On everything and nothing in particular. Philosophy, people, cities, geopolitics, the strange feeling of being alive right now.
These are not articles. They are not researched or concluded. They are the thoughts that happen in between — on the tube, in the middle of the night, standing in a queue somewhere. Written because not writing them felt worse.
A flock of cranes passed over the Terrace Gardens in Richmond late one evening, making the sound birds make when they have lost their way. In less than a second I was five years old again, on a terrace in India, beside my father, who said: let us pray for them. So I prayed. And then I spent two days wondering whether feeling good about it had ruined it.
Read →An elderly woman in a white saree called me over on an empty street behind the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. She asked for twenty rupees. That was seven years ago. She has never left my thoughts.
Not places that have been demolished — though those too. I mean the places that still stand but have become something else entirely.
The unsettling thought I had watching a very important-looking meeting through a glass wall.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from living in a world that demands you have a position on every single thing that happens, immediately, publicly.
Why does it matter if someone you will never meet reads something you wrote? I ask this genuinely. I do not have a clean answer.
This is not a complaint. It is the most useful thing the city has taught me.
A rough inventory of habits, objects, and ways of thinking — which ones have travelled with me and which ones I have quietly discarded.