The Sky I Keep Looking At

 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 their theology — that's their business. Something narrower. The moment things stop working and they simply stop believing anything's on their side. No God, no order, nothing to lean on. Just them, alone, against a world that feels rigged. That scares me more than any disagreement about religion. A person without hope isn't short one belief. They're short the one thing that gets you through the part of the story that doesn't make sense yet.

I say all that. Now let me be honest about where I actually am.

I used to look at the sky like it owed me an answer.
Lately I look at it like a stranger,
wondering if it even remembers my name.
I haven't stopped believing.
I've just gone quiet —
the way you go quiet with someone you love
when you're tired. Not when you're done.

Two months in Bangalore. I'm losing hope a little.

Not the dramatic kind. A slow leak. The city still doesn't feel mine. Some mornings the sky looks more like ceiling than heaven. I catch myself doing the exact thing I said I don't understand in other people — quietly wondering if anything here is actually on my side.

Same silence, different stories, depending who's listening to it. A spiritual person hears it and calls it the doorway to nirvana. A darker mind hears the same silence and calls it a warning sign. I don't think the danger is the silence. I think the danger is which story you believe about it. And the more I try to understand people — why they hurt the way they hurt — the more tired I get, because there's no clean floor at the bottom of any of it. Negativity doesn't stay flat. It compounds. One dark thought makes the next one easier to believe. Left alone, it snowballs. So I don't leave it alone.

Here's the harder line. I'm not just failing to adjust to this city. I'm losing pieces of myself trying to. The man who had opinions at the dinner table. Who wrote for the joy of it. Who knew exactly what he liked — some days I can't find him in this flat, in this routine, in this version of me that's mostly just getting through the day.

Losing a city is nothing. I'm afraid of losing myself.

Small proof, better than any explaining. In Mumbai, I loved staying home. That flat was worn-in, mine, the kind of place you sink into on a lazy Sunday. Here, home has no pull at all. It's just a place I return to. So I do the opposite of what I used to — I go to office every single day, some weekends too, because at least it gives me somewhere to be.

And it's not some grey cubicle. It's Indiranagar. Every luxury brand you can name. Food from every corner of the world. Streets styled like a magazine spread. On paper, more comfort than I've ever had in one neighbourhood.

And still — empty.

Turns out the ache was never about what's around me. Good coffee can't fill a hole shaped like home. Like people who know you. Like a room that already knows your name.

But here's what I have to remind myself, on the page, tonight: losing hope a little is not the same as losing it. A candle gone dim in the wind hasn't gone out. The people who make it through the hard chapter aren't the ones who never doubt. They're the ones who keep looking up anyway — mid-doubt, half-convinced nobody's listening.

So tonight, tired and a little unconvinced, I'll do the only thing that's ever worked. Look at the sky. Say the same old sentence.

I've done what I can. Now you take care of me.

Not because I'm certain it's listening. Because the asking is the hope. And the hope is what's keeping me upright.

I'd rather be a man foolishly looking up than one who's stopped looking altogether.

…Tune in for next — hopefully with a little more sky in my voice by then.