One of my favorite statistics is that the city of Mumbai has to kill at least 1,000 rats everyday to keep plague and other diseases from breaking out. ‘Rat catchers’ are appointed area-wise and given targets. All the dead rats are gathered at a single location and counted ward-wise. It…

If nature could talk the condemnation it would give us would be the most tragically beautiful poem. But it doesn’t need to. Thankfully, only we are cursed with language. An inefficient means of obfuscation more than then communication. We almost never say what we mean and we are often not…

I have never celebrated birthdays. Or New Year’s…or any other festival for that matter. Once you exit the system, you need not follow their calendar either. You can celebrate whenever you want, as long as you want. But you can still observe the big days. Because most people are still in the Matrix. They can only…

The Pentagon confirming UFO sightings should have arguably been the biggest news in history. The paucity of coverage it got is the most telling indication of how pathologically inward looking we have become. The biggest trend on any given day continues to be K-Pop and the reel of the day. …

It has always intrigued me that the biggest industrialists in the world who are also the biggest polluters also want a patch of pristine green for their children. A dichotomy of knowing what the right, just and natural thing to do is and yet not doing it. Expecting the finest…

Many people suffer from a nostalgia for a time they never lived. The social media shorthand for this romantic affliction is ‘old soul’. Offline pathology is way more complicated. The past is invariably seen through rose tinted glasses. From lost youth at a personal level to lost property at…

Before there were malls there were shopping centers. There still are, in suburbs and in small towns. From the very specific ‘Ladiej Delicates’ to very broad ‘Fancy Items’ the sporadic shops in these shopping centers cover everything Finance Ministers promise but never deliver. The opening and shutting down of…

Politics is the collective outsourcing of our hypocrisy. It is less burdensome than self-loathing and more efficient than armed conflict. Yet we hold politicians to unreasonable standards that we ourselves fail at even though our jobs do no require as much treachery. As a result, politicians constantly accuse each other…

In the middle of recording a podcast that never got released, my good friend CowTuk asked me, “What is your priority for the next 10 years?” I didn’t have to think a lot about it. The answer is, “Making peace with ageing.” Apart from all the social and professional challenges…