The India AI Impact Summit started today. I know this because I have spent the last two months watching it unfold on LinkedIn before it even began. Every other post was someone announcing they’d be speaking, moderating, or appearing on a panel about how AI will change everything about AI, which is changing everything about…
On effort, expertise, and why invisible work goes unrewarded My mother could cook an eight-course meal for twelve people and the kitchen would look like she’d merely walked through it on her way to somewhere else. No splatter on the stovetop, no tower of tasting spoons in the sink, no panic-Googling “is dal supposed to…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
A personal essay on how Friends, a Louis Vuitton tote bag, and two decades of middle-class aspiration shaped a life in India. From navigating the Dadar fast local with a backpack to buying ‘dupes’ on Meesho, a look at the performance of adulthood and the gap between who we are and who we want to…
(Or: What My CGM Taught Me About Human Behaviour) Exhibit A: The humble poha that broke my metabolic heart. The Accidental Field Study Every few months, I run a small, unapproved research project with a sample size of one: me. The apparatus is a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), a discreet sensor I stick on my…
AI-generated image: my mother and me at the Taj Mahal, a trip we never took. Forgive me, for I have mid-journeyed. I asked the machine to bring my grandmother back, not as she was when she died.. frail, sharp, and opinionated, but as a young woman standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, a place…
The one who writes love stories to children who will never exist The girl I brought home, with her collection of becoming. I don’t have a lot of wealth, but I have a lot of crap. Earrings that I bought during various phases of optimism. Books that I’ve accumulated like some people collect frequent flyer…
The recurring character who was almost the main character, until he wasn’t. Some loves don’t take center stage. They light it. Image Credit Some people enter your story as guest stars. Others are series regulars from the pilot episode. The Regular was cast before I even knew there was a show. Our mothers practiced Rabindra…
In which I discover that being desirable to everyone is worse than being desirable to no one. For 7 weeks, I was a babe. Then I pressed delete. Image Credit On the wrong side of thirty, I finally downloaded a dating app. I’d held out through the early swipe years, but my family WhatsApp groups…
Five emails and a wedding invitation (to someone else) But at least we’ll always have the Pilot pens. Image Credit My family was full of wannabe economists who thought they understood currency markets. So when the proposal came for a boy in Japan, they got out their calculators. “500,000 yen per month!” someone announced, after…
The one who existed perfectly in professional font The one I found through a typo and lost through an expired inbox. Some connections exist perfectly at 10pt Calibri. Image Credit This is about the boy I found through a typo and lost through an expired inbox. I’d just gotten my first corporate email address. An…
The one who was better in parentheses The Star That Died Before It Reached EarthSome stories burn brightest before they ever begin. Image Credit Before the apps. Before the swiping. Before everyone turned into product managers of their own love lives.. there was the internet.And if you were young and a little lonely and halfway…
The one I had no good reason to reject The coffee was warm. The conversation was polite.The chemistry? Pure LinkedIn. Image Credit His parents had already met mine.Not in a vague, floating “let’s see” way, but in the full-blown exchanging rasam ratios, best-retirement-plans, and let’s-go-to-Kashi-together kind of way. Our fathers had both retired from the…
Five years ago, fifty-five days after my mother passed away, I made a video I never planned to share. This is what I understand now, watching it again. Grief doesn’t announce itself. It brews tea. Lights incense. Scrolls Instagram. Five years ago, fifty-five days after I lost my mother, I made a short film. It…
And I was just trying to survive Wednesdays Worn into the neighbourhood like memory We lived in the same neighbourhood, but I’d never met him. Our fathers, however, were walking buddies, united by a shared fondness for early mornings, rising cholesterol, and spirited complaints about inflation and their adult children.Their daily route was short, but…
Unsung, unseen, but always on time.. almost Somewhere in Mylapore, Chennai They don’t design, cut, or create. They don’t have Pinterest boards or boutique signage. But they are the ones who make sure your clothes live, long after you’ve outgrown them, shrunk away from them, or simply changed your mind. These are not the tailors of…
Or, what I’ve learned from reading writing advice (and ignoring all of it) Credit The thing about writing advice is that it’s everywhere. Like glitter, or unsolicited feedback. It clings to you long after you’ve tried to brush it off. It shows up on podcasts, in Substack essays, at the back of MFA brochures. And…
On disappearing, dressing down, and choosing clothes that don’t speak for you A dress is just a kurta that went to therapy.A personal essay on what I wore, what I refused, and the quiet power of dressing for no one. In my twenties, I wore clothes that let me disappear, loose kurtas that blended into…
The one who let his brother do the talking A quiet, sunlit apartment. A not-so-quiet surprise inside. Image Credit This one was hard to avoid. The boy was introduced to me by my favourite uncle, the kind of man who called me “child” well into my thirties, and always slipped an extra note into my…
The one who said ‘Oh. Your nose. The arch, the traffic, the twilight. A fork in the road I didn’t take. Image Credit For the longest time, I believed the only thing standing between me and hotness was a nose pin.Not confidence. Not better lighting. Not therapy. Just a little stud on my right nostril.…
The one who found me emotionally underqualified Dadar station, behind the grill. Like every near-miss, framed but unfinished. Image Credit Yes, he aspired to be a singer.Yes, which was a strange choice of profession for a good Indian boy. But the real surprise was this: my parents were the ones who set me up with him. I’d…
A Preface Some stories are love stories.Some are almosts.These are the other kind. This is a recurring series about the people I didn’t end up with, not just because they weren’t right for me, but sometimes because I wasn’t right for them. Too talkative. Too quiet. Too opinionated. Not opinionated enough. Not religious enough. Not thin…
How long-form kitchen videos taught me care, confidence, and the appeal of a ₹3200 brass kadhai. The first time I heard Nisha Madhulika’s voice, I was in my very tiny kitchen in my Bombay home, armed with misplaced confidence and one too many unripe tomatoes. My mother was out of town. The cook was on…
Or, how I quit my job to write a novel I hadn’t started, then quietly returned to that same job three months later [Representative Image generated using AI] In 2012, I did what any delusional person with a vague idea for a novel might do. I walked into my boss’s office and quit my job.…
Or, how I found the perfect quote to open my novel, without actually writing the novel [Representative Image generated using AI] At some point in the last few years, somewhere between revising Chapter One for the fifth time and deleting Chapter Two altogether, I decided what my novel really needed was not more plot, or…