I read the sentence in that strange half-awake way one reads the news now, and for a moment I did not know how a sentence so simple could move me so much.

I was not expecting then that the phrase would keep me up for days, attaching itself to books, conversations, memories, and scraps from my notebook.

Death by sadness. It sounded like something from another time, from a world in which human emotions were allowed to take centrestage, in which people did not yet feel compelled to translate every collapse into the language of organs, enzymes, scans, reports, and causes. A person died of fever; a person died of fright; a person died because the monsoon failed; because the gods turned away; because an omen had been ignored.

And yet the phrase did not feel untrue.

It was the mundane ubiquity of it. Every family has some version of this story, even if a few generations removed: a woman who followed her husband into death before anyone could agree whether it was illness or will; an aunt who, after the call from the hospital, began taking to bed a little too often; an old uncle who stopped correcting everyone at the dining table; a grandfather who, after his wife died, walked more slowly across the room, hesitated before reaching for the TV remote, or just seemed briefly confused by the ordinary machinery of the house.

Today we like to think that people do not simply die of sadness. We expect a more precise explanation, something with the authority of medicine: a blocked artery, an arrhythmia, metastatic disease, respiratory failure, sepsis, the slow collapse of an organ that can be pointed to on a scan.

And yet, in Japan in 1990, doctors described a condition they called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, after the octopus trap whose shape the heart’s left ventricle can come to resemble when it is stunned by severe stress. Newspapers called it broken-heart syndrome, which sounds almost too sentimental, until one learns that grief, shock, illness, a violent argument, the loss of a loved one, or even fear itself, can sometimes produce symptoms indistinguishable from a heart attack.

There is a gendered aspect here too. More than ninety percent of reported cases are in women between the ages of fifty-eight and seventy-five, which makes one think of all the older women whose hearts have been asked, for decades, to absorb the shocks of everyone else’s lives — husbands, children, and families — the price of being, for multiple generations, the Minister for Emotional Regulation of every household.

Most people recover. But in rare cases it can be fatal. So perhaps “died of sadness” is not quite as foolish as our modern selves want it to be.

James Baldwin once warned:

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

I used to read that line as a warning about the obligation of not wounding the person who has entrusted themselves to you. But perhaps it is simpler than that too. To love someone is to let the body learn another person: their presence, their moods, their hunger, the sound of them moving in the next room. One’s happiness becomes partly — or entirely — dependent on another’s happiness. One’s irritation too.

And when that person is gone, what happens then?

Joan Didion, writing after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, says in The Year of Magical Thinking:

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

There is almost nothing in the sentence, which is perhaps why it is the single most articulate statement on grief I’ve ever read. It is the utter ordinariness of the thought that makes it so lethal.

I am currently reading Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and in it, a widow remembers the sweetness of having someone with whom to talk about the little things.

How sweet it was when one could undo the lethargy of time by chatting with someone about the little things. You could always find a person to converse with over the larger matters — a government scandal, the delayed monsoons — but it was the tiny concerns, the moment’s observations, that you couldn’t save up to tell, for you didn’t even recognize their full potential to add meaning to life unless you articulated their humor, tragedy, menace, or charm.

At coffee in Lodhi Gardens, a friend said that given everything Satrapi had been through — revolution, exile — she had somehow hoped she would survive heartbreak too.

But sometimes it is not the great catastrophes of a well-lived life that undoes a person but the smallest pressure afterwards, the way a branch, already weathered by the monsoon, can finally snap under the weight of a myna.

Two weeks ago, travelling by road while looking out at this year’s first rains, I wrote in my notebook:

My mother and I have a habit of stopping for flowers: a champa fallen on the road, a hibiscus opened too widely in someone’s compound, a frangipani tree leaning over a wall, or the orange-speckled parijats that bloom in the night and fall by morning, as if they were interested only in being admired by the moon.

The other night, while walking after dinner, she said, “Anyone who doesn’t stop to smell the flowers has a melancholic ambivalence about them,” which was such a needlessly elaborate sentence that I laughed and made a mental note to write it down.

A little later we passed the mogra plant by our building. The flowers had opened after dark, sending out their particular sweetness into the lane, over parked scooters and water stains and stray dogs.

We stopped and stood there for a moment.

Then she walked ahead.

I plucked a single flower and ran after her.

She took it, smiled, and continued walking.

Later that night, when I went to say goodnight, I saw that she had kept the mogra beside her pillow.

A few days later I saw two bougainvillaea flowers, their papery pink bracts arranged so perfectly that they looked like the wings of a butterfly. I took a photograph of them, because for a second they really did look as if they might lift from the vine.

Heartbreak is not the opposite of love but one of its afterlives: it is the interruption of an old habit, that of turning towards someone.

Love is a mogra pressed beside your mother’s pillow.

It is looking out at the season’s first rain and saying: Hey, come here. Sit with me.

It is seeing two bougainvillaea flowers that look like the wings of a butterfly, taking a picture, and sending it to someone.

Love is often just the presence of someone to whom you can point the most ordinary thing and say: Look.

He used the word vasooli, which is an untranslatable Hindi word that means something close to recovering a return on investment or getting back what is owed. You might use it for a debt or a bad film you want to extract some value from because the ticket was too expensive. But here it was being used for a woman; more specifically, for sexual entitlement. The implication was clear enough to everyone in that room: I paid for dinner, therefore something is owed to me.

After the clip went viral, there was outrage, an apology, a firing, and then the familiar second-order debate about consequences, cancellation, and whether a young man’s life should be damaged over one obscene joke. But what I still can’t get my head around is not just what Jangra said, but the room full of other men who laughed throughout the punchline. Before the outrage and the firing, the room rewarded him.

Sukhmani Malik, writing recently in The Indian Express about the surprising success of the campus romance Off Campus and the horror film Obsession, helped me understand why the reaction of that room stayed with me. Her argument is that both works are responding to women’s exhaustion with the manosphere, though they do so from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Off Campus offers a fantasy in which men are emotionally literate, attentive, and capable of treating women as equals; Obsession, which I saw yesterday, explores what happens when loneliness, entitlement, and resentment curdle into something darker. The film is, as Ekta Sinha writes in Elle India, a “grotesque metaphor for [the] entitlement of men believing women can be emotionally manufactured into loving them back.”

I haven’t seen Off Campus yet, but the pull, a friend told me, wasn’t just the handsome hockey players or the romance plot. There is a scene, she said, where two male characters speak to each other about consent in a gym when there are no women in the room. That, to her, was the ultimate fantasy: Men speaking to other men about consent.

That observation stayed with me because it seemed to answer the question I had after watching the biryani clip. What happens when conversations about healthy masculinity are happening everywhere except between men themselves?

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, the journalist Helen Lewis talks about “masculinism”: the broader ideological project gathering around the manosphere. Lewis’ point is that this is no longer only about influencers like Andrew Tate selling protein powder, dating advice, and resentment. There is a more coherent political worldview emerging behind it; one that sees feminism as a mistake, equality as a failed experiment, and modern society as having somehow emasculated men.

Once you start looking for it, that nostalgia is everywhere. A longing for a time when men were men and women were women. A time before women entered the workplace in large numbers, before divorce became easier, before the family became more negotiable, and before gender became something people could negotiate rather than unquestioningly inherit.

In the American version, as Klein and Lewis discuss it, this nostalgia often fixes on the 1950s: here, the archetype is the ordered household that has a male breadwinner, a female homemaker, and a ‘happy’ suburban family. At other times, it wanders further back: to Sparta, Rome, Christian patriarchy, or whatever other era can be brought up to serve the point. The details keep changing but the vibes do not: modernity has gone wrong because men are no longer man enough and women are no longer woman enough.

The Indian version I have seen recently tends to revolve around “family values”, “our culture”, the rising divorce rate, the decline of marriage, the idea that women have become too independent and men have become too soft. It surfaces at family events and in WhatsApp forwards, in jokes about women who earn too much or refuse to “adjust” or in the idea that every failed relationship is another data point in evidence of civilisational decline.

In both these contexts, much of the longing attaches itself to real anxieties. Families are changing; marriage is changing; dating is genuinely confusing. Yes, many men are lonely and many women are exhausted. Most of us are navigating relationships without the older certainties that once organised family and obligation. A man may no longer know what he is supposed to be and a woman may no longer be willing to become what others expect of her.

But the cure being sold is wrong: women have become too free, men have become too soft, and so we need to restore an older order where men are providers and women are dependents. The answer, still, is patriarchy with a podcast mic.

Much of this feels less like a recovery of tradition than an invention of it. The historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out how many “ancient traditions” turn out to be surprisingly recent constructions. The past becomes a repository for present anxieties. We imagine a simpler world, then go looking for evidence that it once existed.

This is what bothers me about so much talk of traditional masculinity, because which traditions are we actually talking about? The American suburban father? The Roman patriarch? The Spartan warrior? The Hindu householder? The village elder? The king? The monk? The ascetic? The poet? The man who renounces the world or the man who rules over it?

They are not the same person.

And yet, in the online imagination, they get flattened into one figure: dominant, heterosexual, cisgender, physically strong, emotionally contained, sexually successful, obeyed by women, admired by men, and always, always, always, certain of his place.

The sociologist R. W. Connell coined the term “hegemonic masculinity” to describe the culturally dominant ideal of manhood against which other men are measured. Crucially, she says, this ideal is often unattainable. Most men are not exceptionally wealthy, powerful, stoic, dominant or sexually successful. Yet the ideal still shapes behaviour because it becomes the standard by which men judge themselves and each other. Seen through that lens, the problem with the manosphere is not simply that it promotes a particular model of masculinity but that it promotes an exaggerated and increasingly brittle version of hegemonic masculinity while presenting it as natural and universal.

The rules are thus: A man must dominate, provide, and not be rejected. He must not be laughed at or be feminine. He cannot need reassurance or be confused. Oh, and he must certainly not admit that he is lonely unless that loneliness can be turned into an attack against women.

What this masculinity cannot do is tell a man what to do when he is not chosen or not powerful enough. The man has no inner life except grievance and the only language he is taught is that of blame. And almost always, the blame lands on women.

Most of us know this man. He may be a friend, a relative, a coworker, or the loudest voice in a WhatsApp group. And if we are honest, most of us have also been in the room when someone said something similar and decided it wasn’t worth challenging.

What makes this stranger still is that our own religious teachings — the same ones used by the Right when they talk of traditions — have rarely imagined masculinity so narrowly.

In an Indian context, Shiva is perhaps the most obvious example. He is terrifying as Bhairava, yes, but he is also Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. He is the destroyer, yes, but also the ascetic and husband, a yogi and a householder. In Ardhanarishvara — the form where Shiva and Parvati share a single body — masculinity is not made impure by the presence of the feminine. It is made whole instead.

Take Krishna too. He is a divine playboy who is adept at playing the flute and charming women, but he is also a friend, a strategist, a diplomat, a teacher, a child, a God. The emotional world around him is not built on conquest alone. It is built just as well on longing, intimacy, and surrender. The Bhakti imagination does not seem nearly as afraid of tenderness as many modern men are.

Even the Mahabharata, begins its most famous philosophical moment with a man falling apart. The great warrior Arjuna is standing on the battlefield and cannot go through with the war. His body starts trembling, his mouth dries, and his bow slips from his hand. He is not shown weak because of his hesitation; if anything, there would be no Gita without a man publicly acknowledging he is having an emotional breakdown over a moral dilemma.

Even outside India, the past is messier than the masculinity influencers want it to be. The ancient Greeks and Romans whom they like to invoke had their own brutal hierarchies and misogynies, but their worlds also contained forms of male intimacy and dependence that do not map neatly onto today’s anxious heteromasculinity. Achilles and Patroclus have been read more recently not only as comrades but as lovers. The point is not to paste modern identities onto ancient figures. It is to acknowledge that the past was never as clean as the people selling “traditional masculinity” pretend.

The old epics were often more complicated than the new podcasts.

That is the real giveaway. The men who talk most loudly about tradition often seem to know the least about it. They want the father, the warrior, the patriarch, and the king. They do not know what to do with the dancer, the mourner, the friend, or the devotee. They do not know how to hold space for the man who listens, the man who loves, the man who yearns, or the man who, to borrow from Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes.”

Male loneliness is real. I am not waving it away. But it’s equally true that women did not create it by becoming freer and they are not responsible for curing it by becoming smaller. What the manosphere does is take a real anxiety and attach a false cause.

When the biryani clip went viral, women did most of the explaining. They explained the misogyny inherent in the entitlement and used dark comedy to point out that their sanitary pads or lip gloss cost more than Jangra’s biryani. They said, again and again and again, that paying for dinner does not create a debt.

But they shouldn’t have to. The room should have gone quiet when a man said he would recover a ₹370 investment via a woman’s body. It didn’t. So the question is not just what kind of man says something like that. It is what kind of men laugh when he does.

And what happens when conversations about masculinity are happening everywhere except between men themselves?

And that is why I ask, where are the men?

Today, I woke up to a message from a friend: “What the hell is happening?” Attached was a screenshot of the rupee-dollar exchange rate, flashing at another all-time low. By Tuesday morning, the rupee had slipped past 95.68 against the dollar for the first time in history, as the West Asian conflict sent crude prices back above $100 a barrel. For anyone paying foreign university fees, planning travel, or simply watching imported prices climb, the panic felt immediate and personal.

The anger came quickly too. Social media filled with questions about economic management and anxieties about inflation and national decline. Speaking in Hyderabad two weeks ago, Prime Minister Modi urged Indians to reduce petrol and diesel use, take the metro, carpool, curb foreign travel, and work from home where possible — language that deliberately echoed the moral appeals of the Covid years: collective discipline and sacrifice for a national good.

Within hours, the images circulating were of his own convoy in Hyderabad — a sprawling line of vehicles that became an immediate punchline. “All these vehicles running on cow urine?” went one widely-shared retort from journalist and author Mrinal Pande. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi framed the appeal not as leadership but as evidence of its absence; stating the government was trying to shift the blame for “12 years of failures” onto the shoulders of the Indian public. Whatever one makes of the opposition’s motives, the image problem was real. Asking a population to carpool and take the metro, while moving through cities in a dozen-SUV cortege, is a hard sell.

But focusing only on the politics risks missing the larger story underneath the rupee’s fall.

India imports nearly 85% of its crude oil requirements, which means an oil shock rapidly becomes a currency shock. When crude prices surge, India needs vastly more dollars to pay for energy imports, and the rupee takes the pressure. The country spent $174.9 billion on crude and petroleum products in the financial year ended March 2026, some 22% of its total import bill. That number doesn’t shrink when geopolitics turns difficult.

The deeper paradox is this: the rupee’s vulnerability during a global energy crisis is also, in part, a consequence of India’s own development.

A richer, more industrialised, more mobile India consumes far more energy than it did two decades ago. More freight moves across highways. More factories operate across industrial clusters. More homes run air-conditioners during increasingly brutal summers. More people fly, more people drive, and more infrastructure gets built. These aren’t signs of waste — they’re what development looks like on the ground.

For decades, India’s low per capita energy consumption was treated as evidence of underdevelopment. Even today, the average Indian consumes roughly one-eighth the energy of the average American and about a third of the average Briton. But when hundreds of millions begin consuming more energy — which is precisely what development requires — import vulnerability rises too. India still suffers from enormous inefficiencies and deeply energy-intensive elite lifestyles, but a significant portion of its growing energy demand is structural: expanding freight networks, new factories, construction booms, electrified rail, data infrastructure, and a manufacturing push designed to position India as an alternative supply-chain hub to China.

The transition away from fossil fuels is underway. In June 2025, India reached 50% of installed power capacity from non-fossil sources, five years ahead of its Paris target. Railway electrification covered 99.6% of the broad-gauge network by March 2026. Around 1.4 million electric two-wheelers were sold in FY2026, making them the largest part of the EV market (although issues with the grid still persist for wider adoption). This is where India’s energy transition may look different from the West: less about expensive electric cars in suburban driveways, more about scooters, trains, dense cities and public transport. The direction is clear.

But installed capacity is not delivered energy. Non-fossil sources still accounted for only 29.2% of actual power generation in 2025–26. And electricity transition is not the same as oil transition. Freight trucks run on diesel, aviation depends overwhelmingly on jet fuel, and industrial logistics remain tied to hydrocarbons. A country of continental scale cannot decarbonise overnight while simultaneously industrialising, urbanising, and expanding living standards for hundreds of millions of people.

This is where simplistic climate debates tend to disconnect from the realities of developing countries. The question is not whether India should transition away from fossil fuels. It of course must. The question is how a country still climbing toward middle-income prosperity manages that transition without freezing the development it took generations to begin.

Europe industrialised first and decarbonised later. America built its prosperity on more than a century of cheap fossil fuel consumption. India is attempting something without clear precedent: industrialising at the exact moment the world is trying to move beyond fossil fuels altogether.

For years, Indians demanded the material markers of development that wealthier countries already enjoyed: mobility, infrastructure, manufacturing growth, reliable electricity, air-conditioning, logistics networks, and modern consumption. We are now living through the uncomfortable reality that these things require enormous amounts of energy — and that much of that energy, for now, still has to be bought in dollars.

The falling rupee is not simply a story of policy failure or market panic. It is also the sound of a developing country colliding with the limits of the geopolitical world it inherited.

As the politician Shashi Tharoor noted: a Hindu-majority constituency, Kalamassery, had elected a Muslim candidate; a Muslim-majority constituency, Thavanur, had elected a Christian candidate; and a Christian-majority constituency, Kochi, had elected another Muslim candidate.

In a country where every vote gets parsed as consolidation or backlash, where every candidate is their community first and a human second, those results were worth pausing on. It isn’t because they proved Kerala is a paradise of communal harmony — no place in India deserves that kind of romance — but because they interrupted a logic that has settled so deeply into our political language that we’ve stopped noticing it at all. Hindu seat. Muslim candidate. Minority consolidation. Majority backlash. These are concepts that start as analysis and somewhere along the way become fate.

When India became independent, it inherited a genuine problem: how do you hold together a country of this many faiths and languages without it tearing itself apart? The answer Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, offered was a particular kind of secularism where public life bracketed religion, kept faith out of serious political business, and treated India’s pluralism as something to be managed from above. In the wreckage of Partition, the instinct was understandable.

But the model he reached for was more at home on the shores of Europe than on the Subcontinent. It was not quite French laïcité, but it shared some of its discomfort with public religion: the belief that modern politics should keep faith at arm’s length, that the state’s neutrality depended on rising above religious life rather than learning how to live within it. France arrived at it through its own history of religious wars; Nehru, however, picked it up at Cambridge.

The problem is that it was never really true of India. In a country where the calendar runs on religious festivals, where every alley can become a procession route, and where your name often announces your community before you open your mouth, you cannot push faith into the private sphere without pretending it is not there. And when a State built by English-educated elites starts treating religion as something to be managed down, people notice. The resentment that builds from that feeling doesn’t dissipate. It simmers.

Hindu mobilisation from the 1980s onward drew heavily from exactly that grievance. The argument — that secularism had become a cover for treating Hinduism as the problem while protecting everyone else — wasn’t always a fair characterisation. But it landed because it pointed to something real: That the Nehruvian model had never seriously reckoned with what religion meant to most people, which was not a private matter to be kept indoors but the primary way they understood themselves and their place in the world. In trying to rise above India’s religious question, it quietly fed it.

But Kerala’s older coexistence was built on something completely different. It was not on religion being absent from public life, but on no single religion being able to claim the whole of it. And that distinction, between a secularism imposed from above and a pluralism that grew from the ground, is worth sitting with, because one of them has a two-thousand-year head start.

The modern-day state of Kerala is where St Thomas — the doubting Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles — is said to have arrived in 52 AD, finding a place already in conversation with the world. He landed at the ancient port of Muziris, near today’s Kodungallur, a city said to have been swallowed by a flood. Once one of the busiest ports on earth, it welcomed ships from Alexandria and the Red Sea in search for pepper and pearls. When St Thomas stepped ashore, he found Jewish traders who had already made their homes on the coast, some say since the time of King Solomon. Christianity in Kerala, then, was never a colonial import. It was indigenised from the beginning, speaking Malayalam but praying in Syriac. Even now, many Syrian Christian families speak of Brahmin ancestors who converted under St Thomas.

A few miles from Muziris, there’s another story. The Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kodungallur is often described as India’s first mosque. The legend goes that the Chera king Cheraman Perumal saw the moon split in the sky, sailed across the Arabian Sea, met the Prophet, embraced Islam, and asked that a mosque be built in his name. You can take it as history or legend (or both, which is probably the honest answer). But what struck me standing there was the building itself: sloping tiled roof, oil lamps, wood carvings, built entirely in the Kerala architectural language of its time. It doesn’t feel like something dropped onto the coast from Arabia, but like Islam translated into the idiom of Malabar.

What is striking, then, is not simply that Christianity and Islam arrived early in Kerala, but that they were, by and large, given room to take root. The older Hindu society of the coast did not always respond to new faiths as existential threats. Rulers granted land, communities accepted them, and converts often remained embedded in the social worlds from which they came.

I don’t intend to romanticise the past. Acceptance did not always mean equality. Kerala’s caste order could be brutal, and no serious account of the state’s past can pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between a society that absorbs difference unequally and one that sees every difference as invasion. Kerala’s older religious landscape seems to have done more of the former than the latter.

This matters not only for minorities, but for the Hindu majority too. A mosque that borrowed the architectural form of a temple and that doesn’t feel “out of place”, or a Christian family that remembers an older Hindu lineage, tells the older society that the new faith has not come merely to erase what was there before. Its difference remains real, but it is not rootless. It acknowledges the land it inhabits.

And so, what accumulated on this coast over millenia was not tolerance in any thin sense — a polite looking away from difference — but something closer to familiarity. Too many faiths had arrived, taken root, borrowed from each other, and left communities that remembered several pasts at once, for any single religion to convincingly claim ownership of the place. That is not just a constitutional achievement but a historical one.

At the Cheraman Juma Masjid, the caretaker who showed me around was a Hindu man named Tilakam. He didn’t offer his faith as a curiosity or a point of pride. He showed me how to do the wuzu, the ablution, before I could enter — matter-of-factly, the way you’d show someone where to leave their shoes outside a temple — then went back to watching over the mosque while the believers prayed inside. When I asked him about it, he spoke with pride about the Bhagavathy temple nearby, whose architecture this mosque was said to have borrowed. His religion wasn’t set aside. It was just there, alongside everything else.

I’ve been thinking about such stories a lot. Travelling through India’s sacred geography this past year, the people I kept meeting who moved most easily between faiths — who’d leave flowers at a dargah and light a lamp at a temple or a candle at a church and think nothing of it — were not people who had loosened their grip on their own religion. If anything, it was the opposite. They were at ease with someone else’s faith precisely because they were settled in their own. It’s a different thing entirely from the discomfort with religion that runs through a particular kind of Indian liberalism: the instinct to treat public devotion as backwardness, to see the person prostrating at a temple or clutching a rosary as someone who hasn’t quite caught up yet. That instinct doesn’t just misread India. It leaves the conversation about faith entirely to people who want to turn it into a weapon, and then seems surprised when the weapon keeps working.

The way out of religious nationalism may not be less religion. It may be the ability to be rooted enough in one’s own practice not to need anyone else’s diminishment. That is not easy, especially for minorities. To belong to another faith and still feel fully at home requires more than liberal slogans. It requires a dense sense of community, a world in which difference is not treated as a problem to be solved but as part of what makes the place what it is.

Kerala has more of that than most places, not because its people are less devout, but because they have never had the luxury of pretending that faith belongs to only one community. It should be acknowledged that its politics has mattered too. A long Communist presence did not erase religion from Kerala, but it did help train public life around ideas of class, welfare, education, unions and community rather than religious identity alone. People still remained Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew. But they were also workers, voters, neighbours, party members, students, migrants, beneficiaries of public services, and participants in a shared civic life.

When the mosque you enter is built in the style of a Hindu temple and watched over by a Hindu caretaker, or when the synagogue you visit shares a wall with a temple, on land granted by a Hindu ruler, and is now watched over by a Christian caretaker, as at the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry, the story of religion as siege and conquest begins to feel like someone else’s story. It feels imported from somewhere that never had this coast’s particular history.

This is why last week’s election results matter.

Voters in Kerala crossed lines they are increasingly told they cannot cross. I don’t think it’s because they forgot their religion. I don’t think they floated above history as abstract citizens. I think they simply refused to let one part of identity decide everything — and in doing so drew on a habit that no constitution can manufacture and no government can install from above. It is older than the nation, older than the political parties, older than the word secularism itself.

Across India, every political act is being read as a communal act. A Muslim candidate’s victory becomes Muslim consolidation. A Hindu candidate’s becomes Hindu assertion. A mosque becomes a historical grievance and a temple becomes a civilisational claim. Kerala is not immune to this — the national mood has arrived here too, albeit a little less loudly.

The argument India keeps having about secularism — whether to have it, what it means, whose faith it marginalises — is still largely the argument Nehru framed: constitutional, conducted in English, and trying to settle from above what was never going to be settled from above. Kerala suggests a different starting point. Not a principle borrowed from elsewhere but a practice built here, over two thousand years, by people who had no choice but to figure out how to share a coast.

Kerala’s coexistence is not untouched by history. It is made of history. Maybe that’s what it means, in the end, for this to be ‘God’s Own Country’ as its tourism brochures won’t let us forget. It’s not because any one god claimed it, but because so many gods came here and made it their home.

On a Wednesday morning in Hyderabad, on the banks of the Osman Sagar reservoir, I stood inside the Chilkur Balaji Temple and watched people walking in circles. They call it the ‘Visa Temple’ — a shrine where the city’s software engineers pray for H-1Bs and students seek blessings before consulate appointments. I had expected some theatre of aspiration. But I found people moving in overlapping loops around a modest central shrine, some slowly, eyes lowered, lips murmuring, others with the brisk urgency of commuters late for work. The rhythm was simple: make eleven rounds to ask, then come back for one hundred and eight to give thanks if your wish was granted.

Many clutched small cards printed with numbers from one to one hundred and eight, crossing each square with a pen as they completed another round, occasionally pausing to check their count, to reassure themselves that nothing had been missed.

Some cards were yellow, others blue or pink or pale green, picked up from boxes at the entrance or handed out by vendors outside, many already softened by sweat and handling. They were creased, smudged with dust and fingerprints and consulted like exam schedules or fitness trackers.

Outside the main gate, before I had even entered, a small informal market had grown around the temple. Vendors sold garlands of tulsi leaves, coconuts, incense sticks, plastic idols, laminated pictures, strings of beads, trinkets of every description. One of them, a man with permanently sunburnt skin and hands scented with basil, introduced himself as Ranjan. He had been working here for nearly twenty years and was trying to sell me a sixteen-foot tulsi garland which, according to him, would expedite my wish.

“People think it’s only for visas,” he told me. “That’s just how it became famous.”

What I was seeing at Chilkur wasn’t entirely unique. Across India, a number of temples and shrines have, over time, acquired reputations for helping devotees secure visas or overseas travel. In Ahmedabad, applicants visit the Chamatkari Hanuman Temple, which has earned the nickname ‘Visa Hanuman’, and in Punjab, the Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh Gurudwara is filled with toy aeroplanes offered by those hoping to go abroad.

This kind of specificity is not new. Indian devotional practice has long accommodated highly particular, even transactional, forms of prayer — for recovery from specific illness or for success in exams or court cases — often tied to specific deities or sites believed to be especially effective. What has changed is the object of anxiety. In that sense, Chilkur is more like an update: a sacred space absorbing the pressures of globalisation, just as earlier temples absorbed the uncertainties of everyday life.

“So what else is it for, if not just visas?” I asked Ranjan.

“Life,” he said simply. “Business. Health. Marriage. Court cases. Exams. People come when life is stuck.”

“And many like this temple because it doesn’t take any donations, no fees, nothing. You can only give your effort. So people buy garlands from us instead.” He gestured at the other vendors lining the path. “We are the only ones who take money here so if you want to contribute to the temple, it should be here,” he said, as any good salesman would.

Inside, this ethic was written into the laminated notices pinned to the walls, and into the small print on the reverse of the tally cards. The text, in Telugu, instructs devotees to perform the rounds with sincerity and patience, to return in gratitude once wishes are fulfilled, to avoid haste or carelessness, to maintain humility and concentration. It emphasises that the vow is not a bargain but an act of faith, rooted in long tradition. It concludes with a short prayer asking Balaji to grant health, peace, prosperity, and freedom from obstacles.

As I stepped into the moving wave of bodies to begin my own circumambulations, a low chant rose above the shuffle of feet.

Govinda. Govinda. Govinda. It was another name of Balaji, the local incarnation of Vishnu as Venkateswara, the giver of boons, and it was repeated by devotees until it became one steady hum, synchronising breath and movement.

After completing my eleven circles, I stepped aside toward the outer edge of the courtyard, where several people were sitting quietly, watching the flow of bodies. There I noticed a man standing slightly apart from the crowd, hands folded, gaze shifting between the shrine and the moving devotees, as though deciding whether to join them.

His name, he later told me, was Taran. He worked in IT and had grown up visiting the temple with his parents. He had come here more times than he could remember.

“I always stand here first,” he said, when I asked why he lingered. “Before I start walking.” Otherwise, he explained, the ritual risked becoming mechanical, reduced to exercise rather than intention.

“When I was younger, it was very quiet,” he added, glancing at the moving crowd. “Now it’s like this every day.”

I asked him how long his family had been coming here. “My whole life,” he said. “My grandfather used to bring my mother. We never went to Tirupati like other families did,” he said, referencing the most famous of India’s Balaji temples. “We came here.” He paused, watching a group of young people move past, phones briefly checked before pockets swallowed them again. “My grandfather told me a story once, when I was maybe eight or nine. About why this place exists.”

He shifted his weight.

“There was a devotee, a long time ago, who used to make the pilgrimage to Tirupati every year. One year he fell too ill to travel. That night, Lord Venkateshwara appeared in his dream and told him not to worry, that he was already nearby, waiting in the jungle.” Taran gestured vaguely toward the grounds around us, as though we were standing in the forest of that legend. “The devotee followed the vision to a patch of forest and found a mound of earth. He started digging. His axe struck something beneath the soil and blood began to flow—pooling, spreading, staining the ground red.”

I must have looked startled because Taran smiled faintly. “That’s how my grandfather told it. Very dramatic. A voice instructed the devotee to flood the mound with cow’s milk, and when he did, the earth gave way to reveal a self-manifested idol of Balaji, flanked by his consorts Sridevi and Bhoodevi. The temple was built around that mound.”

Did he believe it?

He thought for a moment. “I believed it completely when I was eight. Now?” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it happened exactly like that. But I know this place has been here for centuries. I know my family kept coming back instead of going to Tirupati, even though Tirupati is grander and more famous. There was a reason for that.”

In the late 1990s, according to newspaper accounts, Chilkur had barely been visited, drawing only a handful of devotees each week. Its priest, C.S. Gopala Krishna, had returned from a corporate career to care for his ageing father and inherited a largely forgotten shrine.

Then Hyderabad reinvented itself as ‘Cyberabad’, courting multinational companies and building glass-fronted offices. Students from newly established technical colleges began passing through the area, many of whom were struggling to secure U.S. visas in an increasingly restrictive environment. They came to the temple with their anxieties and Gopala Krishna encouraged them to walk eleven rounds and pray. He reassured them in English. Over time, stories of successful applications circulated, the temple acquired its nickname, and by the mid-2000s, Chilkur was receiving tens of thousands of visitors each week.

When I mentioned the temple’s reputation for visas and passports, Taran laughed. “That’s just what people call it,” he said. “Balaji doesn’t have a passport office.”

Then, more thoughtfully: “When Hyderabad became tech-focused, everyone wanted to leave. So people started coming here for that. When it worked for some, the story spread.”

Did he believe the temple caused those successes?

“I think when you’re anxious,” he said, “you look for places where things have worked before. And I do believe that Balaji makes wishes come true, whatever they may be.”

Chilkur, over time, had become a repository of such stories, a database of favourable outcomes that showed that faith could grow alongside globalisation (or sometimes because of it). I had come on a Wednesday morning, which meant I missed the weekend crowds—the young IT professionals and nervous students who, by most accounts, fill the temple grounds on Saturdays and Sundays, passports sometimes tucked into bags, interview dates circled on calendars. But their presence saturates the temple’s reputation. Online forums and travel reviews overflow with testimonials. A systems analyst whose H-1B paperwork had stalled for three months reported that his visa was approved within days of visiting Chilkur. A game developer described his renewal interview as effortless: “They asked me a single question and told me my visa is approved,” he said, adding the temple had “always been a lucky charm for me.” A twenty-two-year-old woman heading to New York for her master’s degree put it more carefully: “I got the visa because of my capability of course, but I have luck of god as well.”

On one forum, amid the success stories, a parent once asked whether they could complete the rounds on behalf of a child stuck abroad. The question, to this day, remains unanswered. And given the fact that at its peak, the temple reportedly receives seventy-five thousand visitors a week, the arithmetic alone suggests that many wishes must go unfulfilled.

Yet people keep coming. And perhaps that persistence is itself the point. It is tempting, especially for urban, English-speaking observers, to read Chilkur as a parody of modern India: faith bending to neoliberal aspiration, God enlisted in the service of Silicon Valley. But that reading is too thin. What Chilkur reflects more honestly is uncertainty.

For decades, upward mobility in India has been mediated by opaque systems: competitive exams, visa lotteries, unpredictable job markets, institutional gatekeeping. Outcomes often feel arbitrary and preparation does not guarantee success. In such environments, ritual becomes a way of restoring agency. You walk, you count, you mark, and you complete. You do something.

Near the edge of the inner courtyard, next to a small Shiva shrine, I met two young men, Karan and Gopal, college friends. One was preparing for government exams. The other had recently started a small company. Both looked tired in the way young men do when their futures depend on systems they cannot see clearly.

“Everything depends on timing,” Karan said. “Exams, interviews, funding. You prepare for years. Then one day decides everything.”

Did prayer help?

“It helps you keep going,” Gopal replied.

“I’ll still study,” Karan said. “I’ll still apply. But here I feel… aligned.”

Aligned with what?

“With effort,” he said, after thinking. “With the idea that trying matters.”

On my way out, I stopped again at Ranjan’s stall. A young woman in her twenties stood nearby, neatly dressed, her accent suggesting she was not from Hyderabad. We spoke briefly. She worked at an electronics firm in HITEC City and had a U.S. tourist visa interview coming up — her first trip abroad, if it came through. Her friends had told her to visit Chilkur, she said, almost apologetically.

I never learned her name, but something about her stayed with me: the slight embarrassment in her voice, the way she held her tally card as though it were simultaneously precious and faintly absurd. She embodied what I had been seeing all morning: people who weren’t sure it would work, and who had come anyway.

“Did you wish for something?” Ranjan asked me, still tying garlands.

“I did,” I said.

He smiled. “Then next time you come, you’ll do one hundred and eight. Now that you’ve asked Govinda, your prayers will be fulfilled. I’ll see you then.”

As I walked back toward my car, I passed the banyan tree behind Ranjan’s stall, where I had seen some devotees earlier circling and tying threads. At its base, scattered among the roots and pressed into the earth, lay several discarded tally cards. I crouched down to look at them more closely. Their numbers were fully crossed out, their grids completed, ink smudged from repeated handling and folding. Someone had finished, someone had returned, someone had once stood where I was standing, anxious and counting, and had later come back in gratitude, crossing out the final square before leaving the card behind.

For those of us still doing eleven rounds, it was strangely reassuring to see them.

I straightened up and looked back toward the temple entrance. The young woman from Ranjan’s stall was beginning her rounds now, card in hand, joining the moving current of bodies. I watched her complete one circle, then two, then lost sight of her in the crowd. In a few weeks she would stand in a queue outside a consulate, documents in hand, and someday after that — hopefully in gratitude — she might return.

On my way to Dassam Falls last month, a natural waterfall at one edge of the Ranchi plateau in Jharkhand, the car slowed as we entered Taimara village. I perked up to see what was causing the fuss and there it was: a bamboo pole across the road. Two children, neither older than ten, held it in place like an official barricade.…

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The road from Dzuleke to Kohima drops you from forest silence into hill-city noise within a couple of hours. After three days in Nagaland, two of them in villages where the loudest sound was the crowing of roosters early in the mornings, Kohima felt abrupt. Then the cathedral appeared.

It sat on Aradura …

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Most of you know I grew up in Oman. My family moved to Muscat in 2001, a few months before September 11. I was six then. I’ve written about this before, and I won’t rehash it, except to say that when you spend twelve years somewhere as a child, the place doesn’t stay foreign to you. And when you see it on a news ticker getting hit by drones, the reaction can’t just be analytical. It’s personal.

So here’s what happened. For months, Oman had been mediating between the US and Iran. Since 2025, there were rounds in Muscat, one in Rome, and the latest at the residence of Oman’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva on February 26th.

On Friday the 27th, Oman’s foreign minister Badr al-Busaidi even gave an interview on CBS saying that a deal was within reach. By Omani standards this was the equivalent of putting up a billboard in Times Square. The Omanis don’t do public; something that even Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute called “quite unprecedented.” But Albusaidi looked at the camera and told the American public that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium and full IAEA verification. “A peace deal is within our reach,” he said, “if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

Parsi’s read was that Albusaidi went public so that Americans would know how close peace had been, before what came next came next. But on Saturday, the US and Israel struck Iran and Khamenei — as well as much of the senior military leadership — were killed.

Then Iran hit back. Missiles and drones flew across the Gulf, aimed at US bases, but landing on a lot more than that. Bahrain. Kuwait. Qatar. Saudi Arabia. The UAE. Jordan. The Crown Plaza hotel in Manama. Airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Ras Laffan in Qatar. The Qataris shot down two Iranian fighter jets that had entered their airspace heading towards Doha.

But what was even more surprising was that Oman got hit too. Duqm Port, on the Arabian Sea, took two drones on March 1st. An oil tanker was attacked off Muscat, killing a crew member. Another was hit near Khasab in the Musandam peninsula, injuring four. And then on Tuesday, Duqm’s fuel tanks were struck again.

Iran’s explanation was a study in institutional embarrassment. The General Staff said it hadn’t ordered strikes on Omani territory. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, called it the work of military units acting on general instructions. Oman was a “friend and neighbour,” they insisted. I suppose the drones weren’t briefed.

But Albusaidi called Araghchi anyway. On the call, Araghchi said Tehran was open to de-escalation and Albusaidi relayed the message to the international community.

I should explain why Oman was the one carrying these messages.

If you’ve never been to Oman, picture the one person at a dinner party who somehow keeps their composure while everyone else gets progressively louder and angrier with each other. Nobody quite notices them until two guests who aren’t speaking need someone to go say something on their behalf. That’s Oman. I won’t call it passivity — I’ve watched Omanis bargain in the Muttrah souq and they are not passive people — but it’s a kind of institutional patience that extends all the way up.

Part of it is religious. Most Omanis are Ibadhi, a school of Islam that predates and sits outside the Sunni-Shia divide. This frees Muscat from the sectarian logic that has consumed so much of the region. Its constitution explicitly prohibits religious discrimination and geography also reinforces the instinct: a maritime border with Iran across the Strait of Hormuz to the north, a land border with Yemen to the south, and oil reserves small enough that the country needs its neighbours to be stable in a way that Abu Dhabi, say, can afford to care about slightly less.

But mostly it’s accumulated practice. Oman has been doing this for decades, and each time it chose not to take a side, it paid a price for the choice, and then was proved right later when the people who had been angry with it needed a back-channel.

Take Yemen. When the Saudi-led coalition launched its intervention in 2015, every GCC state joined except Oman. Muscat said no, opened its borders to Yemenis locked out by the blockade, and started hosting Houthi delegations. A friend asked me at the time whether this “talking to everyone, committing to no one” was just convenient. I didn’t have a great answer then, but ten years later, when Washington needed someone to broker a truce with the Houthis to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, Oman was the only country in the room that both sides would talk to. That’s not convenience. That’s the payoff for a decade of absorbing grief from allies who’d wanted it to take sides.

Even during the Iran-Iraq war, Oman kept quiet channels open between the US and Iran. When Obama needed somewhere to run the secret talks that became the 2015 nuclear deal, it was Muscat. When the Saudis and Iranians needed to start speaking again in 2021, it was Muscat again. The China-brokered Saudi-Iran deal that everyone credits to Beijing? Oman hosted the early rounds that made it possible.

There’s more. Not joining the Qatar blockade in 2017 cost Muscat goodwill with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Refusing the Abraham Accords — on the grounds that normalisation without Palestinian statehood was premature — has annoyed Washington for years. Each of these decisions was strategic and the balance has always been that when a crisis comes and nobody trusts anybody, they trust Oman. And the reason they trust Oman is that Oman never belonged to any of them.

What happened last weekend tests that arrangement in a way nothing else has.

Qatar cut communication with Tehran after being hit. Al-Ansari said they hadn’t “resumed communication with the Iranians since their attacks on our sovereignty.” Fair enough. If someone fires cruise missiles at your airport, the phone call can wait.

But Oman, which was also hit, took the call. Albusaidi listened to Araghchi say Iran wanted peace, then told the world.

The country whose messages you’ve been carrying for months sends drones into your port, and you pick up when they ring. From the outside it looks absurd. From inside the logic of what Oman has always done, it would have been stranger not to answer.

This is what I can’t stop thinking about. Not just the strikes on Oman, which are bad enough, but what it means if the function Oman performs gets broken. Every de-escalation in this region that I can think of, going back decades, had an Omani hand in it somewhere.

Oman made a bet a long time ago that being useful to everyone was worth more than being aligned to any particular side, and has spent fifty years paying the costs of that bet, and the bet kept paying off. Until, maybe, now.

If Oman stops being able to do this — if the accumulated strikes and the Hormuz closure and the sheer frustration of being in the middle of a shooting war grinds it down — then the next time Iran and America need to talk without admitting they’re talking, where do they go? Who carries the message?

I don’t have an answer to it. Albusaidi says the off-ramps are still there. I hope the powers that be take it.

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The Robe and The Sword by Sonia Faleiro

Fourth Estate India, December 2025

Buddhism travels well. In the West, it has found an afterlife in the mindfulness aisle: wrapped in incense, translated into wellness, reduced to a symbol of zen and calm in a distracted, overworked world. It is often imagined as the peaceful religion, insulated from the fanaticism or violence we associate with others. Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword dismantles that comforting fiction.

“Attaining nirvana can wait,” declares Galagoda Gnanasara, a Sri Lankan monk and leader of the Buddhist nationalist organisation Bodu Bala Sena. The remark came in the wake of anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence, and its power lies not in what it rejects, but in what it prioritises instead. In Faleiro’s account, this fusion of sacred duty and worldly domination is the engine driving militant Buddhist nationalism across South and Southeast Asia.

Faleiro’s book is a calm, deeply reported account of how Buddhist authority — or more precisely, institutions speaking in its name — has been harnessed to defend majoritarian dominance across Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. The robe, in her telling, is not a veil but a uniform: a garment that lends sacred legitimacy to acts that would otherwise look indefensible. “The monks leading these violent movements,” she writes, are “driven not by a pursuit of nirvana in the next life, but by a quest for dominance in this one.”

Structured in three parts — one per country — the book blends journalistic rigour with the accessibility of narrative nonfiction. What emerges isn’t simply the story of Buddhist extremism, but the machinery that enables it: the sacralising of the nation, the invention of enemies, the rhetorical laundering of violence into moral duty.

The Sri Lanka section is the most developed. Since independence, the island’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority has increasingly positioned itself as both guardian and embodiment of the nation. The Sinhala-Only Act of 1956, often remembered as a linguistic policy, becomes in Faleiro’s telling something more foundational: the state’s first major gesture of exclusion, forcing minorities to learn a language that was never theirs.

What’s most unsettling is how adaptable this architecture of fear proves to be. For decades, the Tamil Hindu was the primary object of suspicion. After the LTTE’s defeat in the country’s decades-long civil war, that narrative didn’s disappear but mutated — the Muslim, and to some extent the Christian, began to replace the Hindu in the national imagination, recast as proxies for invisible networks and global conspiracies. After all, “Sri Lanka,” as one Reuters journalist tells her bluntly, “always needs an enemy.”

Faleiro shows how theology bends to serve power. Ahimsa, the principle of non-violence, is not discarded so much as edited, with exceptions made to uphold dharma. The Mahavamsa, a sixth-century chronicle, is deployed to argue that Sri Lanka was chosen by the Buddha himself to protect his teachings, and therefore those who endanger Buddhism endanger the island. Violence, in this worldview, becomes not only permissible, but righteous.

In Myanmar, religion and nationalism were entangled from the start. Under British rule, Indians — Hindu and Muslim — were brought into Burma as clerks, traders, and labourers. They became visible in ways native Burmese, systematically excluded from certain colonial privileges, were not.

One of the book’s most quietly striking details concerns U Ottama — the monk once dubbed the “Burmese Gandhi,” who at one point led the Hindu Mahasabha. There is something almost shocking about that porousness now, the possibility of cross-religious political affiliation, a throwback to the shared struggle against colonial rule. What replaced it wasn’t merely a rigid identity, but suspicion: the sense that anyone with divided loyalties might be an agent of something larger and dangerous. This hardening of boundaries is the soil in which later horrors grew.

By the time Ashin Wirathu, leader of the 969 Movement and dubbed “the face of Buddhist terror” by TIME magazine in 2013, rose to prominence, the architecture was already in place. His sermons gave spiritual sanction to the military’s persecution of the Rohingya, dehumanising an entire population before expelling them. The colonial regime’s extractive footprint — Burmese bodies used to fight imperial wars; teak, gemstones, and labour siphoned out — becomes a backdrop for why postcolonial identity hardens the way it does, but Faleiro is careful not to let history become excuse.

What links Sri Lanka and Myanmar, then, is the colonial wound: the sense that supposed “outsiders” were privileged while the true sons of the soil were sidelined, and that independence meant not just political sovereignty but the restoration of a Buddhist order, with the robe becoming the garment of reclamation.

Thailand, the third case study, sits differently. Never formally colonised, it lacks the same postcolonial grievance narrative — and yet Buddhist nationalism persists, suggesting the pattern is not reducible to colonial trauma alone. Here the alliance of monarchy and sangha is longstanding, and Faleiro is good at showing how it shapes the moral order. One of her most useful observations concerns how hierarchy is literally staged in ritual: in Myanmar, monks are seated above the military, while in Thailand, it is the king first, then the royal family, and only then the monks. Even sacred authority has its rank order. If there is one critique, it is that this section feels more subdued and somewhat compressed into the frame established by the other two — Thailand’s particular entanglement of crown, military, and clergy might warrant a different kind of attention.

Overall, though, Faleiro also surfaces a less discussed layer of this story: Buddhism’s patriarchal scaffolding, particularly in Theravāda traditions. Male monks hold institutional power and privileges systematically denied to women, from legal recognition to ordination to education. These hierarchies matter because they show how extremist monks aren’t anomalies operating outside the system, but are amplified by a structure already primed to elevate certain voices and silence others.

Faleiro doesn’t argue that Buddhism is uniquely vulnerable to violence. Her point is that no religion is exempt from the temptation to serve power. She neither demonises monks nor romanticises minorities, but questions what happens when statehood is draped in sanctity, when nationhood is sermonised, when law gives way to liturgy?

This feels particularly urgent now, in a world where religious nationalism has become one of the most portable ideologies on earth. The Robe and the Sword shows how extremism rarely arrives with fanfare. It creeps in sanctified and sermonised, dressed in virtue. Faleiro’s achievement is to show that the robe is not always what it appears to be — that the aesthetically pleasing version carried to the West is part of the story — and that sometimes, the most effective weapon is the one that looks like peace.

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Goa was abuzz with its annual arts festival when I found a table at a café in Panaji last month. Artists and curators occupied most of the tables, laptops open, festival lanyards still around their necks. I’d found a table near the window and was trying to read, but kept getting distra…

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The sleeper bus pulls out of Goa sometime after 7pm, and I realise almost immediately that I’ve made a mistake. I’d booked the cheapest lower berth, right at the back, without understanding why it cost less — and now I know: it sits directly above the rear wheel, which means every crack and pothole travels straight u…

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We were inside Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, in a small gallery towards the end where a row of artefacts sits behind a thinning rope, when my friend finally stopped in front of a large brass Ganesha and said, “Okay, at some point, I want to know his story. Why the elephant head and the human body?”

I had been travelling with four friends from the UK, and all of them turned towards me with the same look: curiosity mixed with that slightly bewildered readiness people have when they know a long story is coming. I recognised that look. I also knew that whatever I said next would be incomplete.

I told them the version I grew up with: Parvati forming a child from the dirt of her skin to stand guard while she bathed; Shiva arriving unannounced and, unable to recognise his own son, beheading him; the elephant head brought as a form of reparation to bring the boy back to life. I even added the extra detail of the one broken tusk Ganesha snapped off to use as a pen when he wrote the Mahabharata as Sage Vyasa dictated it.

But even as I spoke, I could feel the familiar problem. They were hearing the story but were unaware of the architecture holding it up. How do I explain everything that sits around that one tale? It was like trying to explain a single character from the Lord of the Rings without being able to reference the Ring, or Mordor, or the entire gamut of mythology Tolkien built around it, except this universe wasn’t invented by one author but accreted over millennia — wasn’t fiction but faith — and was woven into the daily life of a billion people.

How do I explain that the elephant-headed god’s brother is the six-headed Kartikeya, the god who rides a peacock? That their father, Shiva, is the destroyer of worlds, who holds the river Ganga in the matted locks of his hair and whose neck is blue because he drank poison to save the cosmos? How do I explain the snake coiled around his throat, the crescent moon in his hair, the tiger skin he wears?

How do I explain that Parvati, Durga, and Kali are the same goddess in different moods and forms? That the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva governs creation, preservation, and destruction, and that the cities we were visiting all have Tripolia gates named after them, woven so casually into the landscape that most people don’t even notice?

How do I explain Ardhanarishvara, the version of Shiva and Shakti fused into one body? That millennia before the German bishop and polymath Nicholas of Cusa suggested the concept of coniunctio oppositorum, arguing that contradictory ideas can be reconciled in an ultimate reality, on the Indian subcontinent a deity was worshipped that was literally half-male, half-female, meant to symbolise that the universe is built from complement, not opposition.

And how do I explain that Narasimha, half-lion and half-man, looks like a demon but isn’t one, instead being an avatar of Vishnu? That we don’t have a concept of the devil, only beings on spectrums of chaos and order, black and white?

How do I explain all of this without giving a full lecture on metaphysics, and once you start explaining metaphysics, where do you stop?

At Chittorgarh — India’s largest fort complex that, at one time, housed over a hundred temples — the guide pointed to yakshas carved into the lowest rungs of temple bases: bent, contorted figures carrying the weight of the structure above them. “They were placed here,” he said, “to trap their chaotic and malevolent energy, so it wouldn’t wander into the village.” Yakshas aren’t gods, but neither are they demons. They occupy a category that doesn’t translate neatly.

At that point another of my friends whispered, half confused, half amused, “Your religion is impossible to follow.” I agreed, because it is expansive. A worldview built from pluralities, not hard doctrines.

Standing in that small gallery in Hawa Mahal with four expectant faces in front of me, I felt a mixture of awe and inadequacy. Awe at the vastness of what I come from, and inadequacy at the impossibility of translating it on command.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try. Over those days in Rajasthan, I talked about the grandeur of Jaipur’s maharajas, about the Mughals and the Indo-Persian architecture that borrowed the best of both worlds. At Amber Fort, I pointed out the natural dyes still visible in the frescoes, how art and culture had been fertile in this land for centuries. At Chittorgarh, I spoke of the valour of Maharana Pratap, of the difference between Maharana and Maharaja, warrior kings and civic kings, and what that distinction revealed about how power was understood here. I talked about all of it, and they listened, and asked questions, and seemed genuinely moved.

But even then, I could feel the weight of everything I wasn’t saying. The context behind the context. The references that needed their own references. For every door I opened, ten more remained shut, and I didn’t have the keys or the time to open them all.

Which is probably why, when the conversation shifted to civic life, I found myself speaking more freely. The dirt, the refuse, the lack of civic sense. Those were things I could articulate without footnotes. Things they could see for themselves.

And there was plenty to see. Jaipur, as I noticed more vividly this time, is shockingly filthy. Just a few meters from the same terracotta-pink walls that make the city so photogenic, the inside alleys told a different story: piss, garbage, shit, plastic. It wasn’t uncommon to see men urinating against walls shared by five-star hotels and heritage havelis, despite the government having built public toilets on nearly every corner. I wanted to acknowledge it, to condemn it — and I did. But I also knew that this was the slice of India that travels easiest, the part that confirms what people already expect, and I was trying to protect the idea of this land from being defined by it alone.

It struck me later that this is the trap of translation: you end up oscillating between extremes. You can describe the dirt because it’s visible, undeniable, requires no context. And you can gesture at the beauty because beauty, too, travels easily. Look at this palace. Look at this fresco. Look at this view. But the substance of that beauty, the why of it, the civilisational grammar that produced it, that’s where language falters. I could show them the Indo-Persian arches and the Mughal gardens and the Rajput frescoes, and they could see that these things were beautiful. What I couldn’t easily convey was why they moved me. The silt of history and myth and memory that had accumulated around them over a lifetime. The awe I felt seeing a rock-cut Ardhanarishvara in an fifteenth-century temple, or sculptures of kings and queens in postures from the Kama Sutra carved on palace walls in a society where that would today be considered obscene. Or the strange vertigo of seeing stories recited and learnt in childhood carved on walls older than entire European civilisations. And so I swung between the dirt they could witness and the beauty they could admire, while the meaning of both remained just out of reach.

After all, it is always easier to talk about the dirt on the streets or the beauty on the walls than the cosmos in your head.

Last night, I went for the launch of ’s new book at Kunzum in Delhi. During the talk, when asked about form, Kumar referenced Ryszard Kapuściński’s essay Snow in Ghana. I had read the piece years ago, but I revisited it this morning.

In the essay, Kapuściński writes about being stranded overnight in a Ghanaian village and his interactions with the village elder, Nana, who had never met someone from Poland before. The title comes from an innocent question: Nana asks Kapuściński to explain snow. Kapuściński tries and fails, and the failure reveals something crucial. How do you explain more than the dictionary definition to someone who has no lived feeling of it? The cold, the brightness, the touch, the childhood associations, the culture built around something Nana has never seen. Snow isn’t so much a thing as it is a memory, a landscape, and a sensibility. Explaining it out of context shrinks it into an outline.

As Kapuściński confesses:

Suddenly I felt shame, some sort of shortcoming, a sense of having missed the mark. What I had described was not my country. Now, snow … that’s accurate at least. but it is nothing, nothing of what we know, of what we carry around within ourselves without even wondering about: nothing of our pride and despair, of our life, nothing of what we breath, of our death.

That was exactly it. That was my Jaipur problem. My Hawa Mahal problem.

Everything I had been describing to my friends — the gods, the garbage, the temples, the dirt, the maharajas and the Mughals and the warrior kings — was accurate. But accuracy is not the same as truth. None of it fully captured what I carry. And even the grandeur I managed to convey was inevitably flattened, stripped of the thousand associations that make it mean something to me.

A month earlier, through one of those sprawling WhatsApp community networks Indian families maintain across continents, I met an older couple from the same Konkani community as my family in Kochi who offered to help me with my fieldwork. We met near the Periyar, and they told me about their family’s migrations during the Portuguese Inquisition, about how Goan communities rebuilt ritual life in pockets across Karnataka and Kerala, and about the food and festivals and stories that survived only because families carried them across borders.

At one point the aunty said, “Being a writer interested in our culture is a big responsibility; it’s important you document our traditions. Even my own children don’t know most of it anymore. I don’t know how to pass it on.”

It wasn’t despair so much as recognition; a recognition that culture survives only through attention, and attention today is not guaranteed.

Listening to her, I understood why even trying to translate India for my friends felt so fraught. Some things are too large, some things are too layered, and some things refuse the format of explanation. And when you have four expectant faces with fertile imaginations and limited time, you want to give them everything at once. Which means you end up giving them fragments, and you have no control over which fragments come to stand for the whole.

R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a novel that captures the impossibility of translation, has a line that has stayed with me:

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

Although at times my inadequacy felt like a betrayal to India, perhaps I need to acknowledge that these were not unintended eyes. My friends wanted to know. They had come with curiosity, not judgement, and they asked questions not to reduce but to understand. So my feelings of incompetance aside, I tried my best. And maybe that is all translation can ever be: an act of good faith between people who want to meet somewhere in the middle.

And partial explanations are not useless. On that journey through Ghana, when Nana assumed Poland was a colonial power, it wasn’t Kapuściński who corrected him. It was Kofi, his Ghanaian companion from Accra, who said:

They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonised whites.

The man who had asked Kapuściński the same naive question at the start of the trip now had enough context to correct someone else. Which made me think of my own friends. Maybe I can’t explain the whole universe to them, but I hope they leave India with just enough context to correct the next person who reduces this place to dirt or chaos or a pretty little cliché.

Describing India, even to those who arrive with goodwill and curiosity, is always incomplete. There is the India I can point to, and there is the India I carry within me, which no combination of vocabulary, syntax, or carefully arranged sentences will ever fully reveal.

Some things must be seen. Some things must be lived. And the rest, like snow in a place where winter never comes, can only be understood by those who have already stood inside it.

Two of them are here already, and two more land this weekend, and suddenly my days are shaped by reunions and the familiar chatter echoing in unfamiliar places. And all of this has made me think about gratitude in a way I have not allowed myself to in a while; about how none of us ever do any of this alone. About how it is impossible to build a life like this, a life spent wandering and writing and trying to understand a country as vast and complicated as India, without a support system that not only cheers from the sidelines but also gets on a flight and shows up, simply because they want to experience your life from the inside. I am lucky to have that. I know I am.

But there are two other people who keep coming to mind even more often in these weeks. Perhaps because tomorrow happens to be their anniversary, and maybe because this move back to India has also been the first time I have ever lived with my parents as an adult. I left home at eighteen and built a life in other cities, and coming back after more than a decade has been equal parts grounding and disorienting. But underneath all of it runs one steady feeling: a deep, old gratitude that I’ve been excavating.

Part of the hesitation comes from where I come from. South Asian families do not hand out emotional vocabulary the way they hand out food. Affection lives in the weight of a tiffin packed too full, in the way the light is left on and a meal is saved for you when you return late, in the silent sacrifices that no one names because naming them would make them too sharp, too real. And for South Asian men, especially, the language of softness is restricted to two spaces: romance and banter among friends. Anything outside that is treated with suspicion, even ridicule. We grew up on films where parents existed as caricatures: either jumping around making inside jokes like overgrown teenagers, or stone-faced antagonists who’d eventually melt in the face of love (think DDLJ). Never as people with internal lives that shifted and deepened over decades. Romance was allowed centre stage; filial love was something you were meant to intuit, not articulate.

We learned to read love in the negative spaces — in what wasn’t said, what wasn’t asked for, what wasn’t expected in return. My father’s pride lived in introducing me to his colleagues and letting my mother and I use his card when we went out shopping; my mother’s care in the way she still asks if I’ve eaten, even when I’m thirty-one and supposedly capable of feeding myself. And I learned to speak this same language back: taking them along on my travels when I could, messaging Aai on Valentine’s Day because she finds it amusing, picking up dinner tabs before Baba can reach for his wallet, sending money home even when he insists he doesn’t need it — small rebellions against their self-sufficiency to show them I love them. But this linguistic poverty around affection creates its own kind of inheritance: generations of children who know they are loved but have never heard it said plainly, who then struggle to say it to their own children, and so the cycle continues.

But I do not think that silence serves us — or at least me — anymore. There is a different kind of adulthood that arrives when you finally see your parents as people and not just the architecture of your childhood — people who became parents younger than you are now, who were allowed to change their minds and grow into different versions of themselves decade by decade, even if you were too busy becoming yourself to notice. And once that happens, the old script of unspoken gratitude feels insufficient. It feels almost dishonest.

So I want to say this today. Thank you, Aai and Baba, for being the ground that held steady even when everything else shifted. Thank you for struggling in ways I did not witness so that I could grow up believing that the world was open to me. Thank you for making sure my education was paid for, even when that meant tightening your own lives. Thank you for supporting friends and relatives when you had your own battles. Thank you for teaching me the value of pursuing my own happiness instead of solely running behind money. Thank you for giving me the privilege of curiosity, something I now realise is one of the greatest gifts a child can receive.

And maybe I’m not alone in wanting to say this. So for all of us who struggle with these words, here’s what we want to say: Thank you for becoming different people than your own parents so we could become ourselves. Thank you for swallowing your own dreams so quietly we never knew they existed until we were old enough to feel guilty about it. Thank you for translating love into action so consistently that we mistook it for the natural order of things. Thank you for never asking us to thank you, which is probably why it’s taken us this long to try.

When I told you I was thinking of leaving my job to write a book, your reactions were almost comically opposite and yet perfectly complementary. Aai, with her bright, almost disarming optimism — a kind of beautiful naivety that refuses to be cynical even when the world has offered every reason to be — simply said, “Why wouldn’t you do this? This is your dream. You’ve always been creative. Take the time. Write the book.” She believed in the version of me I was still afraid to fully acknowledge.

Baba, meanwhile, listened to every practical anxiety I had over long calls. Anxieties like “what would this mean for my career?” “Could I really pick up consulting again if I needed to?” “Would I manage the finances of a sabbatical year?” He was the one who validated the underlying fear that lives in most men my age, the fear of shedding a corporate identity that has become a shield, a shorthand for stability and success. He didn’t dismiss those fears, but helped me map them, name them, understand them. And by the end of those conversations, I realised that I wasn’t reckless for wanting this life. I was prepared for it.

If I can take risks now, it is because of them. If I feel the confidence to step off well-trodden paths, it is because for decades they held the map while I learned how to walk without it (although let’s be honest, I still Google Maps my way around India). After a decade spent continents apart, this unexpected time under the same roof has become its own kind of blessing — not one any of us wants indefinitely, but one I’m grateful to experience in this moment.

Living with them again has taught me just how hard it has been for their generation. We talk about generational trauma, about patterns passed down, but what we don’t talk about enough is that they were the sandwiched generation: they had to obey their parents unquestioningly and then, with barely a pause, had to adapt to the demands and dreams of their children. They became translators between two worlds that barely spoke the same language. They had to somehow honour parents who believed suffering built character while raising children who believed happiness was a legitimate life goal. They straddled arranged marriages and love marriages, joint families and dating apps, duty and desire. Every family gathering became a negotiation, every life choice a careful calculation between what would disappoint their parents least and what would fulfill their children most.

That kind of generational whiplash is rarely acknowledged, but it reshaped families like mine. It softened something. It created room for kids like me to claim the independence we felt entitled to. But it must have been destabilising — creating space for conversations their own parents would never have entertained, building a framework where none existed before.

So I am grateful to be a beneficiary of that shift. I think, sometimes, that I’ve spent so long trying to build a life of independence that I forgot independence is only possible when someone gave you a stable foundation first.

Perhaps this is what travel really teaches us — not just about new places but about the distances we’ve already traveled from home, both literal and metaphorical. Every guesthouse and train compartment becomes a mirror reflecting back the stability we take for granted. Every solo meal reminds us of tables we once rushed to leave and the ones we were excited to join. And maybe that’s why my friends flying across oceans to be here matters so much: they’re choosing to collapse that distance, to say that some connections are worth the price of a plane ticket and jet lag.

I wrote this piece and wasn’t going to hit send. Part of me thought: of course my parents know I love them, do I need to send a mass email to my audience — many of whom want to read about actual travel — so that they read it too? But this is part of the journey, for only this journey could have led me to feel this way. It’s only on trips like this that you realize what you forget in corporate boardrooms: that freedom is not the opposite of belonging. That you need a tribe even when you’re independent. That gratitude is not childish. And that love, especially the non-romantic kind, is allowed to take up space on the page.

Because it’s not just the crossing of borders that makes a journey. Sometimes we have to cross the distances within our own families. And that, I’m learning, is its own kind of travel writing.

“Saale!” A voice explodes down the aisle. “Abhi nahi! Khana chal raha hai!”

I look up from my book. The train conductor is red-faced, shouting at a young man with plastic bags full of chips and biscuits — an unauthorised vendor moving through the compartment like a loud ghost. Usually conducto…

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This weekend I completed another revolution around the sun and unlike last year, when I did that now slightly embarrassing 30 things I learned before 30 list, I don’t feel particularly inclined to measure or summarise this one. Perhaps that’s part of growing older, realising that birthdays are less milestones of achievement and more c…

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I’ve been hitting a bit of a wall lately.

Since I last wrote to you, I’ve travelled from Pune to the pilgrimage towns of Jejuri and Pandharpur in Maharashtra, then on to Mumbai, Goa, and a lovely hosted stay in Jaipur (more about which later), as well as a weeklong hop over the seas to Muscat. This week brings with it the …

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Someone recently asked me what my writing process is, and I thought of Somerset Maugham when he said “I write only when inspiration strikes,” before adding “fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” The first half is true for me, though the second couldn’t be further. For as long as I can rememb…

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Somewhere in between, I managed to draft a chapter. What I’m sharing today is a very early version of it … still very much rough around the edges, but I hope it gives you a sense of the style and direction I’m aiming for.

This is also my first issue only for paid subscribers: an early look at the work-in-progress. If you’d like to keep reading, you can upgrade below or use the one-issue unlock below.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this chapter — what works, what doesn’t — as every bit of feedback will help me sharpen the writing as I go.

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The Muslim queen who built Buddhist temples

The ruins on the hill stood silent, except for the chant drifting from within the temple complex. I had climbed the weathered stairs alone, each step releasing a puff of ochre dust into the dry air.

“This is not like Thiksey,” Ali had said before I set off,

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