequence are not always twins.

Sometimes they’re distant relatives.

And sometimes, they’re strangers entirely.

Maybe the better question isn’t “How far am I from jail?”

Maybe it’s:

What kind of society decides who should be afraid of it?

There are groups that patrol parks in the name of “protecting culture.”

They interrupt consenting adults.

They shame couples.

They film them.

They claim moral guardianship over public space.

It is always framed as preservation. Sanskriti. Tradition. Decency.

But I find myself wondering — why does culture need surveillance to survive?

If the concern were truly public morality, wouldn’t the outrage be louder against harassment? Against men who catcall in broad daylight? Against violence that women quietly calculate into their daily routes home?

It is strange how selective righteousness can be.

Some forms of control are applauded as cultural duty.

Other forms of harm are normalised as “boys being boys.”

And that’s when the question of jail returns.

Who gets policed?

Who gets excused?

Who is labelled dangerous?

Who is labelled patriotic?

The answers are rarely random.

And let’s never forget, Law and morality are sadly not always aligned.

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Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind where someone is chasing you. Not the kind where the news flashes red and urgent.

The quiet kind.

The kind every child feels once in a while.

That sudden, painful, painfully real, thought:

One day, my mother will not be here.

And I don’t understand how that is a survivable thought.

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Every child has this fear. I refuse to believe they don’t. Maybe some bury it better. Maybe some grow out of it. Maybe some distract themselves with adulthood.

But somewhere inside, there is that small, terrified child who realises that the person who feels permanent… isn’t.

And I am the worst kind of that child.

Because I think about it more often than I should.

As strong as I am as a woman, I am the weakest when it comes to this. The most emotional. The most fragile.

I don’t understand how this life will ever, even in the tiniest sense, feel worth living without her in it.

People talk about loss like it’s something you endure. Like you carry it and move forward. They write posts about grief. They light candles. They survive.

But how?

How are you expected to move on when the person who built your entire emotional vocabulary is suddenly gone?

There is a hole in the heart when someone leaves.

But without your mother, it feels like the entire heart is gone.

What do you do with your toothbrush?
With your anger?
With your career?
With your ordinary Tuesday?

Who do you show your smallest achievements to?

Who do you collapse in front of?

I have never been the kind of person who wanted to fly far away. I always knew I would stay close to my family. Build a life, yes. Be ambitious, yes. But close.

Because everything I do — every single thing — is somehow for her.

Last week when the thought came again, I held my younger sister’s hand and told her: everything we do, every day, is for her. The way everything she did was for us.

She lost so much so young. She gave everything. Everything.

And sometimes I think — is there even a version of me without her beside me?

I can survive anything if she is there.

Anything.

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And that is not dependency. That is faith, my kind of faith, helping me get up every morning.

I have been my worst self with her. I have shouted. I have been impatient. I have chosen to be careless with my words because somewhere deep inside I know she will forgive me.

That safety is dangerous.

Because no one else in this world will love me like that. No one else will forgive me like that. No one else will carry me like that.

And I know how rare that is.

That’s what terrifies me.

Not death.

Not the future.

But the possibility that one day I will have to exist in a world where my mother does not.

Every child fears it.

Some of us just don’t pretend we don’t.

And maybe the only reason I am strong is because she is.

And when I think in reality, without people telling me the stupidest thing to ever exist, that is it’s a natural part of life, I don’t think there is a choice, I can not exist in a world without her.

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You can be kind.

You can be empathetic, gentle, polite, well-mannered, emotionally articulate.

You can be all the words people use when they want to feel morally settled.

And still

this is the question that has been sitting in my chest for days

are you a good person if you refuse to look at your privilege?

Because I know people like this. People I’ve known for years. People who have never done anything actively bad. They support their families. They show up. They are, on paper, good, good, good, good people. My instincts around people are usually reliable. They don’t scream danger. They don’t trigger alarm bells. So what is it that unsettles me?

It’s not cruelty.

It’s not malice.

It’s not even ignorance in the innocent sense.

It’s the choice.

The choice to not look.

Hi, I’m Drishti and I am privileged.

I grew up with education. With relative safety. With a family that, in many ways, cushioned me from the worst violences of the world. I can step out of my house on a Sunday night and expect to come back alive. That is not a personality trait. That is not merit. That is privilege.

But do you,

do you—recognise that you are a man?

Or a woman whose life has never brushed against the realities of women in marginalised communities?

Because let me say this slowly, without metaphors:

Every man has male privilege.

Even men from marginalised communities.

If you doubt that, go look at the women of those communities.

If you are a minority in a country, yes, you are underprivileged. But sit with the women who share your identity before you claim to speak for all of it. No—all men do not get to advocate for all men. No—all women do not get to advocate for all women. And no—no single human being gets to believe, comfortably and superficially, that they understand the whole world.

You live in a metropolitan city and tell me, gently, optimistically, that “things are getting better now.”

Are they?

Have you spoken to the girl who believes rape is not a tragedy but a certainty?

Who knows that her survival in her village depends on her silence?

Who understands that “justice” is not something meant for her body?

A minister of this country stands in Parliament and says—on record—that if rape is inevitable, a woman should enjoy it.

And still, you choose not to recognise your privilege.

I keep telling myself: He’s a nice person. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t realise.

But at what point does not-realising turn into not-wanting-to-know?

Are you still nice when you argue with me that feminism is outdated, that everything is equal now, that I should let it go?

Is it equal or are you simply insulated?

You ask me, almost amused, “What privilege?”

The privilege of riding your bike at 11 p.m. without calculating risk.

The privilege of existing freely and calling it normal.

The privilege of sitting at dinner and complaining that your wife needs to ask before buying shampoo and being tired of her purchases without hearing the absurdity echo back at you.

That is privilege.

So tell me

are you a nice person?

Or is the real question this:

do I lower my standards to keep believing you are?

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It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t indifference either. I just never felt particularly enchanted by the idea of 18 the way the world seems to be. I wanted a grand birthday, not because I was becoming an “adult,” but because I wanted all my favourite people in the same room.

People keep their worlds separate, school friends here, family there, old friends somewhere else and I understand why. But my world has always felt most like mine when all of them collide in one place. That, to me, felt more meaningful than any milestone number.

Still, something strange happened.

Without a list, a bucket list began completing itself.

My mother pushed me to learn how to drive. I resisted, then fell in love with it and suddenly I had a license, a car and this quiet sense of independence I didn’t even know I was craving.

I started therapy — which might be the bravest, most tender thing I’ve done for myself. Realising that I could ask for help, that I was allowed to be confused, that my struggles were valid, shifted something deep inside me. It made me bolder. Less afraid of myself. More willing to step out of my comfort zone.

I started writing. My own Substack. A space that slowly became a direction, a purpose, a place where my thoughts could breathe.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I started something that would unexpectedly shape my year — PeaceOut🌸.

PeaceOut — something born from honesty, not hustle

PeaceOut didn’t begin as a business plan. It began as a conversation between me and my best friend, long distance, but emotionally closer than most people I see every day.

She comes from a world of discipline, manifestation, hard work and relentless self-belief. I come from a world of questions, empathy, overthinking and trying to be kind without losing myself.

Somewhere between her structure and my sensitivity, PeaceOut was born.

We didn’t want to create just another “self-help brand.” We wanted to create something that felt real, lived-in and tested by our own lives first. Every guide, workbook, or piece of content we’ve put out has come from something that has genuinely worked for us, something that changed our thinking, our habits, or our sense of self in a meaningful way.

PeaceOut isn’t about pretending everything is perfect. It’s about learning how to make peace with yourself in an imperfect world.

It has also taught me things I didn’t expect about leadership, creativity, collaboration, discipline, patience and how different my mind works when I’m building something that matters to me.

In many ways, PeaceOut has been as much about my own growth as it has been about helping others.

( Connect with us if you resonate with any of this, we’ll be lucky to have you with us in our journey - Peace out)

Why February — and why self-love matters

This month, our focus is self-love, and it might be my favourite campaign we’ve ever done.

I genuinely believe that you cannot be fully honest with others if you are at war with yourself. You cannot give real love if you secretly don’t feel worthy of it. You cannot show up for the world if you are constantly abandoning yourself.

Self-love is not vanity. It is the groundwork of everything, relationships, ambition, creativity, healing, even kindness.

You will live your entire life with yourself. You will wake up with yourself, think with yourself, make mistakes with yourself and, eventually, grow with yourself. You are, quite literally, your longest relationship.

So this month, through PeaceOut’s content and our upcoming self-love workbook, our intention is simple:

Not to tell people how to live but to help them understand themselves better. To slow down. To reflect. To gently return to themselves when life feels overwhelming.

If even one person feels a little lighter, a little clearer, or a little more at peace with who they are, then this work has been worth it.

Coming back to 18

Now, as I sit here, still three weeks away from 19, I look back and smile at the irony of it all.

I didn’t manifest any of this. I didn’t write it down on a vision board. I didn’t meticulously plan my growth.

And yet, it happened.

So yes — manifestation works. Vision boards work. Bucket lists work.

But if something isn’t on them, it doesn’t mean you can’t still achieve it. Sometimes life gives you things you didn’t even know you were ready for.

Maybe the real magic is not in planning your life perfectly but in trusting yourself enough to walk into whatever unfolds.

PeaceOut began that way.
My writing began that way.
My growth began that way.

And I suspect much more will too.

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myself and my people.

Not in a selfish sense. In a moral one.

I have to live inside my own head. I have to sleep with my decisions. So whatever I do has to sit right with my moral compass, with my principles, my understanding of humanity, my instinct for empathy, kindness and respect. That line isn’t something I tiptoe around. I don’t have to wake up every morning and remind myself not to cross it. I rarely even come close.

It’s instinctive. It’s unconscious. It’s natural.

And I don’t know how else one is supposed to live.

Which is why I’ve never understood this idea, casually offered in conversations, almost jokingly, that without religion or law, people would simply start stealing, killing, raping, destroying.

Every time someone says, “But if there were no religion, what would stop you?” I’m stunned.

What would stop me?

Empathy.

Humanity.

A conscience.

The basic understanding that another human life is not mine to violate.

The fact that people need religion to not murder, or law to not marry children, is not a defence of faith or order. It is an admission of ethical emptiness. And we don’t talk about this enough, how disturbing it is that morality has been outsourced so completely that without instruction, some people claim they would collapse into violence.

Where is your head at?

We talk endlessly, especially in India, about culture, values, brotherhood, kindness, coexistence. And yet, this country is governed not by ethics but by religious politics. Not by conscience but by optics. Not by responsibility but by slogans.

How small is that?

How dishonourable?

We are living in a moment where Parliament can spend ten hours debating a song—Vande Mataram—while the capital of this country is quite literally choking. Not metaphorically. Literally. The air is unbreathable. And if you think this is only an urban problem, you haven’t looked beyond the cities at all.

We love to believe India is developing. As an economics student, let me say this clearly: development cannot be GDP. It simply cannot be. If you believe economic growth alone equals development, you are either misinformed or actively choosing not to know better.

And if our leaders believe this, it is not just disgraceful. It is dangerous.

Because while balance sheets grow, we are socially collapsing.

Take women, for instance. People love to say empowerment is happening. That change is underway. But empowerment is not a slogan; it’s a ratio. Compare the effort women put in to survive against the support they receive and the truth becomes obvious.

There is no real backing. Only branding.

A leader rises to power on the back of Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao—a slogan that wins trust and votes. And a few years later, under that same leadership, women are quietly excluded from diplomatic spaces because a visiting regime, known globally for its brutality towards women, “requested it.”

And we complied.

This is how weak we are.

Under the cover of geopolitics and economic development, we shake hands with inhumanity. And nobody fights it, not really, because generations of men have learned to accept the bare minimum. They’ve accepted their fate. Their place. Their powerlessness dressed up as pragmatism.

So they pray.

They justify.

They vote for people who excuse mass violence.

And they call it realism.

Everything around us is a façade. Development is a performance. Progress is a press release. Go to tier-two and tier-three cities and the illusion collapses entirely. Even in urban spaces, the mask slips, dowry still thrives, women are still traded, marginalised sections are still exploited, silence is still demanded.

We celebrate startups while normalising burnout. We’re told work-life balance is a weakness. People are asked to work more, for less, while unemployment rises, infrastructure rots, air poisons lungs and ministers lie openly, without consequence, on public platforms.

This isn’t just incompetence. It’s decay.

We call ourselves the third-largest democracy in the world. Maybe numerically. But ethically? We are nowhere close. A democracy without accountability, without truth, without conscience, is a shell.

And all of this is funded by the hard-earned money of the middle class, by parents who did everything right, followed every rule, trusted every promise, while Parliament debates symbols instead of survival.

So no, I don’t need religion to be good.

And I don’t need law to tell me not to harm.

If you do, that’s not faith.

That’s a failure of conscience.

And that, more than anything else, is the state of this country.

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