In these pornified times, first base scarcely registers.

This is a quote from this article in The Guardian yesterday, according to which… WE AIN’T KISSING NO MO! What happened? We used to be kissing left, right and straight down high street. And then, somewhere along the way, we lost our appetite? We, who harbor infinite appetites? We, who are blessed with the extraordinary gift of intimacy? We aren’t kissing anymore???

Fuck the climate crisis. This is the real tragedy we should be talking about. Kissing!

What We Have Loved This Week

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;…
…And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

— Love’s Philosophy, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Kisses come in many wonderful shapes. You’ve got the classic parental kiss of affection, the gentle kiss on your temple, the passionate kiss of a lover, the weird European peck-peck on the cheeks… the list goes on. Politicians kiss babies on the campaign trail and celebrities blow kisses to their loyal fans in mock familiarity. There’s even King Priam’s heartbreaking kiss planted on Achilles’ hand, pleading him to return Hector’s corpse:

…[ I ] have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.”

But we’ve all had enough Homer this month.

Kissing, by any means, is not universal. There are many cultures that simply refuse. Then again, dogs and cats nuzzle up to us, and I read today that even snails and insects engage in antennal play. Ew.

Before we even begin to understand why we have adopted smacking lips together as a means to show affection, we should note how, even today, the symbolism of a kiss can be confusing.

Ask Francesca and Paolo from Dante’s Divine Comedy. While the two sit reading a book about the knight Lancelot and his love Queen Guinevere, they reach the part where Guinevere's kiss is described. Overcome by the text, Paolo turns and kisses Francesca (Kiss-ception!):

For our delight we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no
Suspicion near us…[ ] …then he, who ne’er
From me shall separate, at once my lips
All trembling kiss’d.

— Divine Comedy, Canto V

Been there, done that Paolo! Anyway, cut to later in the book and we find both their souls being thrown about in the winds of eternal damnation. What the fuck?! They went to hell for love! More than I can say about you. (We’re going to ignore the part where Francesca was technically cheating on her husband.)

Or, ask Jesus. Bro got done in by Judas with a kiss.

Or, the Dalai Lama… wasn’t there a whole thing about him asking a little boy to tongue him? Ew. This, of course, brings up the case of consent and the fact that the kiss, like any other act of shared intimacy, can be scrutinized by motive and sincerity. Though we tend to romanticisize “true love’s kiss”, there is much to be said about kisses that are based on lies too, kisses that become tools of conquest.

You can, also, kiss asses and boots to get what you want. Hence, bootlicking—a symbol of hegemony and power structures—the heirarchy of kisses.

A feminist reading of kisses might question who gives a kiss and who receives it. Or in a reversal of hierarchies, the kiss can be a tool of seduction, with Cleopatra cited as an early master of the art. Marcel Danesi in The History of the Kiss! writes about how at a certain point in time, when marrying outside of family-approved unions was considered morally wrong, the lip kiss was portrayed as going against such moral restrictions and as an act of true love.

Romeo and Juliet are the ultimate example of illicit love being a symbol of rebellion. Their romance begins and ends with kisses.

The point is… kissing is complicated. It’s got a long history. And nobody has been doing it for longer than Indians, which makes sense, seeing as we wrote the damn Kama Sutra. The Egyptians loved it too. The Romans couldn’t shut up about it and had names for different kinds of kisses. The status of a Roman citizen determined the part of the body—ranging from cheek to foot—on which they would be allowed to kiss the emperor. Kisses served to seal agreements—hence, the expression ‘to seal with a kiss.’ Couples were wed by kissing before a gathering, a practice that carries on to this day.

But even for the Romans, kissing wasn’t always straight-forward, or innocent. In Catullus, kisses emerge within the turbulence of erotic attachment and jealousy, where intimacy is inseparable from fear of loss and replacement.

Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?

Desire turns bitter at the lips.

Anne Carson, translating Sappho, and being generally cool as fuck, describes Eros as bittersweet. The kiss, and the desire that it arises from, is always precarious. Sometimes you achieve what your heart desires (sweet), sometimes you do not (bitter), and sometimes, you forget to desire what you once used to (sweetbitter). Lovers lose their passion in time. Kisses lose their bite.

Which brings us to present day, in the light of The Guardian article, and the reality of a digital hellscape where you can’t makeout with ChatGPT (yet). Perhaps, we will all lose all feeling in our lips as we evolve into meta-humans sans desire. But that is too bleak an image and an exaggeration for which I apologize.

The thing is, how could we, in good faith, give up on the kiss?

Consider Anne Sexton opening her poem The Kiss with the line:

My mouth blooms like a cut.

She goes on to describe the sensation as—“Zing! A resurrection!”—For a kiss can bring you back from the great unknown!

Consider how Ocean Vuong opens Kissing in Vietnamese:

My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard

The lips become the site of language, affection, history, and fear, all at once.

Some kisses are less readily offered, and even harder to ask for, as in Robert Herrick’s To Electra:

No, no, the utmost share
Of my desire shall be
Only to kiss the air
That lately kissèd thee.

Some kisses make you want to tie the knot on the spot, as in Stephen Dunn:

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

Some kisses need not even be kisses! Here is Ada Limón looking at two tangled trees, pondering when kissing got so “dangerous”:

I want them to go on kissing, without
fear. I want to watch them and not

feel so abandoned by hands. Come
home. Everything is begging you.

And I’d be remiss to not mention Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her beloved Susan:

Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?

In fact, I’d be remiss to not mention so much—Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep”, Hozier’s “Like Real People Do”, and all the kiss-music and all the kiss-art, and so many other kiss-things that I will never get to.

But the inexhaustability of this list is what I’d like to leave you with. That so many of us kissed and then ran home to write about it, or laugh, or cry, or sigh about it. Far from the social and legal currency of the kiss, far from its symbolic value to art and literature, far from the science of neurons firing in the brain when lips meet, is our long-standing need for blurred boundaries—to become one with something else.

When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
All her flesh is like a mouth.

— Leonard Cohen, You Have the Lovers

To give and receive, in turn. To see and be seen. And felt. And loved.

]
] you will remember
] for we in our youth
did these things

yes many and beautiful things
]
]
]

― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (trl. Carson)

So, please… kiss more!

And till next time, I love you! xoxo

As I write this, Sonam Wangchuk, 21 days into his hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, has been forcibly removed by Delhi police officers goons under the guise of ‘medical intervention’. For anyone with a conscience, this sentence should invoke immediate dread and concern. Your survival instincts should be firing. You should be angry.

India has a long, familiar history of hunger strikes, though their effectiveness has been rightfully questioned, even by people such as Dr. Ambedkar, who was sceptical of civil disobediance and its “grammar of anarchy.”

Unfortunately, I don’t think Ambedkar completely foresaw a Modi-led BJP government which has proven itself to be more afraid of press conferences and public discourse than a fuckboy is afraid of condoms.

Over the last 20 days, we have been inundated with opinions from all quarters of the media and internet. Amidst pointless discussions of Wangchuk’s Bollywood movie involvement, the minute details of his physical deterioration according to ChatGPT, and which celebrity has or hasn’t posted a story about the situation, the point of the protest has flown over most people’s heads.

Who is Sonam Wangchuk trying to reach through his hunger strike? I swear to whatever god is in charge of this shit show, not a single news channel seems to even bother to mention what Wangchuk is actually protesting for.

In addition to his long standing campaign for Ladakh’s constitutional protections, Wangchuk’s primary concern is the condition of competitive exams in India. Over the last couple of months, there have been many controversies regarding transparency, corruption, and the quality of tests and testing agencies—particularly, the cancellation of the 2026 NEET-UG exam after a paper leak was uncovered, which meant millions of students had to prepare again for a re-examination. Reports of multiple students taking their lives following this news, stating emotional distress and undue pressure, has worsened the situation. Wangchuk has demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and a complete reform of India’s examination systems.

Who are we kidding? Did we expect the infamously inhumanitarian BJP government to suddenly come to their senses and feel empathy? I’ll give up eating beef if Modi can define empathy. Fuck it, I’ll do it if he can spell it.

We are talking about the same Modi who refused to engage with G. D. Agarwal, who died in October 2018, after fasting for 111 days, demanding restrictions on mining and stronger legal protection for a free-flowing, unpolluted Ganga. In fact, Modi’s only interaction with the whole situation seems to have been a single tweet—

“Saddened by the demise of Shri GD Agarwal Ji. His passion towards learning, education, saving the environment, particularly Ganga cleaning will always be remembered. My condolences.”

This is the BJP that Sonam Wangchuk wanted to negotiate with?

Gurdeep Sappal of The Wire noted that “Sonam Wangchuk Has Aimed a Gandhian Tool at the Wrong Target.” He goes on to argue that Wangchuk’s fast is misguided because it is aimed at a hostile government that lacks any conscience and also, there has not been enough transparency behind the movement and its aims.

While transparency regarding the AAP’s involvement and CJP’s goals should continue to be questioned, I’d argue Sappal on the first point. I don’t believe, perhaps in my immature optimism, that the hunger strike is purely aimed at the BJP government. Sappal’s argument discusses in depth how Gandhi’s hunger strikes were not merely aimed at the British Colonialists but inward—towards “his own people, his own conscience, his own community and followers.”

Tell me how Wangchuk’s protest is any different. Tell me how the hundreds of students who, even as you read this, gather at the Jantar Mantar, are not addressees of his hunger strike. Tell me how the appeal of humanity being made is not for the millions of parents across this country that, time and again, send their kids down the lightless tunnels of entrance exam preparations. Tell me how each of us watching an exhausted, helpless Sonam Wangchuk being dragged off stage under cover of sheets by police thugs in civilian clothes does not boil the blood. Tell me how this protest too will fail.

Wangchuk isn’t just protesting against the government, he’s protesting against all of us and our indifference too. Metaphor or not, this is the truth.

We know digital activism has made it easy for us to “tune in, turn on, and cope out.” We post our stories and articles, and bathe in the stolen valour of those like Wangchuk who actually go out and do the work that needs to be done. Tomorrow, we’ll double-tap to heart that “everything I ate this week” Instagram post. August will arrive, sure as hunger.

We are a nation obsessed with marks. We want higher scores, better accolades, a better child. Oppressive systems surely exist. But so do oppressive households. Another Dharmendra Pradhan, another Modi will surely return. But we can prevent ourselves from becoming our parents, if only we don’t forget. I know this is not a fair argument, that oppressive forces of politics, money, and power can be combated by the people of a country being “good citizens.” But we cannot, in good faith, ask for change without seeing our own mistakes first—and making sure we remember them.

If there is indeed a protest to be had in our digital spaces, it must be against forgetting. I hope Sonam Wangchuk does not fall victim to our fading attention spans. I hope the message is not lost in the static.

Yes, yes, sure, we can keep asking for accountability from the BJP. I’d rather ask for the favor of the fucking gods, if it is all the same.

How do we evaluate good poetry?

For context, I went to a CBSE school in India in the early 2010s. You might be thinking… what the fuck do I do with with this information?

Well… this fact is exclusive proof that, like every other child in this country that went to a CBSE school during the last decade or so, my earliest encounters with English poetry was that of the “classics”.

English teachers here looooveeeee yapping about the damn daffodils. The moody melancholia of the English countryside! And equally moody wanderings… of lonely men… as a cloud! Praise be!

Even as a child who’d only experienced the sweet sunlit countrysides of Kerala, who wasn’t particulary lonely, and who had never seen a single damn daffodil in my short fucking life, I loved ‘Daffodils’ and Wordsworth! Why? Because my English teachers, or at least the way they talked about it, seemed to suggest that it was the absolute epitome of human literary achievement.

And so, the harmless poetry of the Romantics, the gothic novels of the Victorians, and of course, the Shakespearean plays of… well… Shakespeare became the yardsticks against which I measured the value of all literature.

But after spending some fifteen-odd years slowly making my way down the sewer pipes of poetry, I now know better. We ascribe far more value to the classics than perhaps they deserve.

The problem is that the modes, categories, and the language we inherited from the past no longer fit our realities. The privilege that English studies has held in our post-colonial lives has, slowly but surely, blinded us. We have been fed the lie that British English should be the ‘standard’ for how we speak or write, and hence, its literature becomes the aesthetic and formal benchmark against which we must evaluate all other literatures. Even our own.

And if we cannot evaluate good writing without those rose-tinted glasses, how do we produce good writing that is free from the limited world-view that it offers?

The weight of antiquity bears down on all of us who now attempt to write through the medium of English. This is the central pre-occupation of the post-colonial project of poetry: to acknowledge Eurocentric standards of literature as a direct result of the Imperial hangover that still permeates countries like ours.

The goal of our writing in English is to “convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own”, as Raja Rao so efficiently puts it. To continue to use a language while also rejecting the way of structuring the world it seems to offer.

So, forgive me for not getting doe-eyed at the prospect of John Keating teaching a bunch of rich, stuck-up, prep-school American boys how to get in touch with their feelings. For all the misquoted, misinterpreted poetry in Dead Poets Society, you would atleast think that Keating manages to leave his students with something more than vague enthusiasm. Even as he preaches the importance of “looking at things differently,” he only ends up teaching them to look at things the way HE sees them. Yes, yes, jump on this table… exactly how I’m doing it! So different!

Before you punch me, the point isn’t that all our English teachers sucked, or that Dead Poets Society is a bad movie. It’s a great movie, and John Keating is a rightfully beloved character. But what they have left us with are romanticisations… ideals of feeling that are devoid of critical thought.

The point is also not that all classics are doodoo. Some of my favorite writers are (still) the dead white guys that I constantly make fun of, like the one and (maybe not) only, Mr. William ‘get-thee-to-a-nunnery’ Shakespeare. I will die on the same hill that Hamlet died on, all the incestuous stuff aside ( we don’t talk about that). In fact, I’m willing to go far as to say that the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy is one of the most enduring meditations on the human condition ever written.

The point is neither to reject English, nor to say that it is inherently incapable of conveying otherness. Because we know that it can.

The point is, perhaps, that we must make for ourselves new and inventive ways of evaluating poetry that is not beholden to the classics or thought-less, abstract ideals of beauty and aesthetics. And hopefully, our writing too will follow.

Till next time, I love you, bye. Oh, and I’d love to know… what’s one poem that has stuck with you from school?

With the FIFA World Cup just around the corner and tensions running high, I once again find myself in bed, contemplating sweaty adults slogging it out on a pitch, or a field, or a court, or whatever.

I can’t help but be a little jealous. I was never the sports kid. My feet never did what I wanted them to. Though I have run out of many things in life, not once have I outrun anything. If I were being chased, I’d rather lay down and accept death than run. You get the idea.

Needless to say, I took up chess, and became an English Major. Even went on to teach a Sports Literature paper last year. My own appetite for it notwithstanding, it is no great secret that sports is a matter of passionate contention, both in writing and in life.

People go crazy about it, dude. I mean, why be committed to your wife and kids, when you can commit your entire life to a European football team that you arbitrarily chose in the 6th grade? Why argue about human rights, or politics, or the slow death of the planet, when you can spend hours going back and forth with a stranger about Bradman’s hook shot, or whether the women in sports actually need to be paid as much as the men, because they “bring in fewer audiences”?

Insufferable people love sports.

But, so do poets. Any similarities are coincidental.

There are also genuinely nice people who have a thing for it. My grandmother, without fail, for years, was seated for every cricket match India used to play until Sachin Tendulkar retired in 2012. Nothing in the world could’ve gotten this woman to give up her 8 pm TV soap opera, except Sachin. I’m half convinced she’d give up her only grandson if Sachin offered to return to One Day International Cricket.

So, what is it that has attracted, for as long as we have known ball, millions of loyal fans and even more loyal haters to their respective stadiums, in their cute little matching jerseys, chanting and singing, and shouting horrible explitives into the opposing team’s faces, all these years? This week in Oi! That’s a foul! REFEREEEEE!!! — the poetry of sports.

What We Have Loved This Week

Since the great Greek thinkers put on their fuzzy thinking caps and started spewing bullshit about caves and shadows, athletics and sports have inextricably been linked to the cultivation of the mind, body, and soul. This was after they discovered opium and before they killed Jesus. A tough time period to be in, admittedly.

Much like art and poetry, the ancient philosophers prescribed sports as a means of achieving ethical, virtous excellence. Fucking weirdos. But we see here why sports remain observable, quantifiable metrics of moral and physical value. It gave birth to a long line of literature that we now call Sports Literature.

What the hell is that? I knew you’d ask!

It’s basically Ted Lasso, if I’m honest.

It’s writing where the stadium becomes a theatre, the player a protagonist, the match a metaphor for survival, ambition, and identity. Sports Literature captures the very real, very visceral drama of the game. And the more you read, the more you realize that the drama of sports is no different to the drama of life!

Friendship, rivalry, success, failure, triumph, disappointment, emotions running high — and I’m not talking about your high school days, when you were in love with three different people and didn’t know how to talk to any of them! No, friend, I speak of sports! And writers have figured out this not-so-subtle parallel between these silly games we play and the even sillier game of life.

For indeed, sports also becomes a book of personal wins and loses, private joys and tears. Even as the Italian poet Saba warns of the disease of Fascism, he still finds in him the incredible happiness of a shared moment brought about through football.

This unique ability of sports to lift people above daily despair is reflected in James Wright’s Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Wright’s vision of the American Midwest is dotted with beer-holding, factory-working fathers, and love-starved mothers. Wright ties up this violent image of industrial society with an equally violent, yet poignant image of American Football:

Poetry, as always, is guilty of finding transcendental beauty in the most brutal of places. This is one such instance.

Which brings us to the politics of sports. When you support your country’s hockey team, you’re no longer a sad old twat sat with day-old pizza on a dusty couch in your living room. Suddenly, you are a countryman. What’s on the line? Pride! This goes for all sorts of identities that sports let us become a part of. Think of all the little girls who saw themselves in Serena Williams, in Mary Kom, or Alyssa Liu. Think of all the little boys who saw themselves in Bugs Bunny from Space Jam.

Kwame Dawes, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, speaks of growing up in Jamaica, and then moving to Britain, and later, the US. He confesses: “…cricket is very important to me, and yet I have written so few cricket poems.” He attributes this to leaving Jamaica for a country where cricket is not important, and slowly losing passion for the game. However, his long meditation about this loss ends on an incredibly powerful note about the need to hold on to one’s heritage:

Consider me gagged.

And so, Sports Literature becomes social commentary. A sport can reveal much about its players. And a player can reveal even more about where they come from, how they had to grow up, and get where they are.

See how Yusef Komunyakaa celebrates basketball:

Beautiful and dangerous indeed, to see yourself so faithfully revealed in something you love. Sports becomes a mirror, and not just for the assured winners.

Because who doesn’t love an underdog story? Or any story of overcoming adversities to achieve something that someone told you was impossible? Think of Yusra Mardini or CeCé Telfer. Do we not yearn for literature, movies, songs that sing the praise of such heroes? Well… sports can give you that in real life! Ask any Messi fan. A commercial for the Museum of Soccer in São Paulo declares that “if soccer were a literary genre, it would be poetry.”

And so, perhaps, in no other genre does ‘art imitate life’ as markedly as in Sports Literature. Listen to Marianne Moore:

If you’ve ever created anything that is passable as art, you know the unpredictability of setting out to make something and ending up with something completely different. This holds true in sports too. They ironically call it an ‘upset’ when something unpredictable happens. But we all know that it is as far from upsetting as could possibly be.

And when we speak with such precision about our differences, about how sports lets us be our uniquely flawed selves, we should also speak of how it can bring us together; how it can dissolve our dissimilarities:

Dear Mr. Williams, here, is speaking of a crowd, the crowd, any crowd at any game in the world. Don't even need a ball, really. If you’ve ever been in a packed sports stadium, you know what he's yapping about. Every small decision in the game is now a decision of life and death; it is a revolutionary event, or at least, that’s what you’d gather from how crowds react. You feel every move, every shot, every miss in your bones. We become, even for a moment, part of something bigger than ourselves; greater than our differences.

Let me leave you with my favorite passage on sports. Though it is an excerpt from a novel, it is poetry to my eyes:

I’m not doing it justice by quoting bits and pieces here, but Karunatilaka, as often, is speaking the truth. Straight bars, if I may.

Nobody will remember you, or me, in a few decades. But for many generations to come, many grandchildren will remember how their grandmothers fell in love with a 5’5” giant named Sachin Tendulkar.

And I must write many poems about it.

Till later, I love you for being here, bye!

Ladies, gentlemen, NBs, haters… can we all agree that poetry and dogs go together like me and egg puffs? Funnily enough, since my last newsletter, I have befriended at least three dogs and devoured at least twelve egg puffs. Coincidence? I think not!

While cats have been often relegated to symbols of mischief and mayhem, dogs have gotten away with being symbols of devotion and love. Man’s best friend! Fuck cats, I guess?

Honestly, dogs aren’t even that sweet. In fact, there’s this little fucker next door who has a particular penchant for making sure I’m ready for bed before starting to belt his little throat out towards my window. Bless his soul. I hope he dies in a fire.

That being said, I find it difficult picking a favorite between cats and dogs in this imaginary competition I have made up. My commitment issues and history of liking people who don’t like me back obviously points towards feline favouritism. But I assure you, I love dogs just as much. I am nothing if not a good boy.

So, on that slightly kinky note, get those collars and leashes ready as we paw our way into a very short history of poetry puppers this week in… woof… woof woof woof… woof woof?

What We Have Loved This Week

GOD backwards, the word DOG, is a goddang doggone etymological mystery. Apparently, it just sort of appeared out of nowhere in the English language. The word that was commonly used to refer to our four-footed friends was ‘hound’. The true origin of ‘dog’ is debated and out of my pay grade to get into today.

What I do find interesting, however, is how much we’ve seamlessly absorbed this word and its animalistic habits into daily usage. We have such classics as dog-eat-dog, dog’s age, every dog has a day, go to the dogs, let sleeping dogs lie, who let the dogs out, call off the dogs, underdog, top dog, dog-cheap, dog days, dogpile, you old dog, you sly dog, you lucky dog, you horndog, raw dog, doggystyle, and the cherry on top, Snoop Doggy Dogg, my dawg.

Fortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the literary value of dogs. As pets, friends, hunters, enemies and so on, dogs have enjoyed a rather prestigious position in literary history as iconic muses. We’ve got everything from the mythical canines of yore like Cerebrus, Anubis, and Fenrir (that eventually ended up inspiring fuck-ass J. K. Rowling to create Fluffy), to the more modern iterations of dog-eared, tail-wagging, wet-nosed metaphors that have become a staple of modern literature today.

The Odyssey, famously, features Argos—Odysseus’ dying dog, who, ironically, has now become an undying metaphor for love, for having waited, unconditionally, for about two decades for his master’s return. I’m hearing Nolan has cast Timothée Chalamet for the role!

As for Argos, the dog, death and darkness in that instant closed his eyes,
now that he had seen his master, home again, after twenty years.

—Homer, Book 17, The Odyssey

And many years later, in 1952 Japan, we heard of Hachikō, who pulled a similar stunt, waiting almost ten years for his owner outside a train station. Talk about patience!

Rightfully so, Argos receives a dignified, albeit tragic, death. The same cannot be said for many other charachters in The Odyssey. And Hachikō has a movie, a statue, and the collective love and awwws of everyone on the planet to show for his efforts.

Do you see how easy it is for them to become a literary device, though?

Rumi wrote of ‘love dogs’, his symbols of… well… love, and yearning. For Wordsworth and Byron too, dogs stood for companionship and loyalty. The former referred to them as “comrades”, and the latter wrote an elegy for his dog Boatswain, who died of rabies:

To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

—Lord Byron, Epitaph to a Dog

Byron famously even erected a monument for Boatswain at Newstead Abbey that was notably larger than his own eventual tomb. How Romantic!… Eh eh eh… get it? Because Byron was a Roma… nevermind.

The stray dog is another interesting symbol, this time of urbanity. Billy Collins was particularly prey to this convention. In Dharma, Collins expresses envy for the way dogs live unencumbered by the materialism that plagues human life. Same, Billy, same. Also, in To A Stranger Born In Some Distant Country Hundreds Of Years From Now, Collins uses the imagery of an unwanted "wet dog" navigating a crowded pub as a metaphor for rejection and isolation. This is me after my second pint of Guinness.

I also have to mention Lawrence Ferlinghetti whose poem, Dog, is a hilarious take on the stray dog as a sort of democratic absurdist:

a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dog

For William Blake, things get a little bit more politically spicy: “A dog starvd at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State”. Incredibly Based. But none uses a dog to send a political message or, more accurately, an absolute mic drop, quite like Pope:

I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

—Alexander Pope, Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness

In this two-line poem, Pope utilizes the literal dog collar as a metaphor for the figurative collars worn by the human courtiers surrounding Frederick, Prince of Wales, at his Kew estate. The poem is sly, subversive, and a fucking incredible Trojan horse of an insult.

And, of course, a muse is no muse at all if not spoken to directly. Poems addressed to dogs are always quite heartbreaking, because… you know… they can’t read. That’s like me writing a heartfelt letter to my grandmother about how much she means to me… in Dothraki. It’s the thought that counts!

For instance, Browning addresses her dog, Flush, without the philosophical and mystical bullshittery of the Romantics. She speaks of her beloved pet in intimate detail. There is genuine warmth and gratitude:

Blessings on thee, dog of mine,
Pretty collars make thee fine,
Sugared milk make fat thee !
Pleasures wag on in thy tail —
Hands of gentle motion fail
Nevermore, to pat thee !

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, To Flush, My Dog

Not to be confused with To Flush My Dog, which is a rather different sentiment altogether.

And I wish I could tell you all poems addressed to dogs are this happy and wholesome. Most often, poets tend to write fucking elegies for dead dogs. Gee… I wonder why!

Mark Vinz’s The Way We Said Goodbye reflects on the wasting away of a pet, holding onto the memory of sitting: "There we sit, together, one last time / as all that sweetness slowly disappears." Jim Willis captures the ultimate sentiment of farewell in his lines:

Your place I'll hold, you will be missed,
the fur I stroked, the nose I kissed.
And as you journey to your final rest,
take with you this... I loved you best.

—Jim Willis, I Loved You Best

I’m sure it feels like losing a dear friend or a family member. I mean, I feel like crying when I’ve worn out a T-shirt and I’m forced to throw it out. This is why I can’t have pets, or nice things in general. Because the possibility of loss casts a deep purple shadow over all that is good. Those who write from the shadow, however, speak of it in great earnest.

Except for Kipling, who wrote my favorite treatise on the emotional risks of pet ownership:

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

— Rudyard Kipling, The Power of The Dog

And yet, he acknowledges in the poem that the "perfect passion" of a dog is worth the inevitable heartbreak—“Our loves are not given, but only lent”—and I wrote all this to say exactly that.

I don’t give a fuck about the dog’s literary value, bro. That’s just the hook. The point is that they teach us to love, despite the prospect of loss. If love is lent, then it goes that the tenancy must come to an end at some point. So, why not lend freely when you can?

Also, dogs don’t ask you your caste or what your favorite Drake song is before they decide to hump your leg. They just love you… because they don’t know anything else. Except for that one motherfucking loud-mouthed piece of shit next door. That dog will die alone and loveless. So, do me a favor and make sure you don’t!

I’d like to leave you in the safe hands of Mary Oliver, who dedicated an entire collection, Dog Songs, to her canine companions.

“Tell me you love me,” he says.

“Tell me again.”

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to tell.

—Mary Oliver, Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night

And as always, thank you for reading! Also, I’m sorry there’s so many dead white guys mentioned here. I’ll keep trying to include a more diverse selection of poets next time. Until then, I love you, bye!

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

— For a Coming Extinction, W. S. Merwin

Hello!

When I say the end of the world, what I really mean is the end of the human race. The world is going to be fine. The planet will continue beyblading long after the last scrap of human flesh is well and truly worm-poop. The cockroaches will outlive us all.

I don’t mean to bring on your monthly existential crisis. I’m sure you’ve read enough think pieces on the climate crisis to last you a very short lifetime. In fact, we have become so desensitized to it that the subject does not enjoy the limelight it held pre-Covid, when Greta Thunberg wasn’t busy getting arrested for having a backbone and supporting Palestine.

Let’s admit it: climate change has fallen off. Not enough social capital anymore for the influencers to care about it. Policy makers have better things to worry about… like oil… and pronouns. Nobody has ever listened to the scientists anyway (fucking nerds, right?). And the keyboard warriors who spend their waking hours tracking every flight that Taylor Swift has taken, so that they could scream at her for hurting the planet? Well, AI took their jobs, I think.

Have we given up, then?

Let’s look into it. This week in How many paper straws do I need to use to offset Sam Altman’s server farms: Ecopoetics, why I love it, and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved This Week

Ecopoetics? Never Heard of Her

I just finished reading Amitava Kumar’s The Green Book, where he talks about a conversation he had with Jonathan Franzen, who has been trying to inject some realism into the climate crisis debate. In his essay in The New Yorker (What If We Stopped Pretending?), Franzen’s argued that we ought to ‘accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.’ Now, I know that sounds extremely fatalistic and hopeless, but, guess what, bitch… it’s unfortunately true.

And this is what poetry has been trying to do: redefine hope in the face of impending, inevitable doom. Fuck the Romantics, man. We can’t turn to nature for aesthetic beauty and soul searching, if there is no nature left. We can’t use it as some divine mirror for human emotion whilst we’re actively destroying it. This is like saying… “My house is so beautiful and I see myself in it”, while setting the whole thing on fucking fire.

Cut to Ecopoetics. We woke up one day and BAM! We aren’t just passively experiencing nature anymore. Nature is all up in our shit, and vice versa. We make a dam. Nature floods our living room. We deforest. Nature buries your G-Wagon (or your Maruti Alto, I don’t judge) in a landslide.

Ecopoetics isn’t writing about trees. It’s writing about the bulldozer.

What It Do?

Well, how long do you have?

We could actually trace Ecopoetics, as we know it today, back to the (sigh) Romantics. These guys were so far up their own butts about nature that when the climate began to give them a reality check in 1816 (the year without a summer) even Byron, Mr. Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know, had a bit of a difficult time romanticising anything except the darkness:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day

— Darkness, Lord Byron

They started stirring the apocalyptic pot long before we got around to cooking it. And then, of course, the “satanic mills of Victorian England” happened. By the time we got to Eliot and Pound, everything was (literally) falling apart at the centre (WWII).

You know that familiar feeling of anxiety creeping up every time you watch OpenAI make the news for buying more NVIDIA chips, or Gemini improving their video generation software, or some grandpa in the US that is in love with Grok? Yeah, that feeling isn’t new. The Romantics knew it, the Victorians knew it, the Modernists knew it. I think the Hippies of the 1960s knew it best. But they had cocaine to take the edge off. We have something better though… short-form-endless-scrolling-video-content.

Ecopoetics is a mechanism to process this climate anxiety. A torchlight through the darkness, to see what it holds.

How It Do?

Much better question.

The first step is to actually identify the feelings you are feeling. Climate anxiety isn’t a monolithic block of fuck you. It’s more a nuanced collection of middle fingers. Ecopoetry let’s us parce through it.

Bad news? Neuroscientific research indicates that climate anxiety heavily triggers the amygdala, the brain's primary fear center. Good news? Poetry helps break the panic loop, “because verbal expression activates frontal- and parietal-lobe brain systems involved in emotional regulation. When those systems become active, the fear systems… tend to deactivate.” Science, bitch! [source]

So, here, see how Jane Hirshfield is slowly coming to terms with everything going to shit:

It begins subtly:
the maple
withdraws an inch from the birch tree.

The porcupine
wants nothing to do with the skink.

Fish unschool,
sheep unflock to separately graze.

— Cataclysm, Jane Hirshfield

Here she is again, this time that same acceptance but with a tinge of anger, or perhaps, guilt:

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

— Let Them Not Say, Jane Hirshfield

Here’s pure anger, maybe even hatred from Matthew Olzmann:

Tell me what it’s like […]
To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in and then,
to reach for your knife.

— Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America, Matthew Olzmann

That’s emotional granularity at work. Sure, sometimes it’s fear. But it could also be anger, or irony, or worry, or a sombre acceptance in Hirshfield’s case, or an incredulous hatred for humankind in Olzmann’s. Think of poetry as the litmus test.

Most often though, at least for me, the feeling I associate with the climate crisis is helplessness, which, coicidentally, is also the feeling I associate with most things in life. A lack of agency is, at best, troubling, and at worst, debilitating. Poetry is an antidote to helplessness. Reading and writing poetry transforms silent, isolating climate anxiety into a communal act of protest and shared survival. It brings about catharsis by association. The language of climate change is often deeply entrenched in confusing political mumbo-jumbo, scientific talk, and emotional anxiousness. Poetry makes it legible. Don’t believe me?

Here is Joy Harjo speaking of the anguish of trees:

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry—

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music—
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft—

— Speaking Tree, Joy Harjo

Is this not an anguish you recognize? In talking of trees, is she not talking of something patently human?

Or when we disavow Capitalism as evil, even as we sip of on our Non-Fat, Extra Whipped Cream And Chocolate Sauce Venti Lattes, do we really have the words to say what we mean?

The thing about realism
is industry really means
extraction but extraction

now means extinction
so industry is code
for annihilation

— Comprador, Mark Steven

When we speak of the great formless titan of climate crisis, do we truly have the language to map its scale? Katie Schaag in A Plastic Theatre attempts to do this, and the result is devastating. When she speaks of “saran-wrapped ocean waves”, or “styrofoaming wind”, or the landscape as a “bottomless oasis of plasticine deathlessness”, suddenly, we are not talking of a vague man-made distaster that is happening far away from us. Suddenly, we are in the thick of it, breathing the plastic air, drinking the plastic water, turning into “mutant mineral-vegetable-plastic-animals” by the minute. The climate crisis isn’t formless. It’s made in our image, just like Jesus intended.

One novel that I’ll champion till the day I die is Richard Powers’ The Overstory. While it is not a poem, the language of this novel is still very poetic:

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

This is why we need writing. To render the invisible, visible.

And then, there’s also, of course, the case of the Global Majority, indigenous populations, communities in the Global South, for whom the apocalypse is not a looming future threat: it is an ongoing historical event. Poets have written extensively about how colonization, in its pursuit of Western Modernity, has laid waste to deep ecological knowledge and severed the human link to nature. In India, Ramanujan, Mamang Dai, Jayanta Mahapatra, Ezekial, Daruwalla, Tishani Doshi, Sudeep Sen and many more have written of landscape, both rural and urban, as an archive of a violence that is at once colonial and environmental. This is too big a topic to broach here, but worth mentioning, nonetheless.

What Now?

While I did not want to attempt an exhaustive analysis of ecopoetics, it was important for me to stress how literature has historically been both an autopsy for the anthropocene and a survival guide for whatever comes next. The shift in poetry from “wow look at the daffodils, so pwetty” to “fuck, fuck, fuck, everything is dying, we fucked it, we boofed it, gang” unironically represents a shift in human consciousness. Poetry, to some extent, has managed to absorb the shockwave of the climate crisis.

So, where does that leave us?

Let me go back to the hopelessness of Franzen. Despite appearences, he’s not talking about giving up. By the end of his article, as Amitava Kumar points out, he tells us that meaningful climate action isn’t just about “saving the environment” anymore.

“Any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action… Securing fair elections… Combatting extreme wealth inequality… Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality…. free and independent press… —these are all meaningful climate actions.”

And I agree. What sort of ego must we have when we proclaim that we must SAVE THE PLANET, when we can’t even save ourselves?

And so, yes, everything sucks. Couldn’t agree more. But what are we about to do, bro? Paper straws are annoying. Those new Jordans look fucking great. ChatGPT does make life easier. And you feel guilty. But that’s how the cookie has been crumbling for ages. I’m sorry, friend. I don’t have an answer for you.

But I do have more poetry. Here’s Ada Limón talking about some tomatoes:

Even now, I don’t know much
about happiness. I still worry
and want an endless stream of more,
but some days I can see the point
in growing something, even if
it’s just to say I cared enough.

— Trying, Ada Limón

Oh, and also, this Orwell quote, speaking of planting some fucking trees:

I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

Louder for the people in the back!

Anyway, I hope this was a good read. Go water your plants. And read more poetry. MORE POETRY. In the words of Louise Glück: “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”

Till next time, I love you, bye!

Hello!

Parents! What’s up with that? Amirite? What’s their deal?

Why do people make other people and then go… fuck! I made another person. What do I do now?

My relationship with my mother, for instance, is a Theseus’ ship of parts changed, transformed, added and deleted, moved in and out… and, gang, I’m a little bit lost at sea. There are times when I’m stunned by her innocence, so startlingly childlike, and there are times when her naivety absolutely infuriates me. What do you mean I’m sitting here giving you advice that you will no doubt ignore? Who’s the parent here?!

So, let us explore this complicated clusterfuck of child-parent relationships and see whether I want to end it all by the end of this article. This week in —It’s not a phase mom! I’m 17 and that’s the girl I’m going to marry— Mothers, why I choose to forgive them, and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved Forgiven This Week

Step 1: Disillusionment

Motherhood, especially in India, is mythologized. In the hierarchy of things we are taught to give a fuck about, mothers, often, if not always, come out on top. They become synonymous with God. Unfortunately, the only real thing that mothers and gods have in common is how the rest of us strip them of all individuality and elevate them to some imagined paradigm of boundless sacrifice and moral purity. Now, some of you reading this might have had the luck of being born into absolutely horrible households, with mothers who happened to be neither sacrifical nor moral. I feel for you, but that’s another article.

This pseudo-glorification of the mother is, obviously, patriarchal bullshit. An impossible ideal to always aspire to? One that questions your worth at every juncture? Yum! Everything from ‘Mother India’ to ‘Operation Sindoor’ is political positioning. Mothers, wives, daughters—everyone gets their veneration as long as they stay inside these neatly drawn boxes.

And when the mother inevitably fails to uphold this divine standard, the child experiences a profound sense of betrayal. This is sort of like if you had a load of shit that you convinced yourself to be triple-chocolate-mud ice cream, and then hit the surprised Pikachu face when you found yourself with shit in your mouth. It’s not the shit’s fault, is it?

I’m not comparing mothers to poop. I’m just saying we fail to see themselves for what they are.

If you’ve grown up, something not all of us do, then at some point you’ve infallibly come to the singular most important realization that will shape your adult life: Your parents are not gods. In fact, far from it, they’re profoundly flawed, and will tell you the most hurtful things on a Monday morning for absolutely no fucking reason. Who asked for this? Statistically, nobody. My Right to Choose was categorically denied when my mother pushed me unwittingly out of herself, like the turd I am.

Mothers have an eye for your mistakes, yet are blind to their own. They make the worst choices, and say the darndest things. They will make you feel seen, and hence loved. They will also make you feel invisible, and hence hated. They are a smorgasbord of delicious feelings that can make you feel light and floaty, or, at times, heavy and flightless.

Step 2: Acceptance

This realization, this disillusionment, is not new or unique. Look no further than literature: everything from Euripides’ mythical murderess Medea to Toni Morrison’s Beloved to more recently Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me—talks about the question of what mothers owe their children and vice versa. Look to music: everything from Eminem’s long standing beef with his mother to Hozier singing:

“These days, I think I owe my life
To flowers that were left here by my mother
Ain't that like them, giftin' life to you again”

—reflects the duality of the mother figure. Also, fuck off Hozier. You make me want to curl up and die. Unreal Unearth? More like Unstable, Unwell.

And, of course, look to poetry. Here’s Larkin:

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you."

This is from a 1971 poem called This Be The Verse. It could not be stated more plainly than this. He ends the poem with: "Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself"—I mean, brother, come on. This is Generational Trauma 101. I like to imagine Larkin going up to his mom and personally flicking away the halo floating above her head with his index finger.

Plath anticipates later feminist intrerrogations of ‘idealized motherhood’ in Medusa, describing her mother’s over-involvement as “paralysing” and “squeezing the breath” from her. I’ve also been reading and re-reading Siken’s I Do Know Some Things. This is from Mercy:

“My father is the hand of justice: He finds me guilty. My mother is the hand of mercy: She finds me guilty but helps me realize why, when she’s around.”

Fucking heartbreaking, dude. This whole book, he examines his strained relationship with his mother. Such long interrogations are warranted for a subject of such depth and apparent confusion. Georges Simenon made the claim that “a novelist is someone who hates his mother.” Is it a surprise that writers tend to need 500 pages to actually figure out what the fuck is wrong with their mothers? It would be a tragedy not to mention Mother Mary again. Beyond the oft quoted “my shelter and my storm”, there is so much to unpack in this book that it’s dizzying:

“Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.”

Arundhati, gurl, take a few more books. We understand.

There is also the case of a rising awareness of your mother’s mortality. Fuuuuuuuu-uuck. Don’t die, I haven’t learned how to forgive you yet. You know? Well, you’re not alone.

Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay was modelled after her own mother who died when she was 13. Nabokov’s Lolita features a Kafkaesque (“My mother died today. Or yesterday”) line remarking maternal mortality: "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three". Billy Collins went on to write a whole book of poems dedicated to his mother titled Picnic, Lightning. There’s also Kamala Das, who wrote both about the loneliness of motherhood, and her own mother extensively. From My Mother at Sixty-Six:

"...I saw my mother, beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face
ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with pain
that she was as old as she
looked...”

And perhaps my favorite example, If All the World and Love Were Young, written by the very dear Stephen Sexton, a book-long elegy to his mother. Here’s the last poem where her absence, the TV box in the living room which was his escape, and the coffin that carried her body, all blend into one glowing light that fills the room:

“And now I think I
remember what I meant to say which is only to say that once
when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing
once in the corner of the room once when I was sitting in its light.”

Gods, unfortunately, do not die. Mothers, unfortunately, do.

Step 3: Forgiving

Alright! So, what’s the plan then?

How do we go about forgiving our mothers for being human?

First, exactly like that. Accepting that they are tragically human, hence granting them permission to err. Larkin and Plath failed, perhaps. But there are many who tried, nonetheless.

In Marie Howe’s poem My Mother’s Body, the daughter looks after her dying mother and ultimately finds empathy: “Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers, / our voice in my throat speaking to you now.” Recognizing that the mother possesses a body like her own, outside the "altar of idealized motherhood," allows the child to see her as a peer, paving the way for forgiveness. Wow, it’s almost like we can forgive them, if only we treat them like we treat ourselves—a being with a body, a heart, a soul and interiority!

Maya Angelou in Mother, A Cradle to Hold Me, goes through a curious transfromation. Mid-way through the poem, we get: “I loved you even during the years / When you knew nothing / And I knew everything.” Classic teenage behaviour. Teenagers are honestly the fucking worst. I know because I was the fucking worst. But only a stanza later, Angelou, now older, makes a confession:

“I grew older and
Was stunned to find
How much knowledge you had gleaned.
And so quickly.
Mother, I have learned enough now
To know I have learned nearly nothing.”

Talk about character growth! This sentiment was reflected in the latest episode of The Pitt too, when an older gentleman notes how: “Every old person knows what it is to be young, but no young person can know what it is to be old.” No matter how dumb you think your parents are, chances are you are dumber, solely based on time spent alive. It’s a hard pill to swallow. But the faster you get that down, the easier this will be.

The transition from worship to resentment to forgiveness is not easy. But, I think, it is necessary. Ultimately, learning to forgive our mothers for their humanity is the exact process by which we learn to forgive ourselves for our own. If we inherit anything from our mothers, let it be their fallibility. Go listen to Sufjan Stevens’ Death with Dignity: “I forgive you, mother, I can hear you.” If Sufjan can do it, so can you! Not your speed? Try the Spice Girls’ Mama or go watch Everything Everywhere All at Once, again.

What I’m trying to say is that you won’t be the first to do it. You sure as fuck won’t be the last. You know that old Pope line?: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Well, I disagree.

I think to err is human; to forgive, even more so.

Till next, I love you, bye!

How would you feel if aliens who knew nothing about your lived experience came down tomorrow and started making up rules about what it means to be human, because they just can’t seem to wrap their big-ass heads around how all this complex human business works… and suddenly you have to fucking prove to the weirdos that you are human when all your life you’ve been… you guessed it… HUMAN!

If you’re like me, you’re obviously a little pissed at this new Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill that has just been introduced in the Lok Sabha by the Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment. Read that again. Social Justice and Empowerment. The jokes write themselves. In the scenario with the aliens, at least we’re assuming they are dumb. Indian politicians can’t even be awarded that grace. This is textbook weaponized incompetence. It is actively hostile.

It’s not like this country has other pressing issues to deal with, but we have suddenly woken up to realize that all the hard-won constitutional rights governing transgender lives in India are… I don’t know… too confusing for these butt-hurt little babies. Oh, no… are the big words confusing your lwittle baby brains? Nooo… the horror! Get fucked.

Make no mistake. This Bill, that disguises itself as a means of visibility and ‘administrative clarification’, is nothing but a means of erasure. There is no progress being made by taking away the right to self-determination. I thought our whole Indian identity was built on rejecting the leftovers of British colonialism? I thought we were busy renaming every fucking street in the country so that we could be proudly Indian? How come Trans Rights don’t figure into this stick-up-your-butt patriotism when India has historically integrated, institutionalized, and even revered non-binary identities in everything from myths, to movies, to courts of law?

So, let’s get into it. In this week’s episode of People with Six Months Left to Live Decide Everyone Else’s Future: Transgender Rights — why I care, and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved Should Care About This Week

Everything about the new Bill ignores the Indian Subcontinent’s complex, highly nuanced historical understanding of non-binary identities and gender variance. Transgender persons, contrary to the believes of the dumbasses in the Lok Sabha, weren’t magically pulled out of a leftist magician’s hat to radicalize young people.

The Puranas and Vedic literature have ubiquitous integrations of gender fludiity. In fact, the Sanskrit language explicity uses three genders—masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral. Imagine getting outclassed by an ancient language.

Consider the Ramayana, second only to George of the Jungle in my list of favorite stories with a talking monkey: On Lord Rama’s exile from Ayodhya into the forests, he commands his devout subjects, all the “men and women”, to return to the city. The transgender individuals in the crowd basically just go ‘welp!’ and stay on the edge of the forest for FOURTEEN YEARS for the return of the politically incorrect king. He ends up rewarding their devotion with the power to bestow blessings on special occasions—a tradition that has carried over into the present day, with members of the hijra community invited to sing, dance, and bless marriages and childbirths. There is much to unpack here. One, there seems to be no question of visibility when it comes to blessings. You can’t really receive God’s divine gift from a person whose existence you can’t acknowledge. Secondly, this story is an enduring metaphor of the importance of inclusive language, and also, the fact that non-binary communities have been literally waiting around for years for the cis-pricks to get with the program.

The Mahabharata is more upfront with its iterations of gender transition and fluidity. The Shikhandi, trans-masculine warrior extrodinaire, basically drives the climax by kicking in-house patriarch Bhishma’s sorry ass. There is also the case of alpha male Arjuna famously living his final year of exile as Brihannala, a transgender woman.

In broader Hindu myth, we’re all familiar with the concept of Ardhanarishvara, the androgynous collab between power couple Shiva and Parvati. Even Lakshmi and Vishnu, perhaps jealous of their peers, get in on the action, forming the Lakshmi-Narayan composite. Morever, my favorite bit is, of course, Vishnu taking the female avatar of Mohini to seduce Shiva. We were gay for our bros before it was cool!

Fast forward to the reality of the 1200-1700s—under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, transgender persons, known historically as the Khwajasarais or Nazirs, were integral to the empire. Elevated by their roles in Islamic institutions, as guardians of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, they held highly sensitive, powerful positions within the state as political advisors, royal emissaries, and military commanders. Furthermore, their non-binary gender status allowed them free access to all spaces within the imperial courts, including the strictly segregated royal harems (zenanas), placing them at the absolute center of courtly intrigue, intelligence gathering, and empire-building. So, next time you have a fit over gender-neutral bathrooms, check yourself.

I’m not saying everything was good and well in these lands before the British came along, but, hey, they royally fucked us. The introduction of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 1864, criminalizing all “unnatural offences”, and the categorization of transgender individuals under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 were draconian and unconsitutional, to say the least. These colonial laws mandated the compulsory registration of “eunuchs”, authorizing detailed registries of their names and residences. Hmmm… a compulsory certification??? Sound familiar???

The ‘Othering’ was systemic. It stripped the community of its property, historic prestige, and their fundamental humanity. They were relagated to the economic margins, and baselessly stigmatized as inherently prone to kidnapping and emasculating young boys—a sentiment that the new Bill shamelessly repeats.

Even after the British left, the film and popular culture industries of this country spent decades carrying on this tradition of defamation. The representations of transgender individuals in mainstream cinema swung baselessly from caricature and comic relief to the psychotic and horrifying, drawing associations of transness with predation, deviance, and criminality. While regional and indie cinema over the years has been successful in placing queer and transgender narratives in a more nuanced, progressive, and authentic space, the popular imagination is still healing from the years of damage that has been inflicted by mainstream media. Another issue is the co-opting of these narratives by cis-gender film-makers and writers who have built whole careers using them. This could be a whole other article, so I will resist the temptation to go off on tangents.

Things finally started looking up with the NALSA judgement of 2014, which unequivocally recognized transgender individuals as a distinct “third gender”, but, more importantly, it established a legal principle that the right to self-determine one’s gender indentity is intrinsic and autonomous. Crucially, it delinked gender identity from biological anatomy or medical intervention. In 2018, Section 377 was struck down. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019 was enacted to operationalize the directives issued in NALSA. It acknowledged a wide spectrum of gender identites, aligning with international human rights standards.

THIS was progress—the same progress that is being erased right now. The 2026 Amendment Bill seems to work on the principle that none of this happened and there is no great well of history to draw from. The rewriting and redefining is ignorant but not accidental. Doing away with self-identification is unconstitutional, violently contradicting the NALSA judgement, and, more importantly, it is stupid… because the conflation of intersex conditions with transgender identity is a clear demonstration of a profound misunderstanding of medical science and social reality. Gender identity is a matter of the mind and spirit, not anatomy. It is not subject to the whims of the dumbasses-in-charge. Any medical gatekeeping violates a fundamental Right to Privacy. And the re-institutionalization of derogatory nomenclature is an affront to human dignity. Lord Rama is turning in his grave.

Homi K. Bhabha, in his essay “Writing the Void,” defines the void as “the empty space of erasure and extermination – of missing persons, destroyed things, hidden histories, lost records, expropriated lands, murdered minorities.” He insists that writers who speak from and about the void must evoke this emptiness and erasure without filling the absences. My goal here is not to evoke a unified national story of non-binary identity, but to acknowledge what has been lost, and perhaps, most importantly, what might be lost and erased, if we do not care.

The problem isn’t just that the Bill is unjust; it also stands in contention with India’s mythical imagination, social history, and legal jurisprudence. Trans presence in India is not new, marginal, or Western. It is archival, ritual, literary, and lived. What changes across time is not their existence, but the state’s willingness to recognise it. And hey… the state can go fuck itself.

About a hundred or so years ago now, Eliot confered upon April the title of ‘the cruelest month’. I’m sure he would have had an anuerism if he’d lived to see the Februaries and Marches that I’m currently living through.

Oil wars, international temper tantrums, and infuriating Tourettes discourse aside, it is also fucking hot as balls in the pubic triangle bit of my world. In the last few sweltering months of merciless sun that I’ve sweat through, I’ve come to find the best place to be is inside. Can’t fucking global-warm-my-ass if I don’t leave my room.

In this brief commercial break from touching grass, I reverted to my base model settings. So, I bit the damn bullet, bought myself some acrylics, and put brush to paper. Behold, clouds!

And, obviously, in the intersectional library aisles of my brain, an itch formed so naturally, so effortlessly, so as to beg… well… itching! And on that note, this week in - Cumulus? I sure hope it does!: Clouds, why I love them, and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved This Time

They’re beautiful and come in all shapes and sizes: big and round, flat and puffy, firm and full, loosey-goosey… you get the idea. We’ve all seen them. We all want to touch them. Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m, of course, speaking about clouds!

As I was writing this, I realized that I’ve never actually seen what the Wiki for ‘cloud’ looks like, and I had to see. You know you’re in for a doozy when the article begins with: “In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, ice crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space”, whatever the fuck that means. Where is the poetry??? What happened to whimsy???

I mean, it’s cotton candy that floats in the sky; it’s Gandalf smoking a fat one; it’s caused by some fucking Indian villagers who have broken out in full-on Bollywood dance numbers in hopes of rain! Source (Please click this)

You know what I love, though? Merriam-Webster defines cloud as: “Something that has a dark, lowering, or threatening aspect.” Merriam and Webster, you wee cheeky bastards, you’ve done it again! Needless to say, I love taking this fluffy little water sponge and using it to threaten. A cloud of smoke, the cloud of war, a cloud of suspicion… how fun! Meteorological observation meets human psychology. In fact, earlier in its etymology, it even stood for “removed from earthly objects”, “dome of the heavens”, and “vault of the sky”. I mean, mysterious AND sexy? Like the racially ambiguous protagonist of a romantasy!

I’m sure the ontological allure that clouds have long held is a product of their inherent mutability, ever-shifting and untethered from terrestrial, human concerns. In fact, when Luke Howard, in 1802, introduced the groundbreaking paper that would since become famous for differentiating clouds into cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and cumulonimbus, rather than demystifying the heavenly domes, it ended up making clouds, somehow, more poetic. Goethe responded to Howard appropriately in his Poem on the Clouds:

“To find yourself in the infinite,
You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.”

And so, no drugs involved, we’ve been finding ourselves in the infinite for hundreds of years now, all thanks to our friends in the sky.

The point is, before and after school teachers across the globe hit students over the head with the Wordsworthian “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, we’ve been sort of tapped into profound metaphysical mythologizings of the cloud. Say that ten times! Wordsworth wasn’t the only Romantic who got his greasy hands all over the cloud. Shelley, for instance, when he had time away from all the eloping and marrying and blashphemy of the church, tried to give it a voice. And so, an egotistical cloud in his poem proclaims itself the daughter of Earth and Water,

“And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die."

Calm down, bro. Perhaps, this might have been a case of clouded judgement. Ba-dum-tsk! Sorry, sorry… I’ll stop.

The Modernists, on the other hand, couldn’t fucking help themselves and ended up using clouds as a metaphor for their pessimistic-ass-fragmented-reality-bullshit. Is nothing sacred?! Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves:

“It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever.”

Hole imagery notwithstanding, I have not read The Waves. Hand to heart, I found this quote on Goodreads, Twitter for pretentious whores (respectfully), like me. But I don’t need to read a whole novel to recognize Woolf’s classic Modernist stream of consciousness yapping. But alas, nothing remains for ever, the centre falls apart, yada yada, not even, and especially, clouds.

As usual, tracing everything everyone has said about clouds is beyond the purview of this humbleSubstack post. But I have to tell you about the one writer who I would probably take a bullet for: Anne Carson! Her Lecture on the History of Sky Writing is an incredible read and an even better watch. On the second day of the week, we get to the sky telling us about itself, in the process of making, or becoming, clouds:

“Tuesday I became clouds. Possibly a defensive measure - everyone loves clouds, they lift the heart, they lift the eye. Actually they lift the heart because they lift the eye. Cognitive scientists say that people place gods in the high blue sky because looking up causes a rush of dopamine in the brain. Yet clouds do more than draw your eye upwards. They invent your imagination.”

I would trust Carson over my own mother in this matter. Zeus, Odin, Jesus, Vishnu, Horus, Santa Claus, Peter Pan, Superman… all the looking up we’ve ever done, all that we’ll ever do, is all in search of that hit of dopamine. And the kicker? You really don’t need supermen and mediocre gods. All you need are the clouds. Look up, baby!

And for the two people who got to the end, I’ll leave you with one of my own poems, strangely about someone named after the clouds. Till next time, I love you, bye!

How is everyone’s week going? I, for one, am fresh off a terribly organized literary festival, and exhaustion is weighing on me like a heated blanket. However, I must say, there is nothing quite like large-scale incompetence to raise your spirits and make you feel better about yourself. The event you paid for sucks? At least you’re not the one running the shitty show. A celebrity is being purposefully oblique? Hey, at least, they’re not in the Epstein list (yet).

I miss when the whole world being run by super rich pedophiles was some unhinged fever-dream cooked up by the freaks over at r/conspiracy. These motherfuckers have somehow pushed the standard for evil so far past what I previously thought was the cliff-edge, I’m sure even Satan is in Darkness Visible, the ol’ down under, like ​”Oi! What the actual feck is wrong with youse? You’re making me look like a choir boy here! I’m trying to run a legitimate operation of eternal damnation, and you lot are taking it to a weird place. I run a torture pit for eternity and somehow I’m the one feeling sick looking at this? Youse are absolute mongrels. Get out of it.”

Anyway, talking about evil… CATS! Strays have been on my mind recently for two reasons: 1) They’re everywhere, and 2) I like them for the same reason I like my girlfriend, vis-à-vis, their absolute lack of willingness to put up with any of my bullshit. Today, I’d like to explore this curious thought further.

And on that note, this week in Whaddahell, it’s a cutie patootie: Strays, why I love them, and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved This Time

The word ‘stray’ offers the best entry point into this delightful exposé on your friendly neighborhood feline. As the saying goes, all those who wander are strays. Ah… to stray, to wander, to roam, to digress, to run loose like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind… sorry. Street cats are travelers, explorers, conquerors! These Ibn Catutas grace urban pavement and rural soil, all the same. Fur baby adventurers! Maybe Puss in Boots wasn’t too far fetched an idea.

With their knack for showing up unannounced and their zest for life, stray cats seem to exist in some liminal space unaffected by anthropological assholery. I’m sure being cute lets them get away with a lot, something I know a thing or two about, and something that the local shaggy dog population hold with great jealousy and contempt. Cats seldom receive the shoo-shoo treatment that stray dogs are susceptible to. And more or less, they seem to have found a way to coexist with humans, regardless of the last time they had a proper wash. Go on lads, lick those buttholes clean!

At this juncture, it is important to pinpoint what really sets stray cats apart from their house-dwelling turncoat counterparts. For one, their whole shtick seems to be the very condition of their ownerless-ness. The poor keyboard-crunchers with their 9-to-5s spent sucking up to their bosses can’t relate. Stray cats give off freelancer-energy. Who cares about getting paid or having a proper meal or sleeping on a mattress when you can hold the moral superiority of not having to answer to anyone above your compatriots heads’? This would also explain the smug faces that have become a staple of the stray cat lifestyle. What indeed does a motherfucker named ‘kitty’ have to be so smug about if not the sweet reprieve of emancipation from the powers that be?

There is also, of course, the matter of the literary value of a cat. Forgive this tomfoolery, but sometimes I rate the value of things based on how much they’ve been written about. Cats are up there with love, desire, death, god and exes. Every two-bit writer of any worth, from Baudelaire (from whom the title of this post is stolen) to Bukowski (whose worth is arguable), has had something to say about cats. My personal favorite? I’m glad you asked! One of my poetry professors, Dr. Fran Brearton, who also happened to be a certified cat enjoyer, showed us Christopher Smart’s For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry and I’ve been in love ever since, partly because he named his cat Jeoffry and partly because of the lines:

"For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire."

The list goes on… Rilke famously refers to the black coat of cats as some all-absorbing black-hole, a cat shaped void in reality; Eliot was struck by the difficulty of naming a cat, a name only the cat knows and does not reveal:

"the thought of his name:
          His ineffable effable
          Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name."

And then there’s Atwood zoning in on her cat’s “yellow / Houdini eyes” and “small pink bumhole”, a woman after my own heart. She winds up the poem by asking her cat to “Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.” Sure, put in on the to-do list. Here, then, is the same instinct that led us to build giant Egyptian cat statues, that strange feeling that cats have some sense of the divine that escapes us mortals with only one life to figure it out, let alone nine.

Or think of Harold Monro who describes his milk loving cat as “one breathing, trembling purr”; or some unknown 9th century Irish monk who saw a cat hunting mice and saw reflected in that act—himself, hunting for words… “So it goes. To each his own”; or Neruda writing about about the cat as a sort of self-sustaining universe, “how the night / flowed through it like dark water”; or Mary Oliver watching her cat and then literally going ‘bro, this is everything’ when she writes “what more could I do with wild words?”; or Kobayashi Issa’s famous haiku:

"Goes out,
comes back—
      the love life of a cat."

Listen, brother, you get the idea. I got a little carried away with the whole cat thing and strayed into domestic cat territory (hehe, see what I did there). Nonetheless, consider this a sign—if you see a stray cat, psst-psst that fucker. Learn from their willingness to wander and get lost and find their way back; their pride and their fierce independence; their want to survive AND their want to lounge about and do absolutely fucking nothing!

And on a final note, just to circle back to etymology, you should know that ‘stray’ and ‘extravagant’ literally came from the same Latin word. So, if nothing, when you see a cat, at least remember to go out there and be sassy, bro, be gay!

Aussie Satan will return in Avengers Doomsday! Till then, I love you, bye!

Um… so… ok… I know… elephant in the room! Wicked for Good has zero Oscar nominations!?

I’m kidding. Listen, I sort of disappeared off the face of the earth for a bit and abandoned all five of you, kind readers. I was away contemplating the granularity of my existential lollygagging against the “unexpected density of stars”. That’s an Akhil Katyal original, look him up.

No, seriously, I kind of got tired of being on Instagram and Reddit and got rid of everything. Which means this Substack, which was built on the solemn promise of endless Instagram and Reddit slop, sort of, you know, became pointless, much like the passion of Christ. Now, I’m not saying I’m Jesus, but have you seen me with long hair and a beard? The resemblance is uncanny.

I digress. I also missed typing the word ‘digress’. I digress.

NOW this does NOT mean What We Have Loved is back for GOOD. I think, sticking to a schedule slowly ate away at my soul. I’m not a schedule-person. I don’t even like showering everyday, let alone writing a Substack every week. Change is the only constant? How about my constant lack of routine. From here on out, it’s going to be the Wild Wild West, except Substack will be the Smith & Wesson, my posts .44s, and the tumbleweed of comedy will be seen rolling away quietly in the background. You are going to get one of these in your inbox whenever (THREAT).

But what about content, you ask, with your elbows on a table, and your chin resting on your palms, looking up at me with heart-eyes. Well, kids, I have absolutely no idea. I think what went wrong last time was focusing too much on what’s new. So, instead of three hundred new things to fall in love with every week, I’m slowing down. I’ll find one thing, maybe new, or maybe older, like a black & white movie, or an album from the 70s, or a grandparent, that I want to talk to you about. Plus, I think, less content from influencers, and more from… me? I hope this sudden directional shift doesn’t give you vertigo, as I go from slop-dealer to the annoying guy who gets sober and then tells you drugs are bad. Motherfucker, you taught me how to smoke!

And on that note, this week in Where the Fuck is Frank Ocean?: Blonde, why I love the album and why I think you should too.

What We Have Loved This Week Time

Blonde, also spelled Blond for some reason, has a couple of things going for it. First of all, Frank Ocean is the first Bi person in the world. Facts. Second, this damn album cover has adorned every angsty teenage boy’s bedroom wall for a decade now, and Etsy sellers have made a killing off of t-shirts, hats, mugs, rugs, fucking phone covers, the works, all showing this naked man whose hair isn’t even fucking blonde.

But once you listen to the album, you sort of realize that’s the point. THE HAIRCUT. We’ve all been there. The unexpected but totally predictable break up, the failed exam, the loss of a friend because they thought you smelled like doo-doo wrapped up in a sweaty towel, or even something serious, like realising your whole life is a lie and you are someone different from the one you thought you were. What’s the easiest way for your physical appearence to reflect this abrupt internal change? Exactly! An enema… I mean… a haircut, a new hair color, you know, ANGST!

Blonde is the quintessential coming-of-age album. I know what you’re thinking: Mr. Loved, you are already a grown ass adult, and at this point, for you, coming of age should only mean the age of accepting the inevitability of death. Why are you swooning over this album?

I’m not a music critic. Gun to my head, you couldn’t get a single melody out of me. But allow me to make my case. Blonde has been defined as a genre-defying album. I agree. It’s non-macho rap music, it’s jazz without the pretense, it’s indie-rock that’s stadium-sized and ambitious, it’s psychedelic that’s firmly rooted in reality, it’s R&B that’s… you get the idea. Listening to this album front to back in one sitting is the musical equivalent of getting waterboarded with glitter, which sounds horrible, but imagine you’re into that sort of thing. It will leave you reeling, in the best possible way. You don’t even need to be high to enjoy this album (though it doesn’t hurt), despite what the stoners think, bless their souls.

There’s something gorgeous about the way memory is accessed in this album. The music is nostalgic but still sounds like it came out yesterday. People throw around the word ‘timeless’ a lot, but the way Blonde travels musically and lyrically through non-linear fits and starts of memory, how it engages with the sudden joy or grief that an image or smell or sound can invoke, how it lets itself breathe, there is something about it that transcends time. The use of voice filters, ad-libs, auto-tune, voice notes, atmospheric sounds, it’s all tasteful and intentional. The more you dive into this album, the more it has to offer.

Unlisted background vocals from Beyoncé, and a truly unhinged and beautiful feature from André 3000 are the least impressive things about this album. And that’s saying a lot. You could be 15 or 55, it does not matter. I could go on and on about Blonde, but nobody is sitting here reading my PSA, except you, loser. Go listen to the project. Please.

Ah, the dreaded goodbye. It’s okay. I come back later. Until then, I love you, bye.

Oh, what’s that? Why am I a better person than you? I’m so glad you asked.

I finally managed to delete the Instagram app off my phone this week. And for good reason!

Recently, I’ve noticed myself accidentally unlocking my phone, my fingers robotically scrolling the app drawer, magically clicking the Instagram app open, and automatically start scrolling reels. Plus, all this India-Pakistan propaganda, and constantly having to read dumb people’s dumb takes on the whole shit show was just bumming me out. So, I did the hardest thing humanly possible in this economy: uninstalling the app. I don’t know what it says about me that such a menial thing is giving me so much pride, but that’s where we are in the world.

The revolution, it would seem, begins with the uninstall button. Though… maybe ‘revolution’ is pushing it.

Now, I still have access to Instagram through a web browser, in case of messages. But the experience of using the web version is so outrageously horrible that I can’t stay using it for more than like 2 minutes at a time. And as far as staying in touch with the culture, I say, what culture?

And on that note, this week in ‘So, you’re telling me you hate people picking their preferred pronouns, but you’re okay with the Pope picking his preferred name?’: Pulitzer? More like Pulitz-her; chill music; a how to be chill video; sometimes you gotta Pope out; I didn’t choose the soda life, the soda life chose me, and so much more!

So, stop conclaving, and go wave hi to your fans!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Marie Howe won this year’s Pulitzer for Poetry. I never really got into Howe before but it has been fun discovering their work. So far, my favorites are Chainsaw, Postscript, What the Living Do, and Hurry.

• Get your ears lubed and ready! It’s New Music Monday:

  • Peach Pit’s new album sounds just like you imagined, peach pitty.

  • Seedhe Maut has a single out from their upcoming album. Smooth!

  • Who saw a Timeless remix with Doechii coming?

  • PinkPantheress’ new album Fancy That is… dance music?

  

• Over on YouTube, my favorite internet therapist daddy HealthyGamerGG aka Dr.K has a very helpful video titled What To Do When The World Is Falling Apart. Pretty self explanatory.

• You think you know what a tree is? Think again.

• Longform this week is pretty tame, but still worth the read: check out Skype memoirs and why the new Pope picked Leo.

• And, finally, in the tragic absence of Instagram slop, I thought I’d introduce you to a new favorite subreddit every week:

  • Today, we have the most earnest corner of the internet: r/Soda. It’s honestly just a bunch of pure souls who just really, really enjoy carbonated drinks. Everything from finding old drinks to announcing their excitement for upcoming ones. Wholesome all around.

That’s it! I check the stats every week and there’s at least 40-50 people who click on this newsletter. I don’t know how many of you make it to the end. But if you do, I really do appreciate you. Reach out, I’d love to hear from you.

Next week in What We Have Loved: 'Trump calling for ceasefire between India and Pakistan has the same energy as me trying to get my mother and grandmother to stop fighting.’

Till then, I love you, bye!

This week we’re doing a vibe check.

How is everyone doing, four months into the year? How are those New Year’s resolutions going? Has anyone fallen in love? What about a dream job? Has anyone quit theirs? What about those muscles? Are the six packs coming in yet?

I know, I sound sarcastic and douchey. But I’m genuinely curious. Besides, it’s nice to just stop for a while, take a few deep breaths, check on the skin care progress, try out a new curl cream, change the bedsheets, check if there’s any webbing to clean out of the ceiling, you know what I mean? It’s so easy to lose track of time, of progress, of what you’re doing and what you should be doing and what you want to be doing instead. It’s easy to get swept up in the wave after wave of daily sewage that life throws at you. If you find a plank, get your ass on it.

That is why the whole 100 men v/s 1 gorilla discourse on the internet has been so intriguing for me. Kinda feels like a plank, doesn’t it? For the first four months of the year, the internet has been feeding us war, violence, hysteria, political unrest, Am I Over Reacting posts on Reddit, terrible remakes, and general socio-cultural disintegration bullshit. And then, here’s everyone talking about something stupid, something inconsequential. Takes me back to the what color is this dress days. *Sigh*

My bet is on the gorilla, unless we are willing to give up a few guys for the cause. Distract first, attack later. Anyway, we must get into this week in “Church and State should be separate, unless we are making Trump the new Pope. I’d actually love to see that”: short poems; long articles; actions and consequences; music and mayhem; bunnies, penguins and so much more!

So, stop taking your turn, and rush right in!

What We Have Loved This Week

• I’d like to introduce you to Stephen Crane, not that he needs introduction. Dude’s your run of the mill white man but was an extremely prolific writer. Check out In the Desert and I saw a man pursuing the horizon, to get your started.

• New Music Monday!

  • Flume and JPEGMAFIA

  • Oh, and Hobo Johnson, after forever.

  • Oh, and and and Westside Gunn and Doechii!!

  

• Big Think on YouTube teamed up with Brian Klaas for a very klassy (sorry) video on the Butterfly Effect.

• One of my favorite episodes of Ask Hank Anything came out this week featuring Ludwig from games.

• If you read anything this week, read the Verge’s article of the children of dust, the generation of orphans that survived the fall of Saigon. Operation Babylift, and it’s aftermath.

• And then, if you want to read more, read about my GOAT, Magnus Carlsen.

  

• Ready or not, here comes the slop:

  • The Good, The Bad, and The Bunny.

  • What actual talent looks like.

  • Ayueeehhhhh!!!

  • The T in T-Pain stands for That Bitch.

• Also, bonus slop that actually is the best thing ever: baby, meet penguins.

What a week! I do believe the internet is seeing one of its great meme resurgences that happens once or twice a decade. Very excited. Very scared. Very horny.

Next week in What We Have Loved: “100 Men v/s Emotional Accountability.”

Till then, you know I love you. Bye!!!

This week, I wrote no poetry. In the wake of the attacks in Kashmir, writing about anything else seemed meaningless. Writing about Kashmir is no less difficult. The ongoing occupation of Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the now brewing tensions between India and Pakistan have formed this sort of triangular black hole of misery, and I fucking hate triangles.

The great waves of empathy that washed across Socials over the last few days have receded. No more Ghibli style photos of dead bodies, thank fuck. The conversation has smoothly rolled over to violence, retribution, and revenge. The bigots have never been happier. And our Prime Minister is busy campaigning for his next election.

My own thoughts remain at this time with the families, who must now deal with their loss, with the people of Kashmir, who will continue to be vilified and harmed as a result of these events, and an administration that continues to fail them. But none of these things are surprising.

No, the surprise has been the memes. Pakistan, I was not familiar with your game. The humor and irony that has been on display, following news of a war, has restored some of my joy. A lot of the reaction from this side of the border has been hilarious as well. It has been such a pleasant surprise to see that years of propaganda can so easily be dismantled by a good, or even a bad, joke. Great monoliths of power can surely do nothing to combat a profoundly funny population. This right here, is how we cope: one unserious shitpost at a time.

For now, let’s get back into this week in “Trump falling asleep at the Pope’s funeral boyfriend v/s Zelenskyy getting applauded by world leaders girlfriend”: summer music; reading comprehension; drinking from a human skull; insane celebs; shitposts from the warfront, and so much more!

So, prepare yourself, and be nice!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Even people who have only glanced at poetry, with the air of a curious bystander to an accident, must have come across the name of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet. I will leave you to look up his poetry yourself, but you can get started with Land.

• Lovely week for music:

  • Lorde hath returned, music video up for What Was That.

  • Debut album from TDE’s Ray Vaughn, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu.

  • Thug and Future are back speaking about how much money they have, AGAIN.

  

• I’m going to bet longform content makes a come back. The ChatGPT fueled brainrot must backfire at some point. Get ahead of the curve and read Jacob Silverman’s take on AI and the hostility of the Internet.

• Oxford academics try not to be deranged challenge, level: impossible.

• Jared Henderson over on YouTube has a very informative video on our need to consume content.

• Also, this week in What The Fuck is Wrong with Rich People: Katy Perry’s insane tour choreo and Usher waiting for his doorman to hold his door open instead of just fucking walking through the already open door?!?!?!?!?!

  

• And finally, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Instagram Slop:

  • Subliminal messages from the woods.

  • Internet arguments.

  • A poop interrupted.

  • And my favorite war meme so far.

Alright, gang, thank you for reading. I hope the world is not getting you down. If it is, please remember that there is humor in the world, which means there is hope in the world.

Next week in What We Have Loved: “Someone send J. D. Vance to Russia next. He’s literally the human version of a black cat crossing your path.”

Till then, I love you, bye!!!

I’m a day late because I wanted to respect our lord and savior on the day of his rising (I was lazy). But on the subject of the father and son, this week I want to talk to you about parents. This is a tough subject to both write and read about, so I’ll try and keep my thoughts concise.

It’s so terrifyingly easy to put our parents on a pedestal. Ask Kendall Roy. I mean, why wouldn’t you? They gave you life, and chances are you grew up idolizing them. Makes sense to me!

But then you do grow up, only to realize one day that they are whole adult ass people with their own set of unresolved issues. They kind of suck sometimes, dude. There’s the fucking rub! How do you face the fact that they are flawed human beings, and not the perfect images of god that you thought they were?

Now, if you’re lucky, you just had terrible parents to begin with and never have to deal with this shit like the rest of us. (I’m kidding. Also, I’m sorry.)

But if you’re like me, I think, you begin by forgiving them. Easier than hating them, not exactly the slope you want to slip down. I’m still figuring out what comes next though. You can try talking to them, but this particular piece of advice comes with a statutory warning: performed by experts, injurious to health. And finally, stop expecting too much from them. They’re your parents, not the cast of Ted Lasso, my non-problematic kings.

Anyway, for now, unfortunately it’s just me, you, and Tony Soprano in a room, figuring this shit out, slowly but surely.

Let’s get down to business, shall we?. This week in “Listen, there’s shitty people who don’t deserve fame or money, and then there’s people like J K Rowling, who deserve to rot in hell”: music to murder someone to; music to relax to, after the murder; high production value videos; putting the long in long form; rainbow hunting, and so much more!

So, stop tapping your keys, and get ready for supper!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Recently came across this Prague-based literary journal called BODY that is absolutely ripe with great writing in all genres. Check out their current issue here.

• New music from JID, only had to wait a life time for this fucker to drop. Plus, Jon Bellion back making music regularly. These albums are about to feed generations.

  

• I also discovered this artist called Sudan this week. Genuinely, music for the soul.

• We interrupt this newsletter to bring you my absolute shock at not discovering the sensational OK Go before this week. Boy, have I been missing out. Check out their new music video for Love, and have fun sliding down that rabbit hole.

• For the two people who actually read long form articles, check out this Rolling Stone article investigating the AI em-dash allegations and this ironically long article on understanding ADHD better.

• And while we are here, in this week’s episode of How The Hell is This Free to Watch: SuprOrdinary’s not so ordinary video.

  

• May I interest you in a jolly good serving of slop, good sir?

  • @fartsmella_02 just being one of the girls.

  • @sydwingold’s rendition of what my dreams looks like.

  • @mrsteviewebb’s tips and tricks on flower arrangement.

  • @shitzprobe’s positive vibrations.

  • Finally, genuine joy.

    ---

Wrap it up! Next week on What We Have Loved: “How to ask you parents if they’d like to go to therapy? (GONE WRONG)”!!!!

Until then, Rest in Peace to the Pope. You were a good one. Also, remember kids, Trans Rights are Human Rights. I love you, bye!!!!

We’re keeping it short and sweet this week.

In a sudden new development, I decided to throw myself headlong into poetry month fervor. This means I have been writing poems every day for about a week now, and will be continuing to do so for the rest of April.

Some brief observations:

• I’m noticeably happier. There’s a sense of fulfillment that, much like a butt plug, fills me up every morning.

• I’ve had less time to actually worry about the state of the world and my own existential dread.

Seriously though, it is not news to anyone reading this that the act of making things, of creation, is a source of joy. The fact that I immediately ruined this serenity by watching the first few episodes of the new season of Black Mirror is immaterial. I mean, fuck subscription services, brother, ew.

But I won’t let the digital dystopia of that show, which is not very unlike our own fucking dumpster fire of a reality, bring my spirit down. It’s me and my blank Word document against the world, baby! And my friend, if neo-Nazi-algorithm-driven-late-stage-capitalism has data-mined, surveilled, gaslit and exploited you, and you’re still paying 12.99/month to feel seen, then follow my lead. Pick up your tool of choice, and get creating.

This week in “now that we can bring back extinct animals, maybe we can start working on bringing back my will to keep living”: spoken word, in this economy?; I’d bone Iver; noah, get the submarine; a one person Lion King remake, and so much more!

So, get your cutlery out and wolf these down!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Lots of poetry this week. Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

  • The Poetry Society’s Spring Issue came out in the recent past. I just found out.

  • Sarah Kay returns to form with a number of incredible spoken word poems up on Button Poetry. Table Games is particularly heart breaking.

• Blessed be thy ears. New albums from Bon Iver and Black Country, New Road.

  

• Also, new music (and video) from Arijit Singh and Martin Garrix. Why is this good?

• I won’t even bother linking the Luther Music Video because you’ve already seen it. But while you are there, watch Dua Lipa versus the literary landscape, very interesting video.

• NatGeo has a really cool article about 3D Scanning the Titanic wreck and why this damned ship, what’s left of it at least, still has such a hold on people.

  

• Dread it, run from it, the slop still arrives:

  • Best thing you’ll see today courtesy of @hyperskidsafrica.

  • Cultural observations from @meditationsfortheanxiousmind.

  • @ailaughatmyownjokes’s Lion King Ultra Pro Max.

  • Not a lie in sight, @jessandquinn.

  • I can’t do a cartwheel either, @stupidlittlehaitao.

    ---

I feel like this week went by really quick. Time is relative. I am tired. You’re cute. Thank you for reading.

Next week in What We Have Loved: “Wake me back up when Frank Ocean actually shows up to headline Coachella.” Till then, I love you, bye!

I’ve been seeing all the insane morning routine videos this week and just comparing it my own morning routine, if you can even call it that. Let me get this straight. So, you’re telling me, there’s dudes out here waking up at 3 am and sticking their face in a bowl of ice, while I get to sleep-in till 10? Not to be a rube, but in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, “I've got to tell you, friends, I prefer my stuff to theirs.”

In other news, did you hear about the US YouTuber who went to a remote Indian Island, North Sentinel, and left an offering of diet Coke for the Sentinelese people who are a tribe protected from outsiders? I wish I was making this up. Honestly, I’m just glad he left them diet Coke, and not regular Coke. Gives them something to aspire to.

Combine this with Hooters going bankrupt and the tariffs ushering in the recession, the West is having a particularly terrible week.

In India, forests on the verge of being burned down, Comedy remains dead, movies are being voluntarily censored because of religious fear-mongering, and I lost one of my earbuds. Truly, hell is empty, and all the devils are here, making me lose my earbuds. If this keeps happening, I’ll have to rename the newsletter to What We Have Fucking Hated.

However, it is also Dalit History Month, and I am making an effort to learn more about the stories, experiences, truths, and realities of a people that is constantly under threat of erasure. You should too. The Ambedkarian Chronicle is a good place to start.

And in the mean time, to my fellow morning routine influencers who are playing God, who swear by the wake-up-early, ten-push-ups, hit-the-gym routines as the sole solution to all of life’s problems, all I have to say is this — do not push against the cycle of life, lest it push back against you.

On that note, this week in “let me escape into Nintendo game monetization drama, please, the world is too much”: A whole month for poetry; DC, Disney, and things you hate to love; OnlySad news; Scary crocs; Finger guns, and so much more!

So, stop slouching, brother, and straighten that back!

What We Have Loved This Week

• First things first, it’s National Poetry Writing Month in the US, which means it’s National Poetry Writing Month every where in the world. Don’t ask me why. April just happens to be a really good time for poetry, ask Eliot. Check out the NaPoWriMo official website for prompts, and creative resources EVERY DAY this month.

• New music from the very talented Jon Bellion and Sparks. Good week for rap music as well: Yung Raja, Little Simz, and Yatchy.

  

• Another entry to the ‘How the fuck is this free?’ folder: The Forest at the Bottom of the World is an all timer.

• While you’re on the old Tubes, check out the new Superman Sneak Peak from DC, and the new Tron movie trailer, to hear Jared Leto say he’s looking for something. Probably his career. Listen, I’ll take IP reboots over a Minecraft movie any day.

• A sobering write-up about OnlyFans addiction? Much needed.

• A sobering write-up about being Elon Musk’s estranged daughter? Yes, please.

  

• Okay, gang, stand clear. Dropping the slop:

  • @toodirtydom is couple goals if I’ve ever seen it.

  • @lilnasx is the hero we need.

  • @zandland holding some very necessary conversations.

  • I promise, you need to see this.

  • And finally, humans being humans.

And that’s a wrap. I’m going to go sleep early, so I can wake up late. Next week in What We Have Loved: ‘What did the Penguins do? What are they exporting? Happiness?!’.

Until then, keep yourself cosy, gang. I love you, bye!!!

Gang, it’s good to be back! But first things first — apologies for the absence. I was busy learning things about myself here-before unknown.

For one, I fucked around and found out that brown skin can get sunburnt quite as crispy as any other. I saw my skin turn red and felt my ancestors shaking their heads in absolute disappointment. What else is new? I also found out that my years of gastrointestinal adventures amongst the literal sweat and tears of Indian street food were not enough to keep the diarrhea at bay in Thailand. But the food was so good that I didn’t even mind spending a day just letting myself go to town on a Japanese toilet. All’s well that bidets well.

These last two weeks, a lot happened in the world. I tried to stay away from most of it but unsuccessfully so.

Comedy clubs getting vandalized in India is nothing new, but I was deeply bothered by it this time, second only to having to watch the last episode of Severance S02. The boys over in the US administration accidentally added some opps to the group chat… classic mistake... high schoolers around the world relate, smh, amirite fellow kids? Worried about food being unaffordable? Now you can ‘buy now, pay later’ on your food deliveries. Cue the recession indicator memes. The UK, finally, has something going for them with Adolescence on Netflix. It’s good. It’s a difficult watch, but necessary. I cried. The hype, for once, is real. Talking about hype, Playboi Carti dropped new music after 5 long years, and it is as unintelligible as whatever Kanye, bless his soul, tweeted last. And as we speak, the Studio Ghibli x ChatGPT drama is in full swing. My favorite thing from the whole thing is someone posting “Miyazaki didn’t die for this.”

Miyazaki is not dead.

Safe to say, coming back to the newsletter after a short hiatus, it feels like nothing has changed. If anything, shit has gotten worse, somehow. The world is still a stage, and the play is still predictable, monotonous, and horrifying, but brother, the popcorn has never tasted this good. Gobble gobble!

On that note, it’s time to dive right back into this week in ‘I had to file for bankruptcy because I financed my Five Guys burger, fries, and shake combo meal’: You’re so Vuong about that; Stand-down, hands up comedy; improv music; Darwin rolling in his grave; gangster hamsters, and so much more!

So, light up a ciggy, and let’s get back into it!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Every time Ocean Vuong publishes a new poem, a flower booms, a baby is born... I don’t know, maybe I’m being dramatic. But he does have a new poem about being 16, and also about being the 16th president. It’s called, you won’t believe this, 16.

  

• In light of stand-up comedy in India taking some hits, literally and physically, I wanted to highlight some recent videos:

  • Hindi: The stand-up special in question, Kunal Kamra’s Naya Bharat; also, Swati Sachdeva’s Family First.

  • English: Urooj Ashfaq’s video on Therapy; Azeem Banatwalla’s Crime and Punishment; Daniel Fernandes’ India’s Got Sentiments.

• While you’re on YouTube also check out Jacob Collier’s musical genius at work. Jacob, if you don’t know, might actually be one of the most talented people on the planet. He’s also very weird. I love this guy. Google him!

  

• Music YouTube has been fed very well recently. I mean, in what timeline do we have Rick Astley covering Chappell Roan?

• Tired of audio-visual content? Here, a long ass article about the history and future of theories of evolution. Also, this excellent article on AI art and why it’s the new big bad. Very timely, very demure.

• Back to the slop! Instagram has actually been very nice to me this week. Lots of cool stuff popping up on my feed. The algorithm gods have been kind:

  • @thelookcook making some sweet, sweet lingerie lullabies.

  • @mummy_joe’s the life and times of Dupree.

  • @citizen_theartist maybe sounds a bit generic but I appreciate the marketing.

  • @trackstarshow spreading some infectious Jazz energy.

  • And finally, I have been laughing at this for days now.

Once again, I must bid thee farewell, kind reader. I must thank thee for your patience and extremely sexy demeanor, a trait shared equally by all who read this, I’m sure.

Next week in What We Have Loved: ‘Modi and Trump chat messages revealed: How to flirt, conservatively, while keeping your Russian boyfriend happy.’ Until then, ta ta, bye, I love you.

I saw a video from mid-2024 of Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s Finance Minister and least fun aunt at the family reunion, saying that ‘patriarchy’ is just leftist jargon and all that’s stopping women from achieving their goals is their own inability. This International Women’s Day, I would like to smoke whatever she’s smoking. When you walk into the ‘out of touch with reality’ competition and Nirmala auntie is your opponent… FUCK!

I have been thinking about how to write about Women’s Day without being a total dick about it. The irony! I have come to the solemn conclusion that it is best for me, as a man, to shut the fuck up about the plight of women and perhaps, instead, highlight certain things that I think should be highlighted from the previous year.

Now, I don’t think we should be judging people by their achievements alone. I know a lot of incredible women will not make the Top 10 lists or make it to Buzzfeed’s ‘Women You Should Watch Out for in 2025’ article. Also, I’m still slightly salty about Beyonce’s Grammy win, so maybe all achievements aren’t good achievements. And, clearly, being the Finance Minister of one of the world’s largest economies doesn’t guarantee common sense. So, I guess the point is, while things are still very far away from ideal, and the world is still extremely fucked up to the point of wanting to puke into a paper bag every time I open the news, there is still some things to be happy about.

As of March 2025, there are more female doctors in the UK than their male counterparts, for the first time ever. There has been a global trend in female entrepreneurship last year. In sports, the likes of Katie Ledecky and Avani Lekhara made Olympic history. Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix win at Cannes, Samantha Harvey’s Booker, Doechii winning her Grammy, and Mikey Madison’s Oscar win have all been personally inspiring and, more importantly, just really cool to watch.

Talking about personal, my grandmother survived a fall and a broken toe, and is now happily hobbling around the house. My mother has slowly, but surely, gone out more times this year with her friends, than ever before. My girlfriend got promoted last year, and continues to kick ass in her corporate job, that I still have trouble understanding the magnitude of. My best friend is one step closer to doing her PhD, fucking finally. I have, recently, had the privilege of spending time with some amazing women who also happen to be surgeons, academics, artists and poets. I look up to these people, not just because they are good at what they do, but because they make it look badass.

Anyway, Happy International Woman’s Day! This week in ‘Tariffs on, Tariffs off, Tariffs on, Tariffs off’: Ecopoetry, my beloved; Holy bullshit; Born to be a Star-ling; Poopy parkour; Puppy photo-ops; and so much more!

So, stop pooping around, and pay attention!

What We Have Loved This Week

• Friend, poet, all around excellent human being, Charlie McIlwayne has a pamphlet available to pre-order, E[MIT]. I haven’t read it yet, but if there is any poetry I can recommend with blind trust, it is Charlie’s work.

• Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network published the results for their Earthlings, Building: An Ecopoetry Writing Challenge. In my humble opinion, nothing but net. I am jealous of all the talent here. I see you, Zain Rishi, I see you.

• Ever considered being made a saint by the Vatican? Here’s everything you need to know. P. S. It’s fucked up. Also, you need to be dead first (?)

  

• New music videos from Hanumankind, who is back doing what he does best, and Jennie, who also has a whole album out.

• Ever wondered what a rocket-melon powered skateboard would look like in slow-motion? Well, wonder no further, my friends. The Slow Mo Guys have got you covered.

• National Geographic has a really cool article/photographs on starlings and their weirdly stunning cloud swarms. They look like abstract paintings, or like alien crop circles, but in the sky.

  

• I think I watched too many ‘Conservatives getting owned’ Reels this week and my algorithm thinks I’m part of the American liberal woke mind-virus mob or whatever they call young people over there. But hey, the slop must go on:

  • @liv.pearsall making me feel violated.

  • Imagine Subway Surfers, but through toilets.

  • @tristanmaloney, brother, what the hell is this content and where can I get more?

  • The puppy Oscars. They do this every year?!

  • And of course, @bosslogic giving the people what they need.

That’s a wrap, ladies. I’m going on vacation next week. Will there be a newsletter? Probably. Is that a promise? Absolutely not. But best believe, next week in What We Have Loved: ‘WWIII go brrrrrrrrrrrr’.

Until then, keep your women close, your NBs closer, and your men at a safe distance, but not too far away that they lose interest. They tend to do that, I hear from a source. Anyway, I love you, bye!

Hello!

I’m still recovering from seeing the Shrek 5 teaser… noticing Shrek look like he’s old as shit, realizing maybe I’m old as shit, trying to get my thoughts in order. I guess I’m glad Zendaya is getting more work? Not that she needed the help.

You know who needs help? People who are 36. That’s when birthdays start getting less exciting and start feeling like something is definitely going wrong. Not that I would know, I’m not 36, though sometimes I do that thing where I run for five minutes, for no reason, and wake the next day feeling like a I ran a marathon.

What I’m trying to say is — I’ll miss the old Shrek. I’ll miss looking forward to birthdays. I’ll miss waking up and feeling no aches in any part of my body. I’ll miss being able to eat anything I want and not worry about the calorie deficit. I’ll miss eating 5 parottas and a plate of beef fry, and still feeling like I could fit a Sharjah shake in there. I’ll miss staying awake all night reading and not having dark circles confront me in the morning. I’ll miss driving for 8 hours and not having my butt cheeks feel like chicken breast pounded with one of those meat mallets. I’ll miss being able to smoke a cigarette and not having to cough for the rest of the week. I’ll miss too much sugar and too much salt and too much of whatever they put in Coke, the soda kind. I’ll also… probably miss coke, the powder kind… you get the idea.

Now, I know you’re thinking —Ummm, Akshay, not to be a pooper at your party, but all of these sound like extremely bad habits that should not be missed, let alone celebrated or recalled in a nostalgic vein. And you wouldn’t be wrong, necessarily. But my dear friend, I must admit to you, my definition of happiness has been a concept in flux. I do not completely agree with that old saying “here for a good time, not a long time.” Honestly, I think it’s fair to want to be here for an average time, for a moderate period of time. I have never yearned for the exemplary, only for the mediocre in most things in life. Though, as I grow older, I’m realizing that I do deserve the best, at least, of certain things: a partner, a hobby, a profession that does not make me want to kill myself, you know, the basics. I guess I’m learning that I must pick my battles.

Till then, I’ll miss having the patience to defend the things I loved from people who loved different things that were, mostly if not always, equally bad.

This week in ‘Bezos, you slimy piece of actual human excrement, get my free speech’s name out of your fucking mouth!’: Slam poetry, why it’s probably bad to obsess over your crush, metal is back, chat, is it weird if I touch my husband’s penis?, Paint Drying; The Movie, and so much more!!!

So, stop counting sheep, and drag both feet under the blanket! Let’s go!

What We Have Loved This Week

• I thought I’d highlight some recent spoken word pieces that have caught my attention this week: Katie Ailes - Cringe, Rudy Francisco - After Jeffery McDaniel and Cloud - Restaurant. I hope they lead you down a poetry rabbit hole that you find difficult to return from.

• The woman, the myth, the legend Anne Carson has a new longform essay out, with the London Review of Books, about handwriting. But in classic Carson fashion, there’s references to everything: Ancient Roman literature, music, art, science, boxing, the usual.

• That’s enough reading for a day. Did you know about Limerence? Neither did I! But Dr.K over at HealthyGamerGG has this well-researched video about that high-school crush that you obsessed for a whole year while they barely knew of your existence.

  

• Make no mistake, both The Down Troddence and T M Krishna are legends of Indian music. I’m not the biggest fan of Metal, but it felt important to mention Maharani and this historic music video. And apparently, there’s more music coming! Rejoice, metalheads!

• You know, sometimes you go on Reddit for the posts and sometimes, you go on Reddit for the comments. This wife had a seemingly innocent question about handling her husband’s weiner, and the comment section delivered.

• I feel like the Instagram reels are little pieces of candy I feed you for making it all the way to the bottom. Good reader! Here you go:

  • @letterboxd highlighted one Charlie Shackleton’s struggle with the British Board of Film Classification. Very funny, very demure, very much why I love the internet.

  • Panda core.

  • @cool_lookin_bug on why everyone being able to do art is cool!

  • Everything I’ve seen so far from @8c_records has been heat!

  • Hey @a_mug_of_life, why is there wholesome content on my racist app?

    ---

No more treats for you! Shoo! But same time next week? :D

Thank you for reading, as always. Next week on What We Have Loved: “Trump posts new AI video about him actually being a nice human being. Shit is as unbelievable as the Gaza video.”

Till then, stay safe, try not to grow up too much and please don’t do cocaine, that was a joke. I love you, bye!