Pages From Her Diary

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...