Pages From Her Diary

I booked two things for this trip. The ticket going. The ticket coming back. Everything in between was blank. No itinerary. No hotel list. No map with saved flags on it. I'm a man who plans a weekend in Excel, and I walked into Tamil Nadu with nothing — alone, into a region where I don't speak a single word of the language. Kumbakonam and Thanjavur. I came back with sunburn, a sore back, one conversation I can't stop thinking about, and a question about myself I still haven't answered. Why a Solo Trip With No Plan Changes What You See The only fixed points were leaving and returning. Which, now that I write it, is an unusually accurate description of a life. The moment the plan disappears, something switches on that usually stays off. You start paying attention. You read faces instead of reviews. You ask human beings where to eat instead of sorting by rating. A planned trip is a list you execute. An unplanned one is a day you're actually inside o...

Every year, on Dussehra, we burn Ravana. A ground somewhere. A crowd. A forty-foot effigy stuffed with crackers. Ten heads. We cheer when the arrow lands, record the explosion for WhatsApp status, buy jalebi on the way out, and go home. And then on Monday morning somebody cuts into my lane and I want to kill him. We have been burning this man for thousands of years and he has an attendance record better than most of my colleagues. He comes back every single time. Which should tell us something. Either the method doesn't work, or we have been burning the wrong Ravana. Because the real meaning of Dussehra isn't only the victory of Rama over Ravana. It's a reminder of a battle we keep postponing — the one against the Ravana we are carrying around inside us. My First Dussehra in Bangalore Felt Like a Tuesday I should explain where I'm writing this from. This is my first festival season in Bangalore, and I'm not feeling it. I keep waiting for the festi...

One thing I'll give Bangalore, and I don't give it much. Since moving here I've started knowing myself a lot better. A lot more clearly. Not in a pleasant way — more like the way a room looks when somebody finally opens the curtains and you see what the furniture actually looks like. Back home there were enough people and enough noise around me that I never had to sit with my own head for very long. Here I do. Most evenings, in fact. And a head that gets sat with starts producing things. Last week it produced this. I was watching Dil Bechara — the adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars , and Sushant Singh Rajput's last film, released after he was already gone. I'd read the book in college and loved it. That part has always embarrassed me slightly, and here's why. I have never really believed in love. Not the romantic-film version, anyway. From quite young I was fairly settled on this: selfless love doesn't exist. What we call love is an arrangeme...

I watched The Truman Show this week. It arrives looking like a comedy. Jim Carrey, bright colours, a cheerful little town where everybody waves. And somewhere around the twenty-minute mark it stops being funny and turns into something much closer to body horror — then keeps going until it's just a straight existential question pointed at the person watching. Here's what makes Truman's situation so unsettling: on paper, nothing is wrong. He has a normal routine. A marriage. A best friend he talks to. A steady job. A pleasant town. He is living a perfectly happy life, and that is exactly the problem. Because when everything around you is arranged to be agreeable, there's no gap anywhere for anything real to get in. He can't quite be unhappy, and he can't quite say why that bothers him. The entire world has been built so that he never has a reason to ask a question — which is a far more effective prison than walls. And then the real inversion. Everythi...

This is the first time in my life I'm celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi outside my own house. And if you've ever done a Mumbai Ganpati, you'll know exactly what I'm missing. That city doesn't observe the festival. It becomes it. Ten days where the whole place changes frequency — pandals on every second lane, dhol-tasha starting somewhere before you're properly awake, the smell of modaks in every building, chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya rolling down a street at midnight for no reason except that somebody felt like it. Traffic surrenders. Strangers feed you. The entire city agrees, briefly, to be one thing together. Bangalore is celebrating too. I know it is. I've seen the decorations, heard the odd speaker. A festival is not the ritual — it's the people you've done the ritual with every year since you were small enough to be carried to the pandal. Take those people away and what's left is a date on the calendar and a man in a flat, scroll...

Badshah's separation was all over my feed this week, and I read more of the replies than I'd like to admit. I know nothing about that marriage. Neither does anyone on Twitter. But within a day it had stopped being about them at all and become the argument we always have: "Nobody has patience anymore. That's the problem with this generation." Let me take that seriously — and then explain why I think it's mostly wrong. Patience for what, exactly? The fair version first, because it isn't stupid. Marriage is hard. Every long relationship hits stretches that feel unrecoverable, and plenty of them recover. Our grandparents stayed, and something in that staying built things. And yes, we've genuinely gotten worse at loyalty in an age where every exit is one swipe away. All true. But patience isn't a virtue on its own. It's a tool — and a tool is only as good as what you're using it for. Patience while two people work through a ge...