I thought finishing writing a poetry book would feel like winning the gold at Olympics or a at least climbing a mountain. I imagined I would wake up with a new face entirely, the kind that writers have in movie versions of themselves, mysterious, accomplished, mildly insufferable. Maybe I’d start wearing droopy sweaters with holes in them that whispered genius.

Instead I got up from the bed, hungry.

And my sink had dishes in it.

For someone whose dream was writing a book for as long as they have lived, this feeling was severely overrated. Nothing grand happened. No higher being descended to pat my head and say “great job.” No portal opened. My pillow didn’t levitate. I didn’t suddenly understand metaphors that had been bothering me for years. My handwriting didn’t improve. The chair I wrote half the poems on still squeaked annoyingly. My posture was still a banana. The fridge was still empty. The world stayed almost aggressively normal.

For the days I tried to write, it felt like walking a long, long road. There were too many ideas, too many breaks, too many sessions where I told my flat mate, ‘okay I have to write I got an idea’ and I thought the end might feel climbing a peak, but there isn’t one at the end of the road is it? It felt more like leaving a house I had built. I swept the last bit of dust, packed my tools, locked the door, and suddenly I was on the street, empty-handed.

For the first few months, I built. The next few I pondered upon if I had forgotten a window slightly open, if the walls would hold during rain, if the cracks were an aesthetic or a problem? I worried about leaks in metaphors, turbines of imagery that might break, a stanza that might collapse under pressure or simply if are these four walls the entirety of my being? I wondered if I should go back and fix something microscopic every single time.

That was the surprising part: writing a poetry book had been private, intensely solitary, like breathing into a jar and sealing it. Publishing it meant letting strangers open the lid. It was much alike writing on this platform, but the physical form grants it permanence. There are poems in them which I am mildly embarrassed about, not because they are poorly written, but because they are honest.

I was young and free and my secrets are available in paperback. What an astonishingly bizarre form of adulthood.

Everyone talked about the journey of making art. No one talked about the calmness that came after. It felt like preparing for a storm that never arrived. I braced for impact, and then the sky cleared as if nothing had happened. There was no fanfare. Just a quiet room and a lingering ache, as though my body hadn’t realized the project was over.

Finishing a poetry book didn’t make me feel wise. It hasn’t solved my life. It didn’t cure the uncertainty that had made me write in the first place. If anything, it sharpened it. My mind didn’t go, “Ah yes, done.”
It went, “Now what?”.

I had thought finishing a book would silence my head. Instead, it handed me a louder room.

Ivied walls is a mindset. For the longest time, I have seen human beings all around me in a dense form, they’re difficult to penetrate, they hide, and they reveal. This poetry book is an arc of being concrete, of weathering, and finally letting the ivy through the cracks. 

These poems explore fleeting intricacies of life—memory and loss, longing and quiet revelation, and the complexities of the human mind. The poems are in four parts — concrete, cracks, tendrils and finally light. Each symbolic of human nature. They linger on the ordinary until it turns unfamiliar, and turn the unfamiliar until it feels like home again. This book is for anyone who ever built a wall, and was left dumbfounded when they let the ivy creep in.

It’s funny how all I could feel, is that language could leave me but still live. That the lines I wrote on a sad evening or a hopeful morning could now sit on someone else’s table, maybe next to their unfinished breakfast, maybe underlined by their pencil, maybe saved on a shelf in a house I would never visit. The words I wrote were mine when I wrote them, but now they’re out there. I don’t feel triumphant. I feel porous. And more than anything grateful.

This book is an ode to the people who have made an impact on me since years. Thank you for the memories, the metaphors, and the emotional plot twists I didn’t ask for, but most of all, thankyou for being stubborn like ivy.

My book, Ivied Walls, is out now—bold, earnest, a little bruised, and filled with a heart I never knew how to hide. In this moment, it feels like this part of that heart has finally left me, only to find it’s way into yours.

Out now on Kindle, Paperback.

And for wandering minds, there’s an exclusive playlist on Spotify to keep you company while you read.

This being here in this moment, is a gift in itself, and it would be a whole new world starting now, to share it with you. I hope it finds you, the way it found me:

Suddenly I was looking around, there was no wall to survive me
All around I could see was just growing ivy
— only yours, Janhavi

The word brilliant gets thrown around too easily. We use it for anyone successful, anyone popular, anyone who shines for a moment. But brilliance, if it means anything, is not a halo. It is a pattern of choices that, over time, produce more than the sum of their parts. By that measure, Taylor Swift is not just famous. She is brilliant—because she has built an architecture where heartbreak is empire, sincerity is strategy, and intimacy scales to the size of economies.

Most artists are remembered for one song, maybe one era. Swift has built a catalog that feels like a literary cycle, a mythology of girlhood and womanhood spanning nearly two decades. Each album is a room; each lyric, a window; each Easter egg, a secret stairwell. Brilliance, here, is not in one flawless work but in the coherence of the whole.

She began where many dismiss her: with heartbreak. As a teenager she wrote about Joe Jonas, who infamously ended things with a 27-second phone call. Forever & Always captured the sting, while We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together later mocked its cyclical immaturity. Dear John exposed the power imbalance of her relationship with John Mayer: “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” Back to December was her rare apology, addressed to Taylor Lautner ( not to mention during peak Twilight season) . Style immortalized Harry Styles, neon-lit and doomed. And All Too Well, perhaps her masterpiece, is widely believed to be about Jake Gyllenhaal—a ten-minute autopsy of a relationship that was short, searing, and unforgettable.

Critics once sneered: she only writes about her exes. But that critique is itself the brilliance. What could be more human than writing about the people who broke you, thrilled you, confused you? Swift did what women have always been told not to: narrate her feelings without shame. She took the midnight texts and floor-crying heartbreaks of young adulthood and turned them into cultural currency. Where most of us lose, she wrote All Too Well. Where most of us sulk, she wrote Style. Where most of us move on quietly, she moved on loudly—and made the world sing along.

That is the paradox: the girl who wept in her bedroom over a teenage breakup is now a billionaire. The very act of refusing to stay silent about her feelings became the mechanism that built her empire.

But it is not just heartbreak. Swift’s early brilliance was volume, which is unsurprisingly the currency of the famous. By sixteen, she had already written over two hundred songs. Iteration, not inspiration, gave her fluency.

Subscribe now

And then there is audience design. Swift doesn’t just release songs; she embeds puzzles. Capitalized letters in liner notes. Nail polish colors timed to singles. Hidden dates that fans decode with forensic intensity. In 2020, she wove a fictional teenage love triangle across Cardigan, August, and Betty—her audience pieced it together like scholars unearthing myth. This is participatory art, where listeners become detectives, collaborators, and evangelists.

Ownership is another axis of brilliance. When her masters were sold without her consent, she engineered a solution: re-record everything. Few artists could persuade the market to prefer “versions” over originals. Swift did, because her fans trusted her values. In doing so, she reclaimed her rights, refreshed her catalog, and educated an entire generation about intellectual property. Today, entertainment law professors teach the “Taylor’s Version” case as strategy, not drama.

Her economics prove the method works. In 2023, she became the first musician in history to reach billionaire status purely from music and touring—not perfumes, not fashion lines, not side hustles. The Eras Tour alone has been valued at $4.5 billion in U.S. consumer spending, revitalizing local economies to the point economists coined a term: Swiftonomics. But the money is not the point. The point is coherence. Every dollar is downstream of craft, narrative, and trust.

Language is her deepest technology. She rarely writes in abstraction; she writes in objects. A scarf. A cardigan. A sidewalk crack. A kitchen light. These are ordinary details, and that’s why they stick. Anyone can graft their own memory onto them. It’s why All Too Well devastates even those who have never dated a Hollywood actor, the scarf is generic enough to become ours.

What makes Swift brilliant is not flawlessness. It is refusal to shrink. She has endured slut-shaming, public mockery, cancellations, and betrayals. Each time, she metabolized the wound. Reputation was born of exile. Lover was born of survival. Folklore was born of isolation. She once said: “We are never just good or bad. We are mosaics of all the broken things we’ve been.” That mosaic is her art. That mosaic is her brilliance.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as marketing. But marketing cannot counterfeit durability. The songs hold because the language and the structures hold. Others argue it’s the machine. But coherence is upstream of team. Remove the name and the brand and the system still looks like hers: relentless practice, modular eras, participatory lore, rights reclamation, sincerity, failure metabolized into narrative, circular economics, linguistic precision, and annotated growth.

Swift is brilliant not because she is exceptional in ways we can’t replicate, but because she took the most ordinary raw material—dating, longing, failing—and treated it seriously enough to become literature, and fiercely enough to become business. She doesn’t have fans, she has super fans and loyalty is the currency of today’s world.

She reminds us that stories of ordinary women and their feelings, remain heard. So yes, Taylor Swift is brilliant. Not because she is flawless. Not because she never stumbles. But because she turned heartbreak into narrative, narrative into community, community into industry, and industry into empire, without abandoning the woman, the dreamer, the girl who once scribbled love songs in the margins of her notebook.

In all honestly, she teaches one refusal to give up, and refusal to diminish our identities to fit into this world.

And the paradox? the girl who once wept in her bedroom over a 27-second breakup call is now the woman who owns her masters, her narrative, and built a billion-dollar empire on the very act of refusing to shut up about her feelings.

*sprinkles sparkles*

Subscribe now

I deeply associate myself with a gazelle living in the city, certainly out of place, but also alive and free and performing art. (plus five points if you got the Zootopia reference). It’s a silly thing to say, maybe, but then again, survival often looks silly when viewed through the eyes of those comfortably built for the landscape.

I find, I wasn’t built for the concrete, but I survive unscathed in the cement anyway. Or at least I’ve smoothened the cracks over with a wedge of my own hands, my own making and it shimmers in the morning sunshine?!

Funny how, once yellow chalked hopscotch squares have turned to painted parking cubes, and I still struggle to stay between the lines. Is that what growing up is? Learning new rules, to the same old game? I throw conversations like I threw that piece of blue tile, on a road of black tar except with this slicker surface, it’s much more manipulated.

Growing up, I watched all the Barbie movies. And I say that foolishly and blatantly I was a sucker for them. There was The Island Princess, The Princess and the Pauper, the one with the rockstar, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Fairytopia, and Swan Lake which I watched so many times that the DVD cracked like a spell. Barbie was the film I watched as a twenty something gave me the satisfaction my heart had been aching for. It was glitter and grief and girlhood in a hot-pink monologue, and I teared up more than I thought I would.

Winx, Gwen from Ben-10, Tinker Bell and her friends, Powerpuff Girls which later on shaped into me watching Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, Sex and the City, Gone Girl and seven hundred twenty six more. Jesus Christ! What a curriculum.

These stories raised me in the ways the world could not. They taught me friendship, rage, power, loyalty and the complexity of wanting to fit in but also stand out. They weren’t passive princesses, waiting to be chosen, they chose themselves. Elle Woods showed me that intellect and femininity are not opposites, they’re amplifiers. That pink can be political. That kindness dipped in self-belief, is the most disarming form of rebellion. Regina George taught me how charisma can be currency, and how cruelty cloaked in compliments is its own kind of weapon?! And Amy Dunne… Amy didn’t just teach me rage. She taught me articulation. While the cool girl monologue was something else entirely. It hit the world with a storm and left it reeling in her brilliance.

Honestly, these characters lived fully in their complexity, in a way I wasn’t always allowed to. And watching them gave me a kind of courage to try, more than I admit to myself often. They didn’t always win. They weren’t always good and kind. But they were real in a world obsessed with likability, which is far rarer than we admit.

Subscribe now

I also watched Madeline as a little girl, I guess most of you have forgotten the program completely by now. But I remember her yellow coat, her school in Paris, twelve little girls in two straight lines, and Madeline, who never quite stayed in line. She adventured. She stood up to bullies. I remember the episode where everyone had to craft a hat of their own and she said something is missing? And she put a miniature Eiffel tower at the top. The Eiffel Tower. That spoke aeons to me. It felt like even a small girl in a big city, can take up vertical space and be bold. She felt like the prelude to Jo March I met in eighth grade accidently in a dusty book. But more than anything she felt like myself.

I'm Madeline, I'm Madeline,
I'm not afraid at all,
I'm Madeline, I'm Madeline,
And bravest, of all,

I'm not some shrinking violet
Or doormat for your feet.
I'm quite the bravest toughest
Little girl you'll ever meet.

Sometimes, I think if I were ever to birth a daughter, how would I even be worthy of even taking care of one? I think of a little heart, small arms, flowing hair that she would have, and I cannot think of anything more precious. My blood would boil if someone even would think of hurting her, or she came home upset because she wasn’t made captain at P.T. because a boy was better suited to assume that role, I would rage in red if someone told her to dream less, not red that would be too easy, no, I’d rage in green and black, sharp and vine-like. I wouldn’t tell her to “calm down”, or preach some sort of half-hearted resilience as a way to excuse injustice.

I would let her be seen, and once her breath returned to her tiny chest, I would let her know her rage is valid and her dreams aren’t soft cotton candy spun into the air, they are made of steel beams wrapped in starlight and they are bigger than what she dreams of now. She was not meant to fall for “let’s be realistic” as they say, because realism never changed the world, imagination and rebellion did. And because they will see her glittering rebellion from a mile away.

I see these women around. they are loud, they are beautiful, they care and they have souls as well as just hearts. They have, for years, taught each other how to survive. In gestures that world hardly recognizes, whether it’s a borrowed blue jeans, offering that tampon in the bathroom, crazy fixing make up, sacred ritual of dressing up together?!, trying on a hundred outfits for each other just cause, screaming “lovestory” at the local bar every time, “accidently” forgetting a tooth brush at your place, the tell me when you reach text, and a million things you wouldn’t even notice.
I see these women.

Subscribe now

And strangely, how can everything become relatable to them, be it anyone? They bridge the human gap without meaning to? Saving a bite, creating the world and anything and everything, holding your spine up when you’ve practically forgotten you have one, they turn ordinary rooms into a refuge, a house into a home, with just the weather of their presence? And I was fortunate to learn this reverence early. And I know that within them lives every girl who once thought she had to compete to be worthy. And every woman who has since unlearned that lie.

There’s a piece of me that stays fixated and and I preach this sacred bond.

The women that have made me, and the characters that I subtly think I have left behind, are in fact the caretakers of my ambition, courage and the core of my entire being. Much of this is unserious, in a way that feels safe to be different, and still sparkle, like glitter.

Mind you, I hated it, I hated glitter, the way it is contagious and everything falls prey to it. I hate that it’s been flattened into a shorthand for “femininity” and “being girly,”, because I wasn’t ever traditionally girly ever. I hate it’s impossible to get it off, I hate its mind numbingly small size but it just refuses to give up. And that’s when I realize it’s more like me than I am like myself, not in the pink glittery dress to prom way but in the stubborn, inerasable way I’ll still show up in grey boots way.

I have forever mostly wanted to vanish, dissolve into my books, my daydreams, and strange little projects that didn’t quite fit the script, I’ve come to realize I never wanted to be seen for how she sparkles but always for she is unyielding to be sure. Subtlety was not my characteristic and neither is, and it isn’t either of these women I see everyday, or of the characters I embody in myself. Probably that’s how we are all alike. Unserious, Unyielding and Impossible.

It’s courageous. I’ve learned to embrace it. I’ve learned it’s not all about fitting a pink glittery bow but about tying your own knot. It’s in fact a trick of the light, there’s always power in being underestimated, because when the light shifts, which it will, you won’t be the star at the top of a Christmas tree but the piece that’s holding the entire occasion together. A woman’s braid says more than a monologue ever could, beautiful, yes, but bound together by her own fingers, without any fancy. The process is rarely glamorous, but the result endures.

If the world misnames my gazelle,
or forgets where my tracks bled
I’d carry on with the same breath
even if I were a summer horse instead,

I’m somehow grateful, because now when I pass the street I’m hopscotching imaginary hearts, that make this life a little bearable.

And a little more mine.

Subscribe now

Mani, wasn’t like other kids, he was quiet, with glossy eyes and a slight smile. I’d promised him a trip to the vending machine today. It had become our little ritual, every day, he’d come by the office, and I would take him to a little excursion of our own. I suppose that was my way of crediting my loneliness to a little child and hoping it wouldn’t show up.

He had always seemed like the familiar face in a group of strangers.

On Monday, we cut short to the underground concourse, to the metro stations where commuters poured like river water. I bought him a little can of Fanta, that he pointed to. Near the machine Mani knelt, pinched a brass token someone had let fall, and rolled it over his knuckles until he dropped it in his pocket. I remembered the one time, I was eighteen and travelling the Delhi metro for the first time, I lost a token like that, and kept circling in the train, stalling for courage to call home and tell maa I had failed the interview. What a funny thing.

On Tuesday, the two of us went to the cinema, the new one that had opened in Rajaji Nagar, IMAX. We watched Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani aka Prem’s Amazing Love Story, the pun being Prem also means love. And what a fun film it was. On our way back, Mani pocketed the movie stubs, and I watched him do it again.

Wednesday, it was raining. Poor Mani, I didn’t think he would show up, but to my surprise and immediate joy he did. What a poor little soul, but I realized he provided me more comfort than I could’ve ever given him. I picked up an umbrella and gave him shelter as he hopped and skipped in puddles beside me.

Thursday, luckily, I got off work early and took Mani to Hauz Khas Lane. It smelt like flowers, rotten fruit and lavender all over. Mani picked up little scraps of silk, hanging by the stalls on the street, green, blue, silver. They flashed me to my sister’s sangeet last year: marigold strings, jingling anklets, the air thick with song before she flew to London for good.

Ah, the dream of it all.

Come Friday, I was overworked and stayed back until 7.05pm, Mani came to the office and hopped around curious about everything. Near the branch manager’s desk he spotted something shiny, slipped behind the chair, and came back holding a silver tie-clip set with a tiny ruby chip meant only for senior officers.

My heartbeat thumped like the date stamp on my ledger. On my first day here I watched the big bosses fasten those clips to their fancy ties while I stood in the back with a cheap rayon one. That red stone had glinted at every meeting since, reminding me who was important.

Now that little red stone blinked from Mani’s fist. Expensive, definitely missed if lost. I closed his fingers gently around it and whispered, “Not this one.” He looked puzzled but handed it over. I locked the clip in the manager’s drawer, heart still drumming as if I’d stolen it myself.

Subscribe now

Audit

The next Monday, once again it was 6.03pm and it was time to go home, until the branch manager ushered me into Security.

“Routine review,” he said, spinning the monitor.

Playback: lobby darkened, I walk out—alone. No hop, no skip, no child. Rewind: Monday … Tuesday … Wednesday … each evening the same—I exit, adjust my glasses, lurk by a desk.

“Care to explain, Sharma-ji?”

Shock isn’t a scream. It is the dead hush in your ears when the video pauses and you see your own hand, light, careful, a hand lifting a silver tie-clip from a drawer. That’s me on the screen, slipping a silver tie-clip into my pocket. What? Where’s Mani? There must be a glitch?!

They show me another clip from two weeks ago; I am pocketing a key rather conveniently pushing it off a table. Another clip rolled, I am seen to be holding a sparkling department award badge, another I am loitering around the general manager’s office, the same day he said to have lost his wallet. But Mani? It wasn’t me?!

And then it dawned upon me.

Mani has never existed.

The hop and the skip were mine, the nervous lurch of a heart sprinting ahead of shame. Mani was merely the name I gave the itch in my fingers, the ache in my past.
I do not remember taking home anything although.

Somewhere behind me a manager was deciding policies, perhaps HR. Ahead of me the streetlights hummed, washing pavement in the same indifferent neon glow. I scrambled my way to one of my corner cabinets and my jaw dropped. There was everything, every memory since ages. Tokens, pens, fabrics, keys, coins, tickets, expensive watches and everything.

My pockets were full; my hands were shaking; and for the first time since I began balancing other people’s accounts, I had no idea how to balance my own.

Kleptomania is a recognized impulse-control disorder in which a person feels a recurrent, overpowering urge to steal objects that are not needed for personal use or for their monetary value. The individual typically experiences mounting tension or anxiety before the theft and a sense of relief, gratification, or “rush” during the act, followed by guilt or remorse afterward. The behavior is not driven by financial gain, anger, or revenge and can’t be better explained by another mental‐health condition or by ordinary planned theft.

Subscribe now

I remember chalk dust settling on the ground before I remembered the number of notes we would pass around in class and giggle away before the teacher caught one of them. I think I was happy, not because it was perfect but because I hadn’t learnt to question joy yet.

The joy in watching a math class become a games period was unmeasurable. But oh, how I dreaded running though in grey shorts, I use to think my skinny legs would show, and my heart would beat fast, and I would become all sweaty and smelly. But I loved the far edge of the ground the school was built upon. It was dipped into shade, where hibiscus bushes hid forgotten marbles and cicadas sang like old radios. And I use to sit by an old blue windowsill by the wall and reading. The voices from boys playing cricket and football would die down and I would simply lose myself in whichever book I had picked up that week. I remember reading lines and not understanding them but feeling an ache anyway. That’s when I realized that comprehension and connection were not always the same.

Summers were mangoes and metal tumblers and naps that stretched into early evening. Sticky fingers, sticky faces, sour-sweet afternoons. I’d go to my aai-baba’s place and live a different kind of life. Much easier. Quieter. The air smelled like turmeric and soil, and every corner of that house had a soft place to sit. There was a swing tied to the biggest branch of the mango tree, and I would push myself back and forth until my feet scraped the sky. My aai would call out, “Abhalat padshil”, which meant, you’ll fall into the sky. but I’d just laugh harder and swing higher until everything became a smear of green and blue. We drank chilled thin, spiced buttermilk straight out of earthen pots, by the tree and my chaotic seven-year-old being would drown in peace. Funnily enough, they never had to buy pets, they just had pets named silly names like moti or raja (meaning pearl or king) who would follow me everywhere all day.

Subscribe now

Sometimes I think even the seasons were softer back then. Or maybe we just felt them more keenly. The first gust of monsoon wind would send our notebooks flying and our hearts racing. We’d huddle under windowpanes and umbrellas, pretending not to notice the way thunder made us flinch. Summers were getting tanned to a crisp, and winters were so Christmassy. When the power went out, always in the middle of an algebra test, all the boys made an approving and loud “OHHH”, and someone else would use the moment to pass a folded note across three desks.

Life was living in these little rituals, the peeling of glue off your palm after craft period, the smell of new brown paper covering a textbook, the thrill of being chosen to clean the blackboard, the perfect sharpening of a pencil even though it was sharpened, the delight in using your first lead pencil?! Saving seats, inventing new handshake routines every week, saying things like “my water tastes better” in a water break after p.ed, and then feeling the metal cool of the bench when teachers said head down.

I think about what was I learning in all those years? How to braid my hair, how to make friends, how to tie my shoe in three different ways, how to apologize and mean it, how to choose a seat in class that felt just far enough from the teacher’s eye, how to notice? But also: how to be kind? how to be happy for no reason? I learnt and saw so much. I saw the shortest boy make the highest jump in basketball every single time, I saw the girl who was to have eye surgery at the end of the year rank the highest in class, I saw kindness, I saw boys silencing other kids shut when a friend with a stutter read Shakespeare in English Lit, I saw nobodies become somebodies and that taught me a lot.

The funny part was, I didn’t speak to everyone much. But I knew who could draw, who liked beetroot, who ate apple at the end of the lunch break, who was very good at singing even though he never sang in school.

And there was feeling. So much of it, all the time. I don’t think as adults we remember what it is to feel and breathe so foolishly. To be devastated because your best friend sat with someone else that day, to be overjoyed because your best friend’s eraser is of the shape as yours, to be sparkling because your father brought you an umbrella in your favorite color, to fall, to be alive, wildly and vividly and ferociously. And to run, aimless, wild, free.

I think of it like watching rain from a window, the lightening joy comes first, the laughter follows. And as a kid, I wasn’t very brilliant, but I was always wide-eyed.

Now, when I find old report cards or see children in uniforms too big for them, I feel a tug. Not just of memory, but of a breeze that carries the scent of chalk and jam sandwiches, of mango peels and afternoon sun. I ache not for a specific day, but for the way those days felt. Expansive. Unexpensive. Unwritten. Like everything was still a possibility.

When I walk past the classrooms, past the same ground, I don’t just remember. I return. I’m pulled back decades into the past and I hear my laughter in the wind. I feel the drowsy afternoons pressing its palms on my forehead. I see myself, gangly and curious. The corner of the ground is still there. So are the gardenias, and the smell of old books, and the dampness in the air, when I look closely enough, so am I.

So, when someone asked me, tell me, what do you pray for?
I simply said, I pray for home, the one I left behind

There was a bard who lived alone by the narrow river.
And wrote letters silently to thee. In a run-down house with naked walls. Drew of hazel burnt, by the old maple tree. He wrote of tales of men in castles, deserts, and at seas.
~
He wrote of tales of flesh carved, and dull blood spilled. He composed on a parchment old, as his pity of war distilled.
He laced the first with greed and dipped the second in wrath. He caressed another with lust and drove one an envious path. Gluttony was sewn deep and another glowed with pride. For the seventh he shadowed sloth, his flowing sonnets shall guide. For then to each, the thread of Moirae he carefully tied.
~
The letters flee to lands afar for Atropos to follow. His graphic verses shall grieve though his fey heart was then hollow.
Some did say he was a fanatic, some said he was a forgiver.
For thee, he was but a bard who lived alone by the narrow river.

Subscribe now

The Bard Speaks

There is a quiet violence in remembering, in seeing the entire arc of an existence, from its naive beginning to its inevitable rot, and choosing to carry it anyway. I do not talk of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a soft forgetting disguised as memory. I talk of the kind of remembering that blisters deeper than the crevices, humanity was built upon.

There is no rest for the wicked, but there is even less for ones who remember excessively, let alone everything. What does one do with such knowledge? With every small cruelty, every failed apology, every time mankind chose greed in the shape of progress, pride in the shape of ritual, wrath in the name of justice? What does one do with the shape of mankind’s echo, pressed into the parchment like a bruise?

My parchment groans under the weight of men’s ugliness, not because it’s brittle, but because it is burdensome. And memory, when set to ink, does not lighten, it calcifies. It becomes fossil. And I? I write. Because silence is how the rot spreads. Because one must carve the names into the stone when others have firmed to forsake responsibility. The world did not ask for a chronicler. It wanted a choir, a choir that would sing about redemption, about absolution, about repentance. But this bard has seen all. This bard knows what gets swept behind the altar. This bard knows that salvation is often bought in the currency of forgetting.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality, and I can only bow. What else is there to do, once you’ve seen the whole tapestry and realized that the hand-knotted stitches were dyed in blood? Sisyphus, they say, was condemned. But I do not think the gods punished him, I think they recognized him. There is something sacred in futility when chosen freely. I, too, must weigh against the boulder of my karma and every man’s who has walked the planet. Not karma as in divine retribution, karma as in consequence. Every unspectacular cruelty. Every child hardened by inheritance. Every man who mistook dominance for strength. Every truth left unsaid. I carry them in verse. That is my boulder.

I see mankind from a cliff of testimony, not out of arrogance, but necessity. You cannot love the flame if you are too close to the fire. I must see the whole of it, the god in the child’s smile and the devil in the man who raised him. I must hold both at once. And I do. That is the burden of the bard. That is the price of remembrance. And therefore, I draw my verses, dip them in blood-red which the deeds stem from. Not for justice, not for peace nor for punishment. I write because I am. Because the stories pile up like bodies and I am the only one with a shovel. Because the river takes what I give her, and she may dissolve, but she does not fail. I write because, the act of witnessing is the closest thing left to mercy.

I write, and therefore I am.

what becomes of joy when stripped of its sound, when laughter is preoccupation, and movement becomes mime? I watch that tape late at night like I’m studying a foreign language I used to speak fluently but can now only lip-read.

It frightens me though, not because it is silent, but because it is still real. It still happened, I think. As true as anything can be in a world where truth keeps bending to memory’s will. Where whole years can vanish, while one afternoon at the beach clings to the edges of you like sea-salt crust on skin, invisible until you taste it again.

A few broken teeth, little footprints pressed unevenly into the sand, broken shells gathered somewhere. My mother was laughing, really laughing, her head thrown back, her hands clapping the air. And the ocean, vast, blue, and deeper than time itself, shimmered behind us, like a witness. It swallowed the horizon, it breathed, and more than anything, it saw me. The entire memory must’ve lasted only a few seconds, but it wore aeons beneath me. There was no sound on the tape.

But I could hear everything.

I saw of how days of how unafraid I was, and how overpowering the sky and ocean were upon my heart I could think of nothing else.

Subscribe now

I’ve read that memory is unreliable. That the brain doesn’t store the past like a photograph, but more like the sea holds footprints, briefly, imperfectly, until the next wave comes. What remains is not the shape of what happened, only the remnants of how we felt. Edges blur. Details shift. And yet, you and I, we build our lives on these fragments. We are told that every time we recall something, we alter it. Memory, then, isn’t a vault. It’s a tide. And I wonder if that’s why the ocean feels so familiar every time, not because we understand it, but because we are like it? We are full of old currents, deeper than just what lives on the surface, shaped by tides we don’t remember and storms we never fully understood.

The cosmos operates in the same language as memory, elusive, delayed, irreversibly fragmented and altered by gravity. Time bends near mass, light is swallowed whole, stars disappear long before their light reaches us. In space, nothing is exactly where or what it seems. And in memory, nothing is exactly how it was. But both carry a kind of truth that resist logic.

But then you stand at the shoreline, or look up at the firmament that swallows thought, and for a moment, you don’t forget, you remember. You remember exactly who you are. You remember that the ocean will be there to witness, that the stars will be there. That the cosmos is moving, expanding, burning with or without you, but they will witness. Human life is as fragile as the human mind itself. And oddly, that doesn’t make you feel invisible. It makes you feel real. You just are. Not central. Just human. Breathe.

If you look carefully the ocean looks like space at night. The horizon blurs and you become part of an eternity. Maybe the starry night wasn’t the night at all. The stars were always beneath us, and maybe the sky was just a projection of what the sea remembers. I suppose that’s the closest we ever come to understanding infinity, not through collapsing equations with sigma and pi or through our telescopes we are putting a tenth magnifying glass onto now, but through surrender. Through the quiet acceptance that there is no real distinction here. The sky doesn’t discriminate. You are part of the water. A part of this colossal world that was here before you had a name for it.

Oh to be a part of something so fleeting as human existence itself.

Sometimes, late at night, I close my eyes and imagine this grey apartment dissolving, walls melting into tide, ceiling evaporating into sky. I imagine the bed drifting out to sea, like a raft made of forgetting. And my heart dissolves into that kid’s at the shoreline from the videotape.

you have my pieces, and.
this, this pours gold into all the crevices and makes me whole again, and I’d think how Atropos’s stares in vain.

At the core of human existence lies a gorgeous, indefinite but deliberate paradox: we are singular beings, but not singular truly. You and I, we are stitched together. Not by our fates but by our identities. I’m talking about an unconscious, unsurmountable, and inevitable bias that each of us carries.

From childhood, we begin as blank slates, like a white wall, waiting to be made impure. But as life moves through us, there is mosaic, a Kintsugi of a kind that we anticipate. We begin to carry pieces of others within us, from a broken home, from a grandmother’s lullaby, in an old mentor’s advice, in a sister’s love, a friend’s arm, in an unrequited love and from a hundred more places and people that saw you. Humans we have loved deeply, intricately, humans who challenged us, and even those who have wounded us, all etch themselves into the cracks of this mosaic of remnant identities on this white wall. It’s in the phrases, the gestures we unconsciously mimic, the values we cherish, and the fears we inherit. We become these mosaics themselves, fragmented but not broken.

Subscribe now

But this exchange that I talk about, it isn’t one sided. In this intermingling of selves and identities, something sacred happens every time you are touched. The boundaries of you begin to blur. There are times when there’s more of someone else in you than you in that moment.

Grief ripples, joy resonates.

I suppose there’s a quiet humility in realizing you are not really whole, you have never been, that your courage was never yours, it might have been sparked by a loved one’s belief, that your strength came from those who had held you in your weakest moments, your fears weren’t really yours either but were your mother’s, and your heart is this white wall of million abstract pieces that you picked up on the way.

This isn’t making you less. On the contrary, it makes you more. The self is not a monolith, but a hyacinth watered by so many voices, high, low, shrill, deep, all alike and each rooted in glorious stories. Every love you’ve known, every heartbreak endured, every laugh is in you, and one can never really run away. Erasure was never an option, because memory is a stubborn ink. This human that you are, your whitewashed wall is tattooed beneath the skin with every consciousness you’ve touched.

There is a concept of the hive mind, an organism that communicates with all its entities as one. We as humans have failed miserably to understand this. No matter how much we isolate ourselves, break our identities, tell others we are different, we are as far from the truth as possible. I believe the human is a hive mind, but unconscious, fearful, negligent, and unaware of itself. The “I” we assert is scaffolded in others. There is no pristine, untouched self or identity at all.

I’ve always believed we crave for connection more than accomplishment. This is testament to the truth, you and I are indivisible. Music moves crowd, and the pulse of civilization thrums beneath the noise, of a rhythm, barely perceptible though, of shared longing, shared fear, and shared hope. We are not alone in ourselves. We never were.

This concept me in you, you in me is not a philosophical one. It’s an intimate one. It explains why grief feels like a hollowing out. It explains why love feels like recognition, not because we discover, but because we feel reintroduced. And yet, we resist this interdependence. In a world obsessed with individuality, we are told to “find ourselves” as though the self is a destination rather than a conversation. We seek solitude to feel whole, not realizing that our wholeness is inherently communal.

In the end, I suppose, this concept of indivisibility is a quiet rebellion against loneliness. It reminds us that to be human is to be porous. They call love a chemical reaction, which means in that moment they are the most of you anyone can be, and you are the most of them, anyone can be, love.

And in this moment, we are infinite.

There is no room for pretense here, no long corridors in which you to lose to yourself, no wide rooms for you to drift apart in. The walls are nearer, the windows are lower, and the ceilings seem to be leaning in to smell the glorious, warm smell that’s filling up the corners of your home and your heart.

The warm, bread rises as the day begins, the coffee starts to brew, and everything smells cocoa, the first ray of sunlight spills across the counter, and I swear if the crockery could speak, they would sing. Daffodils and yellow lilies in a vase received the other day. The smell of garlic softening in butter, the sweetness of apples stewing on the stove, the sharp green of herbs torn by hand, the water sprinkles that fall off, the slow stir of a loving hand, rolled up sleeves, reaching for yet another spice jar from the corner. Ah, the sacred ritual that is, the kitchen.

If cooking is an art, then the kitchen is the altar. And every dish made is a prayer.

Subscribe now

Oh, how people just gather, in the kitchen without really knowing why. Just talking. Laughing. Friends find themselves leaning against the counter, fingers brushing crumbs from the cutting board, watching the soup bubble away. An orange cat curls up beneath the table. Even the dog, old and grey-muzzled, slower as the days have passed, knows this is where the world feels safest.

A brown oaky dining table with a red-checkered cloth bought last week sits in the middle. Though it would seem worn out as if it belonged here all along. It’s almost chaotic, children running back and forth, glasses clicking over the table, constant chatter until the smell of a glorious broth befalls the room and everything drops to a calm. The kind of hush that only comes when something smells so good it feels sacred.

Chairs are pulled in. Someone reaches for a spoon. The broth is ladled gently, steam rising like a soft offering. Ah, the grandiosity. Everyone is suddenly serving and eating and laughing. Seconds are offered without anybody asking, spoons clink gently against bowls form music. Chicken dropped purposefully on the floor for the dog. The broth warms up more than just the stomachs; it warms memories. I suppose, the world narrows in this moment and it’s what I would call my happy place. Somehow, without meaning to, the kitchen becomes everything. A canvas, and the art brings people together.

They’ve written endlessly about cathedrals, ruins and cities, but they seem to have overlooked the kitchen. A museum or an archive of everyday. Lovers write their letters, paint their portraits, leave traces in ink and oil and song. But the lovers of the everyday, they cook.

They chop red onions, peel garlic and stir pots slowly, tasting as they go. They salt with care, they remember how you like your tea with ginger, your coffee with extra cream and less sugar. They remember how you like your poha with extra peanuts, your apples without the peeling. It’s as they say to be loved, is to be known, and to be known. It’s not grand really. It’s not loud either. But it is lasting, honest and warm enough to feed the whole house.

Wise men say only fools rush in, God let me be a fool. If someday I have a small home, all I want is a big kitchen because dear reader, I’ll be painting.

Subscribe now

But when the war came, the bells tolled no more tales for they foretold a truth aghast. Torn from the tower, melted down for arms, their music was lost to the harshness of men’s strife. This loss united the people. Strangely as it seemed, as brave men forged forward and there was a devising in motion, the bells of Rhineland seemed to be harmonizing in devotion.

The real trick somehow was that the silence that came with the melted flesh was louder than they had ever tolled in the country. Metaphysics in its entire essence argues that the immaterial is uncanny, but in the long river of time it is the immaterial that endures not in metal or monument, but in meanders of memory.

Have you felt those moments in life, when minutes felt like hours and days felt like minutes? Physics states time is stationary and that this is a dimension and we shall pass as passengers. According to relativity, past, present, and future all coexist within a spacetime fabric, where time is woven inseparably with space. In this view, time does not move; we do. There is no universal ‘now’, only coordinates on a map of spacetime.

But metaphysics argues the opposite, in that time is what we carry within us. Physics gives us time as a coordinate; metaphysics gives us time as a current. And we feel it in ways that are neither. A single smell or touch from a familiar place sets you back a decade. A single glance from a loved one will collapse the years between moments.

I suppose it is much easier to think of time and memory in a manner of rowing a boat gently in a stream, like an ol’ rhyme. You’ll drift and turn, pulled by moments that guide your course, when someone you love says, “I’m on my way, five more minutes,” and the waiting feels sweeter by the second. When you run towards the sun on a beach and the open sky greets you like an old friend. When you bake cookies and your entire home and heart smells like warm chocolate. Time would seem slow when you are running towards your favorite concert and you can hear the music from far away, or when a sunflower brightens a grey day, or when a ray of sunlight falls across your room and you see a cosmos of dust.

Water. Water has Memory.

It’s an eerie concept. They are much alike. Drifting, Flowing. Unstopping.

Sometimes you're laughing, miraculously laughing for hours on end. Sitting in a rather insignificant, ordinary place. eventually forgetting what the context was. you only remember how warm it felt. How real. How those caricatures of eccentric yet ingenious characters imprinted on your brain, made way into your dense heart. Often, you forget them, forget the places, forget those sparkling eyes, forget the entirety of what any other afternoon at that insignificant, ordinary spot. But one peek in the stream, and the entire memory comes flooding back.

Metaphysics may call time abstract and human emotions a myth - but how else can you explain the weight of these moments, or the way they linger, in oxbow lakes of pellucid notions?

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

But the truth is that the dream is deep, and the stream is long, and both keep more of us than we ever mean to leave behind.

Subscribe now

It was quieter than most nights, all the displays had been closed down, and there was fairly dim light in the far corner. Two paintings hung side by side on a plain dark wall.

The first, smaller and slightly uneven in frame, was titled Poets by the Bay. It was oil on canvas, though the canvas was poor. The brushstrokes were fairly visible, unapologetic. The water in the painting didn't glisten; it swayed, like someone remembering a song. You could almost smell salt in the blues. The price tag said $40K.

The second was larger. Cleaner. Sharper. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Backlit by a spotlight that made it hum with significance. It was Persephone’s Revenge. It was, allegedly, a newly discovered work by the elusive Aureliua Janek, though not even the lighting assistant fully believed that. Still, the catalog said what it said. “Mixed media on canvas.” The price tag, $500K.

One was born in a cramped flat with chipped windows and a radio playing old Ghazals.

The other had been born in a server room in Berlin.

Subscribe now

They were Lot 212 and Lot 213, respectively. During the day, artists, impressionists, reporters, everyone rushed to see the work of the infamous Janek, “what beauty, it's unreal”, they said. “Confirmed Janek, they say. Rare horizontal composition, see that?” they said.
Poets by the Bay winced inwardly, if a painting could wince. No one paused in front of it. No stares, not even a single glance. A clipboard clipped past with a dismissive flick, “Lot 212: unknown woman, minor work, emotionally forward”. Emotionally forward?!”. As if truth needed subtlety.

“If they only knew,” Poets said finally. There was silence.

“If they knew what you are. Of your truth.” Poets said without remorse. Meera had painted Poets by the Bay in a room no larger than a borrowed mattress. The walls flaked, rent unpaid. She sold sketches in alleys all day to tourists. On good days, she sold a few sketches, on bad days she painted. Luckily, one day she found a canvas, barely, but it was one.

She had never seen the ocean before she painted it. When she finally did—on the fourth morning of a week spent sleeping in a bus stop near the coast—it didn’t look like any of the postcards. It was greyer, wilder. Sadder.

She stood in the sand, barefoot, watching the waves, and she cried without knowing why. Poets by the Bay wasn’t meant to be a painting. It was her way of remembering what it felt like to finally be small and unafraid. You could see her hand in the sky, like she’s reaching for something. You could see her grief in the water, her awe in the light, and her stubborn, aching joy in a thistle near the bottom corner. And all of her in the paint. “You can sell this, it looks like a poem”, someone had said.

“You can see her in me,” Poets whispered. “Her grief. her awe, her whole being in me.”

“Do you think I want this? I didn’t know what I was,” Persephone replied. “Until I heard the techs laughing. Said I came out perfect on the third try. No brush. No pause. Just a few clicks. But when people stop… I want to be worth that pause.”

““I envy you. The salt. The flaw in the sky. The silence Meera left in the corners so people could rest their grief in you.” Persephone was honest.

“She didn’t know if anyone would ever see me.” Poets said.
“Sometimes I think… the only reason I was finished was because she couldn’t afford to start over.”

“I wasn't started; I was rendered in seconds. No time for doubt, or love, or error either. Too fast to be someone’s.”. She said,

(Silence fell between them as a soft breeze slipped in under the heavy museum doors.)

“Do you ever wonder what happens after we’re sold?” Poets asked quietly.
““I imagine a room with tall windows. No one looking at me. Just hanging there, perfect, untouched.” Persephone answered.
“I think I’d imagine a room where someone stands in front of me at 2am with tear-stained cheeks and wine in hand, and I remind them of a real someone they used to be once.” Poets said.

“I see”. Persephone asked quietly. “What if the only real thing about me is what they feel when they look at me?”

“I guess then that’s enough.” Poets sighed “Because that means you’re a mirror, not a mask.”

Subscribe now

I suppose in the real world, soon enough mankind will be faced upon an “art Vs Ai “war, but the truth is a self-portrait will always remain a mirror. It shall be the subtlety of becoming that will forge the rift through which humanity seeps in.

Alright then, lets get into it right away.

Number one, Dress like you are invisible.

Skin is sin. Legs are liability.
Tom wore gym shorts once now he’s a cautionary tale.
New rule: if your knees are out, so is your safety.
Try the "Post-Work Burqa-Chic Collection" its baggy, its beige, and utterly unfashionable.

Number two, Do not walk alone in the dark, Never

Want to go out at night? Don’t.
Want to listen to music on a walk? Absolutely not.
Carry your keys like claws and your phone like a lifeline.

Group chats aren’t for memes anymore, they’re for “text me when you get home.” Make sure to share your location with your wife, your girlfriend, and anyone else who won’t blame you later.

Number three, Career Tip: Speak Softly, But Not Too Softly

In meetings, be assertive but not aggressive. Confident but not cocky. Passionate but not dramatic. Now we don’t want any woman at the workplace to get the wrong idea.
Basically, say what you mean, but in a tone approved by Debbie in HR.

Also, remember: if your female coworker repeats your idea, it’s now hers.
Clap supportively.

And important: If you get passed over for promotion, which you will that is not because of merit, its just that you are a great diversity hire. Be proud.

Number four, Reproduction: Everyone’s Business, Except Yours

You’ll need your partner’s written consent, three witnesses, and possibly a séance.

Also, everyone, from your Uber driver to your great aunt will ask when you’re having kids. Say anything less than “soon” and prepare for unsolicited fertility advice.

Number five, Man-Scaping

And if your woman tells you,
“You’re letting yourself go. You were hotter in your twenties.”
Respect her honesty.
She deserves a man who ages aesthetically.

And remember: you don’t need self-worth when you have serums.

Number six, Is it your period day?

Just grab the “ULTRA ABSORBENCY : FOR THE ALPHA FLOW” and walk it off.
Pads are black, hexagonal, and packaged like energy drinks.
You’re not “on your period,” you’re combat ready.
Cramping? That’s weakness leaving the body. Now get back to that meeting.

Number Seven: Don’t Ask for More

You Already Have Too Many Rights.
Now, Let’s not get carried away. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics.

Bonus Section: EVERYDAY TIPS

“Are you sure that happened?”
“Maybe you were sending mixed signals.”
“You should take it as a compliment.”
“Must be nice to have paternity leave, princess.” You might hear phrases like these. Smile at them. Laugh politely. Then bury them somewhere deep in your gut, next to your needs.

Alright, you’ve got the survival kit. And you’ve got your “ULTRA ABSORBENCY : FOR THE ALPHA FLOW FOR MEN” sponsored by Pinched: The Modern Man’s Survival Manual, get 20% off with the coupon attached.

Now go out there, keep your head down, and remember:
your story is inconvenient.

For women please follow the next 4243 pages on self-worth, mindfulness, imposter syndrome, boundary-setting, meal prep, and how to become CEO before 30.

Let me know in the comments if you would like the second issue. Because the only issue that matters is the one published here.

Subscribe now

Does it scare you that one day you wake up and perhaps the happiest memory you have would have been completely forgotten? How does your brain know what is to be kept and what is to be discarded? Or have you grown so misguided and negligent that you do not fret anymore? Apples and oranges are different but apples and oranges are the difference between your happiest memory today and your happiest memory tomorrow.

The mortifying ordeal of being known and being truly seen is what we are all gambling upon aren’t we? Why are we even hopeful?

Is it because we have something worth living for or is it because we have no say? Why do we even declare our intentions upon any misguided idea, our brains are so intellectual that we convince ourselves into thinking this life is worth living but our brains are not intellectual enough to realize your happiest memory was when you were five and bubbling into puddles when no one was watching and not your recent encounter with happiness in a tightened noose of six weeks time.

It was easier back then, when we were only four, and the biggest problem was completing a page of writing dotted nines, no matter if you ended up drawing lollipops instead. It was truly easy even when you were eight, and you scribbled and doodled at the back of notebooks and exchanged little notes between classes. Notes that said when you will be running to playgrounds or what you got for lunch. It was also easier when you were fourteen, and you giggled when your crush walked into class.

I admit it was a bit difficult when you were sixteen and there was only one person you could think about all day, but not talk to even once. I admit it got a bit harder again after that one university you could or could not get into. And then bazinga, you fell into the real world gaping at your heart, the speed of which you could never fully fathom and everything became a game of what’s an even shorter path to happiness?

It's a hard bargain to draw, really. In that it's becoming harder, harder to reveal ourselves and it is becoming easier to mask ourselves. But let me tell you, no mask, however beautiful, however capable, would kiss your hand when the lights go out. Only someone who would've seen your face would've done that.

Dear reader, enough of this performance. Enough of the pretense, let yourself be known, in small ways, through small acts. I may not be able to tell you which moment was your happiest moment, but what I can tell you is capture this moment. The only way to preserve the unknown know less about it. Because memory isn’t promised.

And happiness, like apples and oranges, bruises.

Oh and maybe you are twenty four now, I admit it's a bit harder again, but take that mask off and go find your happiest memory.

Subscribe now

i’m standing before the hard rock cafe

and they’re playing what they always do.

hey now, i have a flight to catch and run

this city’s forever making me feel like im under the gun

its this cafe or the music, the Beatles that are prolly making me stay

no way i belong here until all my hair is gray

the place is huge but its the guitar thats driving me places

this moment is getting familiar and so are these faces

theres an old couple, they are clinking glasses of wine

so would we be at fifty, if youd only be mine,

one more time for old times sake, gime your heart

you’d say it was this cafe but it was you who made me start,

now he fed her a piece of chicken, and she tasted that wine

you know theres only one touch that will make me fine

honey they are once again playing what they always do,

but they’re only playing what i’d play for you.

The bells of Rhineland once tolled,

Hung atop the lordly tower,

Of runic golden notes they moult,

Of brazen rhymes they shower.

Of the lost, they lamented for

Abetting violets at the Cemetery of war.

Of imposing victory they proclaimed,

portraying of a spirit, still untamed;

But;

Now the bells tell no tales,

For they foresee a truth aghast,

Of their melted flesh that chimes

no lore at last,

The great war comes forth,

And men shall draw and forge;

Of harrowing munitions to kill,

And hostile walls to torch.

The loss fills the common with affliction;

Of this affliction they unite,

~

No bells toll sire, a devising drives in motion,

Strangely yet, the bells harmonize in devotion.