I shared an early version of this argument on Instagram last week — here it is properly worked out.

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So, it is over, for now. On Saturday India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned. Within hours the government had conceded the rest of what it had spent weeks refusing — compensation for the families of students who took their own lives in the wake of the NEET paper leak, and the withdrawal of the cases filed against those who had come out to protest. The three demands were the Cockroach Janta Party's, the improbable outfit that had turned a scandal over leaked question papers into a national agitation; with all three met, it told its supporters the fight was won and asked them to go home.

Governments here do not usually buckle like this, and almost never to people this young. In one sense what happened is exactly how a democracy is supposed to run: citizens organise, the state feels the pressure and gives ground, and public life absorbs the shock and moves on. But the weeks before the resignation exposed something larger than the examination system, and it is worth looking at now that the crowds have gone.

For most of a month it was as though Indians were living in different countries. For some, the protests were the whole of daily life — feeds full of students marching through Delhi, of interviews outside coaching centres and parents who could not keep the fear out of their voices, of paper leaks and graduate unemployment and the sense that the old bargain between education and a decent quality of life had come undone. For others, the same weeks barely registered; and when the protests did surface, the talk slid almost at once away from the exams and towards the marchers themselves — who had organised them, who stood to gain, what hidden hand might lie behind it all. It was not really a disagreement, but a symptom of the fact that the two sides were not perceiving the same thing.

More than a century ago the biologist Jakob von Uexküll said that every animal lives in its own version of the world — its Umwelt — built from the handful of signals its senses can catch, and from which it assembles what it takes for reality. The physical world may be shared; the experienced one never is. A bee sees ultraviolet paths lit along flowers that look plain white to us, and is blind to the reds we cannot take our eyes off. A bat wraps a dark room in sound and reads its shape back from the echoes. Each of them is somewhere the others cannot follow — and so, though we rarely notice it, are we. The Umwelt is the world as you have learned to perceive it, taken — as it is by every creature that has one — for the entire world.

Most of the time these worlds overlap quietly and no harm comes of it. The trouble starts when one of them is handed power over the rest. For example, humans build glass towers and light them through the night because they make sense to human eyes; and every year, migratory birds that navigate by starlight mistake the glow of our skyscrapers for the open sky, fly into the glass and fall. They are not confused. Their environment has simply been arranged around somebody else’s way of seeing. Power is precisely that: the ability to turn your own Umwelt into everyone else’s environment.

Although Uexküll was talking about the biological world, it describes the political life of countries unnervingly well. We do not all live in one India and merely disagree about it. We live in different Indias, each stocked with its own facts and its own villains, its own instinct for what deserves attention and what is only noise, and each convinced it is simply seeing what is there.

Beyond passing laws and winning elections, power carries a quieter authority: the power to decide what enters a country’s field of vision, which stories open the bulletin and which remain somebody else’s problem. Every political movement competes to shape attention, but governments possess instruments no one else does. They choose which questions to answer and which to leave hanging; which events warrant a ministerial visit and which pass without acknowledgement; what official campaigns amplify; and — through party messaging networks, sympathetic television channels, social media ecosystems, and the sheer advantage of incumbency — how millions are handed a pre-interpreted event before they have had the chance to interpret it themselves.

Much of the divide, though, is simply age, and the yardstick each generation reaches for. Older Indians measure the present against the country they remember, and often find it improved. The young measure it against the future they were promised, and find it wanting. If you are twenty-two, this government is nearly the whole of your conscious political life; it came to power when you were a child in school. It is no longer the insurgent promising to sweep away an old order. For Gen Z, it is the order. That shifts the questions worth asking. A comparison with governments you never lived under carries little weight against the things you meet every morning. Will the exam I have bled two years preparing for be conducted honestly, or sold to the highest bidder? Some two million school-leavers sit the medical entrance each year; to them the leak was never just a talking point, but the hinge their futures turned on. Will there be work on the far side of the degree? National pride is not nothing, but it simply cannot answer questions like those on its own.

None of this hands the young a monopoly on truth. Instagram has its distortions, as television and WhatsApp have theirs, and every generation ends up talking mostly to itself. But lived experience has a stubborn way of resisting the story told over it. It is hard to convince someone the exam crisis is overblown when they have spent two years studying for the exam in question, and harder still to tell graduates that unemployment is a matter of perception while they and their friends are still looking for work.

That is why the protests mattered. It’s true that not everyone agreed on much beyond the need for accountability, but for a few weeks they widened what the country was willing to notice. A leaked question paper came to weigh as much as the evening’s manufactured controversy, and the coaching-class economy took airtime usually kept for the culture wars.

We like to describe democracy as a machine for settling disagreements. Its first task may be more basic than that — to keep enough reality in common that disagreement stays possible at all. When citizens stop noticing one another’s troubles, they stop arguing about how to fix them, and drift instead into parallel republics that don’t even agree on the issues themselves. The month just past was a reminder that the drift is not a law of nature: that one generation’s reality can still force its way into another’s, and that a government can still be made to listen. Perhaps that is democracy close to its best — two ways of seeing colliding hard enough to widen, if only a little, the country both sides are able to see.

The exam that tipped it was NEET, the single national test that decides who studies medicine in India. Close to three million sit it every year, many on a second or third attempt, for a thin band of seats. This May they sat it as they always do — and then, days later, watched it annulled once officials confirmed the paper had leaked. A fresh test was ordered and held weeks later. But the re-test settled nothing, because the leak was not a fault in an otherwise sound machine. It was the machine. Papers have gone out the same way for years now — medical, engineering, police recruitment — with questions sold in online group chats, impersonators sitting in exam halls, centres and dates changed overnight. You can hold an exam again, the protesters said, but you cannot hand a student back the belief that it was ever fair.

And so the protesters wanted accountability. A minister to answer for it. But what they have been handed instead is a change of subject: Who are these protesters, really? Who funds them? Isn’t the whole thing a stunt — aren’t these kids being used? By the time we are done with the questions about the people, the question they came with is still standing in the room, and we have agreed, without quite saying so, to look past it.

In the Mahabharata, one of the most revered figures is Bhishma — the grandsire or ‘Pitāmaha’, the greatest warrior of his age. As a young man he makes an unimaginable vow. To clear the way for his father’s second marriage, he gives up any claim to the throne that would have rightfully been his, swears lifelong celibacy, and binds himself to serve whoever rules Hastinapura for as long as he lives. The heavens rain flowers on him for it and he is granted a boon that allows him to choose the very hour of his death. It is an act of magnificent self-denial.

Years later, in the great hall of Hastinapura, a game of dice goes wrong — though “goes wrong” is too kind, because the game was rigged. Yudhishthira, eldest of the five Pandava brothers, is lured into playing against Shakuni, who throws the dice for the other side and cannot lose. Piece by piece Yudhishthira is stripped of his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and finally his wife, Draupadi. She is dragged into the court by her hair, and she asks a question. Her husband had already lost himself and become a slave before he staked her, she says, and a slave owns nothing. So by what right was she wagered at all? Was she ever lawfully lost?

The hall goes quiet. The wise men are all there, Bhishma among them, and the room turns to him. He is the most learned of them; his word could end it. But Bhishma will not answer. He says the ways of dharma are subtle, that the matter is too fine for him to rule on with certainty. The greatest man in the room, asked whether an injustice is being done in front of him, takes shelter in the difficulty of the question.

But in that same hall, one man did speak. Vidura — the king’s half-brother — called the game a crime and said so to the king’s face. He was ignored. Not one man in that hall saved Draupadi in the end; she was saved by the divine, while the wise sat and studied their hands.

It is a recognisable kind of failure, Bhishma’s — a sense that the question is too complicated to answer plainly, that the people forcing it are a little embarrassing, that the wise thing, or the balanced thing, is to say nothing.

It is the temptation of every comfortable person watching something like this from a distance. To find the crowd too loud, its leaders too grating, its causes not quite the kind you would want to be seen near. To mistake your own silence for fairness.

You do not have to like these protesters to see that their question deserves an answer. You can find the movement’s name juvenile, its figureheads exhausting, and distrust every influencer and actor who suddenly seemed to care. But a leaked exam is a leaked exam regardless of who is complaining about it. That is what a crowd is, in the end. You can doubt a single person, discredit them, wait them out; you cannot put thousands of them on trial. They are a nurse, a farmer, a girl who sits the exam next year, each there for a private reason and all there for the same one. They are what the development economists have been calling India’s demographic dividend — the largest working age generation — and their frustrations should be met with a discussion, if not a solution.

I am not here to endorse every demand being made on the streets. I do not agree with all of them, and some of the people making them I would happily argue with on another day. But accountability is not a favour a government grants when it feels generous. It is the whole contract. A government owes its people an answer — a real conversation, not a monologue — and when it chooses instead to wait a protest out, to question the motives of everyone asking, to clear the streets rather than deal with what filled it, that is not strength. It is the throne mistaking silence for order. A democracy is meant to survive being questioned. The moment it cannot, something has been lost that no re-test will return.

We revere Bhishma still, and we should. But the epic does not let him off easily. It gives us both his greatness and his failure. When the war comes he fights for the side he knows to be unjust, because his oath binds him to the crown and not to what is right. He is the good man whose goodness is spent entirely in the service of order. And when he lies dying on his bed of arrows, offering long and beautiful counsel on how a kingdom should be run, it comes too late to be anything but grief. He had known the whole time what was right. He had simply promised his loyalty to the throne instead.

We make a smaller version of the same trade every time we treat criticism of those in power as disloyalty to the country. A government is not your family; it is not your blood; it has not earned the silence you would give the people you love. The epic is clear that dharma can ask you to question your own kin — Arjuna puts down his bow on the battlefield and refuses to fight until his conscience is answered, and the whole of the Gita exists because a man dared to stop and ask. And when he did, even God manifested himself on earth to respect the question.

I know people who, watching what is done in its name now, have stepped back from Hinduism — who have started to hear a word like dharma as if it belongs to one side of our politics. I understand the flinch but I don’t share it. A tradition does not belong to whoever shouts for it loudest; it belongs to everyone still willing to embrace it honestly. And read honestly, these stories are not on the side of silence, or of power. I am proud to be Indian and proud to be Hindu, and I would rather reclaim them than hand them over.

The oldest story we have honours the ones who asked the hard questions — Draupadi in the Kaurava court, Arjuna on the Kurukshetra field, Vidura speaking when it cost him — and it mourns the good man who, when his moment came, decided it was wiser to say nothing. So when a great many of a country’s people walk a long way and go hungry to ask it something, the real question is never who they are, or whether we find them agreeable. It is whether those with the power to answer will do the one thing that Bhishma, for all his greatness, could not.

On 2 May 1867, in a rented London hall, a Bombay cotton merchant read a paper to a room of Englishmen, titled: ‘England’s Debt to India’. Nearly a quarter of India’s revenue, Dadabhai Naoroji argued, left the country each year for England, leaving India bleeding. He put the drain at thirty to forty million pounds a year, and in 1892 became the first Indian to sit in the House of Commons, itemising the cost of empire from inside its own parliament.

A century and a half later, another person of Indian origin in British politics reached the opposite total. Responding to Jamaica’s plan to petition King Charles over slavery reparations, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who now sits with the far-right Reform UK party, wrote on X last week that “the British Empire did so much good for the world.” Slavery was “abhorrent,” she allowed, but asking twenty-first-century Britons to pay for eighteenth-century crimes had “no basis in law.” If anything, “former colonies should pay the British back” for Britain’s “investment, effort and contribution.”

The irony is almost too neat: the first Indian in the Commons used the seat to hand Britain the bill; a British-Indian MP now uses her platform to hand it to the colonies. Brownness, of course, has never been a vaccine against colonial amnesia, and the colonised can become fluent in the coloniser’s excuses.

But let’s see if the argument holds. The railways are always summoned first to highlight the benevolence of the empire. Yes, Britain did lay tracks across India, but the lines carried troops, cotton, grain and revenue to the ports, under a guarantee that gave British investors a fixed return whatever happened while the risk sat on Indian taxpayers. The railway was never a charity on wheels; it moved an occupier’s soldiers in and an occupied’s cotton out. A robber who builds a road to your house so the carts can haul your possessions to the harbour has still looted you, and that the road stays useful after he is gone does not make the robbery an infrastructure development programme. The “empire did good” school mistakes a consequence for an intention.

Nor did Britain sail to India to admire its muslin. The subcontinent was once among the world’s great manufacturing centres, producing by some estimates about a quarter of global industrial output in 1750, a share that had collapsed to roughly two per cent by 1900. Defenders call it modernisation. Rearrangement is more honest: Indian hands supplying raw cotton, Lancashire mills turning it into cloth, and Indians invited to buy back at a markup what had been taken, at gunpoint, from their own economy.

Then there’s the trade in opium. In Bengal and Bihar the East India Company ran the opium monopoly; cultivators were forced to take advances against a fixed quota, and falling short (a judgment made by the hand that held the lathi), meant the money was clawed back. This was not a crop drifting innocently towards China but an industry of compulsion, worked by hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants, feeding a drug Britain pushed into China to fix its own trade deficit. When the Qing tried to stop it in 1839, Britain sent an army. The National Army Museum’s own account puts it plainly: it was a war fought by British-Indian forces in the interests of opium smugglers. China lost and was made to reopen its ports to the trade it had banned, including handing over Hong Kong. So what goes in the opium column of Braverman’s invoice? The addiction, the war, and the cultivator at the head of a global narcotics chain that paid him in debt?

Braverman’s refuge is the law. But the law cannot clean the slate. Slavery had law; extraction had law; even indenture had contracts and the Company had charters. The genius of empire was never that it broke the law; it was that it made domination administratively respectable, with courts that knew exactly how to recognise a man as property when they needed to.

And if the present truly cannot pay for the past, Britain has already proved otherwise with its own money. When slavery was abolished in 1833, the enslaved received nothing; the forty-six thousand people who had owned them shared twenty million pounds, about forty per cent of the government’s annual spending. The loan raised to pay it was, by the Treasury’s own account, not cleared until 2015, and twenty million pounds then is worth more than two billion today on the Bank of England’s own online calculator. So twenty-first-century Britons did pay for the age of slavery. They just paid the people who had owned human beings.

India’s account was never only economic. It is written in lives: the soldiers sent to die for a system that denied them equality, the bodies in Jallianwala Bagh, the three million dead in the Bengal famine of 1943, a catastrophe tied to wartime priorities set in London. It is written in objects too. The Koh-i-Noor still sits in the Tower of London, set in a royal crown, surrendered under the Treaty of Lahore after the annexation of Punjab. Signed away, the apologists love to say, which is true; they are quieter about who signed: a boy of ten under duress.

So dear Suella, we have already paid. We paid in land, labour, tax, cotton, opium, soldiers, hunger, diamonds, and lives. We paid in the inherited reflex of being asked to say thank you for the empty jute bags left behind in a hurry after the house had been emptied. Naoroji read the debt aloud in London in 1867, and it has been sitting there, unpaid, ever since.

The empire does not need another thank-you note. It needs an honest audit.

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On an unrelated note, always a small thrill to see a piece in print. I wrote for The Times of India’s Sunday edition this weekend on citizenship, and how ambiguity was baked into the idea of India from the very beginning. The print version is below, and you can read the full piece online here.

In 1931, as Britain debated whether Indians were ready to rule themselves, Winston Churchill warned that if British authority in India was weakened, the country would fall back into “the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.” Less than a century later, it is Britain that has to ask whether it can still govern itself.

Keir Starmer has resigned as Prime Minister less than two years after leading Labour to a landslide victory. If Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor and current frontrunner, succeeds him, as is widely expected, the UK will have had seven prime ministers since the Brexit referendum of 2016. For a country that once exported constitutional advice to much of the world with the smug certainty of civilisational entitlement, this is an impressive turnover rate.

There is, of course, nothing unconstitutional about this. Britain, like India, does not directly elect prime ministers. It elects MPs. The person who can command a majority in the House of Commons governs. If a party changes its leader midway through a parliament, the new leader can become prime minister without a general election. This is not a bug in the Westminster system; it is the system.

But politics is not simply about rules. It is also about consent and trust.

When British voters went to the polls in 2024, they voted for Labour under Keir Starmer. They voted on a centrist manifesto fronted by him and a promise of stability after years of Conservative chaos. Andy Burnham was not even an MP at that election. His route back to Westminster ran through a by-election in Makerfield, after a backbencher stepped down and opened the way for him to return to the House of Commons. And that is how a country of nearly 70 million people may soon be led by a man whose immediate path to Downing Street ran through a constituency with an electorate of just 77,462 in one corner of Greater Manchester.

The real issue is structural. Britain is not changing prime ministers because voters keep changing their minds in general elections. It is changing prime ministers because parties keep panicking. Since Brexit, British politics has been stuck in a cycle of revolt, replacement and disappointment. David Cameron resigned because he lost the referendum; Theresa May resigned because she could not deliver Brexit; Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, albeit chaotically, but was consumed by scandal; Liz Truss could not outlast many free trials I’ve signed up to; Rishi Sunak was more popular here as India’s son-in-law than he ever was in the UK. And Starmer promised competence, only to be pushed out by his own party.

The role of Brexit in modern British politics cannot be overstated. It consumed years of governing time and divided parties internally. It also failed to answer the deeper questions beneath the referendum: low growth, regional inequality, struggling public services, rising welfare costs, migration anxiety and a public that no longer believes tomorrow will necessarily be better than today.

The result is a political culture that is more fragmented, more impatient and more personality-centred than before. Leaders are treated less like national figures entrusted with a term and more like chief executives whose contracts can be terminated after a bad quarter. Politics has begun to resemble a show where, if the first few episodes disappoint, viewers demand a new season with a new cast.

That is what Britain is now demonstrating: not the failure of law, but the danger of permanent churn.

Governments need time to govern. Serious problems cannot be solved in the lifespan of a leadership crisis. Infrastructure, welfare reform, healthcare, education, industrial policy, climate adaptation — these require patience. They require leaders who can make mistakes, correct them, take responsibility and still continue long enough for policy to have consequences. If every setback becomes a reason to change the prime minister, politics becomes theatre without administration.

India’s own democratic history offers a useful counterpoint. Since independence, it has known long periods of political continuity, first under Congress and, more recently, under the BJP. That continuity can, at times, be stabilising. It can allow governments to think beyond the next news cycle and pursue long-term projects. A country as large and argumentative as India cannot be governed through permanent crisis management alone.

But continuity has its own dangers too. If power lasts too long, it can begin to confuse electoral success with permanent entitlement. Institutions can weaken, opposition can become hollowed out, and criticism can be treated as disloyalty. Healthy democracies need neither permanent rule nor permanent churn. They need the possibility of change, but also the patience to let governments govern.

For generations, Britain was held up in India as the model of political maturity. India, by contrast, was supposed to be noisy, chaotic, emotional and perpetually unstable. And yet, over the past decade, India has had political continuity while Britain has become a revolving door.

This does not mean India’s democracy is beyond strain. It means stability and instability are both capable of disguising deeper problems. One can hide excessive concentration, while the other can hide political exhaustion. The question is not how often a democracy changes leaders, but whether it has enough trust, institutional resilience and public patience to govern seriously between elections.

The old imperial question, then, was always misdirected. Churchill worried that India would collapse without Britain. Instead, the republic that emerged after him has, for all its flaws, held together through elections of almost unimaginable scale.

The more awkward question now is whether Britain, stripped of empire, can govern itself without collapsing into another leadership contest.

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?

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As the politician Shashi Tharoor noted: a Hindu-majority constituency,…

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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 distracted by the crowds outside: people moving between installations, stopping to photograph the old Portuguese facades, chatting excitedly into the sidewalk.

A man about my age asked if he could share my table — I said yes — and we fell into the easy conversation you have with strangers at festivals. What brought you here, have you seen the exhibits yet, where are you staying.

“So where are you really from?” he asked eventually.

“I’m from here,” I said. “I’m Goan.”

There was a pause. It wasn’t long, but it was noticeable. He looked at me — my (lack of an) accent, maybe, or just the fact that I’d taken a phone call in Marathi earlier. Something didn’t quite fit. But he nodded.

“Oh, nice. I’m from Bangalore. First time here for the festival.”

And that was that. He didn’t push. After all, how could he? He was a visitor, and in the grander hierarchy of belonging that governs these interactions in India, I was clearly more entitled to this place than he was. I had ancestry here, a surname that traces back centuries. He had a hotel booking and a weekend pass.

I accepted my position in that hierarchy easily, perhaps too easily. The night before, my parents had been talking about how Goa feels different now, about changes in the neighbourhood and in the demographics, about how the place they’d visited since children and now lived in for nearly a decade keeps shifting around them. I’d mostly listened. They’re entitled to those observations in a way I’m not. I may live here on paper now, but I’m hardly ever here — always off traveling for one convenient reason or another. They’re rooted in a way I’m not, and that rootedness gives them a different claim to this place. I can show up and leave before I have to reckon with what it actually means to stay.

The man across from me finished his coffee and left. I sat there a while longer, thinking about what I’d just done. The answer I’d given him — that I was Goan — had come instinctively, the way it always does when someone asks. It’s the answer that works, the one that often requires no elaboration, the one that positions me correctly in the hierarchy of belonging in a society where ancestry supersedes residency. But even as I said it, I was aware of how much of my belonging here is narrated rather than inhabited.

The real issue, if I’m being honest, isn’t that I’ve tried to belong somewhere and failed. It’s that I don’t think I’ve ever fully wanted to belong anywhere. Or rather, I’ve never committed to wanting to belong in the way that would make the desire meaningful. I’ve lived too long in provisional states — cities entered with expiry dates, places inhabited with one eye on departure — that the expectation of belonging didn’t even occur to me.

When my family moved to the Gulf, we did so with the explicit understanding that we were temporary residents. Over time, my father’s contract kept getting extended and we stayed. In modern dating parlance, it was us “going with the flow” without any future commitment; Muscat and I were “seeing each other” or at best “dating,” but we never had the conversation about going exclusive. I’ve been having situationships with cities ever since.

Even when I moved to Edinburgh for university, I went thinking I’d return to India after my degree, and that conviction defined the emotional contract I signed with the place. I didn’t demand welcome in the way someone from there (or someone wanting to settle there) might, because I didn’t feel entitled to an inheritance that wasn’t mine. And so when I got my permanent residency in the UK, it felt like a betrayal of an idea of home that was elsewhere, rooted in an India I had hardly ever lived in but felt I owed something. That something was a promise of eventual return, even if I didn’t know how or when that eventuality would materialise. And now, at least bureaucratically, I had broken it.

This might change, of course. If tomorrow I decide that I want to live in one city for the rest of my life — to stay, to build, to be rooted — I imagine I would develop a more visceral yearning to belong there. After all, with commitment comes appetite; with permanence comes grievance.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy recalls one of her earliest conversations with Pradip, who would later become her husband. They meet when they’re both living in Delhi and he asks her where she’s from. She pauses, then answers: “I’m … well … I’m here now.” Later, she explains that far from being a slogan, her answer was just “the personal feelings of an off-grid drifter” in a world increasingly fractured into identities and allegiances.

But what that answer acknowledges, at least in my reading of it, is that there will always be people who belong more than you do. Sons of the soil, in the literal and emotional sense. And rather than fighting that hierarchy or resenting it, the drifter accepts it as a fact of life.

Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans approaches the same terrain from a different direction, but arrives at a similar unease. The book, part-fiction, part-memoir, circles around his parents and the long afterlives of migration. Early on, it is Thayil’s mother, Ammu, who expresses the strongest belief in rootedness. She is a Malayali before she is anything else, we are told. And yet, it is Ammu who later realises the limits of that conviction. After decades of living elsewhere, she and her husband return to Kerala — the ancestral home they had imagined returning to all along — only to find that it no longer receives them in the way they had imagined. “Kerala has changed and they have too,” writes Thayil. “There’s no sense of belonging or welcome. They’ve lived Elsewhere too long: they’ve become Elsewhereans.”

What makes this moment devastating is that it comes not from someone indifferent to place, but from someone who cared deeply about it. Distance, Thayil suggests, doesn’t just change where you live. It changes who you are. And return doesn’t undo that.

Both Roy and Thayil offer different ways of answering — or bypassing? — the question. One anchors itself stubbornly in the present tense; the other accepts drift as a permanent condition. Both refuse the fantasy that origin stories can be made coherent if you just explain them properly.

I met Jeet at the Bangalore launch of The Only City, an anthology on Bombay to which he had contributed a story. At the event, he said something that stayed with me: that for someone who has left Bombay, he misses Bombay most when he’s in Bombay.

That inversion felt familiar. I don’t miss Mumbai when I’m in, say, Rome. I miss it when I’m eating a vada pav in Colaba, or standing at a pani puri stall near Juhu chowpatty, the city suddenly bringing back memories of when Aai would take young me around her old haunts. I miss London not when I’m here in India, but when I’m cycling through Richmond Park or walking by the Thames past St Paul’s. And I miss Muscat when I’m watching the waves hit the shore off Shatti beach, the Arabian Sea stretching out from where it left off all those years back when I took a one-way flight out.

Goa complicates this most of all. Anywhere else, when asked where I’m from, I say “Goa” instinctively — the answer I’d just given the man at the café — and it’s readily accepted. Sometimes there’s a nod of recognition; at other times I’m questioned about my Hindu last name, and I fall into the familiar defence: Goa is more than pork vindalho, beaches, and beers, there are many Hindus here, we’re just not the ones tourists meet. And that makes me feel good, because isn’t this what someone from a place does? Explains, educates, lays claim to a history.

But sitting in that café, watching the festival crowds make plans to go drinking at a bar in Anjuna or a club in Baga, I was reminded again of how partial my Goa actually is. The Goa I know is inherited: ancestral villages, temple rituals, homecooked seafood, and stories of Hindu migration during the Inquisition. It’s the Goa my parents showed me. I’ve gone drinking in Mumbai and Bangalore, clubbing in Delhi, made the kind of memories young people make in cities. But in Goa, because it’s supposed to be where I’m from, I’ve only ever related to it through ancestry. The contemporary Goa, the one where people my age actually live and make plans and have local knowledge, the one of new bridges and local politics, of knowing which beaches to go to and which to avoid, exists parallel to me. That Goa is foreign to me because I have been too busy trying to inherit another Goa. And so, the Goa I claim so easily in conversation is not the same one I experience when I’m in it.

Which means that even here, in the place where I can claim the strongest ancestral credentials, there’s a different measure of belonging I don’t possess. The man at the café deferred to my ancestry, but someone who grew up here, who went to school here or who moved to work here, who knows the place through daily life rather than genealogy, belongs in a way I never will.

In Goa, I have the inheritance but not the life. Everywhere else — Muscat, Edinburgh, London — I had the life but not the inheritance. And perhaps I’m not avoiding any of these places themselves, but the duty that comes with claiming one fully. To accept a home means being accountable to it, not just through blood or temporary residence but through the accumulated weight of daily choices and consequences. I’ve spent so long being an adopted son of many lands that I’m wary of acknowledging a permanent filial relationship with any one of them.

That’s the cost of being a permanent drifter: you learn to live with partial belonging everywhere, even in places where you are, technically, a son of the soil.

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin wrote, “perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” I don’t dispute the condition. I know I’m marked by the places that made me. What unsettles me is the question of what I owe in return. To accept a home is not just to feel held by it, but to be held accountable to it. And while I accept that accountability easily when it comes to people — the filial duty I owe my parents, the responsibility that comes with being an only son in a desi family that has given me a great deal of love — I’m less certain what it means to owe a land. If I call a place home in anything more than name, does that translate into duty? To remain, to serve, to protect, to belong not just emotionally but materially?

So when people ask where I’m from, the discomfort isn’t so much about geography as it is about commitment — about whether I’m willing to stay long enough to earn the answer, whether I’m ready, after all these years of casual arrangements with cities, to finally have the conversation.

But for now, the only response I have that feels honest is a partial one that, like me, is borrowed from other elsewheres: I’m an Elsewherean, but … well … I’m here now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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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