Pages From Her Diary

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...