I remember deaths.

Not many. A few.

Personal deaths. Or rather, deaths I have witnessed intimately.

Not the act of dying, but what comes after. Or doesn’t. I knew them as they were, and I saw them erased. I was privy to their bodies leaving a trail of ash enough to fill an urn large enough to stand on a mantle. Until the remains are washed away in the Ganga.

For a kid growing up, the very idea of not being alive felt wrong. How could perfectly reasonable people just wither away? Who would take them away?

But then she came knocking.

I do not remember my grandmother. That is to say, I do not remember her alive. I have seen her photographs tinged with the sepia of age, yellowed with remembrance on the edge, and thumbed with the smudges of dredge. The ritual to recall is an album tucked away in the corners of different homes. Of my grandfather, my uncles, and my father.

It is he, however, whom I do remember. A flash as instantaneous as the precursor to a photograph. I see him in a dhoti, chest bare but for a line of sacred thread. I find sadness on his face, sadness I do not understand. I hear people crying. I feel people bleating. I smell the air hanging heavy with death. She was there, but I could not see her.

How could I? I was but a bud aged three, clinging to my mother, a shelter from the cacophony of the heralds of the end and of moving on.

That was my first brush. An understanding that I did not understand at all. A ritual I did not want to be threaded with. The holiness of passing had been buried under the folds of grey matter, coffined to confines I didn’t want to unearth.

I grew up and turned away from death.

While my parents stole themselves away from their perfectly tight schedules to pay respects to the departed, I would curl up and lock myself away from the prying eyes of the living. It was a conscious web of struggle. I wanted to scrape the sand off the cold, hard earth and feel the friction turn my skin into minute shavings.

Just to avoid her.

But society does not give an easy release to a child. You are expected to follow in the footsteps of the elders. So when their shoes are parked outside the home of those who were, and the doorbell has been rung, your baby feet tread the imprints of oils from the living and into the antechamber of mourning.

And then they cry. And so we cry. No one is looking, it seems. No one is intervening to comfort the sobs of discomfort. No one helps to man the dams of tear ducts.

My head loses the will to stay up. But my body tenses up. Like a grazing deer made privy to the upwind scent of a predator. I lift my head. My doleful eyes scan the horizon. Nothing comes to pass. But then, just for a fleeting moment, between the pauses punctuated by sobs and earmarked by tears, I see her.

She is gentle. Sad. Tired. Yet unmoving. She scans to see her work done, to collect the tears in her own little urn; a glass vessel colder than the receptacles carved into Himalaya’s face.

She didn’t want to spook me, for I was never her quarry that day. But I knew that she knew that we’d cross paths once again in the Savannah grasslands.

What do they call it? The circle of life? She finds that amusingly pitiful.

She stands up. We stand up. Our patrons stand up. We bid farewell. Her lips carve a smile onto her absent face. Farewell had been bidden twelve days ago when she made the doorbell toll.

I curl up again, angry that my parents made me accompany them. It is a necessity, they say. It’s an act of solidarity, they remark. People work together. I cannot pull myself away from the fabric of life.

Which is why I try to do it a few more times.

I did not want to see her.

But she did.

So she rang more doorbells around us. Sometimes within the extended family. Some I could run away from. Others, I was shackled by familial bonds. I made sure, though, that I would not lift my head. A gazelle only wants to graze. Why should it worry about the herd when it has its mouth to feed?

The grasslands of life, however, are a commune on their own. If not today, then tomorrow, when you gulp the satisfaction from a waterhole, you will find yourself close to the one who brings your death.

Or a death that’s close to you.

There is a night in the deeper folds of my grainy consciousness. A night I often gloss over. Somehow, the events preceding that night live eternally well-lit in our collective consciousness.

It was that night, however, when the clocks had tucked the blanket of the night, that my mother’s phone rang. The first toll had been rung close to our family.

My Naani (maternal grandmother) was a hardworking woman. Short in stature and fragile to look at, as if she’d break at the softest of touch. But iron-willed to the very bones that jutted out of her skin.

I have many memories of her. With her. Without her. Memories I am fond of. Memories I hate. Memories I wish I wouldn’t have to revisit after a cold glass of water on a September morning.

And then there is this memory, a snapshot plucked from the album of my life, neatly labelled in a tidy scrawl, laminated for protection until my end, and tucked back within the flow of time.

How do you remember someone who isn’t alive to be the subject of said remembrance?

I saw my mother collapse after that phone call. Age had had the final word with my Naani. We left that very night, my father driving through the borders of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, my mother trying to keep herself steely-hard, and I unfocused and unsure of what to feel.

Dawn saw us to the doorstep of her home. There were others here. Others from the family and their families. My mother took my support. She couldn’t stand. I couldn’t run.

We did not need to ring the bell. The door was ajar. People encircled what remained of my Naani: a body shrivelled with hardships, age, and neglect. My mother couldn’t hold her emotions any longer. Down came the tears, the sobs, the cries of loss.

And there she was, with her many arms primed to collect the offerings of mourning in her frigid chalice.

We locked eyes. Death had missed me.

I found a place between my maternal relatives—aunts, cousins, women I never knew, men I knew but didn’t want to know anymore. There was a mechanical practice to my movements.

I had done this before, hadn’t I? The visiting, the mourning, the exchanges of recognition, respect, and reverence. I could not feel, but I could remember. Rigor mortis had set in. Muscles tensed with cold grace, neurons activated measured signals, and movements came with practiced fluidity. Even when I sat frozen with the shock of my Naani’s passing washing over me, I was animatedly unmoving. Alive and dead. Life next to Death.

She held her gaze questioningly at me. Where was I all this time? Did she not beckon with the knells of ambulances, wails of the living, and rings of the doorbells?

How could I even answer? I couldn’t even look at her. I was afraid that if I let my emotions unfurl, I’d only lash out at her.

The dead don’t divulge their secrets. Those around me bayed with the ferocity of a trapped and hurt animal. Questioned the threads of fate. Lied at the expense of societal agreement. The mourning had begun.

This time, I couldn’t cling to my mother. She had her own mother to cling to. One last time.

Hindu rituals of passing have their own cadence. There is a time to do things, and a place to do them. The body’s offering to the pyre, to be released back into the elements, is prefaced by practices and recitals that pierce the morning light. Loved ones and pretenders offer their final supplication to undo the mishappen. But Time wears Dali’s overflowing, limp robes. Outside, the world comes to a standstill.

The march begins. Lord Ram’s name is infused with the lively crawl of people, vehicles, and earthly rotations still tugging at the strings of fate. Until the crematorium comes into focus.

It was here that, and I distinctly remember this, I found myself alert once again. The pyre had raged its rage, released the immortal soul from its captivities of the mortal shell. My Naani was free.

I remained standing.

I felt alive.

I felt miserable.

A single tear heralded my sadness. As it made its way down the ash-laced cheek, I knew I’d never see my Naani ever again.

But death? She had passed. There was no one to collect my tears.

It was the early Monday morning,
after a night of heavy drinking,
that I saw my balcony plant;
old geraniums alight in the sun
now faded, thirsty for attention...
which my phone caught just in time,
flashing the screen, for it was 9,
so I shelved the watering need,
planting my feet on steps, concrete
stepping on a bud, lying in defeat.

It was only a blissful morning. I think some days ago. But forgetfulness got the better of me.

As it always does.

For a moment, as I stared at the disheveled reflection in the mirror, all I saw was a blank stare looking back at me.

Was it defeat? Or was it something else? A reminder that I could not remember.

I don’t know. Not even now.

I kept staring at those soulless eyes. The bags underneath were heavy with regret. The toothbrush, of the Oral-B electric variety, kept humming through its two-minute cycle.

A few minutes later, I was done staring eternity into the abyss. I stole my gaze from the mirror and bid farewell to its speckled water spots.

It was time to go. The clock was ticking. The calendar, chiming. The phone, buzzing with the start of a routine I knew like the back of my hand.

What I didn’t know was the reflection I stared at.

Who was he?

What was he?

Why was he?

Duty calls. Cars move. Time moves away.

Three hours later, in the confines of a clinically clean washroom, I saw that face again. Those overhead white lights were strong. A new layer of shadows had covered the bags under my eyes.

But who was I even looking at?

I still did not know.

The phone kept buzzing. The plant kept wilting. All these water coolers had some life giving essence within them.

Drinking their contents, I did. Only to wash away the pity.

It always came back, though. Like clockwork.

What is food?

Sustenance, right? A demand of survival that pits you against nature’s entropy. Food is common to every living being. Living. Not artificially alive in a simulacrum of supposed human experience.

Food is, therefore, the baseline of existence. Different organisms, extant or extinct, utilise their energy gains from food to aid in their existence in the circle of life (I know, cheeky).

Human brains, for example, are a voracious energy sink, taking away nearly 20% of energy each day. That makes it the hungriest organ in our bodies. But it makes sense when you think about it; our brain is the biggest aid in our survival.

However, if you’re a tech evangelist sitting on the sun-kissed thrones of Silicon Valley, a surface-level glance at this information is enough to charge you with a sermon defending resource abuse by AI powerhouses.

Sam Altman tries to live true to his name. Tries, oh yes. It has Germanic origins, meaning “old man” with wisdom and experience behind the eyes. So when Altman pushes the boundaries of artificial intelligence, you feel it’s coming from someone passionate and serious.

Or so it seems.

In an Express Adda panel by The Indian Express during the AI Summit in India, he took arms against the completely valid criticism of AI models requiring intense energy investments by using his brain’s reserves to tell the beads of his wise rosary:

Always trust a tech billionaire to lecture on the inconsequence of your life.

Now, my spectacles are fogging from the steaming cup beside me, but I can clearly spot the manic smudges of entitlement that Altman carries. What does he mean by “produce you”? I know that we’re just sacks of meat, but you don’t have to be so blunt. My intelligence, and that of my fellow people across the globe, is just as equal to your intelligence.

To compare a tool to humans is like comparing apples to peelers. Especially a tool that has been branded on billboards as a replacement for human work and ingenuity in skinning a Granny Smith. Just because we like a good meal or seven (some of us are nasty little Hobbitses) doesn’t give anyone the right to hog these resources for their unblinking, unbreaking, and unfaltering robots.

Then again, it’s hard to keep a rational head when the subject of this debate spans the entirety of bipedal evolution, agricultural and industrial revolutions, a multitude of cultures, and religions that live or died.

That’s the neat part, though. None of us has to be perfect. I like my humans with conflict. That’s why I gravitate towards characters in media who are not paragons of perfection but broken and trying their best to make do. It’s that experience of the human brain having lived that sits perfectly crisp with my morning rusk and my evening tea.

Yes, these brains have left a dirty, bloody trail, but they are the powerhouse (right after mitochondria) of human lives. I could be sipping a decaf, having a McAloo Tikki, or even taking time off from my schedule to eat some crispy flatbread with pickle, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that my food, fast or slow, did not come from evacuating villages, clearing forests, and firing people, all in the name of automation. (Unless I’m munching Nestle products.)

Altman, however, has more to say.

I mean, he has a point. If a human were to find me on the street (big if) and ask me to describe the reasons that led to the diminishing and downfall of Constantinople (the city), I’d blink at him for a full thirty seconds before vaguely recalling the titbits of crusades, Ottoman military conquests, and papal incompetence.

At this point, the human on the street will look at me in disbelief or try to fact-check on Wikipedia or other trustworthy historical sources. Or maybe they’ll try to argue me down on my critique against papacy by using their brain’s energy reserves. We could then hang out in a local gastropub to continue the debate and annoy the local patrons.

In comparison, ChatGPT will neither argue with you nor contradict you. You can get what you want or even gaslight it into submission. All this and more coaxing to satisfy you, to quickly deliver the validation you were looking for. Such a good use of the water you drink, the power you consume, the food your parents put on the table. That too without a ruckus.

In fact, I find this to be the one area we humans often lack in. We might have erected high-sailing flags of empathy, but deep down, we are all selfish. All to do with survival, you see. ChatGPT has no sense of self, though. Sure, the company behind it can go from a non-profit to for-profit, but that’s not on poor Chat. It’s just GPT-ing its way through corporate greed.

You and I (and the hypothetical human on the street in the example above) just don’t have the monetary resources to throw at our whims and be altruistically pleasing to each other. It’s the one resource we, compared to Altman, severely lack.

Ah, if only the human brain were hungry for moolah instead of energy.

Oh wait!

I have never found my rhythm with routines.

It’s why I found it unconvincingly tiresome to stick to schedules. I still do, to some extent, but I’ve been weathered medium rare at the ripe age of thirty-two.

Still, my hatred for sticking to a time-bound process creates an intense physical repulsion from within that’s akin to dry-heaving but only lost in the subtleties of objection that shadow my face.

And yet, it’s these cyclical traps that I just cannot get out of. If I spot the mundanity of a schedule, a routine, or a scheduled routine coming my way, I want to turn on my heels and flee. But sadly, life seldom lets you abandon your responsibilities posthaste. It even predicts my movements, sees me getting placidly comfortable, and pulls the rug from underneath.

All it does is force me into a routine to destroy my routine.

A wise man, though an utterly deplorable human and a fictional character in a headlining video game franchise, once said, “Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change.”

Nearly eight months ago, life found my sunken claws into a job I very much loved and adored to be a bit lax. Lax enough that it only took a gentle push for it to send me tumbling down into chaos.

“That’s a change for you,” Life probably said to itself under a smirk, as it neatly folded the rug I was sat on and continued to knock on someone else’s door. I, on the other hand, was flat on the floor. Heavy. Pallid. And frankly, alone.

Alone, even though I had family. But how do you explain to your parents, who were career government servants with stability, your wife, who’s got security (in some way) of a megacorp behind her, and to your daughter, who is only five months old?

And so began a downward spiral of coping, clawing, and attempting a climb out of a pit. I could not see any light teasing the hint of an exit, nor feel the lick of the wind reigniting my pulse. Yet that clingy, devastating sister of a sleep paralysis, Hope, bent me into a rhythm of sorts…

Wake up.

Seek out job openings.

Apply on company websites.

Wade through LinkedIn’s mucky, often AI-generated, and very likely ghost jobs.

Send Upwork proposals that shoot into the dustbin the moment your connects get deducted.

Wait.

Breathe.

Survive.

I don’t know what I was doing. But I kept doing it. For a chance to scrape my undead body out of the never-ending pit. It wasn’t always abysmal. There were chinks within the walls, intermittent breaks hinting at the twilight rays of a sinking sun. To be honest, I’d have taken the moon’s reflections, too, if they were plated to me with a promise of seeing in the dark.

But no matter what I clung to or locked my eyes on, Hope kept Life’s work brand new. I’d make progress on the spiral. I’d see the light. I’d fall.

What was it? That definition of insanity?

Through all this time, I found myself failing as a son, as a husband, and as a father (though she will never know that, but the guilt of failing to provide for her lives even stronger than Hope). I lost taste in my eyes, smell in my ears, sight in my tongue, and any sense of what it meant to live.

But the spiral was ever so Sisyphean in its ordeal, with Hope taking the rear and the limitless applications with rejections and ghostings piling up behind the rock I kept pushing.

I don’t really know how to put it into words how I actually felt. Or rather, I don’t know how to put it in prose. Poetry has always felt a better outlet for the steam that accumulates within under pressure. Steam that overwhelms every sense I have. Steam that discombobulates every orifice. Steam that boils the instruments of my survival. And I fall into syncope.

I tried my best
to submit the syllables of sensible sacrifice
but I might as well
have been talking to a clockwork device.
Articulation, it seems
eludes me from my suit of skills
and punctuates life
with earworms of admissible advice.

I wanted to break
into the shatters on a stained glass window
separated then broken
but the edges kept me from falling apart.
Preservation, it seems
is the missing card from my suite
but I do remember
leaving a fold of revisiting on its memory.

I held my worst
from exploding like the tears of Prince Rupert
but at the tail end
my suffering was shot with a sharp look.
Indignation, it seems
lurked in the folds, untouched by light
and I roam blinded
by the lighthouses of stark promises.

I felt my pigs
stymying the salacious filth of the sty
but come what may
the pigs drove their heads into shame.
Provocation, it seems
is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg
because the floods
drown me with the subject of my annoyance.

I tore the gauze
of the tourniquet bleeding my senses dry
but the wound
gangrened on the cavities I vacated.
Consternation, it seems
breaks bread with my blood’s boredom
and, when they spill,
paints vermillion the canvas of my emotions.

It was hard to find even a broken ladder to rest my foot on. Lately, though, I’ve been turning the pages of The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. These short stories circle around a fictional play of the title’s eponymous entity, a play that, when perused, brings madness. That’s a fantastic reduction of everything that Chambers’ characters undergo, but it beautifully mirrors what I went through.

I am glad the end result was not how things usually go in his stories. But I also think that I am not who I was last year. I don’t know if I ever will be. Some part of me, in his attempts to make it through the spiral of joblessness, has been lost. Or rather, replaced. I don’t know which is true.

Did I ever read the play? I don’t know. How can I? Do those who go mad remember why they went mad?

I do find myself strangely attached to the stories. It’s become a ritual of sorts these past few days to unwind myself in those pages.

I do have an undying hate for the madness that was. My essence was anathema to structure. Any structure. The spiral of routine that was my Carcosa, praise be, has faded into obscurity. At least for now.

But what about the madness that is? Or will be?

Will spilling these words out into the world suffice?

I was not aware of what I would find when I first stepped out of the car in Pokhran. It was an arid desert, very different from the geography that I’m used to, and yet so familiar.

It is hard to quantify the view of a 5 p.m. sunset, but it goes something like this: The sun sitting lightly on the lip of the horizon, asking—no—demanding from my soul the very question of existence. I did not know what to say. I felt helpless. But it was a beautiful scene. I was soon going to enter the city of Jaisalmer.

It was 2018.

Right around Christmas holidays, we’d picked our brand-new Suzuki Ignis for a trip to the northwestern extremity of the state of Rajasthan, in India. So far, and we’re talking nearly 400 kilometers (or 250 miles) far, the scenery outside was, well, different.

Not in a bad way. It’s just that the people of the hills usually have difficulty orienting themselves within the plains, especially when said plains are largely made of arid flats and dunes stretching farther than the eye can see. But once you roll into the city aptly titled “Golden,” you start getting your bearings. Or so it seems.

By and large, Jaisalmer felt like any other city or town within the state of Rajasthan. A motley mix of modern, traditional, and functional buildings, people loitering around or doing their busy selves, cows on the streets, vendors selling hot snacks, and a big sea of tourists hitching rides or asking for directions. What really stood differently in this makeup—although not too differently—was the sandstone fort perched imposingly over a stony slab of a hill.

Funny thing, sandstone. Quite an oxymoron when you squint your eyes at it. How can sand be stone? But that’s geology for you. And the stone does lend a certain charisma to its creations. Stacked and shaped to sustain the royal household, it commands a different reverence. Monumental, yes, still somewhat dusty.

Now, that’s a word that really sums up what Jaisalmer feels like: dusty. Perhaps it’s the constructions of sandstone that give this city its distinct imprint, or perhaps (and more likely) it is the proximity to the Thar Desert.

Keeping the adjectives aside, it was the sunny afternoon of Christmas Eve that we found ourselves at the foot of the Jaisalmer fort, looking as tiny as we could in front of the gigantic gates. I wonder how mighty the kings of the bygone Rajasthan would have felt, looking down from the parapets, observing the city’s antsy occupants crawling about.

And then there’s the climb. A weird mix of flagstones and other stone blocks that my half-assed architectural mind cannot guess takes you up a slow walk towards the entrance proper of the fort. Peppered along the winding path were colourful characters ready to shove their cultural crafts, headgear, leather products, and an assortment of photographs into the tired Indian and overzealous foreign tourists.

The fort, in itself, felt lacklustre. I’ve seen many of Rajasthan’s famous keeps, castles, and fortresses, but none so commonly public as Jaisalmer’s.

There was no traditional compound-like feel to it, no courtyard for your non-existent curling moustaches. If anything, it felt like a busy street of an old city; not a relic of the past but an eroded route still in use. So, we did what everyone always does—a photo here, a photo there, a glass of lemonade, another of spiced buttermilk, a climb to the battlements, a dive into inner chambers (no guano this time, unlike the Amer fort). About an hour and a half later, we found ourselves in a restaurant outside the fort, tired and bested by the December Sun.

Now, we could have called it a day, but we had two more destinations planned in our itinerary—Patwon ki Haveli and the magnificent Sam dunes. The former was a mansion of a now-deceased family of traders, and our first curiosity pick. Architecturally, it felt grander, and characteristically, it felt richer—more so than the fort. In a compact space on a busy street, this trader family had built itself a luxurious living that even the rich housewives of Jaisalmer’s fort couldn’t. All out of sandstone, you see.

After an unimpressive view from the terrace of this mansion, we climbed down to take on the next leg of our journey. The new family hatchback was glad to see us coming back to it, I assume, glinting proudly in hues of azure blue and bands of blinding sunlight. On we took it to the stretch of a road I had never imagined I’d drive on.

The famous sand dunes are outside the city, obviously. (Kudos to whoever thought they started the moment you enter Jaisalmer, or Rajasthan; we owe it to you for a barren portrayal of Rajasthan.) Along the stretch of the road, we encountered many Jeeps sprinting across dried mudflats, aiming to lift a tourist hanging from a paraglider—all in hopes of entertaining the customer for their 150 bucks. Tough life. Before the Sun started its sink into the horizon, we arrived at a miniature city of tents opening onto the carpet of the desert.

“400 rupaye!”
(400 Rupees!)

“Kyun? Itna mehenga?”
(Why so costly?)

“Haan ji, madam. Teen daure hain, Jeep se jayenge.”
(Yes. There are three dunes, and we’ll go through the Jeep.)

We—or rather my mom—didn’t haggle much. A jeep “safari” through the dunes for 400 bucks? We were in before the tent guys could say “aur tent ka hazaar rupiya” (And a thousand rupees for the tents).

I’ll be very frank here. The word “safari” was doing the semantic weightlifting here. I, for one, had the image of driving around the sand dunes, or sand flats, maybe seeing the occasional bunch of cacti. Man, did I learn the definition of “wrong.”

In what I can describe as sand surfing, we clung tight to the bars within the 4x4 as our driver lurched through and jumped from one dune to the next, occasionally stopping to rev the engine sufficiently to brave the next climb. Sand was everywhere (sorry, Anakin), and it probably clogged my synapses because I was enjoying this thrill. We went “surfing” for nearly fifteen minutes, I assume, before arriving at the third cluster of the moving dunes. This was our stop.

Again, I’ll draw some parallels here because, for us rocky-terrain dwellers, a solid footing is an oft-overlooked sensation. Step into sand (not your kindergarten sandpit, no) and you’ll feel that years-long confidence of walking eroding away from within. Each step is a precarious test of leg muscles, centre of mass, and heel-to-toe assisted body articulation to find a firm footing.

Dusk was approaching, but it was tucked behind the blanket of a twilight yet to come. I had definitely lost my bearings. This was not my natural habitat. The desert, a tourist spot for the colourful travellers, wanted you to feel comfortable. Pierce the absent veil of a mirage, and you’d find it unforgiving—beyond the cacophonous laughter of tourist selfie sticks, old-fashioned whisky clinks, and show-offs of personal 4x4s surfing about—the desert was the antithesis of Rajasthan: Inhospitable all around.

But we, being tourists, enjoyed ourselves a lovely time in this human-selected spot between the dunes, had a camel ride (the jockey playfully named our quadruped companion Jethalal from a popular Indian sitcom), and saw Kalbeliyas belly-dancing to get a taste of money or whisky, whichever was offered first. Yeah, it was turning out to be a joyful evening, for we did not see the twilight roll in.

As the Sun came to kiss the horizon goodbye, I remembered Pokhran from the night before. The barren sight of India’s first clandestine nuclear test, visited by a bipedal with more atoms than needed, just to see the sun and take its pictures. I thought it was rather poetic to see the core of our lives representing the nuclear fission reaction practiced on this soil. Well, and let me tell you, dear reader, the sunset at the edge of (or so we felt) civilization in a desert felt spiritual and destructive.

A passage from the Bhagavat Gita, made famous by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s recitation, snagged at the moral terminator within my mind. As I continued to observe the Sun’s slow descent into the sea of darkness, over the edge of Thar, the lines echoed wilfully within my mind’s desert:

I certainly hadn’t become Death. But surrounded by the hostile desert, uninviting, woeful, unforgiving, and naked beneath the Sun’s fading gaze, I felt alone. I felt like I was sculpted from sandstone, etched with the experience of twenty-odd years. And if the curtains of the night were to fall, the dunes would swallow me whole. That wealth of life, eroded to atoms. The courts of ego, ground to zero. When you think about it, there is no “I” in the desert.

“Sir ji, time ho gaya hai lautne ka,” alerted our driver (Sir, it’s time to leave).

His upbeat lilt had successfully pulled me back into the reality of departure. As we walked back to a smoother shortcut to concrete plains, I think I left—no, lost—something behind.

That part of me never returned. Perhaps it haunts a shade downwind the swell of a dune, latched on to the idea of Jaisalmer’s desert attaché of inhospitality. Or perhaps, it’s only my overactive imagination. But I won’t discount it.

Some days, when I close my eyes, I find myself back on the crest of that dune.

The Sun sinks, and so does my sleep.

What really is solitude?

It’s a question that’s easier to find an answer to once you sift through a dictionary. But a tome won’t really express how you feel. Or, at least in my case, how I feel.

Loneliness, solitude, isolation, abandonment, seclusion, and all other solemn brethren of being alone are better prefaced against the textured backdrop of living that life. That is, experience brings you face to face with the “grain” pattern of what you sense in your time of solitude, whether volitional or institutional.

Growing up, I wasn’t really aware—in the sense that most kids are—of what it means to be lonely. My friends would meet me when they were free. My parents had to leave me behind to tend to their official capacities. But I would, in due course, meet both parties along the way.

Yet, as I grew up, loneliness became more apparent. A veil of unprescribed colour that folded on itself when I tried to comprehend it.

My first brush with an understanding of solitude, now that I push my brows to concentrate on it, was—interestingly—William Wordsworth’s lyrical enjoyment, The Solitary Reaper.

My first read of the poem, in the confines of a cold classroom, on a wooden desk warmed by my day’s use, was one of recognition. Here was a poem that was different. It talked to me. Addressed me in a cadence I had not felt with any other literary or lyrical work, either in English or in my mother tongue, Hindi. All due credit goes to Wordsworth, of course, for living up to his family name.

Yon solitary highland lass! as he calls her, reaping the grain and singing to her tune of life. I, a mere Indian boy—of what, fifteen?—had absolutely no idea what the words were, in a contextual sense. Highlands? Lass? Hebrides? What were we even reading?

There was a picture assisting the poem in our English coursebook for 9th grade, a line art of a girl reaping what appeared to be wheat. That was enough, paired with the poem’s beat, to stroke my imagination into a scene.

Wordsworth cleverly makes himself a vessel of observation. I, the reader, was him. And he, or I, walked through the Scottish Highlands and was enchanted to the tune of a girl reaping grain.

Not much in the poem. But it doesn’t need more. It lives with you, particularly the idea of solitude, or at least the brand that the reaper was comfortable in. I, however, was not alone in that moment.

So once the bell rang, the periods went through, and the school day ended on a high noon note, I was to find myself back home, heaving from climbing three stories’ worth of stairs, all alone.

Then, I was in a solitude. Even though three floors hardly compare to the mountain-like elevation of the highlands, a feat better reproduced had I scaled the nearest hills of the Aravalli, this solitude was my own. So I sat down and re-read the poem. I felt the texture of the smooth page, imagining it bearing the winds of a place I had never seen, the rock of the earth I had never pressed, the scent of the fields I had never breathed. I knew this feeling. I had travelled spatially to a land far, far away.

My isolations—then without a label but frequented in the acts of reading books, playing video games, and enjoying cartoons and anime—had a new label. Solitude felt personal, a category of loneliness I had come to enjoy. Its thick, curry-like walls were safeguards of wild imaginations, fantasies, daydreams (including maladaptive ones) that burned my retina with the feeling of belonging.

But all this was in my headspace. Imaginarium, if you would, as that of that one Doctor Parnassus.

While it allowed me to be lost on my own terms day in and night out, I continued to grow up temporally. Not out of my solitude, but into a new understanding of what it was to me.

Youth, fresh out of teenage bumps, has its blessings and curses. While everyone was busy adhesively clinging to concentric circles of social hierarchies, I found the taste too much to deal with. But it allowed me to look back on my childhood. And it felt lacking.

I thought I had imposed solitude on myself. An “exit stage left” to dissolve behind the curtain and drown the noise outside. A realisation, however, was bubbling. My oddities of spilling daydreams and fixated infatuations did not fit in the circles of society. At least not the ones immediately at my disposal.

And then the memories of childhood resurfaced. Taunts on my nerdiness, an egg thrown, jokes made at barrel-shaped body, clowned for enjoying Pokémon, and the sidelines of the school playground I often marched. I had friends. I had solitude. Flip the coin. I was alone. I had solitude.

There is a trope in visual media that is overdone. Locking away a character in solitary confinement. Darkness. Thick walls. No contact.

Odd. But it felt wrongfully familiar. As if someone had forced that joyful lass to reap the fields in the highlands. She was whistling, singing, her melancholy strain only to bide the time.

What would Wordsworth say to this? Would he pen a new lyric for the lonely reaper? Probably. Probably not. He was an observer who relished, commented, and passed. The reaper remained confined between the tall stalks. All she had was her voice . . . and the sickle.

In such a world, I felt the air heavier than the winter blanket I wrapped myself in. The earth, less an expanse of stacked, movable soil and more a trapping of igneous rock. The fields, mundane like the tasks at hand.

Perhaps that was it. A night lamp in daylight, a pair of shades at night. No tug of war between the two, because I belonged equally to both.

Time doesn’t do well to those who dwell on the past. But space? And aren’t the two connected? It’s a stupid philosophical rhetoric. Potent, but a waste to dwell upon.

The now, however, does not leave. At least in the nanoseconds of brain processes. And so, unlike the two-faced god Janus, I am always surprised to find a third door to peek at. Just a peek. Entering this new form of solitude is . . . not something I look forward to.

Having become accustomed to three immovable presences in my life, presences whose permanence completes me, it’s hard to admit that an escape or old into the Highlands, if for nothing then just to reap edible grass, is a guilt-heavy trip I do sometimes make.

Don’t get me wrong. I do belong now: to my wife, to our daughter, and to our Shih-tzu. But time and space, nigh intertwined, are always apart when you need to plot them together, for the sake of your own plot.

It just so happens that, when time overruns the belonging, or the space feels cramped, I imagine an escape into solitude.

But who am I here? Or where am I, exactly? I belong elsewhere, not to the highlands, not with the sickle, and definitely not in the fields. No reluctant reaper of the highlands, lads!

It’s ironic how, in the underbelly of darkness, right before the clock calls it a day, I find myself alone in front of my screen to express an idea that tilted and titled itself in the back of my head.

Originally, I was going to call it a “dissertation on loneliness.” But the moment I began to type, my (sometimes) analytical brain presented me with two factual inaccuracies:

a) I did not have a research body to back my ideas, and therefore

b) I was only fashioning my ramblings as an essay.

But who do I have to talk to? At least in the immediacy of things. I find my thoughts clearer once they’ve materialised out of my mind. Perhaps this is the solitude that the reaper felt, too?

If that is the case, then is this something done willingly? I find it hard to ask that question.

The thing is, would you? Are you a solitary reaper, a lonely one, or a reluctant one?

It’s officially 2026. The “new” new year.

Just another occasion that could have passed unnoticed in the traffic of Hyderabad without honking its horns even once on the Outer Ring Road. But no, it had to flash high beams into my life’s rear-view mirrors and overtake in a mist of flamboyance.

Good riddance, though. It was gone. Even though I would have to move forward in the year’s wake, I would be keeping a distance. Safe space between the headrush of dates and my lifeboat, enough for a throng of buffaloes and cows to pass with ease.

But the year wasn’t having it. Or rather, my lovely wife.

Overflowing with determination and leaking with confidence, she made a declaration of dedication that decimal-ed its way to my diabolically disturbed decision-noggin:

“Let’s sell Dabelis!”

For readers in India living under a cowshed or those outside India unfamiliar with a food that’s decidedly un-European (even though it uses a European element) and un-American (even though it uses an American element, but not “USian”), here’s a simple English definition of Dabeli:

It’s an Indian snack originating from the Kutch region of Gujarat, consisting of a “patty” of boiled potatoes in a special spicy-sweet masala sandwiched in a Ladi Pao (a variant of the Portuguese bread) and heartily garnished with pomegranates and peanuts.

Now, back to the debacle.

Why did my wife want to sell dabeli? She loves them. It’s an easy snack that’s different from the usual Telugu and South Indian culinary staples prevalent in the city.

That was all the reason she had and needed. But there was so much gumption packed between those words, it would have outweighed a neutron star.

But while my wife is the cosmic background radiation of possibilities, I am the black hole of impossibilities. The prospect of dealing with prospecting customers perplexed me.

This isn’t my story, however. Neither is it my wife’s. The main attraction here, the protagonist, the lead, the champion, the antihero, the villain, the antagonist, is . . . the pao.

Let me elaborate . . .

When the declaration of serving our society with dabeli came out of her lips, my wife was on step 3 of her quick-start plan, which went as follows:

1. Pester friends to reveal secrets of Hyderabad’s better bakeries

2. Get in touch with a bakery to ask about the buns she wants to use

3. Declare the commencement of her ad-hoc dabeli business

4. Make your husband sweat in anxiety

With step 3 taken care of in the dastardliest confidences ever seen on this planet, the story now moved to step 4. And boy was I sweating.

So, here’s a bit of me that I am never proud of—I suck at initiation. However, it’s too reductionist to collate every initiation under this shameful banner that I carry over my head.

Not all initiations are the same, you know. Starting a book? Count me in. Starting my PlayStation? Count me in. Starting a fresh piece of copy bursting with clever ideas? Count me in. Starting my laptop to write a new piece? I’m already there, mates!

But starting a fresh business for self-dependency and a second income in a diminishing economy? Erm . . . well . . . I . . . uh . . . erm . . . sure?

My unwilling sacrifice of steeling myself from the better comforts of life to engage in my wife’s pursuits was a tale of tragedy even Homer couldn’t pen an epic about. Yet, my sweaty armpits did not dissuade the bubbling madness that was my wife, replete with the crazed expression of one patala-bent (lit: hellbent) on feeding people with savoury snacks on a Sunday evening.

However, the plot was about to thicken. Even before a potato filling was stirred into the cooking pan. We needed bread. Enough bread to run our experimental cloud kitchen shop from home.

Posterity always remembers the stories of Prometheus and Epimetheus—the titans of forethought and afterthought. I think the latter escaped its Mediterranean confinement and possessed my Arabian-sea-breezed partner in life.

It just so happened that I became privy to her conversation with the baker. Very loudly, and with the assured confidence of a chef ready to add a second Michelin star to her menu, she ordered forty (that’s 4-0, stitched together to eliminate any gaps, apart from kerning for readability) packets of paos, six per packet.

A sensible person would only go with a smaller test quantity—say, ten or fifteen.

An ambitious person would want to stock up for possible demand while limiting waste—say, twenty.

A sane person would first open a stall in the premises during celebratory activities and give the people that physical confidence of dealing with humans.

But my wife, with second helpings of all these qualities, went the insane route.

It was the next day when, while collecting the bread from a delivery man and dumping two cartons in our makeshift trolley (our toddler’s stroller), my wife had Epimetheus leave her body.

Remember that adage? Out of the pan and into the fire? In this case, the pan is Spanish for bread. And the fire is the aftertaste of that woeful afterthought left behind.

So far in this story, things are looking grim. And we hadn’t even tried out making dabelis yet. What could go wrong?

The two cartons of pao were witness to what did go wrong.

The entry to the kitchen, which shares its floor with a moored circular dining table that takes no sides when the lady of the house is locked in, was ringed with the halo of war: every light turned on, even that of the chimney.

There were sounds of chaos—a battlefield peppered with saltpetre masalas, potatoes lying crushed in the trenches of frying pans, onions massacred under Santoku steel, thick smoke snaking away through the chimney exhausts, exploded pomegranates with blood-red shrapnel everywhere, and paos subjected to second-degree crispy burns.

Soon, three appetising war memorials were erected, assembled from the remnants of this cocina sangrienta scene. And we were to taste them.

Now, I’m not one to brag, but my wife is one hell of a cook. The dabelis were the outcome she was clearly looking for. And I found them satiating that craving of a spicy, sour, sweet snack that I cannot put my finger on, because I was busy licking them. They were so good that I found myself drinking from the same well of confidence that my wife frequents. My eyes were sparkling. We could do it.

The second phase of the plan had begun.

In the war room, the map was laid. Everyone, sans our toddler, had their attention on getting the dabelis out there. But the hand of Epimetheus had not been lifted. A cold drop of calculated anxiety ran down my spine. Goosebumps unfurled to take in the dread. Eyes twitched with fomenting foreboding.

Naturally, I proceeded to make an ad poster on Canva and wrote a small copy to be posted on the society’s community message boards. We were ready to do business.

Business, however, was not ready to do us.

Nobody knew us. Nobody had sampled our dabelis. So, why would they ever place an order? But we weren’t thinking—neither straight, nor angularly.

Time, soon, slipped its hands under the duvet. The TV shied away from displaying clock counters on news channels. Our laptops preferred to go into sleep mode. Epimetheus was still sitting on the couch, lounging without meeting our eyes. At the stroke of midnight, he stood up titanically, exclaimed, “Ah! Now you know!” and barged coolly out of the door.

That was it for us. Tired and weary with the spoils of a war never fought, we retired to our dreams.

Only to wake up to a nightmare.

Those forty packets? We’d only consumed two. The rest loomed with the threat of storage, spoilage, and eventual dumping in the sewage (I challenged myself to not use “waste” here; I think I succeeded). We went with usage, however.

It would have been audacious to say “I told you so” at any point before this. But it was a new day, and I was feeling particularly testy, with an itch to tempt fate. My tongue, therefore, found it easy to slip this quadrisyllabic phrase.

Didn’t enjoy the look on my wife’s face, though. For the sake of drama, let’s say there were pao-sized puffs under her eyes. We had to deal with the consequences.

I think it’s time to give this a rest, now. For one, I’ve never had enough pao in my life in such a short span. We’ve used them for breakfast twice, and I just sat up after a pao-infused dinner. My wife just doesn’t want to look at another bun-shaped bread for a long time.

But I know her well. There will be a Pao-sized snack uprising soon.

Here’s to a Bready New Year!

There it is. The end of the year. A depressingly cyclic end of things that don’t really end.

And I hate it. What do you mean it’s a new year? I see the same shit every day, week, and month. It’s repeating, cyclic, and suffocating.

But I don’t hate circles, no. Circles are fascinating.

Both in a geometrical sense—especially when applied to constructions (think of cross sections of tanks, rockets, missiles, pens, and whatnot—but also in how they’ve charmed the collective consciousness of humankind.

Think of the first time you sat down with a crayon and drew that rudimentary landscape, a rite of passage in creative expression for every kid. You had the triangular hills and valleys, a snaking river, a boxy house, and some green blobs on sticks for trees.

But the sun always found a circle—misshapen, yellow, yet overbearing—as its avatar.

It’s a silly thing, I know. But circles are everywhere. Ubiquitous, missable, physical, conceptual. Circles are primed in your conscious and subconscious. The watch on your wrist, the camera on your phone, the rim of your glass, the rotation of your keys inside the lock, the cycle you ride, the cycle of life, the calendar that repeats, the trips there and back again.

It’s a very small sampling of how thoroughly interbred we are with the idea of circles. Even our fantastical imaginations adapt this shape: the discs of UFOs, the many rings of power, the circle of life, the mouths of sandworms, knights of the round table, the seating plan of Jedi High Council, the accretion disc of Gargantua, the cycle of avatars . . .

I’ll stop. You get the gist.

Circles are essential.

Circles are endless.

Circles are eternal.

(I’m breaking the flow here, but if you don’t connect with the above—you know, if you belong to the square or triangle camp—I urge you to take a dip into the research done on how circles are embedded in our memories as patterns we instantly recognize.)

There is, however, one circle that I absolutely love. Whether you take its physical potential, its symbolic significance, or its literary ligatures.

Drum roll, please?

It . . . is . . . the . . . ouroboros.

And it’s ironically the best representation of what I hate: the cycle of years.

Etymologically, the word comes from Greek, as most unsuspecting etymological things do, οὐροβόρος. These letters mean exactly what the picture shows: a snake or a drakon swallowing its tail.

What we have here is a circle that’s perpetual, cyclical, and progressive. But it also appears to be consuming itself. An endless cycle of self-sabotage, if you will. A very Euclidean geometrical identity that is familiar yet different.

And that’s precisely what I see every day in the enshittification of the world around us. The year’s beginning in revelry rings as hollow as the stupid resolutions everyone sets for themselves. The end, meanwhile, feels like the mourning of a loved one while reminiscing about how they were some years ago, particularly before COVID broke the world.

In this pattern, there emerge the same concepts of life and death that the ouroboros represents. The calendars don’t really change; our notions of what the passage of time is do. The year ends up eating itself, only to start again. Not exactly a phoenix rebirth.

The resolutions are just as cyclic; their emitters have to chew their words back when they fail.

So why stick to this fallacy?

Why conform ourselves to this very Euclidean shape that’s non-Euclidean in function?

Why, to stretch the point, make the world feel like it’s tied to numbers that increment in an abstract notion space and time superimposed on the Earth’s track around the Sun, and its own pirouettes to pass the day?

The truth is . . . we’re dealing with sacred geometry here. Humankind is primed for a pattern that has modelled our visions for atoms, eyes, planets, and cosmic objects. It almost feels too . . . oppressive, doesn’t it? Like a geometrical god only wanting us to fold our space into its dimensional rules?

And once you fold your world and its view into itself, walk a corridor that runs into itself endlessly, you just can’t get out.

No? Is it just me and my ramblings here?

Fine, I’ll keep my cosmically crushing depressive ideas to myself.

To be honest, it all started with the end of the year. A depressingly cyclic end of things that don’t really end.

And I hate it. What do you mean it’s a new year? I see the same shit every day, week, and month. It’s repeating, cyclic, and suffocating.

But I don’t hate circles, no. Circles are fascinating.

Time flies.

Seconds evaporate.

Minutes disintegrate.

Hours dissolve.

Days . . .

Okay, I’m just dragging this. But I honestly don’t know a better way to frame this sentiment. It’s gnawing at me from within. It’s structurally seeding chaos in my heart to disrupt the order my brain wants to seek.

Perhaps time will tell?

But time did fly, you see. It’s funny how a date that looms in the distant future suddenly materialises as an apparition you’ve been trying to avoid every Christmas. It confronts you with more gumption and more weight than the ethereal ghosts that rapped at Ebenezer’s door. The time (heh) is nigh! Do your packing, or you shall suffer the consequences of unpreparedness.

Such an adult thing to warn of. No matter how much you prepare, plan, pack, percolate, profuse, or presume, time always comes. It chimes on your calendars. It sends an audible notification through the DND mode of your smartphone. It catches you by the shoulders to give a shakedown. It cold calls your parents in the middle of the night, fixing your marriage to fate, but does not send an invite to destiny.

That’s how time catches up with you. The ghost of its warnings looms in wispy smokes. The real thing, even with full disclosure, is far more threatening.

And so, I found myself one morning with an uneasy pit in the duodenum, right after my stomach had struggled to digest said pit.

I’ll be less dramatic here: I’m talking about the shift. The relocation. The transition from one city to another. The metamorphosis of a family from belonging to inhabiting. And it came with all the bronze bells and white whistles of everything I hate.

But hate was not the emotion I found that morning. Hate had, I later found, signed off its vacation with a stamp of Hawaii and disappeared from my repertoire of expressions.

Joy? It was tired right after we’d celebrated my daughter’s first birthday.

Anger? There it was! But tepid, like a hot brew of tea kept waiting too long, a thin film of fat stretched like skin over its surface. I tried to ping anger’s cousins, you know, apart from hate. Frustration refused to answer my call. And fear was frozen.

But Anxiety was there. Hand in hand with sadness. A melancholic cocktail you always try to avoid.

I honestly tried my best. These two, however, got the better of me.

Sadness was the first to get hold of me. You would expect it to confront my cold senses in a pashmina of nostalgia that connects a woolly thread to my city, Udaipur. You’d, perhaps, recognise it as an old face on a mural of human footprints walking through the roads, a sharp focus of recall among blurs of existence. You might even, although this one is a stretch, feel its haunting shade in the memory lanes of lives bygone, a familiar expansion of warmth in the cold winters of the halfway north.

But Sadness, as was her promise, came in a poncho of silk woven from its daughter: tears. It held me in shackles of wanting, but at a distance. I was moving. I was the detachment. I was the deserter. My city, my childhood, my memories, would all be frozen in a temporal frieze. Visible only to me and to inhabitants of distant worlds on whom Earth’s reflected light reaches light-years later.

In these fading lights, I see a boy here.

He’s seven. At the turn of the millennium. Roaming about in a red coloured T whose print evades memory. The bedroom is small. Not too small. Less space, because the custom king-sized bed takes up all the room. There is a battered old semiautomatic washing machine. Glossy black with creamy yellow interiors. The boy is busy on its closed top, stapling a bunch of cutouts for the calendar edition that came in celebration of the coming millennium year. The dates do not interest him, though. It’s the planets and their information. Cosmos that the boy dreams of. Cosmos that the boy imagines on the underside of a cotton-filled quilt, the gaps remapped as galaxies and stars.

Time shifts. The boy is fourteen. Short, but sprouting. A moppy crop of needle hair, and no clue how to carry himself. He sits in a small room, a room he calls his own, even though it isn’t. The room has a desktop in a furniture cavity, the top shelves of which house his motley collection of books, new and old—Fifteen Poets, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, a photocopy of a big hardback titled “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stars” taken with permission from his school’s library. He boots up the computer, however, to get lost in a visual world. A soundbite, Windows XP’s operatic startup. The boy waits for the CPU to thrum from its cold inactivity. Five seconds later, he double-clicks on the icon of “Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles.”

Time shifts. The boy is twenty-three. It’s early morning. The apartment’s terrace shows signs of waterlogged wear and tear, a signature of the monsoon. Still, he moves about with his mother in the hazy light. A bulbul appears out of nowhere, on the corner of the A block’s terrace. Red-vented, a plumage of brown upper, white undersides, and void black head with a signature crest. He spots it. He comes close. The bulbul shimmies on the ledge, but doesn’t fly away. He moves in closer. There’s a sparkle in the bulbul’s eyes. A sparkle reflected in his eyes. A sparkle of wonder at Dinosaur’s successors. He knows what his new passion will be.

Time, now on the wings of literary works, soars high into space. Sadness pulls me back.

There was warmth here, however. A promise of something that was. Something that will never be. Something that will have gone cold like the tea I forgot to touch. I grew up. I got busy. I got away. But the city? It’s physical. My ghosts streaking through its twisting lanes and winding pathways? They’re metaphysical.

That’s the only warmth I felt . . . of tears streaking my cheeks in the lukewarm December Sun.

Sadness had had enough of me, and I of her. I was leaving. But she promised her return. I did not want to linger on that word.

Turn I did and found myself haunted by Anxiety. She was always there. Always. I knew her presence. But just as your mind ignores the constant pinging of tinnitus after a while, I had learnt to ignore the shadow of Anxiety’s doubts.

I am no good with confrontations. I always want to flee. The resolutions I seek are anomalies, only to find pockets of relief.

But Anxiety is here. Time has frozen. I don’t know what will come. What will be. What never was, and what never will be. Time does not shift here. It preys. Preys on my fears, who failed to show up in the emotional round-up. Fears that want to consume my future. Devour the possibilities. From familiarity, I am to find myself in new tides.

Will I sink?

Anxiety has no answers. She wasn’t there to foretell. So, she packs her raven wings and flies back. Back inside.

Two ghosts. Preparations sketched. Plans etched. Baggage packed. Sticks out like a sore thumb, but so do I. It’s time to fly.

On air to Hyderabad, as my daughter giggled her way on my wife’s lap and my arms, I stole a look outside. There, above the clouds, I saw a few strands of pale light catch some stray dreams. But I did not have time to train my attention. My daughter called for it.

It was only days after we arrived at the new residence and found our stuff delivered by movers did it hit me. I saw the third ghost on those clouds. My dreams. Lost. Losing. Far from reach.

Sadness hit me. Anxiety bit me. But the third ghost was benevolent.

It knew I only had one future.

The future that continues to steal my attention to this day.

Time will continue to catch new gales of passion and fascination, to contour its beautiful wings and distort our ugly realities in seemingly unseen futures.

And I—the ever non-conformist, non-confrontational being—will sadly, anxiously, dreamily, keep on hitching the rides ahead.

In the Indian airspace, the last couple of weeks have been crazy. The queen of the airline clique, IndiGo, left all major Indian airports in a chokehold of denial. No pilots, no flights, no service. Soon, the ports were flooded by seas of people stranded and unable to reach their destinations for hours on end, much like Odysseus in Ogygia.

Except, unlike Ogygia, there was no love, care, or resources to assist these travellers’ purgatorial incarceration. All they found themselves was IndiGo’s pledge of inhospitable hospitability.

The airline was the cause of chaos. But the people paid the price. That’s a horrible parallel, even when used against the backdrop of Illian and Odyssean epics.

Let’s try to reframe this whole event, then, shall we? We’ll stick to the Greek mythos and turn our attention to a celebrated character who flew too close to the Sun.

The Labyrinth of Limitations

Flying is, without any doubt, no child’s play.

Ever since the Orville brothers demonstrated their biplane’s limited flight, human engineering and creativity have only taken us upward into the sky and faster across it.

But we’ve been met with a challenge. Our passenger flights can’t break the sonic barrier and go supersonic (yet—NASA might be onto something, but a consumer application will still take years to materialise) due to safety considerations (read: sonic boom and Concorde’s last flight).

Passenger flights, therefore, restrict their speed, which stretches the domestic and globetrotting (globecruising?) times. Faster than road travel, no doubt, but not fast enough.

Which means if your flight is spanning faraway countries and continents at subsonic speeds, it needs to take breaks for refuelling and switch up the pilots so that the flight crew is well-rested and alert.

It all makes sense. Overwork never did anyone any good. But when did the human condition ever come in the way of corporate greed?

That’s where our Icarus, I mean IndiGo, comes into play. Ambitious (even though airlines are generally slim on the profits side) to grow into a big player, it rapidly chalked up and spread its wings across India’s many airports. With cheaper fares, clever public-conscious ads, and better (questionable now) customer experience, it quickly found its way to the big leagues.

Crowned at the top, with profitability under its wings, IndiGo became the dominant player in the Indian airspace. A monopoly. And we all know what monopolies do.

Planes have fuel and speed limits. Humans have operational limits. Everything requires a rest. Barring, of course, human greed. It’s the voracious black hole, only a smidge of Sagittarius A* yet with more appetite. Money comes? Money should keep coming. To hell with everything else.

And so began a downfall.

Indian pilots were made hamsters of the airspace wheel, forced to tire themselves around labyrinthine sky lanes. Their compensation? Didn’t budge. Salaries went stagnant for a decade. No rest for the very people on whom civilian lives depend.

This was made worse by the current Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL): a set of guidelines dictating how long a pilot is on duty, hours spent in flight, night operation windows, and rest hours, including minimum off-duty time every week. The old norms were just . . . too much:

• Ten hours of flight time with 13 hours of duty period (for two-pilot operations)

• Night time limited to a five-hour band of 00:00—05:00

• Six landings at night in a single duty period, with more workload due to shorter night time window

• Minimum weekly off set at 36 hours, with two local nights

Combined with more red-eye operations (because night is only five hours) and all this translates to more flight operations at the risk of fatigued pilots. Will a civilian ever agree to board a flight where the pilot is overworked? Clearly not.

And that’s why the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) decided to step in. Think of them as the administration of Crete monitoring the inflow into the infamous labyrinth (air traffic). To keep the maze functional and fully operational, limits need to be imposed for the betterment of everyone.

• So, they focused on fatigue management. Here’s a rundown of the tightened rules:

• A maximum of 8 hours of flight time with 10 hours of duty (for two-pilot operations)

• Night time band is of six hours: 00:00—06:00

• A maximum of two landings at night

• A minimum weekly rest of 48 hours; two local nights. But if a pilot was on duty for more than three nights in a week (seven days), rest time increases to 60

Because of this, the usual early-morning and late-night shifts will strictly be night duties, themselves capped at two consecutive duties followed by extended rest. DGCA also informed airlines to train crew and staff, as well as maintain and issue fatigue reports.

There’s more depth to the rules, and you can inform yourself with details here and here.

Now, the compass has shifted in favour of the pilots. More rest. More time to breathe. Less fatigue. But fewer operations for the airline. So what? It’s the human lives we prioritise.

Right?

RIGHT?

Flying Too Close to the Sun

December packs a punch for air traffic. It’s the fanfare end of a year with a major note of festival streak that spills over into the next year’s calendar.

For any airline, this season requires a smoother operation and roster management. You know? Check the schedules, manage your pilots’ duty hours and rest time, and not fatigue them to make sure the season goes smooth?

But soon after we bid 2025’s November a farewell, IndiGo started to cancel and delay flights. This peaked with over 1,000 cancellations in a single day. A minotaur-sized headache for passengers left nowhere to go.

As backlash began to pile up, the airline’s top brass put up a brave face and decided to offer their version of events. Here’s what the CEO had to say in the official apology:

Like a cog-work, with the bells and whistles of a Nehru coat. But there’s no regret or shame in those eyes.

Apology accepted?

Absolutely not. Hell continues to break loose, and if you get a newspaper (print or digital) or get your news fix from social media, the outrage should be licking the gorilla glasses of your smartphone screens.

IndiGo, of course, does not back down from its official position. As if there were a rapid-onset-flight-cancellation virus that took over their systems and made pilots unavailable. That is, until you find out that there was something sinister brewing under the airline’s fuselage.

On December 6, Mumbai Mirror came forward with a cover story that presented a completely different picture. Here’s a quote from the story:

That’s . . . bold.

But it’s not the only thread that helps us navigate the labyrinthine deceit pulled by the airline.

The Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) issued a letter to the DGCA, incriminating IndiGo for stalling pilot and crew recruitment even when they were given a two-year window to prepare for the new rules.

Along with this, an open letter has started making rounds on social media and news sites, originating from within the folds of its employees, that alleges corporate grind, profit-seeking, and employee harassment. A downfall that was, as the letter quotes, years in the making.

You know what this stinks of? Suit interference. They’re playing ragdoll with employees and passengers. Only to arm-twist governing bodies like DGCA into cutting them slack so they can fly more. Profit more. So what if the crew (ground and cabin) and the pilots have to forget their humans and operate with permanent red eyes?

This Icarus of ours is acting more like King Minos. Selfish. Arrogant. Overbearing. Monopolising.

But it is still Icarus.

For what good are the wings that were sealed with waxy promises?
In the cloud-lined wet and the Sun-kissed provinces.

Yonder took the flight, ‘twas a bird made of metal
Not human, never god, it found some chinks to unsettle
Out the Minotaur’s maze, it flew high over the seas
It had freedom to rule, rolled wings with decrees
The warmth from the Sun, too high a price, bare
When its wax thawed, the bird lost the rudder-fare.

IndiGo flew high. Its swell swept the swine of the airline swatch. Whether it is too big to fail or if it becomes yet another grave of corporate greed, only time will tell.

What I can definitely say with conviction is that it will be you and I—the common man—who will pay the price of its flight, fight, and freedom.

Either with money or with blood.

On a cool December morning, my priorities are as translucently clear as the snowflakes that never touch my hometown. But no matter what I am doing, the satiety from hot food and comfort from wispy quilts are always there, the only anchors I need to pass the winters.

However, there’s always a disturbance in the wind, a storm is always brewing, and some entity is clawing its way to tug at the fabric of the cosmos. December is the month of announcements: word of the year, game of the year, this of the year, that of the year. I do have some vested interest in these, what with my feet entrenched in pop culture, but the rest? They’re the buzz I can buzz away.

Among these is Pantone, the colour giant that monopolises its colour language standards for efficient colour communication and terrorises artists, typesetters, designers, media houses, and anyone using proprietary software like Adobe’s suite.

As if it were of any significance, Pantone, like the uncle who tries to mingle with the cool kids, tries to enforce its colour of the year.

I usually never give two excrements in the general direction of these announcements, but the handpicked colour for this year is as cloudy as my December mornings, to say the least.

Cloudy with a Chance Of . . . Erm, What?

The Pantone colour of the year, or COTY, as we should call this stupidity, is Cloud Dancer.

And I have a long list of problems with it.

Before I begin, go ahead and click the link above to see the colour in all its un-glory.

Notice something? If you do, please shoot me an email with your analysis of what your eyes decipher in the smudge of unnoteworthiness.

Because all I see is nothing. Not void. Nothing.

The colour, or the hue to be more specific, is so uncharacteristically neutral and boring that I probably won’t even notice film grain over it.

To help rock your senses, the copywriters at Pantone whipped out their trusted graphite-tipped writing implements to craft an entire page and a story around a colour that you’ll only notice if it were paired with other vibrant and pastel hues.

Here’s the brilliant nothingburger, typed with sincerity:

To be honest, I sympathise with the writers here. Crafting a compelling argument for a colour to which your company has only added a specific recognizable value for easier communication between creatives is, well, daunting.

So instead of focusing on the USP (which they don’t need to, given that the moment you click on any link on their page, you’re hit with a soft login paywall), they found the whitest of greys with a hint of coffee stain their target.

Lofty? Yes, it is quite lofty to think that looking at the colour would bring calm in society. Except society is too busy looking at the Lava Smoke clouds of ash and dust, left in the wake of many unnecessary wars.

True relaxation? That won’t come in a society too busy to numb itself through narcotic substances, such as cocaine in powdered form that resembles Pantone’s selection.

Now, the next bit in that copy is a masterclass in mismatch. “Focus,” the poor word that is already under enormous strain in the social media jungle, is immediately hit in the gut with “allowing the mind to wander.” The two aren’t exactly the same.

Now, look here. I know what they were trying to convey. But from the experience I can extract from under my skin, it is the intense, rather dramatic colours that catch my eye and dissolve everything else in a blur of ink-in-water cloudiness. That’s what I call focus.

Wandering of the mind? That will happen when Pantone’s chosen victor is almost the shade of a blank canvas.

Okay, enough with the copy. But wait! What’s with “Dancer” here?

The colour only shines when paired with everything else. If anything, it’s the epitome of a silent support, a metaphorical scaffolding that allows other colours—which Pantone itself suggests—to bring out their best.

So . . . how can this colour be a dancer? Tonal mismatch? Ha!

The Right Shade of Skullduggery

Year after year, Pantone’s colour becomes the focal point—unlike this year’s colour—of discussions. A hotbed of comments and opinions, if you will.

Because now that this information is out there in the open, any design or art influencer worth their salt will shift their gears towards capitalising on the trend that Pantone creates. Much like a heavyweight star leaving a gravity well after it collapses under its own weight.

But Pantone isn’t collapsing, is it?

Only a couple of months ago, I sat myself through Business Insider’s exploration of Pantone’s monopoly in their So Expensive series.

For a company that had a winning card in its deck, Pantone did its customers dirty.

You see, Pantone’s IP is not the colours, which it so dramatically names and selects as end-of-the-year attention-seeking desperate hues. It’s the standardised codification of said colours and their distribution throughout the industry that makes them a studio-hold name.

That alone, quite frankly, made them famous and their library of guides and colour systems an instant buy.

But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

So, like every greedy late-stage capitalist wanting to twist the Cloud Dancers of its customers, the company’s top brass went the MBA-favourite way: exorbitantly-priced subscriptions to make their customers cry tears of Haute Red.

In all likelihood, they probably took a page out of their buddies at Adobe. But that doesn’t absolve them from holding their clientele hostage, with absolutely no way to escape.

If only there were alternatives, you know? A truly free market! One devoid of monopolies, duopolies, or oligopolies. Something in the same vein as the humble VLC media player and its equally humble creator.

Alas, until that day comes, designers will have to contend with enshittified subscription services for ensuring the printers don’t f-up the colours of our brands. I, on the other hand, will marvel at the opportunity Pantone provides to pan their year-end announcements with a massive load of Acid Lime mixed in.

That is, of course, until the festivities of 2025’s grave and 2026’s birth role in. Then we’ll all forget what colour Pantone was nominating in the press to stay relevant. It will all vanish in a puff of Cloud Dancer smoke.

Growing up, all I saw was my parents working hard.

Really hard.

For a single child, most of my yonder days were spent waiting for my parents to come home. Although I did enjoy the period of freedom after coming back from school, the loneliness would slowly start to eat me. Especially so when my parents would be running late while the night swallowed daylight.

The hard work they did, however, set up a relatively comfortable future for me. A future that was already looking good, thanks to the introduction of computers—the miracle machines of efficiency.

Growing up, we were sold the idea of smart work.

Really smart work.

For a single child whose parents were coming to terms with computers invading their government offices, these machines were the gateway to new possibilities. Although most of my childhood was spent playing video games on the old family desktop PC, my parents never barred me (apart from playing for hours on end) from experimenting and messing it up.

The freedom they gave me, however, was the fertile foundation for giving birth to my multipolar dreams and ambitions. A new dawn was coming, of passion and play.

Growing up, we were asked to dream big.

Really big.

For a single child of hard-working parents, most of my childhood was spent skipping on extended family events, friendly night stays, or even simple moments of bonding with my family. Although they earned well, I never got to grow close with my cousins, who lived away, or even entertain the idea of a sibling, because of how busy my parents were.

Their savings, however, ensured that I could pursue my dreams—finding a job that fuelled my passions to funnel my ambitions. The future was indeed looking like it was my generation’s for the taking—to work smart, dream big, and live life to the fullest.

But then I found my first steps on the doorframe of adulthood. My foot latched on the crevice of the threshold, and I stumbled stepping through it.

All because its gatekeepers, like Narayana Murthy, were the only people reserved to find time in life to work, dream, and live the future.

The ever-elitist, tech evangelist, and unabashedly controversial Murthy, in his recent confession of comorbid capitalism, contributed his cynical worldview under the thin veil of competing with China:

Clearly, this is another attempt by this 79-year-old billionaire has-been to lobby for a capitalist-centric working timeframe and stay relevant in a world that’s ready to forget him.

But that’s Murthy’s colonial mindset.

Slavery of the Digital Front

Born on the cusp of India’s independence, Narayana Murthy grew up in an India that was trying to find its footing in geopolitics and geoeconomics. Undoubtedly—what with Murthy belonging to the generation before my parents—he had to work hard. Which he clearly did. I won’t take away the credit for his biggest achievement: setting up a company like Infosys.

But when you shift to a capitalist mindset, you can’t help but forget that others in society have an uphill struggle in life. You see, Infosys is, at its core, an outsourcing company. Its services are geared to help other companies, mostly those outside of India, who don’t want to pay their regional workforce higher wages. If you try to read between the lines, you’ll find that it is. essentially, digital slavery.

Here’s a report from Infosys’ Q2 FY26 financials. For June 30, 2025, the revenue sits at ₹42,279 crore ($4,941 million), and the net profit at ₹6,921 crore ($809 million).

Another report by Business Today gives us information on how these Q2 earnings translate into dividends for stakeholders, particularly Narayana Murthy and his family. I took these figures and compared them with the highest and lowest packages at Infosys, as per Glassdoor and AmbitionBox.

The results are in front of you.

Even if you were to factor in dividends for employees with a stake in the shares, you’ll notice that their earnings will always be a tiny blip in an otherwise highly impressive payout for members of the Murty household. What’s worse is that Murthy’s 18-month-old grandson, Ekagrah, earns far more than the highest-paid employees. While the chart above is based on projections from Business Today, a Hindustan Times report chalks his earnings to ₹6.5 crores.

Clearly, Infosys’ profits do not trickle down to its workforce.

You’d notice none of this matches the title—Murthy’s Time Machine. Allow me to build that bridge.

You see, Murthy’s unwavering push for a 70- or 80-hour workweek has got nothing to do with India’s growth or competing with China—the latter a prospect that’s nigh impossible given China’s headstart and our over-reliance on its exports.

The truth behind this vision is to increase the hours of work employees put in, especially for his company, which outsources digital slavery to international corporations. Infosys employees are already slaving away their souls for meagre capital benefits and no life outside the corporate campus, as detailed in this report of an employee whose monthly salary before quitting after nine years of work was just ₹35,000 ($394.09).

But that’s Murthy’s genius.

The more time people spend working for Infosys’ clients, the more his company clocks in to corporates overseas, thereby increasing Infosys’ profits multifold. Time is, of course, money, as the old adage goes. His futurist outlook will ensure that his grandson will be a billionaire by the time he comes of age to work. In a country where job markets are on a decline and freshers are finding it hard to land their first gigs, Ekagrah Murty will have enough financial freedom to retire.

China is just a ruse. Narayana Murthy is building a financial time machine for his progeny’s progeny.

Life After Work Death

Let’s take a look at China’s 9-9-6 work culture, shall we?

Now, Murthy already provides a definition to us in his remarks quoted above: working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., for 6 days a week. Twelve hours round the clock. Despite the country’s labour laws limiting working hours to just 44 a week.

But this worked like a charm for capitalists in China, like Jack Ma. You know, the ilk of billionaires cut out from the same cloth as Murthy.

However, the results were unsavoury for the employees. A decline in physical and mental health was the golden standard everyone suffered from, with several high-profile deaths bringing the issue to national attention.

China’s high courts had to step in—mostly because they failed to enforce their laws strictly from the get-go.

This work culture, however, has started to seep into the U.S., particularly its many ambitious AI startups. And as time has always shown, Indians love to borrow work and lifestyle cues from the States, whether poor, middle-class, or elitist C-suite executives.

The result is overworked employees, teetering on the edge of work, sometimes even wasting away without a lick of life that was promised to them in the digital age.

Try to argue, and you’ll find pushback from tech and business leaders of the nation. How can overworking oneself ever be beneficial for the country? If my threadbare understanding of economics is right, the cycle of expenditure depends on improved wages and livelihoods. If people earn and live well, they’ll spend well. But if they don’t have time to live, perhaps the only industry apart from businesses to benefit will be pharmaceuticals.

In a fair world, I’d say that proponents of unnecessary hard work, like Murthy, would be put on a month-long trial to put their words to the test. You know, leaders leading by example and all that shit. You’d have them freeze themselves in front of a computer and waste away twelve hours for six days a week.

Then, perhaps, we’d have a better understanding of work-life balance, high wages, healthy employees, and true economic growth.

But you and I don’t even have time or money to fight, propose, or contemplate such experiments of social and economic equality. Better work and clock out before the grind starts again at sunrise.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—which my wife and I enjoyed between our daughter’s naps—has brought back the age-old debate. In his Milton-esque adaptation of fathers, sons, and Promethean, life-giving promiscuity, you find the consequences of playing God (or gods, if not the Abrahamic Capital G) blasting square into your knees as if a 12-gauge buckshot. It stays faithful to Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, yet brings out a nuanced tightrope ballet between life and death.

As this evergreen story goes, the creature (Frankenstein’s monster, played by a brilliant Jacob Elordi) finds himself in a trap of life, unable to live a meaningful life and unable to die with a meaningful death. His chase for the metaphorical period to punctuate what never was his never comes. Yet his creator (the ever-charismatic Oscar Isaac) fails his purpose. His self-appropriated mantle of Prometheus crumbles to ashes when he fails to be a father that his father never was.

And so, in the third act, both father and son try to play God with unsuccessful results. The sun might have shone for the creature, but he is forever left alone. Is that the price of freedom anyone who lives is ever willing to pay?

Oh, now Jagruit, you might be saying (if you’re reading this, of course; otherwise, why would you?), why do you have to bring existential questions of philosophy in what looks like a breakdown of a movie?

To that, I’ll reply most humbly, making it clear that this is in no way or form a discourse on the actions of Victor Frankenstein or his creation. Rather, like John Milton’s epic, it is about the Paradise that was lost, the Paradise that was chased, and the Paradise that no one found, even in death, or when the sun sets.

In the recent car blast near the Red Fort that shook India, the people, the victims, and the perpetrators witnessed this Miltonian act of equating oneself with God . . . and the consequences of such an action.

But why do people—terrorists included—want to play God? Will they ever find the promised land?

I have no clue. I am no fundamentalist. But I have dabbled in what I’d call the act of playing God. And I’m going to use that to deconstruct an argument into the terrorist psyche.

Diomedes in a Digital Sandbox

Ensemble Studio’s turn-of-the-millennia, real-time strategy hit, Age of Empires II, was my introduction to a whole different category of video games. For all my cognitive capabilities, however, I cannot recall who gave me a copy. Nevertheless, I first found my hands on (and in) the game almost six years later.

For someone raised on the traditional mills of third-person action-adventure and side-scrolling games, AoE II (as I’ll refer to the game hereafter) was a different breed of entertainment. You create, you wait, you explore, you manage. It wasn’t exactly the thrill I’d chase when I booted my dusty old desktop. There was too much to work through and too much to act upon. Even then, the results wouldn’t be in your favour.

And yet, there was a charm to it. I enjoyed erecting buildings and giving my tribe sustenance. I was gripped by short skirmishes between my strongest cavalry and infantrymen and the CPU-controlled enemies. And in between bouts of harvesting, scouting the map, and training military, I found a rhythm of calm and a potential for achievement.

In the age of my Age of Empires experience, I drifted to other titles of the same genre: Age of Mythology, Star Wars Empire at War, Age of Empires III. And one Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, an offshoot park management game gifted by my cousin which was a one-eighty from RTS games yet built from the same bones. Now, I know it’s not too deep a list (it’s atrociously pale in comparison to what hardcore RTS gamers would play), but it’s vivid enough to keep the games alive in my memory. None, however, lived in my memory as fiercely as AoE II.

Years later, with (relatively) more wisdom under my belt, I think it’s easier to reflect on the winning formula that got me hooked, albeit briefly, to these games.

Age of Empires, and its siblings in the genre, give you a tighter experience in terms of what I like to call fiddly sandboxing. You, the player, are the commander of everything that’s happening on your screen. Unlike, say, Sonic the Hedgehog, where you only control the actions of Sega’s blue mascot, or Doom, where you’re one with the first-person POV yet still only bound to controlling the Doomguy, RTS games allow you to command and conquer any and all within your screenspace.

You can command your villagers to do your bidding (although in a limited framework of actions, but still), and the end result could very well spell your downfall. But that never stopped you from using your mouse to pluck at the digital lives of your tribe. Hell, in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, when the crowd of guests would get angry due to fewer janitors in the park or negatively rate my rides, I’d pluck them up and throw them into any water bodies around. Let them drown with their opinions.

You see where I’m getting at? These games let me play God. I might not have been the maker, but I was the supreme being outside the digital bits and bytes, shaping what happened to them through my actions.

For the Creator Outside Creation

In the entire existence of humankind, two things have been concrete to our DNA: displacement (or migration) and myth-building (or religion). Our feet took us across the globe, covering great distances. Every fork in the journey was a new branch, not only in genealogy or geography but also in cosmology and eschatology. The real treasures of diversity were the Gods we earmarked for creation myths along the way. Life and death were with nature. In a cycle.

And then we settled, giving birth to new legends, to stories that married the Gods of heavens with mortals of mires, with glories of the stars or rests in the Elysian fields. Civilisations came together, city-states were formed, the Silk Route and seafaring trade commenced, military occupations against rivals consumed. And in all this, along with even more migration, the people subsumed.

That was so until the polytheistic open-minded faiths narrowed into cult-like followings of monotheism.

Then, subsuming into a society did not allow for diversity. There was only one Supreme being, said one, then another, and finally a third. They fought. They massacred. They proclaimed the name of the holy and painted his shrines in blood. Their cosmology demanded subjugation. Their eschatology had a period to end all periods. The after that came was a promise unseen, but a promise believed.

I do believe you can see where this is headed. Still very much like the games I discussed, don’t you think?

There is no fundamental difference between the Crusades of yore and Christian fundamentalism of today, prevalent in the U.S. No chasm of separation between the occupation of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 or the modern Israel-Palestine conflict. No foundational schism between the jihad of the sword in the medieval world to push against the opponents of Islam and the jihad of terror nexuses against the sensibilities of the new world.

Every instance of war and terror is an instance of acting for a God that sits outside reality. A reality where human interactions beget human living. In the name of the holy land, the promised land, the promised afterlife. The promise will be delivered after all the teachings of humanity have been eradicated. So what if Christians die in crusades, Jews die in Zionist occupations, or Muslims die in acts of jihad?

It is all for the Creator, the capital C of monotheistic sisters in a boardroom of superiority complex, their manifestos stacked neatly beside their holy books as annexures of holy word. All that’s missing is a computer simulation to play out their fantasies before they declare war.

Frankenstein’s obsession with conquering death led to his demise. My fascination with digital dogma in video games led me to commit crimes that, if outside the world of video games, would hang me under the Geneva Conventions.

But the terror attacks?

On the evening of 10th November, 2025, a car explosion on a busy artery of Delhi’s roads near the Red Fort took thirteen lives and left several injured. A shadow of terror when compared to the one on Taj Mahal Palace in 2008, yet one that left a permanent scar.

Those who passed away were just people. People running their shops. People returning home. People with dreams, expectations, families, and lives full of meaning. The car that exploded, itself a suicide attack, was but a period to end all their periods of meaning.

In a very Shelley-esque development, three of the perpetrators were doctors. Life givers became life absolvers. They were Victor Frankensteins, their blast an obsession with death. They played God, in whose image they were made. A God who is as controlling, as demanding, and as vengeful as a mouse-trigger-happy thirteen-year-old.

Death for a promise, even if their own had to die.

Death for a paradise lost. Paid for by innocents.

Deaths for a paradise that will never be.

That is the cost of playing God.

Religions are fascinating. Dominating the world in kaleidoscopic forms—as animist and naturist practices of tribes, cultured polytheistic takes of emerging civilizations, syncretic beliefs of pantheistic unions, and demanding monotheistic staves of sordid empires and political regimes.

And no matter which camp you belong to, including that of atheism, you cannot live devoid of religion. It’s always there, perhaps in its more modern incarnations of idol (read: movie star, singer, capitalist businessman, orange leader, etc.) worship, but it is oh-so there.

So, when I came across this absurd claim by Palantir’s CTO, that lack of religion was the driving force behind AI’s doomerism, I found myself abhorrently affronted and apathetically aghast. Surely, such a highly educated, well-earned, ethnically diverse, and respected member of the American—erm—elitist society would have a better grasp on the material world?

Right?

I wasn’t having any of it. So, I stroked my threadbare mustache, put on my best olive tweed blazer, and donned my skepticism pince-nez to find a golden thread of disappointment between AI doom, religions, and a company that draws its name from Tolkien’s epic. This, I said to myself before starting this piece, should be fun.

Eyes, Smoke, and Mirrors

For the general populace who have to toil their way for the fruits of their labour, AI has not been the godsend (gods-send? How many gods are we talking here?) that the tech world sugarcoats it to be. When not casually declining résumés efficiently or demeaning the hard work of writers and artists on a Tuesday morning, you can find AI transforming into a vehicle for inflation of hype.

It’s the kind of tech circlejerking where one company, say ClosedUI, finds itself shaking hands with chipmakers that run its AI, say MAudia, and database giant, say Delphi, to create an ecosystem in which the latter companies lift the former’s product into greater focus. Along the lines, you can find smaller AI, cloud, and datacenter startups getting seeded by these giants in a massive loop that resembles the dot-com bubble, both literally and figuratively.

(I don’t need to add winks for you to decipher those company names, right?)

That’s a trimmed explanation of the actual AI bubble in the making. Bloomberg does a great job looking into it, and so does Hank Green. I suggest you, dear reader, check out both. The bottom line is, what may look like a booming market with its trillions of dollars of valuation is just a few companies feeding the illusion.

So, like any healthy, free-breathing human, the alarm bells should be ringing in you, me, and everyone on this soon-to-be-grey earth. But Palantir’s CTO doesn’t think so.

Here are his words, for your attention:

In all fairness, these do not feel comforting the way he might have thought in his head. The AI- and AGI-focused corporations are all but secular. Sure, they dress themselves with all the right toppings and sauces of ethnicities and faiths. But if the recent flip by OpenAI in going for-profit is any indication, I think the overlords of future AI overlords are very much capital worshipers—fundamentalist monotheistic zealots that fiercely believe in the power of money.

And secularists in Silicon Valley? Like Palantir, with one of its offices in Palo Alto? Let’s not forget that the founder, Peter Thiel—labelled the “intellectual architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos”—himself chairs many venture capital firms.

Clearly, the tech people, legacy or new blood, all belong to the religion of capital gain. It’s their one true god. Thiel, when not bastardising Tolkien’s tokens, can often be found giving lectures on the antichrist. In one such episodic euphoria of lectures within San Francisco—the seat of the tech-see—he plants seeds of fear mongering against government intervention for AI regulations, calling them antichrist.

But we are not here for Thiel—even though his antichrist-obsessed lectures demand a separate essay of ridicule. That’s a discussion in deconstruction and derision for another time. Sankar, with his polished position as CTO of Palantir, should have had a trickle of self-reflection when spewing gutsy remarks, which strangely echo his company’s founder-cum-chairman’s religious positioning. Especially when his track record skews away from religious tenets.

One Software to Rule Them All

In August 2025, a Fortune report tracked how the rise of Palantir found its shares surging by a good 25%, hitting the market cap of $411 billion. When compared to the previous year, the stocks enjoyed a jump of 550%. These benefits translated very handsomely into skyrocketing the net worths of Peter Thiel and his C-lackeys. Shyam Sankar, in this wealth downpour, found his net worth rising upwards of $1.3 billion. All thanks to AI.

I don’t know if any religions of the world fit into this overinflated AI bubble that reserves capital gains for a select few—I’m pretty sure the Abrahamic and Dharmic religions of the world are all socialist, altruistic, and welfare-of-the-people kind. Where does Sankar’s brand of religion fit into his personal narrative?

And even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt (only for hypothetical reasons; the uber-rich don’t need it) in terms of finding riches through dedicated hard work, the route that Palantir and Sankar have taken is wrought with moral bankruptcy and fraud.

Bloomberg’s 2018 feature story on Palantir opens more eyes than those in Mordor’s shadow. Created as a spymaster’s tool to augment surveillance for the U.S. special forces and covert ops, the data mining company soon found itself becoming a beloved public sector tool to catch fraud and trace employee activity in the finance sector. But this soon took a sinister turn when Palantir became less of Tolkien’s communication device it was named after and more of Peter Jackson’s vision of the Eye of Sauron—a never-blinking overwatch of constant vigilance across the land of the living, or in this case, the United States and its people.

The story of this fraud detection collective has its own little fraud, which should surprise nobody. In the depths of Palantir’s nefarious use lies the shifty tactics of Shyam Sankar in obtaining an IP by another corporation, i2, to create their all-seeing eye. The result? A lawsuit.

Here’s an interesting paragraph from Reuters on this:

The lawsuit was, as it always happens, settled out of court. There’s more dirt under Sankar’s nails, but Palantir’s doing the role of Grima Wormtongue to quieten the general mood.

Of course, the company is openly in cahoots with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With ICE’s $30 million “donations,” Palantir is developing an AI-based ImmigrationOS to unearth and deport what the current U.S. administration calls illegal aliens. That sits perfectly right with the religious ethos of Sankar, himself the son of Indian immigrants.

You and I shouldn’t be surprised, though. In the Gospel of Monetary Gains, the only truth is the dough that falls into your pockets. Morality is a bystanding spectator that zips out its phone to document what happens. It’s then quickly frisked away for being anti-American, anti-Christian, or any of the various “anti” flavours that the Trump administration disfavours.

There is also something about the way Silicon Valley merchants of tech and gold portray themselves: prophets and saviours against a sea of heretics. Thiel harping on the chords of antichrist against government regulations and Saran downplaying the rising—and very visible—AI bubble with a lack of religion fit cleanly into this motif. It’s among this cast of billionaire elites that you’ll find the masks of pious hellbent on selling you their vision against the dooming world.

It’s also on-brand for them to flip our insecurities and brand them in our consciousness. The means don’t matter, as long as they are able to manipulate the crowd. Why do they need to surround themselves with such myths? Perhaps it’s the self-important image they carry in their minds that they want to project onto the world. And why won’t they? If they don’t weave the fiction, no one will buy their crap.

When Tolkien sharpened his pen on the whetstone of epic fantasy, he created a masterful MacGuffin in the rings of power—three for the elves, seven for the dwarves, nine for the men.

In this modern fantasy of AI doomerism and tech evangelism, the elves are billionaires, the dwarves our governments, and the men remain men, mortal and on the lowest rung of the ladder.

It’s a loose adaptation of the epic, but let’s not forget: There was but one ring to rule them all.

I think we all know how that story ends.

What is good science fiction? That’s a question I have always found myself braving whenever I ponder the works by Asimov, Herbert, Liu, Adams, Weir, and Reynolds. But seeing the world we are living in today, I think that these authors were shortsighted, to say the least.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Good science fiction needs good world-building, and that’s where these authors excelled the most. The worlds they created—or universes in some cases—do not feel alien. They’re accurate projections of what Earth, its civilizations, and its polities could be, mapped onto the greater galactic background and treated like cosmic radiation that withers the existence of the mundane. That’s a heavy-handed statement—I admit—to just say that they did well. But simplicity wouldn’t stroke my ego the same way, would it?

I digress. The authors I listed above, and others that I didn’t, were visionaries. The worlds they built, discreetly or with exposition that felt like second nature, were an opaque reflection of the life that could be in a world that wouldn’t be. Yet, the more I look at the world that is building around me, the more I find that hard science fiction missed the mark of reality. That is, until you take a left turn into the psychotic world of Cyberpunk fiction.

For those unaware or living under digital slabs, the cyberpunk genre is a dystopian basket case; that particularly grimy, neon-lit urban fantasy poking at the science-fiction umbrella from uncomfortable angles of mutilation, body enhancement, transcendence, and no-longer-hiding-it capital crimes from ultra-capitalists that make barbarian lifestyle the USP of the world.

Forked from the punk and hacker subcultures, painstakingly polished by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, and added to by the brilliance of various artists—that created the likes of Blade Runner, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Judge Dredd, The Matrix, and many more—there’s something depressingly charming about this world.

But I particularly like the Mike Pondsmith variety that builds over the foundations and brings a gothic-like, rain-over-the-city, neo-noir depression of living in a world where the lines between digital and physical are blurred. When CD Projekt RED transformed Pondsmith’s tabletop series of RPGs into a video game set in 2077, the world of cyberpunk exploded once again.

Now here’s the funny part: fiction is still fiction, right? So why is it that when I look at last week’s (late October 2025, if you’re reading this sometime in the not-completely-dystopian-yet future), I’m reminded of the cyberpunk mockery of a society all too dependent on technology?

Pulling the Plug Between Fiction and Reality

For every fiction to connect with its audience, there has to be a substrate of reality where it stands. Suffering works delightfully well in this medium, which is why action, suspense, thriller, horror, and mystery work so well. But what do we do when this substrate of fiction starts leaking into reality? What do we do when fiction becomes a gritty reflection of a ditch on a road that hasn’t been mended?

Suffering, therefore, is the artery of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk experience. It’s the interstate thoroughfare of indulgence, crime, and punishment extolled by the corrupt and often hijacked government, suited corporate bureaucracy, power-hungry gangs, and cyber psycho vigilantes. Against this backdrop is the futurist Night City, a (haven?) of human- and machine-rejects fornicating with each other until you cannot separate man from cyberspace.

That’s a pretty reduced setup, but it works. The artery of suffering extends in the physical space as well as cyberspace. Roads aren’t the only way to travel, you see. The version of the internet that runs this world is the beating heart of the people. It physically connects people, gadgets, transports, weapons, and even consciousness. Agents—people, machines, or a mix of both—continue to exist, build, edit, and infiltrate this net. Imagine if something of this complexity were to blackout.

Last week, AWS suffered an outage (on the 20th of October, 2025). What began in the U.S. cascaded to the rest of the globe as the internet (or at least parts of the internet relying on AWS) came crashing down. Many who host their platforms on Amazon’s widely spread cloud hosting found themselves on the shorter, quite comical end of the stick. This included

• Social media platforms:

  • Reddit

  • WhatsApp

  • Discord

  • YouTube

• Entertainment services:

  • Prime Video

  • Disney+

  • PlayStation Network

  • Video games such as Roblox, Fortnite, and Rocket League

• E-commerce and finance platforms:

  • Paypal

  • Venmo

  • Etsy

  • Amazon

  • Lloyds Bank, Halifax Bank, Bank of Scotland

• Cloud tech:

  • Canva

  • Google’s Drive, Meet, and Cloud

  • Amazon Alexa and Ring

  • Duolingo

And many more. You can find a full list of these here.

Apart from banking and payment services that would impede your life, you could sort of go on with your day, right?

Except the outage also took out obscure and odd service platforms that rely on the arterial highway of cloud computing that Amazon provides. Platforms that you probably didn’t ever bat an eyelid in the general direction of their cloud requirements.

Take the smart bed industry. Eight Sleep’s pods (as they call them) found themselves separated from the mother cloud. Some hunched in tense anticipation, while others started to heat up. I still don’t know why a bed needs to be smart (beyond the memory foam requirement). A bed connected to the internet is always concerning. Even if you just use it to sleep.

However, imagine if a massive IoT network—something so pervasive yet becoming unnecessarily ubiquitous—were to come down harder.

The Internet of Undoings

IoT, or the internet of things, is the interconnectedness of smart devices on a single network, such as your home or office.

Now, the idea of having smart devices might be appealing, but is it really needed? The smartphones in our pockets are already too much of a privacy breach. But that doesn’t stop people from buying smartwatches, which just replicate the functionality of your phone screen. Smartwatches, and how common they’ve become, point to a glaring issue with technology consumption. What purpose does a watch have to go smart?

And that’s just the tip of the IoT iceberg. We’ve got smart glasses, smart washing machines, and smart refrigerators, many now also boasting AI capabilities. All so that you can control everything through your phone? Oh wait, no, I forgot that their true purpose is to stream ads at you, 24/7.

You might see yourself as a shadow of Tony Stark with all the tech wearables around you monitoring your sight, smell, pulse, social interactions, and thoughts. Perhaps, you might even have a digital pacemaker or a similar tool regulating your organs with the touch of an app. But what you really are is an NPC (non-playable character; or a commoner in this context) within the shadow of an emerging cyberworld.

And believe what you want, you’re not the controller. Outages like AWS show the extent of vulnerabilities present in these networks. Your wearables are pumping all the data on your person and logging it into their memory before it gets shifted to the cloud for tracking and analysis. That’s your biometrics freely available to study and potentially even mess with. If an outage happens, your dependencies stop functioning.

But an even worse scenario that IoT devices bring is the roughshod code that can become a target point for anyone else. That’s where the cyberpunk world feels more real. Just like this universe of tabletop RPGs and the acclaimed video game, if one were to hack your optics, wearables, or organ-augmenting devices, they could wreak havoc on your body. Or make you do things you’d never imagine.

Perhaps, I’m going too grim here.

Perhaps, we’ll never see such an outcome.

Perhaps, fiction will stay fiction even as time wounds its pace.

To be honest, with intrusive ad streaming in IoT devices and almost comical glitches that make them go haywire, this fiction is not far from becoming a true reality. I might be seeing too much in my tea leaves. Do I need AI-powered lenses to read them better? Or should I just turn my smartphone-controlled T-bulb?

The high moon I saw wasn’t
exactly the right shade
within the tattered blanket
that we call the night.

There was but a tinge of
disappointment, old
and bereavement, bold that
commemorated gold.

And in this seemingly perfect
pale yellow stardom
the moon did outshine all
the “tatters” that shone.

I, for one, always looked up
to this ageing mass
donning its own tattered blanket
as nights went along.

And I, for one, had always
praised those days
when its masquerading greys
faded night-light away.

Irrelevant what you call it,
my pale moon is grey,
irreverent are its scars that
hide in light’s shame.

That’s why I’d rather toast to
its hauntingly cold wash
that dims away every tatter in
the blanket of my nights.

Already subscribed? Leave a like and comment on what this poem made you feel.

My wife and I have a ritual of sorts. After a long day spent managing work, chores, and our baby daughter, the little pocket of time we find past ten at night is invested in discussing, bitching, and bickering the happenings of the day over a 90s Bollywood masala film. Either that or it’s a horror film to test how much it can scare us (read: her).

And that’s how, after mundanely scratching our heads on what to watch, we came across a Bollywood entry that seemed to have masala and horror on Netflix: Maa (lit. mother). The banner promoted its lead, Kajol (whom we’ve always adored), and so, no time was wasted in pressing on play.

The premise seemed fine, and the VFX wasn’t impressive in any way, but when the lore bomb in the name of an exposition reel was dropped, I couldn’t help but laugh with disgust.

Why, you ask? The whole bit was AI-generated. The sequence had the unmistakable print of uncanny-valley renders, multiple fingers, and the fractal-like quality that often comes in any intricate pattern AI tools replicate. Hardly adequate to make the hairs on my back stand in fright.

What did scare me, however, was seeing a mainstream entertainer rely on AI rather than actual artists to create computer-generated imagery blended with practical effects. With the prospect of AI-generated short films, film festivals, and India’s first fully AI-generated feature-length films on track to flood the big screens, there is a clear doom awaiting the creative industry.

And that’s just Bollywood. Hollywood, with fresh wounds from the recent SAG-AFTRA strikes against big studios using AI, is seeing a shift, too. On one hand, you have David Fincher using AI as a tool to fix a funky shot for a 4K remaster of Se7en. On the other hand, you have Ridley Scott embracing AI to cut production costs and push creativity in animation.

I belong to Camp Fincher. AI is great as a tool to help the process. It can, for example, prove invaluable for those who lack storyboarding experience, helping them convey their ideas to designers and artists.

But there are many in the AI creativity camp, like Scott. It is these who parade that AI is no different than when photography first came out, challenging then-existing art styles.

So, let’s expose the chink in the armor they think is infallible, shall we?

What is Art?

In the simplest definition, art is expressionism. It’s the way you sketch, paint, brush, carve, chip, or erase—or any other tool verbs you want to use—to give birth to an idea, an imagination, or a scene that sits outside of reality, no matter how photorealistic it is.

Tools on the job here require manual input. You cannot instruct a pencil or charcoal to sketch out a detailed portrait, or ask your collection of paintbrushes to dive into oil and stroke an imagination on canvas as if it were Disney’s Fantasia. Nor can you chisel details of pillows or fabrics rolling on the skin of a bust carved out of marble.

All this takes skill, one honed with patience and practice. You have to hold your tools, feel them as extensions to your hands, and move them on the canvas to achieve a desired result. This applies to all the styles that have ever existed: from cave paintings and rather flat, medieval religious art to realist perspectives of the Renaissance, and even caricatured cartoons, surrealist melts, dadaist chaos, and abstract messes of modern times.

So, when photography first came out, there was a challenge to the hard work of real artists. What was this stupid box of a tool that captured life as it was? There was no room to express the sky as a swirl of stars and midnight velvet, no channel to portray nature in watercolour veils, no motive to express one’s manliness onto their mistress’s face.

As time passed, photography grew into its own medium of expression, a playground to mix light and shadows as they fell on the subjects, and later, a chance to play with colours and tones through digital tools.

It’s this flashpoint of the emergence of photography that many backers of gen AI use as the foundation of their favourite tool.

But is it a tool like the tactile ones we discussed above? Let’s compare the humble pencil to, say, ChatGPT. Both tools can be used to write and to sketch. So, what’s really the difference?

The pencil is more passive. It only leaves a trail of graphite where you crush the tip of its lattice arrangement to break down into a smoky curve. That curve can be a straight line, a circle, a squiggly glyph we call letters, or a complicated combination of pressured strokes and strikes. The end result is dependent on the hand that wields the pencil. All the pencil does is trace the movements of your hands, flex the rotation of your wrists, wiggle at the slightest push of your fingers, and imprint as dark as you press it onto paper.

Compare this to ChatGPT and its sub-models used for image generation, and you see a chasm between the participant and the tool. Your hands do not flex, turn, or do complicated pirouettes on paper. They just type out some words as instructions. The rest is handled by AI. It’s an active yet removed process, no different than I asking an artist to commission a piece for me. Does that make the artist my tool? No. It certainly doesn’t give me any intellectual rights to the finished work. All I get is the title of a patron. I did no work.

Unlike the proud patrons, however, who delight in displaying oil-on-canvas masterpieces they’ve commissioned, the gen AI crowd prefers to label itself artists. They haven’t picked up any pencils, pens, or brushes. No. They’ve only asked their friendly neighbourhood LLM model nicely to draw on their behalf. How they fancily craft their instructions could be . . . erm . . . stretched to call art, but that’s where their interaction ends.

They don’t even own the piece they created, because their AI tool has just replicated something based on millions of illegally breached art styles. Sure, you can bicker about originality in art as an imitation of another; a sincere form of flattery, right? If that vision came from your head and was toiled upon by your hands on paper or canvas, you could go that route.

But with AI, the waters of copyright seem . . . complicated, to say the least.

Prompts vs Photographs

This is where the photography argument gears up into a clash of schools, of sorts. I say “of sorts” because all I see is incompetence leaping on a platform to stand tall with actual talent and hard work.

Not everyone has the skill to create art, but then again, art is not limited to a select few. Yes, there are people who are phenomenal with their brushes, but then there are far more skilled artists who’ve been consistent with their practice to hone their style and skills.

And yet, the AI crowd performs a crude reduction comparing photography with prompting “art,” replete with the pride of an artist.

Here’s how the argument goes: Taking a photo is all about pressing the button. There is no skill involved. It’s the camera’s body that lets the light in and the sensor—or the photographic plate—that captures the image to be processed. There’s no human creativity there.

I appreciate the effort this argument puts in giving artistic weight to AI. But there is a certain skill in handling a camera. It never replaced traditional art forms because it too became a tool to express ideas, albeit with aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and other factors working the same job as a pencil or a brush stroke.

I know the counterargument that bubbles in this wake, that commanding a prompt that tightropes every factor in generating an image is analogous to turning the knobs and dials on a camera body.

Is it, though?

To make art, you need to know the subject and your craft. A still life of a jug and some fruits will be very different when you paint it versus when, say, Monet, Van Gogh, or Dali were to paint it. Even if someone were to photorealistically replicate these objects on canvas, the final rendition would be different from an actual photograph when you go into the minutiae. A photograph from you vs a professional in the field will be vastly dissimilar.

AI, however, just fakes the imagination and creativity by replicating approximations of something based on the style it was asked to copy. It is, however, getting scarily good at it.

But, for the sake of this argument in the guise of an essay, I’ll change my stance and claim that I do know how photography is no different than prompting. Let me prove it to you.

Say I were to go to the Louvre and take a well-lit, highly detailed picture, or stitch multiple photoscans into a greater print, of Vermeer’s Lacemaker. I make sure that the grains and fibers of the canvas, the brushstrokes, the paint colours, and even the exposure are lifelike. Probably chip my nail working the dial to set manual settings. It’s hard work, after all.

The final composition, then, is mine. So what if my photograph is just a copy of Vermeer’s hard work? Doesn’t matter one bit. I lit the scene, I balanced the tone map, I pulled the shutter.

That final result, for art’s sake, and my camera’s, is mine. Vermeer should try to catch up with the times. In his grave, of course.

Now tell me, would you commission me to create a copy of the famous art pieces for you?