This is not a heroic statement. I am not talking about stoicism, or discipline, or whatever word is currently being used by men on the internet who wake up at 4:30 a.m. and apparently defeat their emails through breathing exercises. I am talking about a smaller and more embarrassing truth: sometimes, after I run, I am so tired that a breeze feels like an act of mercy.

The other day, I ran ten kilometres for the first time in my life. Ten kilometres is not a marathon, which is important to clarify because runners are among the most dangerous people to accidentally impress. You say, “I ran ten kilometres,” and someone with visible calf veins will say, “Nice recovery jog.” But for me, it was not a recovery jog. It was a small private apocalypse. My lungs had filed a complaint. My legs were no longer accepting commands from central leadership. My face had become a public service announcement against ambition.

And then, while walking out of the park, half-dead and fully sweaty, I noticed the morning.

Not in the normal way. Not in the way one notices a nice morning and says, “Nice morning,” before returning to the administrative horror of being a person. I mean I noticed it as if it had been waiting there all along. The trees. The pale light. The coolness in the air. The breeze moving across my skin with the tenderness of someone who does not need to understand me to help me.

I felt happy. Genuinely happy. Not productive-happy. Not “this will look good in my fitness app” happy. Not the smug happiness of having done something morally superior before breakfast. Just happy. A small, bodily, wordless happiness. The kind that does not explain itself because explanation would slightly ruin it.

And I thought: maybe this is one of the reasons I love treks.

On a trek, especially when climbing, there comes a point when the mountain stops being scenery and becomes a creditor. It demands payment in breath, sweat, calves, knees, and humility. You look up and the path continues in the rude way paths often do. You take twenty steps and then pretend to admire the view, when really you are negotiating with your circulatory system.

But sometimes the mountain gives something back.

Recently, I was climbing along a ridge, open on both sides. There was space everywhere. Air everywhere. Wind came from all directions, as if the world had briefly forgotten the concept of walls. I was exhausted. I dragged myself. I took breaks. I stood there, bent and breathing, and the wind moved through me.

The summit was fine. Summits are usually fine. You reach them, take photographs, try to look profound, and immediately become concerned about whether you have enough battery. The top of the mountain is a moment. But the climb—those pauses, that wind, that absurd gratitude for air—that was the thing. The reward was not arrival. The reward was being tired enough to receive the world.

This sounds dramatic, but then again, being human is dramatic. We are mammals with calendars. We carry water bottles and childhood wounds. We climb mountains and then check WhatsApp. We are ridiculous, and yet sometimes the breeze hits us at the exact right angle and we remember that we are also alive.

I used to think beauty was something you encountered when you were available to it. Now I wonder whether availability sometimes has to be forced upon us. Most days, I am not available. I am managed. I am scheduled. I am thinking about work, money, fitness, love, family, the future, the past, the version of myself I am trying to become, and the version of myself I fear I already am.

The mind is a bureaucrat. It stamps everything.

Tree: seen before.
Morning: insufficient time.
Body: needs improvement.
Life: pending.

But exhaustion interrupts the bureaucracy. After a hard run, or halfway up a mountain, the mind loses some of its paperwork. The body becomes too loud to ignore. Breath becomes the main event. Skin becomes intelligent. Air becomes intimate.

And maybe that is why cool air feels so profound when I am tired. It is not merely pleasant. It is useful. It arrives as relief. It answers a question the body has been asking without words: Can I continue?

The breeze says, maybe.

There is a humility in this that I find difficult to access otherwise. When I feel strong, I often become sealed. When I feel successful, I become managed. When I feel in control, I am less likely to notice what is being given to me.

But tiredness changes the terms.

Tiredness does not make me noble. Let us not overstate the matter. I have been tired and also petty, tired and also annoying, tired and also very interested in snacks. But the right kind of tiredness—the chosen kind, the earned kind, the kind that does not destroy you but does remove your unnecessary armour—can make me receptive.

It can make me less interested in appearing alive and more aware that I am alive.

There is a difference.

Maybe this is why I look forward to morning runs even when they are killing me. Especially when they are killing me. Not because I enjoy suffering in itself. Suffering by itself is often just suffering. Hot-weather running, for example, can feel less like transcendence and more like being slowly punished by the sun for having goals. Heat gives you strain without mercy. But a cool morning gives you struggle and grace in the same frame.

That combination matters.

Pain alone can make you bitter. Comfort alone can make you numb. But effort followed by relief can make the world feel newly available.

This may also be why trekking feels different from ordinary travel. A beautiful view from a car window is still beautiful, but it asks almost nothing from you. A beautiful view after three hours of climbing arrives through the body. You have paid attention because the mountain forced you to. You have earned nothing, exactly—the mountain owes you nothing—but you are now able to receive what was already there.

That is the strange thing. The beauty was not created by exhaustion. The park was beautiful before the run. The ridge was beautiful before I gasped on it. The breeze did not become cool because I suffered. The world is not a customer loyalty program.

And yet, my ability to feel it changed.

This is one of the humiliations of being human: the world can be offering itself constantly, and still we may require dehydration, quadriceps pain, and mild existential panic to notice.

But maybe there is also some hope in that. Because missed beauty is not the same as absent beauty. The world was not empty. I was unavailable. And if availability can return after a run, after a climb, after a few seconds of wind on a ridge, then maybe it can return in other ways too. Not permanently. Not reliably. But sometimes.

That may be enough.

I keep thinking about that ridge: open on both sides, wind everywhere, my body tired, my mind briefly quiet. I had not reached the top yet. I was not done. I was not triumphant. I was just there, in the middle, needing air and receiving it.

That is not a grand revelation. It will not fix a life. It will not answer the old questions about love, death, meaning, failure, or whether one should buy expensive running socks. But it does illuminate something small and stubborn about being human.

We are creatures who suffer. We are creatures who adapt. We are creatures who forget the miracle of air until we need it.

And sometimes, after effort has stripped us down to breath and skin and heartbeat, the world touches us lightly and says: here.

Not enough to save us forever.

Enough to continue.

Objectively, this is inconvenient.

Because if you zoom out far enough, my life has improved dramatically since that room closed. The graphs go up and to the right. Money is steadier. Decisions are calmer. My relationship, which once felt like two stubborn tectonic plates testing each other’s patience, has settled into something kinder and more durable. 2025 was, without exaggeration, the best year of my life. I generally wake up most mornings curious rather than afraid, which is not nothing. The future, improbably, looks welcoming.

And yet.

If offered a button labelled Return to Any Year When Your Father Was Alive, I would press it so fast I might sprain a finger. No hesitation. No negotiation. I would trade every spreadsheet of progress, every hard-won insight, every carefully assembled plan. I would go back to worse versions of myself without complaint. Confused me. Anxious me. Broke me. Even terrified me. I would take them all if they came bundled with him.

This is the part where my rational brain would like to object. Surely this is nostalgia, it says. Surely this is sentimentality wearing a convincing moustache. Surely one should not be willing to burn down a good life for the sake of a past that was, in many ways, messier and harder.

But the objection never gets very far, because this is not a comparison between lives. It is a comparison between worlds.

One world contains clarity, love, forward motion, and a conspicuous absence. The other world contains confusion, struggle, and a man who found joy in small things. A man who never had much money but had an alarming capacity to be delighted by a good cup of tea and the idea that his family was doing okay.

A month ago, I took my mother on a trip to Sikkim. We stayed in one of those hotels with windows that insist you look at the mountains, as if the mountains might feel neglected otherwise. We kept saying the same sentence over and over, like it was a prayer we could wear smooth with repetition: He would have loved this. He would have loved the view. He would have loved the breakfast buffet. He would have loved that we were together, that things were, improbably, fine.

This is where the guilt sneaks in. Not guilt for being happy. Guilt for being the only one left to notice.

Joy, it turns out, wants witnesses. It wants to be pointed at and shared and lightly exaggerated. And when the person who taught you how to notice the small, good things is no longer available to notice them with you, the noticing changes. It becomes heavier. Lonelier. Like applause in an empty theatre.

Sometimes I wonder if what I miss is not my father as he was, but my father as he would have been in conversation with who I am now. There is a particular pain in becoming someone your parent would have been proud of too late. In realising that the overlap between their life and your clearest self was shorter than it deserved to be.

This is not despair. Despair wants to flatten everything into meaninglessness, and this feeling does the opposite. It insists on meaning, even when the meaning hurts. It says: this mattered. This still matters. This will always matter.

I do not want to pretend that improvement compensates for loss. It doesn’t. But neither does loss negate improvement. Both can exist. They do exist. I am living proof, which is a strange thing to be.

So I live in the better world, carrying the knowledge that there was another world I would have chosen without blinking. I plan for the future while secretly wishing to show the present to someone who cannot see it. I enjoy my life and miss my father and refuse to rank these experiences in order of legitimacy.

This is, I think, one of the quieter truths of being human: some trades are unacceptable, even when they result in a better life. Some absences are not problems to be solved but realities to be carried. We move forward not because the past was expendable, but because it was not.

I do not know how to reconcile loving my life with wanting a version of reality that no longer exists. I only know that both loves feel real, and that living inside that contradiction is, apparently, part of the deal.

If that sounds unresolved, it is. But then again, so is almost everything worth caring about.

They live in a bus. On purpose. Together.

This is the kind of sentence my brain usually files under Things That Are Not For Me, right next to “cold plunges at sunrise” and “quitting your job to find yourself.” And yet I watched the video. And then another. And then, inexplicably, a third.

The bus was small and warm and aggressively aesthetic. There were plants. There were soft lights. There were mugs that looked like they had been chosen rather than accumulated. The couple drank coffee slowly. They smiled at each other in that way that suggests either deep presence or an extremely good brand strategy.

Of course, the bus breaks down. Of course, the fridge stops working. Of course, the electricity fails in the middle of nowhere. They talk about these problems openly, even casually, as if saying, Yes, this is annoying, but also this is the day we are having. What struck me wasn’t the hardship. It was their faces. There was a steadiness there. Not triumph. Not bliss. Just… inhabiting.

I did not feel envy exactly. I felt something closer to homesickness, which was confusing because I was already home.

I live in a rented apartment with walls and plumbing and a very reliable ceiling. I have routines. I have plans. I have spreadsheets that project my future self into a place where he is finally calm. And yet, beneath all that structure, there is a low hum of anxiety, like an appliance I forgot to turn off years ago.

The present, for me, often feels like a means. A necessary inconvenience. A hallway I am walking through quickly so I can arrive somewhere that actually counts. I am always a little leaned forward, like a runner waiting for the gun.

This shows up in strange ways. I clean my apartment once a week, like a confession. But I do not tend to it. I do not make the bed as if it matters. I do not adjust the lighting for joy. The bathroom is functional. The living room is fine. Everything is temporary, even when it isn’t.

Part of this feels reasonable. I am busy. I am tired. I am working toward something. These are good, adult reasons to live lightly on the present. And yet the bus people wipe down their sink.

They polish surfaces in a vehicle that could break down tomorrow. They hang lights in a life defined by uncertainty. They beautify a container that is, by definition, provisional. They act as if this moment deserves care even if it does not promise permanence.

That is the part that undoes me.

Because I have made a different agreement with myself. Mine goes something like this: You are not allowed to relax yet. This is not the life. This is the setup. Calm is something to be earned later, once the numbers work out, once the escape hatch is built, once the future stops feeling so fragile.

I tell myself this is responsibility. Love, even. Love for the people who depend on me. Love for the future version of myself who does not want to be anxious all the time. But sometimes it feels less like love and more like fear with a planner.

I am always preparing. They seem to be inhabiting.

To be clear, I know Instagram is not reality. I know there are arguments off-camera and money worries at night and moments when the bus feels too small to hold everything. I am not asking to trade my life for theirs. I do not want a bus. I want predictability. I want safety. I want to know where the bathroom is.

What I want, I think, is permission.

Permission to believe that this moment is already my life and not just the cost of reaching it. Permission to care for the present without justifying it as an investment. Permission to stop treating joy like a line item I’ll get to once everything else is settled.

There is sadness in realising how long I have postponed that permission. But there is also something else. A kind of quiet hope. Not the loud hope that promises everything will be fine, but the gentler kind that says the question is still open.

I do not know how to live fully in a world that demands planning. I do not know how to love the future without abandoning the present. I do not know whether calm is something you build or something you allow.

I only know that the future I am so carefully constructing keeps asking something of me in return. And the question it asks is not about buses or jobs or money.

It is simpler, and harder:

Am I allowed to live here now, or am I still waiting to arrive?

A tree doesn’t know it’s a tree; it simply reaches for the light. Maybe we were designed for direction, not definition.

The problem began the moment we mistook self-description for self-knowledge. Somewhere between the Renaissance and LinkedIn, between Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Instagram’s “I post, therefore I exist,” we began treating identity as a deliverable—something to refine, brand, and present to the world for validation.

We became our own publicists, and, like all publicists, we started believing our press releases.

It’s efficient, of course. The world rewards clarity, even when it’s false. “The designer.” “The gym guy.” “The one who always has a plan.” Labels make coordination easier. The ancient Greeks carved their heroes in marble precisely because marble doesn’t change shape. Consistency is civilisation’s lubricant. But what makes societies stable often makes individuals brittle.

A big identity feels solid—anchored, reassuring—but it’s also a leveraged position. The more you invest in a single version of yourself, the more you must protect it from volatility. And life, inconveniently, is volatility itself. So we defend, rationalise, edit. We begin writing for reputation instead of curiosity, speaking to maintain coherence instead of truth. The good person stops experimenting with mischief; the serious person forgets how to play. What starts as integrity ends as inertia.

The irony is exquisite: the more we know who we are, the less room there is to become.

I learned this accidentally. I once decided to write lowbrow romance novels under a fake name. For fun. No pressure, no “voice.” I never completed one to publish, but I realised something valuable in the process. The sentences wandered; they didn’t sound like me. Or rather, they sounded like a version of me I didn’t realise was possible. It was liberating, and slightly humiliating, to realise how many things I’d stopped doing not because I disliked them, but because they didn’t “fit.”

That experiment taught me something simple but sticky: a small identity has large permission. When the stakes are low, curiosity breathes again. It’s easier to throw a stone into a river when you don’t care if it skips.

Identity, I realised, behaves like a portfolio. You need a few stable holdings—the roles that pay rent, raise children, keep promises—but the rest should be options: cheap, reversible experiments that can fail without wrecking your balance sheet. The investor who never rebalances goes broke in silence. The person who never revises does the same. Optionality is curiosity with a safety net.

Of course, freedom attracts its own costs. You can’t be fluid in a world built for solid people. Friends like you better when they can name you; companies promote you when they can predict you. Even the ancient Stoics, who distrusted attachment, carved their virtues into tablets. Ambiguity makes for poor social glue.

There are mornings I wake up and feel like vapour—capable of becoming anything, but not quite solid enough to hold. It can be a little unsettling. Because identity isn’t just a prison; it’s also a home.

Psychologists call this the exploration–exploitation trade-off. Too much stability, and you stagnate. Too much exploration, and you dissipate. The trick is rotation, not balance. Inhale, exhale. Commit, then wander.

It’s the same rhythm nature uses: seasons of structure followed by seasons of change. The challenge is remembering which season you’re in. When the system locks into perpetual summer, it forgets how to adapt. So do we.

Maybe that’s why I’ve grown fond of what I used to call “naughtiness.” I don’t mean malice; I mean curiosity that refuses to obey. The heretic, the hacker, the child drawing outside the lines—they’re not trying to burn the system down; they’re poking holes to let light in.

Civilisation depends on these gentle vandals. You can’t be naughty with a heavy identity; it won’t bend. To play, you must travel light.

Still, I wouldn’t romanticise fluidity. Too much motion, and you dissolve into ambiguity. There’s comfort in a tent, but you can’t live in it through every storm. Stability is underrated. Anchors are what make exploration possible in the first place. The trick is not to confuse the anchor for the ocean.

Certainty feels good. It makes introductions easier, mornings cleaner. But every certainty carries maintenance costs. You start defending your idea of yourself instead of testing it. You stop evolving to stay consistent. The Stoics might have said, “Know thyself.” Maybe that was never advice. Maybe it was a warning.

So I’ve started treating my selfhood like a camping tent—light enough to carry, sturdy enough to rest in, easy to fold when the wind shifts. It’s a home, not a monument. You can set it up anywhere, sleep under the stars, and pack it by morning. I like that image because it admits fragility without surrendering to it.

I like to think the universe rewards the small-hearted experimenters—the ones who try, fail, and try again without turning their failures into identities. Maybe that’s the best any of us can do: keep throwing stones into rivers, not to prove who we are, but to see what patterns the ripples make.

Not in the proud LinkedIn way, but in that quiet, unnerving way where the day runs smoothly, boxes get ticked, and by evening I can’t remember anything that actually happened.

Efficiency is supposed to make life easier. And it has. I’ve built systems for everything—meeting templates, decision frameworks, even a checklist for conversations. It works. I get more done in less time. Lately it feels less like freedom and more like autopilot.

I know where it comes from. The economic part of me—Homo economicus—learned early that time is money, that efficiency is a kind of morality. Don’t waste time. Be useful. If you finish early, you’re a good boy.

But as an adult the lesson bent into something odd: the better I get at finishing work, the more work arrives. There’s no “done,” only a faster treadmill.

So efficiency, which was meant to save me from drudgery, now is the drudgery. What scares me isn’t burnout—it’s numbness. When I’m too efficient, nothing surprises me.

Brains like efficiency; they automate to save energy. But meaning lives in the parts that aren’t automatic. That’s why time feels long when you travel or fall in love or learn a new language: every tiny friction demands awareness. Maybe that’s what the Homo sapiens in me sometimes misses—friction.

Friction shows up only when I’m far from my systems.

Like travelling alone. Every tiny decision demands attention—when to leave, what to eat, whether to trust a stranger—and that constant choosing keeps me awake in my own life. It’s tiring, but it stretches time. By night it feels like three days have passed. Friction slows the clock.

The same thing happens when I write stories. I never know where an idea will go. Half the time it fails and becomes something else. That’s the fun: uncertainty, slow discovery. There’s no shortcut for that.

That’s also the reason I’ve stopped racing through books. Now I read a page or two, close the cover, sit with it. Sometimes a line haunts me for days.

When I look back, the moments that stay aren’t when I was fastest or smartest. They’re when I was clumsy, curious, a little lost. Those weren’t productive days—they were alive ones.

I don’t think it’s just me. We optimise mornings, hack sleep, count steps, track moods—as if life were a problem to solve. Solve one problem, then build five dashboards to monitor the solution.

Maybe it started from fear. Many of us watched our parents juggle jobs, loans, expectations. They didn’t have the luxury of inefficiency. Time wasn’t abstract; it was rent and school fees. We inherited a code: to waste time is to waste life. We built our self-worth on momentum. We mistake movement for meaning. Even tired, we open another tab because stopping feels dangerous—like the world might move on without us.

But I’m starting to think that maybe inefficiency isn’t the enemy. Maybe it’s what makes us human.

When I slow down—write, walk without a destination, get lost—my brain stops predicting and starts noticing. Air feels heavier. Sounds sharpen. Thoughts wander into old rooms.

When the brain’s in task-mode, it’s focused, linear, closed—great for getting things done, terrible for wonder. Drift a little and another network wakes up—the one that connects dots, remembers childhood, imagines futures. In other words: inefficiency is where meaning lives.

Time feels richer when I travel, read slowly, or write without purpose. Those moments aren’t about output; they’re about contact—with the world, with memory, with myself.

Across traditions this isn’t new. Zen has ma, the beauty of the pause. In Sanskrit there’s līlā, often translated as “divine play”—creation out of free abundance, not necessity. We just rebranded it as failure.

When I’m in that slow space—not trying to be productive or perfect—life feels less like a race and more like a conversation. Maybe inefficiency is simply the courage to waste time beautifully.

Of course I can’t just wander. The world doesn’t slow down because I want it to. My father’s generation would laugh. For them, efficiency wasn’t a trap; it was survival. “Work first, rest later,” they used to say. Most of life became “work first.” Rest was always scheduled for a tomorrow that never came.

I don’t want to romanticise inefficiency in a country where many are still hustling to breathe. The freedom to be inefficient might be a new luxury. And yet: no amount of optimisation has ever made me feel alive.

Maybe the answer isn’t to abandon efficiency, but to contain it—be efficient in what keeps me safe, so I can be inefficient in what keeps me human. I still like my checklists. I still love the little hit of a finished task. I just don’t want my life to become a spreadsheet.

There’s a contradiction I can’t shake. I spend a lot of my free time writing small stories and essays—not because I’m trying to publish them or prove anything, but because I like circling around an idea until it surprises me. For me, the fun is in the chase: pulling at a theme, testing it, seeing what breaks.

That part feels enough. Late at night at my desk, or on the walk with a half-formed idea buzzing in my head, I feel like I’ve already won. The act itself—the wrestling with words and questions—is the reward.

But here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: if nothing survives—no draft, no fragment, not even a single line in a notebook—the whole thing feels wasted. As if the moment never happened.

I say the journey matters more than the destination, and yet unless the journey leaves a souvenir, I can’t convince myself it was real.

So I keep circling the same question: is effort enough on its own, or does it only count if it leaves a trace?

Most of my stories begin as questions. Not plots or characters—just questions. What would a superintelligent AI do if it ever got bored? What does the constant need for novelty do to a relationship?

These questions trail me on morning walks and keep me awake at night. I test them, poke at them, see if they can hold the weight of a story. In those moments, the act itself feels like enough.

But if nothing gets written—no draft, no fragment, not even a single line—the whole thing slips away like a dream I forgot to record. I know I spent hours wrestling with it, but without a trace, it’s as if it never happened.

When I do manage to write something down, even if it’s bad, I feel at peace. I can look at the page and think: Yes. That happened. I was there. I wrestled with this. But when I don’t, it feels like talking to myself in an empty room, and the silence afterward lingers longer than it should.

That’s what it looks like, lived out: the joy of the chase, followed by the despair of vanishing footprints.

I’ve seen creativity explained in diagrams: the habit loop, the flow state, the mantra that if you “show up every day,” the muse will too. I’ve read those books. I’ve tried to follow them. But none of them explain why effort feels hollow unless something survives it.

Take intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. The theory says if you love the process, you shouldn’t need a reward. And I do love the process. I love chasing questions that may never have answers. Still, I need the residue—a line, a draft, a scar left behind by the struggle. Without it, the effort drains away like water through a crack.

Even the cliché about “the journey, not the destination” falls short. I want to believe it. But what is a journey without a trace of arrival? Even a pilgrimage leaves behind worn sandals and a story told at dinner tables. Effort needs an anchor.

The best way I’ve found to explain it is through ritual. Lighting a lamp, folding a paper crane. The act matters most, but without the ash of the incense or the crane on the table, it feels unfinished. The residue doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just has to exist.

Effort as fire, output as ash. The fire matters more, but the ash is what proves it ever burned.

The longer I sit with this paradox, the more it feels less about writing and more about being human. We want our efforts to mean something, but meaning alone isn’t enough—we also want proof. A trace.

Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, endlessly pushing his boulder with no hope of finishing. The effort itself is the meaning. But if he left no dent on the hill, would we even remember him? The myth survives because of the trace.

Maybe that’s what art is: residue. Fossils of our attempts to make sense of the world. We struggle, and the by-product—whether a story or a single sentence—is what outlives us. The fire is personal. The ash is what gets passed on.

And this need for residue is generational. A grandfather planted trees whose shade he never sat under. Your parents might have photographed your every birthday, not to perfect the picture but to make sure time didn’t slip away unnoticed. The act matters, but the record keeps it alive.

So maybe this paradox is less about writing than it is about dignity. To try, and to leave behind something that says: I was here, and I struggled with this. Even if the trace is imperfect. Even if it’s only ash.

Most days, I circle questions that never make it to the page. By morning, they’re gone—like dreams I forget before I can write them down. Other days, I leave behind a fragment, a line that proves the moment was real.

When the fire burns, I want the ash. Not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s proof I was here, and that for a moment, I tried.

— Avi

P.S. If this left a trace with you, you can leave me one too—buy me a coffee. ☕

The other afternoon, as I was having coffee and trying to focus on a very overdue deadline, my brain decided it was the perfect moment to remind me of this random shopkeeper from my childhood.

He ran a tiny convenience store in the neighbourhood—one of those kirana shops you pass every day but rarely think about, filled with snacks, lentils, shampoo sachets hanging like garlands.

I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember ever talking to him. He was just a figure in my childhood landscape, one of many blurred faces who inhabited the backdrop of my life.

And yet, suddenly, here he was, occupying my focus, the deadline abandoning all hope beside my lukewarm coffee.

It felt strange—sad even—to miss someone I didn’t really know. To miss a place I don’t imagine I’ll ever visit again, and to ache over an ordinary moment I can’t relive simply because it already happened once.

You ever get that? These uninvited memory-flashes, like glitches in our internal software. Something stored by accident, like when your phone randomly snaps an accidental screenshot of your lock screen and you find it among your actual photographs.

At first, they feel like mistakes. Noise. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if they’re something else entirely. Maybe they’re not glitches at all. Perhaps this is precisely what human memory is designed to do—to grab random, insignificant images and tuck them away. Not because they mattered then, but because they might matter later. Perhaps someday this small, meaningless memory may come to mean something very big and very tender in the quiet halls of nostalgia. I dunno.

I know for sure that nostalgia unfairly reorganises the past. I am deeply aware that my childhood wasn’t the carefree utopia I sometimes make it into. You can’t just brush off the exam panic, the tiny rejections, or the heartbreaks that—at the time—felt like the world was falling apart.

The past only seems simple because we don’t have to solve those problems anymore. And yet, even though that shopkeeper had zero impact, I sort of missed him, for a moment at least. Truth is, it’s probably not about him at all.

Maybe I just missed the version of me who used to walk past him, blissfully unaware of what adulthood held—existential anxiety, taxes, laundry, meetings.

Maybe I just missed the life that even though felt massive and unknowable, it was massive and unknowable in neat, contained ways—like a maths test I hadn’t studied for, a crush I couldn’t speak to, who’d win the cricket match, or what we’d eat for dinner.

Maybe what I ache for now is not the past itself, but the simplicity and straightforwardness of that “massive and unknowable” world. Things used to have a structure, a finish line, a next step. Because these days, everything feels layered, overwhelming, and terrifyingly complex.

Lots of maybes.

But maybe that’s what growing up really is: not some triumphant march toward wisdom, but more like standing in front of the fridge in the morning, staring at leftovers, overwhelmed and oddly nostalgic for a time when someone else just picked breakfast for you.

Yet, as my coffee grew colder and the cursor blinked accusingly on my screen, I realised something else: those random, quiet moments woven into our lives mean a great deal, precisely because they vanish unnoticed until they’re gone.

Memory isn’t the perfect archivist we wish it to be—it’s scattered, biased, flawed—but perhaps that’s exactly where its beauty lies. It saves not just grand narratives, not just highlight reels, but random shopkeepers and shampoo sachets, allowing us to revisit a simpler, gentler past even as we stumble through an uncertain present.

I’m never going to shake nostalgia, just like I’ll never fully understand the rules of adulthood (example: Why does the day feel shorter even though I have too much to do?). But maybe that’s okay. Because adulthood most likely doesn’t erase childhood; it stacks on top of it.

We’re all really just an endless accumulation of memories, fears, dreams, and ordinary moments stitched together.

I think it’s just the human condition: to carry more than we can make sense of, to feel everything too much and never quite enough, to laugh at memes and cry in the shower and then go make ourselves a cup of coffee like that’s a perfectly reasonable sequence of events.

I don’t know if the shopkeeper’s still there, selling little packets of shampoo and lending another child quiet comforts simply by being there—existing in the background, steady and mundane and unknowingly significant. Probably not.

Things change, and it’s both heartbreaking and hopeful that they do. Because someday—a decade or a year from now—I will stumble upon another quiet moment, another forgotten face, another random quirk of memory that reminds me how magnificently strange and unbearably precious it is just to briefly exist, and stumble, and love, and miss.

Here’s to all those little forgotten pieces of life we never realise we’re holding on to; they’re not glitches, they’re proof that we’re human—and that, I think, is pretty wonderful.

I was in Sri Lanka in March. I didn’t go looking for anything specific. Mostly, I was just trying to outrun the noise in my head. But somewhere between the faded temples, the salted air, and those long, wordless evenings, something in me softened. Not a breakthrough, not even a story—just a quiet shift, like a door left slightly ajar. What followed wasn’t clarity, exactly, but a kind of noticing. These posts are pieces of that noticing. A way to make sense of the things that moved, and the things that stayed still.

There are days that vanish like socks in a washing machine. You know you had them—you vaguely remember wearing them—but when you go looking, they’re just… gone. No story, no memory, no snag to catch your mind on. Whole months can disappear like that if you’re not careful.

I used to think this was just what adulthood was. You know, taxes, Slack notifications, a general sense of rushing toward something slightly better than today. We’re all promised that if we keep sprinting—working harder, getting richer, becoming wiser—some future version of ourselves will turn around, smiling and fulfilled, and say, “Ah, yes, this was the life.”

But lately I’m starting to wonder if that’s a lie. Or if not a lie, then at least a tragic misunderstanding.

Because what nobody tells you is that while you’re sprinting toward the future, the present—which is quiet and shy and easily hurt—gets left behind. The present sits there like a kid at a birthday party nobody came to. Balloons sagging, cake melting, candles burned down to waxy puddles.

It’s not that life is boring. It’s that we stop looking.

We stop noticing the way the light makes a stain of gold on the floor. We stop noticing the face of the person who brings us tea, the tiny ritual of their kindness.

We stop noticing ourselves, even, becoming someone new, day by day, wrinkle by wrinkle, thought by thought.

And then—one day—we look back and find the past is thin. Like tracing paper. You can see through it, but you can’t really touch it. And that, somehow, feels more heartbreaking than sadness ever did.

I think that’s why I fell so hard for the beautiful 2023 Japanese/German movie Perfect Days.

It’s about a man who cleans toilets. That’s it. He wakes up. He waters a plant. He listens to cassettes. He drives to work. He scrubs and wipes and polishes, and somehow, in the silence between these tiny acts, a whole world blooms.

It’s not that sadness isn’t there. There’s ageing, loneliness, the unspoken ache of lost years. But Hirayama notices. He really notices. And because of that, he lives.

Now, no matter how much I romanticise it, it’s true that noticing won’t fix your life. It won’t stop loss or failure or the slow crumbling of things you love. It won’t armour you against grief or save you from doomed relationships or taxes or the loneliness that sometimes howls inside your chest at two in the morning.

But noticing might give you a past that feels real. A life you can hold in your hands and say, “Yes. I was here.”

And if you ask me, that’s enough. It has to be.

In March, I drifted through Sri Lanka. I returned with a very bad tan, a few quiet revelations, and notes scattered like breadcrumbs in the corners of pages. Somewhere between the long drives and the soft silences, things started to unfold. Not loudly, but clearly. These posts are me tracing that unravelling. Seeing what falls away, and what holds.

When I was nine years old, I used to think love was simple. Like, once you found it, you’d never again wonder who would pick you first on the cricket team. Love would be your teammate, your designated sharer-of-snacks, the only person who would sit with you at lunch even when your tiffin box leaked dal everywhere.

Love felt like this person who didn’t laugh when you messed up your English elocution in front of the whole class. It was neat, uncomplicated, and profoundly unrealistic.

Fast-forward twenty-something-odd years later, I’ve come to a new conclusion: Love, as it turns out, is mostly not simple. It is unruly, complicated, and entirely unfair—like doing taxes or reading Terms of Agreement and actually understanding them.

We’ve been trained to romanticise rescue. Movies dutifully tell us that we are half people, waiting patiently for our other half, someone who will miraculously fit our broken bits like a puzzle piece, completing us at last. (Hell, the Sanskrit word for wife is ardhangini, which literally means “half of the body”.)

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about puzzles—they’re not alive. And people, I have learned repeatedly, stubbornly insist upon being alive and raw and unruly. They bring their own jagged edges, their own unsolved puzzles.

You mash two incomplete sets together, and instead of glorious resolution, you end up with a tangled mess of cardboard and irritation.

The truth is not glamorous, but it’s incredibly freeing: You don’t complete me, because despite the misleading propaganda perpetuated in Jerry Maguire, we are not actually incomplete. Our partners are not our designated therapists, our rehab facilities, or the glue that holds our emotional IKEA furniture together.

This misdiagnosis—that love exists to rescue or repair—is precisely the reason so many of us ends up feeling betrayed when our partners inevitably reveal their mortal imperfections.

It’s tempting to see love as a hiding place, when maybe it’s meant to be a vantage point—a place from which we see ourselves more clearly. And I’ll confess, I’ve lived out entire chapters of my life curled into relationships where hiding felt safer than emerging.

Maybe we’re allowed some hiding; maybe the bravest step begins nestled in blankets of fear, uncertainty, and carefully concealed wounds. And sometimes, in the gentlest hands of kindness and understanding, we begin not as answers, but as beginnings—uncertain, unfinished, still becoming.

The danger isn’t in being scared or broken. The danger is remaining there, mistaking brokenness for romance and wounds for intimacy.

We all want to be seen. Not in the polished-filter way we carefully curate on Instagram but rather in the profoundly undignified way we wake up in the morning—hair sticking out in ten different directions and fears tumbling out like loose change from old jeans pockets.

Yet, while we desperately hope to be loved without explanation, it seldom occurs to us that perhaps our job, too, is learning to see our partners wholly—mess, flaws, contradictions, and all.

We ask to be held but forget the equal responsibility of doing the holding.

Years ago, I remember I was talking to a stranger online. She was nursing a fresh heartbreak. At one point, she asked, “Why does love always end up hurting more than it heals?” I didn’t have an answer, but I typed back something like, “Maybe love doesn’t break us—it just shows us where we were already broken.” (I was fresh from a heartbreak myself and feeling a little poetic.)

I still dunno why love hurts more than it heals. But, here’s what I do know: Love won’t heal every gaping wound life carves into us. But it can often place a gentle mirror right up against our lives, nudging us to confront what we glimpse in our reflection.

Love is less a Band-Aid and more a flashlight—illuminating hidden truths, half-healed hurts, and long-forgotten memories we’ve buried beneath bravado.

It’s as terrifying as it is beautiful. Because love, honest love, insists we do something uncomfortable: it asks we do the work ourselves. Journal—badly. Sit with our fear—awkwardly. Reflect, forgive, try again.

Not because your therapist said so or because it looks charmingly tragic on your Insta profile. But because when we fail to heal, we too often end up wounding those who never hurt us in the first place.

Still, I flinch a little when people chant, “self-love before all else.” Because, honestly, self-love is hard. It’s not a milestone you reach—it’s a winding, never-ending thing. The truth is messier, but thankfully kinder: You don’t need to have everything figured out. You don’t need to be perfectly healed or emotionally flawless to be loved.

In other words, you don’t have to be fluent in self-love to be spoken to in love’s language. Just… don’t hand someone your bleeding wounds wrapped in pretty ribbon and call it romance or demand they mop you up and call that intimacy.

At the end of the day, we’re all scared and unsure and desperately hopeful, trying to navigate love’s unpredictable geography. Sometimes we land softly; other times we crash spectacularly. All we can do is embrace the uncertainty, accept the messiness, and remember this: being human means you’re allowed imperfection, sadness, and confusion, without sacrificing the hope that someday, somehow, someone will choose to sit beside you at lunch—even if your dal spills everywhere.

I went wandering through Sri Lanka in March—chasing nothing in particular. I came back sun-touched and slightly undone, with half-thoughts scribbled in margins and a silence that didn’t press, just lingered. The kind that hums beneath noise, that gently hands you back your own voice. Somewhere between the winding roads and wordless moments, I began answering questions I never meant to ask. These posts are me listening closer. Tugging at the threads. Watching what frays, and what stays.

When I was ten, I was going to be a cricketer. Or a pilot. Or a scientist. Or, in a particularly bold moment, a cricketer-scientist who flew planes on the weekends and solved global warming in his spare time. I was not concerned with the logistics of this life, or even its biological plausibility. I just knew I had options.

Everything was relentlessly possible. Astronaut? Sure. Nobel Peace Prize winner? Why not? Rock star, wizard, dinosaur tamer? All perfectly viable career paths.

But here’s the weird thing about getting older—we begin to realise, quietly and gradually, that every decision we make diminishes the infinite dreams we once carried.

We select a career, a city, a person, and each choice weaves itself like a thread into the fabric of our finite lives, defining the borders. Suddenly, doors begin to close—not loudly, not in some grand slam of fate—but quietly, with a soft click, until one day you pause and reflect on all the doors you haven’t walked through.

No matter how satisfying our present realities might be, that realisation is painful.

There’s a special kind of melancholy in understanding you cannot visit every city you imagine yourself wandering through or read all the books that accumulate relentlessly on your shelves.

As for me, I’ll never know most of the world’s people, most of their languages, customs, or dreams. And I feel this pang of grief—a small sadness, but a sadness nonetheless—knowing that these infinite possibilities, real and beautiful as they might’ve been, are beyond my grasp.

Maybe this is just a kind of innate mortality—not the fear of our ultimate death, exactly—but the confrontation with our limited existence. The understanding that we get one story, just one chance to write ourselves onto the pages of life. There are no infinite drafts, only this single unfolding narrative: imperfect and unpredictable and messy and holy.

I find myself wrestling with this tension. If believing anything was possible was my oddly comforting childhood friend, does facing the narrowing scope of what I can actually become mean surrendering my optimism? I’ve prided myself on being stubbornly hopeful—even naively optimistic at times—that things will always get better, richer, fuller. But does growing up mean tempering that optimism in me, quieting the dreamer in me just to accept limitations?

I’m not so sure.

Because optimism, true optimism, is for sure not denial. It’s not pretending constraints don’t exist—it’s recognising them and believing anyway. It’s about sensing that hope can remain sturdy, steady, and resilient even when infinite possibilities narrow themselves to practical realities.

And if hope must only exist behind doors not yet shut, well, isn’t that still hope worth fighting for—a hope more precious precisely because it’s worn and lived-in and earned?

So yes, my story might feel more finite at this point in life, but infinite possibility, after all, was only ever theoretical.

Real meaning, I’m slowly beginning to realise, comes from choosing—imperfect, uncertain choosing. The life I’ve chosen speaks louder and deeper than the limitless ones I could imagine. My life is real. It’s messy; it’s filled with stumbles and tiny triumphs, bruised knees and quiet joys, and love so bright it often hurts to look directly at.

Maybe the heartbreak of growing older is merely a symptom of being alert, of being alive. In mourning cities I’ll never wander, lives I’ll never live, or skills and dreams I’ll never master, I’m simply honouring the truth that the human experience will always have a bittersweet edge. Maybe mourning the infinitude of possibilities is precisely what allows us to truly live our finite, one-shot, human lives.

The story of my life might be smaller and simpler than what I dreamed as a child looking out toward distant galaxies—but it’s mine, and it’s precious precisely because it has limits. Because it is finite, every chapter, every page, every word gains meaning and gravity.

Real is enough. In fact, real is all we ever really get.

So I remind myself time and again: It’s okay to grieve what will never be, as long as I remember also to cherish what actually is. Yes, my optimism must now grapple with a world of borders and limits—but perhaps this refined optimism, tempered by reality, is even more powerful and honest than before. Perhaps that’s what always defines us humans anyway—an ability to find wonder and hope in the small, real stories that fill the universe of our one finite lives.

And as long as I’m here, as long as doors remain open—even just a few—I’ll joyfully, stubbornly, optimistically step through them, not out of fantasy or desperation, but out of fierce presence and curiosity. And in doing so, I truly believe the future will always be better than today—not because it’s perfect or limitless, but precisely because, in spite of limitations, hope endures. After all, we’ve yet to know what surprises, friendships, heartbreaks, and revelations await us down even the narrowest of paths.

And meanwhile, wherever this story takes me, I hope—and deeply believe—it will be enough.

I went backpacking in Sri Lanka in March. The trip gave me more than I asked for—sunburns, scribbled thoughts I didn’t finish, and this weird, aching quiet. The kind that makes you hear your own voice again, like really hear it. Somewhere between the long drives and strange silences, I started answering questions I didn’t know I’d asked. These posts are me pulling at those questions. Seeing what falls apart. And what doesn’t.

During my recent trip to Sri Lanka (gosh, it’s been three weeks already since I came back), I found out something strange. Not strange like “a dog wearing glasses” strange, but stranger—like platonic relationships are real strange.

Like, real real. Not the vague sort-of-friendship you have with your coworker who knows your birthday but not your last name. I mean the kind of real that makes you sit on a rooftop at midnight and talk about the universe with someone who doesn’t want anything from you but your presence.

There’s no tension. No drama. Just this weird, beautiful connection. Like meeting a pen pal you didn’t know you were writing to. It made my chest, and somehow my whole self, feel lighter. And for a brief, shimmering moment, I was joyful in the way kids are joyful—before the world teaches them to flinch.

And here’s the part that’s hard to explain: I don’t know why it happened. There was no formula. No magic words. Just this sense that maybe some empty place in me had been quietly asking to be seen. And someone saw it. And they didn’t try to fix it. They just sat beside it.

It reminded me of 2014. I was doing my master’s at IIT Bombay, living on instant noodles and borrowed optimism. That year, I remember I met someone too. But more than that, I met this version of myself—ambitious, open-hearted, afraid but hopeful. I believed then, honestly, that the future was a place where good things happened.

And in Sri Lanka, 11 years later, that feeling came back. I remember waking up at 3 a.m. to get ready for a safari and feeling exactly what I felt in 2014—that strange, unearned joy. Like I’d temporarily borrowed someone else’s life—a brighter, easier one. It felt like flying. Not aeroplane-flying. Emotional flying. That rare, internal lift that makes you want to call your younger self and say, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Of course, it didn’t last. Nothing ever does. But it happened. And that’s the point, I think. It happened.

Maybe all of us walk around with these invisible shields—armour made of anxiety, politeness, distraction. Maybe those shields help us survive the everyday. But sometimes, in a strange land with no mirrors and no expectations, the armour slips. And what’s underneath is soft, and human, and aching to be seen. I think that’s one of the rare gifts of travel.

In Sri Lanka, I wasn’t trying to be anyone. I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t curating my personality like a playlist. I was just… there. And somehow, that was enough.

And sometimes, “it was” is enough to believe it can be again.

This clarity—this joy—I wouldn’t call it happiness, exactly. I’d call it remembering. Not the kind of remembering where you dig through old photos and try to recapture something. But the kind where you suddenly feel a part of yourself return, like a ghost you didn’t know you missed.

You know those rare days when time goes quiet? When you’re not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday, and suddenly life feels full, and rich, and good? That’s what I’m talking about. I wanted so badly to hold on to that feeling. It felt foolish. But what’s even more foolish is pretending it doesn’t matter.

Because it does.

It’s proof that our hearts still work. Proof we’re still alive.

I won’t call it nostalgia. It’s more like hunger. Hunger for presence. For awe. For being known without needing to be impressive.

In retrospect, I don’t think it was really about her. The person I met in Sri Lanka was more like a mirror. Sometimes we need another person to reflect our softest selves back to us, just so we remember they’re still there. I didn’t feel good because of her—I felt good because, for once, I was open enough to see myself through someone else’s eyes.

I think there are craters in all of our chests. And maybe they aren’t damage—maybe they’re just space. Space we’re meant to leave open, so something unexpected can find its way in. And sure, we’ll probably armour up again. That’s life. But we’ll remember that there’s still a version of us who can fly. Who can open up, laugh too hard, feel too much—and not apologise for it.

That version of me showed up in Sri Lanka.

And I hope he visits again. Maybe next time, he’ll even stay a little longer.

Sri Lanka left me with a lot—peeling skin, half-formed journal entries, and more solitude than I knew what to do with. Somewhere between the endless roads and the hush of unfamiliar nights, I started talking to myself in a way I hadn’t in years. In these posts, I’m trying to follow those threads—to see what they unravelled, and maybe, what they tied back together.

When I was in Sri Lanka recently, I met a girl who’d been travelling for years. Like, plural. Her passport looked like a Jackson Pollock painting of visa stamps. She was one of those people who can just sit by the beach and chill. I mean, actually chill. Not scroll-through-Instagram-while-waiting-for-the-next-dopamine-hit chill. Just… be.

And I—I who pack books and podcasts and contingency snacks just to survive a solo lunch—I could not appreciate it enough.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” I’d ask, again and again, to every long-term traveller I met—like maybe if I asked it enough times, their answer would start to apply to me. They always had this light in their eyes, like they carried freedom in their pockets. And I wanted that. God, I want that so much.

But whenever I try to be alone, really alone, it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like something heavy sitting in my stomach. Like I’ve been left behind by a party I didn’t know was happening. The idea of eating dinner by myself or just… sitting by the sea with no one to talk to—it doesn’t feel peaceful. It’s rather painful. Feels like forgetting. Like I’ve been forgotten.

Too often, I fill the empty spaces of my days as though trying to seal leaks in a sinking boat. Silence? Put on an audiobook. Sitting by the beach? No, let’s try surfing—it’s active, productive even. Even meals, those humble moments humans have cherished together for thousands of years, become practical affairs, stripped of joy and ritual when I confront them alone. Meals alone, unlike meals shared, feel transactional—mere nutrients instead of communion. Is loneliness simply a hunger we mistake for something deeper?

At home? Sure, I can eat dinner while watching YouTube videos of people cooking better dinners. But out in the world—at a café or a beach or a bench in some scenic foreign country—being alone feels like failure. It feels like the world is watching and whispering, “Look at that poor guy. Nobody wants to eat with him.”

Even though, of course, the world isn’t whispering. The world isn’t even watching.

But try telling that to the voice in my head.

It’s weird, right? How I can know something logically—that no one cares if I’m alone—but still feel like I’m wearing a giant neon sign that says: UNLOVED.

And that’s the thing about loneliness. It’s not always about the absence of people. Sometimes it’s about the presence of self. Sitting still with myself—with no goal, no agenda—feels like a kind of falling. Like I’ll dissolve into the silence and never quite reassemble.

I admire people who are at peace with their solitude. People who treat their own company like a warm bath instead of a cold shower. I envy them. I want to be them. Not because they’re cool or mysterious—but because they seem to genuinely like themselves.

They don’t sink into self-doubt because their worth isn’t measured by counting companions or filling schedules. They possess something internal, a kind of invisible friendship with themselves that I’ve only glimpsed, like an exotic bird flashing its wings brightly for a second then disappearing into the forest of my anxiety.

And maybe that’s the heart of it. Maybe the fear of being alone in public is less about what others see and more about what I see.

Why does it make some of us feel so acutely self-conscious, while others seem at ease? Is it cultural expectation reminding us we must be liked, included, popular—the modern virtues of social status? Is it simply our own quiet voices whispering stale old stories about our unimportance or abandonment? Or maybe it’s all of this, together?

There’s a version of me I’d rather want to be: someone who drinks coffee alone not to look interesting, but because he genuinely enjoys the taste. Someone who can sit at the edge of the ocean and not feel the pressure to document it, or explain it, or turn it into some achievement. Someone who can just… exist.

But here’s who I actually am: a person who feels lonely more often than he admits. A person who gets a little sad eating alone. A person who wishes every good moment could be shared with someone. A person who has spent years trying to fill every silence with noise.

And I think both selves are real. Both are trying their best.

But I desperately want to tell my anxious self something comforting. Something not about how uncool it is to obsess over these things, but something earnest, human: It’s okay. It’s okay to feel unsure. It’s okay not to have perfected the subtle, delicate art of dining with yourself, or lounging emptily and happily by a picturesque beach. Loneliness is human, and all humans share it, however secretly or perfectly hidden beneath confident smiles at cafés.

Maybe there isn’t a fix—no tidy self-help trick to make the loneliness disappear. Maybe all we get is the quiet comfort of knowing that lots of us are stumbling through the same strange emptiness. And maybe that’s enough. Because even loneliness, when shared, becomes something else. Like two strangers sitting alone at different corners of the same café, each thinking they’re the only one without someone to talk to—unaware they’re already part of something together.

Sri Lanka gave me a lot—sunburns, stories, and way too much time alone with my thoughts. Somewhere between long bus rides and late-night silences, I started having these quiet, intense conversations with myself. In the next few posts, I’ll try to trace those wandering thoughts and see where they lead.

I recently got back from a backpacking trip to Sri Lanka. It might have been the best trip of my life.

The first few days were perfect. I started at Colombo, then Kandy, and then took the most scenic train to Ella. There, I stayed in beautiful little hostel, the kind of place where strangers become friends over food and drinks and stories that only make sense if you were there. The weather was good, the people were good, and for a brief moment, life felt like one of those travel montages in a movie where everything is sunlit and effortless.

And then, at some point, it wasn’t.

The last few days of the trip—after I left Ella and started moving towards the south—felt different. I moved to beach towns, stayed in new hostels, but they weren’t the kind where people gather and talk late into the night. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing things—I was—but without people to share it with, things felt smaller somehow.

You could say my trip had two distinct emotional arcs—one where everything felt alive and cinematic, and another where it all faded into something quieter, lonelier.

When I look at the photos now, I don’t just remember what happened—I also remember how I felt. Which is why some pictures feel like warmth and laughter, and others feel like empty chairs at an empty table.

Memory isn’t just a record of places after all; it’s also a record of emotions tied to those places.

The French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote that our past isn’t stored in a single place but scattered across sensations—smells, tastes, objects. And, in my case, photographs. The ones from the first half of the trip, I look at again and again, trying to sink back into the joy. The others, I scroll past quickly, because who wants to relive loneliness?

But the thing is, my sadness about the last bit of the trip isn’t really about it being bad—it’s about contrast. The presence of joy makes its absence feel heavier. And maybe that’s not a flaw in the experience but proof that it mattered. That I was paying attention.

Also, the thing about being alone—not just alone, but alone and a little bit lonely—is that it gives you an unreasonable amount of time to think. And with nothing to distract me, I also found myself having these long, meandering conversations with myself—asking questions I didn’t quite know how to answer.

Somewhere in that process, I think I got to know myself a little better.

It’s strange to say, but after pondering upon it I realised that this loneliness flipped some kind of switch in me. Not in a dramatic, epiphany-filled way, but in the quiet realisation that I am, in some way, different now. I know my mindset has shifted, even though it’ll take a while to translate that into action. And maybe that’s the paradox of travel—you always go looking for new places and people, but sometimes what you really end up discovering is yourself. I know it’s a cliché, but doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I don’t know. Maybe sadness, or melancholy, or loneliness isn’t just something we endure, but something that shapes us in ways we don’t fully understand until much later. At least, in this case, that’s what happened.

I spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka engaged in deep, overly dramatic conversations with myself—because what else could you do at 2 AM while staring at the bottom of the upper bunk of an unfamiliar hostel dorm room? Over the next few posts, I’ll attempt to untangle those thoughts and turn them into something resembling coherence.

Nietzsche, for those unfamiliar, was a 19th-century German philosopher with an impressive moustache and even more impressive ideas (ideas that were often misunderstood, sometimes intentionally).

Nietzsche wasn’t just critiquing society; he was trying to reimagine what it meant to be human. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he introduces us to the three stages of human growth, told through the journey of his semi-mythical prophet, Zarathustra (named after Zoroaster, an ancient Persian religious figure). But the real protagonist here? Us, and the gradual metamorphosis of our souls.

Stage One: The Camel

At the first enclosure of our metaphorical zoo, we find the camel.

Not the desert-wandering, water-hoarding creature, but a spiritual beast of burden. The camel is the part of us that carries the weight of expectation.

From the moment we enter this world, we inherit a long list of “thou shalts.”

• Thou shalt get good grades

• Thou shalt pursue a respectable career

• Thou shalt not question why we clap to show appreciation

The camel represents the individual who humbly accepts traditional values and societal expectations. It is a state of discipline and self-denial.

At first, we don’t even notice the load on our backs because it feels normal. Society hands us these invisible burdens, and like loyal camels, we trudge forward, convinced that duty and obedience are virtues in themselves.

Nietzsche isn’t saying that responsibility is bad, but he is asking: Is this really your responsibility? Or was it handed to you without your consent?

This is where most people stop. They spend their entire lives as camels, mistaking obedience for meaning. But some—just some—begin to feel the weight and wonder why they are carrying it at all. And these people… well, they start to change.

Stage Two: The Lion

When the camel grows restless and begins to suspect that all these rules, all these “thou shalts,” might not be absolute truths but inherited assumptions, quite suddenly, the camel shrugs off its burden and transforms into a lion. Not just any lion, but a defiant, roaring, rebellious force of nature.

The lion represents the rejection of traditional values and the assertion of individual will (“I will”) against the dragon of “thou shalt.”

If the camel’s defining word was “should,” the lion’s defining word is “No.”

• No, I don’t have to live the life others mapped out for me

• No, I won’t blindly follow traditions I don’t believe in

• No, I won’t wear uncomfortable shoes just because they “look nice”

But here’s the thing: while the lion is powerful, it is also angry. It has learned to reject, but it doesn’t yet know what to embrace. The lion embodies the courage and strength to break free from old constraints. But while the lion can create freedom for itself, it cannot create new values.

And this is where a lot of people get stuck—believing that tearing things down is the same as building something new. Rebellion, after all, is as much a cage as obedience if it becomes your only mode of being.

Nietzsche understood this, which is why he knew the transformation was not yet complete. There is one final metamorphosis left.

Stage Three: The Child

The final metamorphosis is the child, representing innocence, forgetting, and a new beginning.

This, Nietzsche says, is the highest form—the place where creation begins. The child does not carry burdens like the camel, nor does it waste its energy on rebellion like the lion. Instead, the child is free. Free to play, free to create, free to say “yes” instead of only ever saying “no.”

Because what is the point of tearing down a house if you never build something in its place? What is the point of rejecting everything if you never learn to embrace what truly matters to you? The child understands something the lion does not: life is not just a battle to be fought. It is a canvas, waiting for us to paint on it.

To be a child in Nietzsche’s sense is not to be naive, but to be fearless in your own becoming. To create meaning for yourself rather than inherit it. To live, not because you were told how to, but because you are excited by the infinite possibilities of what you could be.

And if you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering if all of this leads somewhere. If complete transformation results in something final, such as nirvana. Nietzsche’s answer is… no, not really.

According to Nietzsche, the progression from camel to lion to child is essential for self-overcoming, a crucial aspect of achieving the state of Übermensch (often translated as “Overman” or “Superman”). But the Übermensch is not a finish line. It’s rather a direction. An ongoing process. A commitment to always evolving, always questioning, always becoming something more than you were before.

Nietzsche doesn’t want us to stay the same. He wants us to transform, again and again and again. To be camels when we must, lions when we need to fight, and children when we remember how to dream.

So, this begs the question: where are you now?

Are you carrying a burden you’ve never questioned? Are you shaking off chains, rebelling against the weight of tradition? Or—just maybe—are you ready to create?

Food for thought.

Some news (basically the same one I shared last week).

So I’ve been writing short stories for the past eight months, and guess what? It turns out writing stories is super fun. I’ve written enough now that I figured, hey, maybe it’s time to start sharing them. So if you like stories, are curious, or just want to see what happens when I put words in a row, you can sign up and check them out. There are already a bunch waiting for you! No pressure, just vibes.

The Night Express

A space for stories—nothing more, nothing less

By Abhishek Chakraborty

I don’t stick to a plan or a genre—stories show up when they feel like it, shaped by memory, mood, or whatever weird thought popped into my head that day.

For me, writing is a way to figure things out, talk to the past, and, occasionally, just pass the time. If you enjoy what you read, then awesome! That means this whole thing is working.

This post is free, but it took infinite cups of coffee, a few days of thinking, three hours of excited scribbling, and a couple more hours of ruthless editing (which, let’s be real, was the hardest part). If you enjoyed it, you can keep the creativity (and caffeine) flowing by sponsoring my next cup!

But… wait a minute. Is it a failure? Just because something doesn’t go on forever, does that make it any less worthwhile? Think about it—when someone walked into that shop, grabbed that coffee, and smiled at the person sitting next to them (without making it weird), there was real joy in that moment. And that’s not a failure, no matter how short-lived. It existed, it brought people together, and it mattered while it was there.

The same goes for creative work. How many times do we measure the worth of something by its shelf life? You spend years painting, each brushstroke infused with a piece of yourself. Maybe you paint dozens and dozens of a sunset (much like how Monet painted the same haystacks 25 times), so perfectly captured that every time someone sees them, they remember a warm, peaceful moment in their own life. But then one day, you stop painting. Maybe the passion fades, or life pulls you in a different direction.

And then what? People might dismiss it as a “phase,” or even suggest it wasn’t worth doing because it didn’t last. But that’s not fair. The sunsets you painted were meaningful, in that moment. Just because you moved on doesn’t mean they lost their power or beauty. The worth wasn’t in the length of time it existed, but in the impact it made.

Even friendships—oh, especially friendships—get caught in this trap.

We often judge their value based on how long they last. A friendship from childhood that fizzles out as you both grow older? That’s somehow less valuable because it didn’t last through adulthood? Nonsense. It mattered then. It shaped you, it gave you something, and that’s what counts.

I think we’ve mistakenly convinced ourselves that success is this tree that’s meant to grow and grow, unbothered by seasons, always stretching towards the sky. But in reality, not everything is meant to grow like that.

In reality, (some) things are meant to be like flowers—delicate, beautiful, and fleeting. They don’t bloom for long, but during that time, they light up the world around them. Does that mean they weren’t worth admiring? Not for a second.

Maybe the real lesson is that forever shouldn’t be the goal.

Not everything needs to endure, and that’s okay. Sometimes, things are meant to have a moment—a brief, shining moment. Friendships fade, books get forgotten, ideas evolve. But that doesn’t erase the meaning they held when they were alive and vibrant.

I like of think of it like a campfire. It burns bright for a while, providing warmth, light, and a sense of comfort to those sitting around for a picnic. But eventually, the flames flicker and die down. And when the fire goes out, do we stand there and say, “That was a failure”? Of course not. We remember the cosiness, the laughter, the shared stories around it. We don’t mourn its end—we appreciate the light it gave while it was burning.

Some things are just meant to shine for a short time, and that’s perfectly fine. Let’s stop treating impermanence as failure. Let’s appreciate the beauty of things that live fully, if only for a moment. Because sometimes, that’s all they need to do.

Some news.

I’ve been writing short stories for the past 8 months or so, and it’s been a pretty fun journey. I’ve written enough now that I feel it’s time to start sharing them. If you’re curious, or just enjoy a good story, feel free to sign up. There’s already a bunch of stories posted for you to check out. No pressure, just a bit of writing I’m excited to share.

The Night Express

A space for stories—nothing more, nothing less

By Abhishek Chakraborty

I do not write with a plan, nor do I follow any strict genre. A story comes when it pleases, shaped by memory, mood, or a sudden whim.

Writing, for me, is a way of making sense of things, of conversing with the past, and sometimes, simply of passing the time. If you find some enjoyment in these tales, then we are both rewarded.

By biggest I mean 400 MILLION PEOPLE—more than the combined population of Russia, Turkey, Germany, and the UK—coming together for a month and a half to take a holy dip at the Sangam, where the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati rivers meet. (I took a dip at 5 in the morning. It was 8 degrees and freezing—totally worth it!)

The Kumbh Mela is not just a festival—it’s a legend. Its origin comes from the Samudra Manthan, the ancient Hindu story of gods and demons churning the ocean for Amrit, the nectar of immortality. At some point in the celestial struggle, a few drops spilled from the “kumbh” (pot) onto four places—Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik. And so, every 12 years, millions gather at these locations to celebrate.

But Maha Kumbh? That only happens once every 144 years, making this a literal once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Walking through the massive mela (fair), I saw saints, sadhus, tourists, and devotees from all over the world. The air was thick with the sound of chants, rituals, and drumbeats as grand processions of ascetics from different Akhadas (spiritual sects)1 marched through the crowd.

Some wore saffron, and some—like the Naga Sadhus—wore nothing at all (covering themselves in ash), symbolising renunciation of the material world. But it wasn’t just about religion. There were yoga camps, spiritual discourses, music, food, and a sense of belonging—something bigger than any one person.

Being there rekindled my interest in my own religion. I can’t really say I’m a religious person (though, there was a time back in school when I dabbled in religious studies, but I eventually moved away from it), so this was surprising.

You could say this is just a sign of getting older, but lately, I’ve been struggling with my sense of identity and my place in the world (thoughts shared here and here).

India’s liberal discourse has always focused on being minority-friendly (which is great), but it has often come with an unspoken expectation that the majority should feel a sense of guilt. (In fact, a draft bill in 2011 even operated on the assumption that communal trouble is only created by members of the majority community, never by the minority.) And the distorted narratives of a few right-wing extremists have pushed me even further away from my own faith.

That’s why, recently, I’ve been feeling a bit lost. I couldn’t quite put my finger on this small but persistent void inside me, but after attending the Maha Kumbh last week, things started to become clearer.

In many ways, the mela is a celebration of the Sanatan Dharma (popularly known as Hinduism), the third-largest religion in the world—and it got here without crusades or jihads.

That realisation filled me with a deep sense of pride.

I figured I could use some guidance. I wanted to learn more about it. I’ve tried and read Western philosophy thoroughly, and it has helped. Why not give my own religion’s philosophy a go this time?

I picked up an old book on the teachings and writings of Swami Vivekananda, who was a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world. He was Bengali, so all Bengali kids grew up reading about him and have always felt a sort of kinship to him.

One of the biggest ideas in Hinduism which I absolutely love is universal tolerance and acceptance.

India has always been a sanctuary for the persecuted. Take the Zoroastrian community for example—hundreds of years ago, they fled Persia (modern-day Iran) to escape religious persecution and found refuge here. The Jewish community, too, has a long history in India, arriving over 2,000 years ago after the destruction of their First Temple.

But here’s where it gets really interesting: Hinduism doesn’t just tolerate other religions; it believes them to be equally true. It sees all religions as different paths to the same truth.

To me, that’s something incredibly relevant in today’s divided world. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that our way is the only way, but Hinduism seems to say, “Hey, we’re all on the same team.”

What’s fascinating to me, too, is how decentralised this religion is. Unlike religions that have one sacred text, like the Bible or the Quran, Hinduism is a spectrum of beliefs and practices.

There’s Vedanta, which offers deep philosophical insights, but there are also concrete practices like idol worship. And Hinduism doesn’t even require belief in God. Some forms of it even embrace agnosticism (like Buddhism) and atheism (like Jainism).

You can be a Hindu without believing in God at all. To me, that’s mind-blowing. It’s so open, so flexible, and so deeply human.

But here’s where it starts to click for me: Hinduism is not about following rules. It’s about seeking divine revelations found in the Vedas, which are not just books, but eternal spiritual laws.

Think of them like the laws of gravity—whether we know about them or not, they exist. These laws are Sanatan—eternal, without beginning or end.

What really gets me is this idea that the divine isn’t some far-off entity. It’s within us. Our journey isn’t about just believing in divinity, it’s about realising our own divine nature.

And how do you get there? Through dharma—doing what’s right, not because you’ll be rewarded or because you’re afraid of consequences, but simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Dharma isn’t just about fulfilling societal expectations, either. It’s about finding purpose in everything you do, taking responsibility, and aligning your actions with something bigger than yourself, through karma yoga (selfless action), bhakti yoga (devotion), or jnana yoga (knowledge).

In a world that’s constantly pulling you in a million directions, that sense of purpose is grounding.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this feels like the right path—one that’s both grounding and expansive. I’m going to keep reading, keep thinking about it, and hopefully it’ll make sense in ways that help me live more fully, too. I’ll share what I learn. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.

I believe that just as solitude has its variations, silence does too. When I walk, silence feels like a calming presence—an opportunity to connect with myself and my surroundings, and perhaps even deepen my self-awareness.

Walking is not just a physical activity, but a way to engage with the world and myself intellectually and emotionally.

This video is free, but it took 2 cups of coffee, 18-ish minutes of non-stop talking (even though the video is only 3 mins long), and 29 mins of editing (I hate this bit!) to create. If you enjoyed it, consider sponsoring my next cup of motivation! ☕

Fuel my chaos 🤯

If you’re now here, as of 2025, I’m tinkering with videos (trust me, they’ll get better and better every week). The plan: post weekly (assuming the universe cooperates). If you like what you see (or don’t), send a bat signal with a like or a comment. Thanks for helping me science the shit out of it.

Then a thought dropped into my head like an anvil in a cartoon: why does it feel like the assembly line of worldshaking brilliance has slowed down? Where have all the geniuses gone?

This video is free, but it took 4 cups of coffee, 29-ish minutes of non-stop talking (even though the video is only 6-ish mins long), and 43 mins of editing (I hate this bit!) to create. If you enjoyed it, consider sponsoring my next cup of motivation! ☕

Fuel my chaos 🚀

P.S. It starts one way, but by 2:15 (when I was two cups down) the caffeine kicks in and my excitement reaches Schrödinger’s cat levels of ‘alive.’ I cannot claim the video becomes more interesting to watch, but with so much entropy in the system, it did get super fun to record for sure.

If you’re now here, as of 2025, I’m tinkering with videos (trust me, they’ll get better and better every week). The plan: post weekly (assuming the universe cooperates). If you like what you see (or don’t), send a bat signal with a like or a comment. Thanks for helping me science the shit out of it.

This video is free, but it took two cups of caffeine and 18 minutes of non-stop talking to make. If you enjoyed it, consider sponsoring the next cup of motivation! ☕

Fuel my chaos 💥

P.S. As of 2025, I’m tinkering with videos. The plan: post weekly (assuming the universe cooperates). If you like what you see (or don’t), send a bat signal with a like or a comment. Thanks for helping me science the shit out of it. 😍

This post is free, but it took two cups of caffeine and 47 minutes of non-stop talking to make. If it helped, you can fuel the next cup.

Sponsor a cup ☕️

P.S. In 2025, I’m tinkering with videos. The plan: post weekly (assuming the universe cooperates). If you like what you see (or don’t), send a bat signal with a like or a comment. Thanks for helping me science the shit out of it. 😍

P.P.S Here’s a link to the glorified spreadsheet I used in the video.