Essays
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The Math of Weight Loss
Manipal Hospital, 2019. Before. The first thing they do, when you are fat and you walk into a doctor’s office, is weigh you. Before asking why you’re there. Before your name, almost. The number on the scale is taken as the answer to every question you haven’t asked yet. Five years ago I went in… Continue reading
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Akka, Amma, Boomer
The first time someone called me Amma, I was buying coriander. This felt about right. Nobody becomes Amma doing anything dignified. You don’t walk out of a boardroom and get addressed as Mother. Unless the boardroom is full of twenty-year-olds, for whom Mother is now the highest compliment going. Said over coriander, it is not… Continue reading
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For Medical Advice
Three doctors, three cities, one losing argument with the internet. It is six thirty on a Wednesday evening and I am number four in the queue at Doctor V’s clinic. I have a work call at seven thirty. The clinic is a ten-minute walk from my house. I have done the maths, because this is… Continue reading
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The Wedding Renu Still Owes Me
I did not attend Renu’s wedding. This was in 2007, when we were colleagues and friends. Not best friends exactly, but the kind of office friends forged under mild but sustained adversity. We would call it trauma bonding today. At the time, we called it getting each other’s jokes. Over the years, the friendship deepened… Continue reading
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My Scientific Temper Has an Astrology Clause
Or, how an evidence-based woman ended up checking her birth certificate at 11:07 p.m. on a Tuesday Recently, while doom-scrolling Instagram somewhere between a friend in Bali, a former colleague announcing she was truly humbled to accept a leadership role, and an aunt forwarding a Good Morning graphic featuring three roses and a sunrise, I was shown… Continue reading
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To Have Known a Love Like Bombay
My earliest memories of Bombay are stitched together with delays, derailments, and the kind of chaos that becomes funny only twenty years later. The first time I travelled to the city, my mother, my aunt, and I boarded a train from Chennai, a simple journey, three days of sightseeing planned, my Maama waiting for us… Continue reading
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Performance Review: Universe, 2025
Employee: The UniverseReviewer: One human who just discovered their antidepressants aren’t strong enoughOverall Rating: Meets Expectations (barely, and only because we expected violence) Executive Summary Congratulations on another year of consistent underperformance. Your commitment to treating human suffering as a growth metric remains unmatched. We’d fire you, but apparently you’re union. Core Competencies 1. Global Stability Rating: Actively… Continue reading
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120 Under 120
On Living Forever With Nothing To Do An AI-generated reconstruction of a lunch that had already ended. At a recent family lunch, three generations agreed on exactly one thing: none of us cared for AI. This consensus lasted approximately fourteen minutes, at which point we realised nobody had photographed the food. We had committed the… Continue reading
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The Kal Paradox
Why Indian English Isn’t Broken, It’s Running on a Different Backend Woman and Clock, Louise Bourgeois (fair use) Salman Rushdie once observed that no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on time (Midnight’s Children). He was talking about the Hindi word kal,… Continue reading
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