Tentative Decisions!

It has been eight years since I resigned from my job. In that time, my laptop and a good internet connection became my teacher and, honestly, my best friend. I read what I wanted, watched what I wanted, followed one curious thread into the next one, with nobody assigning any of it to me. In 2020, one of those threads led me to Andrew Huberman . I remember the exact feeling of listening to him for the first time, hearing scientific names for things I had already been doing since 2014, quietly, without knowing there were names for them at all. I am not a trained scientist. I don't have a deep background in neuroscience. But between Huberman, and later a good amount of Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, I started to see the shape of my own Vipassana practice from a completely different angle, a laboratory angle, not just a spiritual one. A Practice That Disappeared and Came Back Vipassana is old. The Buddha taught it in India roughly 2,500 years ago. What most people don't know is t...

For most of my adult life, I thought of myself as a rebel. I said the word to myself the way some people say a job title, with a little pride attached to it. I invoked God, poetry, feminism, government, money, boundaries, tradition, one after another, in conversations where I knew exactly what reaction I'd get. If I'm honest about the earliest version of that habit, I have to admit it wasn't purely philosophical. Some of it was attention. I liked being the person in the room who said the thing nobody else would say. Somewhere in the years since, something shifted, and it took me a long time to even notice it had happened. The same instincts that used to feel like a performance stopped needing an audience. I stopped my education without finishing the degree everyone expected me to finish. I traveled when I was told to settle. I resigned when I was told to hold onto a job. I didn't marry when I was told to marry. I asked questions about God long after I was told the que...

I drop my daughter at the school gate most mornings, and for a long time I watched the same scene without actually seeing it. The uniform rows. The bell that cuts a sentence off mid-thought whether the thought was finished or not. The line she has to stand in, shortest to tallest, before anyone asks her a single question about what she's curious about that day. I've walked past that gate for years before I let myself ask the obvious question. Who actually designed this, and what were they trying to build. Who Actually Designed This The honest answer surprised me. The basic architecture of the classroom my daughter sits in, age-segregated grades, a bell-driven schedule, a standardized curriculum delivered the same way to every child regardless of what's actually going on in their head that day, wasn't designed by anyone thinking about children first. It was built in early nineteenth century Prussia , in the years after Napoleon's army humiliated them, by a state ...

Late at night, when I was still young enough to be sent to bed on a schedule, my mother would sometimes tell me stories about her own childhood instead, the ones that only ever seemed to come out after dark, after the day's obligations had emptied out of the room. I didn't know it then, but I was already doing the thing I still do to everyone I love. I was listening the way you listen when you plan to keep something, not just hear it. I think I've been a great observer since before I had any language for what that meant. People I talk to don't always know that the conversation we're having might end up, months later, folded into a manuscript, dressed in a metaphor they never said out loud themselves but would probably recognize as true. I don't think I trained myself into this. I think it's closer to something I was simply born holding, the way some people are born with perfect pitch, except what I have perfect pitch for is the exact moment someone reveals...

Every morning, after I drop my daughter at school, I read. Some days it's ten minutes. Some days it's two hours, whatever the book will give me. Then I open YouTube, and that's where this particular morning went somewhere I didn't expect. The first video was Dhruv Rathee on fast fashion, how the clothes we buy and barely wear are quietly one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions and microplastics on the planet. I watched the whole thing. Before I could even close the tab, the feed had already decided what I needed next, a podcast about how porn and everything built around it have left an entire generation's desires permanently unfulfilled. And somewhere inside that podcast, almost as a throwaway line, the host mentioned microplastics from clothing too, the same fact from the video I'd just watched, resurfacing in a completely different conversation about a completely different kind of want. I closed my eyes after that, sat back in my chair, told myself...

On my desk, Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Murakami look at me. They've been looking at me for weeks now, the way old friends look at you when they know something's wrong and are too polite to say it outright. On top of that small stack sits my own book, Tum Lautkar Ghar Ko Aa Jaana , and it looks at me differently than the others do. It looks at me the way a first child looks at a parent, pure, joyous, a little uncomprehending of why the parent seems so far away lately. I'm not going to tell you why the words stopped arriving in the shape a poem needs. That part stays mine. What I can tell you is what it feels like to sit at a desk surrounded by three writers who mastered plain, devastating prose, under a book of my own that once knew exactly how to become verse, and to simply not have the poem come. Not writer's block in the ordinary sense. Something closer to a room I used to walk into without thinking, whose door I can now only stand in front of. So ...