No reason in particular.

I first came across Hum Dekhenge while studying Partition literature back in university. We read it, discussed it, moved on, and I remember thinking it was beautiful without fully understanding why. Like a lot of good literature, it refused to stay where I had left it. It kept returning over the years, in concerts, documentaries, performances, conversations, films, and now, once again, in public discourse.

I figured I should finally give it the attention it deserves. Today feels as good a day as any, entirely coincidentally, of course.

There are very few poems that manage to escape the time they were written in. Fewer still that survive multiple regimes, multiple borders and multiple interpretations, all while somehow saying the same thing.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge is one of them.

Written in 1979 under General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Pakistan, the poem was never simply about replacing one religion with another, or one ruler with another. It was, at its core, a poem about the impermanence of power. Like much of Faiz’s work, it borrows deeply from Islamic imagery, not as theology but as literary language, reclaiming symbols that authoritarian regimes often monopolise. The mountains of oppression would crumble, false idols would fall, and ordinary people would inherit the earth. It is less a religious poem than it is a political one written in the language its oppressor understood best and thats precisely why it travelled so well.

To understand Hum Dekhenge is to understand the tradition it belongs to. Faiz was writing within Urdu’s long poetic inheritance where the divine is rarely just divine, where wine is not always wine, where the beloved is often not a beloved at all, and where metaphor routinely disguises political resistance. Poetry in South Asia has always spoken in layers. It says one thing and means three others. Under censorship and authoritarianism, that was not simply an artistic choice but often a political necessity. When language is watched, symbolism becomes survival.

This is true far beyond Faiz. Art produced under repression rarely announces itself directly. It develops a vocabulary of allegory, myth, religion and symbolism because those are the languages that can slip past power. You see it in Latin American literature, in Soviet cinema, in protest music across the world and in countless traditions where artists learned that metaphor could often travel where plain speech could not.Great literature has a funny habit of outliving the moment that produced it. It stops belonging to its author and starts belonging to whoever finds themselves inside it. And great literature often finds itself being rediscovered by the internet every once in a while.

Not always by reading it, of course. By extracting one line, removing everything around it and asking it to answer questions it was never written to answer.

This time, it was “Bas naam rahega Allah ka.”

Reading that line in isolation is a little like reading "To be, or not to be" as a poem about decision-making while ignoring Hamlet. A single line can rarely carry the architecture of an entire work. Poems create meaning cumulatively. Images speak to one another, metaphors build upon previous metaphors and symbols gather weight through repetition. Lift one brick out of the wall and you no longer have the building.

A line that has existed for nearly half a century cannot suddenly became the entire poem and its funnier because the poem itself argues against exactly this kind of absolutism.

Read within the poem, the line is not an assertion of religious supremacy. It is the culmination of a long metaphorical tradition where God represents what outlives earthly power. Faiz is writing under a military dictatorship that weaponised religion for political legitimacy, and he responds by reclaiming that very language. The “Allah” in the poem is not a call for a theocratic state. It is a reminder that no ruler, no empire and no regime is permanent enough to mistake itself for the divine.

This is hardly unusual in literature.

Milton writes through Christian theology. Dante imagines an entire moral universe through heaven and hell. T.S. Eliot borrows biblical language to write about modern alienation. We rarely mistake these works for sermons because we instinctively understand that literature borrows from religion without necessarily becoming religious instruction. Symbolism is one of art's oldest languages. Contemporary poetry deserves the same generosity.

What fascinates me, though, is how dramatically context changes reception.

A poem that once represented resistance began being called propaganda. Anti-Hindu. Anti-national. Dangerous. The metaphors that had been celebrated as poetic were suddenly read as literal political declarations. The same ambiguity that had allowed the poem to transcend borders now became evidence against it.

Literature has always suffered from this strange fate. We ask poems to behave like policy documents, stripping them of metaphor until all that remains is accusation.

The irony becomes even sharper when you remember that many of the very audiences who later dismissed Hum Dekhenge had, only a short while earlier, embraced it emotionally through popular culture. One of the poem’s most recognisable modern renditions featured prominently in The Kashmir Files. The melody, the verses and the emotional weight were celebrated in one context and condemned in another. The poem did not change. The political location of its performance did.

Perhaps that says less about Faiz and more about us.

We have become strangely uncomfortable with literary ambiguity. Every metaphor must declare allegiance. Every symbol must choose a side. Every poem must be flattened until it behaves like a slogan.

Perhaps that is the larger purpose of art during moments of uncertainty. It preserves complexity when public discourse demands certainty. It insists on metaphor in a world obsessed with slogans. It asks us to sit with ambiguity when everyone else wants immediate conclusions. Good art has never been useful because it tells us what to think it is useful because it refuses to let us stop thinking because poems were never meant to survive by being literal, they survive because every generation insists on reading itself into them. Hum Dekhenge has always been an uncomfortable poem, not because it belongs to one ideology, but because it refuses to let power feel permanent. And power, regardless of who holds it, has rarely enjoyed being reminded that history is longer than any government.

What happens when people remember that nothing built by human hands lasts forever? A regime can claim a poem, a movement can reclaim it, a nation can argue over it, but the poem simply waits for the next generation to find itself inside it.

Power is temporary. Poetry, if it is lucky, rarely is.

Hedonia is the easy one. It is pleasure, comfort, instant happiness, the little dopamine hits we chase because they make the present moment softer. It is ordering the food instead of cooking, buying the thing instead of saving, staying in the familiar because the unknown feels scary. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Life is not meant to be some endless punishment where every choice has to be productive and meaningful. Sometimes you need the lazy day, the unnecessary purchase, the night out when you know you have work tomorrow. But somewhere between comfort and avoidance there is a very thin line and that is where clean pain and dirty pain come in.

There is no version of life where you somehow unlock a secret ending where nothing hurts anymore so the question is not whether you will experience pain or not, its which pain you are choosing.

Clean pain is the pain that comes from doing the thing you know you need to do. It is telling someone the truth even when you know it might change everything or leaving something that you have outgrown even when you still love it, its disappointing people because you finally chose yourself, starting something new and being embarrassingly bad at it and opening the blank document and staring at the terrifying emptiness of the first sentence and saving money while everyone else is going out. It is going home when the party is still happening because you know tomorrow you will thank yourself.

Clean pain is uncomfortable because it asks something from you. It asks you to sit with the temporary discomfort of choosing your future over your present and also endlessly questioning it.

Dirty pain is different.

Dirty pain is what happens when you avoid clean pain. It is staying in the relationship because leaving feels harder, only to slowly become someone you do not recognise. It is avoiding a conversation until the silence becomes heavier than the words ever would have been, it is pretending to be okay because admitting you are not means you have to change something, it is living beyond your means because looking successful feels better than actually being secure, allowing people to know a version of you that is easier for them to accept but harder for you to live with, watching your own world become smaller because you keep protecting the fear that is keeping you stuck.

Dirty pain doesn’t announce itself as often.

Clean pain arrives loudly. It is the scary phone call, the difficult conversation, the first attempt where you fail horribly.

Dirty pain is quieter, it sits beside you, gets cozy, becomes routine, becomes “just how things are.” And suddenly months or years have passed and you realise you were not avoiding pain, you were just choosing the slower version of it.

I think a lot of us misunderstand comfort by thinking comfort means something that makes us feel good. But sometimes comfort is just something familiar. A cage can feel comfortable if you have lived in it long enough, it is very similar to Stockholm syndrome, you stay fucked up so long you fall in love with it. A bad habit can feel comfortable because at least you know what to expect.

A version of yourself you have outgrown can feel comfortable because becoming someone new means admitting the old version cannot come with you.

And maybe that is why change feels so painful because every new version of yourself requires a small goodbye, you have to mourn the person who stayed too long. The person who was scared, waiting, in a dilemma of choices, frozen by indecisivness, stuck in a loop of choosing temporary relief over long-term peace.

And I personally think there is something extremely beautiful about choosing clean pain even if it feels stupid sometimes especially if it feels stupid sometimes.

Because the thing about clean pain is that it almost never feels like a big philosophical decision in the moment. Nobody wakes up and thinks, today I will choose personal growth over comfort or oh I will bravely face my fears and become the best version of myself coz ew.

It is usually much smaller than that. It is the “do it for the plot” decisions and the “what is the worst that could happen” conversations. It is sending the message, applying for the thing, booking the ticket, walking into the room, saying the thing you have been rehearsing in your head for three weeks just to get it over with. And that is exactly why clean pain is so interesting to me because from the outside it looks like courage, but from the inside it is usually just a person convincing themselves that future them can handle whatever current them is about to do.

I have always been the kind of person who does that.

The kind of person who thinks, okay, let’s just have the conversation, let’s just take the step, we will figure it out later because realistically, five years from now this will not be the giant impossible thing it feels like today and neither is it dare i say ‘that deep’, it will just be a tiny dot somewhere in the timeline- a funny story, a lesson i learnt omg i am not doing that again, a random chapter you barely remember and that is why i will always propagate clean pain. You are not choosing pain because you enjoy suffering, you are choosing it because you trust that you are capable of surviving it.

Because if sharks can survive millions of years of existence, if they can keep swimming through changing oceans and different worlds and somehow still make it here, surely I can survive a few bad decisions, surely I can survive a crashout, I have only a million albums to help me through it, surely I can survive something not working out, won’t be my first rodeo, surely I can survive the embarrassing moments, the failed attempts, the backfires, the things that looked like disasters in the moment but eventually just became stories I tell i’ve only survived a million of them.

Maybe we give pain too much power, we treat every mistake like a permanent scar instead of what it actually is, a little proof that we lived (insert ‘i lived’ by One Republic and that one line from ‘Lush Life’)

And end of the day, the truth is, every version of yourself you love now was built by someone who once made a decision without knowing the outcome, who took the risk, someone who looked stupid and got it wrong.

I think its the more self-respectful way the more honest way it keeps you moving instead of having you grounded in something shitty and stale. I would rather have pain but know it’ll get better than have it better and know I will face pain for all of this and again pain is not even scary if you know it’s atleast taking you somewhere?

The pain that, one day, you look back on and realise was the exact thing that saved you.

(this could also totally be a playlist damn I can already think of so many songs to add)

And I don’t mean sad songs in the casual “this is kinda upsetting :(” sense. I mean songs that alter your emotional chemistry for four minutes straight. Songs that make you grieve relationships you’ve never had, people you’ve never met, versions of yourself that never even existed, songs that hit some strange evolutionary weak spot in the human brain and suddenly you’re staring out of windows like you survived war? yeah THAT.

There are levels to this genre too because not all sad songs function the same way.

First, the emotional warfare classics starting strong.

The Night We Met by Lord Huron genuinely sounds like remembering something too late, like nostalgia weaponised into sound.

Before You Go by Lewis Capaldi somehow turns guilt into a full-body experience and makes you feel responsible for things that are not even remotely your fault.

And Glimpse of Us by JOJI might actually be one of the most devastating songs released in the past few years because it understands that the worst kind of heartbreak is not explosive grief but emotional displacement, loving someone while your brain is still haunted by someone else.

Then comes the deeply underrated category of songs that sound soft and harmless until you actually listen to the lyrics and suddenly your week is RUINED.

The Good Side by Troye Sivan absolutely destroys me because it approaches heartbreak through guilt instead of pain, through the terrifying realisation that maybe you were the one who got away easier. (thanks 13 Reasons Why for this banger)

Too Good at Goodbyes by Sam Smith turns emotional detachment into self-defence and somehow makes avoidance sound romantic? Like oh I definitely don’t have commitment issues.

If I Could Fly feels by One Direction like emotional surrender disguised as a love song while Fool’s Gold by One direction is genuinely one of the greatest songs ever written about doomed devotion, loving someone while already knowing you are losing yourself in the process? and well, romanticizing that?

And then there are the songs that lowkey hit harder than they should because they sneak up on you emotionally.

Mercy by Shawn Mendes is technically dramatic radio pop but there’s something so desperate and adolescent about it that it perfectly captures the intensity of feeling too much too early.

Where Do Broken Hearts Go by (yes, again) One Direction somehow sounds hopeful and devastated at the exact same time which is honestly one of the hardest emotional balances to pull off. (my gs)

Ghost of You by 5 Seconds of Summer (I am telling you guys boybands have it figured out) should actually be studied because why does a stadium-rock song hurt like that??

And Drag Path by Twenty One Pilots feels like emotional exhaustion stretched into atmosphere, the kind of song that sounds like trying to keep moving while something inside you is actively collapsing, loud devastation but also slow-burning implosion and somehow that’s worse?

Isimo has that very specific Bleachers quality of sounding nostalgic while the moment is still actively happening which is one of the most painful emotional textures music can create.

Stop Crying Your Heart Out by Oasis feels like someone gently helping you survive yourself.

Save Your Tears by The Weeknd is fascinating because it hides devastation inside synth-pop production, which honestly fun because now you can dance while emotionally collapsing.

And then we arrive at the songs that are no longer just songs but entire emotional landmarks.

Another Love by Tom Odell has become synonymous with yearning at this point, hearing the opening piano alone is enough to psychologically destabilise half the internet.

Piano Man by Billy Joel (had to) is less about sadness and more about collective loneliness, people carrying tiny private disappointments while trying to survive another evening.

Rolling in the Deep and Set Fire to the Rain by Adele transformed heartbreak into spectacle, grief so massive it becomes operatic.

The Man Who Can’t Be Moved by The Script remains one of the greatest songs ever written about pathetic public yearning and I mean that as the highest compliment possible.

And Only the Brave by Louis Tomlinson feels quieter than everything else here, not even a song just a touchy feely poem almost fragile, like loneliness sitting very very still with heartache.

Also yes See You Again still emotionally destroys me but I do have a documented Paul Walker bias so I never stood a chance with that one anyway.

What fascinates me about songs like these is that they all understand sadness differently. Some scream, some whisper, some romanticize grief while others dissect it clinically, some sound angry, some sound numb, some sound like they have already accepted the ending before the grief even began. But the best sad songs all eventually accomplish the same thing: they make you mourn. Not always people either sometimes versions of yourself sometimes time itself sometimes the terrifying fact that everything keeps moving no matter how badly you want a moment to stay.

Anyway that’s enough psychological damage for one post.

Up next: songs I genuinely think are the best songs ever created, which is somehow an even more dangerous conversation and is definitely creating fights

For those of you who do not spend your free time consuming deeply unhinged Instagram and TikTok content, let me catch you up on what might be the funniest ongoing internet phenomenon right now.

There is a snake named Tofu.

Tofu’s owner used to make normal snake content until one day she accidentally discovered that Tofu became visibly aggressive every single time Markiplier appeared on screen. At first, people assumed it had to be something explainable. Maybe the snake was reacting to certain frequencies in his voice, maybe it was the movement on screen, maybe it was contrast, volume, colour theory, male pattern aura, who knows. So naturally, as all great scientific minds do, they began testing the hypothesis.

Different YouTubers? Nothing.
Brainrot edits? Fine.
Rock music? Fine.
Random men yelling? Fine.
Other loud content creators? Completely normal.

But the second Markiplier appeared, Tofu was ready for war.

And THEN other snake owners started trying it for fun.

Which would have been funny enough already except now MULTIPLE python owners have come forward saying their snakes reacted the exact same way. Not mildly. Aggressively and consistently like there is some sort of cold-blooded community alert system being triggered.

And now, if the internet was not already spiralling enough, a random chameleon has apparently joined the movement too??

At this point we are beyond coincidence and entering what I can only describe as reptilian pattern recognition.

Which leaves us with several possible theories that I will now with my brilliant journalism skills explore:

Theory 1: The reptiles know something we don’t

Historically, animals sensing danger before humans has never ended well for humanity. Dogs bark at empty corners, cats stare into dimensions we cannot perceive, birds disappear before natural disasters.

Who are we to dismiss the possibility that snakes have simply identified something about Markiplier that our mammalian brains are unequipped to process?

I personally think we should remain open-minded.

Theory 2: Markiplier committed an unforgivable crime against reptile-kind

Maybe somewhere in 2014 he unknowingly offended an ancient snake deity. Maybe there was an incident. Maybe a reptile convention went horribly wrong. Maybe this is karmic retribution unfolding slowly across ecosystems.

There is simply not enough investigation being done here!

Theory 3: Reptiles reject charisma

This is not my strongest theory currently.

Because what if reptiles, creatures historically associated with stillness, calculation, and ancient survival instincts, simply perceive YouTuber charisma differently than humans do?

Maybe what humans interpret as “friendly internet guy energy,” snakes interpret as deeply suspicious overstimulation.

Maybe Markiplier’s aura frequency is fundamentally incompatible with reptilian nervous systems.

Maybe Tofu is not angry. Maybe Tofu is overwhelmed?

Theory 4: This is the beginning of interspecies discourse

First the snakes. Then the pythons. Now the chameleon.

How long before geckos pick sides?

What happens if bearded dragons start reacting?

At what point do we involve scientists?

And most importantly, has anyone checked how crocodiles feel?

The funniest part of this entire thing is how quickly the internet collectively agreed this was worth investigating. No one said “this is stupid, stop.” Instead everyone immediately went yes actually let me test whether my snake also has beef with Markiplier.

Which honestly says beautiful things about humanity.

People love mystery. People love patterns. And more than anything, people love participating in completely unnecessary collective investigations with absolutely zero stakes. (me being the most interested obvs)

This is community, this is science, this is culture., this is fashion is art.

And frankly I think I am so emotionally invested in this at this point that I should legally be allowed to call myself a journalist.

Until further developments emerge from the reptile community, I will remain attentive to the situation.

What do you guys think the snakes know?

“Forgetful in his fear, alas, he looked back.”

There is something almost unfair about reducing this story to a mistake, as if it was just one wrong move, one moment of weakness, one second that could have been avoided

But it is not just about what happens, it is about why it happens, the fear, the need to know, the inability to trust something you cannot see, because there is something deeply human about that instinct, to turn around, to check, to confirm, to make sure what you love is still there

Even when you are told not to
Especially when you are told not to

This is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus is not just any man, he is a musician so extraordinary that his music can move everything, not metaphorically, literally, trees lean in, rivers pause, even stones soften, Eurydice is his wife and like most Greek myths happiness does not last very long, she dies suddenly after being bitten by a snake

And Orpheus does something that people do not do, he refuses to accept it, he goes to the underworld

He walks into a place meant only for the dead and plays his music for Hades and Persephone and for a moment even they are moved, they agree to give Eurydice back to him but with one condition, he must walk out of the underworld with her behind him and he cannot turn back to look at her until they both reach the surface

He agrees, he walks, he almost makes it

And then just before the end, he turns

She disappears, this time forever

At a surface level this reads like a very simple moral tale about I don’t know, patience or trust, do not look back, follow instructions and you will be rewarded?

But that reading feels almost too neat for a story that has survived this long and sits this close to my heart.

Because the condition itself is strange, it asks for something very specific, not loyalty, not love, not even sacrifice, it asks for restraint in the face of uncertainty, it asks someone to believe without proof, to continue forward without reassurance, to trust that what they love is still there without turning to confirm it, in a way it is less a test of love and more a test of control. And Orpheus is not a character built for control, he is built for excess, the kind of excess that spills, that refuses containment, his music is excessive, his grief is excessive, the very act of going to the underworld is excessive, everything about him operates at the far end of feeling.

So placing him in a situation that demands calm, measured restraint is almost contradictory.

You can read this through a more psychological lens too, the entire myth hinges on the act of looking, the need to see as a way of confirming reality, love here is tied to visibility, if I cannot see you are you still there, if I cannot verify your presence can I trust it?

That anxiety feels very familiar even now

And then there is Eurydice.

She is often treated as passive in retellings but there is another way to read her role, she knows the terms of the deal, she understands the condition and more importantly she KNOWS Orpheus.

Which means the ending is not a shock to her in the same way it is framed for us.

How artists keep returning to the same moment

Every artist seems obsessed with a different second of this story, some paint the walk, some paint the turn, some paint the loss, no one paints the part where he decides not to look back because that version of the story does not exist.

Take Ary Scheffer’s Orpheus and Eurydice, it is all drama, the exact second of collapse, Eurydice is already slipping away, her body fading, her hand reaching but not quite making it, Orpheus is turned fully, completely, no ambiguity left, the tragedy is not impending, it has already happened, the painting does not ask will he turn, it shows you what it costs that he did.

And then look at Frederic Leighton’s version, it is quieter, softer, almost more restrained, Eurydice is pulling away, there is distance, there is hesitation, it feels like the moment is stretching, like time itself is reluctant to move forward, but even here the inevitability is intact, you can feel it, the ending is already decided even if the painting lingers in the in between.

While there are countless direct depictions of Orpheus and Eurydice, artists returning again and again to the same moment of turning, there are also works that seem to echo the story without ever confirming it outright. Paintings that hold the same tension, the same almost-touch, the same sense of something slipping away just as it is being held. They are not officially tied to the myth, not labelled as such, but they carry its emotional residue so strongly that it feels impossible not to read them through it. So I am going to include them anyway, not as strict interpretations, but as extensions of the same feeling.

The painting depicts a couple embracing each other, their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in a style influenced by the contemporary Art Nouveau style. the painting ahs various interpretations: it has also been argued that in this picture Klimt represented the moment Apollo kisses Daphne following the Metamorphoses of Ovid narrative.

But art historians have also suggested that Klimt depicts the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. More specifically, Klimt seems to be showing the exact moment when Orpheus turns around to caress Eurydice and loses his love forever. As shown in this painting, the woman being held is slightly translucent, indicating a fading away or disappearance as told in the story.

Oh and then there are the retellings, the ones you live through

I had the chance to watch ‘The Gods The Gods The Gods’ live, a modern retelling by Wright and Grainger, and it did something strange to the story, it pulled it out of mythology and placed it right in front of you.

It was not a stage in the traditional sense, it was immersive, the performers circling you, music building and dropping, spoken word slipping into song, a kind of gig theatre where myth meets real life.

And I remember sitting there hugging my knees, the sea somewhere in the distance, the sky turning that very specific shade of blue, there was a cold breeze and the music was loud enough that you could feel it in your chest but soft enough that it felt like it was speaking directly to you.

And I cried..

Because when you watch this story live, when you know exactly what is coming and you still hope somehow it changes, you realise how deeply it is wired into us (or me)

Here’s a glimpse of the kind of performance it is:
Watch a snippet of the performance

my problem with the “i would not turn back” people

This is the part that always gets me-

Every time this story comes up there is always someone who says I would not have turned back, I would have just kept walking.

And I get the instinct, it feels like the correct answer, the rational answer but it also completely misses the point.

If you were Orpheus you would turn back and if you truly would not then you could never be Orpheus!

Because the same person who has the audacity to walk into the underworld, to stand in front of gods and ask for the impossible is also the person who cannot tolerate that final stretch of not knowing.

You do not get that kind of courage without getting the crack that comes with it.

A calmer more disciplined version of him might have succeeded but that version would have never made the journey in the first place, the excess of grief and love and yearning and longing is exactly what made him cross worlds and you think that man would just walk out without turning back for the one soul he came for??

and please, Eurydice knew.

The other interpretation that bothers me is when people say it is tragic because she was so close, that if only he had waited a few more seconds they would have made it out.

But what if that is not the tragedy?

What if the point is not that they almost escaped but that they were never going to?

Eurydice sees Orpheus again after death and in that moment she knows exactly who he is, not just the man who loved her but the man who came all this way for her.

And she also knows what that kind of love does.

It pushes and yearns and crosses lines and does the impossible but at the same time it doubts, it needs, it breaks.

So when he turns it is not just a failure, it is confirmation.

She dies again yes but she dies having seen the full extent of his love, in the exact way he exists in the world, intense, overwhelming and unable to hold itself back at the very end.

She does not leave with him but she leaves knowing.

And what we leave with is the story

For me this story has never been about patience or obedience but about how love behaves when it is pushed into spaces that demand it to be something else.

The condition asks love to act like logic, to be steady, measured, unquestioning but love is rarely any of those things.

It wants proof, it wants reassurance, it wants to turn around and check just one last time and sometimes that is exactly what ruins it and also exactly what makes it what it is.

And another simple point we ignore is that this is a Greek story and Greek myths do not treat excess kindly, they punish it, they always have, so the moment Orpheus and Eurydice loved the way they did, intensely, completely, excessively, it was already a tragedy, the ending was just a matter of time catching up.

Because a version of love that never turns back might be more successful

But it would also be something else entirely

You do not get the kind of love that walks into the underworld without also getting the kind that turns back.

And then came what people are now calling Bieberchella. (mad fomo btw)

Justin Bieber’s appearance, or rather presence, split the internet almost instantly. One side dismissed it as lazy, underwhelming, almost unserious, people saying that if they wanted to watch him scroll YouTube and half-sing old songs, they would not have paid that much money to stand in a desert. The criticism wasn’t entirely unfounded, to be fair, it didn’t feel like a “performance” in the traditional sense.

But the other side read it completely differently.

For them, it was absurd in the best way, almost self-aware. The idea that he got on stage, played videos of himself spiralling, leaned into the chaos, and let the audience carry entire songs felt less like laziness and more like a strange kind of cultural confidence. It was funny, intimate and almost a meme performance with people saying things like “justin bieber proved that a guy loves nothing more than show you his favourite youtube videos”

While they are both completely fair and justified takes, I think both readings miss something larger.

Because what actually happened was not about effort but power.

A YouTube-sing-along concert, in any other context, would collapse instantly. It would feel hollow and even embarrassing. But here, it worked and not just worked, it mobilised. It pulled people in, online and offline, into the same emotional frequency.

That only happens when the artist is bigger than the performance.

This is what separates a pop star from an artist and I don’t mean that as a value judgement, but as a structural distinction.

A pop star operates at the level of collective memory.

When Bieber stood there and let the crowd take over, he wasn’t outsourcing effort, he was activating something pre-existing. Every lyric already lived in the audience. Every beat already had history attached to it. The performance was not being built in real time, it was being remembered. He literally pulled the nostalgia card and won everyone over and created this sense of fomo so strong it united everyone?

That is not something newer artists, however talented, can replicate yet because they don’t have time on their side.

The recent resurgence of Hannah Montana, the nostalgia cycles, the re-emergence of early 2010s pop culture aesthetics, the entire ‘2026 is the new 2016’, all of this points to something deeper than trend cycles. It points to a generational need to return to moments where identity felt simpler, more cohesive, more shared.

And Bieber sits at the centre of that.

The Bieber Fever era was not just about music. It was about saturation. He was everywhere, radio, YouTube, school conversations, fan wars, Tumblr edits, early stan culture. He existed at a scale where liking him or hating him was still a form of participation and that level of ubiquity is almost impossible now in the times of cancel culture and woke culture.

Today’s media landscape is too fragmented. Audiences are niche, algorithms are personalised, virality is fast but shallow. Artists can be huge, but rarely singular. There is no monoculture in the way there used to be which is why moments like this feel so disproportionate because they briefly reconstruct that monoculture.

For a few hours, everyone is watching the same clips, having the same arguments, singing the same songs. Whether you thought it was lazy or genius, you were still there, reacting to the same thing at the same time as everyone else and THAT is cultural gravity.

And nostalgia is the mechanism that enables it.

Nostalgia is often dismissed as regression, as creative stagnation, as evidence that culture has run out of new ideas. But that reading ignores its affective power. Nostalgia is not just about the past, it is a form of continuity that allows people to reconnect with earlier versions of themselves, to feel coherence across time.

When Bieber sings old songs, or doesn’t even sing them fully, when the crowd fills in the gaps, what is happening is not just performance, it is collective remembering. The gaps are the point, they prove that the music no longer belongs to him alone which is why calling it lazy feels insufficient because effort is not the metric here. THE SHEER IMPACT IS. And impact, in this case, came from presence, history, and emotional residue.

This also explains why people described it as healing.

Not because the set itself was technically perfect, but because it reactivated something dormant. The same way the return of Hannah Montana tapped into childhood identity, Bieber’s set tapped into adolescence, into early internet culture, into a time when pop felt central rather than optional. He may not be the “last” male pop star in a literal sense, but he is certainly one of the last to emerge from a system that could produce that level of collective fixation.

Because what Bieberchella ultimately revealed is not that audiences have lower standards, or that performance doesn’t matter anymore, but that certain artists transcend the need to prove themselves through performance alone. They have already done the work and they exist as memory, as myth, as shared emotional infrastructure which today? not happening, if I’m not a hardcore fan of say chappel roan I will not know her music but EVERYONE online and offline knew what came after ‘THAT SHOULD BE ME-’

It was messy and unserious, it was a man on stage half-singing and playing YouTube videos but he still held an entire audience, and the internet, in the palm of his hand.

And just like that Coachella ended up being known as Bieberchella.

The evidence is disturbingly consistent.

We have Lightning McQueen, my first crush, whose entire early personality is built on self-mythologising arrogance, “I just never thought I couldn’t do it.”. Buzz Lightyear, whose confidence borders on delusion before it becomes vulnerability. Tony Stark, arguably the blueprint for the charismatic narcissist whose ego is inseparable from his charm. Bucky Barnes, quieter but defined by an intense, self-contained aura that draws attention without asking for it, he doesn’t speak much, but he moves like a man built to endure. The Superman portrayed by Henry Cavill, who exists in that rare category of mythic masculinity that feels both distant and strangely intimate.

There are so many more- Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger in ‘10 things i hate about you’) with his performative indifference, as if emotional exposure is a dare, Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia in ‘Gilmore Girls’) and his intellectual detachment which is more like pre-emptive self-protection, Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker in the ‘Fast and Furious’ series) balancing charm with quiet self-assurance, this steady confidence that feels pre-installed, Loki (Tom Hiddleston in the Avengers franchise) weaponising charisma as both defence and strategy, performing superiority like theatre because anything- even theatre- is safer than vulnerability, Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster in ‘Ted Lasso’) beginning as pure ego before slowly becoming human because again, believing you’re the best is easier than admitting you’re scared, and Flynn Rider literally branding himself as the smooth-talking outlaw archetype narrating himself into legend before anyone else can.

Different franchises. Same energy.

What ties them together is a specific narrative pattern: confidence first, vulnerability later. The smirk arrives before sincerity and the audience is not asked to love them immediately but to watch them soften, to witness the performance collapse.

The pattern isn’t that they think they’re perfect.

It’s that they think they will survive.

They operate as if they are constants in unstable worlds.

And that is DEEPLY attractive narratively speaking.

In media studies terms, this is the charismatic narcissist archetype, a character defined by three overlapping traits:

1. Self-assured exceptionalism: they believe they are special, and the narrative initially agrees.

2. Emotional distance: access to vulnerability is restricted, which makes it desirable.

3. Narrative redemption: the story promises growth, usually through connection.

The key here is that these characters exist in controlled environments. Their arrogance is safe because the script guarantees consequence. Tony Stark can be insufferable because the story will eventually humble him. Jamie Tartt can start as unbearable because the narrative arc promises evolution. Flynn Rider can bluff his way through life because we know the emotional reveal is coming. In chaotic plots, war zones, racetracks, alien invasions, high school hallways, these men move like the outcome will eventually tilt in their favour. Even when they fail, the failure feels temporary and even when they do fall, you never doubt they’ll stand.

And yes, that confidence always begins as armour.

Jamie’s ego is insecurity.
Tony’s sarcasm is trauma.
Loki’s theatricality masks abandonment.
Lightning’s arrogance is fear of irrelevance.
Jess’s cool detachment is displacement.
Flynn’s bravado is self-preservation.

In fiction, narcissism becomes choreography. The smirk isn’t pure narcissism. It’s pre-emptive protection. If I act inevitable, maybe I won’t be erased. Fiction allows this performance to be beautiful, real life does not always allow that.

Which raises the obvious question: why is this pattern so appealing when my real-world preferences are almost aggressively ordinary? In reality? I do not gravitate toward men who behave like they’re immune to consequence. I like grounded, emotionally literate, vulnerable stupid people.

The answer, I think, lies in narrative safety.

Fictional arrogance is curated. These characters are designed to be watched, softened, redeemed. Their ego is aesthetic. The viewer gets the thrill of confidence without the emotional labour that would come with it in reality. “I just never thought I couldn’t do it.”, the line is so simple. But it reveals something enormous: a psyche untouched by self-doubt. Or at least one that refuses to admit doubt exists.

That kind of certainty is cinematic, mythic and, like I said, narratively efficient.

Aura, here, is performance. It’s masculinity translated into spectacle.

These characters don’t hesitate. They assume space and survival, they assume importance.

And then the story tests them.

I don’t love them because they’re arrogant but I LOVE watching the moment when inevitability meets humility when the man who thought he was untouchable realises he is human, and still chooses to continue. (maybe that’s a bit sadistic, who knows)

Even the quieter examples on the list operate within this logic. Bucky Barnes isn’t loud, but his entire appeal rests on restraint and mystery. Jess Mariano communicates through distance and passivity rather than openness. Brian O’Conner embodies that calm, confident competence that feels effortless on screen making the audience drool instantly. The audience is invited to believe that beneath the smirk is sincerity waiting to be unlocked. The fantasy is not necessarily “I want this man,” but rather “I want to witness the moment he chooses softness.”

And THAT is the real draw. These characters allow us to watch ego unravel safely, to believe that charm and emotional growth can coexist.

In real life, narcissism is exhausting. In fiction, it is narrative tension, almost like destiny?

And that, academically speaking, is a far more interesting confession.

Which explains why my real-life type remains normal (ish) while my fictional favourites keep showing up with smirks, swagger, and catastrophic amounts of aura.

In conclusion, I do not want the man. I want the character arc. Give me a man who thinks he’s inevitable, but only if there’s a writer in the background planning his emotional collapse.

Writing this is also me holding myself to that promise, proof that I did, in fact, spend time living inside these worlds instead of just skimming their summaries and now I’m going to make it your problem too:

The Divergent Series

The Divergent series is very much a product of its time, a young adult dystopian world obsessed with identity, morality, choice, and the anxiety of belonging, where society is neatly divided into values and you are expected to pick one and live inside it forever. Critics have often described it as a response to the era’s obsession with categorisation, personality tests (yes, the BuzzFeedification of identity), factions, labels, a world where knowing who you are becomes a survival skill.

I’m very late to it, I missed both Divergent and Percy Jackson at the age when they were meant to imprint on you, but reading it now was strangely refreshing. It’s corny but also morally heavy-handed and I once read someone say that YA dystopia isn’t about predicting the future so much as processing adolescence, and that clicked while I was reading this. It took me back to a time when stories were allowed to be dramatic and emotional and deeply invested in the idea of becoming someone (which is exactly why I took the forementioned quiz- I’d be a Candor apparently), and I enjoyed that more than I expected to. Strange, but I definitely would have made this a huge part of my personality if I’d only read it sooner.

Waiting for Godot

I reread Waiting for Godot and it remains one of those works that manages to be funny and devastating in the same breath. On the surface, almost nothing happens- two men wait, they talk, they repeat themselves, they hope, they wait again. Beckett himself once suggested that the play wasn’t meant to mean anything definitive, only to reflect the act of waiting itself.

Every time I read it, I laugh, and then I end up staring at a wall for a while. Many critics have described it as a play about inertia, about how time passes whether or not we act, and that feels painfully accurate. There’s comfort in its absurdity, in the way it acknowledges that waiting itself becomes a form of living, even when nothing arrives, especially now, when so much of modern life feels like suspension rather than motion, and it continues to be one of my favourites. (I will accept though that I have a personal bias towards it because it reminds me of how we acted this out in class and absolutely lost it.)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Unrelated but totally related- often described as Hamlet seen from the margins, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes existential dread and filters it through confusion, chance, and the terror of not being in control of the narrative. Scholars tend to point out how the play interrogates fate, randomness, and the illusion of agency, characters who know something is happening but can’t quite grasp what or why.

Watching the version with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth reminded me why this play stays lodged in my brain. It’s clever, yes, but also deeply unsettling in how casually it treats existential terror. Someone once described it as watching people realise, in real time, that they are not the main characters of their own lives, and that thought still haunts me. (I do have to watch the version with Benedict Cumberbatch too and see if it lands differently.)

Pluribus

Pluribus functions as speculative fiction in the truest sense, less concerned with narrative satisfaction and more invested in ethical provocation. Much of the critical response frames it as a critique of enforced harmony, questioning whether peace achieved through uniformity is worth the cost of individuality. It presents consensus as coercion and happiness as something that can be engineered rather than chosen. (SCARY AF)

It wrecked me and unsettled me in a very specific way because I know, with alarming certainty, that I would not survive in that world. I would choose individuality over peace every time, even if it meant isolation (I don’t know, does that make me selfish?) The show doesn’t tell you what to think, it just makes you sit with the discomfort of your own values, and I think it’s the stories that do that which end up staying with us the longest, no?

Shrinking

Shrinking has been praised for its refusal to romanticise therapy, despite centring therapists as its protagonists and I agree. I think the show succeeds because it lets its characters be deeply flawed without punishing them for it- they make terrible decisions, cross lines, say the wrong things, and then live with the consequences- that’s what makes it feel human. Grief isn’t tidy and trauma doesn’t come with a manual, and tackling these themes with therapists at the centre of the show could have gotten preachy and self-important really quickly, which is exactly why it surprised me when it didn’t.

My personal favourite was Paul, deeply avoidant, sharp-tongued, giving advice with a side of salt and sarcasm, somehow making me care about him instantly. And Brian, who is objectively problematic, a little narcissistic (weirdly familiar), whose chronic optimism got under my skin in a way that made me start saying “everything goes my way” as an affirmation…..against my will…

Ted Lasso

(I am late to it, yes, I know, but it’s been adding an actual bounce to my step for weeks now.)

Ted’s optimism borders on the fantastical, the kind that feels almost offensive in a world that rewards detachment and irony, but what makes it work is that his kindness isn’t untested. The show captures how exhausting that optimism can be. Ted’s belief in people costs him something. It doesn’t protect him from betrayal or pain. Ted sees potential where others see failure, faith where cynicism would be easier, and while a show like this could easily feel unrealistic, I think it positions belief as a conscious choice rather than an absence of realism, and somehow that distinction makes all the difference.

And safe to say I love it- it solidified something I already believe in, loving without keeping score, showing up even when it hurts, refusing to let the world make you smaller.

Taken together, this month felt like reconnecting with why I fell in love with stories in the first place. From moral YA dystopias to existential theatre, from speculative discomfort to messy human comedies, everything I consumed had my brain wheels whirring.

I have a lot more lined up this year, books, shows, films, rabbit holes I’m very excited to fall into. If you’ve read or watched any of these, please tell me your thoughts, I want the discourse. And if you have recommendations, drop them. I promise I will get to them eventually (realistically, it will take me a while).

Oh, and also, miss me xx

For a while, everything existed in a strange haze. Post-Covid life felt muted, like we were all moving through the motions without really touching anything, sort of like this weird hangover. Everyone was nonchalant, and caring too much was embarrassing. White was the Pantone colour of the year, 67 was the big trend, and ragebait was the word of the year?? (I love ragebait, but still, absurd).

But this year, something shifted.

It feels like the hangover finally wore off.

Suddenly, people are paying attention again, and conversations feel heavier. There’s more drama (which I love), yes, but also more accountability. People are asking questions, sitting with discomfort, digging into things like the Epstein files, AI ethics, politics, systems of power, and content and creativity in a way that doesn’t feel purely performative (another trending word I actually love).

It’s not just outrage for the sake of outrage. It feels like people actually want to understand what’s happening around them. There’s curiosity and friction. And honestly, MAN did I miss it.

At the same time, culture feels alive in a way it hasn’t in a while. New trends don’t just exist, they provoke reactions. People are creating again, not just consuming. Writing, posting, debating, making art, making noise. There’s less ironic distance, less pretending not to care. CARING S BACK PEOPLE. Passion is back. (Not that it ever left me, but still, yay.)

On a personal level, this year felt just as full.

So much happened that it’s hard to compress it into neat lessons. There were shifts, endings, beginnings, phases that overlapped instead of arriving one at a time. I felt stretched emotionally, creatively, socially, sometimes all at once. It wasn’t calm at all but I kinda loved it?

I’ve always been someone who consumes a lot. I read, I watch, I listen, I fall into rabbit holes, I intellectualise (maybe too much), I overthink, I use too many question marks and commas and not enough periods. But going into the next year, I want to do that more intentionally- more books I sit with instead of skim, more films I actually watch instead of absorb through discourse, more music I live with long enough to let it change shape in my head. Learn more. Join more dots. (This is a call for recommendations, yes.)

I want to explore more, learn more, stay curious, and I want to write more.

This year, while exciting, also sent multiple bouts of sickness my way, and well, I plan on living in this body a little longer so I want to start working out, be healthier, sleep better, eat better, and again, explore more.

And well, loving more, socialising more, showing up loudly and warmly in people’s lives, annoying the shit out of them till I’ve burned a divya-shaped hole in their lives- that’s not a new goal, that’s who I’ve always been. I’ve never been someone who knows how to exist halfway. I love openly, talk EXCESSIVELY, form communities wherever I go. If anything, the intention is to keep doing that without burning myself out in the process. (oops.)

Next year, I don’t want to float through things. I want to be present to be engaged and to live fully instead of just existing in between deadlines and distractions.

If this year proved anything, it’s that the world feels better when we let ourselves care. So here’s to staying enthusiastic. Staying curious. Staying soft and opinionated and invested.

happy 2016?

*insert vintage b612-ey picture with a pout and a peace sign

First, Henry Cavill wasn’t in it, which is insane by the way, too old for Superman? be serious. Second, Zack Snyder was out, and at that point whatever fragile hope I still had for the DCEU was gone, I remember thinking okay that’s it, whatever this becomes, I can’t get attached.

By the time the movie was actually close to releasing, I had almost forgotten about it, until the trailer dropped. And the trailer was… bright and aggressively so. There was a new boy, a new suit, and something about it immediately felt wrong. My mind, or maybe my heart, was already made up. Call me unadaptable, but I knew this was not my Superman. (yes I take my superheroes seriously)

I saw snippets, posters, clips floating around online, and every single time my only thought was why would they butcher him like this. The suit especially felt like it was setting him up for failure before he even opened his mouth and that is what happened with me- I watched the trailer and I knew I was NOT sitting through the movie.

But fine. Today, I finally gave in and watched it.

And well you know me, I now have so many opinions.

Let’s start with the obvious- the suit. Why. It genuinely looks like cosplay, like a trying too hard fancy dress. It strips Superman of his aura before he even gets a chance to exist, (moreso after Cavill’s banger physique and suits) and that matters because Superman is not just a guy with powers, he is supposed to hold presence, weight, inevitability. The suit is supposed to carry some of that and this one just doesn’t.

And then there’s the decision to weaken him constantly. Why is he getting beaten every fifteen minutes? Why does every conflict feel like he’s one bad choice away from total failure? Superman is not compelling because he struggles physically all the time, he’s compelling because of choice, because of the burden of power, but here its just the absence of it.

Credit where it’s due, Lois Lane is written well, genuinely. She feels sharp, grounded, like a person with agency. Lex Luthor too, to an extent. While I still think Jesse Eisenberg captured something unsettling and slightly psychotic that worked in its own strange way, this new Lex is fine.

But Superman, Clark Kent, completely butchered.

He’s whiny, oddly irresponsible as a journalist, yet unbearably nitpicky as Superman. There’s this fixation on saving the smallest, most symbolic things, a squirrel, a tree, one hyper-specific act of goodness. And I get what they’re trying to say-compassion, humanity, ‘kind is the new punk rock’ but it comes at the cost of logic and urgency and frankly? they’re rtying to say it in the wrong place.

And then the line. The insistence. The entire philosophy of “I’m as human as you.”

No. You are not. And you are not supposed to be.

Superman’s humanity has always come from how he chooses to live among humans, not from pretending he is one. Making him overly relatable, overly emotional, overly grounded doesn’t humanise him, it shrinks him, turns him into something smaller than what the character is meant to represent.

The colours don’t help either. Everything is too bright, too clean, too soft, too comical. And good lord, why is there a dog? another attempt to make him more approachable, more internet-friendly, more palatable. It feels forced, like the movie is begging you to connect with him instead of letting him earn that connection, its more trying to get people to sympathize with him than, i don’t know, respect him?

Is it more “realistic”? Sure. But he’s a Kryptonian. Realism is not the point. And hiding behind comic accuracy doesn’t save it either, because adaptation is about translation, not replication.

What makes this worse is that Henry Cavill’s Superman was built so carefully and powerful in a way that felt earned, the movies were him auramogging for 2 hours straight and watching this version immediately after that legacy makes the downgrade impossible to ignore. Throughout the film it feels like Superman is deliberately diminished, weakened, made less intelligent, less commanding and inevitably less heroic. At no point did I truly root for him because he’s not well-developed as a character because he’s framed as incapable, and that’s fatal for a character like this.

And please do not get me started on Hawkgirl, or Superman’s party-animal cousin? Why does he have to be transmogrified into a USA teen? And Justice Gang???

Ironically, the only part of the team that actually worked was Mr. Terrific. His design, his gear, his command, which somehow only made Superman look even more ridiculous by comparison, like everyone else belonged in this world and he wandered in from a lower-budget universe IN HIS OWN MOVIE.

Between the suit, the constant beatdowns, the forced relatability, and the tonal confusion, Superman loses the very thing that makes him Superman, his mythic quality, his steadiness, his sense of being more, not less.

I was willing to let go of my loyalties but man did they fuck up, and this is with no hatred towards David Corenswet but his superman is just not for my palette, I’ll take my Superman deitified, untouchable, and permanently aurafarmed.

Lately, everything feels mid. Not bad, not brilliant, just vaguely disappointing. New music drops and vanishes in a weekend. Films trend for a day and are forgotten by Monday. Even things that are technically good seem to arrive already exhausted. At first glance, it feels easy to blame the art itself. Many say creativity is dying or that originality is gone and its all AI’s fault which yes, partially correct. But I do not think that is what is happening.

I think we are tired.

We live in a state of constant cultural overexposure. There is always something new to watch, read, listen to, react to, rank, defend, cancel, archive. Nothing is allowed to breathe anymore. Before we can sit with a song or a show, the internet has already decided whether it is iconic, problematic, overrated, or mid. The experience arrives pre-framed, pre-memed, pre-exhausted, and by the time we actually get to processing it, there are already ideas and we are merely picking sides.

Everything is immediately available, even opinions. Every emotion has a template and nothing is personal. It is just mass ideas against more mass ideas. This is not a failure of artists so much as a consequence of how culture now circulates.

Taste fatigue is real. We are consuming more than any generation before us, but we are feeling less. The problem is not that art lacks depth, but that we rarely give it depth in return. We scroll through albums like moodboards. We binge shows at double speed and if we don’t, poof, the relevance is gone and no one is talking about it anymore. We treat stories as content rather than encounters because god forbid we seem uncool. And then we wonder why nothing moves us the way it used to.

There is also the pressure of constant comparison. Every new release is stacked against decades of canon within seconds- “this is so 2016”, “this is so brat-coded”. A debut novel is measured against classics. A pop album is immediately ranked within an artist’s entire discography. Nothing is allowed to be imperfect, transitional, or simply interesting unless it MOVES the internet like if it does not immediately change your life, it is dismissed.

Call me pretentious, but art was never meant to compete at this scale or speed infact art was never meant to compete period. Most things grow on you quietly. Most meaningful attachments are slow burns. We are asking for instant transcendence in a system designed for instant consumption and well surprise surprise its not working.

There is also something emotional underneath all of this. We are living through ongoing crisis. War, climate collapse, economic precarity, political noise and with reality being this unstable, it has become harder for art to land. Low-stakes joy feels frivolous and high-stakes seriousness feels overwhelming so everything settles into this strange middle zone where nothing quite satisfies but is just constantly there.

Calling things mid has become a shorthand for that discomfort. It is easier to say something is boring than to admit we are numb and easier to critique culture than to interrogate our own exhaustion. We are not even processing things anymore. It is just, oh, this album is out, it’s mid, moving on to the next shiny thing. People refuse to actually formulate opinions and just go with whatever is the hottest take, actually people don’t form opinions so much as borrow them because forming an opinion takes time and attention and honestly, who has the energy.

And I am no preacher. I catch myself doing it too. Scrolling past things I would have once obsessed over. Not getting through albums, just listening to a few songs and deciding okay, this I like, this I don’t. Reading about a movie and deciding whether I will watch it or not. Feeling unimpressed, restless, overstimulated. And then occasionally, when I do slow down and actually get through an entire book, or sit with a piece of art, something still cracks me open. A line in a book. A scene I cannot stop thinking about. Proof that the problem is not the absence of meaning, but the absence of attention.

Art is not bad. We are just too defensive and too opinionated about it, and this once, that is not a good thing. I do not know what the antidote is. Better presence? More pauses? Fewer opinions? Less debate? Or just more space? It feels like we all have collective commitment issues, and that is now extending to ideas and creativity too. Like we are too scared to actually get through something and form an opinion because what if the world ends by then.

Where does your faith lie?

What keeps you going?

What roots you?

What gives you hope?

And I realised I didn’t know? It took me a good minute to say my faith lies in being good to people, in making sure I never make anyone feel the way I once felt… which sounded noble when I said it out loud.

So this is my closest attempt at answering the question properly.

A personal journal entry from the girl who loves everything.

When I was younger, I was talkative. Loud. Curious in a way that made adults sigh. I loved too many things at once, had too many hobbies, too many questions, too many opinions. I wanted to be friends with everyone. I cared about everything all the time. And I was always made to feel like that was too much. Too noisy. Too emotional. Too excited. Too everything.

Later in life came the ADHD diagnosis, which explained a lot, but before that I only knew one thing: I never wanted to grow into the kind of adult who made a child feel small. Somewhere along the way I made a quiet decision that I would be kind. That I would listen instead of interrupt. That I would give love even where it wasn’t deserved even if that broke me. That I would be the person my younger self would run toward, not away from.

And that, I guess, became my version of faith. Not religion. Not a cosmic force of this weird hyper positive kind loving person. Just this stubborn belief in harmlessness and softness and curiosity.

But then I thought about it turning it over in my head. Because maybe that’s not the healthiest way to build a whole life philosophy. Maybe you shouldn’t build your entire personality on the promise of never hurting anyone. But well, here we are and here’s where my ‘life philosophy’ has gotten me.

Right now I’m in the strangest little transition. I put in my resignation last week. My first real job. And I’ve been spending the past seven days slowly detaching from it. It’s bizarre how sad I actually am.

Lesson learnt: do not marry your job.

Was I warned? Yes. Did I listen? Obviously not.

But even now, I know that in five years I will only remember the warmth. The silly moments. The people I met. Some of them I’ll look back on with genuine affection. And that’s enough for me. This was never meant to be permanent, but it was supposed to matter and it did.

There’s another phase I’m re-entering: my literature pr person thingy era.

I graduated in literature. I spent three years eating theory for breakfast. And then, after graduating, I drifted away from it for a good five to seven months. Not consciously just life happening. Work took over, exhaustion took over, the world took over and I was then too busy for research and processing.

But now I’m reading again. Properly reading. Falling into rabbit holes again. I’ve been more active on Substack, writing longer pieces, deep-diving into films and books and metaphors in a way that feels like coming home. And honestly, I feel alive when I’m writing. There’s this little electric hum in my brain that I’ve missed. I want to stay consistent with it.

Can I rely on you to keep me consistent? Please?

And then there’s the whole body chapter of my life.

I’ve been accessorising more. I used to be really insecure, but lately I’ve slipped into this quiet fuck it we ball attitude. I got a piercing I was terrified of. It hurt like hell for three months. I regretted it for two of those months. And then it healed, and it’s pretty, and now I’m genuinely so glad I got it. Will I get more? Probably.

Oh and I’m growing my hair out again after six or seven years. I always kept it short. It was practical and easy, but I’m now realising it was also armour. Short hair made me feel tougher, harder to read, a little more protected. I didn’t want to look soft because softness felt like vulnerability.

But I think I’m okay now. I think I can let myself be softer. Longer hair, prettier hair- that’s still protecting me right? The funniest part is that my hair has always been the one thing I’ve loved about myself without question. When my body made me feel insecure, my hair grounded me. And letting it grow again feels like letting myself grow too.

I’m also trying this new thing where I remain open to people without dissolving into them. I’ve always been someone who loves without a line. No boundaries. Just pure emotion and softness. Which is beautiful but also exhausting. So now I’m trying to love a little more intentionally. To set firmer boundaries. I fail at it a lot. But trying counts, I think.

I don’t ever want to stop being warm. I just want the warmth to be sustainable for my sake.

So when someone asks me where my faith lies, this is the answer I’ve finally settled on:

My faith lies in becoming the person my younger self would have felt safe with.

In staying curious.

In loving widely but not blindly.

In taking small risks like piercings and big risks like leaving jobs.

In reading again.

In writing more.

In learning constantly.

In letting myself be softer.

In returning to the things that make me feel like me.

And in loving. so much. all at once.

I remember starting Fresh and immediately texting a friend:
“omg he’s so cute i love”, with full confidence, because the movie looks like it’s about to be a quirky little romcom where Sebastian Stan plays a charming, softly grinning man you’d trust with your drink, your heart, maybe even your life (I know I would).

My friend replied with a single word: “wait.”
No explanation which left me very confused like what could possibly go wrong, right?

Fifteen minutes in, I was already texting back:
“WHAT IS HAPPENING.”
“NOOOO????”

That tonal whiplash the sudden drop from cute to catastrophic hit me harder because I’d read The Vegetarian barely a month or so around that time. Another story that begins quietly, gently, almost deceptively simple… until the unease creeps in like rot beneath clean fruit. So when Fresh pivoted from soft-boy-flirting to cannibalism, my brain did that same little stutter-step- the feeling of witnessing innocence warp into horror, and realizing how fragile “normal” can be when a creator decides to twist the knife.

Where Fresh is about the female body consumed, The Vegetarian is about the female body refusing to be consumed, by men, by society, by desire itself.
Both are ultimately about women using the body as the only language left either as resistance (The Vegetarian) or survival (Fresh).

The Seductive Monster Trope and Why It Works

What makes Fresh particularly interesting is how Steve (Sebastian Stan) weaponises romance itself. The softness of meet-cutes, the trust built through banter, the illusion of safety. It’s the Hannibal technique, the vampire narrative: danger wrapped in seduction. But Fresh brings it closer to reality than fantasy.

Steve is the kind of man dating apps warn you about in the abstract. Except here, he’s delightful. Funny. Charming. The kind of man you’d screenshot and send to your friend groups.
Which makes his violence land twice as hard.

The horror isn’t just that he cuts women up.
The horror is that you liked him first. (maybe still do)

Han Kang does something similar: Yeong-hye’s transformation feels eerie precisely because the world around her is so mundane. A family dinner, a husband’s disappointment, a doctor’s visit. Horror isn’t a monster; it’s ordinary life turned slightly, unbearably wrong.

Consumption as Patriarchy’s Oldest Language

In both works, consumption becomes a gendered ritual. Men consume, women are consumed- whether through marriage, labour, desire, or literal flesh, the female body is something to be used, managed, or corrected.

There’s a reason John Donne’s The Flea suddenly clicked for me while thinking about Fresh. That poem is playful, yes, but also disturbingly honest about the ways men historically see women’s bodies as shared space, mingled blood, merged ownership, the flea as both metaphor and witness. Donne thinks he is being flirtatious. But beneath the wit lies the same assumption Steve carries: that access is a right, and refusal is a disruption.

The Vegetarian flips that script. Yeong-hye’s refusal to consume becomes her refusal to be consumed. She chooses emptiness over participation. She chooses plants over people. She becomes, in her own words, “a tree.” Her denial becomes an act of rebellion so profound that it terrifies the people who claim to love her.

And that is why Fresh works so well because it’s funny. Horrifying, but funny. The absurdity of Steve dancing while packing human meat. The juxtaposition of millennial dating language with cannibalism (“did you get home safe?” carries so much more weight here). The film is satire wearing a horror mask but the mask is kinda cute. Similarly, The Vegetarian is not “funny,” but it uses absurdity in a way that forces you into discomfort. The logic is dreamlike, slippery, surreal. A woman becomes a plant. A husband becomes a spectator. A sister becomes a narrator trapped in helpless grief. It’s absurd, but the absurdity is the point.

I didn’t expect a romcom-turned-horror film to sit beside a Nobel Prize–winning Korean novel in my head. But here we are. And I think they echo each other in my mind not just because they’re both telling the same joke in two different languages- the absurdity of being a woman in a world that keeps trying to eat you- but also because they both weaponise tone. They start in one register and end in another.
They take the familiar flirting, marriage, dinner, desire, and tilt it three degrees to the left until the whole thing collapses into nightmare. Both works understand the surrealism of modern life and how quickly sweetness can rot, how fast affection can become danger, how stories can turn on themselves with no warning. It’s the same emotional glitch Roald Dahl mastered in Lamb to the Slaughter: that moment when the homely turns quietly feral, when something tender suddenly reveals its teeth. Shirley Jackson touched a similar nerve with the polite surface of life stretching thin over something unsteady beneath.

Fresh and The Vegetarian just render that instability through the body.

I just started this piece writing about Fresh because it had been rattling around in my head since that first “omg he’s so cute i love” text aaand suddenly all these threads started lighting up in my brain like, oh. oh wait-

It’s funny how that happens: you tug at one thought and suddenly you’re knee-deep in Han Kang, Roald Dahl, accidental cannibalism metaphors, women turning into trees, men dancing with human meat, the whole thing getting heavier and heavier in ways you definitely didn’t sign up for when you pressed play on a romcom-looking movie.

So yeah, this started as me trying to untangle my thoughts on Fresh, and somehow it took me over a week and became, well, all of this. Anyway, that’s my monthly deep-dive yap. Please let me know if you’ve seen or read any of these or if there are other pieces in this wonderfully unhinged genre cluster.

There’s so much more I could go into but until then, miss me xx

George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language:

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

As I watched letters vanish in Nollop, the truth of this hit me. At first, the missing Z or Q was funny, I even chuckled at how citizens awkwardly complained in their letters to each other. But then the bans multiplied. Protests became harder not because of punishment, but because the words to articulate dissent no longer existed. The humor that had drawn me in began to feel suffocating.

Foucault’s ideas suddenly made sense in a new, lived way:

“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”

Here, language itself was the cut. Every restriction on speech, every missing letter, was a small, surgical act of control, seemingly absurd, yet undeniably powerful. I found myself pausing mid-read, thinking about how easily these small rules shape what people think, say, and even feel.

I’ve always loved absurdist theatre, the way Stoppard and Beckett show human effort against a world that refuses to make sense. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead had me laughing at the futility of existence, while Waiting for Godot taught me to sit with silence and uncertainty. We read both of these in class and absolutely lost it because it was all so strange.

In Nollop, I felt that same strange mixture of amusement and tension. And, unlike when I read a play passively in class, here I was actively participating: with every new letter ban, I found myself consciously avoiding it in my own notes, mentally censoring my words. I laughed, I groaned, I felt the frustration personally, language was no longer neutral; it was a puzzle, a challenge, and a subtle prison.

What struck me most, though, was how eerily contemporary the book felt. Dunn wrote it in 2001, long before social media outrage and the policing of speech became daily news. Yet the bans on letters now felt like a metaphor for online discourse, for woke culture, for the ways in which even small slights or words can trigger consequences. Absurdism allowed me to step back, laugh, and also be taken back to class and all those theories that didn't seem real but were right in front of me?

By the end, I wasn’t sure if I had read a funny fable or sat through a crash course in political philosophy disguised as a word game. Maybe both.

I hope i’m able to get back to my reading habits and read and join more random dots.

watching belly cry over boys is frustrating. it’s also oddly comforting. people unite in their irritation, in their memes, in long rants about team jere or team connie. it’s not high art, but it is community — built out of sighs, laughter, and collective eye-rolls. maybe that’s why this show, which should have been another throwaway teen drama, has become a phenomenon. it’s not the story we care about, it’s the luxury of caring about something so small.

this is where surrealism sneaks in. the internet is our new surrealist stage, a place where we exaggerate, distort, remix reality until it looks nothing like itself. a single scene of belly sobbing becomes an edit with taylor swift in the background, then a meme about climate change, then a tiktok parody. the absurdity piles up until it’s funny, and the funny becomes survival. remember when these kinds of stories were everywhere? gossip girl, gilmore girls, the oc, even bollywood’s obsession with teen romances like student of the year. none of them were pretending to change the world. they gave you drama, heartbreak and a banger soundtrack to cry to. and then somewhere along the way, the fun got eaten by discourse. every rom-com had to be a feminist reclamation, every drama had to double as social commentary. which is fine, but it’s also exhausting?

so maybe that’s why everyone secretly loves the summer i turned pretty, and continues to watch the absolute fuckery even if they won’t admit it. it gives us low-stakes heartbreak in a world where all heartbreak feels high-stakes. it gives us something unserious to fight about. team conrad or team jeremiah doesn’t matter, which is exactly why it matters. for a moment, the internet isn’t right vs left, for vs against, but just… which fictional teenage boy should this fictional teenage girl end up with. (there’s also a nice side of team staylor for the unproblematic ones)

and i know, i know, it’s dumb. but it’s also collective. everyone hates it together, loves it together, complains about it together. maybe stupid teenagers are doing what prestige tv can’t — giving us something to roll our eyes at, yell about, invest in without actually losing anything.

maybe i’m just too old for the drama but too tired for the discourse. maybe what i needed was teenagers making bad decisions in a beach town while taylor swift plays. and honestly, i’ll take it. it’s what sussanah would’ve wanted..

I should be replying to emails, but I’m just smiling at the glass like a complete idiot. I don’t know what it is about rain, but it turns everything up. Like my smile gets louder. My hair frizzes and grows three extra limbs. The city smells like wet concrete and someone somewhere is boiling chai (I want pakode), and it just makes me want to fall in love with everything all at once.

Even my sadness feels prettier in the rain. Not better, just more... cinematic. Like if I cry now, it’ll mean something with my hair drenched and lipstick smudged. Like the city is crying with me. The kid in me gets louder, the one who used to pretend every puddle was a portal. But also the knot in my chest tightens a bit more, like maybe the rain is pulling things out of me I’ve been ignoring.

The rain just makes the world feel like a movie.

So here’s some main character-y Bollywood rain scenes that rewired me:

1. Ghajini
   Sanjay gets a call. Runs to Kalpana’s place, his car drifting over wet roads. Only to lose her. He watches her die. Completely helpless. She never even knows who he really was. And I cry every single time.

2. Aashiqui 2
   Rahul holds the jacket over Aarohi, the rain pouring, Tum Hi Ho slowly starts playing in the background and gsvahdiuafhquwieggdhb. Yeah. Feelings.

3. OK Jaanu
   They’re out in the rain helping a lady with Alzheimer’s find her husband and suddenly realise they wouldn’t be doing this for anyone but each other. Just like that old couple. It’s the moment they go - “oh. Have we been in love all along?” Like?? Kicking my feet. Giggling.

4. Wake Up Sid
   The most cliché Bombay baarish scene: Marine Drive, chai, emotions. They meet, they talk, they hug. Simple. Beautiful. Yet somehow magnified tenfold because rain makes everything feel like it matters more.

5. Meri Pyaari Bindu
   Maana Ke Hum Yaar Nahi plays. The softest kind of heartbreak. A love that never fully became, but always existed. They’re both in the rain, just like they were back then. And it aches. Quietly. Devastatingly.

6. Life in a Metro
   So many people. So many stories. And the rain threads through all of them. No one gets to avoid it. It ties them together, cuts across timelines, reminds you that even strangers are drenched in their own chaos.

7. Hum Tum – Title Track
   The cutest, prettiest, most beautiful montage of love. I cannot stop smiling. Special mention to that era of Saif because wow. What a time to be alive.

8. Jab We Met
   He’s burnt out, annoyed. And then it starts raining and his first thought is her. Dancing, laughing in the rain. He imagines an entire sequence, all colours and movement and joy. And just like that, he knows he has to go back to her. Aaaa. Crack.

9. Zoobi Doobi – 3 Idiots
   So cute. So silly. No deep feelings, just two people in the rain dancing and laughing with the dumbest lyrics and the happiest faces. Pure serotonin. Feel good cinema.

10. Special Mention: The Notebook Kiss Scene
    I cannot write about rain scenes that rewired me and not mention that. The kiss. The screaming. The rain soaking them through and love punching you in the face. Legendary.

And me?
I think my heart has always been a little rain-soaked. And it’s nice to remember it.

Because it made me realize:
I’m not the problem.
But also: the problem is f*cking massive.

Let’s talk about it.

I. Mirror-Shopping Isn’t Love

Han says real love requires otherness, the thrill of meeting someone who surprises you, disagrees with you, disrupts your inner monologue.

But dating today? It’s like shopping for a version of yourself in someone else’s face.

We’re not seeking connection, we’re seeking confirmation.
But here’s the thing: falling in love with a mirror is boring.

The fun, the fire - comes from friction. From arguing about art or politics or pineapple on pizza with someone who sees the world through a different lens. From someone who challenges your ideas, questions your takes, and isn’t afraid to say, “You’re wrong.” or “But I think-”

Being with someone who’s always agreeable might be smooth, but you don’t grow from smooth. You grow from being jolted out of your rhythm.
Desire thrives in difference.

“Eros is experienced only where there is a wound or a rift.” – Byung-Chul Han

We’ve flattened the erotic into the algorithmic.
What’s left isn’t seduction, it’s self-soothing.

II. Love Is Not a Brand Campaign (and That’s the Point)

We’re living in a time where intimacy feels like performance.
We’re documenting more than we’re experiencing.
From dating bios that sound like startup pitches to Instagram “close friends” curated like brand drops, we’re obsessed with how love looks rather than how it feels.

Han warns that when love becomes fully visible, it starts to disappear. Because love needs mystery. It needs privacy. It needs the courage to exist without an audience.

But hey, this doesn’t mean you can’t post your partner. Celebrate them. Share the silly stuff. Share the joy. But don’t let the pressure to appear perfect kill the beautiful, messy, irrational truth of your bond.

Not everything has to be aesthetic. Not every fight has to be TikTokified into a #healing arc.
Let it be ugly. Let it be cringe. Let it be yours.

“Love needs a protected space of absence. Total exposure eliminates all desire.” – Han

I don’t want a relationship that’s optimized for applause.
I want one that’s awkward in public and electric in private.
I want to love like no one’s watching even if everyone is.

III. Desire Is Becoming Obsolete. And With It, the Art of Loving.

We’ve replaced real risk with the illusion of infinite choice.
Why fall hard when you can just fall into another DM?
Why ache when you can distract?

Because love is inconvenient.
It is glorious and messy and time-consuming.
But guess what? So is living.

This isn’t me saying “bring back arranged marriages” or “stop sleeping around” or any other boring conservative take.
This is me saying: let people be dramatic.
Let people feel too much. Let people write stupid poems and send long texts and cry about eye contact.

“Eros is not a desire that can be satisfied.” – Han

I know the world isn’t built for lovers anymore.
But I’ll be damned if I stop trying.
I want the full myth. I want to be crushed by it.
I want something so real it makes me question myself.

If I’m too much for this world, maybe the world’s just not enough. Maybe I won’t water it down, yes, maybe I am the cliche romcom lead with that annoyingly positive attitude towards love and life, SO WHAT.

So What Now?

I’m not going to end this by saying “just keep loving” or some Instagrammable platitude.

I’ll just say: if you’re reading this and you still believe in love,
in desire,
in soft things and sharp feelings and full-bodied emotion

You’re not alone.

And maybe that’s the most romantic thing I can offer..

10/10 book though.

I don’t believe in the myth of a straight path.
That if you do everything right, it’ll all make sense,
Life is messier than that. It loops, backtracks, skips scenes, forgets its lines
And somehow still moves forward.

I don’t believe in the myth of punishment.
That bad things happen because you deserve them,
That grief is earned,
That love must be painful to be real.

I don’t believe in the myth of stoicism.
That silence is strength,
That feeling deeply is weakness,
That softness makes you fragile.

—

But there are myths I still hold close.

I believe in the myth of finding your way back home.
Even if you build it from scratch, even if it’s not where you started,
Even if you are the only one who knows where it is.

I believe in the myth that you were meant to try things.
That failure is not proof you were wrong to begin,
That curiosity is a kind of calling.

I believe in the myth of romance.
Not just in people but in the way sunlight lands on a table,
in conversations that stretch into silence,
in moments that feel like they were made just for you.
Everything is love, in some form.

I believe in the myth that you are meant to live.
Not just survive. Not just endure.
But really live, even when it’s chaotic, even when it aches.

—

I believe in the myth of becoming.
That we are always shaping ourselves like clay
That we get to begin again, over and over
Even when we don’t know what we’re becoming yet

I still believe in the myth of being saved.
By art.
By a sentence that lands like lightning.
By a person who doesn’t flinch when they see all of you.
By a morning that feels different, softer, possible.

Some myths stay because they’re beautiful.
Some stay because they’re useful.
Some because they’re the only thing between you and the void.

I don’t need them to be true.
I just need them to feel like mine.

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Sharks are older than the North Star.

Older than Saturn's rings. Older than trees. They were here before flowers, before dinosaurs, before the continents cracked into their current shapes. They've survived five mass extinctions with the same basic blueprint: keep swimming, keep biting, don't overthink it.

And it hit me: we are so young. Our cities? Our art? Our wars and heartbreaks and carefully curated Instagram feeds? A blink in shark time. A flicker. A half-formed thought in the universe's draft folder.

Which, honestly? Freeing as hell.

The entire reason I'm (occasionally) fun and (arguably) interesting is because my head's this glorious mess of half-baked ideas and hyper-specific anxieties. Worst case scenario? I write something stupid. Most people scroll past. The sharks certainly won't notice—they've got 450 million years of not-giving-a-damn under their belts.

So yeah. Next time you're spiraling about being "cringe" or "too much" or "not enough," remember: Polaris wasn't even born when sharks started not caring. Be the shark.

And so I'm getting over my "Substack is intimidating and scary" and posting my first post aaaaa...

P.S. If sharks can survive asteroid impacts, I can survive hitting 'publish.' Baby steps, folks

Oh, and another interesting thing: "baby steps" weren't even meant to be careful - babies literally take the most reckless, haphazard steps known to humanity all the time and maybe that's the real lesson here. ok miss me bye.

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