Thousands of students came to Jantar Mantar to ask the questions that the Prime Minister refuses to answer in a press conference. When other forms of political engagement stop working, politics comes to the streets.

The ballot is the only form of political engagement that the BJP recognizes, and the electoral costs of bad policy have been small. The BJP has won election after election through a wildly successful program of narrative management. The press celebrates the government’s cultural achievements and positions India as a Vishwaguru, while sidelining economic stagnation and the lived reality of Indians. Social media is the new arena of public discourse, and until recently, that too was the wheelhouse of the BJP.

The Cockroach Janta Party has reclaimed social media for the people. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation is a victory for political accountability, but we are yet to turn this moment into an inflection point for the country. While accountability is necessary in a democracy, it is not sufficient—we have to make serious policy proposals, for which we must look deeper at systemic issues.

This is a policy article. Policies are enacted by politicians, who have to be elected, and votes come from mass mobilization. This article is an appeal to India’s next youth leader to find their ammunition in India’s deep systemic issues that cut across decades and party lines. It is also an invitation to you, the disaffected reader, to enter the policy conversation.

Reform is possible. The protests have shown that young people are a political bloc. Let us be a bloc that votes for growth-oriented solutions rather than redistribution-oriented revolutions.

We describe two underlying problems driving the protests, and propose a solution.

Problem #1: The anxiety about exams and admission is driven by an unemployment crisis. People want jobs, not degrees, and the Indian economy is not providing enough of them. A flood of Indian graduates is meeting a sluggish economy.

Problem #2: The number of degree-providing institutions is high, but there is a steep quality cliff once you get past the top. Entering the small cohort of top universities is a narrow way of making it ahead.

Solution: We should hold our government accountable for leaked papers, but the long-term solution is to demand economic freedom, which will expand the pie of good universities and well-paying jobs.

Graduate unemployment

A recent study from Azim Premji University analyses youth employment in India. The percentage of graduates that report open unemployment (that is, they are looking for a job but don’t have one) is:

• 40% for those under the age of 25

• 20% for 25-29 year olds and

• lower (<10%) for people over 30.

This trend makes sense—people are willing to wait for a good job.

20% graduate unemployment among 25-29 year olds is more than 60 lakh college-educated Indians not working. This is alarming. The years after college are the most creative, energetic, independent years of one’s life, and not being able to use them productively entails a severe lack of fulfillment for both the individual and for India’s economy. If a degree doesn’t produce a job, college is just an expensive way to postpone unemployment. Colleges should not be adult daycare.

The rise in graduate unemployment means higher competition among graduates, leading to a stagnation of salaries. This bears out in data: since 2011, real (inflation adjusted) salaries have actually dropped. This figure is from the same Azim Premji report:

One would imagine that employers are happy to have a large pool of unemployed graduates to choose from. But employers complain that there are not enough qualified candidates. In a ManpowerGroup survey, 82% of Indian employers say they had difficulty filling a position due to lack of quality candidates, making India the 5^th highest talent-short country in the world. What’s happening?

University quality

Our higher education system is a filter that finds and polishes the top bracket of high school students. We produce Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, but neglect the median student and damage our economy.

Teenagers in India face intense pressure to get into the handful of good colleges in our country. We give up the last few years of our childhood to stay inside and study feverishly for the one exam that will determine our fate. Every year, not just this year, scores of students buckle under this pressure and take their own lives; the linked article suggests 93 deaths over five years due to NEET exam stress. The horrifying reality is that student suicides in India are not an anomalous occurence. They are the conclusion of a tragedy that all Indians know in their bones: there are only so many universities worth getting into. There is a wide chasm between the best and the rest.

The situation is pronounced in medicine. The total number of seats available is itself abysmally low. India has 14 lakh registered doctors—that’s less than 1 doctor per 1000 people. OECD countries have 3.9 doctors per 1000 people. The Prime Minister’s Viksit Bharat vision has set 2047 as the target for India to become a developed country. There are 1.2 lakh MBBS seats in the country. If we hope to reach OECD levels of doctors by 2047, we need to approximately triple the number of medical seats without compromising quality. Contrast this dire need for doctors with students who want to learn medicine but commit suicide because they did not have the opportunity to do so.

Tripling the number of seats in 20 years is not something that even a genius, well-intentioned central education minister can orchestrate. India has low state capacity, which must be used sparingly, and any attempt to reach OECD levels through government-provided medical education will fail.

Get the government out of the way

The only sustainable way to mitigate exam pressure that leads to corruption, paper leaks, and suicides, is to reduce how crucial a single exam is. To do this, we need to increase the number of quality higher education institutes and well-paying jobs after graduation. The binding constraint on both is stifling government regulation.

UGC’s 2003 regulations on private universities mandate that an Act of a State Legislature or Parliament is required to establish a university. State requirements vary across the country. UP requires contiguous land area of 20 acres (urban) or 50 acres (rural), ₹5 cr in initial endowment, and 24,000 square meters of built up area. Harvard and MIT would be dead on arrival—even today these universities don’t have contiguous land areas, but sprawl across commercial and residential plots. A river flows between Harvard’s various campuses. MIT started in 1865 in rented quarters in the Mercantile Building on Summer Street in Boston. Its first permanent building was still under construction.

The same UGC regulations entail that universities cannot generate profit for shareholders. That leaves us with two options: universities can be opened by the government, or by private people as a “service to the nation”. The government lacks resources, so the future of our students is up to the goodwill of a few individuals. Goodwill does not scale. What scales is people’s desire to profit by providing a high-quality service that families want to pay for.

Wouldn’t privatization increase the cost of education and lead to the poor being priced out? A free market encourages competition that reduces prices overall. Private education today is expensive because there are few universities and many buyers. Won’t deregulation lead to a drop in the quality of education? A study on private vs. public primary school education by Karthik Muralidharan found that private schools have equal or better outcomes, depending on the studied subject, with significantly lower costs—the average cost per student in private schools is only one-third of that in government schools. Here’s the paper and here’s a summary article by Karthik.

To make matters worse, the Central government also runs the major entrance exams. NEET is the mandatory entrance route for all MBBS degree positions in the country. Even if someone decides to donate their life’s savings and jump through regulatory hoops to open a private medical college, they cannot choose how to select students. They have to use NEET. Pranay Kotasthane argues that India does not need a Union Education Ministry to run entrance examinations and produce national education policies—decentralization and deregulation is the way forward.

Like universities, businesses are stifled by regulatory requirements, stringent labour laws, and capital controls that limit investment, preventing them from growing and creating jobs. More than 99% of Indian industrial firms are MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises). Becoming a large firm is almost impossible.

A paper by economists Shruti Rajagopalan and Kadambari Shah outlines the flood of compliances that MSMEs have to deal with. They write:

India’s business regulatory framework consists of an overwhelming 1,536 laws, 69,233 compliance requirements, and 6,632 filings at the Union and state levels cumulatively, which Manish Sabharwal has dubbed India’s “regulatory cholesterol”.

Here is one example of an excessive regulation they illustrate:

The Factories Act, 1948 … requires construction establishments to provide “soft” and “absorbent” toilet paper and specifies that latrine and urinal floors and walls must be finished with glazed tiles or similar materials up to a height of 90 centimeters (Section 19).

We are dropping an axe on our own feet by making upcoming firms do a regulatory dance (and pay bribes to avoid it) if they wish to scale and provide the jobs that our young people desperately need.

Conclusion

Many of India’s problems, including the mess of our higher education system and the unemployment crisis, can be eased by letting individuals freely engage with each other in consensual financial transactions, when these transactions do not hurt anybody else. The book In Service of the Republic is the compendium of such ideas. If you are short on time, consider the graphic novel We, The Citizens that will keep you as hooked as CJP reels.

The Cockroach Janta Party has generated an unprecedented political momentum in the youth. Seeing young people demand good governance gives us hope that democracy can be brought back to life in India. Let us nurture this seed with a growth-oriented political philosophy that will make India a good place to live.

There is no mystery deeper than what will make a baby laugh, and nothing more delightful than finding the answer.

The elephants were funny for only two days. There was one glorious week when sounds like ‘ba’, ‘da’ and ‘ga’ sent Malhar into peals of laughter. Now, all I get for my efforts at enunciation is a blank look. Every now and then I stumble on some word that induces uncontrollable giggling: yesterday it was ‘picnic’, today it is ‘chamcha’, tomorrow it will be something else. Sometimes a hiccup makes him smile; at other times nothing short of high-energy bhangra will do. But every trick we discover to elicit his laughter expires in forty eight hours.

The internet abounds with hacks to entertain babies: just-stick-some-streamers-to-the-ceiling-fan or just-take-a-Ziploc-bag-that-you-obviously-already-have-in-the-house-and-fill-it-with-water-and-add-peas-and-tape-it-to-the-floor. Your baby will love playing with it. You must, of course, carefully supervise said baby during this activity, in case the bag tears and they put a pea in their mouth and choke on it. Social media advice is bad for anyone, but for first-time moms prone to anxiety, it is lethal.

On Instagram, I came across a child physical therapist who said, “Avoid picking your baby up from under their arms”. That sixty second reel has stuck in my brain, making me worry about doing some damage—I don’t even remember what is supposed to go wrong—by lifting my baby the way all babies have always been lifted. Another post said that the baby’s bedtime routine needs to be at least twenty minutes long to signal to them that it’s night time. Now I stress every time Malhar nods off in the middle of his bedtime story. Thankfully he sleeps through the night now, so in this department I am ready to GIVE unsolicited advice instead of asking for it.

It doesn’t help that for every suggestion about how to take care of babies, you also hear the exact opposite suggestion.

Make the bedroom ‘dark as a cave’ to help your baby sleep. Teach your baby to sleep anywhere, so that they don’t become dependent on a specific setup. Give your baby toys that move around—it’ll help them learn to crawl. Don’t give your baby electronic toys! They’re too stimulating. Banana is the best first food. Bananas cause constipation. Hold your baby upside down. Don’t hold your baby upside down.

This pattern is so persistent that I’m going to call it Singh’s Third Law Of Babies.

This is nonsense, of course. The only real law of babies is that there are no laws, because babies change so fast that nothing about them is true for more than a week. At birth, Malhar was a sleepy little bean whose head would flop down if one forgot to support it. Six months later, he’s doing yoga. When I started writing this essay, I wrote “Malhar uses an earthworm-like motion to reach things he wants: he raises himself up on hands and knees, then belly-flops forward, and repeats.” At the time of publication, he has learnt to crawl!

Malhar’s repertoire of facial expressions has expanded far beyond the one-dimensional crying/not crying of the first weeks. His eyes go big in shock when he sees something unexpected, like a candle flame being blown out. When he sees me after a long gap, he gives a wide grin that reveals his single tooth and melts my heart like ghee in a hot pan. There’s a disgusted ‘what the fuck’ face that appears when he tries any food for the first time. He has a curious pout when he’s exploring a new toy, and an angry pout when things are not proceeding according to his wishes.

We can tell which toys he likes by the vigour with which he tries to reach them. Laptops, phones and watches are at the top of the list—things he sees us interact with. He has a knack for ending video calls by hitting the laptop trackpad with his hand. A recent hit is a velcro ‘busy board’ with animal cutouts you can remove and stick back on. It takes him five minutes to get one off, but he perseveres, diligently tugging at it until he frees the animal from its prison. Then he promptly stuffs the whole thing into his mouth. Malhar is taking in the world, literally. Every new object gets a thorough inspection with eyes, hands, and mouth. If he can’t bring the object to his mouth, he harnesses his rubber-like body to bring his mouth to the object.

He likes slapping things—books, toys, my face—and banging things on other things, including his own thighs. He lights up when we sing songs or play music, but if he happens to be in the kitchen when the pressure cooker whistles, he’ll throw a screaming fit. He also screams unprovoked—happy screams we call them—various aahs and eeehs that make us think he is testing what his vocal cords can do.

He is understanding how things work, making connections. Bottle contains milk. Spoon brings food. You can see the awareness in his eyes. Yesterday he tried to get out of his play pen (we keep him enclosed in it because he can crawl and we haven’t baby-proofed the house). He failed (thank god). When he gave up, he emitted such an adult-like ‘humph’ of frustration that I thought he’s going to say ‘abbe yaar’ next.

A lot of people, including my husband, say they miss the younger versions of their babies. I don’t. I’m fully in love with six-and-a-half-month-old Malhar, and I can’t wait for things to come: babbling, walking, talking, reading, singing, dancing. Every time he gains a layer of agency that brings him closer to us, like laughing at things we do or saying ‘milk’ in sign language, I feel intense joy at being able to connect with him more than I could before. How could I miss a time when his mind was less developed? I know he will eventually become a teenager and want nothing to do with us, and perhaps then I will miss carrying him around and showing him hanging elephants. But for now, I am content. The word that keeps coming to mind (and I don’t know how to translate it without losing shades of meaning) is ‘sukoon’.

It’s difficult to cast my mind back to the state it was in before he was born, because now, when I think of being pregnant, I do it with the knowledge that it was Malhar in my womb, this Malhar who responds to his name and eats his books. The memory is adulterated by my love. I can’t imagine what it was like to know that there is a baby, but not this baby, on the way. Even his ultrasound pictures look like him, look real, in a way that they didn’t when they were taken.

We were lucky to get a clear shot of his left hand in one of the ultrasound pictures. I remember being awe-struck to see the joints of his fingers. These days, Malhar’s hands seem very big to me. They can grab hanging elephants, scratch people, and as of two days ago, clap. He enjoys looking at his own hands, waving them in front of his face, opening and closing his fist. It’s like he’s amazed at his own existence. Like he’s showing himself, look, I am here.

It doesn’t even have to be a fantasy novel. It could be a cookbook and I’ll find a way to get a map in there.

A map tells you that the made-up world you are about to enter is rich and complex. It invites you to think about how the setting shapes the story, providing a scaffolding for the narrative to hang on. Here is an excellent example from The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss:

This is Temerant. Each of its countries has a distinct identity, with its own language, economy, religion, and style of governance. Like the real world, each culture also has prejudices and stereotypes about the others.

The bulk of the story is set in the Commonwealth, the most cosmopolitan part of Temerant. Kvothe, the protagonist, is a student at the University near Imre. A few years into the story he travels to Ademre: an isolated, orthodox country on the other side of the map. The Adem people have almost no interaction with the rest of the world. In their language, the word for foreigner is ‘barbarian’. Their society is ritualistic and does not easily tolerate deviants.

One of the many ways that the Adem differ from the rest of Temerant is in their casual attitude towards sex. They are polyamorous and view sex as nothing more than a bodily function, like eating—it can, but doesn’t have to be, done in a romantic or intimate context. It is fun, but also part of regular hygiene. No one is judged for taking a stranger’s help to get it done; there’s no concept of sexual promiscuity.

Kvothe has sex with an Adem woman, Penthe, and afterwards, they get into a strange argument.

Kvothe reassures Penthe that she won’t get pregnant, because he regularly consumes a contraceptive herb. Penthe is merely amused. She, like the rest of Ademre, does not believe that pregnancy is a consequence of having sex. They believe that women ‘ripen’ and bear children of their own accord, and men play no role at all.

Kvothe is flabbergasted. He tries to convince Penthe that having sex makes babies. He asks if she has ever heard of someone becoming pregnant without having sex in the preceding months.

“Why would any woman go for months without having sex?” she responds.

He asks her why babies sometimes look like their fathers, and she is even more amused to learn that barbarians have a word for the imaginary concept of ‘man-mothers’. She sidesteps the question by saying that babies simply look like old men.

Neither of them is able to convince the other that they are wrong. In Penthe’s model of the world, all women have sex all the time, and sometimes become pregnant. There is no causal relationship between these two things.

This fictional argument illustrates two truths of the human condition: the culture you are embedded in shapes your worldview, and when someone’s worldview differs from your own, it is very difficult to change their mind using logic. Penthe starts with an axiom: sex and pregnancy are unrelated. She fits the evidence she sees into this theory. If she did come to know of a woman who never had sex, and did not become pregnant, it would look like a coincidence, rather than proof that her model of reality is wrong.

Axioms are the things that we assume to be true without proof. Everything we believe is derived from axioms. Even mathematics, in which every statement starts with ‘therefore’, is built on a foundation of axioms:

• If a = b and b = c, then a = c.

• If two sets have the same elements, they are the same set.

• The shortest distance between two points is the straight line that connects them.1

It seems absurd to even try to “prove” statements like these. But if (and only if) we assume they are true, we can derive all kinds of fascinating things about numbers, and sets, and geometry.

In life, unlike in maths, different people have different axioms. Eugenists in 1880 believed that some races are genetically superior to others. A physicist assumes that nature follows laws that are consistent across space and time, which she can discover by forming theories and conducting experiments. A religious person’s axiom is that god exists, and they interpret the events of the world as consequences of god’s actions.

There’s nothing wrong with having axioms—no knowledge system can be built without them. Imagine if the physical sciences did not assume that the laws of nature are constant across space and time. Galileo might demonstrate how gravity works in Pisa, Venice, Florence, and Rome, and still not be sure what will happen in Milan. Scientists wouldn’t be able to make predictions. We have decades of evidence that vaccines prevent illnesses, but what if that’s suddenly not true tomorrow? We would never send a rocket to the moon.

Human societies depend on sharing a set of common myths. When a large group of people agree to adopt a set of axioms, they can work together to create complex systems. Money is an interesting example of this—it has value only because everyone thinks it has value. Shared reality is the fertile ground from which civilisation is born.

A case of opposing axioms

Abortion was a huge issue in the 2024 US presidential elections. During one of the debates, Kamala Harris painted a gruesome picture of a woman going through a miscarriage in a hospital parking lot, unable to get medical attention because the doctors were scared of providing miscarriage care, which can look very similar to abortion procedures. Anti-abortion activists argued that it is illegal for a doctor to deny miscarriage care to a patient, and an abortion ban doesn’t change that.

Another hot button topic at the time was whether trans people should be allowed to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender they identify as. Republicans spread fear about cis men pretending to be trans and walking into women’s restrooms to assault them. The Democrat response was that sexual assault is illegal, and allowing people to use whichever bathroom they want doesn’t change that.

The same argument structure, used by opposite sides on different issues: behaviour X is illegal and people can be prosecuted for it, so the prediction that law Y will make behaviour X more likely is not a valid criticism of law Y.

This is a case of opposing axioms. The same type of logic appears compelling or disingenuous depending on whether it supports or opposes what people already believe to be true. Neither side is coming to the debate willing to change their mind. They are not looking for holes in their model.2

An invitation to introspect

What are some of your axioms? What do you believe without question, and use as the starting point from which you build your model of reality? It’s an interesting exercise, to introspect and discover a statement that you ‘know’ is true, that you’re unwilling to doubt, but that you can’t justify with logic or evidence. Take any opinion you hold, ask yourself why, and see if you can whittle it down to a core belief that you just believe.

It’s also interesting to ask what role culture plays in forming our axioms. Penthe, the woman from Ademre, believes that sex does not cause babies because she lives in a culture where everyone has sex all the time. As a scientist, I believe that the universe behaves according to some unchanging principles. As a Mumbaikar, I believe wada pav is the pinnacle of human culinary achievement. And as a reader of books, I believe that every single one should start with a map.

मराठी गाण्यांची एक खासियत आहे कि मला कुठल्यातरी अल्बमचं एक गाणं आवडलं तर बाकीची गाणी पण आवडतात. ऋतू हिरवा तर आहेच. सैराट सिनेमाचं पण मला प्रत्येक गाणं पसंत आहे. लहानपणी आमच्या घरी एक मराठी बालगीत ची सीडी होती. त्या सीडीतली अनेक गाणी मला आजपर्यंत पाठ आहेत, आणि मी ती गाणी माझ्या बाळासाठी गात असते: असावा सुंदर चॉकलेट चा बंगला, झुक-झुक अगीन गाडी, सांग सांग भोलानाथ, ससा तो ससा …

असे हिंदी आणि इंग्रजी गाण्यांबरोबर नाही होत. ए. आर. रहमान चं संगीत अगदी अतुल्य आहे. तरी त्यांच्या दर अल्बम मधली एक-दोन गाणी मी फॉरवर्ड करून टाकते—दिल से मधलं ‘सतरंगी रे’, स्वदेस चं ‘देखो ना’, ताल सिनेमाचं ‘रुक्मणी’. (तुम्हाला ही गाणी आवडत असतील तर शांतपणे ऐकत राहणे, कॉमेंट्स मध्ये माझ्या मागे न लागणे.) इंग्रजी संगीत च्या बाबतीत हे अजूनच खरं आहे—असे फार कम्ही अल्बम्स आहेत ज्यातली मला बहुतेक गाणी आवडतात.

पण स्पोटिफाय वर ऋतू हिरवा चे मधुर स्वर ऐकताना मला कधीच वाटत नाही कि एखादं गाणं ‘स्किप’ करावे. अगदी रडकी गाणी पण आवडीने ऐकते मी. लहानपणी मला ‘माझ्या मना’ गाण्याचे अर्थ कळेना; मला ते ‘माझी आमना’ आहे असं वाटायचं. शब्द बरोबर समजल्यावर हे गाणं पण अतिशय आवडायला लागलं. “माझ्या मना, जरा बोल ना… ओळखू कसे मी हे तुझे ऋतू?” वाह. किती सुरेख लिहिलं आहे सौमित्र नी !

ऋतू हिरवा बद्दल माझी फक्त एकाच तक्रार आहे: आशा ताई आणि श्रीधर फडके ह्यांनी फारच वरच्या पट्टीत रेकॉर्ड केली आहेत सगळी गाणी. त्या पट्टीत आशा ताईंचा आवाज सुंदर वाटतो, पण आमच्या सारख्या सामान्य लोकांना वरचे सूर किंचाळूनच लावता येतात. अजून काय तर खालच्या सप्तकात गायचा प्रयत्न केला, तर खालचे सूर एकदम म्हशीच्या हंबरण्यासारखे बाहेर येतात. म्हणजे, जर ऐकता-ऐकता गायचं असेल तर काही पंक्त्या ताईंच्या पट्टीत आणि काही खालच्या सप्तकात म्हणायला लागतात. त्यापेक्षा गप्प बसून ऐकणे बरं वाटतं. कदाचित श्रीधर काकांना हेच हवं होतं.

ऋतू हिरवा च्या सगळ्या गणांमध्ये आशा ताईंनी अनेक सुंदर जागा घेतल्या आहेत, पण टायटल ट्रॅक च्या दुसऱ्या अंतर्यात ‘भिजवी तन भिजवी मन हा S S S श्रावण’ ही जागा डोळे बंद करून ऐकली, तर मनातच पाऊस पडायला लागतो.

खरं सांगितलं तर मराठीत अश्या भावना व्यक्त करणे माझ्यासाठी फार कठीण आहे. मराठीपेक्षा इंग्रजीत बोलणे आणि लिहिणे फार जास्त सोप्पं आहे. मी माझ्या इंग्रजी सबस्टॅक वर ४४ निबंध लिहिले आहेत, पण त्यामुळे हा निबंध लिहिताना माझा आत्मविश्वास अजिबात वाढला नाही. उलट कम्हीच झाला असेल. व्याकरण आणि शब्दलेखन चुकीचं असेल, अशी मला सतत शंका असते. ‘खरं’ लिहायचं कि ‘खरे’ लिहायचे? इथे ‘की’ ला दीर्ध ‘ई’ का लहान? असे विचार येत राहतात. हा वाक्य विचित्र वाटत आहे का? इंग्रजीमधनं भाषांतर केल्यासारखा वाटत आहे का? अधुन मधून ‘गूगल ट्रान्सलेट’ वापरलं आहे—हे वाचणाऱ्याला स्पष्ट होत असेल का?

हे सगळे विचार बाजूला ठेवून मराठी निबंध लिहिणे आणि ते वेब वर टाकणे कठीण आहे, पण मज्जा सुद्धा येत आहे. हे शब्द टाईप करायच्या आधी मी एका वहीत पेनाने लिहीत आहे. देवनागरी अक्षर लिहिण्यात एक खास आनंद मिळतो; त्याचा शाळेनंतर क्वचितच अनुभव येतो. हळू-हळू माझं मराठी चांगलं होत चाललंय,ह्याचाही आनंद होतो. आणि ऋतू हिरवा बद्दल इंग्रजीत लिहिणं विचित्रच वाटलं असतं.

ऋतू हिरवा बद्दल लिहिण्याचा विचार माझ्या डोक्यात बऱ्याच महिन्यांपासुन होता. आशाताईंच्या निधनाची बातमी ऐकून वाटलं कि आता लिहिलेच पाहिजे. त्या एक महिन्यापूर्वी वारल्या. तेव्हापासून सगळे त्यांच्या सुपर हिट हिंदी गाण्यांची आठवण काढताय्त: सलोना सा सजन, जरा सा झूम लूं मै, रंगीला रे. मला ही गाणी खूप आवडतात, पण ऋतू हिरवाची माझ्या हृदयात वेगळीच जागा आहे.

मी ताईंना फक्त गाण्यातून ओळखत होती. त्यांच्या आयुष्याबद्दल जास्त काही माहित नव्हतं. त्यांचा स्वभाव त्यांच्या हरकतींमधून ओसंडून वाहत येतो, म्हणून आपल्याला वाटतं कि आपण त्यांना ओळखतो. त्या गेल्या, तरी आपण त्यांचा आवाज रोज ऐकू शकतो, ह्याचा मला अतिशय कदर आहे.

आशा ताई, हे वाचत असाल तर चुकांबद्दल क्षमा करा.

तुम्हाला माझे मराठी निबंध तुमच्या इनबॉक्स मध्ये यायला हवे असतील, तर ह्या लिन्कवर जावे आणि ‘Notifications’ मध्ये ‘Marathi Writing’ बटनाला ऑन करावे:

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How much money would you pay for a vacation, if you were told that at the end, you would forget about it completely and lose all the photos and videos you took?

Kahneman posed this question in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Memories, he said, are all we get from our experience of living. We take vacations to make memories. Most people won’t pay for a trip they won’t remember, just as they won’t pay for a trip for a random stranger. We are our remembering selves, and we treat the experiencing self, who does the living, like someone we don’t know. If forced to choose between torture that they’ll forget as soon as it ends, and a mild embarrassment that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, many people will choose the torture.

I can report that reading Kahneman’s book does not diminish one’s desire to take photos on a vacation. Last summer, I went on a cruise in the Caribbean Sea. One of the stops was an island called Bimini with the most gorgeous blue seas. I tried very hard to capture the feeling of staring at miles and miles of this blue.

When our ship docked at Bimini, the first thing we noticed was the smell of smoke. “Is this normal?” someone had asked on the cruise Facebook group. There was a fire somewhere on the island—whether man-made or natural was hard to tell—but none of the ship’s crew, or the islanders, paid it any mind. The smoke remained in our nostrils as we lounged on a beach later that day, spoiling the experience slightly.

That day on the beach, I read a story called The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang. The story has two parallel timelines. The first one is in the past: a European coloniser introduces the written word to an illiterate tribe that operates on oral histories. The second is a future in which our imperfect biological memories are replaced with flawless digital ones through continuous video monitoring of our lives. The common thread is that both timelines feature societies adopting new and improved ways to record the past.

Chiang explores what this does to our psychology and relationships. The interesting conclusion that emerges is that more accurate recording technology is not necessarily “good” for society. A tribe without a written history is free to bend the narrative to suit the present day and make choices based on morality rather than historical precedent. Relationships are easier when past interactions are softened by the forgiving lens of nostalgia, rather than having every harsh word documented forever.

While reading, I tried to soak in the experience of the beach so I would be able to remember it accurately. Sweltering heat, white sand, clear water. The only reason I know it was smoky, however, is because I wrote about it in my journal the next day. The smell of smoke bothered us all day, but the Bimini of my memory has no odours.

Which other memories of the cruise have I filtered through turquoise-tinted glasses? Were the views truly as mesmerising as I remember them being? Were the desserts as delicious? The hammock as relaxing?

Present

It has been nine months since I took that Caribbean cruise. What you just read was written shortly after. Unfortunately, I never completed the piece—it died in the second stage of the Excitement → Despair → Acceptance cycle that all essays go through.

A few days ago, I went back to my drafts folder in search of something to work on and found the unfinished cruise travelogue. I have forgotten too much of the cruise to finish it using the material in my journal. But I was intrigued by what I had written about the nature of memory: the fact that we live for our remembering selves, and the fact that our memories are imperfect, corrupted by the act of remembering.

These ideas are doubly interesting now that I have a child who is growing so fast that clothes I washed yesterday don’t fit him today. I already miss one-month-old Malhar, who was very different from four-month-old Malhar. How would I feel about parenthood if I knew I wouldn’t be able to recall my baby’s younger days? Would I still have wanted to have a child? Am I doing this for the experience, or the memories? Or just to bring a human into the world?

I don’t want to answer that, but I have discovered that Substack allows you to add polls, so I’ll ask you instead:

Now that I’ve discovered this, let’s do Kahneman’s vacation question too, just for fun (this is anonymous, be honest!).

The other question about memory is easier to deal with. How much of my baby’s first four months have I romanticized, glossing over the difficult parts in my mental replay? Part of the trouble here is biology, part of it is technology. Biology because it makes evolutionary sense for our brains to forget how awfully hard it is to take care of a newborn, so that we reproduce more and increase our chances of passing on our genes (the sleep deprivation definitely plays a part in making us forget). Technology because these days, a lot of our memory is based on pictures, and we engineer those to look happier than our real lives. We do a whole song and dance to capture our baby’s smiles, and avoid recording the crying (of baby and mother, both).

Then again, as Ted Chiang might say, perhaps recalling our lives as better than they were is not “trouble”. Perhaps it is a coping mechanism.

Future

The drafts folder turned up other abandoned essays. 430 words on the experience of seeing a total solar eclipse. 1300 words about being trilingual. An 850 word follow-up to a piece on brain computer interfaces that I published in 2024 and brazenly titled ‘Part 1’, placing far too much faith in my future self to write Part 2. I don’t want to continue any of these drafts, and to my surprise, I’m OK with that.

There was a time when half-finished projects gave me anxiety. I love doing arts and crafts. I tend to become obsessed with a particular medium, spend a month or two on it and then move on, never to return. The purchased materials are relegated to a box in which I hide all my used-once craft tools. I used to be ashamed about this, but a dear friend of mine wrote a beautiful essay about celebrating our ‘failed’ hobbies and now I look at my collection of half-painted wine bottles with joy instead of guilt.

I can apply the same lens to the six drafts that I may never return to. I am different from the person who started them. I want to write different things. Two weeks ago, I posted an essay about my changing thoughts on capitalism, which felt like a coming out of sorts. I’m excited! In future posts, I want to flesh out some of the ideas that only got a sentence or two in that piece. I want to write about some wonderful books I read last year. I want to write about the intense experience of raising a child.

One thing that these future pieces have in common is that none of them have anything to do with my original conception of this newsletter. It’s called ‘Learning To Be Happy’ because I wanted to write about the mental health lessons I learnt in my twenties. I did write about them: gratitude journaling, solitude, habit tracking, process over outcome. And perhaps I will write more. But for now, I am accepting that I want to write about different things. To do this, I’m adjusting how I see the name of this Substack. Instead of ‘learning how to be happy’, I will imagine that it means ‘learning new things in order to be happy’ so that I can justify going in all kinds of directions without changing the name.

Not that you needed to know that. But as a thank you for reading till the end, here’s another comic strip.

In 2013, he imparted Nine Life Lessons to a class of graduating university students. Here’s one of them:

Be hard on your opinions. A famous joke asserts that opinions are like assholes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this, but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs. Take them out into the verandah and hit them with a cricket bat.

Difficult advice to follow, especially with algorithms feeding us content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Only with deliberate effort can we find opinions we disagree with. If we chance upon such opinions, we rarely sit with our discomfort and give someone a fair shot at changing our minds.

During the pandemic, I started listening to voices from the opposite side of a big ideological divide: capitalism versus socialism. After a few years, I found to my surprise that I had started to think that they were right, and I was wrong.

What is the best way to improve the lives of poor people? When I was 25, I believed that governments should try to reduce inequality and ensure that resources are shared equally. I called myself a socialist. I believed that capitalism was immoral. Now, I am enthusiastic about the potential of free markets. I believe capitalism is the only economic system we know of that can reliably reduce poverty. I believe that for the sake of poor people, governments should get out of the way.

This is the story of the 180 degree transformation of my political beliefs.

Eat The Rich

I grew up in Mumbai with a great deal of privilege. I didn’t realise how well-off my family was compared to most Indians, but I knew we were far from poor. Our house helps were poor, and the drivers of taxis we hailed, and the beggars at traffic signals.

Nothing makes you question life quite like a small, stick-thin child knocking on the rolled-up window of your air-conditioned car, begging for alms, holding an even smaller child on her hip. The inequality was horrific.

In the words of the rapper Divine:1

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Left mein building asmaanon ko chhu ri
Right mein bachhi bhooki sadkon pe so ri
Dekho to hum paas hain lekin
Socho kitni doori hai
Kaisi ye majboori hai

I thought the rich were the villains of the story. Villains of most stories, after all, are filthy rich. I looked down on profit-minded businessmen; I thought them greedy.

In college, I learnt Adam Smith’s theory that the selfish pursuit of profit by individuals leads to the collective progress of society. This seemed too good to be true—a convenient justification for rich people to feel good about themselves, instead of sharing their money.

This belief was strengthened when I moved to the United States. Social media told me that Republicans were libertarian—the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith. They wanted to reduce taxes, ban abortion and protect gun ownership. Democrats wanted free healthcare, fought for gay rights and acknowledged climate change.

Bernie Sanders became my favourite politician. It made sense that most of a country’s wealth shouldn’t belong to the wealthiest 1% of its people. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) came on the radar, following in Bernie’s footsteps. Here’s an excerpt from an interview she gave in 2019, edited for brevity:

Interviewer: Do we live in a moral world, a world that allows for billionaires? Is that a moral outcome?

AOC: No. It’s not. I don’t think that all billionaires are immoral. But I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are people who don’t have access to public health, is wrong. And I think it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country does not make a living wage; I think it’s wrong that you can work a hundred hours and not feed your kids; I think it’s wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government—essentially a wealth transfer from the public—for paying people less than a minimum wage. It not only doesn’t make economic sense, but it doesn’t make moral sense.

I couldn’t agree more. I felt that once a person accumulates the kind of money that they and all their descendants can live comfortably off for hundreds of years, any more money they make should go to the public.

In another conversation, AOC took the argument further:

Interviewer: [Suppose] I’m Jill Billionaire. I made a widget. I sold those widgets. I made billions of dollars. Why am I the enemy of healthcare?

AOC: Well you didn’t make those widgets, did you? You employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you. You didn’t make those widgets.

You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages, and in some cases real modern-day slavery. You made that money off the backs of undocumented people. You made that money off of the backs of black and brown people being paid less than a living wage. You made that money off of the backs of single mothers, and all of these people who are literally dying because they can’t afford to live. So no one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.

I’m not here to villainize and say billionaires are inherently morally corrupt. Capitalism always ends in billionaires; if you don’t do it someone else will. [Capitalism] starves people and that’s why we have to fight for an advanced society.

Most of my friends and family agreed with this view. I believed socialism was the answer to the world’s problems. I thought it must be possible to create a democratic society in which all citizens have equal access to resources, without devolving into authoritarianism, and that we should work hard towards that goal. Capitalism was a bad word in my circles. I felt proud that India was a socialist country.2

The Seen And The Unseen

In 2020, I started listening to a podcast called The Seen and the Unseen. I loved hearing really smart Indians analyse the country’s big problems from first principles. No hemming and hawing—they were brutally honest, yet optimistic.

I just wished the host, Amit Varma, wasn’t a libertarian. He glorified free markets, said taxation was a form of violence, and valued individual freedom above everything else. I bristled every time he said such things, but kept listening because I thought it was important to consider opposing views, and Amit was the only libertarian I knew who argued in good faith and seemed sincere.

He insisted that capitalism could solve poverty, and well-intentioned socialist policies hurt the poorest people instead of helping them. I wondered—could that be true? I felt irritated that some of his arguments made too much sense to ignore.

Consider, for instance, the minimum wage.

In the United States, anyone wishing to employ another person must pay them at least $7.25 for each hour of work. This law is meant to ensure that everyone earns enough money to pay for critical needs. It is based on the assumption that a high minimum wage is good for workers, because it forces companies to pay them more.

You can’t unsee the flaw in this claim once you see it: a minimum wage law does not guarantee employment. It guarantees what you will be paid if someone chooses to employ you. If.

Meet Ramesh Tailor. He makes a profit of Rs. 20,000 per month. He estimates that if he had an assistant to cut his cloth, his profits would increase by Rs. 2000 per month. But he lives in India, where the minimum wage is Rs. 5000 per month. So he cannot afford to hire an assistant.

In the absence of a minimum wage law, he might advertise an opening for an assistant at a monthly salary of Rs. 500. If that is too low to be worth anyone’s time, no one will sign up. He might then increase the offer to Rs. 1000.

If someone does take the offer, it means they are unable, given their circumstances, to earn more than Rs. 1000 per month in any other way, or else the jobs that pay more have worse working conditions (otherwise they would take the better job).

Suppose Ramesh’s neighbour Suresh Tailor notices that Ramesh is profiting from the assistant’s work, and offers them Rs. 1200 per month to work for him instead. Competition between Ramesh and Suresh will then drive the assistant’s wage up—a person who, in minimum wage land, would be begging on the street.

A minimum wage of X does not guarantee that everyone will earn at least X. At best, it may benefit those who would otherwise earn 0.8X or 0.9X, as employers may prefer to pay a little extra rather than lose the employee. Anyone whose labour is valued at less than, say, 0.5X, will be unemployed and earn zero (or else they will be informally employed without a contract, in which case they have no official earnings, limited access to credit and no legal recourse if their employer treats them badly).

These are the poorest people in society. The economist Milton Friedman argued that minimum wage laws benefit workers who are privileged enough to be part of trade unions, and hurt the lowest-skilled, poorest workers.

I became embarrassed that I used to argue for higher minimum wages, which are especially harmful in India, with its huge unemployment problem—our labour force participation rate is about 40%.

Bangaladesh has a much lower minimum wage, which is one reason why the textile industry, which employs 4.5 million Bangladeshis, flourished there, but not across the border in West Bengal.

Bit by bit, other pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

Minimum wage is an example of a set of regulations called labour laws, meant to protect workers from bad working conditions. In poor countries, they often do the opposite: they increase the cost of hiring, which makes it harder for companies to grow and reduces the number and quality of jobs available.

Labour laws are market interventions—government actions that influence the way private individuals conduct transactions with each other. Other examples of market interventions are price controls, subsidies, zoning laws, state-run grocery stores, and tariffs.

Market interventions reduce economic activity. They impose uniform rules for all transactions, such as a maximum price for tomatoes or a minimum wage for tailors. In a free market, the value of a particular good or service is based on dispersed, local information that governments cannot access, such as Ramesh’s profit margin and the assistant’s daily earnings from begging. Prices are signals that aggregate this dispersed information. Individuals who wish to buy and sell goods and services adjust their behaviour based on the price signal. When a central planner imposes uniform rules for all transactions, they override the price signal. As a result, some transactions become so suboptimal that they do not occur; Ramesh does not hire an assistant.3

Voluntary transactions between consenting individuals create win-win situations: they only take place if they leave both parties better off. John Stossel called this phenomenon the ‘double thank you moment’ (I learnt the phrase from Amit). You pay for a good or service only if you value it more than the money. You take a job only if the wages are worth more to you than your labour.

The ability of individuals to freely transact with one another has achieved what central planning cannot: a positive sum world, where one person’s gain does not imply another person’s loss. We are all better off now than we were a few hundred years ago, whether you measure it in GDP per capita or metrics of human well-being like life expectancy or infant mortality. Though the inequality between the rich and the poor is increasing, the overall poverty of the world, measured as the percentage of the global population living on less than $3 a day, accounting for inflation and correcting for purchasing power disparities across countries, is four times lower in 2025 than in 1985.

Our brains evolved in a zero-sum world, so it’s difficult for us to understand this new paradigm, but we must convince ourselves it’s true. Capitalism reduces poverty.

There is a set of situations in which free markets do not achieve better outcomes than central planners. These are called market failures. They are narrowly defined, and are a useful framework for thinking about what governments should (and should not) do. Market interventions are justified in these situations because they make everyone better off.

The 1991 Reforms

India gained independence in 1947. For the next four decades, the country’s economy was tightly controlled by the state through industrial licensing, state ownership of financial institutions, protection of domestic industries by restricting imports and foreign investment, public procurement plus rationing of food grains, and a host of other central planning measures.

The country remained poor. Everything from fuel to flour was in short supply. Corruption was rampant; starting a business almost impossible. By 1990 we had a full-blown crisis; the government sold gold from its reserves to import food.

Salvation came in 1991, when some brave individuals introduced reforms to liberalise the economy and loosen the hold of the state. The 1991 reforms got rid of most industrial licensing requirements, making it easier to start and run a business. They opened the country up to foreign investment and imports, which created jobs, eased shortages and forced domestic businesses to become competitive. They allowed private investment in telecommunications, aviation and other sectors.4

This transformed India. A hundred million people were lifted out of poverty.5

I was born in 1994. I did not see pre-liberalisation India. I took our prosperity for granted, not realising how dramatically different my childhood was from my parents’. I was only vaguely aware of the 1991 reforms. I thought corruption and over-population were at the root of India’s problems, not a history of bad policies. I consider this the biggest failure of my education.

Because here is a clear demonstration of the power of free markets, and the inability of central planning, to improve peoples’ lives. It is as clean an experiment as we can hope for. We need to make sure that India does not forget this lesson; that our future leaders, who did not live through the change, carry the torch in the same direction.

For more on the impact of these reforms, I recommend this podcast episode—9 hours long, and worth every minute—and this essay by economist Shruti Rajagopalan.

She writes of the present moment:

After a great start in the 1990s and some progress in the early 2000s, India did not commit to further reforms required to exit socialism and ensure a well-functioning market economy. Without policy changes to reduce government control over the economy, moving halfway to embrace markets has led to an explosion of corruption and cronyism in the last decade.

…

After the initial gains, India went from crony-socialism to crony-capitalism... Two-thirds of Indians today were born after the 1991 reforms and have no memory of India under socialism with its shortages, corruption and general impoverishment. They associate markets with this new kind of corruption by big businesses courting politicians, leading to the demonizing of big business, and a misplaced nostalgia for the era of socialism and protectionism.

Turning On My Tribe

I am nervous to hit send on this post. Most of my social circle holds the opposite view. I’ve had multiple heated arguments over the last year or two, and I’m sure there are more to come. It’s not fun.

But I am convinced that the children begging on the streets of Mumbai will be better off if we allow free markets to flourish. The poverty in our country is heartbreaking. It makes sense to want to reduce the gap between the poorest and the richest people.

The solution is not a Robinhood state that takes from the rich and gives to the poor. It doesn’t work; it actively harms the poor. We need the state to create conditions that enable private economic activity. We need rich people to sit on their couches and make risky investments, some of which create millions of jobs.

I don’t want to imply that there are no issues with free market capitalism. Market failures happen. Crony capitalism is a huge problem in both India and the US, and we should think about the consequences of wealthy individuals having too much sway over governments.

Fixing these issues is a worthy goal. But our ship is sinking. Let us plug the holes first, then worry about other things. Let us get the basics right: big businesses do more good than harm. All voluntary economic exchanges between private individuals leave both sides better off. Capitalism doesn’t starve people; rather, it has been the single biggest force in the history of the world to reduce starvation.

If we want to help those less fortunate than ourselves, we have to ensure that our attempt to help does not harm the least fortunate. We have to consider the unintended secondary and tertiary consequences of policies we support, not just the intended primary ones. We also have to think about opportunity costs and counterfactuals: would it be better to spend our limited resources on something else, or to do nothing?

In the coming months, I will elaborate on a few things that I only mentioned briefly in this post: market failure and the role of the state, empirical evidence for the effect of GDP growth on poverty, why we need rich people to make risky investments, why we should try to solve poverty, not inequality, etc.

For now, I’ll leave you with some words from a song I love:

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Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

On the left, buildings stretch up to reach the sky
On the right, a starving girl sleeps on the road
We seem to be close, but
Think how far apart we are
What a hopeless world it is

This piece is the opposite. I have so much to say, and I don’t care how it comes out. I just want to get going. I have fifteen minutes between showering and the baby’s next feeding time, so I sit down with my laptop and force myself to ignore all the open tabs (we have to order diapers, find a new pediatrician, read about sleep training…). All that can wait, now is the time to write. I create a new document and take a deep breath, fingers hovering over the keyboard—

I hear a cry on the baby monitor. Malhar is hungry.

My baby has snuck into this essay in the same way as he entered my life: suddenly and fully. No graceful introduction, no on-ramp.

In the days after his birth, we were in survival mode. Focusing on getting through the day. Holding onto the promise that it would get easier.

“I just remembered to brush my teeth,” my husband told me one day at 2 pm.

“Oh shit,” I replied, “Thanks for reminding me, I also haven’t brushed today.”

I imagine pregnancy as a ship we were sailing, my husband and the baby and I, and our life now as another ship we had to cross over onto. The two ships passed close to each other, but there was a dangerous gap in between that we had to leap. Many hands held us and swung us from one ship to the other, making sure we didn’t fall into the ocean. Doctors and nurses and grandmothers, yes, but also friends and cousins and Uber drivers and receptionists and the hospital cleaning staff. Malhar was born healthy and we were on the new ship, safe and sound.

We spent three nights at the hospital, where nurses would wheel the baby off to the nursery every few hours so we could sleep. They answered all our questions, helped us change his diapers, and made sure he was OK. I felt safe. We came home on day four and suddenly we were fully responsible for his well being. Is he breathing? Is he getting enough milk? Is he too hot? Is he too cold? I kept checking on him at night; I was too anxious to sleep. Every other emotion was also turned way up. I would hear my mother singing a lullaby to him, and find myself weeping, unable to stop.

We named him Malhar after the Raag and the rainy season. He was born in the coldest winter New York has seen in decades. The first time we took him out for a walk, there was snow everywhere. I loved showing him off. Old ladies are the best audience for this, because they somehow understand how young he is, and say things like “Ohh, a newborn!”.

It is difficult to not be fully consumed by parenthood. Even when I’m “doing my own thing” while my husband takes care of the baby, half my mind is with them. 80% of our conversations are about Malhar. Did you change his diaper? How long has he been awake? He’s so cute. Did you notice that he’s started punching his own face by mistake? He looks shocked when it happens, it’s so funny. Let’s train him to fall asleep on his own. Are we doing enough tummy time? When should we give him a bath? What should we make him wear today?

I love choosing outfits to put him in—like he’s a little doll. Tiny hats with bunny ears on them; a little yellow sweater that my mother knitted; mini baby sunglasses. I love the baby products: the play gym with toys hanging from it, the stroller, the crib, the swaddles and blankets and burp cloths in twelve shades of green. I even love the diapers. I love the domesticity of it: arranging his things in labeled bins, keeping supplies stocked, giving him a bath, washing his bottles.

Yesterday I read a book to Malhar. He seemed to like it. When we say Malhar likes something, we mean that he focuses on it with his big eyes, and it doesn’t make him cry. At some point, ‘Malhar likes X’ will mean that it makes him laugh, and later it will mean that he asks for it, and later still he will tell us he likes it.

I am impatient for him to grow out of the newborn phase. “Alexa, when do babies start smiling?” I asked about a hundred times in the first month. I’m impatient for Malhar to start recognizing me, to start responding to his name, to hold his head up. Taking care of him is so all-consuming that I have forgotten that in the weeks before his birth, all I wanted was for him to be healthy.

The smiles came, as promised, around 7 weeks. Now we get big, toothless grins when he wakes up and sees us. Yesterday I found I could make him smile by making a beatboxing type of sound with my mouth. I kept doing it until the effect wore off.

He’s starting to ‘come online’ and it is fascinating to watch. The first thing that made us feel he was conscious was gaze tracking. I noticed that one day when I was walking around, he followed me with his eyes. “He sees me!” I thought. I felt a jolt of joy. He could make out that I’m an object, separate from the background.

Malhar smiles a lot now, and still I am impatient. Hungry to hear his first words and make him scream with laughter by holding him upside down and read the same book over and over and over to him, as many times as he wants.

The “fourth trimester” is coming to an end. There are things from this time that I will miss for the rest of my life. As hard as it is to remember while rocking him at 2 am, there’s a finite number of times I’ll get to hold him in my arms. His weight has already doubled since birth. Before I know it he will be too big to carry. Photos and videos are great to look back on, but they can’t capture the feeling of his soft hand touching my cheek, his head nestled between my shoulder and neck, his little body snuggled close to mine. That’s on me to cherish.

This is my first ‘adult’ short story. I put off posting it here for a long time for various reasons, but here it is now. Please be kind! Putting a work of fiction on the internet is somehow much more terrifying than an essay or research article.

The plane thudded onto the runway and this woke Sara. As it roared to a halt, she noticed that the other passengers did not seem to be the same people that had taken off from Mumbai. Nobody stood up. She didn’t hear a single seat belt click open. Even the babies were quiet. Indians can behave, she thought, just not in their own country.

Sara readied herself to leave the plane. This was only the first leg of her journey and already, she was tired of sitting.

“Finish your water,” Lakshmi advised her. “If you leave one drop also, in security they will throw your bottle straight in the dustbin. No questions, no nothing.”

Sara was learning that Lakshmi enjoyed giving advice. But it was Lakshmi’s suitcase, not Sara’s, that they pulled aside for manual checking. The security officer rummaged through its contents for a while, then produced a glass jar containing mango pickle. Red oil had leaked out into the plastic wrapping.

“Vatt is zis?” he barked.

Sara looked at Lakshmi.

“Um,” she started. “I— it is... It is aachar, it is homemade—”

“You made zis?” he wanted to know.

“No, I... Yes, I mean, my mother—”

Sara stepped in. “Sorry, sir,” she said, “My friend made this at home. It’s a kind of sauce. Is it not allowed?”

“You cannot take zis,” he told Sara. Lakshmi started to protest but he had no time for it, and tossed her treasure into the trash can behind him. Then he peeled off his gloves and threw those away too.

“Mummy made it at home,” Lakshmi sobbed, putting the rest of her things back into the tattered suitcase. “For all of us.”

“Tell her to make some more and send it by courier,” Sara offered. “My mom is going to send a package in two weeks.”

But Lakshmi said she didn’t want her mother to find out that she had lost the pickle. She mumbled something about unripe mangoes being out of season, and anyway her mother had too much work to do in the kitchen. Personally, Sara thought it was good for Lakshmi. What was the point of moving to a new country if you were going to keep eating the same food you ate at home?

They boarded the second flight, and Lakshmi chose a cheeseburger for lunch. Sara wondered if she should tell her it would have beef in it, not just cheese... but she decided not to say anything. What Lakshmi didn’t know wouldn’t harm her. Lakshmi ate the entire burger and afterward, licked her fingers.

***

Half the students in Sara’s class were Indians, and they didn’t seem to realise that they were allowed to hang out with people from other countries. Sara made it a point to get to know her American classmates. Jessie and Michael were interesting—they read, and went on hikes, and discussed politics. And Jessie was bisexual. Sara’s first queer friend.

Sometimes they got into long discussions about things that Sara couldn’t relate to, like their love of cheese. She learned that there were at least twenty different types of the stuff; hard cheeses were for cooking and soft ones for spreading, and mozzarella was not at all the same thing as cheddar. Michael would notice that Sara had been quiet during these discussions, and say, “Paneer is a type of cheese, right Sara?”

Michael asked a lot of questions about India. Once, he asked Sara what her caste was.

“Oh, uh.. Well, my mom’s a Muslim,” Sara said, “So she’s kind of outside the caste system. But my dad, he’s Hindu, he’s... um, you know, Brahmin. Like, upper caste. But we never really talk about it.”

“Right,” said Michael, as if he had been expecting this.

***

That winter, when Sara returned to the US after the holidays, Ammi didn’t cry while saying bye to her at the airport. Amir was coming with her, and this somehow made the parting less bitter. Even Amir’s parents seemed happy, sending their only son off to live with his girlfriend in a foreign country. Sara was proud of them for being so progressive.

To her surprise, Amir held his own with her American friends. She enjoyed watching him debate Michael, though she winced when he pronounced the ‘p’ in ‘coup’. He also got along with Lakshmi. She was pretty, but thankfully, overweight. Lakshmi seemed to be in awe of Amir, and of the fact that he and Sara had been dating since their school days, and were allowed to “do live-in”. She averted her eyes when Sara asked Amir not to put her bra in the washing machine, and her fair cheeks would turn cherry red when Amir put his arm around Sara. Sara noticed that Lakshmi tried to sit next to Amir sometimes, and hoped that Lakshmi didn’t know that she knew.

The three of them were uneasy flatmates. They argued about whether Sara and Amir were entitled to one half or two-thirds of the fridge space, and what temperature to keep the heater on. Lakshmi was always feeling cold, and Amir sometimes took her side.

“She can wear more clothes!” Sara burst out one day, hoping Lakshmi couldn’t hear her. “What am I supposed to do when I feel hot, walk around naked?”

Amir raised his eyebrows, smiling, and she threw a pillow at him.

“She was wearing gloves the other day,” he said. “While doing an assignment, poor thing. And they weren’t nice writing gloves like yours, with holes for your fingers.”

“So she should get writing gloves then.”

Amir opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything.

“She keeps telling me to wear a sweater so that I don’t fall sick,” Sara complained. “Yesterday she asked if I wanted to borrow the sweater that her mom sent. Pure wool, it seems. Does she think I can’t afford a sweater?”

“She’s just being nice,” Amir said. “Why don’t you take it? You know, to make peace.”

It was Sara’s turn to raise her eyebrows.

“It’s brown, Amir,” she said. “With bright orange flowers. Yuck.”

***

They went to Greece that summer, Sara and Amir and both sets of parents. It was Aunty and Uncle’s first time in Europe, and Sara was worried that they would be typical tourists, wanting to see five countries in three days and eat only at Indian restaurants, but they surprised her.

On the flight back, Amir told her she shouldn’t have worn a bikini in front of his parents.

“What the fuck, Amir.”

Sara’s ears were burning. “I’ll wear whatever the fuck I want, and people can deal with it, or they can fuck off.”

“I’m sorry,” Amir said. He glanced at the lady sitting across the aisle, then turned back to her and said in a softer voice, “I’m sorry. Of course you can wear whatever you want. I didn’t mean it that way. I just... I mean, my parents are not used to this kind of thing, and I know they feel uncomfortable, even though they don’t say anything. I’m just trying to ease them into it.”

Sara pressed the button to summon an air hostess and started gathering her things. Amir kept talking.

“Sara, please. I’m just saying, let’s introduce them to our lifestyle slowly. One step at a time. They’re good people. They’ll understand, slowly slowly. And we won’t back down on the important stuff.”

An air hostess arrived, and Sara asked if anyone in Economy class would maybe want to upgrade to Business. She didn’t want to sit... here. The air hostess gave a brisk nod and went off to find someone willing to exchange seats.

“Sara, please,” Amir said. “Don’t do this.” She hoped he wasn’t going to start crying.

“You know I’m not like that man, come on. And my parents care about you, and respect you, and they won’t hold you back in any of the important ways. And if they do, I’ll fight with them.”

Sara stood up and Amir shrank back in his seat to let her pass into the aisle. He still hadn’t given up.

“You know I don’t drink in front of them,” he said. “That’s not because I think it’s wrong. I just don’t want to hurt them. They’ve been religious their entire lives, they really believe in it. They would be heartbroken if I told them I drink alcohol. They’re adjusting a lot already.”

The air hostess returned with an eager-looking boy whose underwear was showing above the waistband of his low-rise jeans.

“Thank you, madam,” he beamed at Sara.

***

Sara and Lakshmi graduated on the same day, which turned out to be a chilly one. Sara had gone dress shopping with Jessie, and bought a slick, backless gown that she was reluctant to cover with a cardigan. She decided she would brave the cold. But Lakshmi put on her lumpy brown sweater and asked three times if it was ‘going’ with her sari. Amir, who couldn’t tell the difference between red and pink, told her it was perfect.

“You are also looking smart,” Lakshmi smiled at him.

Sara muttered that the sweater matched Amir’s brown suit more than it matched Lakshmi’s sari, but they didn’t notice. Sara was talking to Amir again. It seemed that Lakshmi, of all people, had convinced Amir to apologise to Sara about his sexist bikini comment. Amir hadn’t told Sara this. She had understood, because he had gone for a walk with Lakshmi (“Why?” she had been tempted to ask), and said sorry soon after. Part of her wanted to tell Lakshmi to mind her own business. The other part was happy to be back on talking terms with Amir.

***

When Amir said he wanted to break up, Sara didn’t think it had anything to do with Lakshmi. He had to return to India; his company didn’t allow remote work anymore. Only six months later, Sara noticed that Amir was in a photograph that her ex-flatmate had posted online. It was a group photo. The girls and boys were standing separately, as if they were in seventh grade. They were at a theme park of some sort. Or maybe it was a mall.

Was she reading too much into this? Lakshmi had also returned to India, and was living with her parents since she hadn’t managed to land a job in the US. Did her parents live in Mumbai too? Sara wondered where Lakshmi was from, and how this had never come up. Had she not asked? Maybe Lakshmi and Amir had overlapping friend circles.

Yes, they must be hanging out as friends. They weren’t even next to each other in the picture. And in any case, Lakshmi’s parents would never allow her to date a Muslim boy. When Amir had come to live with Sara, Lakshmi had kept it a secret from her family. Sara remembered her giggling, telling Amir to keep quiet when they called—which was three times a day. No, that girl wouldn’t defy her precious Mummy.

And what about Amir? Didn’t he want someone... intellectual, someone he could talk to about climate change and redistribution and... things? He would get bored with Lakshmi... and how could he even be attracted to her? She might lose weight if she tried, but she had no taste; she wore the ugliest things... Amir had sometimes bought stuff like that for Sara, and she had told him gently that it was gaudy, and taught him to be refined.

Sara shook her head and closed the app. There was no way. Amir had been with Sara for eight years, there was no way he would settle for Lakshmi. And they would look ridiculous together. She didn’t have time to think about this. Michael and Jessie were coming over to watch the Presidential Debate, and she needed to make a grocery run. She was going to serve them a platter of cheese.

PS: If you liked this one, you might enjoy another short story I wrote called ‘The Supporting Cast’. That one was published in Setu literary magazine. You can read it here.

Life with him is full of wonder, joy and contentment; and also full of pain, confusion, anxiety and frustration. When I look at him I notice small details—long eyelashes, tiny toes, dirt under his fingernails (where the hell is it coming from?!). He can now track my movements with his eyes. I feel astounded that this perfect, functioning human was made inside me.

I will no doubt write about him a lot, but those are words for another day. For now, I want to look back on the journey that brought me here. These are some diary entries I made when I was pregnant.

5 weeks

I JUST HAD A POSITIVE PREGNANCY TEST!!!!!!

9 weeks

I feel as if my brain is made of boiled carrots. I wonder how much longer my neck will be able to hold my head up. Stomach did not like Trader Joe’s chana masala. Jeans are too tight. Eyes are leaking.

12 weeks

The doctor shows us a blurry picture on a monitor
and we hold ourselves back 
from loving you.

Your heart is three pixels
As it beats, they turn
on and off
one and zero
black and white.
The doctor says, “You see?”
We do.

Last week
we saw your limbs. 
Twenty pixels
held your arms, your hands
the promise of fingers
that may someday curl around mine.

But no! I must stop
We still don’t know
if you are healthy.

The 1% chance of disaster
holds us back
from calling you ‘you’.

The wise thing is to wait
a few more days
till we hear the words 
“No genetic abnormalities detected.”

This is not the last hurdle.

The next one is at twenty weeks
and that’s not the last one either—
finally, we will know
if you are healthy
when you’re born.

But we must jump.
It’s better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all.

So we have chosen this moment:
the 12 week genetic screening
to jump.

Love does not obey
the neat mathematical boundaries
that we have drawn 
to protect ourselves.

Love happens
like a wave 
We just haven’t dipped our toes yet.

We will tell everyone
that you are coming.
We’ll talk to you
in baby voices.
We’ll let ourselves imagine
how it will be
when you are here.

Am I prepared?
Does my stupid, human brain
understand what 1% means?
No, it doesn’t.

We stay balanced on this tightrope
for ourselves, and you
And if I meet you, dear baby
I promise
I’ll teach you how to do it too.

Or maybe you’ll be like my friend
who bristled when I told her
my mathematical ideas about love
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said.

And though I’ll try
to make you see
I’ll trust you to find
your own way to be.

14 weeks

I haven’t pooped in three days.

16 weeks

प्रिय बबलू,1

मैं तुम्हारे बारे में कुछ नहीं जानती, सिवाय इसके कि जहाँ तक डॉक्टर पता कर सकते हैं, तुम स्वस्थ हो और तुम लगभग २० जनवरी को पैदा होने वाले/वाली हो। बस। इससे ज्यादा तो मैं अपने पडोसी को जानती हूँ (जो हमसे २ साल में तक़रीबन १० ही बार बात कर चुके हैं, और वह भी मामूली बातों के आगे कुछ नहीं; इधर अमरीका में अक्सर पड़ोसियों के बीच ऐसा ही होता है; तुम आओगे/आओगी तब देखोगे/देखोगी) |

खैर। मैं तुम्हें बिलकुल नहीं जानती लेकिन तुमसे इतना प्यार करती हूँ कि समझाना मुश्किल है।

तुम्हारे आने के इंतजार में,

आई

23 weeks

Dear baby,

Maybe in a few decades babies will be born in artificial wombs, with better health outcomes and no need for women to go through nausea, constipation, mood swings, labour and delivery and possible complications. But for now I get to grow you inside me and viscerally experience your alive-ness.

We are approaching a big milestone: in a few weeks, you will be viable, which means that if you were to be born, though you’d be very premature, there’s a good chance you’d survive.

Be well in there, baby. Please keep kicking. Please don’t be allergic to chickpeas like your dad. I would really like to enjoy Vada Pav with you.

Aai

27 weeks

Our little one is healthy and kicking away to glory.

29 weeks

The baby is kicking and moving pretty regularly now. I’ve been feeling some kicks near the top of my uterus too—hopefully this means the baby is turning head down!

What if our baby is a boy? I’m trying to work out my feelings about this.

30 weeks

My overwhelming desire right now is to take a nap. It feels a bit like the first trimester, when I remember one day I was sitting in my office trying to do something—anything—and I wrote in a notebook, ‘my brain feels like a boiled carrot’ or something like that.

32 weeks

We are about to find out the gender of our baby! It’s a strange feeling, knowing that our baby has been this gender for the entire pregnancy, we just don’t know about it.

33 weeks

We found out that our baby is a boy!

I felt disappointed.

I still feel joy about having a child, playing with them and doing all kinds of things with them. I feel like continuing to say ‘them’ because my joy is connected to the un-gendered idea of a child, not to the idea of a boy.

I’m going to love this little boy so much that I don’t even understand, right now, how much I’m going to love him. I’m going to run around with my son, kick a ball, do finger painting, sing songs, play board games. A smile is creeping onto my face.

I don’t want my son to think that me wanting a girl means that I didn’t want him. I want him. I want him so much. He is my bachha. I want him more than I want anything else (in the realm of possibility).

I love you, kiddo.

I am very, very excited to have a baby. To raise a child. To get a front row seat to watch a mind take in the world.

33 weeks, 1 day

I know I will love him, but I’m still grieving the possibility of having a daughter. Although if I was having a daughter—maybe I would have mourned the possibility of a son? Perhaps gender disappointment is just about having half the possibilities removed, and it takes time to get over that.

33 weeks, 6 days

Dear Malhar,

This is a name we are trying out for you. I wonder if you will like it. Will you enjoy being named after a Raga, and the monsoon, or will you think it’s a weird name?

The one thing we want to avoid is your pet name becoming Mallu (though they make great food). We may not be able to stop your friends from doing this.

Yesterday, your Papa and I played a board game and I lost. I got upset. I don’t want to pass on this sore loser temperament to you. How can I teach you to be OK losing, when I myself have such big, difficult feelings about it?

You were hiccupping earlier. I’ve started recognising when you hiccup—it’s a very regular, high frequency jerky movement, unlike all your other movements. I think you’ve turned head-down. I hope you have. I wish there was a way to know, but my Ob/gyn says we’ll find out at 36 weeks and not to worry about it until then.

I love you, sweetheart. I’ll deal with my insecurities and try not to let them affect you.

Love,

Aai

34 weeks, 3 days

The baby is in a breech position. If he doesn’t turn head down by 37 weeks, we’ll try a manual turning procedure. If that doesn’t work, we’ll do a C-section.

I don’t want to have a C-section. The recovery takes longer. It doesn’t feel ‘right’ and it’s not what I had pictured and I want to test myself with labour and delivery. I’m worried about my milk not coming in—how is my body supposed to know that the baby has been born? I’ve never had a surgery and I’m scared of the operating room.

But there’s nothing I can do about it. At least I won’t have to deal with a baby exiting my vagina. And does it really matter? Especially in light of the grand privilege of having a healthy child and a relatively smooth pregnancy? No!

Just a few days ago, I grieved the loss of having a daughter and decided it’s OK because there are so many things I won’t get to experience in life, and I can’t sit and mourn all of them. I have to enjoy what I do get to experience, which is pretty phenomenal. In fact, I’m deeply grateful that medicine has developed a way to safely deliver breech babies. WE GET TO HAVE A BABY!! If we do a C-section, I’ll get to meet Malhar a full week earlier than expected. One more week with my baby boy. That’s worth something.

34 weeks, 6 days

My friend is pregnant with a girl. I felt kind of jealous of her when I found out, but now I’m feeling OK again and looking forward to meeting my little boy. I hope this doesn’t last for long.

35 weeks, 2 days

I’ve been pooping everyday, and haven’t thrown up for the last few months.

36 weeks

I’m feeling excited the way I used to be before a school camping trip. Plus anxious, angry, lots of joy and love. Basically what everyone says about having a child.

As I read recently, the cliches really are true. It’s difficult to deal with the uncertainty around when the baby will come, despite being fully prepared.

Clothes and bedding are washed, diaper caddies are ready (almost—I just remembered we need to get wet wipes), hospital bag is half packed, breast pump is ordered, bottle sterilizer has been tested, a kitchen shelf has been cleared for baby stuff, most of my postpartum essentials are in place, we are both fully vaccinated.

I’m grateful that I’m going to have a baby.

Oh my god, that can be easy to forget. After all this, after all this waiting, after years and years, I am finally going to have a baby. It is something that I have wanted to be a part of my life for so long. And now it’s going to happen, and it will always be a part of my life. I’m going to have a baby!!

36 weeks, 4 days

Pregnancy is a fucking rollercoaster.

The baby is still in breech position. My amniotic fluid level is low, so we can’t try to turn him around. We will have to do a C section. It might be the day after tomorrow.

So we had to do a lot of mental adjusting. Our parents are flying out of India tomorrow. It is crazy how much is being turned topsy turvy for little Malhar and he isn’t even here yet. As the cliche goes—it’s his world, and we’re just living in it.

I’m grateful, and really excited, that I get to meet my baby boy soon.

37 weeks, 1 day

We didn’t do the C section last week. The fluid is back up, but baby hasn’t turned head down. So now we wait for him to grow a bit more and then we’ll try to turn him.

How will people react when we announce that his name is Malhar? I hope my husband remembers what they told us in the newborn prep class. Malhar hasn’t been kicking much; maybe 5-6 times in the last hour. I think that’s enough. It is so goddamn stressful to be singularly responsible for monitoring this baby’s health through his movements! I should ask Natalia if she has any newborn clothes. We have so many baby blankets now! I wonder what we’re going to do with them.

Pregnancy required me to be strong in all sorts of ways. To deal with nausea, to tolerate pain, to remember to keep protein bars at my bedside and ginger mints in my purse and a rubber band in my bag when I go exercise.

And now it needs me to be patient.

37 weeks, 4 days

Malhar will be born in less than 4 weeks! The idea of him as a living, breathing baby on the outside is still an abstract concept, even though he’s real and I can feel him moving inside me right now. I’m getting so impatient to meet him. It’s driving me a little nuts.

38 weeks

I’m going to hold him, and hear him cry. My husband is going to hold him and I am going to see him holding him. Malhar is going to be HERE. On the outside. I am not going to feel him kick anymore. My belly is going to deflate. We are all going to take care of him.

38 weeks, 1 day

My amniotic fluid wasn’t enough for Dr. Cho to turn the baby manually. We will have a C section tomorrow. I am going to meet my baby tomorrow. Oh my god.

It’s a little odd to have a surgery for something so happy. I’m not really nervous about the operation.

My Malhar. I already love you a lot and I don’t know what will happen when they put you in my arms. Flood of hormones; I might cry. I’m looking at the laptop as I type this but here you are, in my belly; all I have to do is turn my eyes 50 degrees downwards and here you are. My baby. I am going to hold you in my arms tomorrow.

It’s going to be the most surreal moment of my life.

No such luck. Disappointed with the universe, I shut the door. And then I noticed one of the magnets on the fridge—a beautiful painting of a coastal road in Hawaii. It made me smile. I went back to my desk, put aside the draft of the serious essay I’ve been struggling with for the last two months, and wrote a paragraph about fridge magnets.

Then I thought, why stop there? What other little things—inexpensive, easily overlooked—can I think of that bring joy to my days? So I put together a list of six things that make me happy, for no other reason than that I can.

1. Fridge magnets

One of the paradoxes of modern life is that we take so many photos of the places we visit that we don’t look at most of them even once after returning home. Gone are the days of the family photo album, extracted from the sofa-cum-bed and admired every time relatives come over.

Enter magnets: you buy one on each trip, stick it on your fridge and voila—a visual reminder of your travels whenever you walk past.

While we’re on this topic, please don’t be the weirdo who gifts fridge magnets from their own vacations to other people. Your giftee has no emotional attachment to the country you visited, and you’ve now forced them to give an awkward little explanation every time someone checks out their magnets, about how they’ve gone to all these places except the three random ones in the corner.

Here are my favourites from our collection:

Maui, Hawaii

My husband and I once had the pleasure of driving around this Hawaiian island, and this painting reproduces the feeling perfectly: ocean on one side of the road, dense jungle on the other, green cliffs in the distance. The artist has drawn a view that is tough to capture in a single shot. Plus, I like that they chose a red car.

Key West, Florida

Layered joke, accurate depiction of local wildlife—what more can you ask for?

Valencia, Spain

I don’t have any photos to put next to this one, because the first time I took a picture of a beautiful tiled wall in Valencia, it turned out to be the facade of the house of a well-built man who was not happy about what I had done, and threatened to break my phone if I didn’t delete the picture. Needless to say, I didn’t try again.

2. A snake plant that grew a baby

Growing house plants is the second best hobby as measured by effort-to-satisfaction ratio (the first is Netflix). If you choose the right plants, you don’t really have to do much, and they reward you with the feeling of being a nurturing life-giver, a Parent of Things That Grow. If you rank individual plants by the same metric, the snake plant is the uncontested winner. This thing would thrive in a dustbin.

What’s more, if you cut off one of its leaves and stick it in a glass of water, the cells at the cut edge somehow decide to produce roots. When placed in soil, the roots grow a horizontal underground stem called a rhizome, which gives rise to new leaves.

Precious few moments in life can give rise to the depth of emotion you feel when you notice the first new baby leaves poking out of the soil.

3. New metaphors

Any writer worth their salt will tell you that overusing common metaphors makes your writing dull as dishwater. A new metaphor, on the other hand, makes it exciting and unexpected, like a Vada Pav in Wisconsin. Here’s Orwell in his essay, Politics and the English Language:

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

In a recent essay, a friend of mine said of some trees that had shed their leaves, that they were ‘as thin as sketches’.1 It made me smile, because I could immediately picture what she meant.

Letter to the Reader

Under The Happy Leh Sky

Fri Mor November 14 2025 NYC…

Read more

10 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Rita Mishra

4. Potatoes

At some point, I will write a full essay on the merits of the potato; one bullet point cannot do justice to its greatness. Can there be any higher achievement, for a vegetable, than appearing in such varied dishes as samosa, pav bhaji and masala dosa, and holding its own in all of them?

I submit ‘masala in the dosa’ to replace the worn-out metaphor ‘cherry on the cake’.

5. Good beat drops

One of the leading theories about when and why our brains release dopamine is that it happens in response to a ‘reward prediction error’, when we experience a good thing that we didn’t expect. Beat drops in music create this situation by changing the rhythm in a surprising way, or inserting a slightly-too-long gap in the beat, then rewarding us with heavy percussion that makes us tap our feet.

Beat drop dopamine is unlike any other kind—deliriously satisfying when it hits right, but without any danger of addiction. There are the obvious songs, like Mundian To Bach Ke, Apna Time Aayega and Dhoom Machale (plus points for excellent use of ‘aai ga’, which means ‘oh mother’ in Marathi). But here are some you might not have considered:

• Lukka Chuppi. It takes two and a half minutes, but when that tabla comes on board, it is goosebump-inducing.

• Madari. Another slow burn, but you get two hits: first a rhythm change at 50 seconds, then the drums kick in ten seconds later.

• Right Here Right Now. This one has the proper DJ waala chk-chk-chk sound right before the beat drop—can’t get enough.

• Azadi. First you get all riled up by Kanhaiya Kumar’s protest chant (hum leke rahenge azadi, tum kuchh bhi karlo),2 then Dub Sharma delivers.

• Genda Phool. Rahman’s coolest beat drop ever? With Mohini Dey’s superb bass slide to bring it in, and Rekha Bhardwaj’s honey-butter voice on top… uff.

The masala in the dosa is that I put these songs into a playlist for your listening pleasure.

6. Unexpected pockets

Makers of women’s clothing have not yet cottoned on to the fact that we love pockets, despite a cornucopia of social media content about it. Why do they continue to design flowy dresses, for example, which can accommodate pockets with no change to their outward appearance, WITHOUT them? Such an easy win, so casually squandered.

A consequence of this malpractice is that if a woman chances upon a piece of clothing with pockets that are deep enough to hold something useful, it creates a huge, positive reward prediction error in her brain. I recently bought these overalls which have a kangaroo-style front pocket into which all manner of paraphernalia can be dumped. It is an unusual amount of bodily storage space for a woman to have. Stuff kept here does tend to fall out if you bend forwards, though.

Honorary mentions

These things deserved to be included because they’re delightful, even though they didn’t make it to the top six.

• Dangly earrings that make you feel like Alia Bhatt in Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani. Plus points if they make a sound when you move your head.

  

• The o-ho-ho-ho-hooo part in Dil Chahta Hai (if you know, you know). It makes me happy whenever I hear it, but especially if it occurs while driving/riding in a car, and super-especially if the people in the car all sing it together. Actually, any situation that involves singing loudly with other people is cause for joy, like this audience singing Bohemian Rhapsody before a Green Day concert:

• Receiving packages. Oh, the excitement! The pleasure of a surprise gift (assuming you forgot it was coming)! Even though most packages turn out to be boring shit like dish soap or toilet paper that you realise you had panic-ordered three days ago because it was running out.

That’s all for now. Serious essay coming in a week or two. What are some little things that make you happy?

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“How do you know?” you might be thinking, “You don’t know me.”

I know one thing about you—you want to be a scientist. That is enough. The wanting is everything.

The world will tell you otherwise: that to be a scientist, you need to be good at solving maths problems quickly under pressure, or to memorise facts about things you have never seen, or that you need to not need eight hours of sleep a day. They are wrong. The only thing you need is to be curious, and to want to do something about it.

The truth has been there for us all along, in a wonderful book written by a woman twenty seven years ago:

Internalise this. It’s not easy; the world will tell you the opposite a hundred times a day. We constantly judge people by abilities instead of choices.

A clarification if you have read the book in question: yes, Dumbledore was saying that Harry’s ability to talk to snakes didn’t make him evil, and I am saying that a lack of ability won’t prevent you from becoming a scientist, but the fundamental truth is the same: the things you want to do matter much more than the things you can do, because if you want something enough, you can learn to do it.

The wanting is the most important tool in your toolkit. Think of it as a flame—it holds great power, and yet it can be snuffed out by the wind. There is a lot of wind out there; you must protect your desire to be a scientist. People will do things and say things, sometimes without knowing, that can make you not want to be a scientist, make you think you can’t do it.

So how do you protect your desire to be a scientist?

First, let your curiosity drive you. Read as much as you can get your hands on, about questions you want answers to. If anyone tells you that something you want to learn about is not worth it, or not interesting, don’t listen to them. If they say “Stop reading about dinosaurs and study for your calculus test”, don’t listen. You may not do well on the calculus test, but that’s okay, because you can be a great dinosaur scientist if you are curious enough about dinosaurs, and if you need calculus to do it, you will learn it; but you need to be deeply curious about dinosaurs to do a difficult thing like learning calculus in order to study dinosaurs, so fan the flame of that curiosity.

Second—and this is going to be tough—don’t worry if other people think you are not intelligent. Unless you were very lucky, you grew up believing that it is important for other people to think you are intelligent. This made you want to do well on tests and attend prestigious institutions, and while those are not bad things, and might even help you become a scientist, they are not nearly as important as everyone thinks they are.

The problem with wanting others to think you are intelligent is that it interferes with wanting to be a scientist; it is like a turbo jet blowing out the flame. It can prevent you from saying some words that are very important for all scientists to say:

“I don’t understand.”

Some people will make you feel silly for saying those words. They will make you think that it is your inability to understand, rather than their inability to explain, that prevents you from understanding. You may even feel the need to pretend to understand, and work things out for yourself later. Try not to do that; try to become comfortable saying “I don’t understand”. Try to move away from the people that make you feel bad about saying it.

Remember the rule: the desire to understand, not the ability to understand, shows what you truly are.

Third: don’t rush. Again, the world will tell you otherwise. Tenure tracks are short. Life is long. Take your time. If you find yourself in a place where your desire to be a scientist is decreasing because of the people around you, leave and go elsewhere. You will lose some time, but it is much more important not to lose the desire—the science may take longer, but it is better for it to be slow than for it to not happen at all.

Don’t listen to people who say you need to rush. If baking cakes makes you happy, and not doing it makes you unhappy and makes you not want to be a scientist anymore, then don’t listen to people who say that baking cakes when you could be doing science is a waste of time. They are wrong. Protect your desire.

If you want to have a child, and biology dictates that it must happen during your PhD, don’t listen to people who say that it will ruin your chances of being a successful scientist. The beauty of the modern world is that there are many ways to be a scientist; traditional paths aren’t the only way anymore. You don’t have to be at the best institutions. You might not even need to be at an institution. Your life as a scientist doesn’t have to look like any other scientist’s life.

You have to want to do science. But you don’t have to only want that.

The pesky question of money

“Sure,” you might be thinking, especially if you have been in this business for a while, “This is all fine and good. But who is going to pay me to do curiosity-driven science at my own pace? How will I get grants and funding and students and high impact papers? How will I survive?”

These are good questions. I am not going to pretend that the world has moved far enough away from the conventional model of science to make it easy to thrive in this world the way I’ve described above, with self love and the courage to be wrong and different. Many types of science, such as those that can only be done at a specific facility, or those that require large budgets, will be difficult or impossible to do without aiming for the best institutes, the best journals, the fastest career.

But if someone had convinced me early on that it is worthwhile, and might even be a lot of fun, to do a slow, quiet kind of science—for the love of discovery, instead of working at the bleeding edge of technology—then I might still be in it.

You might decide that it is not worth it. That if you have to struggle to get funding (which is getting harder in many parts of the world), and settle for working on less expensive questions, or earning less money and respect than many of your peers, you would rather not do it at all. Or you might find the strength within yourself to fight it out and pursue conventional academic success, as many amazing women have.

You deserve to make that choice from a place of calm and self-acceptance, not anxiety and self-doubt. To know that you are good enough, and if the world tells you otherwise, it is because we don’t have a system that can tap the incredible scientific potential of women who don’t fit the mold.

Why this essay is addressed to young women

Maybe some young men need to hear it too, and perhaps older women, and why not everyone in between?

I wish I did not know so many young women who, while trying their hardest to be scientists, came to believe that they were not good enough for it. I wish it were not so easy for confident men to decimate the confidence of young women scientists.

“I’m surprised you aligned those images so quickly. There was a girl in my old lab who was very bad at spatial reasoning.”

“You attended a flower-arranging class? … Why would you do that?”

“Are you sure you want to do science? You should think about other options.”

The women that came before us have tried to protect us from these landmines, with DEI workshops and micro-aggression awareness training. We have a long and winding road ahead of us, before we get to a scientific culture where these things aren’t necessary anymore. In the mean time, if even one young woman reads this and decides to believe—that curiosity is enough; that not knowing what a GPU is, or using multi-coloured pens, or wearing hoop earrings, don’t make her a bad scientist; and that she deserves to live out the dreams of her childhood—then I will be glad.

I experience the same sensation every Sunday morning, however, when I open my inbox and find it inundated with a flood of Substack posts from my favourite writers. These essays, when I get around to reading them, are incredible. However, when faced with a dozen arresting titles at once, I freeze. I open them one after another, copy the URL, paste it into a document titled ‘To Read’, and close the tab.

Substack posts are only the tip of the iceberg. There are short stories, magazine articles, podcast episodes, TV shows, Youtube videos—all recommended by well-meaning friends. The list of great movies I haven’t seen includes (and you may want to swallow anything that is in your mouth right now) Sholay, The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Schindler’s List, and Gangs of Wasseypur. My list of must-read books is long enough to be a book of its own.

How does one deal with this deluge of content? Having lists in which to dump recommendations helps to some extent—you can hope that your future self will have the decency to stop being addicted to your phone and consume at least some of it.

Adding a drop to the wave

Unfortunately, I have an even bigger problem. Each time I want to write something, I have to first convince myself that it’s OK to add to the mountain of material on the internet, despite not being able to keep up with my own to-read list.

Here’s how I do it.

I am the only person in the history of humanity, I tell myself, who has lived my life. No one else can write from my perspective. All human experiences, including mine, are worth writing about. If we all decided to put down our pens because everything worth writing has already been written, then nobody would write about the present moment. We need good writing to make sense of the things happening around us.

That doesn’t mean, though, that one is only justified in writing about one’s own life or current events. Anything that comes out of a brain—fiction, poetry, opinions—is a function of that brain’s personality and circumstances—by definition, unique. We should put our thoughts out there, even if no one wants to read them.

Which means, I tell myself, that I should write because I enjoy it. It doesn’t matter who reads it. This philosophy is, of course, easier to preach than to practice. Two years on Substack and I still cannot resist the urge, when I publish a piece, to check how it is being received. I feel bad when the reception is lukewarm. The only writing I truly do for myself happens in my journal. Still, when my inner demons whisper “Who are you to write an essay on the Internet?”, I yell back “GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN” and it works.

The quality of my Substack posts is much better than that of my journal entries. The possibility of someone reading the words, even if no one actually does, tricks the brain into working harder, editing more ruthlessly. Some of the writing I am happiest with happens in the hour before I hit publish, because the audience suddenly becomes real.

These answers are messy. Write because your life experience is unique, but write about anything you want, not just your life experience. Write for yourself, but put it out in the world so that there are stakes. But don’t worry if no one reads it or likes it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if such existential questions keep you up at night, as long as you can get yourself to do the thing—whatever you have chosen to do—with some regularity. It doesn’t matter if you feel like a hypocrite while doing it, guilty about the stack of beautiful unread articles sitting in your inbox.

Only the doing matters.

Only two weeks ago, Shah Rukh Khan was here for the Met Gala. Some people managed to see him as he left his hotel, and one of them posted a video online. This was happening five kilometers from my house.

I did not know SRK was attending the Met Gala until the day of the Met Gala. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have bothered to figure out which hotel he was staying at, then stood outside for hours in the cold, rainy weather, hoping to catch a glimpse. But I am human, therefore the video made me question whether I should have.

In hindsight, the answer is no, of course not. At the time, I happened to be taking a long tub bath and reading a book. How can SRK compete with literature and lavender-scented soap bubbles? And anyway, bade bade deshon mein choti choti baatein hoti rehti hain.1 But in the moment, when I realised I could have seen SRK in the flesh and made several people combust with jealousy, I felt a pang of regret.

That is the nature of FOMO. You may be perfectly content with your diet of butter chicken, garlic naan and diet coke, but OH MY GOD HAVE YOU TRIED AUTHENTIC CHINESE FOOD FROM FLUSHING? Maybe you are a museum connoisseur, and visit the Met every other week. What about all the other amazing museums less than an hour from your home? You love Manhattan, but have you sufficiently experienced the *vibe* of Brooklyn? What are you doing with your life if you’ve never been to Katz’s Deli?

Recently, I decided to squash this constant background angst by asking myself, “If I had to leave New York in three months, and never return, what would I do?” This, I thought, would help me prioritize things that matter to me. I wanted to feel like I’m making the most of my time here, and stop worrying about everyone else.

One thing came to mind, and it did not involve museums or food. I wanted to explore Central Park. Really get to know every inch of it. This is impossible in a single visit, because its dimensions are 4 km X 0.8 km. So I took a map, divided the park into ten segments, and decided to conquer them one Sunday at a time.

We (the husband is, of course, involved in this) have done the top two sections. It is the first time we have seen the park’s northernmost reaches. We have encountered a bard playing a nineteen-string lute, a magic turf that turns into both a swimming pool and an ice skating rink, a large family of sunbathing turtles, and a birdwatcher who told us that we should visit the Brooklyn Museum because it is underrated but just as good as the Met, thus completing the cycle of FOMO that triggered this journey.

Would I ever have done such a systematic exploration of Central Park without pretending that I only have three months left in New York? Do we need a sense of finite-ness to do meaningful things?

Tim Urban’s essay about the Tail End of life forced me to confront the fact that I will only read a few hundred books in my life, even if it is a relatively long one. This prompted me to read more books. If a genie gave me the ability to read thousands of books every day, would I read at all? Would I get out of bed if I could live forever?

Immortality is a favourite theme of fantasy authors. Gods have it, villains chase it, the world becomes a dystopia when all humans achieve it. I can’t think of a book where normal people become immortal with no negative consequences (if you can, put it in the comments!). The consensus seems to be that nothing good comes of living forever.

Our lifespans and health spans are increasing. We may live to see the invention of a treatment or procedure that makes humans near-immortal—if not our biological form, then at least the consciousness, uploaded to a server and installed in a robot. Given that choice, would you take it? I think I would. This sort of immortality isn’t fail-safe (you could always be hit by a bus, or the server could become corrupted). So I don’t think it would interfere with my desire to live a full life.

A near-immortal life, I think, would be extremely exciting. How incredible to witness 500 years or more of societal, technological and scientific development! Equally, what kind of depth of understanding could one achieve by studying the world for that long? What problems could one solve, what art could one create? What would one learn by travelling to every corner of the Earth? Incidentally, this is something that really irritates me about the Twilight series—why would immortal, hyper-intelligent vampires who don’t sleep attend high school instead of working on interstellar travel?

Then again, maybe Stephanie Meyer was on to something. The grass is always greener on the other side. Maybe, if I was immune to death and sparkled in the sunlight, I would crave normalcy. Would I need to construct hypothetical situations to get my bum off the couch? “If you only had ten years left instead of ten thousand years, what would you do right now?”

It’s possible that the answer would be “Go to the park.”

Explain how fruit symbolises both life and death in Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’. [5 marks]

Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ uses every figure of speech ever invented. Why? [10 marks]

If you are a fan of Shelley or Frost, I mean no offense. These poems just weren’t relatable. What could “thou breath of Autumn’s being” mean to a teenager growing up in Mumbai, who has never seen an autumn? This is not to say that all the poems in my school syllabus were boring. I still remember reading “I’m in Charge of Celebrations” by Byrd Baylor, in Class 5. Here’s an excerpt:

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Sometimes people ask me,
"Aren't you lonely
out there
with just
desert
around you?"

...

And I say
"How could I be lonely?
I'm the one
in charge of 
celebrations."

Sometimes
they don't believe me,
but it's true.
I am.

I put myself
in charge.
I choose 
my own.

...

You can tell
what's worth
a celebration
because
your heart will
POUND
and 
you'll feel
like you're standing
on top of a mountain
and you'll
catch your breath
like you were
breathing
some new kind of air.

This was the first non-rhyming poem I read. I loved how cheeky it was. The poet was letting me in on a secret—in your imagination, you can make up the rules.

The end of high school brought with it the luxury of ignoring poems I didn’t like. Unfortunately, I threw the baby out with the bathwater. I read Orwell and Kafka, but ignored Dickinson and Faiz. Some friends started writing poems and sharing them online, but I didn’t pay much attention. Occasionally, I’d come across something earth-shattering, like “Separation” by W. S. Merrin:

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Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color. 

But for the most part, I was indifferent to poetry.

Something shifted in 2023, when I started writing this blog. I was suddenly very interested in finding the best and fewest words with which to say things. I stopped skipping past poems on social media. I had more patience for poems I didn’t understand on the first read. I started to see magic in the lyrics of my favourite Hindi songs. I began to appreciate the power of an image painted with words.

And then, a year and twenty one blog posts in, the unthinkable happened. Here’s part of a journal entry I made at the time:

I had an idea for an essay yesterday, and pulled out my phone and made some notes. Then, I felt like this should be a poem, not an essay, and I put line breaks to make it a poem. I ended up working on it till 12:30 am and really liked it.

I felt like a complete imposter. I hadn’t read any of the great poets, or Mary Oliver’s poetry handbook. In fact, I didn’t own a single book of poetry. Most of the time, when someone declared that a particular poem was good or bad, I didn’t understand why. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about rhyme schemes and syllable counts. A few days later, I posted “Nouns and Verbs” anyway, and to my surprise, people liked it.

That, it turns out, was the gateway drug. “This should be a poem” started happening more often. I wrote another one, and to hell with the handbook (before you come for me, I have great respect for Mary Oliver and the handbook is on my must-read list).

I’ve started to think that what makes a poem good is less about pleasing sounds and perfect syllable counts, and more about whether it can convey an idea so strongly that it becomes a part of the reader’s brain, something they cannot avoid knowing and feeling forever afterwards. Check out these untranslatable words from ‘Asli Hip Hop’, written by Spitfire for the film Gully Boy:

कलाकार मैं, कल को आकार दूँ

Was there ever a more powerful description of art?

April is national/global poetry writing month, or NaPoWriMo. I participated in the Ink and Quill Collective’s April poetry challenge in which we wrote one prompt-based poem every day and shared it with the group.

This was a new kind of poem-writing for me, no longer fueled by “this should be a poem”, but “what does this prompt make me want to say?”. I wrote more poems in thirty days than I’ve ever done before. I tried weird stuff. I experimented with form, length and language. It is still scary to share my poems with the world, but the other day, I saw this note on here:

Here are some poems I wrote last month.

Prompt: War and Peace

Sand

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Grains of sand 
caress my lips,
sun-warmed
they tickle my nose.

Head rests on cool, moist layers
beneath the surface.

Eyes shut tight
no sand goes in,
no tears come out.

Soft sand against my cheeks.
Is this good for my skin? 
Is it a form of exfoliation
to bury your head in the sand?

I hope so,
because I do it a lot.
Sand holds back the noise.

BANG!
Gunshot, screams 
(though they are muted)
disturb my sleep.
“No!” I shout.
“Stop,” I whimper.

But my voice is muffled.
Noise cancellation 
works both ways.

Prompt: Earth Day

You Must Save The Earth

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A woodcutter slept in the shade of a tree
sharp shiny axe at his side.
Another came by, dull of axe, sharp of eye
He froze in mid swing when the first man cried,
“Hark! Do not cut! You must save the Earth.
By my hand, enough trees have died.”

Prompt: Nature Poem

Lily

Prompt: Ode to a Loved One

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आया है ज़िन्दगी में जादूगर कोई 
पास मेरे रहता वो हर घडी घडी 

उसमें मुझे सारी दुनिया मिली 
वो दूर हो तो होती हर पल बेचैनी 

तरसता है दिल, प्यास बुझती नहीं 
“बस एक मिनट और!” -- उसकी जादुई छड़ी   

न वो कभी झगड़ता, ना रूठा कभी 
हर मुसीबत में सहारा देता है वही 

देखा उसे तो हर उलझन भूल गयी 
याद उसके बिना कुछ भी न कर सकी !

उसके ही ज़रिये चल रही है ज़िंदगी | 
प्यार ही क्या अगर ये मोहब्बत नहीं ?

- मेरा प्यारा मोबाइल

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A wizard has bewitched my heart,
he and I are never apart.

I drink and drink, but cannot sate
my thirst, I need him night and day

Endless fun at a finger’s flick
“Just one more!”--his magic trick

He doesn’t fight, he’ll never pout
Whatever’s wrong, he helps me out

He takes my troubles off my mind,
If not for him, I’d be flying blind!

Life without him would be rough.
If this ain’t it, then what is love?

- My Darling Phone

And yet, to ignore psychology is to eat crumbs next to a feast. The mind is mysterious, but not unknowable. Psychologists have discovered many rules that predict how humans behave, even if neuroscientists can’t say yet how the brain does it. Much of our lives are made up of these predictable actions—snoozing alarms, scrolling through reels and buying stuff we don’t need when it’s on sale. Our “gut instinct” makes many of our decisions.

Apart from being hollow, slimy and often bloated, the gut is old. Its instincts were learned at a time when we lived simple lives in small groups, eating and being eaten. Why should they work in a world where lions have been replaced by recommendation engines, and fireside flirtation by Tinder swipes?

They don’t, or at least, don’t always work well. The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by late psychologist Daniel Kahneman outlines the built-in biases and blind spots of the gut. After reading it, I started to notice these biases in my daily life, like believing things just because I’ve heard them often, or not wanting to take a flight after that plane’s door fell off.

These biases can be overcome. Sometimes, just knowing they exist is enough. The availability heuristic makes us overestimate the probability of scary things like flight accidents, when they are fresh in our memory. “It’s natural to be afraid,” I can tell my gut, “but plane crashes are still exceedingly rare.”

Over time, I’ve gotten better at this “slow thinking”. I’ve learnt to recognise contexts in which the gut trips up and makes bad decisions. Here are two of them.

The Anchoring Effect

When you look for a plane ticket, the first price you see always seems outrageous. You panic. Why didn’t you buy tickets a month ago? Then you scroll down, and sigh with relief—there is a cheaper flight, though the timing sucks. This flight is only 10% cheaper than the first one you saw, and would have made you balk had it appeared at the top of the page, but now it seems reasonable.

You have been anchored.

When we try to estimate a quantity, such as a reasonable price for a plane ticket, our brain starts with a number that is obviously wrong, and adjusts it up or down until it feels alright. For example, if you want to rent an apartment in Manhattan, you know you won't find anything cheaper than $1000 per month, so you think about how much more than that you can afford.

This is a clever way to solve a complex computation that depends on many things: your income and spending, saving goals, space needs, and location preferences; the New York real estate market; the type of houses your peers live in; and so on. Your brain has some idea about each of these things. Your gut synthesises this information into an emotion: $500 per month feels awesome, but $3,000 makes you anxious.

There are two issues with this system. First, the gut doesn’t move far enough away from the obviously wrong number—the ‘anchor’. Kahneman’s explanation is that we stop moving when we are at the edge of the ‘region of uncertainty’, i.e., when we are no longer sure that the number is obviously wrong. A better estimate would be the midpoint of the region of uncertainty.

The second problem is that the gut is lazy when picking an anchor. It will readily accept the number on a price tag, the salary that the hiring manager suggests, or even a random number that it knows is unrelated to the question. A chilling example of the last one is an experiment in which judges setting the length of a prison sentence were biased up or down by the outcome of a die roll.

Psychologists have demonstrated the ‘anchoring effect’ in all sorts of situations. They give some people a very low anchor, and other people a very high one. The ‘anchoring index’ is the difference between the average estimates of the two groups, as a percentage of the difference between the anchors. 0% would mean there was no anchoring, and 100% would mean the groups are completely anchored.

In experiments, the anchoring index is usually between 30-50%. So as a rule of thumb, you can assume that anchors make you choose a value that is higher or lower than the ‘correct’ number by 30-50% of the distance to the anchor. For example, if the fair price of a flight ticket is $100, but the first price you see is $200, you will then estimate that $130-$150 is reasonable.

Psychological effects like anchoring apply to everyone. We think we are above this silliness; that if we had to decide how many years someone should spend in prison, we would not be influenced by the roll of a dice. But statistics don’t lie—anchoring is built into the human brain. Fortunately, many anchors are easy to avoid.

After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, I stopped looking at price tags.

Museum gift shops are my kryptonite—full of overpriced little baubles that I yearn for. Now, I protect my purse by saying out loud what I’m willing to pay for an item, and purchase it only if it costs less than what I said. You can do something similar any time you spend money. Don’t let the marketing department tell you what a fair price is.

If you cannot avoid the anchor, Kahneman suggests two back-up strategies:

1. Assume that anchors have an effect on you. Tell yourself that you will be irrationally drawn towards the number you see.

2. Try to construct arguments against the anchor. If you had to convince someone that the price is too high, or the salary too low, or the prison sentence too long, what would you say?

Regression to the Mean

The world is more random than we think it is. The human brain is built to find patterns. “It only rains when I forget my umbrella at home,” one might think. I have been convinced for some time that the weather gods have a personal vendetta against me. Same goes for the traffic gods—they always ramp it up when I need to get somewhere on time.

Regression to the mean is a cruel illusion of pattern—an extremely counter-intuitive statistical phenomenon that makes you see causality where there is only randomness. It’s worth taking the time to fully understand it, because it might trick you into believing your friendly neighbourhood astrologer, or taking a miracle weight loss drug.

Imagine that we have measured the weight of 5000 people on a particular day, and measure it again one week later. Let’s call the two measurements w1 and w2. Since weight fluctuates, but doesn’t change a lot in one week, w1 and w2 will be similar, but not equal. If you make a graph with w1 on the X axis and w2 on the Y axis, it might look like this:

On average, w1 and w2 are almost the same (in this graph, the average difference is 0.02 kg). If they were exactly equal, they would fall on top of the dashed line (X = Y). Now imagine that we select the 50 people who weighed the most in the first measurement, and colour their dots red:

Let’s take a closer look at these people:

The values seem to be suspiciously below the X = Y line. w2 is lower than w1 for most of these 50 people. The difference between w1 and w2, the amount of weight they lost in a week, is 0.66 kg on average: 33 times the average difference of the whole group.

There’s nothing special about the values that I plotted. This pattern will show up regardless of the number of people, the mean of w1 and w2, how similar they are to each other, etc. The only requirement is that w1 and w2 are at least a little bit similar, and not exactly equal to each other. I made a thing where you can play with these numbers and generate the same graphs for yourself (will take a minute to load).

So can we conclude that the heaviest people in a group lose the most weight? Unfortunately, no. The easiest way to see that there is no ‘cause’ for this result is to look at the 50 people with the largest values of w2 instead:

These people seem to have the opposite thing going on: w1 is lower than w2 for most of them, or in other words, they seem to have gained weight (in this example, 0.81 kg on average, 40 times more than the group).

The only thing that’s happening here is regression to the mean.

When you measure something twice, if the first measurement is far from the mean, the second one is likely to be closer to the mean. When w1 is large, w2 is likely to be smaller than w1, and vice versa. If you ever need to make a quick buck selling a weight loss wonder pill, you can use this to your advantage, but don’t cite me.

Regression to the mean happens whenever two quantities are similar, but not equal, like w1 and w2. If you roll a die and get 6, the next roll will be closer to the mean if it is 2, 3, 4, or 5. The probability of this is 4/6, whereas the probability of the next roll being as far from the mean as the first one is 2/6 (if you roll a 1, or another 6).

The first roll does not have any effect on the second one; dice don’t have memory. You can, of course, roll two sixes in a row, just like a few people with high w1s had higher w2s. Regression to the mean tells you what is likely to happen, and will happen on average. If you run the experiment many times, it will show up. The following statement is also an example of regression to the mean:

Very intelligent women tend to be married to men who are less intelligent than them.

The IQs of married couples are like w1 and w2—similar, but not equal. Choose outliers among the wives, and their partners will naturally be less outlying. Of course the same thing happens with the smartest men, but it’s more fun to say it this way.

In real life, we tend to intervene when we observe extreme outcomes. Kahneman gives the example of an officer training fighter pilots. The officer reported that pilots usually flew better when he scolded them for a bad flight, but got worse if he praised them for an exceptionally good one.

A pilot’s performance on any given flight is subject to randomness. Unusually good or bad flights are likely to be followed by more average flights, thanks to regression. So pilots seem to improve when criticised, and do worse when praised. Feedback does impact human behavior of course, but regression to the mean also plays a role.

You can train your brain to recognise regression. Unlike anchoring, this is not something you can avoid, really—it’s a fact of the world—but like anchoring, if you assume it happens, you protect yourself from the pitfalls. Here are some examples:

1. Perhaps you only shout at your child when they do something atrocious. You notice that they behave better the next day. Don’t take that as an affirmation that shouting is good—it could be regression to the mean!

2. If you learn of a miracle cure for a serious disease, ask if there was a placebo group to control for regression to the mean (the sickest people in a group will appear to get better over time, just like the heaviest people appear to lose weight over time).

3. When you move to a new city, sample ten restaurants and take your guest to the best one, be prepared for disappointment—you probably caught them on an unusually good day. They might regress to the mean when you visit them again.

Thinking, Fast and Slow has a lot more insights where these came from.

A delightful one is the focusing illusion: nothing is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it. In other words, if you have to decide whether something matters to you, like buying a fancy car or running a marathon or becoming paralysed from the neck down, you will likely overestimate its impact on your life. Most people dwell much less than they thought they would, on the car or marathon or full-body paralysis, after it happens.

Then there is the peak-end rule: the best or worst part of an experience, and its last moments, disproportionately affect your opinion of it. You don’t consider the entirety of an experience when judging how good or bad it was. This even applies to your whole life! Consider this question: Is a wonderful, extraordinarily amazing life improved or made worse by adding five average years to it?

If you enjoyed this, pick up the book and let me know your thoughts.

A lot of Indians were outraged, believing that the CAA and NRC could be used to selectively deny citizenship to Muslims residents, legal or otherwise.1 Shortly after landing in Mumbai, I attended a massive protest. For weeks, I read opinion pieces, shared memes, and argued with fervour in comment sections.

That was five years ago. What happened to the CAA and NRC? Were they implemented? I have no idea, which is shocking given how thoroughly I was immersed in the issue back then. As far as I can tell, the only contribution of the protest movement to present day discourse was the Chronology meme.2

A few months ago, I wrote an essay about Vinesh Phogat, a wrestler who almost won Olympic gold, and risked her career to protest the appointment of a man accused of sexual harassment as the head of India’s Wrestling Federation. For a few days, she was all I thought about. Then the Olympics ended, she was out of my social media feed, and I went back to being clueless about wrestling.

Sexual harassment, unlike wrestling, is never out of the news for long. But even in a zeitgeist littered with sexual violence, some incidents stand out. A week after Vinesh Phogat, I wrote about the brutal gang rape of a doctor in Kolkata and the avalanche of social media content that followed. At the time, it felt like nothing else mattered. If you ask me whether the rapists have been found and punished, I would have to admit that I haven’t the faintest. If I raged online about it today, it would seem out of date.

It’s difficult to zoom out in moments like these. The emotions are intense; they eclipse everything else. The algorithm generates a feeling of extreme urgency—this problem has to be solved now. But if these things are really that urgent, how can we forget about them so easily?

Don’t waste a good crisis

A crisis can be a call to action. The flame that erupts from our collective outrage can fuel change. It is good and right to have strong feelings about the world we live in, and demand justice for each other. These viral moments might be the only time politicians get enough feedback from the people to generate the political will to do what is needed.

But in the modern world, every crisis is all-encompassing and therefore, exhausting. Our brains are not equipped to deal with information about so many people— information that is so detailed, that it feels like they are in our inner circle, which was meant to be capped at around 150 individuals.

I remember another horrific sexual crime, in 2012, that sparked outrage and protests all over India. We had just started using social media on our phones. We were aware of what was happening, and angry. But I don’t remember feeling overwhelmed by grief and rage, close to tears for days, unable to function.

We owe it to ourselves to remember that devastating as the news may be, and important as it is to participate, we live in a time when companies profit from our attention. We are hardwired to turn our heads when we see a burning car on the road, and in 2025, those head turns can be monetized. There is a strong incentive to make the explosion look as gory and eye-catching as possible.

So let us be deliberate about protecting our sanity during a crisis. Let us remind ourselves that the world is much less violent than it has ever been before, and when we feel otherwise, it may have more to do with our easy access to sensational news than to reality. Let us put our phones down.

If we don’t, we run the risk of becoming apathetic. Now, when we feel group outrage over an atrocious crime, a voice in my head whispers, “You’ll forget all this in a month.” Real change requires slow, boring effort over a long time. The best way to use a crisis, in fact, is to prepare for it before it happens, like the economic reforms that were written up well ahead of India’s 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, and implemented when the moment was ripe. Chronology samajhiye.3

So let us continue the mundane work of educating ourselves about the world, teaching our children, calling our moms and debating with our uncles. The revolution, as they say, will not be televised.

My favourite comedian
Is having a baby!
I smile to myself.

Scroll.

Purple paint on a thin brush
Painting perfect petals!
I want to eat them.

Scroll.

Slow motion onion toss!
Golden brown in the pan
This reel smells so good.

Scroll.

Girls, in dresses with pockets
Red, blue, black—it’s an ad.
Fleeting annoyance.

Scroll.

Girls, in sarees, they're dancing!
Viral tune makes me grin
What moves ya! Hit like.

Scroll.

My favourite comedian is back with a banger
His deadpan expression pretending at anger
I pause for a bit,
Let this one repeat,
And laugh, but then, once more, I choose to

Scroll.

Take papad, add maggi,

Scroll.

Do this to be happy:

Scroll

Hot guy

Scroll

Must try—

Scroll

Scroll,
Scroll,
Scroll,
Scroll,

No time to savour
Neck hurts, roll over
That was a good meme
Click, click, send to him
How long has it been?
Oh shit.. an hour
OK, just one more—

I wrote this poem for the Ink and Quill Collective’s April Poetry Writing Challenge. On 1st April, the prompt was ‘A Fool’s Paradise’. I thought of the hour I had spent sitting on the couch the previous night, watching stunning, hilarious, annoying, mouth-watering, heartwarming, electrifying reels. One after another after another. Each one the culmination of days or weeks of work; endless entertainment at my fingertips. If this is not paradise, what is?

Why am I unable to write? Do I have writer’s block? Writer’s block, like lactose intolerance, is a polite name for an unpleasant situation. It makes the lack of writing seem like a consequence of events outside our control, rather than of choices we make. Look at the first sentence of this paragraph—I asked why I’m unable to write, instead of the more honest question: Why am I not writing?

When asked that way, the question has many answers. I am in India, on vacation, busy meeting and greeting and eating. I’m cramming a year’s worth of living in my country into a few weeks, and don’t have time for “work” that I owe to nobody but myself.

A more important answer is that I have become scared of publishing writing that is bad or boring, because of a strange thing that happened to me two months ago. I posted what I thought was a witty little observation on Substack Notes:

Murakami said “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking” and I used to worry about this.

Then I realised that most people aren’t reading at all.

A lot of people ‘liked’ this note. Some of them subscribed to this newsletter. During the week or two that the post was blowing up, I checked the number of likes and my subscriber count ten times a day, incredulous and delighted that they had gone up each time.

I sound like an ungrateful brat, but this sequence of events has not been good for me. After the first hundred likes, I realised with horror that my note had deceived the readers into believing two lies: that I read a lot of books, and in particular, those written by Murakami. In truth, I haven’t consumed an iota of the man’s work (apart from the sentence I quoted, which I found years ago on awesome-quotes.com or some such place). As the number of people reading the note increased at an exponential rate, I frantically looked for the original source of the quote.

To my even greater horror, I found that Murakami did not “say” this thing in an interview, as I had imagined, to encourage people to read unpopular books. This is in fact a dialogue in a novel, delivered by a pompous sort of character who looks down his nose at those who read contemporary literature. In all likelihood, Murakami disagrees with the sentiment in the quote.1 I tried to cleanse myself by telling friends and family about my hypocrisy.

The drama of the viral post, and the accompanying embarrassment about the untruths it contained, were only the beginning.

Once things had settled down, I started having visions of these new subscribers reading my next article. Would they remember, when my email showed up in their inbox, that they had subscribed—or would they assume it was spam and delete it, or leave it unopened, or worse, start reading only to be turned off by the first few sentences? All the writing advice on the internet (which I consume in copious amounts) didn’t stop me from telling myself that my next piece had to be at least as good as the best thing I’ve written so far.

While I ruminated, life kept happening.

My parents live in a housing complex with a well-maintained community pool. A few days ago, I went for a swim there. The only other swimmer was a five year-old, lording it over the two-foot-deep kids section.

“Hi,” she said to me, in a voice that demanded I respond.

“Hi,” I smiled, happy to be on the receiving end of attention from any child.

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

A reasonable doubt, given that my hair was hidden beneath a swimming cap and half my face obscured by goggles.

“Girl,” I said. “And you?”

“Girl,” she confirmed. “Let us do a swimming race. MUMMA!” she called to to her mother who was sitting next to the pool. “She is my friend.”

I immediately wanted to write about this exchange. Almost every day in India, I experience something that I want to write about. An auto ride reminiscent of a rollercoaster. The best ceviche I’ve ever eaten. A cat napping in a bookstore, undisturbed, on top of a display of bestsellers. A sign at an airport carrying the bold and futile warning ‘NO PICKLES ALLOWED’.

Nothing in this country happens in a normal, uninteresting way. Consider, for instance, my trip to the US Consulate in Chennai for a visa interview.

The consulate does not permit phones to be carried into the premises. I was going for the interview alone, so I booked a room in a hotel that was walking distance from the consulate, and planned to leave my phone in the hotel. An hour before the interview, I looked up directions to the consulate and drew a map on a piece of hotel stationery. Thus armed, I ventured into the sunlight.

I did not know that Chennai (or at least, the part around the consulate) is un-walkable. Taking inspiration from the locals, I ran across chowks in the few seconds between one signal turning red and the other turning green. I crossed main roads with no zebra crossing in sight, putting my hand out in front of cars and autos as if to magnetically repel them. Then I came to Anna Salai, the most important road in Chennai. It was buzzing with trucks and two-wheelers. I hesitated for a long time.

An old man was sitting on a tree stump nearby, picking his teeth. He took pity on me, got up and started crossing the road, gesturing for me to follow. He swept his hand forward as if to say “Come, come, cross now. How long you will wait here only?”

When I got to the consulate, I found that in addition to phones, smart watches are also banned from their hallowed halls. I was at a loss; there was no time to go back to the hotel to leave my watch there. I briefly considered hiding it under a pile of leaves.

I walked away from the consulate, looking for someone I could give my watch to. I decided that the security guard of a nearby building was a likely candidate. I motioned for him to come towards the railing that surrounded the building’s compound. He obliged. I asked in English if I could give him my watch, and promised him five hundred rupees if he gave it back to me in an hour. He didn’t seem to understand. He called another security guard, who also didn’t understand.

I don’t speak Tamil, and I don’t think either of them spoke English. Suddenly, the second guard indicated, by miming, that I should throw the watch over the railing. Overcome by confidence, I obeyed him. This may seem foolish in the extreme, but when I returned after a successful visa interview and showed them a five hundred rupee note, they gave me my watch. I returned to the hotel and promptly made note of the day’s events.

My ‘blog topics’ document grows ever longer as I jot down anecdotes and ideas. I feel overwhelmed, like a toddler in a toy store. What to write about first? Meanwhile, the article I had started before leaving the US is languishing in a file called First Draft. Take it all in, I tell myself, and write about it after returning to the relative calm of New York City.

I have lived in the United States for nearly nine years now. Each year, I visit India for a few weeks. Can one visit one’s home? Yes, I suppose, if one makes a new home somewhere else. But what I am doing now doesn’t feel like a visit. On the surface, I am seeking permission from the United States government to continue living and working in their country. On the inside, I feel like I am seeking permission from myself to move back to India.

I don’t want to romanticise the pleasures of being an elite in a developing country, with access to cheap labour and private pools and air conditioned lives. The United States is a better place to be for many reasons: clean air, functioning cities, freedom to live as one wants. And halfway across the world is no longer as far as it used to be—plane tickets keep getting cheaper; video calls are free; restaurants in Queens make fantastic chicken momos.

And yet. As I scroll through my photos from the last few weeks—the streets, the skies, the people, my people, our food—I feel an irresistible pull towards this country that I call mine.

My grasp on the language is enough, however, to understand that in the movie Silsila, when Amitabh Bachhan’s baritone delivers Javed Akhtar’s lines “Main aur meri tanhayi, aksar ye baatein karte hain/Tum hoti, toh kaisa hota”—there is more emotion in it than can be captured by the literal translation (“I and my loneliness, often discuss/how it would be if you were here.”).

Perhaps the wise thing to do is to leave that extra feeling there, in the Hindi/Urdu words, and not try to extract it into the language I am more comfortable with. Perhaps it is enough to marvel at the poetry in the original tongue. But there is some madness inside me; I can’t leave the words alone. About a year ago, I allowed this madness to drive me into attempting translations of five of my favourite Hindi songs, and now, it is time for another round.

The great Gulzar looms large in this world. The words ‘Jinke sar ho ishq ki chhaon/Paon ke neeche jannat hogi’2 were imprinted on the brain of every 90s kid before we had an inkling of what any of them meant. From 2000 to 2010, Gulzar wrote songs for 39 films, including Saathiya, Omkara, Guru, and Ishqiya—the mind boggles.

There is a hidden gem in the second stanza of Gulzar saab’s Bol Na Halke Halke, from the movie Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

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Aa neend ka sauda karein
Ik khwaab dein, ik khwaab lein
Ik khwaab toh aankhon mein hai, 
Ik chaand ke takiye tale
Kitne dinon se ye aasmaan bhi
Soya nahi hai, isko sula dein

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Come, let's trade our sleep with the night
A dream for a dream
One dream from the brow
One from Moon's pillow
The sky has not slept 
For so many days
Come, let's put it to sleep

The movie Kashmir ki Kali features an overwhelming number of songs in which Shammi Kapoor serenades Sharmila Tagore from a boat on Dal Lake.

One of them, written by Shamsul Huda Bihari, is Deewaana Hua Badal.

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Jab tumse nazar takraayi sanam,
Jazbaat ka ik toofaan utha
Tinke ki tarah main beh nikli
Sailaab mere roke na rukaa
Jeevan mein machi halchal
Aur bajne lagi shahnayi
Ye dekh ke dil jhooma
Li pyaar ne angdai

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My gaze, wandering, met yours
My heart rose in a storm
And I, a twig, floating in it
Could not stop the flood
My heart danced
To the storm's beat
Love took me in its arms

The 2018 anthology film Lust Stories starts with a scene that takes me right back to my childhood in Bombay: Radhika Apte leans out of the window of a kaali peeli taxi, wind in her hair, smile on her face. Director Anurag Kashyap has paired this image with the opening strains of Dam Bhar Jo Udhar Moonh Phere from the 1951 movie Awara, written by Shailendra.

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Dam bhar jo udhar moonh phere 
O chanda
Main unse pyaar kar loongi
Baatein hazaar kar loongi

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O Moon, please look away
For a moment
So I may love him
And say a thousand things

We end where we began, with Javed Akhtar and Ye Kahan Aa Gaye Hum, from the movie Silsila. I struggled with this one, and almost left it out—the English words seem to be but a shadow of the Hindi ones. Tanhayi is not only ‘loneliness’ but the thirst of a lover for their beloved, a desperation that comes from being utterly alone.3 This is less of a translation, and more of a lament for what has been lost in doing it.

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Main aur meri tanhayi
Aksar ye baatein karte hain
Tum hoti, toh kaisa hota?

Tum ye kehti, tum woh kehti
Tum iss baat pe hairaan hoti
Tum uss baat pe kitni hasti
Tum hoti, toh aisa hota
Tum hoti, toh waisa hota
Main aur meri tanhaayi 
Aksar ye baatein karte hain

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I ask myself
How it would be
If you were here.

And I reply,
It would be like this
And it would be like that
You would say this
And laugh at that

Myself and I,
We talk about these things.

Will this translation exercise improve my Hindi? Probably not. For that, I need to practice speaking it. And maybe read a book or two. But now I can recall the Hindi words for emotion (jazbaat), dream (khwaab), and compromise (sauda) faster.

Cooking is not one of my favorite things to do. What humiliation, to be reduced to a teary-eyed, snotty-nosed mess by a mere onion. In my books, chopping onions is the second worst activity available to humans, and it would have occupied the bottom spot were it not for washing dishes. Basting and boiling and blending and blanching are all best left to other people. Stirring is tolerable.

I do cook, however, and when I do, there is a moment so pleasurable that it almost makes up for everything else.

A few teaspoons of oil sit quietly in the rounded bottom of a kadhai,1 gathering power from the flame below. The oil doesn’t know what is about to happen to it. (That’s good, for it might otherwise leap out of the pan in fear.) I gather mustard seeds in a spoon; they roll around like tiny, perfect ball bearings. 

I hold my palm above the kadhai, feeling the warmth, then test the oil with a single black seed. A thin stream of bubbles escapes—perfect. The oil has reached the right temperature for tempering. It is time.

I pour in the mustard seeds. A sputtering cacophony ensues. Curry leaves next—I steal a second, though there is none, to feel their cool smoothness on my fingertips as I rip them from the stem—I toss them into the oil and yank my hand back as it lashes out and deposits miniature burns on my skin. The fresh leaves crackle, and my mouth waters. Now, hing!2 Just a pinch, held tightly between thumb and index finger—its sulfurous onion-garlic aroma enters my nostrils and goes straight to my heart. It will burn! Quick, quick! In with the chillies! And then the tadka3 is done. My tongue tingles with anticipation. 

Tempered spices form the basis of a wide range of Indian food. The tadka can be the start of a sabzi, or be sizzled on to a bowl of lentils to transform it into dal. It connects me to a home I have left behind. How many tadkas are made around the world at any given time, I wonder. Everywhere, my people chuck whole spices into hot oil and inhale their incense. How did this come to be? What fool played with fire and fat and stumbled into this violent magic? If the tempering sounds right, the food will taste good. The ear serves the tongue.

Making a tadka is fun, pure and childlike. There is no time for measuring. You go with your gut, and your eyes, and the feel of things in your hands; the result is slightly different each time, like an artist mixing primary colors into exotic hues. The oil does the work for you, penetrating cell walls to extract the aromatic compounds within. It is easy. It is delicious. It makes me want to cook.