A Letter to the Girl I’ll Be on Tuesday: Stop Optimizing, Start Living To Cherish (Version 24.0), By the time you read this, the calendar will have flipped. You will officially be twenty-four. The earth will rotate, the Mumbai humidity will be exactly the same, and your coffee order won’t change. But inside your head? I know you. You are treating this birthday not like a celebration, but like a performance review where you showed up without the slide deck. I am writing this t

I used to think the worst thing that could happen to my career was Burnout. You know the visual: messy bun, 4 a.m. emails, crying in the office washroom, The Bear -level cortisol spikes. It’s terrible, but it feels… oddly heroic? Like you’re a war veteran of capitalism. But lately, I’ve been sensing a different energy in the room. Or rather, a lack of energy. I’m seeing glazed eyes on Zoom calls. I’m seeing people "Hurkle-Durkling" (that Scottish trend of rotting in bed way p

I am sitting in a café that charges ₹450 for a latte, staring at a bank balance that says "you’re safe," while my gut screams "you’re stagnant." It is a very specific, privileged kind of hell. We are told that money buys freedom. We are told that once you cover the rent, the bills, and the occasional Zomato binge without looking at the price, the "Purpose" part unlocks automatically like a video game achievement. But here is where I am stuck: I have the resources. I have the

At some point between 18 and 25, I realised the most dangerous thing about growing up isn’t heartbreak or failure it’s how easily your own lies start sounding like truth. You begin with harmless self-soothing: I’m fine, just busy.   I don’t care if he didn’t text back.   This degree will sort itself out.  And then one day, you say it so often that your nervous system files it under “facts.” We call it fake it till you make it,  but no one warns you that it works both ways. Yo

Lately I feel like my love life is a vending machine: tap, get a quick hit, promise myself a real meal later. Short-term gratification...

Last night I caught myself hiding my smile in a group photo classic “half-turn, hair-forward, maybe no one will notice” pose. And then I...

Yesterday I left a coffee with a twenty-two-year-old who’s building a vernacular AI tutor on WhatsApp, walked into a call with a solo...

I used to think college was a stack of PDFs and a decent attendance record. Then my bachelor’s cohort happened chaotic, creative, funny...

Last night I sat across from a man whose laugh landed somewhere between a soft snort and Ryan Gosling’s Ken chuckle. The restaurant...

Yesterday I spent twenty-three minutes toggling between two nearly identical noise-cancelling headphones on Amazon convinced that...

One lazy Sunday, while my Spotify served SZA’s “Saturn” and Instagram coughed up back-to-back clips from The Bear  season three, a...

I wish this piece started with a virtuous epiphany like I traded hookup apps for meditation because “mindful celibacy” glitters on my...

Some mornings I wake up with every tool a hustler could dream of laptop fully charged, cappuccino foaming, Google Scholar a single click...

I walked into the theatre last Friday strictly because my therapist said, “Maybe watch something that isn’t a true-crime doc for once.”...

My first morning in Tokyo felt like my phone had been switched to silent mode without telling me. Rush hour at Shinjuku station—nearly...

I cracked He’s Just Not That Into You  open again  last weekend; right after a Hinge date that dissolved into a 2 a.m. “U up?” and an...

Just watched Materialists  and damn; it really held up a mirror to what we now call “modern dating.” Especially in India, where the...

We talk so much about “casual” today — casual dating, casual sex, casual flirting, casual emotional presence — as if it’s all a light...

Have you ever liked someone so much that you found yourself doing everything right  — texting them good morning, showing up for them,...

There was a time when I could fall for someone just because of the way they held a cigarette. Or how they said "I'll text you once I...