Pages From Her Diary

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...

It's Janmashtami today. And I've wanted to write about Krishna for a long time — not as mythology, but because of what he has actually meant to me. This isn't something I picked up recently. Years ago I went through a stretch I don't write about much. The kind of dark that doesn't announce itself — where you keep functioning, keep showing up, and something underneath has gone very quiet. Somewhere in the middle of that, without any grand decision or moment, I started doing the jaap. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare Not out of deep theological conviction. More out of need — the way a person reaches for something familiar when the room gets too quiet. And it held. It genuinely did. It carried me through that year and stayed with me long after I stopped needing it quite so badly. Then it came back this year, in Bangalore. New city, empty flat, a lot of nights that ran longer than they should h...

Almost three months in Bangalore, and I hadn't really gone anywhere. Office and room. Room and office. Weekends spent entirely within four walls, telling myself I'd explore the city once I felt like it — knowing perfectly well that feeling like it was never going to arrive on its own. Then a friend called. Come to Indiranagar. Let's meet. And I went. Which, for a man who hadn't stepped out socially in twelve weeks, was a bigger thing than it sounds. It was a good evening. Easy conversation, the kind you don't have to prepare for. For a few hours I stopped being a stranger in a city and was just a person sitting across from another person. And then his phone rang. His wife's name was on the screen I watched his face. Something in it just… closed. The ease left. He straightened slightly, glanced at the screen the way you glance at an email from your boss on a Sunday, and said quietly — "she's calling." Not warmth. Not "oh, on...

Watched Wake Up Sid last night. I've seen it before — everyone has. But some films don't stay the same film. You change, and the story quietly rearranges itself to meet whoever you've become since the last time. It ages like wine. At twenty it's a fun coming-of-age story about a spoilt Mumbai boy. At my age, three months into a city that doesn't know me, it's something else entirely. And it made me think about Ranbir, honestly. He has one of the strangest, most specific filmographies of any mainstream Indian actor — Sid, Bunny, Jordan, Ved in Tamasha . A whole career built out of men who haven't figured themselves out yet. Nobody else was consistently choosing that. Most stars want to play the man who has the answer; he kept playing the one still looking for the question. The first time, all I noticed were the t-shirts I'll be honest about what this film meant to me the first time around. I wasn't thinking about family, or ambition, ...