I rarely function like that though.

I’m a serial multitasker. But not the simpleton kind – where I make tea while replying to an email while reading an article while eating a meal while watching TV while scrolling Instagram. That is so high school. I’m clearly finishing my doctorate here. Keep up.

I have no issue staying with one thing at a time and being present for hours. Romantic, right? Being present? No one mentions the duration though. Stay present. For how long?

So I switch. Like a bitch. Never pass on a good rhyme, folks.

My beginnings are solid. I plan, I start, I get into it. And then, very reasonably, time slows down and I begin to get fatigued. Something else, equally important, starts to feel very alluring. So I step away, briefly. Just to take a break and do something else.

A break. Such an innocent little vague thing. The break turns into a mood without warning. And then another thing follows.

So nothing overlaps. It just refuses to end – over days, weeks, sometimes months. That’s the doctorate-grade serial multitasking. You follow?

By the time I return, the thing I started with feels like it belongs to a different version of me. I have to re-enter it, remember what I was doing, why it mattered, and reconnect the threads. It gets harder and harder with time.

The week fills up this way, with things that were started with full intention and very little outcome. Everything is now in motion, with no sign of completion. Just stuck in the middle.

Heck, this has now entered my medical records.

On a recent, completely unrelated consultation, a physician checked my heart rate, reviewed my reports, and wrote on my prescription in firm, confident capitals: AVOID MULTITASKING.

I went in with chronic conditions and came out with this, written alongside some actual medication, as if it were equally measurable and equally doable.

Many thoughts ran through my head as I read that: How did he know? And more importantly, when exactly am I supposed to “avoid” it? Before or after meals? No dosage mentioned.

Not that it matters, but that was my very first visit to this doctor. He didn’t know me well enough to prescribe personality changes. Apparently, he didn’t need to.

But spellings aside, he’s a good doctor. And he was right.

What I’ve been calling efficient is actually expensive.

The brain doesn’t multitask. It switches. And there’s a cost.

Every time you move from one task to another, the prefrontal cortex has to disengage from one goal and reconfigure itself for the next. It feels instant, but neurologically, it isn’t.

Researchers call this a switching cost. It shows up as slower processing, increased errors, weaker working memory, and reduced cognitive depth. Each task gets a thinner slice of your attention.

Every switch can come with a small reward signal, giving a false sense of progress.

And the cost lingers in the form of attention residue.

When you leave a task unfinished, the brain doesn’t fully let go. Mental activity linked to that task lingers in the background, particularly in networks associated with working memory and goal tracking. So when you move on, part of your attention stays behind.

This causes cognitive interference. You’re holding multiple contexts at once. Your brain is trying to resolve one while engaging with another. It’s that low-grade mental clutter. A constant hum of something-else-is-pending.

Multiply that across weeks and months of unfinished tasks, and your brain is basically hosting a really long, dreadful meeting no one is willing to adjourn. Each return becomes a restart. The brain has to reconstruct context and rebuild momentum. Even simple tasks begin to feel heavy.

So my problem is not doing too many things, but leaving too many things open, active, and unresolved. And then carrying them forward, stacking them through the day.

A very efficient way to stay busy, by the way. Just very inefficient for life.

That one line on the prescription doesn’t feel like generic advice anymore. It feels precise.

Let things end. Stay long enough for something to move through its own beginning, middle, and end without interrupting it halfway.

So here’s to medically prescribed restraint. And yet another attempt at reaching the end.

No, no, stay. There’s no need to rush for pads and newspapers and black polythene bags.

Good. Now, let’s lower our voices and continue like sensible adults.

This one is not the usual kind. This one requires medical vocabulary. The kind with invasive scans and biopsies and hormone pills.

Very Common

It started with a large fibroid. Very common, they said. Large turned out to mean fourteen centimetres, which feels excessive for something that is supposed to be common. Then they started listing the rest of it, which felt less like a diagnosis, more like qualifications I didn’t apply for. Diffuse adenomyosis. Clap clap clap. Endometrial hyperplasia. Clap clap. Polypoidal endometrium. Clap.

They stared. I guess I wasn’t supposed to clap.

Till then, in my head, my symptoms were perfectly reasonable. Heavy bleeding… happens. Clots… everyone gets them. Fatigue… just a phase.

Finally, after bleeding myself pale for nearly two months, I carried my third-trimester-sized uterus over to the doctor and said, okay, do what needs to be done.

From that point on, the tone shifted from “don’t worry” to “please sign here.”

Then came the service package. Myomectomy. Hysteroscopic polypectomy. D&C. Mirena insertion.

Great, where do I tick?

They smiled. No need. All of the above.

I qualified for the full package.

I am, of course, grateful that we live in a time where something like this can be diagnosed, explained, and fixed without anyone lighting incense and hoping for the best.

So the surgery went well. That is the official summary. The fibroid is gone, the lining is scraped clean, the IUD is in place, the reports look good, the doctor is satisfied, and I have been sent back into the world with the general understanding that everything should now behave itself. For at least five years.

It depends

While the surgery comes with precise words and clear instructions, the aftermath quickly returns to the familiar territory of “it depends.”

Recovery would take about two weeks, but it’s subjective, they said. Like pain is. Which is reassuring, and also completely useless, because recovery is not a straight line. Eleven weeks post-op, I’m still negotiating with my body like we’ve just met.

What recovery actually feels like is a series of small, humbling discoveries. In the early days, you lie in bed cramping in open protest. Once the pain settles a bit, you realise your abdominal muscles have resigned. Just when you start feeling them again, you discover your pelvic floor has moved out and left no forwarding address. Nothing seems to be where you left it. Your muscles are guarding, everything feels inflamed. Getting out of bed becomes a group activity. Clothes don’t fit, walking becomes a negotiation, and you find yourself leaning on furniture everywhere.

You just figure it out as you go.

That, I’m starting to realise, is the actual recovery plan.

Language gap

The strange part is, none of this is unfamiliar. Not the words, at least.

Fibroids. Polyps. Cysts. Adenomyosis. Hyperplasia. Endometriosis. IUD.

The vocabulary is everywhere. It comes up in conversations here and there. But no one really knows what it is. Or why it happens. Or how it feels. Or how to prevent it.

Women’s health seems to exist in two languages.

One is medical: precise, technical, full of diagrams, and Latin words.
The other is socio-cultural: vague, polite, embarrassing, and private.

Hormonal. Common. Happens. Don’t worry. After thirty. After marriage. After childbirth. After stress. After life.

The medical one tells you what is happening. The social one tells you to keep going. But the two conversations rarely happen in the same place. And between the two, the actual experience slips into shorthand.

We discuss fibroids the way we discuss the weather. We say procedure like it means one afternoon. We say PCOS like it is a category, not an experience.

The problem is not that we speak this way. The problem is that the shorthand is all we have. And the way we talk about these things rarely matches how much space they take up in real life.

Learning sideways

You learn very early that the body is something you manage quietly. You carry the essentials, you track your cycles, you cancel plans, you adjust life, you sit down when you need to, you get up when you have to.

Most of the knowledge about your body comes sideways, from other women, from half-heard advice, from things you notice and never formally confirm.

You learn the logistics before you learn the explanation.
You know how to fold a pad before you know why you bleed.
You know what cramps feel like before anyone tells you what causes them.

So when something bigger happens, you realise how much of this system runs on the assumption that you will adjust. That you will tolerate uncertainty. That you will get used to the new normal without needing every step explained in advance.

And mostly, you do.

You learn how to move in a body that feels different. You learn how to read small signals. You learn which pain matters and which one will pass. You learn to ask fewer dramatic questions and more practical ones.

Is this expected. Should I wait. Should I call. Should I ignore this.

Repair

It’s not that women don’t understand their bodies. It’s that we understand them the way people understand old houses. You know which door sticks, which switch doesn’t work, which pipe makes noise at night. You don’t know exactly why, but you know how to live with it.

And every now and then, something breaks badly enough that you have to call in professionals and get the whole system opened up and repaired.

After that, you get casual reassurances: Everything looks good. You’re fine now. Just give it some time. And you go home a little lighter, a little stitched together, and a little more aware that the manual for this body was never written in one place.

It has been passed down in lowered voices, wrapped in newspapers, wiped with tissues, and stuffed in black polythene bags.

Very common, they say.

And you nod, because you know exactly what that means.

It shows up everywhere and explains very little. We reach for it when something feels off. Someone has an attitude. Someone needs to change theirs. Someone’s attitude says it all. As if the word itself completes the diagnosis.

But when you try to pin it down, it slips.

We use it to describe mood, tone, behaviour, mindset, personality, worldview, outlook. A single word carrying far too much weight, pretending to explain what is actually a complex internal structure.

Attitude isn’t just how we feel. It’s how we expect.

More than choice, it’s a lens we inherit. A default setting handed to us long before we have the language for it.

We talk about changing attitude as though it were a simple act of will. Something you can adjust if you try hard enough. But most of it is already in place by the time we think we’re choosing.

Context

Neuroscience makes something clear: brains are social organs.

Attitude is not purely individual. It’s shaped by caregivers, peers, culture, power, and safety. Our nervous systems calibrate themselves to their environments.

Seen this way, attitude stops being a moral trait and starts to look like context made internal. Like climate, carried inside the body.

This perspective is humbling. It makes judgement harder and compassion easier.

Prediction

Another useful frame that neuroscience offers is predictive coding.

The brain is not a passive observer of reality. It’s a prediction engine. It constantly forecasts what is about to happen and updates itself only when those predictions fail.

Perception works this way too. You don’t “see” the world as it is. You see the brain’s best guess, corrected only when wrong.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: How much of what we call attitude is actually a bundle of predictions, formed early and reinforced often?

If you grow up around unpredictability, your nervous system learns vigilance.
Around criticism, it learns to anticipate mistakes.
Around warmth, it learns openness.
Around silence, it learns to shrink itself.

None of this is conscious. Much of it is encoded in subcortical systems – the amygdala, hippocampus, brainstem – long before the prefrontal cortex fully develops.

So what later gets labelled “personality” often begins as adaptation.

Attitude, in this sense, is not chosen. It is learned.

Choice

This becomes clearer when you look at how choice itself works.

Studies by Libet, and later by Haynes, showed that the brain initiates action milliseconds, sometimes seconds, before we become consciously aware of deciding. By the time we feel like we’ve chosen, neural processes are already underway.

This doesn’t eliminate agency. But it reframes it.

Our internal stance, our attitude, often reaches the situation before our conscious mind does.

So when someone avoids risk or seeks it, reads silence as rejection or relief, experiences criticism as collapse or information, those reactions are not spontaneous. They’re predictions being confirmed or challenged.

Pattern

The brain is metabolically expensive. Prediction saves energy.

It’s easier for the brain to repeat a known pattern, even a painful one, than to generate a new response. Trauma research shows that the nervous system often prioritises familiarity over accuracy. A known threat feels safer than an unknown possibility.

This is why people find themselves returning to recognisable dynamics. Recreating emotional roles. Choosing environments that feel oddly familiar.

Not because they lack insight, but because learning requires the nervous system to tolerate uncertainty.

From this angle, attitude is not preference. It is efficiency.

Shift

This is where the advice to “fix your attitude” falls apart.

The brain does not rewire because something makes sense. It rewires through experience, especially emotionally safe, repeated experience.

A nervous system shaped by threat learns safety in increments. One primed for abandonment updates only when presence is consistent. A mind trained to expect punishment learns trust only when expression doesn’t lead to loss.

Change feels slow because the brain needs evidence, not arguments.

Sometimes the shift is microscopic. Noticing the old prediction rise and staying long enough to see it fail. That’s how new data enters the system.

Attitude

I would define it like this: Attitude is the posture your nervous system takes towards uncertainty.

How it leans when things aren’t clear. How it braces when outcomes aren’t guaranteed. How it hopes when control is limited.

Some postures allow movement. Some lock us in place. Some protect us long after the threat is gone.

The moment you notice the posture, something shifts. A small gap opens up between prediction and response. Just enough to ask: Is this stance still serving me?

That pause is where agency lives.

Awareness

Seen this way, attitude isn’t something we perform or fix.

It’s the architecture of how we meet the world, built from every certainty and uncertainty we’ve lived through.

And architecture can change. Not quickly or cleanly. But measurably, through awareness and experience that is safe enough to challenge old predictions without overwhelming the system.

There’s no prescription here. Just the recognition that many of our decisions arrive before thought, and many of our limits were drawn long before we agreed to them.

Once you see attitude as structure rather than character, what felt inevitable starts to feel situational. Not who you are. Just where you’ve been standing.

And that awareness itself is change.

A strange sentence to hear, I know.

We grew up on Disney after all. A world where magic solves things, goodness triumphs, and every heartbreak gets sung away by woodland creatures.

But here’s the part no one mentioned: Fairy tales were never meant to be gentle, comforting things.

Long before animation and orchestral scores, fairy tales were carved out of hunger, fear, winters that took children, and adults who believed stories should prepare the young for danger, not shield them from it. Told around fires, in famine, in grief, they were designed to scare, not soothe. These weren’t bedtime tales. They were warnings disguised as wonder.

Picture a village lit only by embers, wolves pacing the tree line, cold pressing against thin walls. In a world where winters could kill quietly and strangers were a real threat, stories had teeth. Fear wasn’t entertainment; it was education.

Almost every Disney classic we adore today stands on the bones of those darker, older tales. Their violence was trimmed away, their grief was scrubbed clean, their endings stitched into a smile. Disney softened the endings, not the existence of danger. Their worlds still held death, betrayal, loss, and fear; just written in a way that a child could survive the telling.

It’s important to say this too: there is no single “original” fairy tale. These stories travelled through memory and firelight. They changed shape with every teller, sharpened in one village and softened in another. Long before Disney, Perrault, the Grimms, and Victorian collectors were already polishing the rougher edges. So Disney didn’t invent the brightening; it simply perfected the gentlest version.

Consider what those stories used to look like.

Cinderella
In Grimm’s telling, she is “Aschenputtel,” ash girl, forced to sleep among cinders. Her wishes are granted not by a fairy godmother, but by a hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave. The stepsisters slice off their own heels and toes to fit the slipper and later, pigeons peck their eyes out as punishment for their cruelty and they’re condemned to live out their days as sightless beggars. Unflinching brutality.

The Little Mermaid
Andersen gives her no wedding, no reunion. Every step on land feels like walking on knives. The prince never loves her back and to survive, she must kill him. She refuses to do so. At dawn, her heartbreak is so complete, she dissolves into sea foam. No happily ever after. Just disappearance.

Snow White
In Grimm’s version, the queen demands the girl’s lungs and liver as proof of death. The dwarfs place Snow White in a glass coffin for display, not devotion. And when the queen attends the wedding, she’s punished by being forced into red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she dies. No redemption arc. Just fire and vengeance.

Sleeping Beauty
In Basile’s version, there is no kiss, no romantic awakening. A wandering king finds her unconscious in the tower and rapes her. She gives birth to twins while still asleep, one of whom sucks the splinter from her finger, accidentally waking her. She opens her eyes, not to romance, but to confusion, motherhood, and the consequences of a life lived without consent.

Rapunzel
In Grimm’s tale, there are no lanterns, no golden glow. Rapunzel’s parents barter her away to a sorceress for stolen herbs. When she secretly meets her prince, she becomes pregnant, hinted at only by her “tightening dress.” Once discovered, she’s exiled to a barren desert. The prince leaps from her tower in despair and is blinded by thorns. They reunite only after long years of suffering. Her tears restore his sight, but the life they might have had is already gone.

And these are just the polite stories. Look deeper, and the shadows lengthen.

The wider canon gets darker still.

Esmeralda is executed in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Quasimodo dies beside her body.

Mowgli burns the jungle and is rejected by both humans and animals in The Jungle Book.

Hercules murders his wife and children.

Pocahontas is abducted and dies at twenty-one.

Pinocchio is tortured, mutilated, and nearly executed.

Some versions of Mulan end in her suicide.

Tarzan’s tale begins with murder and the killing of his ape mother.

Beauty and the Beast is rooted in coercion, not romance.

Andersen’s Snow Queen, the seed for Frozen, is a bleak meditation on abduction and dread.

The Fox and the Hound ends in the pointless death of both friends.

The Black Cauldron is steeped in undead armies and ritual sacrifice.

The original Aladdin enslaves, deceives, and kills.

And beneath The Lion King is Hamlet: a story that famously ends with a stage full of corpses.

So what did we do, generation after generation, faced with tales like these?

We didn’t abandon or erase them. We adapted them.

Not to deceive, but to survive.

Across continents and centuries, humanity has taken the jagged edges of our inheritance and sanded them down. We softened what was once sharp. We brightened what was once bleak. We rewrote the endings into something we could sleep through.

Most cultures eventually chose comfort over cruelty, mercy over literalism, hope over horror. Not universally, not uniformly, but consistently enough that the gentler versions endured.

We like to pretend we’ve outgrown happy endings. That adulthood demands grit, complexity, and moral ambiguity. Yet our reading habits, our cinema choices, our streaming queues betray us.

We still crave stories where

order returns
love is dependable
evil announces itself
loss is temporary
goodness is rewarded
closure is guaranteed.

The older tales trained us to expect suffering. The newer ones trained us to imagine the world as it could be.

Softness isn’t a denial of reality. It’s a decision about how we want to live inside it.

We don’t choose happy endings because they’re truer. We choose them because they’re kinder. They let us breathe.

Fairy tales have never been about factual accuracy. They’ve always been about agency: the right to reshape fear, revise destiny, and redirect inherited dread into futures we can live with.

That might be the oldest magic running through every version of every tale: the human instinct to weather the dark, and reach, stubbornly and deliberately, for the light. Not because it is guaranteed, but because it is ours to choose.

Simple, harmless things. Growing plants. Sketching faces that didn’t quite look human. Playing the same three chords on a guitar for years. None of it was content. None of it was monetised. It was just something to do after dinner when the world wasn’t asking for proof of productivity.

Now, every interest is an audition. The moment you enjoy something, it becomes a potential side hustle. Try painting, and someone will ask if you’ve opened an Etsy store. Cook a decent meal, and suddenly you’re told to start a food page. Buy a camera, and you’re one Lightroom preset away from becoming “a creator.”

We no longer have hobbies. We have unpaid internships for imaginary careers.

The modern brain can’t sit with mediocrity. We have been trained to optimise everything: our sleep, our steps, our skincare, our sourdough. Pleasure too has become a project plan.

It’s no longer enough to enjoy something. We must master it, track it, document it. The hippocampus, once the brain’s gentle archivist of memory, now works overtime to store evidence of our accomplishments. The dopamine that was meant to reward curiosity now fires for every new follower.

We live in a time when “doing something just for fun” has started to sound suspicious.

Tell someone you’re learning to crochet, and they’ll ask what you plan to do with it. The answer “nothing” now feels radical.

Hobby guilt is the quiet anxiety of the creative age. That hum inside the mind that whispers, This could be something. It’s the voice that won’t let you doodle without wondering if you should post it. The one that asks if your evening walk should be a podcast, or your journal a newsletter. It’s the part of you that confuses joy with output.

The tragedy isn’t that we’ve become too ambitious. It’s that we’ve forgotten the holiness of being ordinary.

As children, we were allowed to be delightfully bad at things. To sing off-key. To draw suns with faces. To play pretend. To make messes that meant nothing. Somewhere along the way, adulthood replaced curiosity with competence. The world convinced us that joy without an audience is wasted.

We began to fear being seen as beginners.

But hobbies were never meant to impress. They were meant to humanise. To soften. To make the hours stretch gently. To remind us that not everything needs to scale, not everything we love has to earn its keep.

The painter doesn’t need a gallery. The reader doesn’t need a Goodreads goal. The gardener doesn’t need a YouTube channel. The act itself is the reward. It is the brain’s prefrontal cortex quieting as the motor cortex takes over, that subtle shift from thinking to doing, from judging to being.

Neuroscientists call it flow – that state where time dissolves and the self loosens its grip. It’s the mind’s natural way of healing. The body’s way of saying, You’re safe enough to play.

And yet, we keep chasing outcomes. We treat leisure like labour, joy like investment. We turn every quiet pleasure into a public performance, then wonder why we’re exhausted ALL the time.

Maybe it’s time to reclaim the luxury of being mediocre. It’s fine if your calligraphy looks like bad handwriting. If your sourdough collapses. If your dance never becomes a reel. The joy of creation was never meant to be measured in likes, comments, or ROI.

To do something badly is to do it freely.

So maybe the next time you feel the itch to be good at everything, let yourself be delightfully average.

Write badly. Sing softly. Plant something and forget what it’s called. Paint a wall the wrong colour and live with it.

Every act that doesn’t demand perfection rewires the nervous system to relax. It tells the amygdala that nothing terrible will happen if you’re not brilliant. It reminds you that play is not the opposite of work; it’s the reason we learned to work at all.

Because the point of a hobby isn’t to master it. It’s to remember that life is not a performance. You don’t owe anyone a polished version of your joy.

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Theism was born from this longing to turn mystery into comfort, chaos into story. To say, There is purpose, and it is ours.

In the East, this longing took subtler shapes. Karma offered a moral physics of its own – every action with its echo, every cause bound to its effect. It was, in its way, an early attempt to make sense of chaos, to find justice in randomness. Yet even karma, for all its elegance, is built on the same desire: to believe the universe keeps score.

In the West, the same yearning took on grandeur, with God as architect, man as design. The heavens were drawn like clockwork: perfect and divine, with Earth at its centre and humanity as its meaning. Creation was not merely origin but validation: proof that we were special, chosen, necessary to the story. Order became sanctity; curiosity, often, a trespass. The search for knowledge was framed as rebellion – Prometheus stealing fire, Eve reaching for fruit, Galileo defying scripture.

For beneath both karma and creation lies a shared human hunger to find pattern in the unknown. One calls it consequence; the other, providence. Both search for laws that can anchor chaos.

Faith, whether in gods or in karma, seeks comfort in the known. Science, on the other hand, finds wonder in the unknown. The believer stops at meaning; the scientist begins there. One builds order to silence uncertainty; the other studies uncertainty until it speaks.

And that is the essential difference. Where religion seeks answers, science seeks better questions.

The story of science, of us, is the story of learning, again and again, that we were wrong.

We once believed the Earth was the centre of everything: immovable, divine, perfectly designed for us alone. Then came Copernicus, who moved us out of the spotlight. Galileo tilted his telescope towards the heavens and saw moons orbiting Jupiter, not us. Newton uncovered invisible forces binding apple to planet, matter to motion. Darwin traced our lineage through finches and fossils, erasing the illusion of human exceptionalism. Einstein folded time and space into a single trembling fabric. Heisenberg showed that reality itself refuses to sit still; that the closer we look, the less certain we become. And Goodall, decades later, watched chimpanzees craft tools from twigs, erasing one more line between instinct and intellect, between them and us.

Each revelation didn’t just expand what we knew; it dismantled who we thought we were.

To know that you don’t know is not ignorance; it’s evolution. It is the mind’s way of remaining porous to mystery. The believer says, Here lies truth. The scientist says, Let’s keep looking.

Every great leap forward began in discomfort – with a mind brave enough to say, This doesn’t add up. Marie Curie’s hands glowed faintly blue before the world understood radiation. Rosalind Franklin saw the structure of life in an X-ray, and no one believed her. Richard Feynman spent a lifetime celebrating “the pleasure of finding things out.” Richard Dawkins reminded us that evolution is not a ladder but a vast, tangled tree; that meaning is not bestowed from above but emerges from the bottom up, through trial, error, and time itself. The Higgs boson, the double helix, plate tectonics, black holes – each was born from disbelief, from the audacity to ask, What if the map is wrong?

Science is not a monument of facts; it is a living act of humility. Every theory carries its own expiry date. Every discovery opens ten new doors of ignorance. To say “I don’t know” is a declaration of freedom; freedom from dogma, from ego, from the human need to crown itself the centre of creation.

The creationist once said, We were made in God’s image. The evolutionist replied, We made God in ours. Perhaps the truth is simpler: hydrogen, given enough time, began to wonder about itself.

What could be holier than that?

To question is to love reality enough to resist simplifications. Skepticism is not the absence of faith; it’s faith in the process that through observation, repetition, and revision, we move closer to truth, even if we never reach it.

We once thought disease came from sin, until Pasteur found microbes. We saw madness as possession, until Freud found the subconscious. We believed the atom was indivisible; until it split, and so did our moral certainty. We thought we’d reached the edge of the universe, until Hubble showed us there is no edge at all.

The more we learn, the smaller we become, and the more magnificent the world grows.

To know that you don’t know is to live with wonder intact: to stand beneath a night sky filled with objects that will outlast us and say, I don’t know what you are but I want to find out.

Because wisdom was never about knowing everything. It was about never mistaking what we know for everything that’s true. And that, the humility to be wrong, the courage to stay curious, remains humanity’s greatest discovery yet. So let us go on – flawed, fleeting, and gloriously uncertain – lighting our little candles of knowledge in a universe that never asked to be known, yet shines a bit brighter because we try.

And if there is any mercy in the cosmos, let it be this: that we never stop being astonished by it.

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Every breath feeds us and ages us. Each inhale gives energy, each exhale leaves a trace of decay. The same molecule that keeps us alive also rusts us from within, cell by cell, atom by atom. It fuels both fire and fate.

This is the oxygen paradox, the elegant cruelty of biology. We cannot survive without oxidation, yet it is oxidation that wears us down. Inside our cells, oxygen fuels the mitochondria, turning food into the energy that keeps hearts beating and minds awake. Yet the same process spawns free radicals, rogue oxygen fragments that chip away at DNA, skin, and time itself. The act of living, in chemical terms, is a slow and steady combustion.

Perhaps that is the most human truth of all: everything that sustains us also reshapes us, and everything we love leaves a mark.

Sunlight feeds the earth but burns the skin. Salt gives flavour but corrodes the tongue. Movement strengthens the body but thins the joints. Love expands the heart but exposes its cracks.

The universe was built on this strange covenant: vitality and vulnerability are inseparable. The brighter the flame, the faster the burn.

Yet maybe this is not a tragedy. Maybe it is the point. To need what can also hurt us keeps us awake to the present. We breathe knowing that breath is borrowed. We love knowing that loss is certain. We create, connect, and persist, fully aware that everything is temporary, and still, we choose it.

That is what makes meaning possible.

The plants that feed us turn sunlight into sugar. The same process releases oxygen – the element that will one day damage their own cells. The world does not resist this contradiction; it depends on it.

The deeper we look, the clearer it becomes: stability is an illusion. Stars burn to create light. Mountains rise only to erode. Every element that shapes us also consumes us in time.

Perhaps joy was never meant to last and love was never meant to be safe. Perhaps the purpose of life is not to eliminate risk, but to find balance – to take in just enough of what can harm us to remember that we are alive.

Oxygen, like love, cannot be hoarded. It must be taken in, moment by moment, knowing it will fade and take something from us each time.

And so we keep breathing. Lungs open, hearts open. Aware that every act of survival is also an act of surrender: a quiet acceptance of nature’s terms.

Perhaps consciousness itself is the universe’s way of watching its own beauty decay; of knowing that creation and destruction are not adversaries, but two halves of the same pulse. We are its burning witnesses, and through our fragile awareness, the cosmos looks upon itself and experiences the wonder and ache of being alive.

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Clean notebooks, labelled folders, colour-coded tabs – they promise that life can be organised if only I try hard enough. Nothing gives me a greater sense of control than a well-made list.

My mornings begin with ambition disguised as stationery: the to-do list.

It looks innocent enough – black ink, clean lines, good intentions. Send invoice. Write essay. Buy detergent. It fills me with a small, caffeinated thrill to start the day. Within a few hours though, it’s no longer a to-do list; it’s a self-improvement manifesto. Fix neck pain. See doctor. Don’t miss workout. Change life.

I stare at it like it’s a boss I secretly resent. It stares back, knowing it owns me.

There’s something addictive about that first tick – a declaration of order in an otherwise disorderly world. It’s clean, final, satisfying. For a second, chaos seems negotiable. The list gives shape to the invisible: all the errands, decisions, and small obligations that hold a life together. It whispers, you can do this… just start at the top.

And for a while, I believe it.

I tick boxes, cross lines, move tasks to the next day, underline some twice. It’s a dance between realism and optimism; a choreography of small lies told with perfect handwriting.

But the thrill of ticking a box lasts exactly six seconds. Then I notice the forty-seven others still blank, blinking like unclosed tabs in my head, humming with quiet disapproval.

By afternoon, the list has evolved. It now includes things I never wrote: Reorganise house. Rewire brain. Take backup of last backup. Reply to person who replied to your reply. I don’t write them down, but somehow, they’re implied… like fine print in the contract of adulthood.

By 7 pm, half the list remains untouched – each task a small fossil of who I thought I’d become by now. Still pending.

And yet, lists have their grace. There’s a reason why we love them. They save us from the tyranny of fading memory, from the clutter that spills out when we try to hold the world in our little heads.

Atul Gawande once wrote that checklists save lives in operating rooms because they turn chaos into sequence. A surgeon can’t rely on inspiration; neither, perhaps, can the rest of us. Lists tether the drifting mind. They remind us that progress doesn’t always require brilliance – sometimes, it just needs a checkbox and a pen.

But even grace has its limits. They begin as helpers, then turn into silent auditors of all that didn’t get done. It’s a rolling performance review conducted by your own future self.

Sometimes I wonder who we’d be without them. Would our days dissolve into chaos? Would we forget how to function? Would our memory collectively crash? Or would we finally do things for the pleasure of doing them, not for the satisfaction of striking them out?

I tried it once – a list-free day. No agenda, no tasks, no plan.

By noon, I felt free.
By 2 pm, unmoored.
By 4 pm, I was writing “relax” on a Post-it just so I could tick it off.

Turns out, I don’t need lists for structure. I need them for comfort – for the illusion that life can be itemised, managed, held together by check boxes.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe the list isn’t an enemy but a mirror that shows us what we’re avoiding. And maybe the list isn’t supposed to end at all. Maybe it’s just an ongoing conversation with the future – a way of saying, I’m still here. Still attempting coherence.

So I tell myself I’ll finish it tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up early.
Tomorrow, I’ll prioritise better.
Tomorrow, I’ll be the kind of person who finishes things.

Tomorrow, of course, I’ll write a new list. As I will, each day for the rest of my life.

I’ll carry forward what I didn’t do, add a few things I might, and pretend again that catching up with life is possible. I’ll feed it small, digestible things: Water plant. Write pitch. Walk more.

And on good days, when a few small boxes get ticked, it’ll be enough. Because, for that brief, merciful moment, the world will feel manageable.

After all, some days, making the list is apparently the only thing that ever truly gets done.

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Not the Himalayan kind. Just the five-minute kind that follows after replying to a few messages and feeling productive. He wasn’t chasing enlightenment, only motivation. But fate and push notifications had other plans.

It began, as all spiritual journeys do, with purpose. He opened the app to do one specific thing: reply to a message, check a tag, post a reel, casually stalk an ex. Something sacred like that.

But the gods of distraction were already awake.

First came a skincare ad, tailored to his pores with unnerving accuracy. Then a stranger’s engagement post. Then a dog wearing sunglasses in Santorini. His thumb, now under divine possession, scrolled on.

Within minutes, he had witnessed three weddings, five breakups, two baby showers, a man who quit his job to “follow his purpose,” and a woman who made banana bread at 2 am under a ring light of regret.

Time, once linear, began to melt.

He drifted through reels of people cleaning their fridges, aligning their chakras, and quitting their jobs to “travel full-time.” Somewhere between “5 habits that changed my life” and “10 Amazon products you must have,” his soul quietly left his body.

He didn’t notice.

He stared into the dull glow of his phone – eyes glazed, mind empty. And that’s when it happened. A full-bodied, mind-blanking stillness washed over him. For the first time in days, he was thoughtless. Calm. Detached. A single tear of emptiness threatened to fall.

He had achieved Digital Nirvana.

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No incense. No guru. No chanting. No mountaintop retreat. Just forty-seven minutes of scrolling. And his own private cliff to hang from, unhinged.

His mind became a still pond reflecting ads for ergonomic chairs. He could hear nothing but the hum of the refrigerator and the faint whisper of the algorithm telling him to stay.

In that transcendental stillness, he reached for purpose. Why had he opened the app? To reply? To post?

He couldn’t remember.

So, like every enlightened being, he turned inward – by visiting his own profile. He stared at his last photo, filtered and captioned, wondering if he had always looked this tired. He did not find the answer. But he did find a new angle to hate his face.

He closed the app to detox. Then reopened it three seconds later. His thumb had muscle memory; his willpower did not.

And so, he became an accidental monk. He had not found peace. But the algorithm had found him.

He was now fully present. Scrolling through the void. Thoughtless. Aimless. Neither happy nor sad. Neither here nor there. Beautifully mindful. Tragically mindless.

As word of his serenity spread, people began to visit him – not to talk, but to watch. They said he sat for hours, face softly lit by his phone, thumb moving with divine rhythm. Sometimes he smiled at nothing. Sometimes he gasped, enlightened by a meme. They whispered that in his silence lies a lesson, though no one remembered what it was.

He became a guru of the scroll. A saint of the feed. The first person to truly find peace, by losing all reason for it.

The Scroll Sutra
Verse 108 of the Algorithmic Age

In the age of endless light,
a man sought silence and found a screen.

His thumb moved as the wind moves over water –
without intent, without end.

He beheld the feed,
the feed beheld him.

In its depths, he saw all beings:
the joyous, the weeping, the filtered, the real.

And lo, the noise became his prayer.
The scroll became his breath.

Each flick of the finger was a chant.
Each reel, a vision.

His mind emptied, his eyes shone.
Time dissolved like salt in still water.

And the Great Algorithm whispered unto him:
“Behold – you are seen.”

In that moment, he was free of thought,
yet bound by signal.

Thus was born the first accidental monk of the scroll,
who found peace not by leaving the world, but by refreshing it.

Most of my writing life has unfolded on this triangular battlefield: deadlines, migraines, and procrastination. The unholy trinity.

Deadlines glare at me from the corner of my desk. Migraines press their cold fingers into the back of my skull. And procrastination, of course, lounges on the sofa like a well-fed aunty with a bowl of bhujia, patting the seat next to her and cooing, “There’s still time, beta. Plenty of time.”

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On these cursed days, my rituals are painfully predictable. I sit at my desk, staring at the blank screen like it’s an arranged marriage prospect I can’t quite refuse. The cursor blinks back at me with moral disapproval. The only real commitment I make is to tab-hoarding: retro fonts, obscure city maps, and rabbit holes about whether Mughal gardens were influenced by French landscaping. (Spoiler: they were).

When the work finally begins, the migraine makes its entrance. Not the delicate kind, not the “let me sip chamomile tea and nap” kind, but a full marching band inside the skull. The kind that makes light feel violent and smells feel offensive. The kind that sends me staggering into a dark room with a heat pack, muttering like a cursed epic hero: Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned.

Once an enviable writer’s haven, my desk mutates into a shrine to deadlines. Meds scatter across it like ritual offerings: triptans, muscle relaxants, anti-nausea pills, antacids, anti-inflammatories, magnesium, and the inevitable painkillers. Packets of salt flank a half-drunk glass of iced tea – my holy water. Physiotherapy resistance bands dangle from a chair like abandoned garlands. I’m supposed to stretch, breathe, and strengthen to appease the migraine gods. Instead, I hunch like a tragic gargoyle for nine hours straight and then wonder why my spine revolts like a betrayed union worker on strike.

And Bangalore joins the satsang. Inspiration walks in, the power promptly walks out. The construction site next door strikes up its drills like percussion practice. And to top it all, I make my own daily crawl through two hours of traffic for physiotherapy – a pilgrimage so slow, the journey outlasts the prayer.

Of all the tricks writing plays on me, procrastination is the cruelest. At least, deadlines shout and migraines sting. Procrastination, though, is sweet. It whispers comfort, and sells me faith. Faith in a future version of myself who will somehow rise at the last moment like a Bollywood hero, sweaty and glorious, to save the day. But this faith is a scam. I know this hero too well. She’s typing like a maniac at 2 am, cold compress tied to her forehead like Bandit Queen, whispering “never again” while fully aware it will happen again.

That’s the irony: procrastination feels like a friend, but really it fattens up the other two. By the time it’s done with me, the deadline is rabid and the migraine is hungry. I’ve learned they’re not enemies at all – deadlines and migraines are co-conspirators. One chases me into action, the other paralyses me the second I begin. And procrastination just watches, amused, like Krishna playing the flute while Kurukshetra burns.

And yet, sometimes the chaos works. The migraine lifts, the deadline looms, and the words pour out, jagged and desperate but alive.

Because art doesn’t roll off a factory line, polished and packaged by 5 pm. It arrives in stutters, in floods, in fragments scrawled at 2 am. It stumbles in at the very last minute, feral and unpolished. Deadlines crave discipline, but creation resists domestication. That’s why we resent them – they try to leash something that was never meant to be tamed.

Out of the rubble of missed alarms, half-drunk teas, and migraines that feel biblical, something always gets made. It may not be perfect. It may not even be what I first imagined. But it is breathing, stubborn, and real – and that matters far more than perfection.

That, I think, is the only true blessing these gods grant. Not peace. Not mercy. Just proof that in the middle of pain, delay, and absurdity, something meaningful can still be born.

And on the gentler days, when the migraine loosens its grip and the words flow unbidden, writing feels less like penance and more like being touched by grace.

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I’m Gujarati, which means Navratri is supposed to be my Super Bowl – nine nights of devotion, rhythm, colour, and community.

Except, I don’t dance. And I’m an introverted atheist with a festival allergy. Crowds make me itch, rituals make me break into sarcasm, and forced enthusiasm triggers mild existential dread. Yet, every year, I find myself fascinated. Not by the prayers or the people or the song and dance, but by the mirror-worked theatre of it all.

Because Navratri isn’t just a festival. It’s a living, moving organism, overfed by Gujjus for nine nights straight. It’s hard to ignore.

Raas Garba

At its heart, garba is circular: graceful, communal, and endlessly looping, symbolising the cyclical nature of life itself. When the folk songs rise – the dakla thundering, the taalis striking in unison, the dhol vibrating in your chest like a second heartbeat – it’s impossible not to feel moved. The singers stretch their voices in raw devotion to Durga, and for a brief moment, the air itself trembles. It feels ancient, like the earth remembering its own rhythm.

Disco Dandiya

But somewhere between goddesses and reels, garba lost its centre. Enter disco dandiya – a heady cocktail of devotion and cardio, bhakti set to EDM. The dhol is still there, but now it competes with the DJ, who has no qualms mashing up Sanedo with Shape of You, Dholida with Despacito. The sacred circle has been hijacked by strobe lights.

Here, the goal isn’t worship; it’s spectacle. Who twirls the fastest, who looks the sharpest, who nails the most reel-worthy Tran Taali without blinding an unsuspecting aunty with their dupatta?

Garba has side-stepped quietly. What lingers is cardio, competition, cash prizes, and content.

Kediyas and Chaniya Cholis

There is range in this beauty pageant – from royalty to backup dancers, from kediyas and chaniya cholis to dhotis with sequinned sneakers. Everyone jingles like human wind chimes, strapped with enough oxidised jewellery to trigger a minor earthquake. (Relax, I’m Gujarati. Quake humour is one of our few inside privileges).

If clothes could talk, Navratri would be one long scream of sequins. Gorgeous, yes. Dazzling, absolutely. But let’s be honest, but by the second nortu, it borders on sensory assault.

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Farsan and Fasting

In theory, people fast during Navratri. No grains, no onions, no garlic. In reality, it’s a nine-night buffet. Sabudana khichdi, rajgira puris, pakodas, and potato chips stacked higher than the deity’s offerings. And let’s not forget farsan – because a Gujarati festival without fried food is basically just a satsang.

Here, “fasting” means you skip rice but gain three kilos by the fifth nortu.

The Rituals

For nine nights, lamps are lit, goddesses invoked, flowers offered. I like watching the city glow – entire neighbourhoods draped in fairy lights, sweet shops erecting pyramids of halwa, the air thick with sugar and incense. Even neighbours who’ve ignored each other all year now exchange laddoos over the gate. It’s nice.

The Contradictions

What fascinates me the most is the paradox. Navratri is devotional, but also wildly social. Ancient, yet relentlessly modern. Spiritual, yet spectacularly commercial – garba passes now cost more than IPL tickets. It’s noisy, sweaty, and overwhelming, and still, undeniably beautiful. The lights, the music, the laughter – they leak into the streets.

Gujarati or not, the dhol will summon you. Last week in New Jersey, an uncle must’ve strung fairy lights across a school gym while teenagers in Converse would’ve spun to a remix of Kala Chashma and Tara Vina Shyam. In Bangalore, I saw Tamilians, Punjabis, Malayalis, expats – all leaping into the circle with uneven rhythm and questionable outfits.

And I did what I always do: avoided the crowds, dodged the dandiyas, and enjoyed the festival sideways. Through the glow of fairy lights, the faint thump of a distant dhol, and the ripple of voices carrying old folk songs into modern chaos. From my balcony, I marvelled at a tradition resilient enough to turn devotion into disco, and still make everyone feel strangely at home.

Because Navratri’s truest rhythm isn’t religious at all. It’s human. A circle of joy wide enough for anyone willing to join in.

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Every junction has its own dialect of horns. In Indiranagar, it’s a polite tap – like saying “excuse me” at a cocktail party. At Silk Board, it’s a full-blown orchestra, each driver convinced they are the conductor of chaos. On Outer Ring Road, the horn is no longer a horn; it is a long, existential wail, a cry for deliverance that could be mistaken for grief.

MG Road plays its own jazz – quick, impatient bursts, like someone restlessly tapping their foot. Whitefield’s horns sound exhausted, like sighs on repeat – less urgency, more surrender. Hebbal flyover is pure percussion, a rolling thunder of honks echoing against concrete pillars. And Koramangala? That’s improvisation at its finest – scooters cutting in with cheeky beeps, autos offering comic relief, cars thundering in as bass line.

Together, they form the background score of Bangalore. Not Carnatic, not Bollywood, not indie rock – but a sprawling, unscripted traffic opera.

And the stagecraft doesn’t end here. Lane discipline is a myth, like unicorns and efficient government offices. Two-wheelers invent new lanes on footpaths, SUVs straddle three lanes at once, buses lunge like bored bullies picking fights, trucks drift diagonally as if sketching abstract art on asphalt, and everyone still meets at the same red light together – a reminder that chaos is oddly democratic.

Time behaves differently here. A two-minute red light stretches into twenty. You can finish half a podcast, re-evaluate your career choices, and still watch the same cow amble past four times. Bangalore isn’t a tech hub; it is a time machine with brake lights. And in that warped pocket of time, you aren’t just stalled. Sometimes, you are scarred.

Once, inching through a jam with my husband, we watched an uncle on an Activa slip past our car and park himself beside a cow at the divider – a cow midstream. With the ease of someone topping off his water bottle, he cupped his hand under the pale yellow fountain, took a sip, anointed his head, and rode off like it was a perfectly natural pit stop. Nobody around us blinked an eye. We sat frozen, gagging in stereo, unable to speak for the rest of the ride. Bangalore traffic gives you many things; that day, it gave me trauma.

For all its absurdity, traffic carries its own strange philosophy. Staring at brake lights until they blur into red halos can feel like meditation. Nirvana, in Bangalore, is always two U-turns and a pothole away. Flyovers are built and announced like salvation, only to funnel us into the next bottleneck. They’re less solutions, more metaphors for adulthood: promises of speed that still leave you stuck. On a flyover, the only thing that accelerates is your blood pressure.

Relationships bend to traffic too. People don’t ask where you live; they ask how long it will take to reach you. Google Maps’ ETA decides whether friendships endure, dinners happen, and love affairs survive.

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Meanwhile, the jams grow their own ecosystems. Vendors weave between cars selling guavas and peanuts. Beggars tap on windows in practiced rhythm. A cow chews with absolute calm in the median. And Ola drivers brush their teeth cruising at 40 kmph at 8 am. Proof that life, like traffic, always finds a way.

And still, even in gridlock, Bangalore offers its quiet mercies. The setting sun filtered through the vast canopies of rain trees. Bougainvillea spilling riotously against grey compound walls. A polite pedestrian waiting patiently as traffic snarls around them. These are the moments you notice only when you’re forced to stop; when the city compresses your speed but widens your gaze.

The jams may hold you captive, but they also teach you to look up: to see the tabebuia blazing pink against the sky. Bangalore traffic doesn’t just test your patience; it rewrites it, bending time and space to remind us that even in the choke of horns, flowers still bloom.

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It is tempting to call this hoarding, but that word feels cruel. Because in these things is more than clutter – there is history, aspiration, and longing. The middle class lives perched on a narrow ledge, always afraid of slipping downwards. Every object becomes both insurance and armour: proof that we’ve made it this far, and a hedge against the possibility of losing it all.

The compulsion to keep is layered, inherited, and deeply human. We keep because we fear, we keep because we dream, we keep because we must.

Scarcity and Survival

Our relationship with things is stitched with scarcity. Families who saved for years to buy a fridge will not discard it easily, even when it no longer cools. Clothes bought for Diwali are too sacred to throw away, even after decades. Letting go feels like betrayal – of the effort, the sacrifice, the version of us who once celebrated owning it.

Aspiration and Display

Some things, though, are kept not for need but for status. The expensive sofa no one is allowed to sit on. The crockery reserved “for guests.” The car seats still wrapped in plastic. Objects become symbols of aspiration – proof not just of survival, but of climbing.

Inheritance and Guilt

Then there are things passed down. Parents and grandparents who lived through scarcity hand over cupboards of saris, utensils, and unopened boxes, along with the guilt of discarding them. Generations inherit not just objects but the anxiety of keeping them. To throw something away feels like erasing history.

Morality and Respectability

Beyond fear and memory lies morality. It is this burden of middle-class morality – that quiet tyranny Alfred Doolittle once railed against – where respectability itself is a possession, guarded as fiercely as any piece of jewellery. To waste feels immoral. To want too much feels immoral. To not preserve what you already have feels immoral. And so we preserve everything – every plastic bag, every gift box, every appliance that once worked, every sari that might someday find an occasion again.

Control, Pride, and Shame

Finally, clutter is also about control. In an uncertain world, things become anchors – proof that at least something can be held onto. The same home that hoards with one hand is polished with the other, presenting order to outsiders while concealing chaos behind cupboards. Pride and shame coexist here – pride in having, shame in having too much.

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The Weight of Things

All of this adds up. Homes turn into warehouses of “just in case.” Shelves sag under the burden of futures that never come. And slowly, the things begin to own us: shaping our rooms, narrowing our movements, demanding their share of our air.

And yet, it is hard to judge. In every saved polythene bag and every reused Kissan jar is a story of thrift, resilience, and vigilance against downward mobility. In every act of saving, a small assertion of control. A way of saying: nothing will go to waste, not even me.

To be middle class is to live with this paradox – of longing for freedom from clutter, yet being bound to things that once symbolised survival, morality, aspiration, and dignity.

So perhaps the question is not why we hoard, but what we fear will vanish if we don’t: the object itself, or the fragile proof that we once climbed and managed not to slip.

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Elevator mode ON. Hands folded, eyes glued to glowing numbers, pretending floor 11 is the most riveting entertainment ever. Phones whipped out as if breaking news will drop exclusively while we’re trapped between 8 and 9. Polite nods are offered, just enough to not spark a conversation. The choreography is universal: shift weight from left to right, stare at meaningless spot on floor, smile without meeting eyes, clear throat twice, and hope the ride ends before someone says something dangerously genuine.

Here’s the irony: elevators exist inside buildings that shape entire social ecosystems. They are the arteries of our vertical neighbourhoods, carrying gossip, groceries, and generations up and down like lifeblood.

In giant apartment complexes, you see the same faces daily – neighbours who know your grocery habits, your office timings, your laundry days, your gym hours. Outside the elevator, they’ll ask about your Pondicherry trip; inside, they become monks of silence, staring at the floor as if enlightenment hides beneath the linoleum.

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Meanwhile, in smaller standalone buildings, the problem flips: too much intimacy. You don’t just know whose pressure cooker whistled; you know exactly how many whistles they let it go before turning the stove off. You know when the in-laws arrived, how long they stayed, and which poor nephew had to drop them back. You know the uncle’s blood pressure reading, the aunty’s third attempt at yoga, and the dog’s ongoing feud with the security guard’s slipper. Privacy here is more myth than reality.

The elevator in these buildings isn’t a box of strangers but a confessional booth with mirrored walls, where neighbours trade updates, pass judgements, and slip in unsolicited critiques of your lifestyle and weight. It’s less silence and more surveillance – your groceries inspected, your outfit graded, and your mood diagnosed before the doors open.

So maybe that’s why we fidget. The elevator collapses the comfortable distance we keep in daily life and forces us into proximity we don’t know how to name. These are not friends we confide in, nor strangers we can dismiss, but something in between – neighbours, colleagues, witnesses to our routines. Too close to ignore, too distant to embrace.

For one compressed minute, we become performers in a theatre of silence – adjusting bags, shuffling feet, studying glowing numbers. Our reflections multiply on mirrored walls, reminding us how small we look when stripped of context, how fragile when reduced to breath and posture.

And then, mercifully, the divine ding! The doors open into sunlight and ease.

Elevator mode OFF. We spill back into the safety of distance, hostages of etiquette, destined to return the next day. Rehearsing again, the clumsy ballet of unnamed awkwardness, with people bound only by shared air in a steel box.

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Nothing irks me more than a happy group of people in polyester and silk, armed with small talk and mithai.

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Over the years, I’ve built a survival kit that has carried me through countless family functions – weddings, birthdays, housewarmings, and those mysterious pujas where even the priest looks like he’s guessing.

Consider this my field manual.

Step 1: Arrive Armed

Weapon of choice: food. Grab something the second you walk in. A samosa, a gulab jamun, anything greasy and unputdownable. Nobody interrogates a person mid-chew. Time it right, and the aunty charging towards you will be so distracted by the gulab jamun, she will forget to ask why you haven’t “settled down.”

Step 2: Perfect the Art of Vague

“How’s work?” → Good.
“When’s marriage?” → Soon.
“Kids?” → Someday.
“Bought a house yet?” → Almost.
“Salary?” → Enough.
“Promotion?” → Pending.
“Still writing?” → Always.
“Why have you put on weight?” → Metabolism.
“Why are you so thin?” → Genetics.

Think of it as corporate jargon meets Antakshari: one-word only, no follow-ups. Delivered with the polite gravitas of a government press release. It should be vague enough to kill all momentum and smother all curiosity.

Step 3: Create Diversions Like a Magician

Compliment someone’s sari. Point dramatically at the buffet. Casually announce that a cousin just got a promotion. Remember: Congratulations are the smoke bombs of family functions. The crowd swarms the new target, leaving you free to sneak away with your plate of pani puri.

Step 4: Master the Look of Urgency

Hold your phone like you’re on call with the Prime Minister. Walk briskly as if you’re solving a national crisis. Sit in a corner and type furiously. To the untrained eye, you look indispensable. No one bothers the “busy” cousin.

Step 5: Blend into the Furniture

This is an advanced move. Station yourself near the sofa where three uncles are dissecting petrol prices. You’ll vanish into the wallpaper of male opinions. Be warned: you may suffer mild hearing loss.

Step 6: Exit With Grace

Leave early, but not suspiciously early. The golden window is right after dessert, when everyone is too sugar-stunned to notice your escape. Bonus points if you smuggle out a box of kaju katli as your war loot.

And that’s it. Another function survived. Another night of unsolicited life advice dodged, marital prophecies deflected, and passive-aggressive compliments neutralised mid-air.

You lived. You ate. And most importantly – you revealed absolutely nothing.

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But the past doesn’t leave quietly. It lingers like humidity, invisible yet heavy, seeping into everything you touch. You carry it into boardrooms and bedrooms, into conversations that should have been light. It follows you like a shadow at noon, impossible to shake off even when you turn to face the sun.

It doesn’t haunt the mind so much as it colonises the body. Shoulders held stiff, braced for a blow long after the storm has passed. A jaw clenched in sleep, grinding down what cannot be spoken. A chest that tightens for no reason, except that the heart is still reliving an old wound. Migraines that arrive like uninvited guests… reminders that memory isn’t just thought – it is muscle, nerve, bone.

The body remembers what the heart pretends to forget. Every slight, every silence, every betrayal is stored somewhere: in the curve of your spine, in the catch of your breath, in the exhaustion that no amount of rest can cure. And until you release it, you carry the weight of ghosts, mistaking them for yourself.

I have carried old stories like scar tissue – invisible, but aching every time I stretch towards something new. Resentments tucked between vertebrae. Regrets lodged under the ribcage. My health has often paid the price for emotions I refused to let go.

And yet, when the release does come, it is unmistakable. Letting go is not fireworks or fanfare; it is quieter than that. It is the breath you didn’t know you were holding, finally exhaled. The shoulders that ease down an inch. The jaw that slackens. The heart that, for the first time in months, no longer feels like it’s sprinting towards danger.

It is space opening inside you, like windows thrown wide open after a long monsoon. Light spilling where heaviness once lived. Even pain changes texture: not gone, not erased, but no longer sharp enough to wound.

Letting go doesn’t empty you. It empties what no longer belongs to you. And in that clearing, you rediscover laughter that doesn’t taste of guilt, sleep that isn’t interrupted by nightmares, and days that are measured not in pain, but in presence.

The body knows when it’s free. It stretches differently, breathes differently, walks differently. Freedom shows up not as triumph but as ease. And in that ease, you realise: letting go is not weakness, not surrender. It is the most powerful act of survival.

Letting go is not one grand gesture. It is a daily discipline. A quiet permission slip you write yourself, again and again: to set down what you were never meant to carry this long. And in that fragile, trembling unclenching, there is not emptiness, but room. Room for health. Room for lightness. Room to finally, breathe.

And in that breath, you inherit the sky. You come home to yourself.

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The truth is, I do finish what matters. But I also abandon what feels too close to the bone, too ambitious, too risky. My laptop is a graveyard of half-baked brilliance. My Notes app, a landfill of poignant first lines and heavily plotted outlines that never saw daylight. Entire worlds trapped in limbo, waiting for me to return.

I call it restlessness, but let’s be honest: it’s also fear, boredom, and an unhealthy addiction to the dopamine hit of beginnings. I’m a junkie for the fresh start – the crisp new notebook, the untouched Google Doc, the electric high of saying, “I’ve got an idea!”

Still, I can’t stop. Always multitasking, always juggling ten lives inside one. Script writing, prose writing, social work. And while those balls are still in the air, I’m plotting more: shooting a short film, learning Kannada, planning a two-month trip, hosting friends, launching new artwork, relearning the ukulele, returning to French lessons, starting a letter-writing service (oh wait, I already did that). The hunger never quiets; it’s insatiable.

One life feels too small for everything I want to express, to attempt, to experience. Or is it that I’m just too afraid to choose one love and kill the others? I’ll never know.

Sometimes I imagine myself as a curator of incompletions, building a museum of fragments: Rooms lined with half-drafts, shelves stacked with almosts, drawers filled with abandoned beginnings. Visitors would come and say: She almost did everything.

And yet, I can’t imagine living differently. The unfinished keeps me alive. The juggling keeps me moving. The chaos, the flaws, the half-attempts – they are not just a part of me, they are me.

So here is my confession: I’m a restless creator. It’s both a curse and a gift to live in the delicious chaos of possibility, and to be haunted by what I never finished. But perhaps that is where I truly belong – in the pulse of beginnings, in the thrill of juggling, in the belief that creation will always overflow the borders of this one life.

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Start by waking up on time. Yes, on time. Bright-eyed. Slightly hopeful. The sun is gentle. The sheets are warm.

There’s no reason to panic – yet. And that’s exactly when you should begin.

Step 1: Check your phone.

Ignore the birdsong. Scroll instead.

Let the algorithm remind you of everything you didn’t do yesterday, last week, last lifetime.

A girl in Bali has six streams of passive income.
Your ex is thriving.
A stranger just bought a house with a mango tree and a skylight.

You, meanwhile, are lying under a creaking ceiling fan, with commitment issues and unpaid electricity bills.

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Step 2: Open your inbox.

Ah yes. Your daily buffet of obligations.

That one unread email from someone who uses “gentle reminder” like a threat. An invite to a Zoom meeting that could’ve been a coma. A newsletter from a productivity guru who wakes up at 4 am, drinks chlorophyll, and hasn’t felt despair since 1995.

Step 3: Remember everything. All at once.

The bills. The guilt. The thing you said in 2016.
The message you didn’t reply to. The call you’re avoiding.
The gym. The therapist. The laundry.
The question: What exactly am I doing with my life?

Step 4: Criticise yourself quietly.

For not journaling.
For not being a “morning person.”
For not doing yoga on the balcony while sipping green tea.
For not being gentle with yourself – aggressively.

Step 5: Make a to-do list. Then loathe it.

Write down 14 tasks. Finish none.
Stare at the list like it insulted your ancestors.
Resent your own handwriting.

Step 6: Forget breakfast. Drink anxiety instead.

Cold coffee and cortisol. Neat.

Step 7: Try to salvage it.

Light a candle.
Play a calming playlist.
Say an affirmation.
Burn your tongue on hot tea. Spill it on the affirmation.
Consider retiring from personal growth entirely.

Now, it’s only 8:47 am.

Congratulations.
You’ve turned a perfectly ordinary morning into a low-budget emotional thriller.
You may now proceed with your day: Fragile. Buzzing. Late.

But here’s the inconvenient truth of adulthood: you can spiral and still make toast.

So:

Put on real pants.
Eat something that didn’t come out of a packet.
Water a plant. Water yourself.
Text someone who makes you feel like a person and not a productivity app.
Cross one thing off the list. Then accidentally throw the list in the laundry.
Open a window. Let some of the noise out. Let some of the air in.

Yes, the morning’s a flaming heap. But noon doesn’t know that yet.

You could still win this one. Stranger things have happened.

Now go. Show the day who’s mildly in charge.

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It always begins with noble intentions.

A cousin’s wedding. A Diwali plan. Someone’s kidney stones.

“Just for coordination.”
“Will delete after the function.”
“Quick updates only.”

Lies. All of them.

What begins as a temporary alliance soon mutates into a permanent institution, one with unwritten laws, rotating hierarchies, and zero escape.

And you? You’re a citizen of this chaotic digital oligarchy.

I left the group. And lived to tell the tale.

Scroll at your own risk.

The Ruling Cabinet (Characters you’ll meet):

1. The Forward Minister

No quote left unforwarded. No image left uncompressed. Runs a tight ship: 4 am – 11 pm, like a BPO with poor Wi-Fi and poorer ethics. Sends every message with the urgency of a bomb threat, and the accuracy of a broken compass.

You will receive:

• 1 fake news alert

• 3 “Good Morning” roses

• 1 video about turmeric solving world hunger

• Something in Sanskrit no one understands

Every. Single. Day.

They don’t sleep. They circulate.

2. The Good Morning Syndicate

A multi-generational cartel.

Each member has a signature style:

• Uncle: Rainbows and “Have a Blessed Day!” with fonts last seen on Windows 95.

• Aunty: Sunshine images and “Stay Positive 😊” holding the family’s mental health together.

• Cousin: Unironically sending Minion memes in 2025.

They operate on the belief that Good Morning is the glue holding the bloodline together.

Reply once and you’re marked “active” forever. There’s no parole.

3. The Enlightened Uncle

Wears a smartwatch. Sends conspiracy reels.

Starts every argument with “Actually…” and ends it with “Just my opinion.”

Fears Western culture, soy milk, and women who wear jeans on Thursdays.

Posts ancient scriptures and deeply personal Facebook statuses to the group. WhatsApp is his personal diary.

His holy trinity:

🚩 Tradition
🇮🇳 Nationalism
💊 Distrust of modern medicine

4. The Moderator Aunty

Silent enforcer. Queen of covert control.

She changes the group icon without warning. Deletes messages that cause unrest. Says “Let’s not fight here, beta,” then video-calls you on speaker to do exactly that in HD.

Also adds new members like:

• Uncle’s friend’s cousin

• A “close family friend”

• And once, accidentally, a Swiggy delivery boy

She’s not the admin WhatsApp deserves. She’s the admin it cannot remove.

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5. The Ghost

Blue ticks, no words.

Hasn’t typed a message since 2017 but watches everything. At family functions, people are shocked they still exist.

Less person, more presence. At this point, they’re just haunting the group.

6. The One Who Left

Me. Hi.

Exited after the fifth diabetes miracle cure and Ramdev ji doing yoga in ways God never intended. In 240p.

Was last seen on the group 6 years ago. Now, a faint memory.

An icon. A rebel. Left Maasi’s DP compliment with 8 sunflower emojis on read. War crimes, basically. The audacity.

They still say my name sometimes. They try to re-add me. I fight it with grit. Because I’ve seen things.

Like the Navratri forwards.

No one really leaves quietly.
There will be screenshots. There might be a side group created just to discuss your exit.

75% of the messages are wishes for festivals you didn’t know existed: “Happy Left-Handed Guru Purnima everyone! 🙏🏼✨🍃”

It’s not a group chat. It’s a performance stage. A katha. A courtroom. A self-congratulatory echo chamber.

Family WhatsApp groups aren’t designed for communication. They’re designed to remind you of:

• How bad you are at replying

• How single you still are

• How childless you still are

• And how irrelevant your opinions have become since 2014

They’re not for the weak. They’re not for the woke. They’re for the brave.

If you’re still in one – may the mute button be with you. ✌🏽

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Not the charming kind. Not the “she’s-so-thoughtful” kind. The deep-end kind. The kind that scans the room like a weather app, constantly checking the emotional temperature. The kind that says “I totally get it” when I totally don’t. The kind that keeps smiling long after the cheeks start to ache.

It starts early, this disease. You learn to be nice before you learn to be honest.

You learn that niceness buys love. That likability buys safety. That being easy to be around keeps the peace. That it’s safer to disappoint yourself than disappoint someone else.

As a child, I couldn’t even hear my own needs over the noise of everyone else’s.

I said yes before the question had finished forming. Offered help before it was asked. Laughed when I wasn’t amused. Apologised for having boundaries. Agreed when all I wanted to do was shake my head profusely and scream “no.”

I was charming. Attentive. A great listener. “So nice.” I made people feel safe – because I never risked offending them with my honesty.

I became fluent in emotional ventriloquism, throwing my voice in support of everyone else’s comfort.

I was the understanding one. The peacekeeper. The helper. The problem solver. The “she’s always there for me” person. I noticed micro-changes in tone, mood, energy. I preempted feelings. I translated silences.

And no one thought to ask if I was okay. Because I taught them not to. I was always okay. I made sure of it.

I confused likability with love. Service with self-worth. Approval with belonging. Obedience with connection.

And slowly, I began to vanish… gently, sweetly, efficiently.

But people-pleasing is a slow kind of burnout. A quiet depletion. Every conversation starts to feel like a transaction – you giving something invisible away: your time, your energy, your presence, your patience, your boundaries. A little piece of yourself.

You become everyone’s safe space but have no idea where your own is.

And over time, the exhaustion seeps in. Not like a thunderclap, but like a leaky faucet. Drip by drip. Yes by yes. Just a dull, constant, unrelenting ache of overextension.

An inbox of unsent honesty. A calendar of obligations. A life that feels like it belongs more to others than to you.

At 35, I’ve come a long way.

I pause before I say yes.
I ask myself if it’s kindness or compulsion.
I sit with the discomfort of disappointing someone, and remind myself it’s not fatal.
I cancel plans when I need rest.
I ask for help without offering ten favours in return.
I let messages sit unread if I don’t have the energy for them.
I ask for space without drowning in guilt.
I leave a party when I’m done, and not after I’ve helped wash the dishes and it’s 3 am.

I’m still gentle. Still warm. Still agreeable to a fault. I still relapse and pay for it with introvert migraines. I’m still deeply conflict-avoidant.

But I’m no longer auditioning for a crowd in every room I enter. That’s progress.

It’s hard to teach your nervous system that you’re not in danger just because someone’s mildly disappointed.
It’s hard to unlearn a lifetime of applause for being accommodating.
It’s hard to believe that you can be loveable, even when you’re not useful.
It’s hard to rewire decades of “being good” into a few years of “being real.”

I still try every day. One clumsy no at a time.

If you too are a chronic accommodator, a human buffer zone, an emotional contortionist, and an over-functioning empath – welcome to PPA: People Pleasers Anonymous.

Introduce yourself.
Share your story.
What was your last “no”?

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