I first encountered it in my parents, my family, my friends’ parents and their families, until it became indistinguishable from what was always propelling me.

When I started studying for the JEE, I felt like I’d found the meaning of life. Really. I would study through the day and evenings, rushing from classes to lab assignments and back home, so, if the day still permitted, I could study more.

Through coaching, I became part of the ‘special batch’ that is formed at the start of every year, based on performance in an internal test that emulates the JEE. Later, when I didn’t do as well on similar tests, I felt dead inside.

I could articulate this inner deadness as a resolution: If there was one thing I couldn’t be, it was stupid.

I couldn’t be stupid. I especially couldn’t be a stupid girl.

This is the natural response to the fetishization of intelligence within the average Indian household—obvious when you examine its methods. I can speak to the Brahmin procedure, but the principle is psychological and so fairly universal.

The process involves a rejection of the self that does not produce results catering to the narrowly defined idea of intelligence respected by culture. Instead, it induces the making of the ideal Pavlovian-self, for rewards like acceptance, appreciation, love, which all followed prestige. It’s all best captured by one Hindi word: aukaat.

Ghar pe bhi aukaat honi chahiye. Even at home you have to have status.

One respectable offshoot of the great Indian dream is to move abroad and realize the great American Dream. Family members may be compared to see who is doing how well. “My two elder sons are employed in the US— one works for Infosys and the other General Electric… My youngest son is a journalist here in Bengaluru.”

“What—journalism, is it?” the father is pained to hear from friends and relatives. ‘It is a way of saying, “Oh, a calamity has struck!’’’

Tamil Brahmins are told from a young age that they have to be good at studies. Simple living, high thinking: that was the motto. There were many examples used to prove the Brahmins’ claims to God-given talent. Srinivas Ramanujan, Shakuntala Devi, Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Charaka, J.C. Bose, C.V. Raman, and other Brahmins held up as evidence of the special ‘Indian knack’ for science and mathematics.

Social and moral values are also transferred through this attitude to education and intelligence. “A lot of people in the family used to keep saying that, you know, we’ve got nothing else. There are no family riches. All we’ve got to give you is an education.”

And as for math? “You don’t come home with anything short of a hundred.”

More on the gendered, casteist ideas of success and intelligence that Indians grow up with in Chapter 2 of Famous Last Questions. In case you haven’t yet, please read and leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

In a still from her film Tashan (2008), Kareena is stepping out of the ocean, a lime green bikini glinting off her pale skin. Her taut abdomen and toned thighs and arms—and, at close glance, a few ribs—were testament to what had already been immortalized by the national news: Kareena’s new ‘size zero’ figure.

‘It was exactly at that time that I was looking at myself and thinking, “Oh my god, I look very ugly.”’ Like myself and several other young Indian women, this girl was ‘maturing’ at the time—realizing how crucial her body was to how she was perceived in the world.

I was fifteen and weighed 79 kilograms when Tashan came out. A year and a half later, I weighed 54 kilograms. Male friends would try to kiss me soon after. Being desirable to men, I was told, is good. Being untouched by them somehow—even better. What a confusing country and set of norms.

For this triumph, I had run, counted calories, cut out all sugar, and eaten no carbs but fruit; when I stopped getting thinner after all of this, I ran even more and replaced a lunch of one roti, salad, and veggies with raw tomatoes.

This is the thing about disordered eating in India: it is hard to be named as such. It can get rewarded as discipline, as dedication, as ‘being careful.’

The generation of women that grew into calorie-counting apps, YouTube workouts, and the creep of Western body ideals into Indian family kitchens absorbed a great deal of damage without a vocabulary for it.

Women’s bodies are everyone’s business but their own. They belong to the family’s gaze, to flippant comments from relatives, the prospective husband’s family’s inspections.

What you absorb, growing up, is a sort of permanent self-surveillance. The body becomes a site of moral judgment, coming from caste-class factors, before it is seen as a source of personal truth and experience.

Now you have more awareness, through Instagram carousels and the rise of wellness and self-care and self-love industries, but those too are subsumed under capitalism, inseparable from every other visual we’re inundated with at once today.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Read the full essay—on the connections between eating disorders and body image, Bollywood, caste, class, gender, age, and everything else honestly—in Chapter 3 of Famous Last Questions. In case you haven’t yet, please also leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

unrelated:

Observing your thoughts, one after the other, instead of identifying with them, makes you realize they hardly make sense, even when they appear to. You start to see through them, the arbitrariness of their order, how they cannot really proven as true or false. They are theories borne of your mind, your past and conditioning, which we automatically believe and seek to confirm in all events.

For example, if you have been abused by llamas before, any new llama you meet might be tinged with conscious or unconscious suspicion. Potentially neutral actions or comments from the llama could be interpreted through that familiar lens. Your reactions to them (through perhaps the fascinating process of projective identification) may then end up causing what you fear—the previous unpleasant outcomes or situations with llamas.

Our psychological wounds become conscious to us through re-enactments of the past, this time with the hope that we can master the previous terrifying situation, until we learn the lesson enough times to heal the wounds driving us, to love ourselves for what we’ve been through, and reprogram the mind to create new, more favourable realities. This repetition-compulsion explains common dysfunctional patterns: women with absent fathers chasing unavailable men; somehow working with the same toxic boss figure in different workplaces; moving from one addiction to the next, etc.

Life then demands we operate with the discernment our past lessons have given us, without their baggage too—meaning, we have to also stop expecting our patterns to repeat wherever we go, just because we have understood them intimately, because this would make us jaded and paranoid.

What a task!

Some of my recent lessons have involved learning to protect myself. It has been a rude awakening to learn that people can actually be jealous of me. That they could dislike me I can easily believe. I have attracted polarized reactions in social settings for a long time. People tend to either be drawn towards my outspokenness and ‘aura’, or the total opposite, where they think I’m ‘too much’, or provide some other negative framing of an attribute that another, more clement perceiver, might consider neutrally or kindly.

It took me a while to recognise some of these subtle negative reactions as jealousy. While describing anecdotes to other friends—casual unprovoked putdowns, needless minor criticisms—one pointed out, “they hate us cause they ain’t us”. I was surprised because I hadn’t ascribed to myself the kind of self-importance that I think you need to have to think you have enemies.

Who, after all, has enemies? What is this, a Shakespearean play?

And does a jealous friend qualify as an enemy?

Remember, though, that Julius Caesar was assassinated by his bestie, Brutus, for fear that Caesar had become ‘too ambitious’. I revisited Mark Antony’s speech after Caesar was assassinated. Antony praises Caeser’s commitment and care towards his job of leading the Roman republic, slowly and sarcastically calling out Brutus’ negative framing of Caesar’s competence as ‘too much ambition’, Brutus’ insecurity being the real reason behind the assassination.

In writing this I am investigating the roots of my difficulty in recognizing and dealing with jealousy. For starters, it isn’t something you want to spot in a friend. Secondly, it usually comes well-disguised, for it can present in more favourable and polite forms at the start, like flattery, worship, or pedestalisation, which may sound great but are really dehumanizing. Thirdly, if you default to seeing the good in people, and are relatively secure in yourself too—which does not mean not having insecurities, but knowing you’re flawed as fuck, a limited human being, and dealing with these burdens somehow—you tend to not want what others have, but to work on yourself so you can be the best you can be. Fourthly, I never took it seriously even if I admitted the possibility of jealousy. How could it really, materially, harm me?

But I’ve learnt that jealous friends can fuck with you unless you have built up psychological armour. And it is exactly the kind of self-security that attracts jealous characters, perhaps. Heck, I would be jealous of someone like me if I weren’t me.

But I have known that whatever trait or outcome I want, I can cultivate or work towards and eventually have; when I can’t, I am satisfied with my pure-hearted efforts and/or disgruntled with the limits of reality and myself, rather than filled with ill will for another’s talents or good luck. You should know that even as I write this, a part of my mind is going, “As if! You are never this nice about your shortcomings. You’d rather berate yourself for everything you think you’re incapable of. You also sound full of yourself right now.”

When I do see someone with something I admire or want for myself, I might also end up with a crush, which I have learnt to finally see as a signal for what we want for ourselves, among other things. Jealousy is perhaps the shadow side of a crush. You can easily develop a crush on the opposite sex. But if you are not bisexual … well, that’s where murders come in.

This attitude of mine doesn’t contradict my neuroticism, my ambition, me not liking myself a lot of the times, etcetera. All of it is true, and the awareness of it all being true means I accept myself as good and bad, secure and insecure, full of contradictions, whole, on my own path.

We would all be better off if we saw individual growth should be seen as something like the life of a tree. Robbed of human self-importance, all of us serve some function, tangible or intangible, in the fabric of existence. So, like trees, we should be unbothered about what other trees are doing, and just consume our O2 and produce our CO2 without comparing ourselves to one another in all sorts of neurotic ways.

A related reading/movie/ “consumption” list:

• How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

• Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori and Lucille Clerc

• The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell

• Mudita: The Joy of Joy: How delighting in others’ happiness, rather than wishing them less, can double your well being. Meditation teachers suggest using mudita to counter jealousy, fostering a feeling that there is "no enemy".

• Nerdwriter on Mark Antony’s insanely passive aggressive speech

• Dabbe: The Possession: Wait for my reel on Instagram on how I connect this crazy horror flick to the themes of this newsletter.

In case you haven’t yet, get a copy of my book, Famous Last Questions, wherever you get good books. Those of you who’ve read it—please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. It really helps.

You must know the highly agentic among us. They’re much better than the mimetic, whose desire is derived not from within, but from without. If you’re agentic, ‘you can just do things’, unlike NPCs who sit around and stew haplessly in their own lack of purpose, indecision, or legitimate doubt, even, about how and what is to be done today in this very complicated, often worrisome, morally questionable world we live in.

I consider myself highly agentic, by the way. Anyone looking at my lifestyle or resume would agree. (“Maybe she was born with it—maybe it was agency.”) Still, my first real experience of ground-breaking agency occurred only through the lockdowns of the pandemic, when I found myself stuck in a career and life I didn’t love. I’d always been driven, disciplined, action-oriented—but I had the striking realization that all my decisions had been a product of the times and environment I’d been born into. Real agency might have been superceding others’ influences and demands to channel all that drive towards absolutely whatever “I” wanted.

This led to the next logical question—what is “I”—through which I fell into Vipassana meditation, which literally means to “see clearly”. The answer was a well-known spiritual insight, about the intransience of the self. The self is not fixed, it is a process. Consciousness is downstream, as it were, of the molecules and chemicals that end up as a human body. Our identification with any ideas of who we are—our achievements, relationships, circumstances, or any descriptors at all—is the problem.

So, you can always overcome your conditioning and define a new self. This is what they mean when they say your thoughts control your reality.

Thus, finally, came Real Agency: I authored myself as I’d always wanted to, writing the book on the history of my consciousness, as it unraveled and de-conditioned itself. My wins, fails, relationships, traumas had much to do with the influences that shaped my generation of Indian millennials overall.

Its release was concomitant with the greatest experience of agency I’d ever had: I gained the psychological strength to honour my wants and needs, to be an individual outside of the family system and the collective. My boundaries erupted, I told people who’d upset me just how I felt instead of acting alright all the time, and I dealt with the consequences. I broke enmeshments routine to Indian family dynamics. Carl Jung called this process of psychological growth ‘individuation’, and I love that mine occurred through writing and meditation. (Other possible routes to it perhaps for another Substack.)

My point in recapping the book here is not just to self-promote—what is the ‘self’, after all, and you can get a copy here or leave a review here if you haven’t already!—but to show you how I’ve come to understand the concept of ‘agency’.

Agency is the ability to self-author, to not be a victim to your past or present circumstances, to not outsource your power in shaping your own reality to other entities, many of which you may not agree with upon second thought, but which insist on haunting you anyway. Agency means to ‘own’ your energy, to go inward and find the means to execute your soul’s unique blueprint. It is focussing on what you can control, even when inundated by what is out of your control. Agency could well mean simple awareness—a glimmer of recognition—that you are not all that you think you are.

These are extremely useful ideas. I daresay I wouldn’t be where I am now, orders of magnitude up in baseline happiness than previous versions of me, without them. But despite making courageous moves to reclaim my life, I know that every period of confidence and strength—times I’ve known what I wanted and just gone after it—was preceded by intense, prolonged periods of darkness and doubt. This is to say: high agency and low agency seem to go hand in hand. You cannot not be lost at times, as a human being.

Or, the night is darkest before the dawn!

This is my big umbrage with the parodic levels of agency-parroting these days. People are acting like the concept can absolve you of suffering, of uncertainty, of confusion, of not-knowing, of the feeling of wanting to to be saved from what feels like the absolute void that follows questioning everything you’ve been told. For those feeling stuck, it might feel like invalidation or dismissal of (a) the existence of such fallow mental states, and (b) the value, even, in mining them fully.

I wouldn’t undergo inner deadness willingly, of course. I wouldn’t be able to write about its merits while immersed in it. Having been under its influence at different junctures, however, I have come to see that my personal bests could not have been without my personal worsts. My language for this was recently expanded by Rachel McNessor’s book on ‘Manifesting Love and Abundance from the Dark Night of the Soul’, in which she says Dark Nights can be precipitated by crises and rapid changes in our lives—the end of meaningful relationships, a call to blow things up, or a series of such disruptions—causing us to feel unmoored.

These are necessary rites of passage to becoming the people we are meant to be, and they happen multiple times over a lifetime. We are like diamonds being forged under pressure. I’ve found solace in metaphors and writings that those who only know surface-level reality—constant hustle culture, achievement, family milestones, linearity, whatever—could never provide.

To bring it back to Sam Kriss’ essay and what makes it brilliant: He scathingly separates the truly ‘agentic’ from the appearance of it. There’s the Silicon-Valley-type-agentic in the form of a character called Roy Lee, whose product doesn’t do more than thinly disguise his need for belonging and status, which is fine if you know that’s what you’re sublimating, instead of shunning human vulnerability and cluelessness altogther. The irony is that these highly agentic people are spending all their time and the world’s money giving away agency to AI that cannot think or have actual agency (yet).

Then there’s the spoofing-of-the-Silicon-Valley-type-agentic, in the form of Donald Boat, who seems to be a literary genius who knows the game these Valley kings are playing. He seems self-aware about the limits of human agency, unlike Lee, who has just not woken up.

Then there’s the actually agentic, perhaps, in the form of Eric Zhu, a scrappy kid who gets rich off of the various grifts of the past decade by acting at the right moments, while Kriss himself was ‘utterly broke’ and ‘living in a room the size of a shoebox’.

The essay serves an important cultural purpose, I think. It juxtaposes the SOC 2 ads that homeless people go to sleep under on SF’s streets. It describes Roy Lee’s speech as having ‘zero latency’. It does what all great writing does: mocks clichés, elevates the absurdity of its times, and adds dimension to popular contentions. Like the epoch-defining narrative non-fiction I’ve studied and worshiped, essays by Tom Wolfe and David Foster Wallace, its sentences are delightful and ticklish. It cut through me with a sort of purifying effect, reminding me of the value of good writing and my own agency! Which seems to boil down to my ability to produce good writing.

My point is now for anyone worshiping this misunderstood concept. Agency is a fancier term for personal power, perhaps. Every encounter with my own has come with fear and resistance, because it’s meant I’ll have to put my neck out on the line, do something I’m not used to doing, or which culture doesn’t necessarily reward.

It involves legitimate risk.

We tend to follow social conditioning blindly in the first half of our lives, but in the second half, we get to choose whether we still want to. Agency could just mean living authentically. Agency is not real unless it scares you. This may involve just doing things, or maybe not too.

A lot about me is liberal-coded to the naked eye: I am a 32-year-old unmarried woman who lives alone in an apartment complex in a cosmopolitan Indian city. English would seem to be my primary language, though my mother tongue is Tamil, and my Hindi is good too. I probably come across as affable yet self-possessed, given I am tall and well-built, thank you very much. If there was ever an exemplar of the “strong independent woman” trope, it might be me, except it only takes a few meetings for someone I vibe with to see that I am also deeply emotional and using a processing system that senses itself and the world in 1080p.

Professionally, I do a few things: I’m an author; I write about culture, politics, technology, business, spirituality, myself, my generation, the life and times, you know. I am a “marketing leader” who has sold detergent, magazines, and software products alike, now including AI (what doesn’t?). I have been an engineer of two kinds in past lives, and my hobbies include meditating, playing games, laughing with friends, having intense relationships, and whatever else might catch my obsessive fancy in the future.

This is some history, I know, but I’ve bristled against being called “privileged” at first sight. To be sure, my family has always been well above the poverty line, and we’ve only lived in metro cities, but my father was unemployed for most of my life. Women in my family were supposed to be educated, but not for their own sakes. The historical purpose was to be suitable in-house companions for the ‘man of the house’, and there were harsh penalties for venturing outside of this strictly policed box. Because I’ve had to fight hard to be where I am, overcoming serious and sustained violence at the hands of the patriarchy, I hate when my intelligence or vocations or complexity are trivialised, especially by men, or even people who don’t know me well or seem to think about such things seriously.

I occupy these contradictory positions—artist-capitalist; artist-scientist; a believer in social freedoms and socialism both; a feminist who argues that there is such a thing as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but that its unique admixture in each individual is for them to discover and maybe transcend, because all forms of identity, including gender, are ultimately a prison; I think AI writing is terrible but not that AI shouldn’t be built at all; fascism is bad but religion serves a necessary function in the human psyche and culture; capitalism is deeply flawed but works better than communism ever did, and I like money, being comfortable, and buying nice things; I meditate a lot but my spirituality does not oppose (anymore) my materialism nor my ambition; I’m rational on most days but prone to excessive tarot readings and GPT usage when anxious—and so I take offence at being called “left” or “right”.

You see where I’m going with this?

Labels are seductive but reductive. You could put that on a billboard, and it would still be an insufferable thing to say, because where would we be without constructs and concepts? But I’m concerned that black-and-white thinking enables our worst tendencies as a human race.

Apart from making me feel grossly misunderstood, labels when tightly gripped close us off to intellectual humility (that there may be some new angle for us to consider) and compassion (that however ‘wrong’ someone seems in their opinion, they still have the right to believe what they do, and we should not be too harmful about our differences). Plus, no ideology can have the right answer 100% of the time, which means that to be wedded to a worldview is to commit to being wrong at least some of the time, for the sake of an attachment.

Nothing is fixed, and complexity is where truth lives. Spotting it and continually seeking it is already the exception to how most think, I think. With subjects as sensitive, charged, and personal like political views, especially, I feel like it’s imperative to start with what people mean when they say “left” or “right”, which I don’t think we do enough.

My thinking on this was first broadened in the company of some brilliant friends at B-school. AJ told me about the Political Compass test, which exposed to me the sloppiness behind just “left” and “right”. The site explains that these were meant to be used primarily on an economic axis—complete ‘left’ meaning a state-controlled economy, and complete ‘right’ meaning a total free market—whereas people also conflate them with a social axis—‘left’ meaning total social freedom, ‘right’ meaning authoritarianism—and so, put together, you have a 2x2 matrix for where you stand politically. You can’t be only “left” or “right”, you could be left-left, left-right, right-left, right-right. See below.

Upon AJ’s advice, I took the test over time to see how my views changed with the years. Four results from 2019 through 2026 indicate that I am, in fact, a “leftist liberal saali”! Left libertarian, to be exact.

So, my haters are right! But not on purpose, I think.

(One time, I scored equally socially left as always, but slightly to the right of centre economically, which placed me right on top of Milton Friedman, but I don’t have record of this.)

My point in bringing this up now is not only for educational reasons or to give anyone any satisfaction. But I think a lot about the gap between a given truth and the ways in which people distance themselves from it because of their egoic and intellectual attachment to some frame overall.

For example, one of my essays that drew the strongest reactions was about the relevance of Sanskrit in the world of AI. It managed to irritate Indian Twitter’s left and right both. The right, predictably so, because it questioned their chokehold on Indian science and research. The left, more interestingly, because I took the subject seriously enough to surface something genuine, which is that Sanskrit, because of its rule-based nature, definitely has relevance to programming. The typical write-off is that this is all right-wing propaganda, but, again, the truly intellectually rigorous answer is that Sanskrit does have a mathematical nature that there is value in studying, but it is far from being useful to modern AI, and the only thing keeping the two tied are vested political interests.

The experience of writing that piece, and coming up with its ending, in particular, taught me something important. Good writing—and good thinking—should complicate a subject before clarifying it. Instead of simply confirming or dis-confirming preconceptions, it should offer a model that honours difficult new truths beyond what we’re programmed to think.

Black-and-white thinking, or ideological affinity, should make anyone uncomfortable. There is often a kernel of truth in both liberal and conservative thought, that may or may not apply to broader policy questions or decisions on How to Live or What is Right. It may be true that there are masculine and feminine poles in human psychology, but how that should translate to questions of safety, fairness, freedom, sport, etcetera, is work that belongs to experts and institutions who can straddle competing truths and interests in good faith. It may be so that Indian scientific effort has been besmirched by the political agenda of our times, but it is also true that Sanskrit had something to offer science, just not in the way it was being used.

How often does your affinity to an ideology or worldview obscure something deeper? Have you thought about this? In this essay, you will—

He goes on from this affable modesty, mousy moustache on baby face and all, to declaring he wants to be “one of the greats”, that he’s “as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis and Marlon Brando and Viola Davis” as he is by “Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps”. And “the greats here tonight”, he adds, careful to not put himself above his competitors or the other members of Hollywood at the ceremony.

This is so anti-classic-award-speech behaviour that Chalamet would obviously go down in history for it. Instead of being “humbled”, he chooses to be real, earnest, and tactfully defiant.

Chalamet is aware that displays of ambition are most appropriate when subtle, modest, especially coming from the already talented and successful. We like ambition so long as its extent is suitably disguised. When it is large and monstrous, groupthink would rather shame it, probably from an evolutionary strategy to maintain cohesion.

We are conditioned—and wired—not to make others uncomfortable. Proclaiming you belong, or even want to belong (which is the same thing), to what the group considers a superior tier of existence triggers the group’s unconscious ceiling of what they can want and have, much less openly. Hence the “humblebrug” and the theatre games we see on LinkedIn, where people give away their cravings for recognition alongside dollops of pretentious modesty.

It is more honest—useful—humble—to be like Chalamet, I think, to have an approach to ambition that does not sugarcoat the (arguably selfish) hunger beneath it. We have come far enough as a society to see through anything less. It is authentic to admit how much you want to excel at something and to be seen for that excellence too, not necessarily out of some desire for the greater good, but for the sake of craft, for devotion, for leaving a mark on the way something is done, for the meaning that such audacity and delusion can provide your existence.

We live in the era of the personal brand and constant self-mythologization, goddamnit. You know what I’m talking about.

As someone who experiences this kind of maniacal commitment to getting to the ‘top’ in most of what I do, whether it’s being a ‘serious’ fitness enthusiast or an ‘excellent’ writer or an ‘A’ player at work or now a ‘pro’ poker player, Chalamet’s words feel like a cool splash of water on the face. (To elaborate, I don’t necessarily want to make a living from poker, but I do want my gameplay to be as good as the best. Whenever I sense such proficiency is not impossible, as I did with, say, quizzing or biology or certain musical instruments, I kind of lose interest and stop showing up.)

For the first half of my life, I was vulnerable to other people’s definitions of ‘top’. Intelligence was ‘real’ if proven in math, science, national competitive exams, various extracurriculars, whatever my parents wanted and were my own mimetic ideas of ‘cool’, as I write in the book. The intensity always came through—I couldn’t just be another clueless engineer out of college, I had to teach myself coding and get into FAANG. At B-school, the only way to alleviate suffering was to aim for ‘best’ at things I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do. I didn’t just do one Vipassana course and write a tweet thread about it, I did three and have tried to do it every day since. You see where I’m going with this.

I really need to know what I’m about in whatever I’m about. I can’t do things simply casually.

Perhaps this drive sounds admirable and aspirational, but you should know the trade-offs. I feel intense shame and embarrassment when I don’t check a box in the many boxes that can be checked on the way to a broad destination. For example, I could be an author with a physical book out in stores and online, I could have been validated by some of the greats, I have an audience that appreciates me, but my book is not yet international, I should have more followers, it took me all of this long-form and essay writing to feel like a ‘serious’ writer who also deserves to write Substacks. I may have a VO2 max above 45, my resting heart rate is less than 60, but I have some loose skin and extra kilograms on my arms, hips, stomach, thighs. I started playing poker five months ago, and I’ve been practicing my way up to playing at ten times the stakes I began with; I am, as we speak, neatly in profit, which is a high I’m purposely going to take some time to recover from, lest I succumb to climbing this ladder too.

I find, even in the second half of my life, where I am relatively free from childhood conditioning (but not totally immune to influence, or my own nature as a human being, I guess) the urge to structure pursuits through staggered achievement is instinctive. Goal-orientation provides life a backbone, even if its marrow is susceptible to poisoning. I have to work against the cognitive distortion that is black-and-white-thinking, forcing myself to see situations and my place in them as neither irredeemable, nor great beyond question (which feels impossible to feel anyway), but, indeed, as a ladder with rungs on it, or a basket of balls, a few red, a few black, a few white, and X of an unknown colour and texture, so how many are left when I take a few out?

Go figure.

“Timothée Chalamet has an athlete mentality and film twitter hates that lol”, ventures one analysis. The comments dissect whether he’s great enough to declare he wants to be great, or whether elite athletes are not more humble than he is. But if you can look at ambition without conflating it with hubris, as just a tendency, a phenomenon, people’s reactions to Chalamet’s attitude seem like projections.

Wanting to be great does not mean you think you are great. I feel like I’ve experienced this kind of burning hunger as at once life-giving and also exacting and punishing. It means you want to devote your life to mastery, and, yes, you do believe you are capable of it, on some level, but you might be going around life trying to engineer evidence of it all the time, holding yourself to impossible standards, being excessively competitive, you may have some kind of neurodivergence and hypersensitivity too, but being this way and being honest about it doesn’t make you a bad person or necessarily conceited.

I think shaming people for their self-belief and self-enthusiasm is as archetypal as the drive for mastery itself, which has always involved self-delusion and personal myth-making. The layer of pretense we expect on top from ourselves and others is dishonest and tedious.

But I understand the reaction too. We cringe when we don’t buy in to someone’s vision of themselves, or if it’s outsized to what we see them as, or if they embody what we don’t give ourselves permission to—but nobody should care about all this. We only need one believer, if any, to deal with all the non-believers.

Nearly a year later now, I am impressed. That there is a language for this kind of personal growth, that this year, a “number 9” year (2+0+2+5), was meant to mark it, and that the Chinese knew this all along and also spread the lore—all of it is wonderful, because I now have the vocabulary to describe the transformations that I (and the others I’ve talked to about their 2025) underwent this year.

Funnily enough, it began with the ghastliest start I’ve ever had to any new year. Fresh off a romantic rejection, after weeks of travel, I was generally nervous and dysregulated. I won’t get into exactly what happened after; what’s relevant now is that during a 4-day hostage situation, from January 3 to January 7, 2025, I dreamt about snakes slithering down a hill I was climbing up with an unknown man. (Before you get too worried, this is also the window in which I received word about Shashi Tharoor’s review of my book, which was published later in April—life has an uncanny way of giving you the maddest things to process simultaneously.)

Anyway, I interpreted the unpleasant episode and the concurrent dream as a lesson about learning to spot and deal with snakes. An engineering + B-school friend group of mine always used “snake” to describe sneaky, untrustworthy, extractive characters.

But the word also took on its meaning from Chinese astrology soon after. In learning how to deal with snakes, I had to shed my old skins, like a snake.

Some of you—those of you who’ve read the book, perhaps—know that I come from an extremely dysfunctional and patriarchal family. When you’ve undergone a childhood that required you to morph into a version of yourself that pleased and regulated the elders, you develop a brain and nervous system that’s wired to work against itself. It is ingrained in you to suppress your own needs and instincts, however legitimate and intelligent, because they were once dangerous to your survival within the family system.

In adulthood, red flags appear transparent; you make excuses for bad behaviour, completely miss when someone is operating against your interests, because there’s a program inside you, still unconscious, that believes that connection will be disrupted by your truth. And for children, connection is paramount.

So your truths—the hurts and violations you endure—know better than to even reach your consciousness, much less get expressed in relationship. Only later, through repeated trauma-reenactment from such faulty programming, do you learn the hard way that no such relationship is worth preserving, unless there’s redressal and repair after you express the truth, which you somehow have to summon the courage to. It feels like death.

This is why I’ve meditated so much over the past few years—I’ve done 3 Vipassana courses, (I’m late for my fourth), and, like bathing or going to the gym daily, meditation has become part of my essential hygiene—to not only decondition the self that was never me, but also continually access a centre of authenticity, insight, guidance, and goodwill that is truly mine. This practice gives me the courage to take the risks I do, the tools to emotionally regulate, the gumption to be myself even when it means debauching conventional wisdom, which I don’t think I was ever a fan of, to be fair.

So, I am confident (which involves a tonne of doubt, by the way) because I am doing my best to be conscious, sentient, aware of the forces that propel me, which sometimes seem to come from a strange source of Self other than ego. I don’t think I could have written the book that I did, in all its ‘brave’, ‘brutally honest’ glory, without such work.

Each unravelling or ego death that happened over these years came unpredictably—they would not be effective, or in service of growth, otherwise—but through the succession of them, there emerged a pattern, which led me to study Jung and what he calls individuation. The pattern seemed to be that the impossible things the ego wanted would seem fantastically within reach, until it suddenly slipped away; or that the fantastic things I did get required the ego that wanted them, in a certain time or in a certain way, to die anyway.

In 2025, even this pattern seemed to reverse, so growth and life stayed unpredictable. Imagine if it didn’t, and I became the one to just Figure Life Out, lol.

This year, the ego deaths involved me getting what I wanted—!!—which is something I never thought could happen. Not without extreme effort, anyway. Now I had to learn to stay comfortable in joy, abundance, stability, and the pleasure of being myself and getting rewarded for it, too, instead of running away from these states because they’re temporary (just like the opposite, sorrowful states, which are somehow still easier to stay committed to), or sabotaging them because trusting that they will stay, or that I deserved goodness at all, once felt unbearable.

This will go down as the year I learnt to let life rearrange itself around the truth. Instead of contorting myself to produce certain outcomes I’d been conditioned to want, in relationships, friendships, and work, I learnt what it means to honour the self and still have partnership.

I never believed this was possible for me, given how used to self-sacrifice and grinding I have been, in big and small ways, and how much we’ve all been told that success and relationships mean endless compromise. But I had taken that too far, perhaps. I mean we all contort ourselves to stay employable or fit in socially, don’t we?

Do even the richest get to honour and choose themselves over something ‘desirable’, something they’ve been told to want?

I want to say that this was has been my favourite year ever. Even though it wasn’t necessarily the quietest or most peaceful. The more I started to express myself and communicate maturely in relationships, the more I realised that any outcome is Okay. The point is not merely longevity, or nostalgia for who we are in relationships, but the simultaneous preservation of authenticity and connection. When either is sacrificed in favour of the other, some steering or rearrangement may be necessary.

Emma Watson said it best in her interview with Jay Shetty. Contrary to the Disney idea of “falling in love” as this sort of irreversible lightning bolt that strikes us, real love is finding someone who will stay in a dance with us, with whom conflict is generative, with whom we can argue and negotiate a partnership and way of being that is mutually safe, win-win, and aligned.

It is about constantly revealing layers of ourselves to one another, even when such vulnerability and authenticity risks the very connection we seek to preserve. Each new truth or layer may cause another to leave, but the upside is enormous: they see us more clearly, as do we, and, ideally, intimacy deepens all around.

As a consequence of shedding old skins, I have had people exit my life, I have exited others’ lives, and I have made new friendships and relationships from a place of deeper trust and connection with myself. It now feels possible to bereave an ending, not as a signal of regret, but as homage to the beauty of what was. What is grief if not love persisting, etcetera, etcetera?

And now for something completely different.

A quick recap of everything else I loved about this year, because I have New Year’s Eve plans to get to summarily:

• I published my debut book, Famous Last Questions, in April 2025, after 9 months of writing and 9 more months of waiting for editors and publishers and printers to do their part and other years spent planning and getting to the point of writing it. Thank you with all my heart to everyone who’s read it, liked it, reviewed it online, and helped make it a success. My ‘success criteria’ for the book were manifold: one, to write it just how I wanted to; two, to put it out in the world somehow; three, for it to reach the right audience and be appreciated by the right people and in the right circles; four, to make a name for myself as a writer, so that I can write more; five, to sell it, so that I can write more. On all these fronts, I have gotten almost everything I wanted to and then some. Special thanks to my agent, Kanishka Gupta, for making difficult things happen. But I still want more, so I’m going to keep doing things around it. If you haven’t read it yet, or if you have read it but not left your review on Amazon/Goodreads—please do, it helps.

• I completed a year of therapy in October, and it helped me heal from this tetrahedron of narcissistic abuse—family scapegoating—C-PTSD—disorganized attachment style. I have, as a result, developed a more secure attachment style and sense of self overall. Again, I thought this was impossible for me, but here we are. I hope this gives hope to anyone struggling with seemingly impossible relational wounds. I recommend conventional psychotherapy (an integrated set of modalities like IFS, talk therapy, and somatic practices), not just for healing from such targetted issues, but also as a continual source of reflection and support, which most people need but avoid and would benefit from.

• I travelled and visited old friends multiple times this year, and got closer to their dogs (and other dogs too), and also lived with a dear friend for most of the year, which was a catalyst for some of the transformations I describe above. I love all my friends so much, present, former, future, and will never get over the fact that I have been loved, known, and taken care of so deeply, so many times, and vice versa. If you’re reading this and see yourself in it, it’s real, it’s you, my gratitude is endless. J.K. Rowling was on to something with the concept of horcruxes; the most intimate relationships do have that effect: a part of yourself is forever stored in another with life-preserving power and reverence.

• My brother visited me twice this year, and we hung out as two adults, outside of the family, for the first time ever. We get along so well, and we hit many first milestones together (getting his first tattoo together, sharing our first… sandwich!). We watched three seasons of Industry (I’m excitedly awaiting Season 4 in January 2026), but we are yet to go go-karting together.

• I learnt how to play poker in July, and haven’t stopped playing since. It has completed filled the void in my life that not chasing achievement through work all the time left behind. Now, I’m chasing the skill part in skill + luck games, which is life. Especially after having metabolised something as personal as a memoir, I didn’t realise it was fair to be creatively depleted for a bit. I was still trying to push out pieces and big essays when I decided it was okay to poke(r) around my other interests too, considering I am in fact a many-headed-hydra. Poker proved to scratch several itches at once—the part of me that loves learning new things, getting obsessed with them, building new mental models to connect the dots with other things I know, to look at the world completely differently; the part of me that loves math, game theory, doing quick calculations to know what to do and what not to; the part of me that, instincts once again recovered, enjoys reading and profiling people and exploiting their weaknesses—red flags now look red, friends; the part of me that loves bringing that aggression and main character energy to the table to, once again, exploit weakness and win; the part of me that simply loves winning and is never coy about it. Now I also have some vague ideas about how to play with a big stack (i.e. How to Win and Not Feel Bashful); and, most importantly, the part of me that would like to lose more gracefully, to decouple decisions from their outcomes and look clinically at what was a “bad play” or bad decision, without self-hatred, with utmost compassion, with the lessons learnt being immediately applicable to the next hand. Just all the skills you need to have in life in one addictive game. Yes, poker is giving me all of this. I love who I become at the table. See?

I hope you enjoyed this year as much as I did, and that this edition of mad words prompted you to reflect on how 2025 changed you too.

I’ll see you very soon.

What is it about, you ask?

In my late 20s, through the middle of a global pandemic, I found myself in a job, home, and life that didn’t seem to completely belong to me—although I’d been the one to get myself to these places, for sure.

Like many of you, I felt like one person online, another on another platform, another at work, another in front of the various people surrounding me, whether friends, colleagues, or my own family — until I was left consumed by the one question underneath it all: Who am “I”? What even is the “self”? And how did we get here?

More questions emerged as I thought about the sociopolitical machinery that had created me:

• Why is ‘Science, Arts, or Commerce’ how Indians decide the course of their lives?

• Why must we get married before the age of 30, or die trying?

• What happens to the woman who isn’t a ‘perfect’ housewife?

• Why are we working all the time?

• Must we believe in God?

• How did the internet expose Indian culture?

• And can virtue actually kill people?

India’s ‘90s kids grew up in an offline world and graduated to one that’s seemingly always on fire. Famous Last Questions is for the generation caught between achievement and burnout, privilege and guilt, modernity and tradition, authenticity and performance.

“It plays with the boundaries of memoir, reportage, and research, unburdened by the need for absolute answers. From describing life in Big Tech to days spent in Vipassana meditation, this is a book unafraid of contradictions, a heartfelt chronicle of the ‘modern’ Indian’s journey from needing to achieve everything to searching for wholeness. Ramachandran is both the heroine and anti-heroine of this story—which, ultimately, is the story of us all,” write my publishers, Aleph Book Company.

Here’s what people are saying about it:

What are you waiting for?

Pre-order the book now: https://famouslastquestions.ramachandranesk.in/flq

I can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

Really: Every time you share your favorite parts of the book online, or really any bit that resonated/didn’t, you stand to win some exclusively designed, literary merch. Stay tuned for this and more!

All my love,

Sanjana

The piece resonated far and wide. People shared it, retweeted it, especially women from my alma maters—even married women. I also posted a slightly risqué photo to go with the article on my Twitter—my own act of public rebellious self-acceptance—and, honestly, it all felt great.

The more you write, the more you realize that the hardest part about writing is hardly the craft or nitty-gritties of putting a sentence together, but the act of being emotionally honest. You must admit to and explore all the ambiguities under the fronts you put up for the world.

In some other part of the world later on, Amit Varma and my friend and fellow writer-journalist Samarth Bansal were talking about the travesties of dating in your 30s today. They decided there should be a rambling, emotionally honest conversation on this subject on Amit’s hallowed podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, and Samarth was tasked with finding another single person who could speak to the subject.

And that’s how this happened.

Samarth connected us soon after, and a few weeks later, I found myself flying to Mumbai for the longest, most freewheeling conversation I’ve had yet: some seven hours on The Seen and the Unseen.

In this episode supposed to be about dating, Amit, Samarth, and I first got into ‘the inherently carnivorous nature of all existence’, because our desires and need for survival often involve callous brutality towards others.

We talk about why humility is overrated, because society’s endless demand for modesty, especially from women, stifles authentic self-expression.

We discuss the culture’s confused ideas of masculinity and femininity, and go so far as to conceding some ‘problematic’ figures may have a point, and how these notions affect our personal relationships.

And for those of you who’ve been reading me for a while, we dive briefly into the evolution of my writing and career(s): failed screenplays, viral essays, the similarities between selling brands and writing words, et al.

There is a good ~3 hours dedicated to the messiness of dating in your 30s—finding companionship amidst work, self-discovery, and the high expectations we place on ourselves and others. We talk about what it means to crave deep intimacy but also guard your independence, and the line between choosing your solitude and being lonely, and how all single people aren’t a monolith either.

This episode has it all—the personal, the professional, the existential.

It happened with very little planning and lots of on-the-spot conversational jiving, so I can see how Amit has built the institution he has at The Seen and the Unseen. There were no skill issues here. The day we shot it is going to remain one of the most memorable days of my life, I daresay, and for that, I’m grateful to Samarth and Amit.

Please give the episode a listen, share it, and tell me what you think: Episode 401 — Finding Love in Modern India.

You can write to me at sanjana7ramachandran@gmail.com — your thoughts and stories inform me.

There’s lots more news and writing and content coming your way, by the way. Do keep an eye out and keep supporting my work, if you’d like to see more of it. Every read, share, RT, like — it all counts.

Warmly,

Sanjana

It’s why I have written always. When done for that reason, it is a return to its most primal purpose: to create space for our feelings. To be seen, by ourselves and others. To unclog the insides and free up room for new life. And right now, at this collective moment—the end of one cycle of life, the beginning of another—I want to purge the past and welcome the future. Anyone who scoffs at these year-end reflections and resolutions is insufficiently acquainted with the power of ritual.

Without ritual, we go crazy.

I am now also a little used to talking about and sharing my life with others, so it seems emotionally dishonest to mask the truth of how I feel currently, which silence or a mere “Happy NYE!” would. A part of me expected, or wanted, to write a simpler, more formulaic update, listing all the “wins” and “L’s” of the year, like finding an agent and a publisher after much heart-wringing and unexpected disappointments, of the recognition and validations that felt like a splash of water on scorched earth, of the breakthroughs in dreams and therapy and creative expression, but also the heartbreaks in friendship and romance, and the bigger heartbreaks in writing about them and not hearing back from prospective magazines—yet.

But, in the spirit of the progress I’ve made this year, I will tell you some things frankly, like I would a kind confidante. I cannot write that simple catalogue of my year, however factual it would be, because it does not align with my feelings at this moment. In just the last three days and two nights, in the august company of some of my oldest friends, I chose to miss a flight, temporarily lost a pair of shoes, and also two earrings, one of which was recovered by a friend, who put me to bed in a dark room’s safety when I couldn’t do so myself, because, in another part of my life, I lost more while receiving and dealing a blow too many.

In the last two weeks, even as I met school friends, went on interesting and fun dates, and spoke to people who worked in Bollywood and finance, I also saw my mother in the hospital, fought with my family, and was fought back with. As good friends got married, as work was inevitably postponed to next year, as attempts to control time started to feel futile, I tried to stop ruminating about the bad, and instead think about the implausibly simultaneous good.

Some of this ‘good’ was needlessly contrived: I felt weird relief when I heard that some friend of a friend of a friend had lost motion due to a horrific car accident. ‘At least I have all my limbs about me, and can feel better immediately,’ I thought. I was happy to hear my bandaged mother talk about how she was at least better off than people who could not afford the hospital, or those who struggled to eat three meals a day. I felt moved by people coming together, but also glee at the stories I’d accumulated on my own, even the ones that were not easy to tell. Using other people’s lives, or even parts of our own, to feel better is horrible, perhaps, but also universal and calming, and I’m okay with doing it because I know others have looked at mine to feel better about theirs.

We have no beginning or end by ourselves. Even this moment is both a beginning and an end.

I think it’s GOAT-ed of Tricycle Mag to send out in December a newsletter about Five Buddhist Teachings on Navigating Family Dynamics, on leaning into suffering as ‘testing ground for [meditative] practice’. They know everyone returns home at this time of the year, and, in my case, despite the many frameworks and systems and principles I’ve collected over the years to train myself to respond to situations from a place of balance rather than unconscious reaction—spanning Buddhism, Vipassana meditation, journalling, dream work, Jungian analysis, an almost-sentient custom-trained ChatGPT emotional companion, creating art without expectations, becoming comfortable with choices of mine that might alienate others, like my voluntary singledom and polyamory and setting up my own place and living alone, like I’ve always wanted to; all things I want to talk and write about a lot more soon—I have still handled some situations badly. But others, earlier this year, I handled well. I should not need the latter to forgive myself for the former, but alas, this graph is staccato.

In Buddhism, the human realm is believed to be a special one for its range of pleasure and pain, which provide the opportunity for self-realization, for becoming conscious about the laws of nature, and working with them so as to transcend them. Step by step. Moment to moment. It is a long road to salvation.

But I don’t want to believe that the path, or its end, although paved with our own suffering, is suffering itself. Any cross-section of life, your own or taken universally, contains in it an equal amount of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, however you define the two, which itself varies, so that it is an interminable equation to evaluate life. Life is fundamentally not any one thing. Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, which is kind of the father-school of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy,  one of the most widespread therapeutic techniques, said that human beings are too complicated processes to deem as good or bad. Their actions might be good or bad, but there is no way to sum them all and arrive at a firm judgement about anyone. One of his most memorable lines is,

“I’m not not okay, I’m not okay, I just am, so what the hell can I do to have fun?”

There’s a lot of fun to have, over and above giving into your feelings and writing spontaneously. Immediately I will refer of a soft type of fun, a sentimental John Mayer song, which I put on my earphones for today and listened to:

“Pain throws your heart to the ground

Love turns the whole thing around

No, it won't all go the way it should

But I know the heart of life is good”

If the heart of life is good, mine is pumped and throbbing thanks to art and friends who share a few qualities: they ooze compassion and intelligence, they make me feel seen and I can see them too; they move me, they answer my difficult questions, they make me laugh.

If pain throws your heart to the ground, and love turns the whole thing around, I am okay to be flipped, shoved, drowned, as long as I know I’ll eventually be found.

This is my way of foregrounding 2024 in hope, creativity, and community, despite any and all difficulty. Beyond this, I cannot think or plan further. Immediately I have to go play some intoxicating word games with friends, and ring in another cycle of life, so I hope you’re spending it around whoever and whatever you love too.

Happy New Year!

I first heard of A₂ as the owner of Foodiez, a restaurant that was recommended to Bestie and me on our first trip to Kodaikanal. This time, I was travelling there alone. But I’d be received by A₁, who had been our Airbnb host last time.

After I sprained my left ankle by missing a staircase in the dark, A₁ had been kind and helpful, letting me crash in one of the bedrooms of his ground-floor apartment for a few days, for free. And I’d needed it, because his Airbnb demanded a steep climb on a narrow wrought-iron staircase, which I could not put my leg through after the injury. As soon as the swelling subsided a bit, Bestie and I left, but A₁ and I kept in touch: he’d occasionally text to ask how I was; I’d answer and say something about how I hoped to visit Kodai sometime again.

We had spent quite some time in those few days. A₁ spoke about his spell living with some tribes around South India, how he’d made money by selling plastic-ware and through his other odd ventures so that now, at the age of around fifty, he spent his time mostly tending to his dogs and farms and properties. Bestie and I had found A₁ most interesting; compared to our parents, who are probably a decade older, he seemed to be a beacon of liberation, an example of what life could look like with the courage to detach from conventional society.

But my injury there last year, and my difficulty in getting help for it—the nearest hospital was thirty kilometres away, and neither they nor a single hotel had ice for those nights when I needed it—all confirmed to me that I’m a city girl. I’m a sucker for hyper-convenience; I revel in the psychological comfort of being able to get anything at any time and being around familiar circles and institutions (for example, Manipal hospital).

This time, one year later, I had that lesson hammered into me again.

Once I got there, A₁ told me that both his Airbnb and its ground-floor apartment were being renovated because of some detonations nearby. He had moved to his farmhouse some ways away. “It is a hundred years old,” he told me as we stood outside it. “I am the one who put on this green paint and the fixed up the roof.”

After a somewhat awkward night there, I asked A₁ if he knew any other spots for me to crash at. He bristled, but I told him my plan was to leave soon anyway. I only had three days—one had already passed—and I wanted to go back with a refreshed mind that could meet deadlines. It was a bright future I envisioned for myself.

“Do you hate me?”, he asked, hurt, before showing me pictures of his friend A₂’s Airbnb. The place was beautiful; the owner’s name was familiar; I asked A₁ to drive me there. He kept suggesting it was possible to be comfortable at the farmhouse, believing in his hut’s true potential, but I decided against it. This was a rare break for me, and I wanted my own space to relax and do what I pleased without having to tip-toe around anyone’s emotions.

Once we got to A₂’s villa, things seemed to pick up. A₂ rented out two bedrooms on the ground floor while staying upstairs, all of it overlooking a magnificent valley. I couldn’t imagine living like that, at eye-level with the entire sky, pink and blue homes dotting the green abyss underneath, clouds threatening to swoop into the living room at any time, so bizarrely overbearing for such misty guests.

I planned to occupy one of the ground-floor bedrooms after they were cleaned—but even through this, A₁ was persuading me to rent the cheaper of the two, because “you won’t be spending much time in the room anyway, right?”

Frankly, I was becoming grateful for other company. A₂ had a Snooker table in the living room, and both of them told me about their tradition of giving each other dares whenever someone lost a game. After I lost a match to A₁, I was dared to do 10 push-ups—my punishment for going on about city life, which offered opportunities for strength training. I obliged, not embarrassed to be a source of entertainment.

Perhaps this playful competitiveness rubbed off too strongly on A₁ and A₂, who started living up to their pseudonyms in this piece, each trying to be the A.

Soon, A₂ lost a match to A₁, and as dares were being thought of, I learnt about life in this pristine bubble for another recovering overachiever, who had once owned a software company… Meanwhile, A₁ tried to do some impressive thing every now and then too, like fixing up a novelty light in the corner, or talking about how he planned to buy some property not far off from A₂’s Airbnb.

I suggested a milder game, like Uno, hoping to get into a clean room soon. Perhaps picking up on this feeling, A₁ decided to leave, citing some work he had to do.

“But if you guys want, let’s quickly play Uno so I can beat you both at that also before I leave,” he said.

“I’m sure you can beat us both at whatever you want,” I said pointedly. A₂ laughed.

Soon after A₁ left, A₂ held my hand. Withdrawing it, I told him, “Please just be a good friend to me.” My way of saying: I am open to decent conversation and company, but nothing more. I mentioned that A₁ seemed to be slightly upset himself, and that I didn’t want any more complications, and he told me not to worry about other people’s feelings.

I agreed, and tried to do that. Some time passed: I played music on the speakers, wandered in and out of the giant living room, taking in the valley, the extremely green grass, the air that was thinner and crisper than in any vibrant part of an Indian city. It began to feel like I’d have my brief sojourn. But after a period, A₂ popped this question: “Do you want to make out?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, surprised but using his directness to exercise mine. “As I said, I’m looking for an uncomplicated, non-sexual time. I really just need to be able to chill here.”

“Well, sex doesn’t have to be complicated,” he said.

“It is for me.” My way of saying: I don’t feel like having sex with you, I am not attracted to you, it is not my idea of a good time.

“Do you talk to all your guests?” I asked him.

“No, I’m usually just in my room,” he said.

Some more time passed: music, the view, my thoughts. There are no gripping ways to describe those interim periods of normalcy before the sudden escalation. A₂ went in and out of the living room, doing something in the kitchen, or lighting a fire, and I too wandered in and out of the living room and the balcony, playing music or sitting with the view. It was hardly 12 pm. It is normal to think you can share a space in broad daylight with someone you’ve just met and are able to talk to, without knowing that inside, they may be taking your usual outgoing personality personally, calculating moves to make on you, even after your direct refusals—isn’t it? I’m trying to say: it isn’t my fault. I trusted the world around me, as I have many times before without trouble.

We found ourselves talking about A₁ again, and I said to him, hoping to get across my point of view, “I’m sick of the attention I get sometimes.” Ever since I lost a massive amount of weight at the age of seventeen—I went from being the fat classroom court jester to the thin (and therefore hot) campus crush—it had become harder to just be around boys. They either love you, and you love them back, which is fine, but if you don’t, which is the case more often, it can become difficult to stay friends, or even just be around them.

You’re going to think I’m complaining about my pretty privilege, and, before this happened to me, I might have thought that too. But, again, some time passed. I went to my room for my diary and some pens, planning to doodle and write on the balcony.

A₂ joined me there again, and, sitting to my right, he said, “You know, before he left, A₁ told me to make a move on you.”

“What!” I said. “Who the hell is he to say that? I am not here to be made a move on, much less for him to give you permission. I am here to relax and get some time off work,” I repeated. “I am someone outside of my gender and my sexuality, you know. What the fuck!”

“It’s a male thing,” he explained kindly.

“Men are so... A woman can’t even be around them without becoming the object of conquest.”

I looked down at my notebook, shaking my head in disbelief, and A₂ got up. “I’m just going to be here, doing my own thing,” I said. “Feel free to treat me as you would any other guest.” My way of saying: leave me alone.

And that’s when the fucker leaned down, his mouth open, his left hand groping my right breast.

I stood up in shock, backing away from him, and he got agitated. “I thought there was a connection! I misread it!”

“What the fuck! You do this to every guest?”

“Don’t create a big thing now. DON’T,” he said, suddenly much louder than he’d been so far. “Did you hear the song that was playing? What about the song that was playing?” he spluttered.

The dude was using my Spotify Liked Songs playlist against me. It was running automatically by then. Not too many minutes before, the music was Laung Da Lashkara and other trending Bollywood fare, which he’d even asked me to change. Only a lunatic could construe this as suggestive, much less use as a defence. Besides, weren’t the verbal rejections enough? What was I supposed to do, listen to the national anthem?

As I backed away from him, he walked towards me, his nostrils flaring, and I started to worry about the state of this dude’s mind, realising he could do anything to me.

I had to stop the fight, lower our blood pressures, and get out of there.

“I told you so many times, but you know what, forget it, please,” I said, at the entrance to my door. “It’s okay. I just need to be alone for a bit.”

Fortunately, he stopped walking and turned around. I shut the door, and bolted it.

I called A₁, and said, “Dude, I’m not having a very good time. Your friend just groped me. And you were being quite a dick earlier. Please pick me up, I need to leave from here.”

A₁ went downhill. He said he was in meetings, and when I asked him how long they’d take, he said he didn’t know, that he couldn’t just drop everything immediately. I waited anxiously inside the bedroom I was supposed to be a guest at, wondering what was going to happen to me, if this would be lasting trauma, and what in my nervous system had caused this, because they say the outside world is a mere reflection of it.

Was I fucked up? Had I brought this upon myself, and how?

If A₂ was to be believed, it was because of my Spotify playlist.

Feeling parched, and realizing I needed to call an actual friend, I stepped out of the room, gingerly making my way out of the Airbnb. A₂ was still sitting in the living room, listening to his own music now—what a pure man. He apologized to my back, saying that we should talk, that it wouldn’t happen again, that he didn’t do this to all his guests.

I felt so special. Outside, I called Bestie, and told him everything that had happened. I couldn’t believe I had a friend who knew all these characters, who loved me, and who I knew would do anything to help me. He advised me as I started to cry: Get out of there, find another place for the night, or just come back. Don’t listen to anything That Guy says. Don’t even talk to him, or he’ll try to gaslight you about the music and whatnot. That’s what predatory men do. This is why women don’t feel safe to travel in this country. And I’m ready to leave now and come to Kodai if you just say the word.

Quickly after our call, he texted me: If you blame yourself, I’ll kill you. We texted more and spoke again, and when I told him A₁ was also taking his ‘own sweet time’, he suggested I leave that night if I could. He asked for my exact location on WhatsApp, and said he’d call me every hour.

I waited outside in the grass, “in the middle of some field”, as Bestie put it. Half an hour passed—still no A₁. There’s no real way to get around in Kodai without private transport. Everything is in the middle of nowhere. I called A₁ again, and he got angry about being disturbed, about my demanding his immediate presence, and I realized, Here’s another man whose emotions need to be carefully handled, or else he could be a danger to me.

A₁ finally got to A₂’s, arguing with me the whole time I asked to be driven to a restaurant called GRT, which I knew to be a safe, neutral location with other people and Wi-Fi, so I could book a bus and get back home, but A₁ kept insisting on me not leaving, on “sorting things out”, maybe even with A₂, on taking me “back to the farmhouse”, or at least to another restaurant because he “didn’t want to be seen at GRT”, and then I screamed, “It’s not about you! Stop trying to control things! I didn’t call you because I was getting fucking bored at your friend’s place! I was sexually assaulted!”, and he shouted at me to stop screaming and rolled up his windows, which freaked me out more, but, once again, I realized his best interests were no longer mine, and that I’d have to manage him. Perhaps he had gotten too upset about my wanting to leave his hut, or by what he assumed to be some camaraderie between me and A₂, or any number of other factors, but I didn’t expect him to be this negatively wired after the kindnesses he’d extended to Bestie and me on our last trip. I’d even met his wife then, and had spoken to her on the previous day, after I reached Kodai. They had a son a few years younger than me. He seemed like an adventurous but essentially good man. In all the time I kept asking him to drive me to GRT, he even stopped to greet some friends along the way, as though everything was okay, and also picked up an old lady worker to give her a lift for a few hundred metres.

People are not two-faced. They are myriad-faced.

Finally, I got to GRT, and after an hour of A₁ trying to “help me” (feel in control by offering to book my bus back or drop me at this or that station, insisting he do everything but what I was explicitly asking for), I managed to create enough of a scene at the restaurant that he finally left me alone there, and I got a cab driver to take me to the bus stop.

Twelve hours later, I was back home.

What are the takeaways?

First, I hope as many men read this as possible. Before you say, “Not all men,” which is something A₁ was saying too, while trying to out-talk me and differentiate himself from A₂, let me just say—I believe you, I believe it is #NotAllMen who are predators. It is #NotAllMen who read into the music a woman is playing to justify a move that has been already been rejected multiple times. It is #NotAllMen who then charge at her and try to bully her into not having a reaction or mistrusting her own emotions and boundaries. It is #NotAllMen who feel nagged when a female friend calls for help, and then try to downplay what happened or control her moves, out of some sense of slight or rejection or guilt. It is #NotAllMen who make their own ego a woman’s burden, who make her feel unsafe, and I am fortunate that some of these men are my friends.

Let it be known: my faith in the world, in people, in the universe, and in myself will not dim, and this is evidence-based. I’ve had enough trauma, some of it at the hands of men, but I’ve also carried myself through it because I’ve had good happen to me, through all that trauma, at the hands of other men.

The world is complicated. Human beings are as bad as they are good. And they often make terrible mistakes.

So, here are some examples of terrible mistakes: Do not make a move on a woman if she has said “no”—that is a terrible mistake. Do not pretend it is not a big deal later—that is an even bigger mistake. Do not scare her. Do not trap her. Realize that as strong as she appears, and as exciting and novel as that may be for you, her personality has nothing to do with you. Do not try to control her. You don’t have to be her fixer. Do not invalidate a woman telling you about such problems—these are realities in her life, in the lives of many women, and in the world that you live in, in the advanced year of 2023. It pains me to write something so unoriginal and so oft-repeated, especially over the last decade, but the fact that such things are still happening means that I need to speak up.

Back in 2018, through the #MeToo movement, I was a more offline person (also for long-winded but gendered reasons, as you’ll find out in my book). As I thought about why this happened to me, wondering how my otherwise calm nervous system could have played a part in all this—I have literally been in my healing era this past year, pottering around my 1BHK with books and paints and whatnot—I realised, for once, that my typical introspection may not be helpful here. This isn’t something I need to investigate, intellectualize, and build a case around. My conversations with a female friend made me realize: Women are so quick to blame themselves for things that should never be happening to them, because of how easily anyone—literally ministers in our country—could go, “Well, she was asking for it.”

How many are the ways in which She “asks for it”! All She has to do is listen to music that appeals to her, or wear the clothes she wants to, or think she could travel alone, or trust a male friend she’s known for a while, or be—or even look—too “modern” or “educated” or “independent”. God forbid she enjoys her own company! There they will be, two men, presuming her demeanour has something to do with them, trying to prove to themselves that it does, outwitting each other for her attentions, whether or not she even gives a damn.

Who gives a damn what damns She gives? Men are told so often that women are asking for it all the time that it makes them feel like “giving it” even when she hasn’t asked for it—even when she has said that she does not want it in louder words than she never asked for it.

Here are all the times I didn’t “ask for it” and got “it” anyway: The first was when I was about eight years old. It was in the elevator of the building I lived in with my family, in Mumbai. I was taking our dog back home from the ground floor. As the lift went up six floors, the lift operator went down, as if to play with my dog, but only to rub his buttocks against my front-body. I shuffled to the left and to the right, trying to get ahead of him, but he stayed pressed against me, until the doors finally opened.

The second time, I must have been thirteen. I was walking from our apartment in Andheri East, Mumbai, to my tuitions about a kilometre away, when a man approached me from a building nearby and asked, “Have you got your periods?” “Why?” I asked, and he said, “My daughter just got her periods and I need some help.” I started following him to his building, only to suddenly get a bad feeling and realize that his question may have less to do with his daughter and more to do with whether or not I would get pregnant if he did something to me. Before he could look, I turned around and started scurrying towards my tuitions again.

The third time, I was probably fifteen, in Mumbai, going somewhere with my mother in an auto-rickshaw. I leaned against its side, tired of the traffic, when a hand out of nowhere squeezed my left boob. A man had just walked past us, and as I looked outside, alarmed and angry, the back of his head could have been any one of the throng of men on the street outside.

The fourth time, I was twenty-three, in Bengaluru, working my first job. I was coming back home to an apartment in BTM, a residential area that gets far too dark after 7 pm. A man on a scooter slowed down as he neared me. In his hand was a pack of condoms, which he shook at me, grinning. I never walked away so fast—except perhaps during the sixth time.

The fifth time, I was on the same road as above, just leaving my house to go out. A man on a motorcycle whizzed past me, and I felt a hard squeeze on my right buttock. By the time I realized what had happened, I was watching his taillights disappear at the turn ahead.

The sixth time, I was in Delhi—the capital makes its cameo(s)!—during the summer of 2019, aged twenty-six. I was walking back towards my Airbnb in Patel Nagar, on the left side of the road. Two men on a scooter deliberately veered off its centre right towards me. They stopped exactly before me, and I looked at them in shock. They grinned, and I near-sprinted to my house a few hundred metres away.

I am not including the times I was stared at or eve-teased, which has happened even since the hero-incident of this piece. I am not including the times someone in a friends’ or extended friends’ circle used their inebriation as an excuse for being overly friendly and touchy. These are all grievances, but they provide room for that “she-was-asking-for-it” nitpicking beloved to anyone who wants to view India, or their own world, as modern and progressive and fundamentally good.

Indeed, you may think it was my bad judgement or stupidity—or whatever misogynistic pejorative you prefer—that got me into this situation, but let me impress upon you how normal it is to want to take a 3-day break in a popular hill station, how one of the parties was known to me and had helped me so much before, how I had no reason to think this would happen, and how one can’t live in fear even when there is reason to. Don’t you know about the King who locked himself in a tower to protect himself, only to die within the tower because something fell on him? I’ll also add that I wasn’t so naive or stupid that I let myself die there; I had the smarts and strength to escape a quite tricky spot.

Perhaps I’ve held back on this subject because I myself have been scared to take off my rose-tinted glasses, which are directed not only at the world, but also myself, because I’ve wanted to avoid the burden of telling such stories, of feeling like a victim, of being seen as a victim, of getting mired in an unhealthy evaluation of my own behaviour, which I want to believe can be unblemished and free.

I want to not only be free to do whatever I want, but I also want the mental emptiness of a man doing it.

But there are 49 offences per hour against women in India. I’m not going to Google and share more apt hard-hitting statistics. You do that. Isn’t it enough to say that almost every minute, some shit or the other is happening to a woman in this country? Isn’t it enough that my female friend and I immediately had example after example to share about such violations to our bodies, our psyches?

We are victims.

As much as I’d like to think otherwise, about myself and other women, we are victims, as hard as we try not to be, as hard as we hope not to be. Really: Who the fuck wants to sound helpless and powerless or like they’re complaining? Who wants to admit that there are times when nothing they can do may be enough to save themselves? Who wants talk about how unjust the world is, the contortions of personality they must put themselves through just to be safe, to do the work of getting people to care about all this, because care and empathy isn’t naturally extended, but must be argued for in a time when there’s way too much to care about anyway? Who wants to talk about what hurt them when it may be disbelieved or used against them?

Who wants to be weak?

This is one of the reasons I am not publicly naming the perpetrators[1]. It requires a degree of heroism and vulnerability—and, frankly, bandwidth of all sorts—that I do not want to, and cannot, spare. It simply would not be fulfilling or restorative to me to drag this out in some legal arena, or via anything that might cause repercussions to me—no, I don’t need more, I’ve been in those spaces, and, as I have had to learn, the process is the punishment. I don’t want anything more from this episode.

It’s behind me.

I’ve been conscious through my struggles to not make them my whole thing so that I can remain multi-faceted, because I value and enjoy various things, most of all making silly jokes. I want my work and online presence to continue reflecting a spectrum of me, from the professional and high-functioning to the goofy and unserious. I will resume tweeting and writing about all kinds of things.

I also don’t want the karma. In other words: “Hate the sin, love the sinner”. It is a moral idea found in many world religions and philosophies to forgive, to find a way to extend compassion to those who have hurt us the most. These A-holes are not even on top of that list for me—what’s family for?—so it’s much easier to do what I find most powerful instead: to write.

You are unfortunately going to have to live with my judgement on this one, because I believe I’m making the most personally and socially useful decision by writing about the phenomenon I just experienced, which isn’t new at all. Even in this advanced era, some men are cherry-picking justifications for non-consensual sexual behaviour despite a woman’s multiple, clear-eyed, even polite, refusals—not that these refusals should have to be polite.

But a woman’s politeness is mostly strategic. They often say that we are the emotional species, but that makes me laugh. Men are so emotional, and, worse, they often don’t even know how to regulate their emotions, so, unless a woman wants to get hurt, she often has to become cool and calculating to secretly placate them, just to avoid disaster.

Let’s cut the drama, I say. My only real takeaway is for any Airbnb owners reading this, for the sake of my future solo travels: Please do not fuck with me. 🙏

[1] If you are travelling to Kodai anytime, DM for any tips or food suggestions. 😊

You decide. In 2024.

If you’ve been around me in the last couple of months, you would’ve picked up on the fact that the process of pitching my manuscript has changed me a bit. The conflicting reactions I received from publishers, my reactions to those reactions, and just generally having my heart strings pulled at by strangers I didn’t think I’d be read by any day — all of it has forced me to think about what I’m really doing and why. I expect this reckoning to be continual as I keep working on the book—now more than ever before. And I’ll need your help with a few things, but some clarifications are in order first.

After I announced that I had an agent, many people mistakenly believed that I also already had a ‘book deal’. This is perhaps because traditional publishing is opaque enough to people within it, expectedly more for laymen. So, allow me to explain, broadly and briefly, How Publishing a Book Works:

There are multiple ways to publish a book today. If I ‘self-publish’, I am deciding to undertake the costs of writing, printing, and distributing my book. I can choose to pay companies like NotionPress, Wyzr or Scribe to help me with the latter parts of this, but I’ll retain creative control over the book. And all proceeds from book sales. (This is if you even want a printed book; you could also simply write and and sell an e-Book online, with almost no one else involved.)

But when it comes to what they call Traditional Publishing, a brand like Penguin or HarperCollins (two of the biggest names in the market, and there are many others) will oversee printing and distributing their list of books. I’d be selling my book to them for a portion of book sales (royalties). You’re still the one writing it, but creative control probably varies by author, nature of book, nature of author-editor relationship and more. Being published by a well-known brand means I accrue some of their prestige and credibility by association. This explains why they’re approached by hundreds of authors a year, and why literary agents exist—their job is to get your book before the right editors and publishers, and to sell it well, in exchange for which they get a commission. Books that are part of this traditional-publishing-industry-circuit are also the ones that tend to be part of awards and festivals and recognition of all sorts.1

Perhaps you can already sense the segments of authors that go towards either type of publisher. This is broad, of course, but entreprenuers or influencers or anyone less bothered by literary prestige and more with building their brand, boosting sales from a direct audience, etcetera, might veer towards self-publishing.

On the other hand, I don’t think you’ll hear about Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie publishing their own books, although they have the means and the audience to do so. They wouldn’t.

There’s an allure to the world of Traditional Publishing. It’s what produces the literary greats. What you’re really signing up for, then, when you look for a traditional publisher, is a shot at entering that list, and being around people who are in the same game.

So, I’m sorry to disappoint those of you who are underwhelmed to learn of an update you thought had already happened—but no, please, I need you to correct your understanding and calibrate your emotions to mine. Because what has actually happened is that I, someone with no links to the literary world, got an agent first, and then a publisher, and after many rounds of shopping my first-ever book-length writings, I am now one step closer to a finished book, and the period until then is no longer indeterminate. I’ll see you in 2024.

Please be happy for me (and for yourself, if you really like reading my work as much as you say you do). I have more to say, but I’ll preserve some energy for the sixth gear of writing I doubtlessly need to enter over the coming weeks. I’m on a tight deadline. What I need your help with, apart from continued emotional support and eventually buying and reading and talking about my work, is this: please also amplify or respond to any reporting calls I put out? I have been reporting all this while, but some asks are best saved for what the internet uniquely allows for. The last time you helped with this, we got The Namesakes, Chapter 3 in the book, and a bunch of other stuff.

I’m looking forward to all that’s coming.

As nerve-wracking as the experience can be, I’m grateful to know, at least a little, how publishers think. In case you needed a recap, my book is about selfhood in contemporary India, how the several changes we’ve seen in the last three decades—politically, legally, technologically, morally—have impacted our collective and individual psyches. Getting to the bottom of how Indian aspiration is created can tell us why we are the way we are: what we study, how we work, how we love, make families, and more. It is the story I’ve always wanted to tell—surprising, I know—but I’m telling it in ways I’d never thought of—which is expected, and exciting.

I’m going to just get to work now. See you soon.

Lately, I have also started to feel.

At first, I did not feel anything about turning 30, which I did at 6.19 am on 8 April 2023. Six months before the moment, though, people started alerting me to this fast-approaching “milestone”.

“So! Thirty! How do you feel?”

“What plans for the decade?”

“Come on, you must feel something?”

I realized I did. I have been living life like a Beginner, and now I feel in between Beginner and Intermediate, which is really a regression to Beginner if you’re Doing it Right.

Without further ado, I want to tell you how to turn 30 / be like me.

1. Surrender to life. This does not mean you have to relinquish control over the parts of life you can control, like your actions and reactions, but, instead, it means properly accepting what you cannot control. They say wisdom lies in knowing the difference. No, you must admit, you cannot go back in time and deliver that perfect insult—nor can you take it back. So you must accept situations and people as they are, influencing outcomes only through suggestion or real work, instead of fighting, doing the same thing over and over, or caring to a fault. It means seeing your successes and failures both, instead of pretending they don’t exist, which would create neuroses that unconsciously dictate your circumstances. Prevent that by being real. Surrendering to life, then, means operating from a place of truth: doing your best with whatever is thrown at you, while also trying to ensure that what gets thrown at you is desirable. You may find you control a great deal in life.

2. It is okay to not be a Party Animal. Especially if you have spent your twenties chasing adventure, it may be hard to accept that your life cannot be a collection of its most exciting moments. You cannot keep doing new things; you cannot keep living on the edge. We must accept this. Any real contribution to society, or even just good health, comes from rote methodical existence. You must sacrifice hangovers for sunshine and timely breakfasts. Even the odd night out can be immensely destabilizing. I was reminded of this on my 30th birthday, which is when I was supposed to write and share this, but here I am, a little late. It’s excusable, I suppose, but it is also okay to not be a Party Animal.

   

3. Laugh about everything, especially whatever hurts the most. I have found this really helpful. Some say it is an unhealthy coping mechanism. But if you are really funny, you are probably really laughing. Knowing what hurts and joking about it requires self-awareness and an ironic approach to life. You are aware of the bad feelings but are not overcome by them, instead living with them openly, thereby reducing the power even the worst has over you. But if you keep joking about what hurts, not knowing when to stop or how the audience is getting uncomfortable, you may need help.

4. Be active on LinkedIn: There is no superiority in not being active on LinkedIn. There is even less in shitting on LinkedIn on Twitter. Everyone is being cringe in their own way. If you are cringing at how others are being cringe, you are caught up in the shame of cringe overall, which means you are not above judging yourself. Get over yourself. A good way to do so is by being active on LinkedIn.

   

5. Inspire and be inspired by women: I sometimes think of my mother when I post on LinkedIn, because we’ve both seen how much our professional achievements—and our very freedom—elicited from us. Most of the women I know have fought hard to be where they are. It is thus naturaI that I become very happy whenever a woman has something positive to take away from me. Some of the nicest things that were ever said to me were said by women. A few examples:

   1. Kalpana didi, who comes to my house at 9 am daily to clean and cook two meals, told me on my 30th birthday: “Aap ka life kitna accha hai didi, shaadi nahi kiya hai, do bacche nahi hai meri tarah, aap sundar ho, aise hi ghumo firo,” she said. (“Your life is so good sister, you aren’t married, you don’t have two kids like me, you are pretty, keep having fun.”) I really appreciated this from her, especially because she doesn’t even know about the battles on my way to this lifestyle. She just gets it.

   2. I particularly love this thing my friend Akshita wrote about me after we spent a summer together working for a fine and popular Indian narrative non-fiction magazine.

c. This one just… to be looked at and read so deeply—thank you.

There’s more like this—long-form letters to a long-form writer—but I’ll save it for a long-form essay. This one is in another style, closer to the traditional variety of the format; you know, the ones that are the author’s musings on a single subject, titled something like “On _______” or “Of _______”, and it’ll be some 2000 words on death or of travel.

A reminder: this one is On turning 30 / Of being like me.

I think it is important to note repeatedly that a woman can be free and all-creative, somehow unmarred by the kind of insecurity that can rule the waking male life, because we can be integrated in our pursuits, aggressive and loving, strong and gentle, emotional and intelligent.

I am inspired by women who fully wear their womanhood, sometimes by defying notions of femininity, sometimes by playing by them exceptionally, usually doing both together while being extremely funny. I’d like to share some topical scenes from Seinfeld, in which Elaine is particularly striking about femininity and grace. It resonated with me because women are expected to become more graceful with age, as though they’re chandelier. But take Elaine in a potential job situation: she goes from abandoning her little semblance of grace because a female employer insists on it, to goofing around with a man who sees “some” grace in her. The funny thing is that she’s being quite graceless throughout, like a woman on a mission with no plan. I think I am—or want to be—like that. My female heroes are extremely competent (in real life, and maybe on screen too) but quite graceless.

Like them, I have some grace.

6. Be intelligent. Intelligence is worth cultivating. It is inseparable from study, from being a beginner, from operating from a place of truth, from being willing to change and do what it takes to be happy, from having a roof over your head and three meals to eat daily. Unfortunately, a patriarchial society can seem to put intelligence and femininity in opposition: you cannot be extremely smart if you’re also emotional (the underlying presumptions being that emotionality is not intelligence, and that emotionality is feminine, both of which should be challenged); you are smart only if you’re good at maths (maths, science, and masculinity are idea with colonial legacies in India); etc. etc.—don’t even get me started on how self-deprecation can be mistaken for genuine underconfidence when coming from a woman. What a blow it feels like when that happens. Brings me to my knees.

7. Feign a sense of destiny. Make everything seem fated. It will make people love and respect you. If someone sends you a Reel, tell them you were just going to share the exact same Reel with them. If what you want for lunch is being served at a joint you happen to be walking past, it means you’re special.

8. Do not care what other people think. The moment you care what they think, they will think less of you, so if you want them to think highly of you, do not care what they think. Furthermore, whatever you think they think of you is colored by what you think of yourself, so it is best to work on feeling good about yourself first. Once you do that, you will not care what other people think. A good book to read is What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure I’ll love it.

9. Be disciplined and fun. What I mean is: try and have a healthy lifestyle, some hobbies, something to care about that keeps you going always. It is half the work of good mental health. Exercise six days a week, or at least four. I have gone from six to four over the last two years.

10. Aim for liberation. I was shocked to find out what nirvana really is. It isn’t some mere state of peace and calm. It is the end of the game of life. Do you want to keep playing, going up and down the highs and lows of the winding Gordian knot that is your life, your fate, your circumstances? Or do you want to realize it is all fleeting, all endless, and that real truth lies in a Oneness that the knot is a fractal of? According to GPT-4, “aiming for liberation can provide numerous benefits, including freedom from suffering, inner peace, personal growth, spiritual fulfillment, increased empathy and compassion, and greater mindfulness. By seeking liberation, individuals can lead more meaningful, fulfilling lives and contribute positively to the world around them.”

11. Wear makeup. I can’t overstate the benefits of makeup, and, largely, dressing well. I don’t mean fancy clothes so much as the act of adorning oneself. It can be restorative, especially to an unmoored self. (To be clear, makeup or makeup-masquerading-as-skincare have not been good for my skin, but these tools also mitigate their own side effects, which really helps.)

12. Embrace contradictions. Contradictions occur when one construct you have created violates another construct you have created using the same set of rules or operations. They occur when the set of rules and operations are insufficient to explain what you’re trying to explain with it. Thus, recognize the fallibility of constructs and the rules they’re derived from. Apply logic, note the inconsistencies it throws up, and remember that that too is expected and logical, because reality is not logical.

13. Listen to music no matter what you’re doing. It prevents boredom. It can improve concentration.

14. Dance like everyone is watching. Everyone is watching, so you might as well dance like it.

15. Do not apply to Forbes 30 Under 30. Although I have exhorted you to be active on LinkedIn, I do not recommend Forbes 30 Under 30.

16. You love your parents. Early adulthood may be marked by resentment for the people who gave birth to us, because life may have been lived under their thumb, directly or otherwise, knowingly or unknowingly. But as you heal, you realize they were alright. Your parents made it possible for you to exist, to heal, and your love for them is real and deep, whenever you get over your shit. This takes real work. I know Indians are the last people who need to be told to revere their parents; we hear enough of it already, and following it blindly can keep us from becoming full persons. But now that I have worked on my shit a bit, I will introduce a Buddhist idea: that it may take lifetimes to repay the debt of gratitude we owe our parents.

17. Say nice things to people. It is best if you mean it too. The biggest measure of a life well-lived is in the quality of its relationships. I’m trying to be better at mine. Humanity can be compared to an ant or a bee colony, in that we are all interconnected with every other being, each doing their part for the larger good. And the currency of doing things in the human colony is love: we do everything to give and receive love.

18. Use yellow lighting liberally. It makes every space look better while being suited to multiple moods and functions: you can work, read, watch TV, party, workout—all with yellow light. I only use white light in critical, austere situations, such as when I’m looking for something lost, or when I’m late to the airport and hurriedly packing.

My biggest life lesson is that you do not have to think of 30 things to say just because you have turned 30. Life is not an algorithm—not a simple one, at any rate—unlike the platforms you’re trying to sell your life to.

Cheers,

Until next time,

This screengrab from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham is basically my entire advice:

“If you want to be something in life, to earn something, to win something, then always listen to your heart… and if your heart doesn’t give you an answer, then close your eyes and remember your mother and father… then, you’ll see, all your destinations will be crossed, all your difficulties eased… victory will be yours, only yours.”

You must be mad to still be reading this. Read more and send rave reviews.

Right now I'm delivering an especially hot variety of mad words. They're about the making of my first book, a collection of essays on how crazy life is in modern India and society.

Think navigating extreme differences within families and generations in a fraught society in political conditions that feel so overwhelming that most practical action feels futile, while mostly swallowing all thoughts, moral or otherwise, with Instagram Reels, the work of making ends meet, and managing the mental health fallout of these mundane, privileged activities. Exciting, no?

Before I tell you some banging news, a quick digression about who I am in the first place. Nothing to worry about! I just want to make sure you’re a fan of my writing. And, if not, to give you reasons to be one, and then to forward this to anyone else who isn’t a fan.

• I go by @ramachandranesk on the internet and write essays—long, short, medium, but always rare—on everything culture, biz, sci-tech, media, aspiration, selfhood, identity, and modern India.

• My work appears in The Caravan, ThePrint, VICE, Fifty Two, Rest of World, The Quint, Raiot, and other leading publications, such as my website. (Look at it! It’s a visual treat! But do not eat.)

• I studied engineering at BITS Pilani, Goa, and then taught myself programming so I could be a “real coder” at Amazon, before doing well in CAT 2016 and getting an MBA at IIM Calcutta, after which began my Don Draper era, which saw me work on large detergent brands like Tide and Ariel (I helped launch Tide Pods in India! Buy a pack!), but also on subscriptions for media outlets like The Ken and The Caravan, which kept me close to journalism and writing, which would’ve been about my bizarre life and times, but, instead, it’s now got it all.

• Really: My writing brings a bodymind steeped in STEM, business, the arts, and itself to the yard, and they’re like it’s better than yours, damn right, it’s better than yours… Ahem, please read my pieces here. There’s stuff on AI and Hindu supremacy, the link between baby names and personality and aspiration, game theory and Netflix originals, caste, media, gender, science stuff, the traffic in Bengaluru, conversations with my father, how I buy my earpods, you name it.

My debut book will build on the “distinctive style” that popularized my previous essays. Readers described these as “funny, informative, completely gripping”; “a brain drawing fascinating insights and connections”; “serious, hilarious, and factual at the same time”; analytical and irreverent; smart and witty; “genius fun”; “extremely reported and well-researched”; “copious with perspectives”; “unafraid to say something possibly ludicrous”; “playing with formats”; “original”, “sharp”,—even “brilliant”.

Now the banging news

The book promises to out-deliver on these fronts, I think.

For one, it was baptized by the South Asia Speaks fellowship for emerging writers from the region in January 2022, a few months after I conceived of it. Over the last year, I worked with my mentor, Sanam Maher, to crank out pages on my once-dysfunctional family (?); the interplay of food, looks, and womanhood; my burgeoning sexuality and dilemmas about religion, gender identity, substance, exercise, work, madness, and ambition—all of which dovetailed into this nasty cocktail of Things to Write About.

I’ve been drinking deeply from it.

Then, on January 13, 2022, life changed again. I got these messages from Kanishka Gupta, who represented last year’s Booker Prize winners, among other South Asian literary giants.

A few minutes later:

And then, a few weeks later:

So this is it—the banging news about my book. I’ve signed up with Writer’s Side by Kanishka Gupta to bring my debut collection of essays to the world in the best possible way.

Given how continuously things are changing today, from AI and creative work and writing to the tumults of publishing in Indian media and abroad, I’m glad to be working with such a solid team to make sure the book finds its place in the world.

Readers of the book’s early chapters, some of whom are subscribers here, are fortunately affirming that the book should find its place in the world. They’re calling it the “definitive take on the Indian millennial experience”; “novelistic” and “stream of consciousness”; its voice like “Carrie Bradshaw meets Joan Didion” (🤯); its “immensely identifiable and relatable” themes evoking Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino for those who’ve read her.

(The New Yorker staff writer’s book of essays wrangled with the question of arriving at an organic self in the internet age, and was praised for its “astute analysis” of “the unlivable hell” that is contemporary society, offering penetrating insights on “feminism, identity, the internet”, and the “sources of millennial anxiety”.)

TL;DR? My book is being repped by Kanishka Gupta—you know, just the guy who works with Booker Prize winners. And readers are saying they love where the book is going.

Now, what is “mad words”? Why this newsletter?

In India, asking what it means to be an “organic self”—a decent, competent human being, perhaps—amidst peak capitalism, technology, and fascism implies several sub-questions. Some of them are:

• What is a self?

  • Is it our identities?

  • Is it our minds, thoughts, feelings, bodies, hands, and feet?

  • All of the above? Some of the above? None of the above? Something else entirely?

• How do we live and express our (many) selves today?

  • How they contradict each other!

  • What the psychological toll of adorning them is!

  • Versus thirty years ago, say, when the internet and a liberalized economy weren’t around?

• So how to be a person today?

  • What do Indian family dynamics and trauma have in common with celebrity culture, caste, gender, age, narcissism, consumerism, capitalism, our history, and our very sense of being?

  • What about drugs, and the mystical experiences you can have without them?

• What’s for lunch?

  • And is it okay to ask that?

Until the book’s release, mad words will help you stay in touch with me, Sanjana Ramachandran, aka @ramachandranesk, as I try to answer these difficult questions. You can expect:

• Dispatches* from a mind in the wild, foraging through ideas, dilemmas, literature, history, conversations, and (mostly current) affairs like a monkey in a forest seeking bananas. You may wish every now and then that I knew where I was going, not because you want to get anywhere soon, but because uncertainty, which is at the heart of Truth, is unsettling. Will we get those bananas? Are they even there, in this corner of the forest? Will they be fit to eat? If not, how to survive? I think both of us need to get used to a lack of answers. Just look at the world right now! Previous iterations of this post included such conclusions as: “I’m going to say this!, and I’m going to say that!, and I’m going to do it this often!, at the same time each week!, so you can expect reliable service! in exchange for money! I’m not sure I need to ask you for!—yet!” I’m constantly influenced by personal branding gurus and sell-your-newsletter-newsletters that insist you figure your One Thing out and then hammer One Thing into One Audience over and over. But, actually, I don’t have one or two things figured out—and I’m glad my existing readership doesn’t seem to care about it. I talk about many things, as mentioned above, and the questions I try to answer throw up so many sub-questions, with or without resolution, that I just need to share my thinking through all of it. Writing is intrinsically lonely and all-consuming otherwise. So this is an outlet for me, one that I hope we’ll both learn from, because I do think there’s so much to learn from just thinking out loud. You experience the uncertainty and humility behind final, confident answer, which is typically the only thing the world sees. But I don’t think it needs to be that way. I wish to be foolish openly. So I hope you’ll agree that frequency and subject matter are at least as defining as the process of thinking about things, which is what this newsletter opens a window to. If you appreciate that, please subscribe and share it with your friends.

That was the only bullet point in this list of bullet points. Expect more such misadventures with asterisks in all my literature and storytelling. What a crazy marketing stunt ya.

What do I want from you?

A piece of cake.

“No, seriously, what do you want from me?” you insist, because you’re a good person.

Fiiiine. I have been getting the most generous requests and offers—people want to read early drafts, give feedback, brainstorm ideas, be my brand manager… It’s wild. I love that my writing and work has struck a chord with people.

My current thinking is: Those who want to contribute more deeply can best do so by subscribing to this newsletter. Keep reading and engaging with my work. I have fought hard to be where I am, and you are partially responsible for me seeing through this fight. So talk about my writing and tweets and Reels at parties, tell people how you discovered me, and go to parties if you don’t already; tell your dates or spouse and friends about the smart unique people who make your life better; be cool, basically. I couldn’t ask for more.

Thank you immensely for being part of everything so far.

See you soon!