Pages From Her Diary

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, ...

I spent last night reading about death. Not in a morbid way — in the way you do at 1 a.m. when the flat is quiet and the mind has nowhere left to hide. Audio playing in the dark, one article leading to another, all of them circling the same question: Why are we so afraid of the one thing that is absolutely certain? We whisper about it. We change the subject. We postpone difficult conversations because some part of us assumes there will always be more time. It's the only appointment every single human being is guaranteed to keep, and we've collectively agreed not to discuss it. Epicurus had an answer that's logically perfect and emotionally useless. Where death is, you are not; where you are, death is not. So there's nothing to fear. Airtight. And it has never once comforted anybody. What Osho does differently I've been listening to a lot of Osho lately — usually late, usually in the dark, which is probably the only correct way to listen to him. And he does something...

Moving to a new city is a lot like getting married. You arrive full of hope. You promise to adjust. You tell yourself the difficult parts are temporary, that it takes time, that everyone says it gets better. And like most marriages, it either makes you or breaks you. Mostly, in my experience, it breaks you first. Not with anything dramatic. A city doesn't fight with you. It simply refuses to know your name . It lets you discover, slowly, how much of your identity was built by the streets you knew, the people who greeted you without asking who you were, and the places that once felt like home. But the real damage doesn't happen on weekdays. Weekdays are merciful. There is an office to go to, meetings to survive, deadlines to chase. Routine keeps your mind occupied and convinces you that you're doing okay. It's the weekends that expose the truth. The festivals. The evenings. The birthdays. The days when your phone is full of pictures of people laughing over dinner with fa...

 I believe in God . Or something like Him. A force. An order. A hand beyond my control. Call it God, call it the universe, call it whatever your grandmother called it. I believe in it. Here's why. There's a point in everything worth doing where your effort runs out. The 5 a.m. alarms, the planning, the polished version of yourself — and still, nothing moves the way you willed it. The job doesn't land. The room stays cold. The plan falls apart on a random Tuesday, no reason attached. And right there, hands empty, something in you looks up. Not weakness. Instinct. Okay. I've done my part. Now you take care of me. That's not defeat. That's hope . The most underrated force we have. Not the sit-back kind. The kind that keeps you showing up to a life that isn't cooperating, because some part of you still believes it's going somewhere. Take hope out of a person, and watch the fight leave with it. Which is why I've never understood people who let it go. Not ...

It was Father's Day last week. I didn't post anything about it. I posted what I always post — something honest and a little unglamorous. This time it was about how I write for myself , and how it's perfectly fine with me if not one single person ever reads it. A friend read it and said, almost like he was doing me a favour: "It was Father's Day, yaar. You should've posted about that." I just smiled. Because I don't chase the trending thing, and I don't write for views. Never have. But here's what I didn't say to him. The truth is — I did want to write about Father's Day. I sat down to, more than once. And I couldn't. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I don't actually know what a father's emotion feels like. I have never, in my whole life, seen my father emote to me. Not once. No "I'm proud of you," no tears, no open arms — just a quiet man and a quieter love I had to learn to read between the lines....

 I read something today that quietly caught me out. A writer — Kritika — wrote about the particular silence of posting something into the world and watching it collect exactly zero reads. That weird, specific heaviness of it. And her conclusion stayed with me: that the reader was never really the point of writing at all. That the person who gains the most from a piece of writing is not whoever reads it — it's the one who wrote it. I sat with that, and then I looked back at the last few weeks of my own evenings, and I felt a little exposed. Because what have I been doing? Berlin. Ved. Light Yagami. One after another, these long late-night posts dressed up as "character analysis." And tonight it's obvious, almost embarrassingly so: none of them were ever about Berlin or Ved or Kira. They were about me. They were me, sitting alone in a city I don't like, taking the mess in my head and quietly bullying it into sentences until it made some kind of sense. Berlin was jus...

So the film spiral I fell into didn't stop at Money Heist One reflection leads to another — that's how it goes when a new city leaves you with too many quiet evenings. Berlin had me thinking about  how  to live, about romancing the moment even when the moment is a strange town and a borrowed flat. And then, almost by accident, the algorithm threw  Tamasha  at me. Imtiaz Ali, 2015, Ranbir and Deepika. A film I'd watched years ago and shrugged off as "nice songs, slow story." I put it on as background noise while eating my dinner. I did not eat much dinner that night. Because this time — and I keep coming back to this,  the second watch is where the real film hides  — I wasn't watching a love story. I was watching a man I recognised. And I didn't like how much I recognised him. You know the setup. Ved meets Tara in Corsica, and they make a beautiful little pact: no real names, no real stories. For one week he gets to be anyone he wants — funny, wild, dramati...

  Two weeks in Bangalore now. Two weeks, and the city still feels like a borrowed jacket — right size on paper, but it just refuses to sit on my shoulders the way Mumbai did. The traffic doesn't make sense, the roads loop into themselves, and every evening the same thought rings in my head — yaar, yeh apni jagah nahi hai . People keep telling me it grows on you. Maybe. For now it just sits on me, heavy, like an unwanted guest who has decided to stay for dinner. So I did what I always do when a place refuses to feel like home. I went back to something that does. I opened Money Heist again. Funny thing about watching anything a second time. The first time, you are a slave to the suspense — racing ahead, eyes glued to what happens next , who lives, who dies, which mask falls when. You swallow the story whole and miss half of it. But the second time, the suspense is gone, and suddenly you have eyes for everything you blew past. The plot stops mattering and the details start scream...

  Five Lines That Stayed A 2 a.m. reading of Kevin Kelly's "68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice" — and the five sentences that refused to let me sleep. It is 2 a.m. The fan is on. The city outside has gone quiet. And I am doing what every adult swears every night they will stop doing — scrolling through old bookmarks on my phone, hoping something I once saved will turn out to still be worth saving. Most of it is junk. And then I tap on a link from months ago: "68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice" by Kevin Kelly — sixty-eight short sentences from a man on his sixty-eighth birthday, written by someone who has clearly travelled vividly and paid attention. Out of all sixty-eight, only five stayed with me by sunrise. These are the five. 1. "When you die, you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation." I read this and thought of every Indian funeral I have ever been to. The same plastic chairs, the same quiet uncle with the register, the same con...