Writing
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Wore-drobe
It is March again, and this year will be different. I know this because the spring-summer collections have begun dropping in my inbox, because a linen shirt has been sitting in my saved-for-later cart for eight months now, and because I am standing in front of my wardrobe having decided, once again, that I will… Continue reading
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Malkosh
Life goes on. The TV is back on, even if something has shifted Nobody tells objects. That’s the thing. The package arrives at the door, scanned and sorted and dispatched through a chain of human effort so elaborate it borders on devotion, and it has no idea. The algorithm that predicted the purchase, the warehouse… Continue reading
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Borrowed Words
Some years back, when I was in a Rumi phase, because who wasn’t, I used to quote: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there. I said it like I’d discovered it. I said it like it was mine. Fifteen years ago, quoting Rumi was already cliché. But it was… Continue reading
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Roll Call: Notes on Names and the People Who Get Stuck With Them
The annual pre-Independence Day office party. The night before I was born. Dilip Kumar and Saira Banu in the front row, with Appa. My name almost decided. I know, I know. What’s in a name? is the most overworked question in the history of questions. Shakespeare asked it, your motivational calendar asked it, and now I am… Continue reading
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The Other People Who Weren’t There
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… Continue reading
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Listening for the Ciiii
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… 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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