Now, think of this in contrast to the generations before us. I’m sure all of us have, at some point, sat down with our parents and asked, or heard without asking, about the years they lived before us, or the ones that just followed before we became our own people.

Some memories they are passionate about, some too careful to share, and for some they might just pull out a photograph from an old album because that story needs (and luckily, has) a photographic reference. Then there are some they might not remember in a complete way, or at all. And they have no way of remembering, which is okay, I guess? Just a little strange for the generation that records every single moment of our lives.

Because when I think about my parents’ generation, I imagine that they must have had entire lives that simply disappeared. Years of ordinary mornings, vacation arguments, friendship gossip, TBR lists, train journeys, bad haircuts, pregnancies, boring Sundays. All of it happened, and then, mostly, it was gone, except for a few photographs—

a wedding album, a handful of pictures from someone’s childhood, my mother in a saree, looking impossibly young, my father with an enormous moustache; a photograph of my siblings and me sitting on the floor in some house we don’t live in anymore; a birthday cake, a school uniform, somebody’s wedding…

There might be thirty photographs from my entire childhood. My son gets clicked this many times in a single day. And yet, somehow, when I look at them, I have the exciting opportunity to construct a childhood around those selective photographs, the way I like it, the way I think I remember some of those moments.

I wonder how this will take shape for my son when he’s older and tries to understand his childhood. From the thousands of photos we have of him by then. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

There will be videos of him walking for the first time, eating his first birthday cake, falling asleep in the car, dancing to all his favourite songs through the ages, throwing food from his high chair, running around the house in a Spider-Man costume, sitting on my lap while I work.

There may be recordings of his voice, old WhatsApp conversations, Instagram stories saved somewhere. There, most definitely, will be a digital trail of the people he loved, the places he went, the things he was afraid of, the political moments he lived through much before he was able to make sense of these, the jokes he found funny, the food he ate, the music he listened to.

He will probably know more about his own childhood than I know about mine. And that thought is both beautiful and slightly terrifying. Because I think we are the first generation to live with the possibility that almost nothing has to disappear.

We are documenting ourselves all the time. Almost compulsively.

We photograph the coffee before drinking it and the baby before holding them properly. We record the sunset before looking at it wholly. We record ourselves crying and then record ourselves explaining why we cried.

Sometimes I wonder about the absurdity of how we have become historians of our own lives without ever applying for the job.

Human beings spent thousands of years trying to leave traces behind. Paintings on cave walls, inscriptions on stone, letters tucked into drawers, diaries, family recipes, portraits, photographs.

And then we arrived here. A generation carrying a tiny camera everywhere. With a live archive in its pocket. A generation that can document a Tuesday afternoon with the same technological ease with which previous generations documented a wedding.

Historians and archivists are already thinking about this. Social media posts, websites, emails, photographs and other “born-digital” material are increasingly being preserved as historical records. Researchers have even described social media as a potential historical source for understanding how societies and individuals change over time.

Which makes me wonder about us. What will someone, forty years from now, think when they look at an Instagram account from 2026?

They won’t just see a person. Since we are all co-existing in a big giant trend, behaving in ways predictable and replicable to the media systems, one look at a single profile will be able to tell what we ate, how we dressed, what we bought, how we decorated our homes, what our weddings looked like, how we spoke to our children, what we thought about the state of politics in our countries, the evolution in men’s thinking with regards to masculinity, what women were angry about, what we considered beautiful. They will even know what restaurants we went to or which songs we danced to. They will know what we were doing when wars began, when governments changed, when cities flooded, when pandemics shut the world down. They will know our slang, our obsessions, our shopping compulsions.

In some ways, this feels like an extraordinary gift at even a rather politically powerful level, I’d say. The fact that we have been given this strange privilege of narrating ourselves. A woman can write about her own marriage instead of allowing the family to write the story of it for her. Someone can document migration, loneliness, friendship, divorce, grief, infertility, ambition, queerness, illness, class mobility, ordinary working life.

History has never been an entirely neutral record of what happened. It has always depended on who had the power, time, money, and access to record what happened. The internet changed some of that. For better and for worse, we have all become minor archivists of our own existence.

I say worse, because oftentimes when I photograph the little moments of my son doing things, because I want proof of every version of him that existed, I also have the uncomfortable feeling that I am standing outside the moment instead of inside it. That I am preparing something that I’ll watch in the future while missing out on it when it’s happening live in front of me.

This is the part of our documentation obsession that makes me uneasy. We have begun to experience life with an audience-shaped consciousness even when nobody is actually watching.

There is a properly coined phrase for this too. “The Facebook Eye”. The idea that our brains begin to look for moments in lived experience that can be translated into something postable. We can see this phenomenon having gone well beyond Facebook, as we now mentally compose tweets, reviews, posts, and stories while experiences are still happening.

“This looks like the perfect opportunity to make a trending reel.” The “opportunity” lost in this is a beautiful sunset best enjoyed by the friend who would now be behind the camera shooting video for Instagram.

And this is what I’ve been lingering on as I come near wrapping up my thoughts here. To look at it differently. The act of documenting my life vs turning my life into documentation.

And social media makes that distinction particularly slippery because it doesn’t just preserve our lives. It rewards us for packaging them. When our parents took photographs, there was a limit to how many photographs they could take. You had to decide. Is this worth a photograph? Now my phone can hold thousands of photographs, and I can take ten pictures of the same thing without thinking about it.

Which means something strange has happened to the value of a photograph. We have more memories and, somehow, less remembering. My camera roll is a graveyard of tiny moments. Screenshots I thought I would need. Pictures I took because something looked pretty. Photographs of meals I cannot remember eating. There are thousands of little pieces of my life sitting in there. But disappeared too soon from my mind, because perhaps I didn’t spend enough time actually experiencing them.

We may be the most documented generation in history. But documentation is not the same thing as memory. And memory is not the same thing as a life. Forty years from now, my son may have access to more evidence of his childhood than I have of mine. But would I remember that evidence as clearly?

Another aspect of this whole argument takes shape when we go beyond seeing the internet as, in many ways, a gigantic accidental diary of being human. The thing we need to realise is that diaries are usually written with the knowledge that one day someone might read them. We are writing ours while thousands of invisible algorithms are also reading them. That changes the archive. Because the thing we are leaving behind is not simply a record of who we were. It is a record of who we were willing to be seen as.

Social media does not document reality. It documents the reality we selected. The parts we photographed. The stories we told. The things we deleted. Which means that forty years from now, someone looking at our lives online may think they know us. But they will know the version of us that survived the edit, and that is the biggest irony of all.

I don’t think the answer is to stop documenting. I don’t even want to. I love photographs. I like looking at old stories. I just want to remember that preservation isn’t the same as participation. That sometimes the photograph can wait, and some things can remain unrecorded.

That not every beautiful thing needs to become evidence.

I think about this when I look at my parents’ photographs. There are only a few. But behind every photograph is a whole life that was not photographed. And perhaps that is why those photographs still feel so intimate. They are not trying to tell me everything. They are simply little windows. The rest I have to imagine. But to the people inside those photographs, it’s also proof that they lived, perhaps, more.

And maybe that is the difference between leaving behind a record of a life and actually leaving behind a life worth remembering. We have become very good at proving that we were there. I hope we don’t forget to be there.

I avoid using AI to write. I really do. The idea of asking a machine to find the better version of a sentence that came from my mind will never not be dystopian to me. Some of my sentences are clumsy. Some are too long. Some take three different turns before they arrive anywhere. Some probably need an editor to tell me to calm down. But they are all mine, right? True, contextual reminders of how I was feeling at the moment.

And lately I have been wondering if we are becoming so accustomed to polished writing that we are starting to distrust the evidence of a person behind it. There’s suddenly so much AI everywhere we see that sometimes I want to puke.

And sometimes, which is worse, I want to open ChatGPT and ask it to make my own writing better. Make this tighter. Fix this awkward sentence. Give me a better opening. Make this less meandering. Make it more lyrical. I know that temptation because I have looked at something I have written and thought, this isn’t good enough. And then I have read something beautifully written and wondered why my own writing cannot sound like that.

But what if the awkward sentence is part of the writing? What if the paragraph that wanders a little is evidence that someone was actually thinking while they wrote it? What if the slightly overdone metaphor, the unnecessary comma, the sentence that is probably too long, the parenthesis that could easily be removed, are all little fingerprints? I think about this a lot because writing has always been a way for me to figure out what I think.

There are things I know because I wrote them.

That has happened to me so many times. I have started writing about one thing and ended up somewhere else entirely. I have written about motherhood and found myself thinking about my own mother. I have written about marriage and found myself thinking about the girl I was before I got married. I have written about feminism and realised that something I thought I believed quite firmly was actually much messier once I had to put it into words.

That is the part of writing I don’t want to lose.

Stephens writes that writing forces us to think in a particular way. He says it “compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence.”

I keep coming back to that sentence.

Because writing is such a strange form of thinking. You can carry an idea around in your head for weeks and feel like you understand it. Then you try to write it down and suddenly realise you don’t.

You have to choose the word. Then another. Then decide whether the sentence actually says what you mean. You have to see the thought outside your own head. And sometimes you discover that the thought was wrong. Or incomplete. Or much more complicated than you wanted it to be. That is what writing does to you. It makes you stay.

There is something deeply personal about the way a person writes. The things they repeat. The words they overuse. The kinds of metaphors they reach for. The sentences they cannot seem to write without.

I have mine. Some, I have had them for years. Some, I discover with every new piece of writing that I produce

And this brings me to something that happened recently that I still find completely ridiculous.

Substack introduced a feature that uses Pangram to estimate how much of a piece of writing was generated by AI. The idea, I suppose, is to give readers some sense of transparency about whether something they are reading was written by a person or a machine.

So I tried it on one of my own pieces. It was a piece about why I love being a mother to my toddler, a piece I poured my soul into, where I wrote my way into a feeling instead of the other way around.

Pangram said it was 61% AI. I have never been so confused so I went back to see what it thought sounded like AI. It was flagging the em dashes. The “maybe”s and the metaphors. The sentences with too many commas.

I mean, I have been writing like this since Grade 3. I remember writing a love poem when I was eight or nine. I am certain there were too many commas in it. I probably used a word because I liked how it sounded rather than because I fully understood it. Was that AI too?

At what point did I apparently start writing like a machine?

This is what bothers me about AI detection. The ultimate irony of it is that the technology trained on centuries of human writing is now flagging human text as artificial simply because it follows the exact patterns it was taught to mimic. I understand why people want it. There is a real problem with passing off machine-written work as your own. There is something dishonest about asking a machine to do the thinking and then presenting the result as evidence of your own mind. But we can’t rely on an arbitrary percentage to tell us why or how something was written.

It cannot know that I sat on my bed writing about my child growing up and cried. It cannot know that I deleted a paragraph because it felt too sentimental. It cannot know that the metaphor came from something I had been thinking about for weeks.

I think this is why Stephens’ piece stayed with me.

His argument is not really about whether AI can produce good writing. Of course it can. The machine can make a sentence sound beautiful. It can produce something coherent in seconds. It can probably make my paragraph much less embarrassing than it currently is.

His concern is what happens to the person doing the writing.

He describes AI as an “escalator toward a result” when what we need is the habit of “taking the stairs.” He also makes the point that the writing we do every day, even the boring stuff, exercises the same intellectual muscle that we need when we are trying to write about things that actually matter.

I think that is the part I agree with most. Because writing is not just something that comes out of your brain. It changes your brain. Or at least, it changes the way you understand yourself.

Every time you sit with a thought long enough to write it down, you are doing something to that thought. You are making choices about it. You are giving it shape. You are deciding what matters enough to stay and what can go. And sometimes the thing you thought was the point turns out not to be the point at all.

I don’t want to outsource that.

And just to be clear, I am not in this moment in any way trying to romanticise bad writing. I want to edit. I want to learn. I want someone to tell me when a paragraph is going nowhere. I want to remove the sentence that is trying too hard. I just don’t want to let go of the pleasure in finally finding the “it” sentence myself. And I don’t want to lose it in the pursuit of better sentences.

I have written for as long as I can think- essays, letters, opinion pieces, poetry. And I truly feel that is how I have discovered the person I am today, and that is how I continue to shape my best version, which will always be my most authentic version.

Oh, I am enjoying it. As an experience like no other I have ever witnessed or heard about. And so it only seems fair to share it with y’all who have only heard me cry about it before.

But before I begin, to answer that friend, I don’t know if I can recommend motherhood with the same conviction or for the same reasons as the women in our mothers’ generation did.

"It’s the best experience of life that a woman can have."

"There’s no bigger joy than becoming someone’s mother."

And I won't say that, not because they were wrong, but because the women in my generation are showing us that there are so many more ways to build a joyful life than the ones our mothers inherited.

They're solo travelling across the world, building careers they genuinely enjoy, earning paychecks that give them freedom, choosing the loves of their lives, marrying on their own terms, or deciding not to marry at all. They're finding joy in colourful clothes, learning pottery, scuba diving, hiking mountains, moving cities every few years; discovering versions of themselves that previous generations never had the permission to become.

They aren't waiting for one life milestone to make life meaningful. They're making meaning all along the way.

So no, I cannot tell them that they won't know joy unless they have a child.

What I can tell them is that motherhood (what I’m going to say is not, in fact, a limited experience to mothers, though, but anyone around whom a child is growing) has returned wonder to me in a way that I didn't know I'd lost it, and with it, I am meeting the world again.

As adults, we have spent so much time here that we've stopped being astonished by it. We move through our days efficiently, moving past the world rather than witnessing it. A tree is just a tree. Laundry is just laundry. The tens of different voices of the world are just repeated background noise, whilst we go around doing whatever we think is important.

This is until a toddler comes along and insists I stop because there's a squirrel halfway up a tree. And in that moment, also for the first time in thirty years, I was actually able to recognise the exact sound a squirrel makes.

With my one-and-a-half-year-old son, I feel as though I am touching the world for the first time again. Every ordinary moment arrives carrying the possibility of a miracle. Everything becomes worthy of an audience.

A bird drinking water from a puddle.

A cow crossing the road with complete indifference to the traffic around it.

The escalators in the mall.

A ceiling fan slowing down after being switched off.

Things that have always existed, carrying on with their jobs, suddenly receive applause. For me, for us, it also feels like discovering a new language between us, with a twinkle in our eyes and a gibberish version of the word's pronunciation we never knew was possible.

As an example, “Aaiyo” means Alexa (it has a new name every week), “Manana” means Makhana (his favourite snack), “Butarr” means Kabootar (Pigeon) but also the sound he makes when someone or something falls, and the list goes on…

Because he is so amazed, I find myself becoming amazed too. Children haven't learned what is supposed to be ordinary yet. We have. Perhaps that is the biggest difference between them and us.

Adults have become experts at filtering. We have learned to ignore ninety-nine percent of the world so we can get through the day. We walk while thinking about emails. We eat while watching our fav show. We fold laundry while planning tomorrow's meeting.

Children have no such efficiency. They stop for ants. They wave to dogs. They clap when the moon appears. They stare at the rain as though someone invented it that morning. And yet, I suspect this is closer to how humans were meant to experience the world.

Maybe this is what people mean when they say children help you see the world through fresh eyes. I always assumed it was a metaphor. It isn't. It's wonderfully, embarrassingly literal.

You really do end up standing in front of a washing machine for so long that it forces you to be fascinated by a drum, wondering how many beautiful things you've overlooked simply because no one small enough had asked you to stop and look.

The other day, my son and I walked to the neighbourhood flower shop, stopping every few feet because something had caught his attention. A pebble. A leaf. A scooter parked outside someone's gate.

When we reached the florist, she handed him a flower. He looked at it for a few seconds, almost as if he was deciding what to do with it. Then he walked straight to a dog sleeping outside the shop and held the flower out to him.

No one had asked him to. He wasn't looking around to see who was watching. He simply thought the dog should have the flower. I stood there thinking about how often we assume kindness is something we teach children. 

Instead, in that moment I realised that perhaps as the world weathers us, we slowly learn to hold it back, being too cautious of when and why and to whom we display our precious kindness as if it was a non-renewable resource.

A few days later, I also realised that with children around, this kindness offered by adults also becomes inexpensive. We were at a restaurant just getting ready to leave. And so obviously I was caught between looking for my wallet while also making sure he didn't run off, throw a spoon or knock over the water glass, as it was just him and me at the time.

Just then, one of the staff walked up to us, gave me a  “take your time” with a comforting smile, and then reached over and wiped a little smear of food on my son’s cheek that I hadn't noticed was still there. 

Then, as we got up to leave, another came by with an orange wedge because she'd noticed how much he'd enjoyed eating them.

Neither of them had to do those things. They just did.

I've started noticing this a lot these days. The way people soften around little children. The smile that appears before they realise they're smiling. The extra minute they give you. The stranger who points out a puddle before your toddler steps into it. The security guard who waves back with the same seriousness as a one-year-old.

Perhaps that softness was always there in all of us; sometimes a child unlocks it, and other times they just make you start noticing the warmth in people around you. 

Motherhood has changed many things about me. It has made me more patient on some days and far less patient on others. It has stretched me in ways I expected and in many ways I didn't.

But more than anything, this little boy has made the world feel porous again. It has restored my capacity for wonder.

Just when it hit me, the paradox of this. Would I really enjoy this if I were to acknowledge how I rarely step outside anymore without at least a little concealer to hide my acne scars? Uncovering another truth about the societal expectation that women are obligated to present the world with a perfected version of their faces.

When I look back at my late teenage years, I didn’t even like makeup as much as my friends did. Not because I was constantly thinking about how the whole idea of using makeup stemmed from a system that thrived on women’s physical insecurities, but because my skin condition was so bad that figuring out the right facewash and moisturiser took precedence over anything else. Meanwhile, I saw friends experimenting with all sorts of eyeliner wing styles and the most beautiful colours of lipstick on their faces.

There was another layer to it, too. Being slightly more brown in my complexion, and ever so conscious of it, thanks to growing up in north India, where people still can’t look beyond it, I was never sure if any of the stuff my fairer friends used would even suit my skin. It makes me wonder about all these expanding shade ranges in makeup now — are they really giving people of different colours more options, or just repackaging the same old idea that a darker shade should stick to it? Nevertheless, it does look like progress on the surface, falsely making us feel more feminist about it, as historically, limited ranges pressured women with darker complexions to use lighter, mismatched shades to “fit in” and buy a false dream to look a shade fairer.

And after all these years, now that I confidently hold a mascara, an eyeliner, a brown kajal, and an eyeshadow in my hand to use my eyes as a canvas to execute my “art vision,” I wonder about the birth of makeup as much as I appreciate the result.

I am a feminist — is it so horrible to still like makeup? The reality is almost always more nuanced, though. Someone can genuinely love the artistry, choose it for themselves, no external pressure they’re consciously aware of, and that choice can still be shaped by a world that rewards women for looking a certain way. And I feel this same unease showing up for so many other things bred around choice feminism. It’s there when a shorter-sleeve t-shirt makes me regret not shaving my arms. It’s there when I catch myself justifying another impulse buy as “treating myself,” some quiet act of defiance against traditional frugality taught to women, when really it’s just me giving in to consumerism and calling it agency.

As I spend money on a different makeup product for a different part of my face — sometimes multiple for one — and tell myself that it helps me express myself, am I forgetting that by doing so, I’m simply feeding into the patriarchal culture that says my value lies in how I look?

If what I want has been shaped by ads and algorithms before I ever “chose” it, how much of that wanting is actually mine?

And I see that in a lot of the feminism packaging I scroll past online these days, how it has inevitably absorbed capitalism is its core understanding and performance of expression or confidence. A century-old movement turning into a sales pitch in our wake. Every second post is telling women that healing comes with a price tag attached. A candle, a serum, a “cute” journal, a course on “becoming your highest self.” Researchers Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill have coined a name for this: “confidence culture.” It is the idea that whatever is holding women back, the fix starts with fixing ourselves. It is the relentless push telling women to love themselves, empower themselves, heal themselves, as long as it’s done through the right purchase, the right routine, the right self-care ritual. It’s consumerism wearing the language of liberation.

Take the example of the recent Lakmé ad called “Unapologetically Me.” On the face of it, it encourages women to discard the guilt often associated with vanity, framing indulgence in beauty and fashion as a fierce, independent right by rebranding the act of buying and wearing makeup as a form of personal rebellion against societal judgment. What it doesn’t tell us is that it’s a brand yet again selling conformity as rebellion, keeping women tied to spending time and money on their looks, the exact behavior patriarchal structures demand.

This is often referred to as commodity feminism, where buying things becomes the actual practice of the seeming self-love being sold online, which isn’t just a feeling anymore; it’s a shopping list that never stops growing, fed by FOMO as much as anything else.

And then there’s the reflection on my privilege above everything else, how I’m standing here, picking apart confidence culture and consumerism feminism. I have the time, the headspace, the distance from more immediate worries to think about whether my eyeliner is politically compromised. But for most women, this space does not exist at all; this isn’t a choice they’re weighing and rejecting, the question of whether self-care is empowering or exploitative doesn’t get to exist in a life that’s still fighting for rent, or safety, or the next meal.

As I write this, I’m also reading through women’s opinions on how makeup shaming has become a trend that, in their belief, is restricting us from being ourselves. Their counter-argument is that makeup is an artistic medium, a form of self-expression, and for some, a way of pushing back against what men expect women to look like in the first place. The ritual of doing a “full face” or wearing a bold lip triggers a small hit of dopamine, sure, but also a sense of feeling more like themselves, more confident to take on a world that wasn’t built to work in their favour.

Ultimately, the debate highlights the central tension of choice feminism, i.e., the struggle to separate personal pleasure from systemic pressure. While one side passionately defends makeup as a liberating tool for self-expression and bodily autonomy, the other cautions that celebrating this choice overlooks the financial, social, and professional penalties women face if they abstain. Both perspectives reveal that in a society obsessed with women’s appearance, the decision to wear or forgo makeup is rarely just a simple aesthetic preference, but a complex navigation of social survival and self-identity.

And to me, what irritates the most in all of this is how the burden of defining, defending, or dismantling these beauty standards falls exclusively on women, while men move through the world free from the exhausting requirement to justify their everyday appearance.

None of this means women shouldn’t enjoy their choices or their independence. The point is to remember that real empowerment isn’t about individual choices existing in a vacuum. It’s about the conditions and systemic inequalities that make those choices possible.

True empowerment requires looking beyond the immediate satisfaction of an individual action to examine the framework that surrounds it.

When a woman celebrates her ability to choose her career, her lifestyle, or her appearance, she is exercising a hard-won independence, one she didn’t win alone, but inherited from every woman who fought for it before her. Even so, that freedom remains incomplete if the choice itself is dictated by structural survival or social coercion. For instance, choosing to opt out of the workforce to raise children is a valid personal preference, but it becomes a compromised choice when the systemic reality includes unaffordable childcare, unfair parental leave, and a persistent gender wage gap.

By recognizing that personal decisions do not exist in a vacuum, feminism shifts from merely applauding individual autonomy to actively fighting for the structural, economic, and legal conditions that ensure all choices are made freely, safely, and without penalty.

For feminism to actually move forward, it has to stop mistaking choice for liberation. We need to keep asking what’s shaping the wanting itself. Choice still matters, but noticing what stands behind it matters more. Maybe the one choice worth making, above all, is to stay cognisant and honest about what our choices are really doing to us, and to the women who don’t have the same choices to make.

I look up, and I’m still standing in front of the same mirror, one eye lined, the other bare as I move to pick the liner back up, and keep going. I’m not sure if that’s just muscle memory or something more. What does it mean if the wanting stays exactly the same, even after all this unravelling? Maybe the question is whether I’ll ever look at this mirror without also seeing everything I just laid out.

I get a phantom itch in my thumb from the muscle memory of scrolling, and the moment I decide not to scratch it, the world unravels in front of me. My window into the life that is mine, on unborrowed time.

I sit from across my son and realise just how much more there is to his childhood than the squeals I hear in the background while typing away into a lifeless device. I actually see the way he holds his breath when he’s concentrating, the way his small hands are learning the physics of gravity with his blocks, all the failures before he shows me the finished stack tower.

I see the way his brow furrows in a perfect imitation of his father’s, and it warms me up the same way as the January sun blazing through my windows.

When you aren’t rushing for a notification, you let the light in for a little longer. I noticed today that the sun has started to rise a little more to the east than it did in the dead of winter. It now illuminates a corner of the balcony that reveals a cluster of spiders nesting peacefully above my AC vents — a tiny, busy civilisation I would have mindlessly swept away otherwise.

In the dining hall, this shift in the light now hits the dining table at an angle that exposes every scratch and water ring in the wood, creating a map of every meal we’ve shared over the past day or maybe year, and forgotten. Forgotten, along with the dust settling on the fan above it. Along with the chest of drawers with a box hanging slightly open, just enough to be unremembered. As my gaze shifts to it, I realise how, when we don’t remember, we don’t repair.

Past the window, the Red silk-cotton tree nests the largest eagle I have ever set my eyes on. It sits there, ancient and still. Seeing it reminds me of their near-extinction, which reminds me of the role we play in it. It’s uncomfortable to realise that when we are distracted, we are also indifferent. When we notice, we are more accountable. We are more human.

It’s a strange thing how the phone makes the world feel small but solid, but the moment you put it down, the world becomes vast and fragile.

It’s the same way our hearts shifted as we became parents this past year. Growing vast enough to hold a whole new love between us, yet fragile enough to let our old selves break to make room for something more beautiful.

I look at my husband now, expecting to see a face worn thin by the sleepless night we’ve just survived. But he catches my eye and smiles, and instead of looking back at a screen, I let myself be pulled into him.

Without the phone, the “in-between” moments stop being things to kill and start being things to inhabit.

I notice the way my mother puts her makeup on now, more like an aged woman than an ageing one, and it breaks my heart, but also reminds me that I am lucky to be a witness to it, to share the intimacy of the years that have softened her.

I notice that my own hands look older than I remember them. The skin is a bit more in need of a moisturiser than last year, a bit more like my mother’s. The room begins to fill up with quiet, rather loudly.

In the moment, I notice the hum of the refrigerator, a mechanical pulse you can feel through the soles of your feet, a steady, electric heartbeat for a house that is finally quiet enough to be heard. I start walking towards it just when the last floorboard in the bedroom creaks. A house is settling into its own bones. Finally being seen.

As is the old woman, standing on the balcony opposite ours, wearing a crinkled cotton saree in the most beautiful shade of a crushed jamun. I watch her make the most of the afternoon, as her fingers move with a practised patience and untangle the knots in her hair before straightening them out leisurely with her wooden comb.

There is no rush to get to the next thing. For both her and, inadvertently, also me.

The window into a screen-less world really requires you to be here for it.

Here are other essays by fellow Bangalore Substack writers:

The window that looks back, by Vaibhav Gupta, Thorough and Unkempt

A window into the vegetable market by Rakhi Kurup , Rakhi’s Substack

A window Into Permission: The FIRE Number by Shruti Soumya, Same Here

A window into the fixity and flux by Amit Charles

A window into a person who shivers on stage by Mihir Chate, Mihir’s Substack

A window into a life on a sabbatical by Ritika Arora, Ritika Arora – Medium

A window into bendy morals by Amit Kumar, EarlyNotes

A window into Kalimpong by Karthik Ballu, Reading This World by Karthik

A window into what makes a great Quiz Question by Rajat Gururaj, I came, I saw, I floundered

Still Looking By Spandana, Spandana’s Substack

Three Windows in a Week By Nidhi, General In Her Labyrinth

So if I have to name just one thing it’s this: in 2026, I want to be de-influenced.

What really made me write this is the constant state of hyper-awareness we’re all living in. Reading labels closely enough to count six grams of sugar. Making sure you’re buying the right sensory toy at the exact developmental stage of your kid. Trying to choose the most toxin-free cooking utensils from fifty brands that all claim to be safe.

Every influencer has found their own niche of fear to build content around, and slowly, it’s made us so paranoid that we believe we don’t really know anything unless we hear it from them first.

And well, the internet is very good at telling us what a good life looks like. It arrives as advice, aspiration, anxiety even. It tells us what to buy, how to live, what to fix first and what will happen if you don’t. Often, it’s easy to mistake these suggestions for truth.

There was a time I forced myself to try to do it all, especially as a mother. All thanks to doomscrolling through reels of women who seem to manage everything so beautifully. Cooking elaborate meals, reading thoughtfully curated books to their babies, documenting every milestone.

Turning care into content and content into competence.

I know these are fragments, edited moments, but they linger anyway. And therefore the first thing for which I want to be deinfluenced is this exhausting expectation of being a perfect mom.

Another thing that has bothered me the most on the internet is how much it has convinced us to shop. Why are we suddenly buying new clothes for every event, whatever happened to repeating our clothes like normal humans? Shopping during sales because it feels financially responsible, even when I didn’t need the thing yesterday.

In the new year, I want to close more tabs, abandon more carts. I want to stop buying things in the hope that they’ll organise a life that mostly just needs more rest and downtimes.

Talking about consumption, I’ve been thinking about how travel has shifted too. What once felt like an excursion, a break from the ordinary, has slowly become the norm. And when life settles back into routine—as it inevitably does—what’s left isn’t contentment, but a FOMO that just wouldn’t leave.

Let’s promise ourselves to be deinfluenced around wanting to live in constant anticipation of the next escape. This last year has brought this change for me, courtesy the new mom life, and I so want to continue to be present in my everyday life as staying feels just as fulfilling.

One other “trend” I’m going to de-influence myself on is the pressure to explore the next best restaurant in the city, while all I really want is to feel the reassurance about returning to the same place again and again, letting the comfort of the place, the food warm me up with its predictability.

And in choosing familiarity, I am not resisting the world. I’m just choosing my relationship to it.

As I am choosing my relationship to the people around me. It has come with a quieter reckoning about boundaries. “Protecting my peace” is being used as a shortcut lately I feel. We are too quick to dismiss our friends, families, people as “undeserving” of our time, of our life. All based on a couple of instances?

This year, I’m learning that discomfort isn’t always a signal to leave but more often than not, it’s actually a reminder to give the relationship more time, more thought, more consideration.

That has also led me to think a lot about how empathy is framed and sold online. How, for example, caring deeply is increasingly labelled radical, and naming a genocide is treated as a greater extremism than the violence itself.

I can’t really point though, to when exactly this collective numbness set in. Maybe it began with witnessing the feelings of an entire world during the pandemic, or with the fatigue of watching democracies fall under fascist rulers, or with the surreal normalisation of seeing images of bombed children appear between concert clips. Whatever it was, something shifted and our comprehension or the expression of feelings have never been the same since.

To be de-influenced is to refuse the emotional fatigue the powerful benefit from us carrying.

Then there’s the lost experience of boredom. I’m learning to sit with it. To lie in bed with my thoughts. To let silence stretch without rushing to fill it with noisy screen time.

Slowing down brings me face to face with things that are otherwise so out of reach for our ever busy minds.

And finally, I want to de influence myself to stop believing everything I see online. A reminder that these spaces often function as echo chambers, validating what we already think while quietly discouraging learning or unlearning.

The constant reinforcement feels good after all. It gives us the comfort of being “informed” but at the same time it keeps us in a loop, consuming ideas that agree with us instead of challenging us.

Mostly, I want to stop becoming unrecognisable to myself in the name of growth, and stop stalling my growth for the sake of social media fed approvals.

So in 2026, I’m not chasing a better version of myself. I’m choosing to stay with the one I already recognise.

To be de-influenced, for me, is not about rejection or withdrawal, but about intention—what I let in, what I linger with, what I allow to shape my days. It’s about moving a little slower, wanting a little less, and trusting that a life built quietly, with attention to ourselves and the ones around us is still a full one. Maybe even fuller.

This essay was written as a part of a collaborative exercise with fellow writers in the Delhi NCR Substack group. Links to their essays are at the end of the article.

The word of the year, apparently, is parasocial. Another jointed little term to describe the one-sided relationships we now build with people we don’t actually know- creators, influencers, strangers with spotless living rooms and hollow opinions on everything.

It’s funny, this illusion of intimacy in the times we are living in. Where the word of the year quietly admits how we are watching people live, not living with them.

Parasocial reflects more than a cultural trend; it exposes the kind of connections we’ve been practising lately. We know a thousand people in the loosest sense of knowing. We see their new jobs, new babies, new heartbreaks, their carefully curated celebrations and “photo dump” captions.

And because we’ve seen it, we feel an odd responsibility to reciprocate the exchange of information.

It’s a strange pressure, this quiet obligation to keep feeding the machine so we don’t disappear from the collective awareness of people who may or may not even remember what our real voice sounds like.

But I don’t think this is how humans were meant to connect. We weren’t designed to hold the emotional complexity of a thousand storylines in our heads at the same time. The faces we eat with, cry with, work with, lean on. The handful who shape us and stay with us.

In fact, there is a theory proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar that suggests that the size of our neocortex limits the number of meaningful social connections we can manage at any one time, and estimates it to be around 150.

Maybe that’s why, even though we’re “connected to” or “friends with” hundreds, sometimes thousands, we barely feel any true connection. And if we’re honest, we don’t give much either. Not because we’re incapable, but because there is simply no space left.

And I catch myself feeling this often lately. The more I am on social media, the more I try to care for everyone, and the more I realise I’m only offering fragments of myself, never the kind of presence that actually counts.

It feels like we’ve collectively forgotten how connection is really done. How it feels when it isn’t mediated through screens or story updates or algorithms that want us to perform our lives to each other instead of really living them together.

And speaking of algorithms, I honestly think that’s what’s wearing us down. This constant nudging to think of ourselves as brands is just inadvertently feeding into a not-so-apparent pressure we all share to constantly maintain an online presence.

If I was the one coining the term of the year it would be called Connection fatigue. And, I would define it as the exhaustion of performing closeness without any of its depth or truth, or safety.

The tiredness that comes from constantly witnessing others, constantly being witnessed. A kind of emotional burnout from carrying the stories of people who aren’t really ours, while neglecting the ones who are.

Because, how else do I describe how even while being surrounded by all the casual, compulsive check-ins and comments, a longing still remains. A hunger for the kind of connection that doesn’t need subtexts. The kind where feelings can unfold; where we carry a little of each other’s lives with us, and not just on our screens.

Maybe what we’re feeling isn’t the death of connection but the ache for its return. Or maybe it’s the grief of misplacing it.

And maybe the way back from this parasocial everything simply lies in slowness. Slower friendships, slower conversations, slower witnessing.

Letting people arrive in our lives at the pace a real connection demands. And with that, letting ourselves arrive, too.

Other essays from fellow writers
Story of Delhi NCR Substack group by Abhishek Singh

When strangers feel like friends by Mansi Goel

Where guidance felt like grace by

On my Love for Chai by Disha

Cuts, scrapes, and a theory of personhood by

I feel enslaved to a system that demands my absence in order to justify my love. A system that tells me this is how care looks now — a working mother, providing, optimizing, building a future.

Capitalism after all has always disguised its chains as opportunities. And most days, it feels like I’m trapped in an endless loop. Working more to buy more, to maintain the life I’ve built, to afford the next thing that promises to make it all feel worth it.

-while what’s worth it in this moment is growing so quickly in another room, making memories without me in them-

Sometimes I wonder if this pull I feel, the ache of leaving my baby, the constant need to “do right by him,” comes from the gendered expectation that mothers are supposed to be the primary caregivers. Maybe part of it is. Maybe I’ve internalized it more than I realize. But even that, I can’t fully examine, because the system doesn’t let me pause.

Even when I finally wrap up work, I still have to tend to my baby, more than anyone else, because that’s what he needs. I’m working like I don’t have a child, and mothering like I don’t have a job. I end up doing both entirely and enjoying neither fully.

It’s not lost on me that I’m saying all this from a place of privilege. I can afford help. I live in comfort built by the same capitalist system I’m criticizing. But that’s what makes it even more insidious. That the very system that gives me comfort also decides the terms of my exhaustion.

I watched a video recently that said capitalism limits what we can achieve by convincing us that the only achievements worth chasing are the ones that make money. And it stuck with me.

Because that’s exactly how it feels. Everything that should feel sacred, time, tenderness, care, gets turned into a transaction. My worth at work is measured in numbers. My worth as a mother is measured in spending.

It’s made me realize how deeply consumerism has shaped even my sense of love. And the internet has made this even worse. My feed knows exactly what to show me. Montessori toys, organic snacks, ergonomic baby chairs. It preys on the anxiety of wanting to do my best as a mother.

And maybe that’s what feels the most suffocating that I’m trying to build a life on rules that belong to a system that profits off my longing to give me any meaning.

Some days I try to make sense of it. This constant push and pull between gratitude and resentment, between privilege and fatigue. I know I’m lucky to have the choices I do. I know so many women don’t. And yet, I can’t shake off the feeling that even my choices aren’t really mine. That they’ve already been shaped, narrowed, decided for me, originally by patriarchy, and now by capitalism.

I don’t even know what I want anymore. I only know what I’ve been taught to want. The expectations of being a mother marrying the metrics of success, together they have sunk so deep into me that I can’t tell whether I’m chasing my own desires or just performing the script I was handed.

Finally, I’m sure there are a lot more layers to uncover at the intersection of capitalism and motherhood, but between earning and rearing, I’m simply too exhausted to explore any more of it, neither for the sake of my own clarity nor this article. So aura minus for capitalism but I’ll leave you with just this.

And tomorrow morning, when I hand over my baby again, I will still go back to doing exactly what I’ve been doing. I will convince myself to make it sense. Or I won’t, who knows?

Because at night, when he finally curls into my arms, none of this will matter. Not the work, not the guilt, not the questions. I’ll just go back to smelling him like that’s not what I did the night before, and the one before that.

There’s a Vogue piece doing the rounds online titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” and I’ll admit, I enjoyed. As a feminist, there’s nothing more satisfying than women reclaiming their identities out of their partner’s. 

The way this article narrates is also funny, clever, and born out of a very real fatigue — a collective exhale from decades of being told that a woman’s ultimate glow-up is to be claimed, partnered, chosen by a man.

And while I love that this piece is rooted in rejecting the historic over-romanticisation of heterosexual love and centring the woman instead. But the problem arises when that rejection itself becomes a new script women must perform.

We’ve moved from being “the girlfriend” to being “the girl who’s above being the girlfriend.” Either way, we’re still performing. The lines have changed, but the stage hasn’t.

There’s a specific kind of irony in watching this unfold online. A woman says she doesn’t care about her boyfriend. She says it publicly, beautifully, almost ceremonially. There’s an aesthetic to the unbotheredness: the casual selfies, the captions that wink at detachment, the subtle assertion that I’m not like those women who lose themselves in love. It’s empowering on the surface, but beneath it there’s that old familiar tension, the pressure to prove that you are your own story, and hide (or worse, feel embarrassed of) when you’re in love.

And yet, men don’t seem to carry any of this. They don’t wake up wondering if being someone’s boyfriend makes them less independent, less desirable, less cool. They don’t post about how they’re “still their own person” while in a relationship. They just are.

Men exist within love without it threatening their individuality, because they were never told that love could consume them in the first place. And that is the real privilege they enjoy.

To not have to think about your identity in relation to another person is power. It allows men to move through love and life without self-consciousness, without performance. 

While women dissect, disclaim, and defend every choice they make in love, men simply benefit from the emotional labour that women continue to do, even in this supposedly detached age.

Because the truth is, the work of “rethinking” love, of “deconstructing” heterosexuality, of “making sense” of what it means to be in a relationship, that work is still being carried by women. 

Women write the essays, post the TikToks, debate the politics of care. Men just live inside the systems we’re constantly analysing, and benefit quietly from the empathy we’ve been trained to extend.

We think we’re opting out of patriarchal patterns by refusing to romanticise our relationships, but sometimes we only end up cushioning the same imbalance where men get to be loved without question, while women are expected to intellectualise every ounce of feeling.

And yet, I don’t believe the answer is to stop thinking, or to stop feeling. Love is political. It shapes how we see the world, what we make space for, how we practice empathy. 

The right kind of love of course, heterosexual or not, can be radical precisely because it asks us to care in a world that rewards detachment. It teaches us tenderness when everything else demands performance.

So when we reclaim ourselves, perhaps we shouldn’t feel the pressure to dismantle love. To see loving as neither naive nor embarrassing, but as something that can coexist with selfhood, intellect, and agency. To stop treating affection as a regression.

Maybe the Vogue article is right for now, maybe this embarrassment is a necessary pendulum swing, a collective attempt to rewrite how women relate to men. But I can’t help wondering if it still keeps us inside a world built to favour them, where they get to be, while we still have to explain how we’re being.

Maybe the real flex isn’t being embarrassed about having a boyfriend. Maybe it’s not having to make a statement about it at all

I recognise that my ability to choose the hijab freely comes from a place of privilege, one where my faith is not enforced or policed. I write this knowing that for many women, the hijab exists within patriarchal or coercive systems that deny them the same agency.

I didn’t start wearing the hijab because of a sudden religious reckoning. I started because I was lost. There was a time when everything I knew about myself felt uncertain. Adulthood was demanding clarity I didn’t yet have, and I was watching parts of my life fall apart faster than I could rebuild them.

In that moment of confusion, desperate for an act of refuge, I did something that felt both impulsive and instinctive. I reached for the hijab.

I grew up in a religious home, but faith for me was mostly absorbed through osmosis, softened by the liberal spaces I inhabited. Also, at the time, not many women in my immediate family wore hijab.

But I had grown up surrounded by its presence — women at weddings, neighbours, relatives — modern, progressive women who wore it with grace, who spoke their minds, who travelled, led, loved, and prayed without contradiction. They carried it like an armor and a celebration both, and I suppose a part of me absorbed that image long before I understood it.

At first, it was impulsive. A way to feel anchored, to do something that marked a change, that drew a line between the before and after of my life. But soon, the act became less about what it is supposed to mean and more about what it did to me.

Each morning, when I’d wrap the scarf around my head, there was a small stillness as if holding myself together after coming undone. The hijab stopped being symbolic; it became a conversation with myself.

People often assume the hijab is about hiding. But I have never felt more visible or more deliberate than when I wear it. It draws eyes, yes, but it also redirects the gaze, I feel. Behind that curiosity, behind that caution, people began to see me differently.

When I first started wearing it, I felt like I had found an identity that wasn’t borrowed or blended. I wasn’t just another face in a crowd; I was recognised. The hijab became my introduction before I even spoke. And that visibility, though sometimes heavy, made me feel grounded. It gave shape to my sense of self in a way I had never experienced before.

And that’s where the feminism in it lies for me. For so long, I was taught to think of freedom as exposure, to believe that showing more meant I was claiming space. But the hijab taught me a different kind of feminism, one that isn’t about sameness but about sovereignty.

It’s the feminism of choosing for myself, even when that choice is misunderstood. The feminism of saying no to being defined by what I wear, how much I show or don’t, or what I must perform to be considered liberated. In covering, I learned to occupy space, to be present in my body without having to offer it up for interpretation.

Sometimes I think people don’t quite know what to do with this “identity” of mine. Like, when I post my outfits online, I get comments like, “You should become a hijabi influencer!” and I smile, because it’s both funny and revealing — as if I’m being admired and alienated at once

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love that somewhere, it’s seen as aspirational, even cool. But I can’t also not be bothered by the quiet need to label it, to fit it neatly into something familiar. I’ve learned to take it in stride, though. To accept the celebration, laugh at the boxing, and keep showing up exactly as I am.

After all, over the years, wearing hijab has become the quiet rhythm of my becoming, feeling like an extension of my skin, of my spirit. I don’t wear it to prove anything. I wear it because somewhere along the way, it started to feel like the most honest way of being myself in a world that is always asking women to explain who they are.

Perhaps the only statement I am trying to make with my hijab is my refusal to be scripted.

I think of his eyes, the way they pause before meeting the heroines’, as if just the act of looking at her is bringing him so much joy.

I think of his characters apologizing for being flawed, smiling when they least expect to, and sacrificing without trumpeting.

And so, it’s no wonder that across decades, women have found in him not just entertainment, but comfort. A hero who sees, who feels, who allows softness in a world that often demands hardness of men.

As Shrayana Bhattacharya writes in Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, women clung to him because he embodied a kind of man they rarely encountered in real life, a man who didn’t fear vulnerability, who made devotion seem grand but also ordinary. A man who looked at a woman as if she were the center of the story.

She also mentions, and what I’ve seen around me as well, is that so many women don’t just follow him because of his films, but because he offers relief, affection, wisdom. After all, “there’s nothing wrong with seeking anything that brings us joy.”

This isn’t just about fanboy/fangirl worship. It’s generational. It’s watching him enter a scene and knowing your heart will soften. It’s hearing his characters break, and feeling permission to break a little, too.

I know this because I come from a line of women who loved him. I have an early memory of him making his charming entrance in Kal Ho Naa Ho. I remember being a little too young to perhaps follow the depths of the plot, but I still remember the warmth that filled the room when he appeared with his arms wide open. My mother blushed; I blushed. We were just happy to see him.

Twenty years later, I’d sit in a packed theatre watching Jawan. I screamed and cheered like a teenager, grinning at him again, this time fierce and unyielding, a completely different man, but underneath it all, still him. That’s the thing about Shah Rukh, he doesn’t let you outgrow his charm. He shapeshifts, but you’re always glad he showed up.

Naturally, I want my son to know this man. I want him to grow up seeing that a hero doesn’t have to have bulging biceps or a brooding silence, that strength can be quiet, that love can be playful, vulnerable, gentle.

But here’s the paradox I struggle with.

For all his gentleness, many of his romances rested on persistence (stalking, yes I know but we like to use euphemisms for Shahrukh, I don’t make the rules). Back then, we would watch him chase women who weren’t interested until they gave in and struggle to accept it as a grand passion.

So years later, here I am, holding my son, wondering, how do I introduce him to Shah Rukh Khan? How do I give him the gift of this man who showed us women what tenderness in love could look like, without teaching him the endless following, the refusal to hear “no.”

Maybe one day, when he’s old enough to sit through a full film without crawling away, I’ll start him on a Shah Rukh syllabus of my own. Not the obvious ones first. I don’t think I want his first impression of love to be Raj chasing Simran across Europe like a very charming creep.

We might start with Mohabbatein. Not the singing and dancing, but the way he treats love and heartbreak with sincerity. “Sometimes you won’t get what you want, but you can still make something beautiful, even out of an experience of loss,” I’ll say.

Yes Boss might come next, to remember the boy who’s fumbling, unsure, trying to do right even when he messes up. “It’s okay to be clumsy. Being honest about your feelings matters more than being perfect,” I’d tell him.

And maybe, Dear Zindagi. “Watch closely, he listens more than he speaks. He never makes himself the hero of her healing. Remember therapy is cool, beta. Being a man who listens is cooler.”

The romances, I’ll serve with caution. Perhaps a movie night when he’s older. “This is Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, son. Notice how he looks at her like she’s the entire sky? That part is gold. The part where he follows her across Europe and sneaks into her family vacation? That part, you can skip. In real life, it’s called trespassing.”

Maybe that’s what it means to pass down Shah Rukh to the next generation. Not as a perfect hero, but as a man of contradictions. A man who showed us what love could be, and also what it should never be.

Hopefully, one day, my son will know the difference between the two, without me having to explain why breaking into someone’s terrace is not a viable dating strategy.

Hopefully he carries forward the right Shah Rukh. The one who stretched out his arms like an invitation, not a demand. The one who showed us that men can be heroes not because they could get into muscle fights, but because they could care enough to fight for love.

And maybe, if I get it right, my son will grow up knowing what so many women found in Shah Rukh Khan: that love, at its best, is soft.

This essay was written as a part of a collaborative exercise with fellow writers in the Delhi NCR Substack group. Links to their essays are at the end of the article.

Most of my mornings begin with a cup of coffee I did not make. My husband sets it down beside me while I prepare to start another day of juggling between my two full-time roles. It’s always in the same blue mug, the same careful temperature. I take that first sip and feel, absurdly, that the day has been acknowledged.

The cup is not dramatic. It doesn’t show up with music or a speech. It arrives like a small truce with the day. It arrives like love, the way I’ve started to recognize it. Less in surprises and fireworks and more in routines and rituals that make you feel steady.

Predictability I feel is a love language. To hand someone a cup of coffee the same way every morning is to say, without words, I will do this again tomorrow.

The truest promises, after all, are the ones carried out until they blur into routine.

I see it in other corners of my life too. A friend who never lets a day pass without sending multiple check-ins, not because there’s anything new to say, but because it’s our way of saying, I’m here again today. A sibling who calls at the same hour each evening on their way home, not to deliver news but to mark the day’s closing together. These are small, memorised rehearsals of care. And to remember is to love.

Back at home, my father would ask us if we wanted to have some fruit. Every day at the same time. Despite our refusal, the fruit plate would always appear like a small, stubborn miracle. Like it knew that the neat circle of apple slices would be empty an hour later. We would all just pick some as we crossed the table; and so it would reappear in the same way the next day, and the days after that. Looking back, I realize how my father and his fruit plate had mastered this language of care fluent in repetition.

Maybe that’s why, years later, I find myself clinging to my own small rituals. For example, I love making the same breakfast for myself every morning. It sometimes looks as rushed as a promise muttered in transit. Often, I even eat it mechanically, while checking messages, while soothing a small hand tugging at my sleeve. But I continue with insistence.

A predictable pattern of care for myself, disguised as a routine. A small daily reminder that I still deserve this constancy, something of my own, even when the rest of the day feels like skidding in borrowed time.

Now, as a mother, new little rituals are forming that surprise me with their tenderness. Every weekend we take our baby to buy flowers. The vendor’s stall is a riot of lilies, sunflowers, roses — colours that insist on being noticed. He simply wants to clutch them, or eat them perhaps?

These outings are ridiculous and ordinary at once. They’re not about flowers, really, but about weaving colour into the fabric of his childhood. He may not remember the details, but perhaps the memories of these mornings will stick in their softest parts. The sound of his mom bargaining while his father strikes up a conversation to keep him engaged, the smell of crushed marigolds against the hum of light traffic.

If rituals are indeed a language, then these will be his earliest lessons in vocabulary. I hope he holds on to the predictability of joy, the sense that some small beauty will always return to meet him.

And to remind that to myself I have created another ritual these last couple of weeks. Once I’ve put my son to sleep, I steal an hour from fatigue and give back to my words. In the darkened room, the mellow flicker from my phone feels like lighting a candle. A metaphor for the small glow I keep for myself.

The practice is not yet polished, and most days the words I write are ordinary. But the act of keeping at it, day after day, makes it sacred. I’m still learning to love myself in this new phase of being, and I guess I’ve already found the language for it.

And what I am learning is that there is humility in these habits. To keep a routine, you must remember, again and again. To remember, you must care enough to refuse forgetting. Predictability is not passive; it demands attention.

Because when you wake up in the middle of the night and always, always find a filled water bottle beside you. Or when you simply know you’ll find your clothes, washed, folded, and waiting neatly where they belong, every single time. These are a series of small, unsaid vows performed with careful attention by people fluent in a love that speaks through things that refuse to be one-offs.

And don’t get me wrong, there are days when I crave the unpredictable. I like surprises as much as anyone. But there is also relief in knowing there are rituals and routines that will always return, holding love in their repetition.

There is a comfort in the ordinary that keeps the rest of life from unraveling. It is proof that love doesn’t always invent. Sometimes it endures. Sometimes it repeats. And in repeating, it keeps us alive to one another, and to our own selves.

Tonight, after the baby finally sleeps and the city noise softens, I will think of the little rituals that have kept me afloat. I will hold them up like an inventory of kindness.

I’ve been putting these words down for years, not knowing who they might find. That they’ve found you feels like a quiet kind of luck. Thank you for reading.

Between diaper changes and half-done drafts, I write about love and the ways it shapes us. Coffee helps me make it to both.

If you enjoyed reading, you can fuel my next piece with a cup:

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Other essays from fellow writers
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The quiet choreography of the ordinary by

My ruthless morning routine could make great Shah Rukh Khan Cry by

About childhood, habits, and the rituals you curate by

The day in the life of a woman at home by

I romanticize my caffeine addiction by

How ten minutes of humiliation taught me the difference between rituals and routines by

I love being a mother. Truly. These days, my son crawls across the floor like he has somewhere urgent to be. Racing himself until he crashes into me. His laughter comes in unstoppable bursts, making me laugh even before I care why. He discovers the world with unfiltered wonder. From the sound of the pressure cooker to the zipper hidden at the seams of the mattress he sleeps on, everything is a thing of joy.

Watching him, it fills me with a love that sneaks into every corner of my day and quietly rewrites what I thought happiness could mean.

Maybe that’s why my answer surprises people. Because as much as I adore my child, I am not really excited about having another. Not because this love is lacking, but because it already feels whole.

When people ask, “But won’t he be lonely?” I pause. I think of my own siblings, and how we’ve stitched ourselves into every corner of each other’s lives. I think of how much they mean to me. And then I realize how this choice isn’t about rejecting that life. It’s about creating a different one.

I have two younger siblings, a sister and a brother. This simply means that for most of my life, I was never really alone. When I look back, it isn’t one grand memory that comes rushing in, but a string of small, ordinary ones that only make sense when stitched together.

When we were little, for instance, we took countless train journeys to our grandparents’. Each overnight ride in packed compartments felt less like travel and more like a moving picnic. Snacks opened too early, chips packets being passed around, arguments over the window seat dissolving into random laughter.

Every holiday, no matter how ordinary, somehow turned into a party just because we were together.

At home, it was the little rituals that bound us close. The gossip about our parents, the plotting of birthday surprises, the report card dramas, the midnight munchings, the clothes that migrated mysteriously between cupboards.

And then, of course, the fights — God, the fights — over TV remotes, over the temperature of our room, over the chocolates that would mysteriously disappear from the fridge. Imagine full-on drama, slammed doors, sulking, swearing vengeance. But give it twenty minutes and we’d be sprawled together again, sharing the same bed, whispering as though none of it had happened.

That’s how siblings are. We clashed, we made up, and in between, we grew up, bound tighter each time.

Adulthood looks different. Now we exchange books and swap thoughts about them. We spend hours on the phone, talking about everything, from politics to the rituals we grew up with and whether they still belong.

They video call my son, their faces lighting up as though he belongs to them too. Sometimes they drop everything and come over, just to be with him. I realize just how much this bond has stretched, softened, deepened.

Looking back, I think this is what I’m most grateful to my parents for. Not the vacations or the toys, but the gift of never having to carry life alone. To have loved and been loved as an elder sibling is one of the deepest joys I know.

And that’s where the paradox sits, quietly. How can I know the miracle of siblings, the built-in friends, and the witnesses to your whole story, and still say, “No, one child is enough”? How can both be true?

But maybe that’s what life is, a long practice of holding two truths at once. Love after all is not a fixed equation; it can shift with who we become and where we find ourselves.

Something can be deeply beautiful and still not meant to be repeated in the same shape. So it’s okay that my son’s experience will not be the one that I had, because it doesn’t have to be the same to be beautiful still.

What I want to give my son isn’t a sibling, but a whole mother. There is a small, stubborn ethics to this choice. While love is not a commodity, the way I show up is shaped by limits. I want to give my son a mother who loves him without running herself empty, who is present enough to notice the small tucks of his life. I don’t want my life reduced to a performance of joy; I want him to see me living it fully.

I want him to see how to tend love without losing yourself. That is a deliberate kind of inheritance.

And I should say this too, that this is my personal choice, shaped by the way I’ve come to know myself and my life. I don’t see it as a statement on what motherhood should look like. Every mother’s love carries its own choices, its own compromises, its own quiet wisdom. What feels whole to me may unfold differently for someone else, and together, all these choices and differences only widen the ways we can understand love.

Maybe one day my son will ask me why. Maybe, he’ll wish for what I had. I hope he also sees that there are many ways to belong. That he will gather his own people, his own archives of love, in friends, in cousins, in whoever life sends his way.

So here’s to my siblings. Thank you for sharing meals with me, for stealing my clothes, and for teaching me so much about life. I really don’t know how the silliest kids I knew turned out to be the smartest. Thank you for keeping me company in childhood and now, for loving my son with the same uncontainable joy.

I might not give him a sibling, but I’ll give him stories of you, and maybe that’s a start.

Parenting would never have been simple, I’m sure. But parenting today feels like raising a child with one eye on him and the other on a world breaking in real time: climate collapse, genocide, political corruptions, economic instability.

Polycrisis is the word they use when crises don’t line up politely one after another, but feed into each other until it feels like you’re living inside all of them at once.

I often find myself wondering what it means to raise a child when the future feels more fragile than ever. My son is eight months old, discovering his own small world one crawl at a time. By now, he knows where all of our slippers are, which room I disappear into for work, when it’s time for the park, and when the bell means his father is back home.

Inside, his world keeps unfolding, piece by piece. Outside, the world keeps inventing new ways to bruise itself. I witness both the news and the crawling. Cheering, but with a fear I don’t yet have a name for. In front of me, there’s a day that asks to be lived.

There is no rule book for parenting inside a pile-up of crises. Most mornings, I check my phone and see new footage from the genocide — the kind of images that should stop the world in its tracks. Instead, the world goes on, and so do I. Answering emails while a part of the world is left in hunger. Rocking my baby to sleep while a reel shows another child being carried through the rubble.

The ordinariness of my days runs alongside the unthinkable, and I don’t know what to do with the space between them.

I am learning as I go. If a choice feels gentle, I try it. Sometimes that means turning off the news before my emotions are picked up by him, before the weight of the world reaches him when he doesn’t even have the language to make sense of it. At other times, it means holding him close long enough for both of us to breathe through the weight of what I’ve seen.

Some days I read too much. The numbers are heavy: a billion children at risk from climate collapse, surveys where half of young people say they believe humanity is doomed. These numbers sit heavily in my chest as I watch my child just beginning his life. But then he laughs at the sound of a drill outside, and the heaviness cracks. His laughter is proof that life keeps insisting on itself.

“Feminism is a practice, and perfection is an illusion,” I remember reading this in Sonora Jha’s book, and it has stayed with me since. In her memoir, Jha reflects on parenting not as mastery but as constant becoming. I don’t know how to be a perfect parent or perfect anything. But I’m practicing. I’m learning to let the day feel small and human instead of overwhelming and urgent. Showing up unsure is still showing up.

Sometimes it feels unfair to hand down resilience as a necessity. Resilience, traditionally, feels like tough skin. But here, it has to be soft like the way I breathe when I feel despair rising, and choose to continue whispering the lullabies instead.

I’m learning that tenderness might be the most radical act I can offer. It would be simpler to pretend the world is not on fire.

But sometimes the doubt is loud: Will he grow up in air thick with smoke? Will the rains come too late? Will the world remember kindness while everything else falters? I let the questions pass through. They don’t need me to have answers to be true. What they need is a space to sit quietly, without seeping into every corner of our lives. I am learning to give them a chair, while I drag one for my baby to sit him down for a meal he loves.

There are moments when I want to write his handbook for this broken world. But I fall short. How to teach him to feel without naming numbness, how to teach him love without despair, how to let him breathe without warning him about collapsing cities.

But then he crawls across the room with a handful of soft toys, leaving them at my feet, wide eyes looking at me, as if to say, “Here, this is for you.” In the living room, he looks at the fan, satisfied by the sound that it makes, giggling at the shadows it throws on the floor, and I see how he lets the world reflect in him, curious and trusting.

Every smile is returned, every sound is an invitation. I see how the world has not been harsh on him, yet.

When we step out, he searches for the faces he knows — his father, me, the neighbour’s dog stepping out of the lift. He looks up towards the sky and babbles at the cars passing by. Expanding his world by offering acceptance.

At night, when he drifts off, I hold him close and feel both gratitude and awe for the chance to share a life with him before the world presses too hard, for the softness of this moment, for the now.

I don’t know what the world will become by the time he can read this. But I hope he finds in these words a mother who was sometimes afraid, often unsure, but always learning. Maybe that will be enough.

When the sun begins to set, I carry him through the corners of our home, his small hand reaching to switch on every lamp. He lights up the room before the dark can arrive, and I let the glow steady me too.

Tomorrow, I’ll try again. Because he is watching, and because the world needs witnesses who refuse to let the dark have the final word.

The first time I heard someone say, “I’m in my main character era,” it was probably in an Instagram reel. It sounded harmless, even a little charming. Who wouldn’t want to see themselves as the lead in the movie of their life? We deserve our own soundtracks, our slow-motion exits from heartbreaks, a way to claim space unapologetically.

But lately, I’ve been wondering, what happens when we’re constantly curating our lives around ourselves? We stop letting people matter to us beyond how they serve our story. And that’s when it hit me how main characters are usually… crappy friends.

Think about it. Emily from Emily in Paris crashes into people’s lives like a well-dressed wrecking ball. Ashley’s problems? Background noise to Emily’s self-discovery montage. Another example is our favourite Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99. Jake’s hero complex runs the show. Friends bend around his impulsive grand plans while he basks in the glow of saving the day.

And then there’s Carrie Bradshaw, the blueprint for so many of these characters. She built an empire of essays on her friends’ shoulders while barely noticing when they needed her. Samantha’s cancer? Miranda’s marriage? Charlotte’s heartbreak? Somehow, it always circled back to Big. She is the ultimate bad friend dressed up as a cultural icon.

And here’s the thing, we love them anyway. We forgive them because, well, they’re the story. It’s what makes them interesting. But when we try to become them, that’s when things break. Because in real life, being the main character doesn’t make us magnetic. It makes us alone.

According to psychologist Shannon Sauer-Zavala, the “main character energy” often manifests as intense extraversion. Dominant, attention-seeking behavior that can overshadow others in close relationships. And this isn’t necessarily malice; it’s gravity. The spotlight we are chasing is slowly pulling us away from connection.

Why does this happen? Because life is messy and being the main character offers the comfort of a neat arc: I’m the story. I’m the meaning. But in friendships, meaning doesn’t live in one person’s script but in the spaces created together. The comfort in the silences and laughters alike, the knowing without words, the secrets that would always find a home in the dark.

Friendship used to be a place where we could vanish a little, until you couldn’t tell where your life ended and theirs began. Listening to friends because we love them, and not because we couldn’t wait to talk about ourselves. The soft labour of care is incompatible with constant self-branding.

The most precious memories I have of my friends aren’t documented. In fact, they would seem unremarkable to anyone else. Like the day we wandered through cafés, talking about everything and nothing, the kind of conversations that stretch and soften you without you noticing. Or that strange trip that turned into quarantine when we survived on bread and cheese, laughing at how ridiculous life can be when the world has shrunk to four walls and a shared playlist.

The most precious memories I have of my friends revolve around discovering their latest obsession in food, music, or love.

And so, I find myself missing my friends most when I stumble on something they love. Their coffee order scribbled on a menu board, a pizza with no olives, a movie we once obsessed over playing on TV. That moment of recognition reminds me that I only know these details because there’s a part of my mind that belongs to them. And maybe that’s the most grounding truth — I can’t even be who I am without these spaces borrowed from the people I love.

Because real friendship? It becomes its own main character. A shared story that two people hold between them. And it shows up in small, almost invisible ways. Sharing glimpses of our cities so home never feels too far, or finishing each other’s thoughts before they even take shape.

None of this is cinematic. It’s better. It’s the kind of intimacy no feed can flatten into a highlight reel.

And yet, social media keeps pouring gasoline on this problem. As Dr. Alison McClymont observes, “performative friendships” create exclusion and pressure, and social media becomes their stage. The private joke becomes a post. The catch-up coffee becomes proof. And when friendship becomes something to display, it stops being a refuge. It becomes labour, another episode of performance in the endless season of me.

So why do we cling to this performance, even when it costs us intimacy? Part of the answer lies in what psychologists call self-enhancement bias — the tendency to present ourselves in ways that secure approval and admiration. In evolutionary terms, this helped us survive. In Instagram terms, it helps us trend.

But here’s the quiet paradox. What shields us in the moment slowly hollows us out. Every time we polish the story, we risk sanding away the very bonds that make life bearable.

Friendships survive on the quiet labour of care, thrive on mutual vulnerability. Showing up in their smallest joys and quietest griefs. They survive on your willingness to show up unfiltered, unspectacular, and still be loved.

When we are deep in our main character era, we lose that. We keep just enough vulnerability to appear “relatable,” but never enough to feel raw. That distance keeps us safe. And lonely.

Maybe the answer isn’t to throw away the idea of being the main character, but to loosen it. To remember that friendship isn’t a subplot; it’s its own epic. To let it breathe stories that don’t have to orbit us, but run alongside us. Tugging us back into the world.

Because the most enduring stories aren’t the ones where we shine, but the ones where we dissolve a little into the quiet comfort of being known.

Every city I’ve lived in, I have tried to memorise its many details. The streets and the skies, the aftertaste of the accents, the story behind their food. Every city I’ve lived in has left me with its fingerprints. On my heart, my story, on the mosaic of my life.

The love of my life, Delhi, is where I’ve spent most of my years. When I left home for the first time, it was to go to Pune to pursue my master's degree. I devoured the city the way the last bite of pav soaks up the leftover misal.

Mumbai was a short work stint that somehow seemed to stretch longer than a lifetime, each day pulled thin like the horizon at Juhu. And finally, now, I’ve settled in Bangalore, the startup city with its nice weather, where I’m still trying to become fluent in its people.

It always really begins with the people, and it’s also the last bit that stays with you. They decide how much of a home you can build in their city. If they’ll participate in it or guide you from the seams. They decide how deeply you belong, how much of their own love for the city they are willing to share, how much they are willing to let you in.

Mumbai people, as I experienced, are tactical, having mastered the art of socializing as per convenience. When they do let you in, though, it’s with unexpected warmth. Hurried, yet evocative. Like, an ocean held at the edges of a sleepless metro.

In contrast, I remember Pune being more in control of its conversations. Sometimes it would be just enough; other times, it would unravel into storytelling about how the city comes into being every day.

Bangalore, I’m still learning. For the larger vibe of how people meet each other here, I’m trying to find an euphemism for performance. Sending endless texts to plan a meeting only to talk about the weather, and perhaps the latest restaurant opening on 12th main.

And Delhi. People like to say we have big hearts and bigger mouths. But what’s less often said is that we are unafraid to use those mouths to speak our hearts. A conversation here won’t let you leave until you know why they love, what they love — a movie, a place, a dish. Everything has a story, and every story insists you learn it by heart. The people you meet, the monuments you cross, the many turns through the Lutyens’.

While the people are the most defining feature, what I miss the most about all these cities is the food. For example, it took me years to finally make peace with the fact that I couldn’t find Pune’s strawberries anywhere else. How I wish I knew back then that I was relishing a delicacy. Or that one Dabeli from that one vendor at that one turn in Aundh.

Food really only travels in memory.

Friends have brought me vada pav from Bombay, but it’s never the same as when you eat it piping hot — chutney adjusted to taste, the grease seeping through yesterday’s newspaper. Bombay’s food scene doesn’t disappoint, whether it’s those vada pavs or its bougie restaurants. Well, contrary to popular belief, I’ve always walked out with a favourite from a Veronica’s or a Joshi House.

Perhaps the real charm of navigating your taste for the city of dreams is in the fact that you live with the constant awareness of your life brushing, however briefly, against the life of a star.

Coming to Bangalore, just three years in, I’ve never stop talking about the dosas. I’ve eaten it in restaurants, at the various Sagars, at the infamous Rameshwaram, and from the legendary Vidyarthi Bhawan. Each one different, each one delicious. The healing warmth to come back to after a day that doesn’t go as planned.

And finally, Delhi. I don’t think I’ve yet mastered the craft of writing about Delhi’s food, of compressing its grandeur into a single paragraph. It feels unfair to the city that shares its food passionately, celebrates it with an obsession unlike anywhere else. It’s a city where butter-laden parathas, smoky kebabs, colourful chaat, and steaming plates of momos share space with sushi rolls and tiramisu. Where each bite is a reminder that Delhi never met a flavor it couldn’t make its own.

After food, I feel it’s the weather that shapes how much you love a city. The way the city lingers in your memory. Because I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have survived those hostel years had it not been for the whimsical Pune’s skies, painted in shades of pinks and purples, with a wind that never leaves your side, if only you are willing to find some shade.

As for Bombay, it redefined my relationship with the monsoon. I grew up loving rain, but here I learned how to endure it even when it was relentless. Watching it swallow the city whole against the smell of damp clothes and the salty sea air, so close yet out of reach.

While Mumbai braves them because the day won’t wait, Bangalore enjoys the rains from inside the glass office ceilings, as if framed for the pleasure of the people inside. Pune embraces them with the ease of an old marriage. And Delhi, well it pauses. Not stuck, but to commemorate. It pauses for chai at a tapri, for a slow walk through CP, for the simple joy of letting the rain be part of your day.

And this is why Delhi will always remain my number one. The city knows how to honor its moments. It knows that life isn’t happening at the surface, and that staying with things long enough is how you make them matter. It is also Delhi’s greatest gift that it doesn’t let you pass through. It holds you, insists on being learned, tasted, argued with, adored.

Adored for its contradictions and its corners. The vibrant stalls of Dilli Haat giving way to the critical pulse of the Khan Market. The chaotic music of the old city — vendors calling, rickshaws honking, jalebis slipping into hot oil. Winter afternoons spent in Lodhi Garden, families and lovers spread across the grass under the quiet gaze of tombs. Then, of course, the metro that carries you through it all, like a moving gallery of faces and lives, making the city feel endless yet yours.

In Delhi, you never stop witnessing something worth looking at.

It breathes art in every corner. Life-size murals in the Lodhi District, dates in the quiet of a museum hall, a historic monument at every turn. And then there’s Sarojini, offering art you can wear. I don’t think I’ve found styles anywhere else like I did in those crowded lanes. And when summer arrives, you just can’t miss the sight of amaltas setting the streets aflame with yellow, like the city decided to hold the sun in its branches.

Everywhere, something insists on being savored, on being remembered.

And because of that gift, every city I’ve lived in continues to stay with me. Pune’s skylines, Bombay’s rains, Bangalore’s dosas. They survive not just as memories but as extensions of how Delhi lives within me. Ordinary moments stretched into stories worth keeping.

To be able to love Delhi, after all, is to learn how to love the world, one city at a time.

Some days—most days—I feel like my head doesn’t switch off at all. Even when I’m doing nothing, even when I’m sleeping. Planning meals, thinking ahead to nap times, tracking how many diapers must be left. It’s like an invisible to-do list that rewrites itself every hour.

I was reading a BBC article about the hidden load that mothers carry and realised how all of us, across cultures, across the world, are doing this constant mental work that no one sees, but which quietly shapes every moment in our lives.

The more I think about this, the more I want to distance myself from the whole do-it-all mother identity. The more I want to choose presence for my child over chasing an idea of perfection that doesn’t exist.

I want to consciously avoid living a life where my mind is always consumed by endless tasks. The kind of living that leaves nothing of me behind. Nothing for me to hold on to. Nothing for me to look forward to.

I mean, some days I have to run around my baby’s schedule, fitting in meetings and a bath somewhere in between. But that’s not all that I want to be known for.

I don’t want my worth to be measured by how much I can multitask, as it has been for women for generations. In India, women still spend nearly three times more hours than men on unpaid domestic and care work. It’s invisible, yet it is what keeps households running.

Especially for mothers, who are so often placed on a pedestal for their sacrifices. Worshipped, so they can continue making those sacrifices. Continue stretching themselves to the point of breaking. Or better, beyond.

I want to be whole for my child, not breaking. To love him without mentally drafting the entire parenting plan. I want to still have pieces of the day that are mine, small reminders to keep going without disappearing. I want to find hours of rest and not feel guilty for taking them.

But I’ve seen how easily motherhood baits you into the do-it-all trap. There’s a rush in being the one who can manage everything, in hearing people say, I don’t know how you do it. For a while, it feels flattering, almost like proof of love. But soon, the rush gives way to exhaustion. Heavy and relentless.

On paper, I have everything a new mother could hope for. A nanny, a grandmother who visits often, the comfort of working from home. And yet, survival mode has never really left me.

Even when I’m sitting still, my head is buzzing. I’m thinking about the fifty new things my son needs for his particular developmental stage. About the things I need to do, and the things I am not able to. About how to set boundaries without sounding ungrateful.

And here’s where I have to pause and acknowledge my luck. To have help. To be surrounded by people who don’t guilt me for it. I know how rare that is. A lot of mothers I know, even if they desperately want it, simply can’t have this kind of support. Often, because of money, sometimes because there’s no one around who can step in. For them, doing it all isn’t a choice; it’s survival. And that reality makes me deeply aware of my privilege, even guilty sometimes, to admit I don’t want to do it all.

And yet, I’ve noticed that even when help is available, many women don’t know how to accept it. Partly, because society has taught us that a “good mother” should be able to handle everything herself.

Maternal gatekeeping. The BBC has a term for this behaviour. The instinct, characteristic to us mothers, to hover, to correct, to supervise, to step in because it feels like no one else will do it the “right” way.

I feel that’s what makes it so hard to break free. That’s not just doing the actual work. It’s the constant thinking about it, the remembering, the anticipating, the not switching off. And it chips away at presence. At joy.

I was talking to a mom friend who said that last weekend she finally had the time to make herself breakfast and eat it in peace. But even then, she found herself still pacing, never having bothered to sit down. Then she noticed her daughter watching her, breaking into a smile. As she remembered, that was reminder enough to exhale—both then and in the moments to come.

And that’s what I mean when I say I don’t want to do it all. I don’t wish for the little things to slip away. The way his tiny fingers wrap around mine. Soft, but firm. The way he smiles at me like I’m his whole world.

The way my coffee tastes when I actually sit down to drink it. An unhurried walk with R, unloading the day into the last light. Catching up with a friend and not having to keep one eye on the time. All the small things that make this life what it is. Lost when I rush through it.

I’m trying to step away from that. To remind myself that my life is not a checklist, that my child doesn’t need a mother who can do everything. Just one who can be here with him. That my days deserve space. Space to think, to rest, to laugh, to enjoy the home we’ve built with so much love.

So I will leave things undone if it means I can be present. For just watching my baby crawl for the first time. For staring at the sky while another family member takes him for a walk. For afternoons with no agenda.

I know I’m privileged to even think about this. That itself is a gift, and one I don’t want to waste. Because I can, I want to choose this warmth, again and again, over the relentless pace of trying to do it all.

I don’t want to do it all. I just want to be here. In this season of life, in the moments that won’t come back. Some days I’ll be able to hold on to it, some days I’ll let the hope slip away. And for tonight, that feels enough.

there’s no manual for being the eldest. just a list of things that happen to you before you even know they’re happening. events that pile up until one day you look back and realise they’ve written you.

you remember being older but not being young.
you remember being told you’re too quiet
before everyone started saying you’re too loud
before you’re convinced you’ll be wrong either way

the day you decide to do it your way

you want something the other girl in your class has
and it’s the first time you do the math in your head
you can’t not. 3 kids, outings, school fees.
you know you’re too young to calculate
you know the parents will get it if you ask
so you don’t.

the day you learn to never ask

first time you think you’ve made friends for life
first time you lose them— new sections
first time you learn what a void feels like

but you hide

the first time you learn to hide things.
because home already has enough.
first lies, as it turns out, weren’t about homework or crushes after all

the first time you’re let into the family secrets

first time you catch yourself parenting your parents
first time you catch yourself parenting your siblings
first time you catch yourself parenting yourself

the first time you hear
we didn’t tell you to do all this

the first time you’re told you’re a teen
and heart feels tired already. too early?
more emotions than you can handle
your mouth is too full with words
that you’ve by now learnt to carry like installment
while they still come out eagerly

the first time you feel the rush
of being the family’s decision maker
what to wear, where to go, how to order
the family’s chief consultant

then one day you remember
parenting the parents quietly shifted into becoming their partners

first bestfriend
even though you didn’t yet know what that word could hold
it was enough then just to be claimed
to have someone who would save you a seat,
say she’s with me

what is it with elder daughters always needing to be claimed
one would think we’ve had our fill
perhaps time simply makes us wired to be needed

what a fateful paradox

falling in love. first love
a name scratched in the back of your notebook.
flowery poetry. searching for synonyms of love
where there was none?
you rehearse heartbreak before it even comes.

the last day of school.
the first place you were not the eldest
one last time, folded away with the uniform

the day you wake up as a feminist
the day you wake up as a writer
defence mechanisms, survival instincts
both stick

the day you catch yourself shouting like your dad.
the day you catch yourself stressing like your mom.
the day you realise you can’t stop

younger siblings hovering at your door
with hopeful eyes and armfuls of outfits,
waiting for your verdict like it’s gospel
the first time you decided between ‘too much’ or ‘just enough’
half-amused, half-drunk on this quiet authority

the first time you leave the house

the first to leave
carrying the sound of your house inside your chest
tasting freedom with the side of instant noodles
served, at an empty room’s behest

big girl college phase
days haunted with shame you couldn’t name
following the out-all-night partying phase

remembering to call every member of the family individually phase

finding a friend who’s also an elder daughter
first time understanding it was a thing
the weight, the work, the strange pride of it

first trip without family
guilt sits next to you on the bus
they would’ve loved this
they would’ve never done this without me

the first time you learn the word dichotomy
torn between being hyper independent and wishing for a knight
in the same breath
the ache to be taken care of. the risk of losing autonomy
in the same breath

dating someone for the first time
dating someone you have to parent phase
dating someone you don’t have to parent phase

dating someone you have to let go of

getting a job— making your own money
gifts for everybody
less guilt for yourself

the first time you catch yourself people-pleasing
like it’s an irreversible phenomenon
sucking you in
worse when you realise you’ve always done it
like breathing

the first time you hear people being nostalgic about childhood
and realise you don’t miss yours at all
you love being an adult
you love being an adult with money

you buy yourself a heavy thing. a bookshelf. a washing machine.
it feels like proof: I live here

days spent talking on the phone with mom phase

finding a love that feels like it’ll stay
marrying another elder sibling
marriage is its own canon

the first time you catch you parents starting to age
and it starts humming in the back of every day
so learning to call them every day becomes like a mission

the first time you inherit a medical condition

the canon of the canon events—
finding out you’re going to be a mother
have I not done this already?
the canon of actually delivering the baby, of holding him

of living every day since, to make sure not to shift the load

I’ve been thinking a lot about the version of my parents I’ll never meet. The ones they might have been if I hadn’t shown up. Perhaps, still in there somewhere.

It’s strange and a little wonderful to realize that we are made from people we never really met. Before they were our parents, they were someone else entirely. Not better necessarily, just more themselves.

My mother, for instance, was a tomboy in the most joyful sense of the word. The kind who pulled pranks on her peers and played cricket with her brothers’ friends. The hem of her salwar almost always dusty from running after the ball. At night, when the house went still, she’d switch from bat to pen, scribbling poems under the weak tube light.

She was a voracious reader. Reader’s Digests lying on the table, half-torn Mills & Boon passed around between cousins, classic literature from the school library, hidden columns in fashion magazines. Whatever she could get her hands on.

When fashion couldn’t keep up with her, she made her own clothes. She was bold and creative and carried a kind of restless charm. That of the youngest child who knew she could run to her father and never be turned away.

But the woman I first met, the one who raised me, was nothing like that girl. Gentle, infinitely patient. Not mischievous or self-indulgent. She poured her energy into us, into running a house that often felt like it might collapse without her. She lived and loved and fought the world for us, all with a quiet fierceness. For years, it was hard to believe she had ever been anything but my mother.

Until, when sometimes, the girl would return. In a sudden excitement before a family trip. Or a dance in the living room while the pressure cooker hissed away in the kitchen. Little signs that all her sparkle was still alive, just carefully enveloped right now.

My father, on the other hand, was the eldest son, which meant being born with responsibility stitched into him. Even the version of him that I grew up with was a disciplinarian and a creature of habit.

But once, long before I knew him, he collected stamps and wrote in tiny journals. I found them years later, tucked away in an old cupboard, and discovered someone I didn’t expect to find.

He documented his moods, his aspirations, his attempts to quit smoking, and his reasons for starting again. He wrote about how much he loved the sea. How much he loved being around friends. He wrote about love in a way I had never heard him speak of— without hesitation.

The father I knew was awkward around emotion. Avoided big words like “love.” He socialised, sure, but I don’t really remember him having real friends. He was too busy being a dutiful son and a rule-upholding father to us. Whatever was left of the boy was stored away in corners we didn’t have access to.

But every now and then, the seams showed. A Kishore Kumar song would play, and his humming would sneak out before he caught himself. Once, on a family vacation, he stood at the shore, staring at the sea as if it were speaking to him in a language only he could understand.

I grew up with these hushed versions of them. The edited ones, the ones shaped for parenting. And now, as the years collect, it feels like the earlier drafts of them are slipping back into the room.

Maybe it’s us growing older that’s given them permission. Or maybe time itself has softened the edges. Whatever it is, I catch them returning to themselves now.

My father has new friends now, the kind who make him laugh out loud. He cracks silly jokes. He even texts me “I love you,” no hesitation, no ceremony. A man who rationed his tenderness for decades now spends it freely.

And my mother’s laugh sounds louder, freer now. When she plays with my son, there’s this unmistakable glint of her younger self in those moments. She makes travel plans with friends, doesn’t run everything by us, and doesn’t orbit around our needs anymore. It’s as if I’m watching someone finally exhale after years of holding her breath.

I don’t know when I first started noticing these things, or if they were happening all along and I was too wrapped up in my own life to see them. Maybe that’s what adulthood really does— it changes the lens.

Or maybe it’s being the eldest child. You get so used to holding the family picture together that you forget the people in it are moving, changing, becoming. And then one day, without warning, you catch it. Soft shifts, so small they make you wonder how long you’ve been missing it.

It also makes me think about what we carry from them without even knowing. How much of who we are is just borrowed habits, little signatures left behind by the people our parents used to be.

My brother, for instance, loves the way my father did in his journals, defiant yet earnest. He also has my mother’s grit, her way of showing up no matter what. My sister is different; she’s bolder, with something of my mother’s nerve and my father’s stubbornness to see things through.

And me, I feel like I carry both of them at once, the contradictions, the half-finished stories, the dreams they put away in drawers for later. Sometimes it feels less like inheritance and more like I’m walking around with their earlier selves folded into me, tucked in the lining of who I am.

And maybe that’s the part I missed growing up, that so much of love is just translation. A preference muted, a hobby tucked away, a dream set aside so something else could fit. These silent edits our parents made so a family could hold together. They didn’t disappear, but remained with us as evidence of the soft rearranging of self.

Maybe that’s what love becomes when it grows into parenting. Not a conscious reinvention, just an inevitable shapeshifting. They didn’t stop being themselves; they just pressed pause on certain pieces. They became who they thought we needed, folding their love around our lives as if to say, without words, this is where I’ll be for you to find me, always.

There’s a line by Ocean Vuong that I keep returning to: “Because the thing about a heart is it doesn’t stop, even when you tell it to. It keeps going, collecting, collecting.” And I think that’s what I’ve inherited most. This way of carrying on, gathering small pieces of others, letting them live inside me.

Now, as I step into motherhood, I can’t help but wonder which parts of me will go quiet for a while, which ones have already slid into the background. What shape my love will take when it begins to edit itself. Maybe I won’t notice at first.

Perhaps, like my mother, I’ll learn to tuck joy into the ordinary— catching light through windows, turning dinners into excuses to laugh with our mouths full. Or years later, like my father, I’ll learn to let love leak out just enough. The way it urges him to replace ‘I miss you’ with ‘Next time you’re here, I’ll take you to this new restaurant.’

Maybe one day I’ll pause long enough to notice. This is who I’ve become, and this is how my love has learned to live here all this time, shaped in a way our child would one day inherit. Perhaps.

You know where I once heard the wisest relationship advice of my life? In a Bollywood movie.

Dr. Jug, leaning against the ferry railing in Dear Zindagi, casually tells Kaira that we ruin our relationships by expecting one person to be everything: best friend, therapist, safe space, entire world. “Why put that kind of pressure on one relationship?” he asks, almost casually, as if it isn’t the most obvious thing we all forget.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe why I never made that mistake is because my girlfriends were always doing the real work of carrying me, teaching me how to love long before romance ever did.

There has always been a woman somewhere, making space for my emotions before I even realised I needed it.

A neighbour I met before I could speak in full sentences, who somehow still remains a constant in my story. A school desk partner who turned into a best friend and grew into everything that deceptively tiny phrase is capable of holding. Girls I grew up with in school who went off to build wildly different lives but never stopped bringing me along, tucked into group chats and calendars and inside jokes.

My first friendships didn’t all come from the outside world. My younger sister, once my roommate for most of my life and now my long-distance confidant, with our days still unfolding in blurry details over chaotic video calls. And of course, my mother, who I know now was my first female friend, gently pushing me to stretch my idea of what my life could be, to read more, to want more, to become more.

And, just when I thought my time to make any more real friends had passed, my hostel corridor gave me girls who caught up on my entire life in one night and then just decided to stay. Until our parents, partners, and siblings also started treating one another like their own.

Years later, work surprised me again with more women to cherish. Some pulling me through “feedback days” with ridiculous humour, some bonding simply because we chose to fall apart in front of each other once.

The older I get, the more I recognize this isn’t just my story, it’s how so many women stay afloat. We are handed entire rulebooks on what romantic love should look like, but are given no real blueprint for survival in everyday.

So we turn to each other. We lean, gossip, collapse, rebuild, send panic texts, and refuse to let the other person disappear.

Female friendships are often dismissed as dramatic or too intense, but truly, they are just defiant. As Sreejata Roy writes in Female Friendship and the Politics of Care, these bonds become “a resistant space of survival against the everyday violences of patriarchy.” Those violences aren’t always loud; sometimes they’re just the slow erosion of self.

Patriarchy, after all, has always thrived on women staying isolated, bearing emotional burdens silently, convinced their struggles are private rather than shared. Female friendship disrupts that machinery simply by talking— refusing to hide what they feel, creating small, stubborn spaces where they can be themselves and carry that confidence into the world.

So I watch my friends, not merely existing alongside the system, but gently rewriting it. By reminding each other who we were before life started calling us by our roles. Girlfriends, managers, mothers. They mirror parts of me I might otherwise lose: the version who loves fiercely, and the one who laughs so loudly the neighbours complain.

A friend will send me a meme that will remind me how much I miss my “party hard” version. Another will threaten to show up at my house if I say “I’m fine” one more time. Yet another will mail me a book, precisely when I need it. This is how they archive me. How they return me to myself.

I think often of Surabhi Yadav’s photo project Women At Leisure, and how it feels almost rebellious to simply witness women doing nothing: lounging under the sun, laughing mid-conversation, braiding each other’s hair. On the surface, it is ordinary, but it also asks an urgent question: what happens to women when they are no longer working, serving, or proving?

Vogue wrote that such images lie at the heart of feminist liberation, because they show women as women, not in societal roles. As if, to be leisurely, to take up time and space in friendship without apology, might just be one of the most political things a woman can do.

Then, of course, none of this is new. Women before us have always done this in quieter ways. Sharing recipes, secrets, remedies; rocking each other’s babies so someone could rest; insisting on joy even during scarcity.

Revolutions often forget to record this lineage of nurturing, of women creating small worlds inside a harsher one, so that each of us could keep going. Our modern group chats and annual catchups are simply the latest version of that same inheritance.

And I now realise how this kind of love— stubborn, ordinary, unshowy— anchors you. A 2022 essay in Feminism In India describes female friendships as spaces where we learn “to absorb the emotional chaos of another without expecting a neat payoff.”

Maybe that’s why, when it comes to romantic love, I have never looked for fireworks or miracles. I had already learned a softer kind of emotional math, one where care isn’t transactional and being present is a language in itself. So when love finally arrived, I could recognise it, only because there were women who had kept showing up long before it did.

And perhaps that’s all this is, a long thank-you note to the women who stood between me and the version I would’ve become without them. Women who refused to let me hand over my entire emotional life to romance, not because they didn’t believe in love, but because they knew it deserved room to breathe, not perform.

Which is why what Dr. Jug said that day on the ferry remains with me as a lived truth. We break relationships not because they aren’t enough, but because we keep asking one to be everything.

I am so grateful to have a life quietly shaped by the most radical kind of affection, where different women have held different parts of my story so no one person ever had to carry it all.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious. It has to be women. It’s always women. Because it is in one another that we find the courage to survive patriarchy’s small daily undoings, and, just as importantly, the tenderness to keep returning to who we truly are.

To the women who held me long before I learned how to hold myself.