Tentative Decisions!

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 ...

Somewhere north of two hundred podcasts. More than sixty books, dog-eared and underlined, stacked on a shelf that used to hold scripture. A decade of nights where I told myself I'd sleep after just one more chapter, one more lecture, one more debate clip, and then watched the clock cross four in the morning anyway. I did this for years before I let myself say out loud what I was actually doing: trying to find out if God was real, using every tool except the one I was raised to use, which was simply believing. Here's the honest end of that search. There is no truth waiting at the bottom of it, not the kind I was hoping for. What I found instead were parameters, the edges of what evolution and consciousness can currently explain and the much larger space just outside those edges where I still don't know anything. I didn't find God. I found a haunted question I can't put down, and I've decided that's a more honest place to live than certainty was. Where It...

It's been a while since I've written anything sociological. For the past few months I've been buried in a book, one dedicated to the people who shaped me, the ones who never made it into anyone's acknowledgements page before. It's a slow book, meditative, or at least trying to be, though I won't pretend I've moved through the writing of it half as calmly as the book itself asks its reader to. But some part of me hasn't stopped being a student of everything else. Global politics, history, philosophy, literature, technology, sociology, whatever refuses to sit still long enough to be filed under one subject. For the past year I've been quietly journaling something I couldn't stop noticing: how the protests erupting around me seem to rhyme with the rise of cryptocurrency, and why Bitcoin might not be separate from this generational story at all. It might be the truest expression of it. This is that journal, finally put into words. It started, as ...

एह मेरी कविता, मैं अब तुझसे विदा लेता हूँ। तेरे घर में कितने कामयाब कवि ठहरे होंगे, कितने सफ़र पर चलते हुए यहाँ ठहरे होंगे। पर मेरा ठहरना तेरे आँगन में, बस इतना ही था। मैं अगर कुछ देर और बैठा, तो यह अपमान होगा उनके लेखन का, जिनका यहाँ आना अभी शेष था। मैं अब कवि नहीं रहा। मुझे अब यह कुदरत आकर्षण नहीं देती। रात मित्र नहीं है, वृक्ष संगीत नहीं देते। जिस देह पर कितने गीत अभी लिखे जाने थे, वह प्रेम की सियाही अब मेरी कलम में नहीं रही। मेरे दृश्य अब, प्रेम की कल्पना नहीं करते। मुझे चेहरे एक-से दिखने लगे हैं, और मेरा दर्पण, मुझे दैनिक सलाह देता है, कि तुम अब कवि नहीं हो। इसलिए मैंने हफ़्तों से, दर्पण नहीं देखा। मैं कवि जन्मा हूँ, तो कवि ही मरूँगा। पर मेरी साधना मुझे यह विश्वास दिला रही है, कवि, तुम्हें जीवन ने नहीं, प्रेम ने बनाया था। अब कवि होना, उसका अभिनय करने जैसा है, जैसे बड़े शहरों में लोग मित्रता का अभिनय करते हैं। एह कविता, मुझे एक नए पथ पर निकलना है। मुझे यह भूलना है, कि मैं एक कवि था। उस पथ में अनुराग, ममता, आसक्ति, अवैर, करुणा, सब होगा, पर प्रेम नहीं होगा। कोई राह पूछेगा प्रेम की, त...