“I am like a sponge. I absorb the dumbness or the intellect of the people I am surrounded by.”

I felt that.

I’ve always been a bit like that. I absorb people. Their language, their interests, their energy, sometimes even the way they think. And for the longest time, I didn’t realise how much the people around me were affecting the quality of my own mind.

There have been so many rooms where I have dumbed myself down.

I don’t even mean this arrogantly. It wasn’t that I thought I was smarter than everyone around me. It was more subtle than that. I would know something and pretend I didn’t. I would have a thought and simplify it before saying it. I’d stop myself from talking about something I was genuinely interested in because I could sense that nobody really cared. Sometimes you just learn to meet the room where it is.

And when you do that for long enough, something strange happens. You start becoming the version of yourself you perform.

You absorb the dimness.

That line made me think about how intelligence is not as individual as we like to believe. Of course, there is what you read, what you study, what you know. But there is also the intellectual environment you live in every day.

Who are you having dinner with? What are you talking about in the car? What are your friends sending you at 1 a.m.? What are you arguing about? What are you curious about together?

These things matter.

I’ve also realised that I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room anymore. Because what does that even mean? And what does it really give you?

Maybe an ego boost. But then what?

I would much rather sit at a table and realise I know nothing about what somebody is talking about.

Tell me about a book I haven’t read. Explain something to me that I don’t understand. Tell me about an obscure artist, a scientific discovery, some bizarre piece of history, a city I’ve never been to. Challenge something I say. Make me rethink an opinion I have carried around too comfortably.

I want to come home from conversations and Google things.

That, to me, is such an underrated pleasure, almost like meeting someone who makes the world feel slightly bigger than it did before you met them.

And I don’t necessarily mean conventionally “intelligent” people either. I’m less interested in degrees or who can use the biggest words in a conversation. Some of the smartest people I know are simply incredibly curious. They notice things. They ask questions. They have strange little obsessions. They know a ridiculous amount about one completely random subject. And they are comfortable saying, I don’t know.

I love people who still want to know.

Because curiosity is contagious.

But unfortunately, so is the opposite.

If you spend enough time around people who are interested only in status, eventually you start thinking about status. If everyone around you is cynical, cynicism begins to feel like intelligence. If the conversation is constantly about other people, eventually you stop talking about ideas.

And without really noticing it, your world becomes smaller.

Maybe that’s what I’m learning now: the people we choose are also the environments we choose for our minds.

So I want to be more careful about my rooms.

I want to be around people who know things I don’t. People from completely different worlds. People who disagree with me. People who send me down rabbit holes. People who are deeply interested in something, anything. People who make me want to read more, see more, understand more.

And I also don’t want to keep making myself smaller just because a particular room requires it.

I can listen without disappearing. I can be humble without pretending I know less than I do. I can make space for someone else without reducing myself to make that space.

Maybe that is the part of Richy’s line that hit me hardest.

If I really am a sponge, then I have to be careful about what I keep placing myself next to.

I have absorbed enough dimness.

I want to absorb people who make me curious.

And I want to leave rooms knowing a little more than when I entered them.

Not entirely. Just the neck. The lip that had survived decades of hands, homes, journeys and stories. It slipped from my grip while I was cleaning the house and landed with that unmistakable sound of glass surrendering to gravity.

For a moment, the room was silent. Then I put on my slippers. I picked up a broom. And I started sweeping.

A year ago, this would have broken me.

Not because of the object itself although it is one of the most precious things I own but because, back then, everything felt like evidence that life was falling apart.

When your inner world is fractured, every cracked plate, every dead plant, every chipped mug becomes proof that nothing stays whole. You stop seeing accidents. You start seeing omens.

Back then, I would have sat on the floor and cried over this bottle. Not because it was expensive. Not because it was irreplaceable. Because I was. Or at least, I believed I was.

When I left my old life, this demi-john came with me.

Not in a moving box. Not wrapped in newspaper. I carried it on my lap. Carefully. Like something alive.

There are objects that become witnesses. They don’t merely decorate our homes; they quietly archive our lives. They see the versions of us that nobody else remembers.

This bottle had seen a relationship. It had seen the leaving. It had seen me moving homes. It had watched me begin again. Somewhere along the way, it had stopped being glass.

It had become memory.

The irony is that it didn’t break during the hardest year of my life. It didn’t crack while it was transported. It didn’t shatter when everything else did.

It broke today. On an ordinary Saturday.

While I was dusting. While sunlight fell across my Bandra apartment. While life was, normal.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this apartment lately.

When I first moved here, I romanticised independence. I imagined slow mornings, coffee, fresh flowers, cooking every meal, vacuuming every corner, knowing every object I owned because I had cleaned it myself. A tiny home that was entirely mine. My own little universe. A place that finally felt like belonging.

Then life happened.

A new role. Long days. Deadlines that stretched into nights. Meals eaten standing up. Laundry waiting. Dust gathering quietly in corners.

The house became something I slept in instead of lived in. This morning was supposed to be my reset. The day I reclaimed my home.

Instead, I broke one of the things I loved most.

And somehow, I didn’t break with it. That surprised me more than the accident itself.

Healing is funny that way. Nobody tells you when it arrives. There isn’t a ceremony. No certificate. No dramatic soundtrack.

Sometimes it reveals itself in the most ordinary moments.

In traffic. In a conversation. In a song you no longer skip. Or in the way you react when something precious slips from your hands.

I didn’t panic. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t think the universe was punishing me.

I simply thought, “Well… that’s unfortunate.”

And then I started figuring out how I might repair it.

Maybe wrap the neck in a handwoven jute cord. Maybe leave it exactly as it is. Maybe let the scar become part of its story.

Perhaps that’s what healing actually is. Not becoming someone who never feels loss. But becoming someone who knows loss isn’t the end of the story.

We spend so much of our lives trying to preserve things. Relationships. Furniture. Homes. Versions of ourselves.

We polish. We dust. We protect.

As though enough care could keep everything intact forever.

But life has never made that promise. Everything breaks eventually.

Glass. People. Dreams. Expectations.

The illusion that we are in control.

The question isn’t whether something will break. The question is what breaks with it.

A year ago, the bottle would have shattered, and so would I. Today, only the bottle did.

And that feels like the quietest miracle I’ve ever witnessed.

Maybe strength isn’t loud. Maybe it doesn’t look like resilience quotes or grand declarations about moving on. Maybe it looks like wearing slippers before cleaning up broken glass.

Maybe it looks like knowing that memories don’t live inside objects.

They live inside us.

Maybe it looks like understanding that a cracked vessel is still capable of holding beauty.

The Japanese have a philosophy called kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold so that the fracture becomes part of its history rather than something to hide.

I’ve always admired the idea. Today, I realised healing isn’t becoming the gold.

It’s becoming the person who no longer mistakes a crack for the end.

Later today, I’ll probably find a way to repair the neck. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll let it remain exactly as it is a little imperfect, carrying the evidence of its fall. Because somewhere over the last year, I’ve stopped believing that love lives in perfect things.

It lives in the things we choose to keep, even after they’ve broken.

The demi-john is still sitting in my living room.

Its neck is chipped. Its story is longer now. So is mine. And perhaps neither of us needed to stay unbroken.

We only needed to survive the fall.

Mumbai has taught us to romanticise the rain.

Every June, our feeds begin to look the same. A cup of chai resting on a windowsill. Pakodas. Gulzar lyrics. The sea turning grey. The smell of wet earth. The first drizzle after months of unbearable heat.

I love the monsoon too. It is, without question, my favourite season.

But somewhere along the way, I realised that loving the monsoon is a privilege. And like most privileges, you don’t notice it until something reminds you.

This morning, I woke up to the sound of rain and walked to my window. Across from my building, I noticed a roof covered in a blue tarpaulin, the kind that appears across the city every June. The kind we’ve all seen so many times that we barely register it anymore.

I stood there for a while, wondering what it must feel like to hear rain not as poetry, but as a threat.

To know that every heavy shower means checking whether the roof will hold. Whether the walls will leak. Whether your mattress will stay dry. Whether everything you own will still be usable tomorrow morning.

That blue sheet wasn’t just plastic. It was someone’s hope.

It reminded me how quickly we forget.

I grew up in this city. I know what the monsoon feels like when you don’t have the luxury of escaping it. I remember commuting across Mumbai, watching local trains come to a halt because tracks disappeared underwater. Sitting in traffic for hours without moving an inch. What a privilege, still. Watching the Western Express Highway become one endless parking lot. The anxiety of not knowing whether you’d reach home in two hours or six. Wondering whether your phone battery would survive longer than the journey.

I remember the strange panic of being stuck in traffic during a downpour with nowhere to go. Something as ordinary as needing a washroom suddenly became a crisis. The city had stopped moving, and so had your life.

Back then, it felt normal.

Today, my life looks different. I have my workplace very close to me. If it rains heavily, I can postpone a meeting and work from home. I can wait for the skies to clear. I can make myself another cup of tea.

But the people who make my everyday life possible don’t have that choice.

The woman who helps keep our homes running still has to leave before dawn. The driver still has to report to work. The delivery partner still has to ride through flooded streets. The security guard still stands at the gate in the rain. So many people travel from Virar, Vasai, Kalyan, Ambernath and countless other suburbs, spending hours on overcrowded trains that become more unpredictable every monsoon.

Many of them return home only to find water waiting for them there too.

We often call them “essential workers,” but somewhere along the way, we’ve stopped asking what kind of city we’re asking them to endure.

Every year, we hear of people losing their lives during the rains. Trees collapse. Walls give way. Roads cave in. Local trains stop. Families spend entire nights waiting for someone to get home.

And every year, we somehow accept that the city simply “wasn’t ready.”

But how many years can a city keep saying that?

We’ve built remarkable infrastructure. New bridges. Coastal roads. Landmark projects that promise a better future. They matter, and they should exist.

But I can’t help wondering why the daily commute of the ordinary Mumbaikar still feels like an endurance test every single monsoon.

Why is getting home safely still a privilege?

The phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is PIN code privilege.

It isn’t just about wealth.

It’s about whether your neighbourhood gets its trees pruned before the rains. Whether your roads are resurfaced in time. Whether drains are cleaned. Whether water disappears in thirty minutes or stays for three days. Whether rain means inconvenience—or disaster.

The same cloud bursts over all of Mumbai. The experience it creates depends entirely on where you live.

That’s what privilege looks like. The monsoon doesn’t discriminate. Our city does.

Perhaps that’s why I can no longer look at a cup of chai by the window without also thinking of the blue tarpaulin stretched across someone else’s roof.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t call the rains romantic without asking who gets to experience them that way.

The beauty of the monsoon has never been equally distributed.

Maybe this year, before we post another photograph of rain-soaked bougainvillea or another plate of pakodas, we should pause.

Think about the people who keep this city alive while the rest of us admire it from behind glass.

Think about the animals huddled beneath parked cars, searching for dry ground.

Think about the family hoping the roof survives one more night.

Think about the millions who will spend four hours commuting today because the city still hasn’t figured out how to protect the people who need it the most.

Maybe gratitude isn’t enough. Maybe remembrance is.

Because the rain falls on all of us.

But shelter doesn’t.

Back in my hustling era.

The one where a different city is just a day trip. Where midnight oil isn’t burned it’s a primary fuel source. Where calendars resemble battle plans, phones never stop ringing, and conversations blur into one another because you’ve spoken to what feels like a million people before lunch.

The era of endless decks, design briefs, strategy documents, voice notes, presentations, approvals, revisions, and somehow finding enough energy to do it all again the next morning.

And strangely, it feels like coming home to myself.

To the 21-year-old Shruti : hungry, hopeful, fearless. The girl who saw opportunity where others saw obstacles. The girl who believed every problem had a solution if she was willing to work hard enough to find it.

What has changed is that this version of me is kinder to herself.

I hydrate. I eat well. I take my omegas, vitamins, collagen, magnesium. I wear sunscreen. I do my skincare. I run when I can. I pay attention to the machine that carries the ambition.

Because somewhere along the way, I learnt that success is not built on self-destruction.

And for the first time, even in the middle of all this motion, I am staying deeply connected to the people I love.

I make time for Maa. For my sister. For my brother. For my two best friends. Sometimes it’s a five-minute video call squeezed between meetings. Sometimes it’s the last conversation of the day, unwinding with a chilled beer or a glass of white wine in hand. The work is important, but so are the people waiting on the other side of the screen.

A younger version of me thought success meant sacrificing everything at the altar of ambition.

A wiser version knows that ambition means very little if there is nobody to call when something wonderful happens.

So yes, I’m running low on sleep, but high on ambition.

Still building. Still becoming. Still saying yes to the things that scare me. Still betting on myself.

And if there is one thing I’ve learnt, it is this:

The goal isn’t to choose between a full life and a successful one. The real work is learning how to hold both at the same time your dreams in one hand, your people in the other and not let go of either.

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Hum kitne ajeeb hote hain na. Pyaar mein padte hi, dheere dheere khud se utarne lagte hain.

Jaise koi apni hi dehleez se pair hata de. Jaise ghar mein sabko khana parosne wali maa, aakhir mein bartan ke kone mein bachi thandi roti kha leti hai..aur kehti hai, “Mera mann nahi tha.”

Sach toh yeh hai, uska mann bhi tha. Usse bhi aam ka woh aakhri tukda khana tha. Usse bhi kabhi garam chai bina uthkar peeni thi. Usse bhi kabhi bina dare, bina soche, sirf apne liye jeena tha.

Par humne apni maao ko dekha hi aise hai. Unhe pighalte hue dekha. Unhe har baar apni khwahish ko chhota karte dekha, taaki hum bade ho sakein.

Aur phir… pata hi nahi chalta kab hum bhi wahi ban jaate hain. Pyaar mein hum khud ko khaali karne lagte hain.

Sabki plate bharte bharte, apni bhookh ka naam tak bhool jaate hain. Hum sochte hain mohabbat matlab qurbaani.

Matlab har baar “tum.” Kabhi “main” nahi. Aur ek din, raat ke kisi kone mein baith kar achanak yaad aata hai… ki humein toh woh aakhri aam ka tukda bahut pasand tha.

Ki humein bhi zor se hansna aata tha. Ki humein bhi bina wajah sheher ghoomna tha. Ki humein bhi pyaar milna tha, sirf dena nahi. Zindagi ulajhti nahi hai sirf duniya ki wajah se. Kabhi kabhi hum khud ko itna peeche chhod dete hain, ki lautne ka raasta yaad nahi rehta.

Aur phir seekhna padta hai, ki apna khayal rakhna khudgarzi nahi hoti. Kabhi kabhi, sabse badi mohabbat woh hoti hai jab aap aakhri tukda kisi aur ko nahi, khud ko de dete ho.

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Zindagi na… kabhi kabhi bilkul uss kamre jaisi lagti hai jahan roshni toh hoti hai, par aankhon tak pahunchti nahi.

Dil itna toot jaata hai ki aadmi jeena nahi, sirf din kaatna seekh leta hai.

Phir pata nahi kaise, insaan roz thoda thoda khud ko uthaata hai - 10 pratishat, 20 pratishat. kabhi sirf ek saans bhar jitna. Aur zindagi chup-chaap dekh rahi hoti hai.

Wahi zindagi jo kal tak aapke seene se sab kuch kheench rahi thi, ek din achanak aapki jeb mein thodi si roshni daal deti hai.

Kuch log bhej deti hai, jo aapko samajhte nahi, mehsoos karte hain. Jo aapki khamoshi ki zubaan padh lete hain. Jo aapke jhukey hue kandhon par izzat rakh dete hain.

Aur phir ek din, jab aap mar-mar ke jeena chhod dete ho. zindagi dheere se kaan mein kehti hai. “Ab tum akelay nahi ho. Ab tumhare khwaab hi nahi, tumhare ghar waalon ki umeedein bhi hum saath milkar poori karenge.”

My work is moving, things are aligning, I’m clearer than I’ve been in a long time. I’ve built a life that finally feels like it belongs to me.

And yet, today something small pulled at me, and I came undone so fast it was almost embarrassing.

It wasn’t even a big thing. Just a reminder. A trace. A ghost of something I thought I had already buried under growth, distance, and time.

And suddenly I wasn’t this version of me anymore.

I was back there.

Back in the confusion. Back in the overthinking. Back in that quiet, humiliating place where I was waiting for something that never fully arrived.

That’s the part no one tells you about healing.

You don’t just become this evolved, untouchable version of yourself. You still have days where your body remembers before your mind can catch up.

And it feels pathetic.

Because how are you here, thriving, building, moving forward, and still affected by something that is so clearly over?

How does a person who isn’t even in your life anymore still have access to your nervous system like this?

That’s the part that stings. Not just the memory, but the fact that it still works.

I hate that version of me sometimes.

The one who tolerated confusion. The one who stayed when things felt off. The one who needed clarity and didn’t always get it, but kept showing up anyway.

Today she came back.

Not fully, not permanently, but just enough to shake me.

And for a few hours, everything I’ve built felt fragile.

Like all this growth is real, but also somehow reversible. Like I could slip back into that old self if I’m not careful.

That’s the fear no one says out loud.

That you’re not as over it as you thought. That healing didn’t erase it, it just made it quieter.

And on days like today, it gets loud again.

But here’s the part I’m trying to hold onto, even if it doesn’t fully comfort me yet.

I didn’t stay there.

I felt it. I hated it. I questioned myself in ways I thought I had outgrown. But I also saw it for what it was.

A trigger. Not a truth. A memory. Not my present.

That’s the only difference.

Before, I would have lived inside this feeling. Now, I’m just passing through it.

Still hurts though.

Still feels like a punch to the stomach you didn’t see coming.

Still makes you question how something so small can undo you so completely, even if just for a day.

And maybe that’s what this phase of life actually is.

Not being untouched. Not being fully healed.

But being someone who can fall apart a little, and not mistake it for the end of everything.

I did not grow up around extravagance. I grew up around discernment.

In our home, things were bought carefully and kept for years. A dining table was not furniture; it was an inheritance in progress. Crockery came out with occasion and reverence. Curtains were discussed, not casually replaced. A fresh bedspread could transform a room. A bowl of marigolds in the right corner could feel more luxurious than anything imported. Beauty was not measured by abundance but by attention.

When money is limited, taste sharpens.

You learn to notice proportion, usefulness, durability, mood. You understand that atmosphere can be created with one lamp placed well, one meal cooked lovingly, one object chosen with care. You learn that elegance is often less about possession than perception.

Perhaps that is why I now walk into certain luxury launches and feel strangely untouched.

The budgets are enormous. The flowers have flown farther than many guests ever will. Crystal catches candlelight from every angle. Waiters move in orchestrated silence. There are tasting menus no one finishes and gift bags no one needs. Everything gleams with the effort of expense.

And yet, so often, nothing lingers.

I leave remembering the cost, but not the feeling.

This, to me, is the poverty of imagination: when immense resources produce only the obvious.

The same formulas repeat themselves with numbing consistency. Towering floral arrangements standing in for personality. Borrowed European grandeur in cities with richer visual histories of their own. Generic notions of sophistication copied from hotel ballrooms and Pinterest boards. Music selected to offend no one and move no one. Menus with no sense of geography, season, or memory. Rooms designed to be photographed rather than experienced.

So much spending. So little authorship.

What saddens me most is where this often happens.

In India, imagination is not scarce. We live inside one of the world’s greatest archives of beauty. Step into an old haveli and watch how light is handled. Sit in a Chettinad home and study scale, rhythm, and hospitality. Look at the intelligence of a handwoven textile, the curve of a brass lota, the mathematics of rangoli, the sensuality of sandalwood, the colour confidence of a spice market, the quiet drama of monsoon clouds gathering over stone.

We come from cultures that have long understood texture, ritual, fragrance, ceremony, and emotional atmosphere.

Yet many luxury brands here still perform aspiration instead of confidence. They reach for imported symbols of prestige while ignoring the sophistication at their feet.

I have stood in rooms costing crores and thought of modest homes that felt far grander.

Homes where someone ironed table linen with pride. Where steel tumblers shone because they were polished by hand. Where guests were fed until refusal became comedy. Where flowers came from the local market. Where conversation was the entertainment. Where nothing matched perfectly, yet everything belonged.

There was imagination there. There was intimacy. There was an understanding that beauty is not assembled through spending, but through care.

That lesson never leaves you.

So now, when I enter lavish rooms, I am not asking how much was spent. I am asking what was felt. What was noticed. What was risked. What was truly seen.

Did the space have a point of view?

Did it belong to the brand, the city, the season?

Did anyone think beyond impressing people?

Because money can buy scale. It can buy polish. It can buy the appearance of importance.

But it cannot buy taste. It cannot buy memory. It cannot buy soul.

And perhaps that is the quiet gift of being raised middle class: you learn early that the difference between luxury and mere expense is imagination.

Somewhere between oversharing, healing, crying over sentences, and hitting publish with a racing heart. You stayed. You read. You felt with me. You wrote back. You held space.

This little corner of the internet has become less “my writing” and more our quiet, chaotic, deeply human archive, an archive of stories of India I deeply romanticise, and the ones that live within me.

I came here to make sense of things. Turns out, I found people instead.

Thank you for reading my stories, my essays, my unfiltered becoming. Thank you for letting me be soft, messy, and occasionally dramatic (okay, often).

If you’ve ever paused on a line, felt something shift, or just lurked silently, I see you too.

1000 feels less like a number and more like a room I’m grateful to be in.

Thank you for letting me be. You are why I kept going 💌🤲🏼❤️‍🩹

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And if you’ve ever paused mid-sentence, searching for the “right” English word while knowing exactly what you want to say in your own language, you already know which one I’m talking about.

I grew up doing everything right on paper. English-medium school. State Board. Essays, exams, comprehension, all in English. Privileged.

My grandfather, when he first came to Bombay, was a grammar teacher. Language, in our home, was meant to be precise. Certain. Correct.

And yet, I couldn’t speak English fluently one-on-one. Not because I didn’t know the language.

But because I didn’t live in it.

We lived in Hindi. We thought in Hindi. We joked in Hindi. We became ourselves in Hindi.

So English became something else. Not a language of intimacy, but a language of performance.

And performance requires awareness.

Of how you sound. Of how you’re being received. Of whether you’re getting it “right.”

So you edit yourself mid-sentence. You replace words. You shrink your thoughts to fit your vocabulary.

Not to be understood, but to not be judged.

Bombay taught me this early. Because Bombay is not one city. There is a Bombay that inherits ease, where English is not taught, it is absorbed.

And then there is a Bombay that learns it. Slowly. Publicly. Carefully.

If you’ve grown up in places like Mulund, or in smaller towns and arrived here with ambition, you know this feeling.

You can be intelligent, articulate, even brilliant, and still feel like you are entering the room, not belonging to it.

We like to pretend language is neutral. It’s not. In India, English carries class, in who has access to certain schools, certain environments.

It carries caste, in who historically had proximity to literacy, to education, to power.

And it carries aspiration, in the quiet belief that if you just speak well enough, something will unlock. Sometimes it does. But often, it only changes how you are perceived, not how you are received.

I see this in my work all the time. I meet artists, craftspeople, thinkers, people with extraordinary minds. And when they speak in English, they slow down. They construct sentences carefully. They become aware of themselves.

So sometimes, I switch. I respond in Hindi. Softly. Casually. Without making a point of it.

And almost instantly, something shifts. Their shoulders drop. Their sentences expand. Their personality returns. They stop performing. They start speaking.

And that’s when it hits you. In India, English is not about fluency. It is about fluency without hesitation.

Because hesitation reveals you. It tells people, you may have learned the language, but you didn’t inherit the comfort.

Recently, I was working on a project with collaborators from France. And they refused to speak in English. Not arrogantly. Not politically. Just normally. They spoke in French. And we had a translator.

No one apologised. No one adjusted. No one felt the need to meet us halfway. It was simply understood, this is our language. And strangely, everything still worked.

The ideas were clear. The conversation flowed. Nothing was lost. Except one illusion.

Because in that moment, I realised something deeply uncomfortable. What feels “normal” to us in India, switching to English, accommodating, adjusting, is not universal. It is learned.

Inherited. A kind of colonial muscle memory. We don’t even notice ourselves reaching for it anymore.

And then, there is the internet. Which loves authenticity, but only up to a point. Take the recent case of a young creator, Life of Puja.

She speaks beautifully. Clearly. Confidently.

She comes from a rural town near Kolkata. Her content feels unfiltered, untrained, unpolished in the best way. The internet loved her. At first.

Because she felt real. Because she didn’t sound like the usual urban, media-trained voice. But the moment she began to grow, to get recognition, visibility, opportunity, something shifted.

Suddenly, the same internet began to question her.

Is she an industry plant? Is this too good to be organic? Who is backing her?

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And I find that fascinating. Because what changed? Not her voice. Not her content. Not her clarity. What changed was her position. She crossed an invisible threshold. From authentic to threatening.

Because we love people from smaller towns as long as they remain where we can place them. We admire their rawness, their simplicity, their honesty. But the moment they enter spaces of visibility, spaces historically dominated by a certain class, a certain fluency, a certain polish, we become uncomfortable. We start looking for explanations.

Because how can someone who doesn’t fit our idea of cultural capital suddenly hold it?

This is where language becomes a gate again. Not just in how you speak, but in how others decide to hear you.

And maybe that’s the deeper discomfort. That English in India was never just about communication. It was about creating a certain kind of Indian. Educated, but in a specific way. Articulate, but within certain boundaries.

Legible to power. That project didn’t end. It just evolved.

I took the time to learn. To read, to write, to speak fluently. Today, I can move between languages with ease. But that’s not something I say with pride.

If anything, it makes me more aware of the gap. Because access should not depend on how convincingly you can sound like you belong.

So maybe the question is not, do you speak English? Maybe it is, who are you allowed to be when you speak it? And who do you become when you don’t?

And more importantly, why does ease still feel inherited and effort still feel exposed?

I don’t have neat answers. But I do know this a language should not feel like a test you never stop taking. And yet, for so many of us in India, it still does.

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Is it what we say it is, or what it quietly does to us when no one is watching?

Is it the thing we choose, or the thing that chooses us, softly, repeatedly, without announcement?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since someone in Kochi asked me, almost casually, “What’s your favourite cuisine?”

And I said, Gujarati.

They were surprised. It wasn’t the answer they expected. It felt almost too simple, too close, not “discovered” enough.

So I found myself adding, almost instinctively, what is a favourite if it doesn’t make your heart full?

Because that is the only way I understand it.

Yes, of course, taste comes first. I devour Gujarati food. I enjoy it fully, unapologetically. Wazwan too, I devour. It sits close, my second. The warmth, the indulgence of it, I give myself to it completely.

But Gujarati food, Gujarati food fills my heart.

It is about the taste first, and then something else entirely.

When I eat it, I don’t stop at enough. I keep going. Not mindlessly, but emotionally. I eat more and more, with my whole being, until I feel full in a way that is not just physical, until I feel like I need to lie down immediately. And that feeling is not about excess, it is about contentment.

Mulund lives inside that feeling.

Childhood afternoons at my friend’s homes, Mayuri, Sheetal, Divya and Janvi. We never made a thing out of care, it just existed.

I would sometimes skip meals, not dramatically, just because life was what it was. And without ever announcing it, they would say come home, eat with me, we’ll just hang.

There was no imposition, no charity in it, just a quiet understanding.

Food would be served, and I would eat without holding back. And then I would sleep, deeply, peacefully, in their air-conditioned rooms. And they knew, without saying it, they knew this might be the only peaceful sleep she gets.

That is what Gujarati food holds for me.

Not cuisine, but memory. Not taste, but care. Not indulgence, but safety.

A feeling of being held without explanation.

So when I say favourite, I don’t mean preference. I mean something that makes my heart full.

And I wonder if we’ve complicated this too much now.

Today, we look outward before we look inward. A long line outside a dosa place in Bandra becomes proof that it must be the best. Social media tells us what is worth trying, what is trending, what is “good taste.”

We rarely ask, did I actually like this?

Or did I just like that I was supposed to like it?

We’ve developed a kind of herd mentality around liking, where popularity replaces personal experience and visibility becomes value. And slowly, we begin to lose our own sense of taste, not just in food, but in everything.

But as children, we were different. We were curious, endlessly.

Curiosity made us try, question, observe, reject, return. It made us form opinions that were entirely ours.

Maybe that is what real taste is built on, curiosity. To sit with something long enough, to feel it, to understand it, to let it move you, and then decide.

So what is a favourite?

Is it what sounds impressive when you say it out loud, or what quietly makes your heart feel full?

Is it what everyone agrees on, or what you return to, again and again, without needing to explain why?

Is it what you discovered online, or what has lived inside you for years?

When was the last time you chose something without checking if it was already chosen by others?

Or asked yourself, why do I call this my favourite? What moves me about it?

When was the last time you trusted your own experience enough to call something your favourite?

And if you sat with yourself, without the noise, without the influence, without the need to perform, what would you love, and would you have the courage to name it as your own?

So I’ll ask you, simply.

What is your favourite cuisine? And more importantly, why?

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There are rooms I find myself in now, rooms with polished floors, soft lighting, and conversations about ideas, aesthetics, culture. Rooms where people debate nuance over wine glasses and speak about resilience as if it were a philosophy.

And sometimes I sit there quietly and think: none of you know what it means to be afraid of footsteps.

Not the kind that means someone has come home from work.

The kind that means someone has come home angry. The kind that makes your stomach knot before the door even opens.

I often find myself surrounded by people who have never had to wonder whether there would be food at the table. People who had decent childhoods where money was never an issue. People who grew up believing that if something went wrong, someone would fix it. That home, at the very least, would remain safe.

My childhood was different.

Not in the poetic way people romanticise struggle. Not the kind that becomes a motivational anecdote later in life.

It was chaotic. Bizarre. Brutal.

There were police cases, more than I can count.

There were nights when fear was a physical thing sitting in the room with us.

There was a week, an entire week, when we were locked in a room without food.

There were days when our heads were forced into a red bucket filled with water, held there just long enough for panic to bloom in the lungs.

Not playfully. Not accidentally. Deliberately.

Torture disguised as discipline.

I remember watching members of my own family being beaten with whatever was closest at hand—a horse stick, a belt, sometimes even a metal nutcracker pulled from the kitchen drawer. Objects meant for ordinary life suddenly becoming instruments of violence.

Violence has a sound.

The crack of leather. The dull thud of wood. The silence that follows when everyone is too afraid to scream.

These are sounds children should never learn to recognise.

And yet many of us do.

When you grow up like that, you develop a sixth sense for danger. You learn to read the air. You can tell from the sound of footsteps in the corridor what mood someone is in. You learn how to shrink yourself into silence, how to become invisible when the room turns hostile.

You learn how to laugh in school with a black eye. How to show up with a broken chin and tell people you slipped.

How to keep moving through the day while your body is still carrying yesterday’s fear.

And year after year, you fight your own demons just to stay alive.

Many of us grew up this way. We carried the violence quietly into classrooms.

Later, into offices. Into friendships. Into relationships.

We learnt how to function while bleeding inside.

Which is why I sometimes struggle in those polished rooms.

Because the people in them speak about life with a kind of ease that only comes from never having had to survive it.

They know people. They have networks.

Doors open for them because they have always belonged behind those doors. They have never had to claw their way into a room.

They have never had to build themselves entirely from grit.

And often, the people who have never had to worry about money, never had to question whether there would be a roof over their head, clothes to wear, or food on the table, are also the ones with the most rigid ideas about morality.

They speak in absolutes about what is right and what is wrong. What people should do. What people should tolerate. What people should walk away from.

It is easy to have a purist view of the world when survival has never been your daily negotiation.

I try to be better than who I was yesterday. I try to grow beyond the anger that trauma leaves behind.

But there is one thing I refuse to pretend about.

Money matters. In fact, money is everything. People often say, “Money isn’t everything.”

But the truth is, that sentence is almost always spoken by someone who has never had to live without it.

Because when you have known hunger, instability, fear of losing your home, or the helplessness of having no escape route, money stops being abstract.

Money is safety. Money is freedom. Money is the ability to leave violence. Money is the ability to rebuild a life.

To pretend otherwise is privilege.

Privilege is not what you have. Privilege is what you didn’t have to go through.

You didn’t have to be treated in a government hospital where you are battling for your life while four out of the nine people lying in beds next to you are dead. The kind of hospital that feels like it might kill you before you are even admitted. The kind where the washroom itself can give you a bacterial infection.

You didn’t have to carry the pain of a root canal for months, swallowing Combiflam every day because you simply could not afford the procedure.

You didn’t have to count coins before buying sanitary pads, and when you couldn’t afford them, tear old T-shirts into pieces just to make something that would get you through the month.

You didn’t have to calculate every rupee of your day. Walk for hours just to reach college. Take buses, trains, and whatever other transport you could piece together just to arrive.

You didn’t have to plan survival with that level of precision.

And when someone like me walks into those spaces now, someone who has nothing left to hide and nothing left to pretend about, it unsettles people.

Because we say things plainly. We do not decorate reality.

When you have survived the worst versions of human behaviour, honesty stops feeling dangerous.

Silence does.

Recently, I had to confront another truth.

I survived narcissistic abuse in my last relationship.

The kind that slowly dismantles your sense of self. Where love becomes manipulation. Where your reality is constantly questioned until you no longer trust your own mind. Where your heart and self-worth are chipped away piece by piece until you feel like a stranger inside your own life.

Leaving that kind of abuse is not dramatic.

It is slow. It is confusing. It is lonely. And healing from it is even slower.

But something strange happens to people who have endured violence.

We develop a dangerous quality. We stop being afraid of discomfort. We start telling the truth. And the truth makes people uneasy.

Especially those who have never had to face it. Suddenly we are labelled: too much. Difficult. Crazy. Intense.

But what they are really saying is: you are saying things that disturb the illusion we live in.

So yes.

Some of us take space now. Some of us speak loudly. Some of us refuse to shrink.

Because we have spent too many years being quiet.

Too many years surviving things we never signed up for. Too many years carrying wounds nobody saw.

And now that we are here, alive, standing, still capable of love and courage, we will not apologise for occupying the room.

Not anymore. Not after everything it took to get here.

So the next time someone calls a survivor too much, perhaps the real question is this:

• What kind of world have we built where truth sounds excessive?

• Why are we more comfortable with silence than with the stories of those who survived it?

Because there are far more of us than you think. People who laughed through childhood with broken bones. People who went to school carrying terror. People who built lives out of ashes. People who fought their own demons just to live.

And we are done whispering.

We are here.

And we are taking our space.

What Drops of God taught me about taste, memory, and the poetry of the earth.

A cellar is perhaps the most contemplative place to begin a story.

It is dim and quiet, almost monastic in its stillness. Bottles lie horizontally in wooden racks, their labels carrying years that once held particular summers, particular harvests, particular storms that arrived too early or too late. The air smells faintly of oak and dust. Time moves differently in such places.

Watching Drops of God felt like entering such a cellar for the first time.

Not simply because the show is about wine, but because it slowly teaches you how to see wine differently. What begins as a narrative about inheritance and competition gradually becomes something else entirely. It becomes an exploration of memory, geography and human devotion.

Wine, the show insists, is never just wine.

It is the earth. It is the sky. It is the people who make it.

That single idea transforms the way you look at a glass placed before you.

Each bottle begins to feel like a condensed landscape. Inside it lives the memory of soil, of sun, of wind moving through vines in the late afternoon. A vineyard is no longer just agriculture. It is an ecosystem of patience.

This manga adapted series moves through vineyards in France, Japan and Italy with a reverence that one usually associates with sacred architecture. Estates appear less like businesses and more like living archives. Rows of vines stretch toward the horizon like lines of poetry written across the land.

And slowly you begin to understand terroir not as a technical term but as something almost philosophical.

A wine carries the personality of a place.

The most remarkable thing Drops of God does is transform tasting into storytelling. Before this, wine tasting seemed like an intimidating ritual reserved for sommeliers and connoisseurs. But the show reveals it as a deeply sensory experience, almost artistic in its interpretation.

The process begins not with drinking, but with smelling.

First you hold the glass against a white cloth or a sheet of paper and observe the colour. The wine reveals itself slowly. Is it pale and translucent like early morning light, or deep and inky like dusk settling over a vineyard? The colour carries clues about age, grape, and the season that shaped it.

Then you swirl the glass gently, letting oxygen wake the wine from its stillness. You bring the glass closer and wait.

At first there is nothing.

And then, gradually, aromas begin to unfold.

Sometimes it feels like wet stone after rain. Sometimes like dried figs and tobacco leaves. Sometimes like cherries warmed by sunlight in an orchard.

The characters describe flavours with such imaginative precision that tasting becomes almost cinematic. A sip might evoke an autumn forest. Another might recall the salt air of a coastal town. Wine becomes less about grapes and more about memory.

What moved me most about the series is that wine is never framed as luxury.

Instead it is treated as inheritance.

A vineyard holds generations of labour. A vintage captures a single fragile year when climate, soil and human intuition aligned. Winemakers speak of their work with humility, aware that nature always has the final word.

You cannot command the rain. You cannot negotiate with the soil. You can only observe, respond and hope the harvest is kind.

Watching this reminded me deeply of craft traditions across the world. Whether it is a weaver working with natural dyes or a potter shaping clay, mastery often lies not in control but in collaboration with material and environment.

Wine belongs to that same philosophy.

It is craft shaped by weather, patience and human care.

On the surface Drops of God unfolds as a competition between two extraordinary individuals attempting to prove their mastery of wine in order to inherit a legendary collection. Yet beneath that dramatic premise lies a quieter question.

What does it mean to truly understand something that has taken decades, sometimes centuries, to come into existence?

A great wine is time captured in liquid form. A vineyard is patience made visible.

And a glass of wine, when approached with curiosity, becomes a doorway into geography, climate and human devotion.

Since watching the show I find myself slowing down whenever I pour a glass.

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I swirl it longer now. I pause before tasting. I try to listen to it.

Because somewhere inside that glass there is soil and sunlight and wind moving through rows of vines. There are hands that harvested grapes before dawn and cellars where barrels rested quietly for years.

And sometimes, if you pay attention, you can almost taste it.

The earth. The sky. And remember the people who made it possible.

If loving India means pretending not to see, then maybe we don’t love her enough.

Delhi once recorded an AQI above 900.

At that point you are not breathing air. You are slow-cooking your lungs.

An AQI above 300 is officially hazardous. At 900, it is less weather report and more crime scene. Yet mention this at a dinner table and someone will say, with patriotic tenderness, “But India is the greatest civilisation in the world.”

Civilisation, yes. Ventilation, questionable.

I was in Singapore recently. The pavements were so clean they looked like they exfoliate themselves at night. Public transport arrived with the punctuality of a Swiss watch. The tap water did not require boiling, filtering, blessing, or divine intervention. The AQI hovered between 20 and 50 like a disciplined student who does not bunk class.

I said, “Singapore is clean.”

The car reacted as if I had insulted someone’s grandmother.

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Since when did noticing efficiency become sedition. Since when did comparison become betrayal. Since when did love require blindness.

Let me clarify before the WhatsApp University alumni assemble. I love India. I document her crafts, her handlooms, her oral histories. I sit with artisans and archive stories like they are heirlooms. My relationship with this country is not casual. It is committed. I have written about her with more romance than most honeymoon blogs.

But love is not the same as delusion.

What we practice today is not patriotism. It is public relations.

India has become a brand deck. Slide one, ancient civilisation. Slide two, yoga. Slide three, diversity. Slide four, space missions. Missing slide, municipal drainage.

We export spirituality and import sanitation.

Emotion is not infrastructure.

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India consistently ranks among the highest in air pollution related deaths globally. Every winter, children in Delhi inhale air that would shut down cities elsewhere. In Mumbai, construction dust rises like ambition. We build sea-facing glass towers while the air below them resembles a Victorian novel.

We can send rockets to Mars, but crossing the street sometimes feels like a trust fall exercise.

And yet we say, “Indians can adjust.”

Yes, we can. We adjust to potholes that return every monsoon like relatives who refuse to leave. We adjust to traffic that ages us in real time. We adjust to power cuts, to bureaucracy, to corruption that requires three signatures and one “contact.”

We call it jugaad. We celebrate it like a national superpower.

But when jugaad becomes the default governance model, it is not innovation. It is improvisation on a sinking ship.

We romanticise resilience the way some people romanticise toxic relationships. “Yes, it’s chaotic, but it’s passionate.”

Passion does not fix sewage.

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Culture, however, is our favourite shield. And to be fair, India is unmatched in cultural depth. Our music rearranges your spine. Our textiles carry memory in every thread. Our languages hold entire philosophies in single words.

But heritage is not a clean-up strategy.

Aarti does not repair drainage. Temple bells do not filter particulate matter. Civilisational pride does not unclog rivers.

And then there is caste. The topic that makes urban dinner tables suddenly fascinated by dessert. I have seen it firsthand in my village. Who sits where. Who eats first. Who remains outside. We speak of modern India as though hierarchy quietly retired after independence. It did not retire. It rebranded.

Manual scavenging is officially abolished. Sewer deaths still happen. Municipal workers still enter toxic pits because someone must clean what the rest of us prefer not to see. We speak of civilisation. They inhale it.

But say this, and you are “negative.”

There is a particular kind of patriot who thrives abroad. “India is the best country in the world,” they declare, while enjoying healthcare systems where appointments do not require divine alignment. If India is unquestionably superior, why is our aspiration so frequently elsewhere. Why do we seek foreign degrees, foreign hospitals, foreign passports and then deliver emotional speeches about greatness.

It is easier to love a country when you are not dependent on its systems.

“Privilege is not what you own. Privilege is what you never have to endure.”

If you have never depended on a government hospital, never navigated a broken public school system, never inhaled industrial air daily, never negotiated caste in a rural setting, your patriotism will sound very different. It will sound uncomplicated. It will sound like poetry.

For many, the nation is not poetry. It is paperwork.

We trend hashtags faster than we fix potholes. We argue about pride while children breathe poison. We mistake volume for vision.

The delusion is not loving India.

The delusion is believing love means pretending the house is not on fire because the living room curtains are beautiful.

The delusion is shouting “India is the best” while stepping over garbage to reach a luxury SUV. The delusion is defending systems you privately escape. The delusion is confusing emotional attachment with measurable progress.

So let us ask, gently but honestly.

If India is the best country in the world, best by what metric.

Air quality. Public education. Urban planning. Healthcare access. Gender safety. Or goosebumps.

Are we paying taxes honestly. Are we questioning municipal contracts. Are we holding leaders accountable even when they wear our favourite colour. Are we investing in public good instead of only private comfort.

Real patriotism would be deeply unsexy. It would involve budgets, sewage reform, school audits, policy literacy. It would involve staying in rooms that are uncomfortable instead of storming out with a flag emoji.

Less slogan. More system. Less branding. More building. India does not need louder applause.

She needs higher standards.

And perhaps the most radical thing we can do is not insist she is the best. But insist she deserves better.

And then ask ourselves, without filters and without drama, are we better citizens than we are nationalists.

Because loving a country should feel less like defending a family WhatsApp group and more like actually fixing the plumbing.

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Have you ever replayed a sentence in your head for hours? Not because it was profound. But because of the tone.

A younger colleague cuts you mid-sentence. A relative says, “You’ve changed,” but what they mean is, “You’re harder to control.”

Someone laughs when you’re serious. Someone speaks over you as if your words were background noise.

Outwardly, nothing explodes. Inwardly, something fractures. That fracture is where self respect is built. Or abandoned. Most of us don’t lose ourselves in dramatic betrayals. We lose ourselves in micro-moments.

In the meeting where we smile instead of saying, “Please don’t interrupt me.”

In the family gathering where we swallow a joke at our expense.

In the WhatsApp message we draft, delete, draft again, and finally send something softer than we meant.

We call it maturity. We call it peacekeeping. We call it being the bigger person. But sometimes we are just shrinking.

And then there are other days. The day you snap. The day your voice sharpens. The day you say exactly what you’ve been holding in for years.

It feels powerful for five minutes. Then heavy for five hours. Because reaction is not architecture. It is demolition. Self respect is not built in one dramatic confrontation. It is built in the nervous system.

It is built in the pause before you reply. When someone disrespects you, your body knows before your mind does. Your jaw tightens. Your stomach drops. Your heart accelerates.

The ancient brain whispers: defend your status.

Especially when the disrespect comes from someone younger. That one hits differently. It unsettles something almost prehistoric. A hierarchy we didn’t know we were guarding. An invisible ladder we thought we had already climbed. And suddenly it is not about the sentence. It is about identity.

But here is the uncomfortable truth I am learning.

If my peace can be dismantled by someone’s tone, then my peace is not yet structural. It is decorative.

Real self respect is not loud. It does not rush to correct every misreading. It does not crumble either. It is architectural.

It knows when to reinforce a boundary. It knows when to walk out of the room without explaining. It knows when silence is strength and when silence is self abandonment. The difference is subtle but seismic.

If I am responding to win, I am still negotiating my worth. If I am responding to align with who I am becoming, I am building something solid.

There is a kind of maturity that looks like endurance. And there is a kind that looks like clarity.

Endurance says, take it. Clarity says, this does not belong in my space.

I have taken it. I have fought back. I have done both.

But the real shift has been this: I no longer need to attend every argument I am invited to. Sometimes the most radical sentence is no sentence at all. Sometimes the most dignified act is standing up, picking up your bag, and leaving.

And sometimes, self respect is simply this : letting people be wrong about you without trying to renovate their opinion. Because not every misunderstanding is a crack in your foundation.

Some are just weather.

A friend offered me something, suspiciously cheerful lollipop earlier in the day. The kind that looks like it belongs at a child’s birthday party but behaves like a philosophy professor. I didn’t think much of it. People underestimate candy all the time. History should have warned us.

By 7:42 pm, I was home in Bandra, sitting cross-legged on the floor, designing an Instagram feed for a client, moving thumbnails around like obedient little soldiers, when suddenly my tongue felt democratic.

Expanding. Occupying space. Demanding rights.

I was certain it was growing. Not metaphorically. Physically. Like yeast. Like sourdough. Like it had its own five-year plan.

I rushed to the mirror.

“Shruti,” I told myself very calmly, like a news anchor reporting a flood, “you can talk. Talk normally. You’re fine.” “Listen to yourself, focus.”

I opened my mouth.

The tongue looked regular. But also enormous. But also normal. But also clearly plotting something.

I stared. The mirror stared back. We both agreed not to escalate.

Living alone is a very specific genre of theatre. There is no audience, so you become actor, director, background score, and emergency helpline all at once.

So I started talking to myself. Out loud.

“See, you’re fine. You’re literally fine. You’re overreacting. People have tongues all the time.”

Which is a sentence I never thought I would say in my adult life.

Then hunger arrived. Not hunger. Devotion.

I made one sandwich. Then another. Then toast. Then something that began as pasta and ended as an existential stew.

At some point, I wasn’t cooking food. I was cooking possibilities.

The kitchen light felt like Renaissance painting light. Everything looked sacred. Tomatoes had character arcs. Cheese had backstories.

I started plating like I was opening a restaurant called Lonely Woman Makes Seventeen Dishes at Midnight.

Then obviously I started shooting content, because what is suffering if not aestheticised.

My camera, however, chose betrayal. The lens refused to cooperate, it’s been broken for a while. Only 3x. Still every photo looked like it was out of Vogue. My sandwich looked like architecture. My plate looked like a satellite image. At one point I photographed my own hand and it resembled a documentary on prehistoric mammals.

And I remember thinking, wow, this is my life. High concept art direction. Zero functioning equipment.

Very on brand.

Time became soft, like butter left out too long.

I lay on the bed. Sat up. Lay down. Ate again. Texted nobody. Narrated everything.

Now we rest. No actually we snack. No actually we reflect on mortality.

It felt like my brain had opened forty-seven tabs and all of them were playing lo-fi music.

I wasn’t high. I wasn’t sober. I was annotated. Every thought came with footnotes.

Why do we have tongues. Why are kitchens so emotional. Why do I own so many spoons. What is identity. Should I reorganise my pantry.

At 1:15 am I was convinced I had unlocked the secret architecture of existence.

At 1:17 am I was eating leftover bread straight from the packet like a raccoon.

Humility is important.

Nothing catastrophic happened. No visions. No revelations. Just me, my expanding but not expanding tongue, twelve accidental meals, and eighty-three terrible wide-angle photos.

But somewhere between the mirror pep talk and the fourth sandwich, I realised something oddly tender.

There is something very funny about being alone with yourself. No performance. No coolness. Just you negotiating with your own brain like please let’s behave.

It felt less like a trip and more like a private comedy show the universe staged only for me. A one-woman play.

Girl Thinks She’s Dying, Ends Up Meal Prepping.

Five stars. Would accidentally attend again.

Last week, I came across a headline that made me pause. “Companies Are Desperately Seeking Storytellers.”

I read it twice.

Desperately. Seeking. Storytellers.

As if storytellers were a new invention. As if story were something you could recruit for, like a growth marketer or a product lead.

Somewhere between brand decks and quarterly reports, “storytelling” has become a corporate requirement.

Wanted: storyteller. Three to five years of experience. Must craft compelling narratives. Comfortable with brand voice.

I smiled.

Because where I come from, no one becomes a storyteller. You inherit one. In India, story was never a profession. It was simply how life moved forward.

It lived in my grandmother’s kitchen, in the way she measured spices without spoons, each pinch a memory, each recipe a map of migration and survival.

It lived in the hands of a weaver who never called himself an artist, yet carried a motif older than the country itself.

It travelled in songs sung while packing grain, while walking cattle home, while waiting for rain.

It was carved into temple walls, painted onto kashkuls, stitched into quilts, hammered into Bidri, block printed onto cloth, whispered into bedtime.

No one called it narrative design. No one said content.

It was simply continuity.

Story was how knowledge survived when paper did not exist. Story was how grief softened. Story was how communities remembered who they were.

In India, story is not a department. It is inheritance.

And yet today, brands are searching for storytellers like they are searching for a missing plug in.

As though story can be installed. As though it can be optimized. As though it can be delivered in three slides under the heading Brand Narrative Framework. I understand why. We live in an age of noise.

Every brand looks the same. Every campaign sounds the same. Everyone is authentic, purpose driven, community led. So companies assume the problem is expression.

Maybe we just need better copy. Better films. Better words. But the problem is rarely expression.

It is absence.

Over the last few years, my work has taken me into rooms very different from boardrooms.

I have sat with Kalbeliya musicians in the desert as dusk turned the sand violet and songs rose without rehearsal.

I have watched craftswomen embroider stories into quilts that map marriages, losses, births.

I have spent afternoons with wood carvers, papier mâché artists, and metal workers, people who do not speak of storytelling but whose entire practice is memory made tangible.

Not once have they asked, what is our story?

Because the story is already there.

In the material. In the gesture. In repetition.

Their problem is not invention. It is preservation. My job, when I work with them, is not to create narrative. It is to listen carefully enough not to interrupt one. This is what feels missing when corporations say they want storytellers. What they often want is decoration.

A good line. A cinematic film. A moving caption.

But story is not decoration. It is structure. You cannot add it at the end. You have to build from it.

The irony is this. The places most obsessed with storytelling are often the places with the least lived memory.

Startups with no lineage. Brands with no relationship to land, labour, or community. Products made far away from the people who make them. So they hire a storyteller to manufacture meaning.

But meaning does not come from cleverness.

It comes from roots.

You cannot write depth into something that has not lived. Lately, I have been documenting everyday objects from across India. A lota. A raincoat woven from bamboo and leaves in Nagaland. A begging bowl carried across centuries. A quilt stitched from old saris. A chair shaped by a regional craft tradition.

None of these objects were designed to tell a story. And yet each one holds a thousand. You can trace trade routes through their materials. Climate through their form. Migration through their patterns. Survival through their wear. They carry history without announcing it.

They do not perform meaning. They simply are. That quiet confidence is what story looks like when it is real.

Somewhere along the way, we confused storytelling with performance.

We thought it meant make it emotional. Make it viral. Make it cinematic. But the most powerful stories I know are small.

A recipe remembered. A motif repeated for generations. A song sung slightly off key but together. A craft that survives because someone refuses to let it die.

No script. No pitch deck. No strategy document. And yet unforgettable.

When brands ask me to help them with storytelling, I often want to ask them something else first.

Not what is your narrative.

But where do you come from. Who makes your product. What do you owe them. What do you protect. What will remain if you strip away the marketing.

Because if you cannot answer those questions, no storyteller can save you.

A story cannot be applied.

It must be uncovered. Maybe that is the difference between content and culture. Content fills space. Culture carries time. One is produced. The other is lived. You can outsource content. You cannot outsource memory.

When I think about the word storyteller now, I feel protective of it.

In my mind, it belongs less to copywriters and more to grandmothers, artisans, singers, and archivists.

To the people who remember. To the people who hold fragments and pass them on.

To the ones who understand that story is not about speaking louder. It is about listening longer.

So when I read that companies are desperately seeking storytellers, I do not feel excited.

I feel curious. Because maybe what they are actually seeking is not a storyteller at all. Maybe what they are seeking is time.

Patience. Roots. Responsibility.

A reason to exist beyond selling. Maybe they are seeking a past.

And that cannot be hired. It has to be honoured. Story is not a skill set.

It is not a job title. It is not a line item on a marketing budget.

Story is what remains when something has been loved long enough to matter.

It is memory carried forward. It is lineage spoken softly. It is the quiet proof that we were here and that we cared.

And perhaps the real work is not learning how to tell better stories. But learning how to live in a way that leaves one behind.

This one felt like a door.

Not dramatic. Not cinematic. No violins, no thunderclap. Just a quiet, interior click.

As if something inside my chest, some long rusted latch, finally loosened. And suddenly, I could breathe.

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For years, my life had been a blur of becoming. Becoming better. Becoming stronger. Becoming enough. So much becoming that I forgot how to simply be.

Time behaved strangely. Twenty one melted into thirty three. Cities, projects, love, loss, ambition, all of it like watercolour running into the next shade. Nothing sharply outlined. Everything smudged.

If you had asked me then who I was, I would have handed you a résumé.

Not a self.

Somewhere in the noise of wanting, performing, proving, I misplaced the girl I once knew. The one with unreasonable hope. The one who worked without witnesses. The one who did not ask if this was good enough.

She simply made. I think we all lose her at some point. Life teaches us to look sideways too often.

Who is ahead. Who is applauding. Who is leaving.

We begin measuring our worth in reflections. And reflections, as you know, are unreliable things.

They shimmer. They distort. They lie.

So we chase validation like thirsty animals. Until one day, exhaustion. And then something gentler happens. You stop asking.

Not because you have become indifferent, but because you have become rooted. You start waking up early. Rolling out a yoga mat. Drinking water slowly. Having your vitamins. Doing the work, quietly, stubbornly.

No announcement. No audience. Just hours. Hours and hours and hours.

It is deeply unglamorous, this rebuilding of the self. No one claps when you choose discipline. No one congratulates you for not texting someone you miss. No one throws flowers when you decide to stay alone and write.

But brick by brick, something returns. And then, one morning, you catch it.

In the mirror. In the way you laugh. In the way you walk into a room without shrinking. You think, oh.

She is back.

Shruti at twenty one. Twenty two. Twenty three.

The girl with the stubborn spine. The unreasonable hunger. The quiet resilience. Not unchanged, life has marked her, but intact.

Like an old house restored, not replaced. I used to think healing would feel like fireworks. Instead, it feels like spaciousness. Like someone moved the furniture out of your chest. Like light entering rooms that had been closed for years.

And oddly, solitude becomes sweet. There is something electric about a no man’s world. About not orbiting someone else’s gravity. About your energy belonging only to you.

You wake up and the day is yours. Your body is yours. Your time is yours. Your becoming is yours.

It feels less like loneliness and more like sovereignty. As if you have reclaimed your own land. And here is the strange miracle of being human.

Three months ago, something felt unbearable. Six months ago, something felt permanent. A year ago, something felt like the end.

Today, it is simply a story. How elastic we are. How quietly we survive.

We fall. We drop the ball. We swear we will never recover.

And then, without ceremony, we bend down and pick it up again.

There is something almost funny about it. This stubbornness of the heart. This refusal to stay broken. Perhaps this is what growing up really is.

Not becoming invincible. But becoming recyclable.

We break. We mend. We begin again. Over and over.

And so this month feels like a threshold. Not because everything is perfect. But because I finally trust myself.

Not the world. Not timing. Not outcomes.

Myself. The hours I put in. The work I show up for.

The quiet faith that if I keep walking, the path will reveal itself. Beautiful things are not arriving like gifts anymore.

They feel earned. Cultivated. Invited.

Like a garden I forgot I had planted years ago, suddenly in bloom.

And I stand there, slightly stunned, thinking, So this is what it feels like to come home to yourself.

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In Puri, devotion has always been restless. It walks barefoot on hot stone, waits in salt heavy air, moves with the tide of bodies toward a temple that has never believed the divine should remain still. Jagannatha, Balabhadra, and Subhadra belong to this grammar of movement. These small wooden figures were shaped not for altars of permanence, but for the human hand, for departure, return, repetition.

Their forms refuse completion. No legs, no proportions to admire, no anatomy to perfect. Only what is essential remains the head, the gaze, the sign. The body becomes a post, a marker, a reminder that presence does not require fullness. Arms emerge abruptly, like interrupted gestures. Subhadra, smallest and quietest, does without them altogether, an assertion that stillness, too, can be whole.

Wood was inevitable. In a coastal town where salt corrodes and humidity erases certainty, stone would have been arrogance. Wood accepts time. It cracks, lightens, softens. It ages as people do. These figures were carved quickly, painted boldly, sold in the markets around the temple to pilgrims who needed something that could remember when memory itself would blur. They were made because belief wanted to travel home.

The colors speak without explanation. Red that signals life and threshold. Yellow that carries heat, grain, sustenance. Black that absorbs rather than reflects. The eyes, always widened, always awake, are not decorative. They are anchors. Held close, they do not watch the world, they watch the bearer.

Puri sits at an edge, of land, of water, of certainty. The sea is never far, and neither is impermanence. Here, the divine is not distant or untouchable. It falls ill, is renewed, comes out into the street once a year, exposed to dust and sun and human noise. These small figures hold that same truth in miniature. Gods who do not hover. Gods who agree to be handled.

To take one home was not to possess the sacred. It was to continue a journey. The god did not end at the temple gate, it entered kitchens, trunks, prayer corners, everyday life. Without legs, these figures cannot walk away. Without refined detail, they cannot intimidate. They stay because they must.

These are not objects made to last forever. They are objects made to return, again and again, to the human hand.

I learnt this the hard way.

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I did not intend harm. I did not intend hierarchy. I did not intend to diminish. And yet opinions were formed, swiftly and confidently, about who I am and what I must have meant. Somewhere between what I offered and what was received, the story changed. I was no longer a person, but a conclusion.

This is the part we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes you are not cruel. Sometimes you are simply misread. And misreading has consequences.

We treat perception as sacred and intention as irrelevant. If someone feels something, it must be true. If someone is hurt, someone else must be guilty. Nuance is inconvenient. Context is tedious. It is easier to appoint a villain than to sit with uncertainty.

What I’ve realised is that insecurity learns to speak before generosity does.

Someone can be genuinely kind, truly open, quietly well intentioned, and still be met with suspicion. Before a thank you can surface, insecurity interrupts. What’s the catch. Why are they doing this. What do they really want.

Insecurity does not wait to understand. It rushes to protect.

Psychologically, I understand it. We are all carrying bruises we didn’t earn. Old dismissals. Old power imbalances. Old wounds that trained us to read danger in neutrality and threat in warmth. So when someone shows up with openness, it doesn’t feel safe. It feels unfamiliar. And unfamiliarity gets mistaken for malice.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Not every act of care is manipulation. Not every silence is strategy. Not every confidence is arrogance. Sometimes it’s simply what it is.

What hurts is not being misunderstood once. That’s human. What hurts is watching people build entire narratives about you without ever checking if the foundation is real. Watching intention be overwritten by assumption. Watching generosity be reframed as agenda.

There is a quiet loneliness in being well intentioned in a suspicious world.

I’m not saying perception doesn’t matter. It does. But perception is not infallible. Sometimes it is bruised, reactive, inherited from past harm that has nothing to do with the present moment. Sometimes what people are responding to isn’t you, but someone they once trusted and shouldn’t have.

My antidotes haven’t been noble. They’ve been practical. I pause instead of panic. I ask myself whether this is about me or about what I’m triggering in them. I stop over explaining to people committed to misunderstanding.

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I’ve also accepted something harder. Not everyone will meet generosity with generosity. Some people will meet it with defence. That doesn’t make either of you evil. But it does make clarity necessary.

Here is the most politically incorrect thing I know to be true. Being hurt does not make someone right. Being misunderstood does not make someone wrong.

Sometimes intention is pure and perception is bruised. And no amount of goodness can outrun someone else’s fear. The work then is not to convince. It is to stay intact. To remain honest without becoming smaller.

If insecurity speaks first, it does not erase generosity. It only reveals a room that was not ready to receive it.

And I refuse to make myself smaller to fit into someone else’s unhealed imagination.