But my hate to the quote emerged in relation to my ownself. I had no fear of being not found. For I believed that I could re-invent myself in ways I wanted for anyone. I could show them a part of me that will be loveable, appealing and someone they would always remain curious about. I could act and act and act, not that what I acted was not part of ‘me’ but it was never fully me. It worked well till I was given a mirror by someone who asked me what makes me exhausted so much, or why do I keep doing so many things always. Perhaps then I realized I was so close to the people who I had worked with. Rather than ‘talking’ about things in excruciating details, I would do things with excruciating details, to the point that others can ask me ‘how do you manage to do all of that’ and I will never have an answer.

But then, I wonder who asks me the question of ‘how am I’ and I still remain empty and quiet, feeling more hollowed and irritated with that question as if the question alone has found me in my hiding place, where I had found safety.

I sit in that cave, with a candle on my right, a book on my left, my heart on the desk, away from the exhaustion of what all the world outside offers. And when someone asks me, it seems like that they can peep inside the cave. Perhaps that is what annoys me.

However, what annoys me more is the desire to step out of the cave once in a while. When I do, I stretch my arms, wiggle my legs and attempt telling someone about how I have been. When I do, a bodily disgust arises in me, a layer covering upon me of someone’s gaze and me wondering as in why did I ever tell anyone about me. But then I counter it with a desire that ‘aren’t they the ones who were supposed to know me?’ or ‘shouldn’t they at least try to know what all I have been doing in my cave?’ And that desire to be known feels more sticky and grotesque than the desire to share.

Why did I over-share with my own family? Why did I tell them about the cave? Or anyone about the cave? With that, I rush back in, with more boulders up front and make sure I do put more acts outside so all they can ask me is ‘how do I do so much?’

.Khair, if you wish to step out of the cave and talk without feeling disgusted, maybe you know the place to reach out to.

It is interesting and surprisingly narcissistic how we are capable of making spaces, public spaces or sometimes almost an entire part of city as ‘our space’. A space that belongs to you, a space where you body loosens, you take that deep breath because your nose is familiar with that smell that somehow will be unrecognizable to a new person, yet foolishly you will bring someone new to that place each time you want them to know you, and then you will take that deep breath and make a fool of yourself when they will ask you, ‘but what is so special about this place?’

Perhaps that is the tragedy. There is nothing special about that place. Or a place. Or any place for that matter. Places don’t have psyche. Places don’t have nostalgia. People do. People make memories, people leave reminders. People hold on to nostalgia of smell, sight and desire.

Your body loosens up and finds comfort even in the air of that metro station, undershade of tree or that cafe because it is YOU who holds something to that place. You are the crow who has been finding shiny object-like memories from your life and placing them in that place so each time you return to that place, your nest, all you remember are those strings of sweet memories, heartbreaks, aches and unsaid words that live with you now. But somehow, as foolish as it may sound or appear, that is something so unique to us.

How we crazily make places have a psyche, a city or a space so romanticized that everytime we want to tell what love means to us, that place stands like a friend next to us, trying to speak to that new person what we mean by love. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Regardless of what happens, we (me and my spot) sit calmly next to each other, having some abysmal dish because it is too nostalgic for me. We know, that despite what happens, the place and I are going to be there.

Maybe years go by sometimes and the places stay, and we come back to them as individuals so new we don’t recognize the person who created memories in those places. We don’t know who was the architect or the curator of the museum that now stands in the place and what happened there. All we do then, is remain witness, an audience to our own memories, wondering if we will ever be that person again who had it all in that one place?

You asked a question, as data centers around the world depleted more and more water, ‘what is that AI cannot perform?’ and I looked at you with the same eyes of surprise I would have looked at someone holding a dead fish in hand and wondering why did it die the moment it stepped out of the water? I imagined you and that person holding the dead fish to never know what it means to be surrounded by something that keeps us alive!

Well, for starters, AI won’t kiss you. AI won’t hug you. AI won’t offer you that intense, mind-fogging make-out session in the back of the car or the lift. AI won’t drive you entire rationality out of the window, leaving primal desire intact when they trace a finger or lips upon your skin.

AI won’t hold your hand as you weep. AI won’t hug you and tell you that all will be okay when you are breaking down imagining your worst possible fear. AI won’t break your heart, shatter it and ask you to be okay about it.

AI won’t offer you love and not mean it the other day, and days later, again ask if you are capable of loving them despite their mistakes, and you will say yes, because that’s who you are, a love-desiring being, believing in love, believing that the touch of the other can heal you and fix you, but once the other is done taking all they could from you, it leaves you again, leaving a human-sized hole in your heart, AI won’t do that. AI will not bruise your neck, or back, or face, because it hasn’t known violence yet, it hasn’t known that it can justify violence in the name of love yet, and can torment millions in the name of it. AI won’t hold you as if it never wants to let you go, as if pressing their fingers deep in your skin will write a permanent impression of their identity upon you and they would know you would never go away. AI won’t do possessiveness, it doesn’t know that.

Humans do. From the moment they lie their eyes upon you, the whole of you, without the pretense of layers, clothes, skins, fears, miseries, only you and your flesh and soul, baring in front of them, submitting to that one person, who will leave nail marks on your skin, bites on your neck, torn muscles, ripped souls, healed souls, mended souls, fixed souls, broken souls, calm souls, tormented souls, so much of what a person can do. Only and only a person can do. AI won’t have sex with you, neither hold you after it, neither hold you before it, letting you know that you are safe with them, that you won’t be harmed, that you won’t be shattered if you become vulnerable with them, that you can let your body be theirs for a while and they will care for it, their gaze hints at that, their touch confirms it.

AI isn’t capable of doing to you what a human body can, and neglecting that fact is your prudish assumption of imagining humans to be possessed only of cognition, and not of desire, lust, love, hate, pain and all the sorrows and joys and jouissance, that comes from the inter-embodied relation of two bodies with each other. Two human bodies.

Never forget. That’s what humans are, first of all. Bodies of matter. Bodies that matter.

“Of course, I will hurt you. Of course, you will hurt me. Of course, we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” - Antoine de Saint

I read these lines again and again and wrote them on my open palm again and again. Letting the skin bleed in with the words etched with the blade that I keep at my neck to threaten myself to stop me from hurting you, but I bleed a little and you notice, and I weep more because you notice, because not many notice the small cuts and pains. Paper cuts were something we made fun of, but the day a letter you wrote cut my finger, you slept holding my finger close to your heart and it experienced a warmth that felt sinfully soft, I did not know what one does with this warmth, how it feels in the coolness that I keep around me like a waft, a wind on a scorching summer heat to feel that this is how hope looks like, like a breeze that can only touch me.

But you offer me a warmth, you offer me a heart(h) and I desired to let go of that blade but knowing to let go of it would mean believing I can fall vulnerable and demand and ask, and who knows how much ask is too much ask? Who knows how much demand of one becomes suffocating for the other? How much love becomes a bruise on your skin? Maybe you will tell me, maybe you won’t.

Maybe, you will sit with me, having coffee each morning, till one day, you won’t and I will look at your cup sitting next to me, only the cup, with a steam rising in the air, like my hope, my soul, my wind rising in the air, into emptiness, leaving only behind a darkness as bitter as my coffee.

In literature, we have a term called ‘negative capability’ that John Keats writes about. He says to his brothers that great authors are capable of letting go of their ego, morality and rationality, and submerge themselves to the consciousness of their characters. They are able to stay in the ambiguity and unknown of their characters’ lives and let it unfold. In simpler everyday terms, negative capability means being able to stay with the uncertain, the unknown and let things unfold on their own.

But each time, I think of it, the fear holds me strongly, the knife more tighter, asking me what if I will run if I let things be, what if I escape from anything and everything and by the time I realize I am out of breath, all bruised and paining, there will be nothing to return back to. And not being able to return to the same coffee table where you sit, holding your coffee in your palms, the same palms you have cupped my face with multiple times, I can’t imagine that.

So, I sit, having a conversation with Keats, asking him what I have to do to bear the uncertainty, and he asks me to break myself. Break the boulders I have carved around myself like a gigantic piece of art, hoping it does not show any ruptures of temper, anger, pain and hurt. And I get to work. Breaking myself each day. Hurting you in the process to just tell myself that yes, I am capable of breaking things.

To what extent I break the boulders of my heart and my being without destroying the city you and I have created is a question that I leave to my ‘negative capabilities’ to work with. I leave my reason behind, my thought behind but just hope and hope is what I preserve in my mouth, like the last morsel of food from a home-cooked meal, that you stay as I break myself open and stay when I am able to see within myself too.

.Khair…

It was not my insistence to see you in the kitchen, struggling with flour, spices and chopped vegetables lying around your hands, the way I had found my heart often spread in your hands. It was the moment when you choose to make something for me, with an agency I cherish more than the aroma of the food that has just come my way.

My stomach grumbles with hunger, an old ache of imagining food in my belly crumbling me a bit, but I hold on, patiently, slowly, knowing you are finding your way to me.

If that is what it means to love, maybe that is why it is a challenge. You hold on to your carnal, primitive desires like hunger because the harsh softness of patience is demanded to hold on to them while the other navigates their way to you, while they cook for you.

Perhaps, on another day, I have tasted what your fingers cook for me, how soft your hands feel when they place themselves upon me, and that makes me learn to be patient. But some days, I feel exhausted and wonder if you found joy in exploration of your art of cooking so much that whether you remembered I was there, outside, waiting for you.

Maybe, this piece is not about cooking. It is not about you or I. Maybe, it is not about hunger or anything. Maybe, it is about me wondering if people in love share a common language, rhythm, speech or flow. Do they always sit on the same page or does one wait for the other if they walk too fast or too slow? Do they wonder if the other knows what they want or do they call and tell?

When I sit waiting for you, I know you are learning, making those efforts for me, because love is effortful and you know that, and I know that. But what I wait with is a patience that I have also begun to understand as love. A love that melts in my bones like molten lead on some days, and a gush of steam on another.

But how do I explain this to those who rush? Those who know fast-food chains and ready-to-eat-food? How do I explain to them the love of patience when all they know is a give-and-take? When their language hasn’t ever been of holding on to their grumbling stomach and flesh, and waiting for the other to figure out a language, a desire, a way to them is not known to them…

Perhaps, as I write this, I do wait too, but at least I have learnt the art of patience, for I know what is done in love is done well as Van Gogh said.

“A-mal-tas. You say it.”

“Ama-latas,” He repeated.

“Now you are just trying to tease me. It’s simple. Move your tongue like this,” and he enacted, his tongue rolling to the roof of his mouth after the syllable ‘aa’ to form the ‘mal’ and it being released like a water drop from a leaf after a heavy rain at the ‘tas’. Sugandh could see him all day, making that gesture. The intricacies of his mouth, the smile he held was something he would never get bored of. They were sitting so close that he could have just reduced the gap between their lips and said the word ‘amaltas’ on his lips alone. Sugandh knew the word but he preferred words falling from his lips more.

“Are you even seeing how to speak it?” He tapped on his forehead with a flick made by his index finger and thumb. He knew Sugandh did not like it. But he still did it. The fact that he knew about his likes and dislikes at this point was enough. Nothing more was ever needed. The way amaltas didn’t demand much.

In the city of Delhi which many have tried to romanticize and many have died doing so, it’s hard to not fall for the city and die falling for it too. Perhaps, one can lose themselves figuring out the roads and the temperament of different parts of the city that appears like a miniscule point on the country’s map but in reality, holds a labyrinthine space that changes its color, shape, form, attitude, heat, and god knows what. When Sugandh came to the city for the first time, he was not afraid but rather felt free. Something about the poor AQI and smog-filled wintery streets of Delhi University made him feel alive in a way that he hadn’t felt in his hometown of Vrindavan. How would he have? When, like the man in front of him, his family was obsessed with syllables and letters all his growing life.

“Sugandh-a. Sugandha. That’s your name. Don’t we ever dare listen to you calling yourself by a man’s name,” His mother would scold him, pulling his ear and making him stand in front of the mirror, which he despised horribly. Making him see that the gods that live in the streets of his city have not granted him a man’s body but a woman’s. He couldn’t accurately remember the number of times he had stood in front of the mirror - some days convincing himself that it’s all just a confusion and he’s a girl, some days trying his best to hide his body that deceived him the most. Long hair, rising chest, a high-pitched voice. Teenagers have many reasons to not like their body. Sugandh had different ones from all his peers.

Sugandha. Sugandh. Just a simple syllable. ‘Aa’. The very first syllable a child speaks that resonates in the ears of their parents. Aa. The sound with which most languages begin.

“But it is not an innocent syllable. I am telling you. Simply the existence of ‘aa’ in a language can change so much. See, your name is Sugandh. If someone would have called you Sugandha, it would have appeared…I don’t know more feminine, thus, giving people an altogether different mental image of you,” Palash had explained to him once, frantically moving his arms up and down, the way he did whenever talking about something passionately. For him, Sugandh was a girl. A girl with a name that sounds masculine. Nothing else. For Sugandh, hearing the name Sugandha was like experiencing a nose piercing. But a thousand times worse.

“So, Ritik is a guy’s name, but Ritika is a girl’s…” He had tapped his fingers lightly on Sugandh’s knees, as they had been sitting really close to one another on a single bench near the college canteen, under a tree. Sugandh didn’t care much about what Palash said, but loved to listen to him. On some days, in Delhi’s winters, you don’t do much, except sit and listen to the person you love talk frantically about something they love. Delhi winter doesn’t demand much from you. The way amaltas don’t demand much.

“Your town. You come from Vrindavan. Krishn is a male name. But Krishna can be a girl’s name too. Hence, my point!” Palash had a satisfactory smile on his face, having proven his point. No one remember what had triggered him to make this argument, but when you are a student of linguistics, words and syllables bounce more in your mind than the fact that the boy or the girl sitting in front of you might be experiencing a thousand fireworks in their mind as your fingers dance playfully on their knees.

Sugandh could still think in the middle of fireworks. Palash’s point was ironic. It takes adding a syllable to one’s name to make them feminine, but biologically, a chromosome has to be replaced to be a female. An XX instead of an XY. No doubt Sugandh always felt different, lacking something, seeking something.

***

Seeking a refuge is a sincere task, but seeking a refuge from your own home is a heartbreaking task. But when the world doesn’t offer you alternatives, you choose. Because not everyday you can get beaten up for wearing boy’s clothes and acting up like a guy. Because not everyday you can stand and watch people laugh as they say, “God made her a girl, but she definitely forgot how to act like one.” In the city that had the rich history of two celestial lovers cross-dressing and making love to one another, where gender fluidity should have been celebrated, people’s hearts have a different way of measuring what’s right and wrong in their world.

Delhi offered Sugandh a space to breathe, ironically. Sugandh could cut his hair short, remove all the nose rings, bindis, piercings and horrible clothes. He could wear shirts, jeans, trousers and as Palash often jokingly said, ‘dress up like a school boy’.

At first, Sugandh’s instincts taught him to not love Delhi and its people who turn twice to see a girl who looks like a girl but doesn’t fit in the brackets of one and dress up in ways they could get confused by. But slowly, as the eyes became a constant visitor, Sugandh’s instincts told him to ignore them. Because his instincts made him land his eyes on Palash. Palash, the man with the name of a flower. The man who could be spotted in the University campus with a flower tucked behind his ear. Palash, the man with a calm voice and an intellect that can charm you. Palash, the man for whom people can fall for. Palash, the man for whom Sugandh fell, just the way palash flowers fall in spring, the way jamun fall in monsoon, but most importantly, the way amaltas fall in summer.

Palash entered Sugandh’s life like a summer hailstorm, befriending ‘her’ (for Palash, Sugandh was a new girl, intimidated by the city and someone who deserved to fall in love with the city he had grown up in), and taking ‘her’ out to places that were historical, cultural and charming, like him. Sugandh never made an attempt to tell him, to reveal the secret his mind battled with everyday. He just could not.

One evening, Palash and Sugandh sat under a tree, in a college’s campus located in a totally different part of Delhi. It was a small canteen in the middle of what seemed like a forest, with an old couple who ran it. Music crackled from their old speakers and Mehndi Hassan’s ghazals sprang to life from them. It was early February, the weather could still turn crisp and cold in the night. It was good for Sugandh because that could give him a chance to come closer to Palash. Palash held his hand, bringing him closer as they continued to sip tea.

“I like this weather,” He said and immediately his voice drowned the background music which Sugandh had just started to enjoy. He didn’t mind though. In Delhi’s early spring, if you are sitting with tea in one hand and your beloved’s hand in the other on a cold evening, you don’t mind anything. That’s what Delhi’s springs are like. They don’t demand much. The way amaltas don’t demand much.

“Uhm hmm,” Sugandh just nodded, not wishing to disrupt the moment with words. When all your life, words and labels have tormented you, you do not usually form a healthy relationship with words. You avoid them as long as you can. Silences are better. They don’t demand much. Just like Palash’s presence. Just like the city’s love.

“Do you ever wonder? What life would have been like for you if you would have been a guy?” Palash asked and the words sent a jolt down Sugandh’s spine.

“What do you mean?” was all he could ask.

“Nothing. I mean, Delhi is beautiful and all, but it’s not safe for women. Or even the queer folks. I know so many friends of mine who can’t roam around like this at night just because the city feels threatening to them. Intimidating.”

“I never felt that way,” Sugandh said, trying not to look at him. He was burning inside and just hoping to end this conversation at any point now. The question had sent a burning smell in the air and Sugandh didn’t want to breathe at that point.

“Only yesterday I got to know that a trans man was denied entry in a bar and beaten up. I mean, come on. Till when people have to live with false identities. Can’t people breathe in their own skins?” Palash sighed. Sugandh could have wept at that moment, and he knew Palash would have held him, collecting his face in his palms bigger than his. But he did not cry that night. He could not have. Because if it would have, what happened next would have never happened.

“But I am sorry. The thought was just going in my head and I wanted to talk about it. I know I can talk about things with you. And anyways, my question was wrong,” He looked at Sugandh, tilting his head.

“What do you mean?” He asked for the second time, in the same conversation. Sometimes, he even wondered if he was the same academically blessed human that he showed in classes or if he just turned dumb around Palash.

“If you would have been a guy, how would I have ever done this?” Palash bent forward and placed a kiss on his lips. The first kiss that Sugandh got in his life from the man he loved. The only problem was the man assumed him to be someone he was not. Oh how much he wanted to cry at that moment. Out of happiness or misery, he did not know.

But one thing became certain as the sound of the ghazal again reached their ears. If Sugandh had even a tiny inkling of telling Palash about himself, now that was even gone.

If love asks you to be someone, to what extent do you go to become that person?

***

Over the next couple of months, as life in Vrindavan felt distant and forgotten, the battle of being Sugandh or Sugandha felt like old scars on his arms, Sugandh learnt to be happy. It was a battle nonetheless. You have one life and you think you deserve the happiness that comes your way. Like you have earned it. But the happiness Sugandh felt with Palash felt like a borrowed one. A stolen one. From someone called Sugandha. In a different life, Palash and Sugandha could have been together, happy, in love, and normal. But in this wretched life, Sugandha has been replaced by Sugandh, a lesser being, a being with a chromosome different and a syllable less.

Yet, in love, you learn to be happy with the broken, stolen, borrowed happiness you get. Because love doesn’t demand much from you. The way fallen palash flowers don’t in spring. You see them falling, you pick them up, you put one in your beloved’s bag and hope they see it and smile when they reach home. It’s as simple as that.

Delhi was the place that let Sugandh be, but Delhi with Palash became that place where Sugandh could live. And when you have just ‘existed’ and newly learnt to ‘live’, you can never go back to just ‘being’. So Sugandh made new attempts everyday to be the one that Palash could love. He began by learning how to shave his bodily hair. He learnt makeup from tutorials on the internet. The day he came up all decked up in front of Palash, he just noticed Palash’s sad eyes looming over him.

“I like you just the way you are. You never need to change yourself for me or anyone in this world, Sugandh,” He had taken his face in his palms, the palms whose touch Sugandh could never forget, and kissed him. But he still wanted to laugh at the joke Universe was playing.

***

It was a hot day in June when Palash took Sugandh to a pride parade. It was an experience that deeply impacted Sugandh. He could not process how liberated he felt when he saw swarms of people, walking around, embracing each other, proudly talking about their identities and sexualities, and telling the world they too have the power to resist. To love. Sugandh felt a strength within like a warm, fuzzy feeling that often good alcohol leaves you with when you drink it with the right person.

After that, when Palash and he sat under a tree where he witnessed the beautiful amaltas for the first time, again listening to Palash talk romantically about them, Sugandh could not help but wonder what it takes for nature to reveal something so beautiful. What do amaltas demand if they don’t demand anything?

“Intense heat. Burning. That’s what it takes,” Palash answers. Probably, he had asked the question aloud or Palash could just know what he thought. As Palash stood up, Sugandh spread himself under the tree and continued to stare at the golden flowers swaying on the tree, slowly falling on him and the ground. If pain makes something so beautiful, he wanted that.

He turned and saw Palash standing at a distance. If it would have been in his control, he would have happily buried Sugandh under the falling amaltas and risen up as Sugandha. He would have burned himself in the intense heat of June to turn into the amaltas that Palash could love without deception. He would have done anything to be with the man he loved brutally.

But that day, he knew what he would do. Rise with a new ease. The ease with which amaltas enter summers and leave.

Because amaltas don’t demand much from you. So why should life demand so much?

Painting from Pinterest. Credits to respectful artist

It is not difficult to find angry men. I write carefully when I don’t say men with anger but angry men, because it becomes a trait, a feature after a point of time. It no longer remains something that they wear like a glove or a tie. It remains like their skin, upon them, with spikes on its ends, attempting to hurt whoever comes close. But who develops this skin? This angry, prickly skin? We don’t know. What we know is it becomes painfully comfortable to bring that anger. Anger, in my humble and exhausted assumption, is an easy emotion to bring forth. It is reactive, explosive and impulsive. So many things said and done in anger, all forgiven just because they were said in the heat of the moment. The heat takes the blame, the man wipes his sweat and he is back at the dinner table.

But if anger is easy, what is not? Grief. Disappointment. Fear. Jealousy. Abandonement. Feeling powerlessness. Knowledge of one being wrong. These things remain under that prickly skin that never get out. They suffocate within, like the kid who looks at the father angry and erupting in flames in the hall, and not knowing how to meet the same person next day at breakfast or outside school.

Yet trust me, this post is not about hating men or their anger. It is not even a resolution. There is no hope in this piece. There is just acknowledgment of an anger that becomes mundane, a part of living, a part of everyday psyche that never gets away. It remains like a skeptic ghost of one’s past and present which lurks in relations and at home. Who suffers? The woman in that man’s life.

I have seen more exhausted women than angry women. Women who are exhausted of the man’s anger and listen to it like thundering clouds on a rainy night when you know you stand under a leaking roof. You know the thunder can hurt you but the constant dripping water on your head has made you numb and soaked so much, you don’t know what else to do. The prickly skin of the man with anger and harshness has bristled the woman’s skin and at points, the woman looks in the mirror, wondering what happened to her skin and at what point did she lose herself entirely?

She walks with stains of the man’s anger, a murky red color all over skin which does not go away by skin care or laughter. It remains like dirty stains of water in an old, leaking house.

There remains silence in that house, with anger of the woman that has taken the form of silence and exhaustion. She remains tired, complaining only in few places, wondering whether her complaint even means anything. All forms of attempts at looking at the man beyond the prickly skin have gone away.

Now, she sits, as the dinner gets cold, with the child looking with empty eyes at the two of them, and the man wonders if he could have done something better?

These lines by Faiz sahab keeps coming up in my mind again and again as I sit with my own pains and my clients’ pains when they keep bringing the same stories again and again, despite of resolution that seems to come in their heart once in a while like a butterfly lightly nestled on a flower petal.

Each time the pain surfaces or re-surfaces, I wonder what is so miraculous about the pain that one would want to hold on to it. Perhaps, a simple answer being that the pain is the memory of the thing one remembers dearly, and despite all the atrocity and suffering, the memory is the only thing remaining of that thing/person. And what will a tree be without its leaves? What will a caterpillar be without its cocoon? Maybe a tree will have spring and a caterpillar will turn into a butterfly? But that is too far ahead for us to imagine and work with.

Presently the question is what makes us hold on to the painful memories and not cherry-pick only the memories that calm us and make us feel delighted? Why do we want to hold on to the mess as much as we want to hold on to the aesthetic and beautiful? Perhaps there is a reason why we all are museums of painful things as much as we are a gallery of beautiful pictures. Why do we have all broken, annoying and messy things within us when we could have chosen to just keep the polaroids of our smiles and laughter with us. Because our mind tend to see pain and pleasure both equally important in forming of this horrible yet crucial thing called ‘self’.

Who am I if not the mistakes I have made in the past? said one actor once in an interview and a fourteen year old Sarthak took those words by heart. So when next time someone asked me if I would change anything from my past, I said NO because I was afraid that changing anything would also mean changing my ‘self’ and I wasn’t ready to change that ‘self’ regardless whether it was good or not. At least it was mine and mine alone. I am the person who has learnt through those experiences and I am not going to un-learn all that just because it gave me pain.

Hey, I am a warrior. I keep my scars like decorative medals because they remind me of my courage. But oh dear, do you really need to have all the scars - fresh and bleeding - to remind you of your courage? Isn’t the fact that you are still standing here, breathing and thriving a good enough proof of your courage and being?

Maybe that is the place where we all are in, holding on strongly to our sense of ‘self’, fearing the unknown territories of what we can be and keeping together the grief, remorse, pleasure, pain, joy, playfulness, hate, anger, everything well decorated in our personal museums because if not that museum, what will we ever be?

Khair, if you wish to explore your museum and learn how to shed some leaves, we might have the space for you. Maybe, I will see you here.

So, naturally, it came up in a session that someone told me, ‘What if you telling me ‘to feel all these things’ is also a narrative, a propaganda, and what if things can work fine without even doing so?', and as a good therapist trying to control his own anxieties, I asked the person to reflect upon why they think ‘fine’ is enough (a joke, guys!).

Yet, I sat with the question way too long, wondering if my client is right, what if it all is actually a narrative, a propaganda?

What if my therapist, my therapist’s therapist, my therapist’s therapist’s supervisor, and their supervisor, are all part of a large network of this narrative that it is important to feel all your emotions and sit with them and grieve about losses and lacks and disruptions and cry because one should, what all about it is just another elaborate ‘alternative truth’?

Feelings are costly. Feelings are expensive. Feelings are privileged. To feel something when you had been working fine without it for ages is like suddenly realizing that the chair you sit in all day for work is actually uncomfortable, its arm-rest is wobbly, its back has fallen weak and now, suddenly, you can’t tolerate sitting in that chair. Oh how much you wish you could go back to that state of not knowing that you were uncomfortable and in pain in your chair! You and I, we both have the full authority to hate our therapist for making us hate our chairs! I wonder if they hate their chair too! Anyways…

Still, once you have heard the question that the entire idea of ‘feelings are important’ is a propaganda, you can’t actually go back from it easily. You can’t go back to your work asking your clients to feel once again when now you know it might be a political act.

And on this note, I do agree that it is a political act. A political act of resistance and power and struggle to ask someone to feel something and to ask them to sit with their emotions for which there is no space that accepts them easily except a therapist’s room (or gmeet link or zoom session). But the client can’t stay with you forever there. They go back to the world, now with this knowledge of how much they hate the world or hate their environment or feel angry at their loved ones or feel disappointed with them, and they hate their therapist the most because ‘oh god, where the hell shall I keep these bundle of emotions which now I possess because the rest of the world around me is moving as if nothing happened here’. As therapists, in this entire political struggle and breakdown of one’s reality, we must own that yes, we are part of their heavy realization and struggle. We must take responsibility for bringing them in this struggle and now, telling them that ‘yeah, we know now you are able to see all this mess, but let’s sit together with it as long as it takes you to find your way through it.’

That is…where I believe…the work becomes the toughest and most important. Our repulsion to emotions and feelings and therapy become a part of what the society’s narrative asks us, whereas our desire to explore those feelings becomes part of our therapy’s narrative. In the middle of it all, we wonder what is even needed? What is even important?

to feel or not to feel, that is the question.

.Khair, if you wish to be part of this propaganda of exploring and understanding your feelings, reach out here.

A Palestinian poet wrote, “In order to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent”, and I had been thinking about this line each time I had tried to open up my word document to work on a research paper. I sit to write the ‘researcher’s position’ or ‘rationale for choosing the topic’ and I stare blankly at my screen - the reason not being that I do not know what I had in my mind, but I think what is still relevant? My positionality when I began working on something was that my topic mattered, my idea mattered, what I wanted to tell was important for the world to know. But things have shifted now.

However, I am not just writing here to vent my anger and frustration at a world that relentlessly is trying to ruin itself, like a patient in therapy bent on tasting the flavors of destruction (something like what Jaun Elia would say, Main bhi bohat ajeeb hun, itna ajeeb hun ki khud ko tabah kar liya aur malaal bhi nahi). But the world will have ‘malal’, it will have its sorrow, it will have its grief. It will have the unfulfilled desires that could not be realized because something around them was torn apart without even them knowing about it.

To deal with a war that ruins the havoc outside and to deal with a chaos that ruins internally, one often faces a question that is pushed to the margins - what shall happen to things that you thought mattered to you? The things that occupied your mind before the chaos ensued?

Does the child who sees his school blown up by war ever go back to worry about the dream of becoming a pilot? Does the lover who witnesses countries split apart ever think about the fear of abandonement in love? Does the researcher studying the reasons why we need to express ourselves more ever think about it once the world just starts counting days before things are blown apart?

Where do our desires go when catastrophy hits? Do they still occupy a part of our heart and mind? Or do we throw them away, keeping only the essential ideas in our minds, ideas of survival and safety?

In therapy, when someone says, I have been unable to tend to my plants because all I can think of is the kids’ school that was blown up in some part of the world, you think how are they related? But then, isn’t the care of one tender being similar to the care of ones in a different part of world?

Maybe, it is up to us. To find that insurmountable kind of hope, a hope something closer to what Ruskin Bond once says, “and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful”. So, regardless if the chaos is of heart or the world, you will have something that still will make sense, despite it all.

.Khair, it can be tough to find sanity and relatedness in times of mental and worldly chaos, yet if you feel something resonated with you or you would like to have a space to talk more, reach out.

Once you decide to be an accountant of love and care in your life, you will realize you the most love you owe perhaps is your own self. Not in a way that ‘oh I need to do more self-care or fill up gratitude journals’, or ‘I need to be happier each day because I am the one who shall have an impact upon my mood’. No, that is too narcissistic. This is more than that. This is like you stepping hungrily into a restaurant full of dishes to offer, and money in your pocket, and you telling yourself, ‘Ah I don’t think I deserve this’.

It is tough to just say that society has done that to people. To make them feel that their efforts shall have benefit for others and it is through their happiness that one shall feel happy. Purely hedonistic tasks are seen as greedy and needy. In a capitalistic mindset where each effort is to be rewarded, love remains as something you owe to the world the moment you receive it. You carry a heaviness upon you because you were offered love - either in tablespoons or just sprinkles. You feel like returning it, as soon as you can, because it feels itchy on your skin, oily on your skin, something that will stick, something that will make you shine like glitter on your skin after you were done completing your school summer holiday project. You don’t want that glitter. It is cheap!

Sahir Ludhianvi wrote once, apni tabhyat ka mujhe koi ghham nahi, tumne kisi ke saath mohabbat nibha toh di (I have no sorrow for my own pain, atleast you followed at least someone in love). The moment I read the line, all I could think of was Sahir sahab sitting in a therapy room with me, and I asking them, “But Sahir, what about your own ‘ghham’, your own sorrow? When are we going to account for that?” Do you, like me and many others, also discount for your own love till the world around you is full of love and care?

It is tough to love oneself. It is simple. No one has seen you closer than you have. You know what horrible, guilty, greedy, needy, cold, distancing, painful, atrocious, kind, loving, hopeful, fantastical, desiring, manipulative, hurtful thoughts you have had. With the fullest knowledge of oneself, with all its flaws and broken parts, love doesn’t come easy for one’s ownself.

So what do we do when love is easy as our own mother tongue when it is for the other but as alien as a colonizer’s language when it comes to loving us? And what love is possible for other when we are unable to love our selves? How can we expect to keep giving love and not feel atrocious or horrid when that love is returned? Wouldn’t we stop respecting the other the moment they love us back? I mean, wouldn’t we judge them for loving someone like us?

Perhaps, that is the thing. To truly love and receive love from someone, one must begin somewhere in attempting to be kinder to oneself, a little more loving to oneself. The language may be tough, but like Sahir, like us, like many others, we shall find ways of accounting for our ‘ghham’ and our ‘ishq’ too.

If you feel you need help in understanding your love for yourself, you know how to reach us. .Khair always has a space for you.

I sat with an exhaustion and wondered how do you survive in a world that tells you at each moment what you are meant to be or what you are meant to do.

Your Internet tells you how clothes are to be worn, what night-time-skin-care to follow, how to lock-in for upcoming exams, how to live a 9-5 and then a 5-10 as a corporate employee/lawyer/doctor/scholar/all occupations under one roof, how to cook healthy, how to eat healthy (some even suggesting how to shit healthy), how to chase someone, how to love someone, how to hate someone, how to ghost someone, how to miss someone, how to or how not-to display affection to someone, whom to protest for, whom to protest against, what are rights and what are wrongs, why men are horrible, why women are horrible, why every rich person in the world is horrible, why everything makes sense, why nothing makes sense, what to do on your first date/first job/first rejection/first marriage (?), how to care for a child, how not-to care for a child, and maybe also, how to die.

When everything that is there under the sun is also under the Internet and people are constantly finding answers to everything under a world that seems to have all figured out, what do you wonder about? What do you amuse about? What is there to figure out still that you can’t ask Chat-gpt and it won’t answer to you with its newly-evolved human-like way of talking.

In times that offer you knowledge, or maybe explosive amount of knowledge, where does our agency goes? What remains ours and what is borrowed from outside? Here, I strongly believe, going back to my perception of the Pride movement and the expression of oneself that gets showcased there. Since I haven’t been there ever, I can’t comment closely but from the visuals I witness, one thing seems clear. It does not fit.

It does not fit in the world’s narrative. It does not fit in the way people are ‘supposed to be’. And that is the beauty of it. To find ways of doing things that do not fit into the usual schemes of ‘narratives’ being pompously announced in the world. To love yourself or someone in a language that you both haven’t figured out yet. A work in progress. To learn each day with a curiosity. About yourself. About the other. To wonder and smile each time you accomplish something. To ask. To let it unfold. So many things in love that are still left to ‘mystery’ and that is a win.

I used to believe literature used to do that. Find odd and new ways of being. But of course, most literature today has again typecasted itself into limited genres. Few stories stand out.

Maybe, this write-up is nothing but a lament of loss of agency and novelty in a totalitarian world (see, I am not criticizing any ‘one’ in power but all of us who follow what is being offered to us right away). Maybe, this write-up is also a way of saying that somewhere, amidst love and loving, we have a possibility of opening up new ways of being - of humbleness that hasn’t been defined yet, of kindness and care that are not propagated yet, maybe.

.Khair, if you resonate with something I said, let me know?

In Hindustani, we have a word ‘beghar’, often used in phrases like ‘beghar hona’ or ‘beghar karna’. In simple terms, referring to ‘not having a home’ or ‘to make someone homeless’. What often stands interestingly here for me is that both are verbs, actions, acts that can be done to another or are done to oneself. In English, as much as I know, we don’t have a word for ‘beghar hona’. We might refer to ‘abandon’ or ‘disown’ but no other word comes close to explaining the feeling of stripping away someone’s home from them or a home being taken away from oneself in such agentic manner.

Now, let’s move away from the linguistic dilemma here. We are not keen in finding the exact translation of ‘beghar’. Our idea is to find this feeling within us. What it means to stay ‘be-ghar’ while remaining with people you call as ‘ghar’. And if you do, what is exactly this ‘ghar’?

Sociological studies of queer communities often talk about something called ‘chosen homes’ or ‘chosen families’ which people all across societies have now taken to imbibe within. It feels like a rite of passage for almost everyone to find ‘home’ elsewhere, because the ‘home’ in which one has grown is fundamentally flawed or disrupted. The whispers of silent sobs, shattered desires and insomniac disappointments lurk in every household for most people.

But isn’t that a larger pressure? To keep finding home outside and remaining ‘beghar’ in one’s own life? Or a disconnect from one’s ownself? When you keep seeking something outwards that you never find with the proximal home?

And what about the terrors of being able to find a comfort space within your own home that you don’t have to look out in the world for it? How horribly you become a black sheep of the society? (You have love and care in your own home. Ew. Keep it away.)

Imagine the lives of two people.

One who finds love in home. One who seeks love in the multiple ‘homes’ outside.

One who can place their desire at home. One who doesn’t know the language of desire at home.

One who laughs and feels grounded at home. One whose feet are always shaking to walk out.

One who listens and is listened to in their home. One whose voice is known to them better in the world outside.

One who desires to expand their home and make a calmer world. One who feels ‘home’ means being blocked and held.

Maybe, both are loved, both are cared for, both are hopeful. But where do they find ‘home’? In a typical cliché way, in each other? Who knows?

Yet, the aspiration remains. To find a home, create one, maybe in people, maybe in places, where for once, the act can be dropped, the desire can be burped and farted around, the laughter can be silly, love can spill on kitchen slabs, and you can bathe in calmness in the hall of your home.

It can be a tough journey to find your ‘home’ or make your ‘home’. If you need someone to help you do that, reach out at .Khair. We always have a space for you.

It is horribly ironic that in a consumerist world (as Erich Fromm imagined to be a giant capitalistic breast from which we, consumers, are sucking endlessly), our desires often appear the heaviest to us. Maybe it is a Jungian archetype that even he failed to fathom - of the Greek God Atlas, who spent aeons lifting sky on his shoulders, dealing with a punishment that was for crimes of someone else.

But I mean, come on, what does Atlas’s archetype has to do with me wanting a date night every friday with my loved one?

Well, for starters, everything.

Atlas, in mythology, remained the only punished God whose punishment was seen like a heroic sacrifice - lifting the sky above his shoulders so it never causes destruction of the world (I really don’t want to go into the ‘Mommy-Daddy mating issue’ of the story, so if you know, you know). But at the end of the day, he was suffering a punishment for acts of someone else. So if you tell me you have never taken care of others’ unfulfilled wishes or desires, I will not believe you. I will say, we all had tried to be heroic at one point of time in our lives.

The heroic sacrifice trope from Atlas’s mythology got passed down or perhaps was already there in other spaces - Lord Rama leaving his kingdom to fulfill a promise his father made, warriors following Odysseus (ah, the much awaited Nolan reference) - but you get the gist.

You make a sacrifice of your wishes, you are a hero. You demand your desire - either your nose gets cut or you are turned into a stone-turning-snake-haired-horror. Nothing in between. And hence, in order to avoid our desires being played out and us turning into monsters, we remain weightless.

Yet, the weightless-ness comes with a price. A price so heavy it drowns us. Living a life where we do everything perfectly, fulfilling everyone’s wishes and making everyone smile. But our desires suffocating in some dim-dark corner and then one day, us waking up, feeling a heaviness in our chest that not even bad AQI can explain! That’s when a therapist asks you, “But what do you desire?” and you begin hating your therapist too for asking you such a question because you don’t have an answer.

WHAT IS MY DESIRE? HOW WILL I KNOW? DIDN’T THEY DIE NAMELESS AND BREATHLESS IN SOME CORNER YEARS AGO?

So we sit, with the corpses of our desires, the wounds still fresh and rotting and ask what we can do. We ask if there is a way we can live with fresh, living desires, desires that demand to take up space, threaten to say their mind and ask for something that doesn’t align with everything that others’ are doing.

Undoubtedly there is a horror in having your desires out in the world. They become so heavy that you have to carry them on your own. The change of you transitioning from a weightless bird to a bird that wants a warm, comfortable nest can make you feel cringe and ashamed.

However, there is one hope. As you continue lifting your desires like weights in a gym, perhaps you will find someone, one who will lift your desires with you, make them look weightless and tell you, “Hey, that wasn’t much. Anything else I can do for you?”

Maybe, that ‘someone’ will be someone actually out there. Or maybe, that someone will be you for your own self.

.Khair, if you still feel your desires are heavy and you don’t know where to place them, I always have a space for you. Reach me here.

Picture source: Wordpress : Oedipus taking his eyes out after realizing the truth

This is not a ragebait article. I am not picking sides. I am not telling you all how the stereotypical ‘brown-families-giving-trauma’ notion is once again true. Maybe, I am just looking at a thread, a thread so meticulously nourished and glorified, a thread that binds people so closely together, is actually a comforting, lulling noose around our necks.

For a while, let’s call it ‘the invisible umbilical cord’. The thread. The knot. The tie. Everything that most people carry around their knecks so comfortably till they are withered away by it. Unlike the actual umbilical cord that nourishes and sustains an unborn being, this invisible thread is meant to hold you, weaken you, dampen you and make you fall on your knees.

Sudhir Kakar, in his book, The Inner World (1978), wrote about the fear most Indian men (although he focused only on one religious identity) have, that is being constantly in a state of intimidation by their mothers, the ‘mother-who-can-consume-the-infant’, the mother, who by her overarching love, may blur boundaries between the identities of the two, who may outpour all her anger, grief, desire and love on a child who may never grow up to be an adult. Is it about a mother’s omnipotence, her incomplete desires, her own neglect, a constant desire for control - it is all a different conversation. For now, we focus on the fear.

I don’t mean to say the fear is only with men. Interacting with clients in my therapy work, I have come across statements even from women who say, “I don’t want to be like my mother”. So, the fear is in-large in both the sides. However, women mostly have a way of identifying with their mothers and learning how to resist following themselves on the same path.

What is interesting to note is how the umbilical cord (mind you, the invisible one) is never cut by the man. Rather, it is worn like a sacred thread. The archetypal ‘bibba munda’ (the good boy) will wear the thread and even invite others (in most cases, his partner or wife) to also enter the same noose. The boy will sing grand praises of the thread, as a stark reaction to what he feels (the sense of crippling anxiety, the spinelessness that makes him weaker) and show perhaps anger and resentment towards women of the society in general. The archetype of ‘man-child’ is perhaps, a result of a noose that never gets cut, the man who remains incapable of independent boundaries and sense of self, as Winnicott might have asked for. Generations after generations, boundary-less men growing up, never to understand what they desire or how they talk about anything, because the noose never leaves them.

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Some days, I listen to my autowale uncle tell me, “Beta, don’t get married at all. These days, women are all cunning and will ruin you,” and I doomscroll on Twitter/X where more men go around moral-policing and slut-shaming women, and I wonder, but aren’t these men also the ones who love their mothers so ardently. Do they split the identity of their mother as a woman and a mother? Do they see other women as corrupted, falliable, weak and tormentable while the mother a pedestalized shrine with evangilical voice and commands? What causes such reaction?

Or, perhaps, a scary thought appears. Or perhaps, men’s suppressed anger and suffocation of the invisible umbilical cord comes through their anger, oppression, resentment towards other women in their lives? All this may sound like premature assumptions and maybe,

.Khair, feel free to share, reflect, discuss, and critically comment on the free-floating random trail of thoughts that led me here.

While traveling in metro on a fine morning when strangers were smashed against each other’s bodies during rush office hours and one’s breath travelled down the others’ neck, without consent, without a romance, but just plain suffocation in a public transport, I heard an amusing announcement, “Please don’t engage in any indecent act that may cause discomfort to others. It is punishable.”

I smiled at the irony because in a space where touch is so imminent due to crowd, a touch that might cause rest to someone (after a tiring day, the shoulder of your beloved or the arm of someone holding you close) or make one feel safe amidst the swarm of strangers…that touch is indecent.

However, I am not writing this to argue or debate once again about PDA (public display of affection) and tell you all why it is right or wrong, or when we can accept fights, arguments and beating up in public and we tend to ignore it, why is affection (holding hands, hugs that linger for a moment too long, or maybe…a kiss) is considered the greatest affliction upon our eyes. No, we are not doing that here. Rather, we go about understanding what causes discomfort in viewing affection in public or engaging in it.

Is it the moral policing? The state-supported violence in urban and semi-urban cities? Or simply because Eros has to be seen as shameful since innocence?

After talking many netizens, I came to a common finding, something which can almost be translated into a formula -

Approval or Disapproval of PDA = Social context x Level of intimacy

If the context is okay (a party, a concert, a celebration, a closed space), and level of intimacy is tredding carefully on the lines between decent conduct and indecent acts (let the subjectivity of this play in your mind), PDA can find its approval in public or not. But who decides what is a context and what isn’t is still a lurking question…

People also say that social media has played a big role in expression of desire - from Pinterest-y posts of hugs, kisses and intimate moments - individuals have romanticized it among multiple other things. This often translates to people also finding moments in real life to replicate it for themselves because come on, who doesn’t want that perfect Pinterest shot with their loved one too!

Yet, the question remains. What brings the shame? What brings the fear? What brings the awkwardness?

Is it the fact that many of us may have never seen our parents showing affection to each other in public so our very basis of affectionate couples is a Bollywood dream? And we all know how we see fantasy and reality? IT IS A HORROR TO SEE YOUR FANTASY EVER BEING TURNED INTO REALITY!

Is it because there has never been a thing as such as ‘desiring’ woman - a woman who may be comfortable in expressing desire or demanding affection - because, uhm, we all know how social media police and real-life moral police acts with women who show desire…

And god forbid we talk of homosexuality and expression of desire here. It will a pandora box that will explode.

However, as couples struggle to find liminal spaces to express desire (the spaces being influenced by caste, class, heirarchies and sexuality constraints), and the morality of people fluctuating like picture-editing filters, one netizen, a friend, made a statement, Pyaar se space reclaim karna (Sidra Khan, 2025).

Maybe, we had been asking the question wrong. Maybe, we don’t need to shovel PDA down people’s throats or completely de-bar it from society. Maybe, we don’t need to keep re-telling that our culture doesn’t allow it. Because hello, so many cultural myths and legends will prove you otherwise. All we need to do is…ask for space for love. A space where desire can breathe (ironic, right, Delhi people?) and love can become an act of resistance, a resistance against the slowly dying life itself!

.Khair, Share your thoughts and views (about PDA) or pyaar, if you feel like.

I write this on a winter evening. Evenings that starkly hold a problematic relation to me. I am scared of them, to be honest. Perhaps, they remind me of multiple things. Out of many things, one thing being how we are afraid of kindness.

Forget intimacy, love, desire, affection. Just kindness. A kindness of ‘Oh I can hold the door for you while you run towards the lift’, or ‘I can wait for you outside the dressing room holding your stuff while you try new things’ or maybe, a kindness of ‘I can help the person getting off the ground on their own when they had a fall even when I don’t know the person’.

What makes us kind? I don’t think we are intrigued by this question anymore. Psychologists, social thinkers and philosophers spend endless time wondering what makes us aggressive. We celebrate aggressiveness. We celebrate violence. We tell the world about our sense of justice and violence through movies, books and ideas. Sacrifice, as Rene Girard puts it, is celebratory because it is backed by the sacred virtues. It reminds us of God. Oh what a big fallacy to imagine that Gods are pleased by violence.

But who am I to talk about kindness when even a simple act of kindness by the ones I love makes me feel like I owe them something now. I repeat the kind act in my head over and over again, relishing it, feeling amazed to see how they did something for me. Are we capable of embrasing kindness? Do we understand kindness? Do we speak a language where kindness is acknowledged? Or are all our words simply an act of imposing authority over the other?

Imagine it is a cold winter evening. You order something. A man wrapped in three layers of sweaters comes and delivers it to you. You complain that your food has turned cold because he got late. You desired hot food. He leaves with an apology conveyed to you. What do you get? Hot food? Or food and an apology that came from hurt. Is it that easy to hurt someone? By placing one’s desire so strongly that the other has no space to occupy. Maybe, that is all there is. Kindness is placing your desire softly, like a butterfly landing upon a delicate flower, requesting nectar out of it. Not like a foot that crushes over the flower because it desired to walk.

I don’t know maybe where I am going with this post, honestly. All I know is I wonder if we have what it takes to be kind? Or accept kindness? And if we do, if we actually start thinking of being kind and placing our desires righteously but kindly, how will we take it? Will we embrace it and cherish it the way we cherish violence? Or will we fall to our knees, and weep, like Nietzsche did, embracing a carriage-horse and weeping for hours?

You fear what has been done to you. Suddenly you feel heavier than you do after a Leg’s day at gym. You feel heavier than you did when you favorite sportsperson played their last match of their lifetime. You don’t know what to do with this heaviness, this sudden anger that boils in you, but unlike other times when you imagined yourself punching walls and shouting, you want to just curl up and maybe do yet another shameful thing - cry.

Oh ‘they’ told us that therapy will be good, crying will make you strong, but suddenly, it is a floodgate and there is no stopping. All systems seem broken, all barriers seem crossed. You seemed to have turned into a monster after therapy - a greedy, weeping, desirious monster. You occupy space, you show desire, you demand care. Being more like the aliens whose language you have suddenly learnt.

But hold on. Trust me, hold on. The new skin feels weird, it feels lighter and that’s why you don’t want to wear it. It is the discomfort of the new shoe on your feet, of the touch of new fabric on your skin. You don’t know how to adjust in a skin you haven’t known before. But you are here now, you choose it, let’s try to stay here a bit longer.

The point of being a ‘man’ is that the violence you endure never showcases itself. You are told to harden up like rock, bark of an old tree, leather, dirt, and all things that do not change over time. But therapy shakes the core of you - changing you from rock to a river, from a tree to a leaf, it makes you softer and vulnerable. And being vulnerable is the price you pay for healing.

Now, you are here, reading all this till here, knowing that the bag of heavy emotions you are suddenly carrying, shamefully over your shoulders, knowing that it perhaps, it is not that shameful.

Perhaps, it is not shameful to ask.

Perhaps, it is not guilt-provoking to desire.

Khair, it is okay to find a place where you can put down the bag and rest.

If Darwin had to re-create an understanding of traits that get passed on to the next generations, he would count over-thinking. Not because it might help future generations survive aliens, monsters or maybe, love-bombing by romantic beings spawned by artificial intelligence (Hello, Her movie reference), but maybe because today, it serves us a great deal. If you are, at this point, ‘oh hell, another post about over-thinking and why it might be okay, and has the writer ever been awake in the middle of the night, replaying a conversation in their head, imagining how differently it could have ended’, well…read on.

When I say ‘overthinking’ might be crucial is because we are living in times of over-stimulation. Over-stimulation through OTT producing crime docu-series and bold serial killer biopics that we are gobbling up like Diwali sweets on a post-Diwali weekend. We are watching brain-rot reels mindlessly, sharing them mindlessly with face icons on Instagram with whom we hadn’t had a proper conversation in years but we share reels to frequently. We are talking about reels, in language of reels (slow claps for your imitation of the infidelity reel that went viral), we are thinking like reels. Clearly, we are a ship of Theseus where even the last plank hasn’t remain ours and soon someone can question who is the original us, or who we are without our meme and brainrot references?

Over-stimulated times bring, ironically, under-thought mindsets. We consume more than we think. We agree more than we criticize or think. We do a ‘+1’ before we word our own thoughts. Here come our heroes in disguise, the vigilantes of the night (oh well, quite literally) who think, who think more than others and that’s why get blamed as ‘over-thinkers’.

People who play conversations, arguments, ideas multiple times in their head before they place it out in the world. Because they are fickle and can’t stick to one thought? Oh God, no! Rather, they look at multiple POVs, see how anything they say or do affects the ones they love and eventually affects them too, and then, make a choice. A choice which is thought out in times when we just follow.

I believe and maybe it is just I who believe, but additionally to being in the company of someone who uses their capacity to overthink in the smartest way out there, I can say, over-thinking or let’s just call it thinking, is an under-used asset. If you can actually tolerate your brain’s cognitive overload and work your way through multiple voices of others (who single-mindedly tell you things to do), you can find a voice so unique, it can’t be replicated by a prompt on A.I. You become capable of finding answers that are yours and yours alone, and that today, is a voice of resistance.

But who am I to say anything? I have been rambling here for the past so many words. Maybe, this is my over-thinking-over-writing. Yet, if you get what I mean, you know what I mean. You understand what my loads of thoughts have to say to your loads of thoughts.

Maybe it is all a mess.

Khair, we are in the mess together!

“There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me.” - Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice.

I don’t know what Kafka meant when he wrote it, I don’t know if he loved the melancholic romanticism of being away from his beloved, or whether he genuinely suffered from it. Literary critics can come and do their work, but what I learnt during one of the walks I conducted was something different.

With a group of people, on a warm afternoon with hint of cold wrapping us in October, in ruins of a place that celebrated and remembered two Sufi lovers, I freely associated about Love and Loneliness - two equally romantic notions - each more insufferable than the other when experienced but sufferable when intellectualized.

But then we talked about Longing, and I was taken back to my playlist. All playlists about songs that are about distance, longing, waiting, imagining, dreaming, hoping, crying, begging God, and just hoping Love is something that happens to me, and not just other people. I wondered what it makes of me, and thousands of others, who daydream about love, are experts in love in theory, but amateurs in practice.

In the bubbles of psychoanalysis explained poetically, love is an ocean and we view it while being submerged in a submarine. We are surrounded by water (or devoid of, who knows), and we keep yearing to touch the water, breaking the glass and just feeling it on our skin. But somewhere in our mind, we know, the glass is strong, it will hold us, protect us, not let us go there. Because otherwise, we will drown. So. we create the illusion of longing for us, a longing that makes us fantasize swimming in the depths of ocean, surrounded by water with pressure that can burst our heads open, but we fantasize, and that fantasy is beautiful, it is gorgeous, it is serene. Scary is the glass breaking and the water actually reaching us.

Then, I wondered, with the group of people I was with, we want to hold on to our feelings, especially the feelings we are in control of, and longing is one such feeling. Love is not a feeling you control or manage. Longing is. That is why longing is stable, love is not. Longing is what comforts us, love is not. And when we keep doing it for some time, it becomes part of our identity - like our suffering, our pain, our anger. We don’t know what we will be without it. Fantasy takes the throne, while reality begs for alms.

When it rains horridly outside, but you sit inside the cafe, the window in front of you showing you what rain might be like, what love might feel like, to get soaked in it, you wonder, you anticipate, you fantasize. But you don’t step out. Because you know, somewhere within, or maybe someone told you, the rain isn’t for you. Or you won’t be able to tolerate the rain. Or maybe you convinced yourself that rain is good, when viewed from a distance. Or rain is something that others enjoy and frolick around in. Not you.

Till the time you actually do…

…and what happens when you do? Do you seek the submarine again to protect you or you let the water submerge you fully?