The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage

― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

In the purple haze of doomerism, my spring keeps unfurling in its indifferent joy. Here sacred, there volatile. Now conjuncted to the carousel of everlasting deride that has gripped this decade in its fistful agony, then awakening to the timeless joy of eternal awareness. Swinging between the heat of summer announcing itself in the humid melancholy of gathering grey, and the cooling heralded by the early Kalbaisakhi (nor’westers) chastising the city veiled in carbon dust.

There is a grief deep and hidden, vapid and transparent, relentless and silent — all the same for which a vast container needs to be assigned. The collective demands despite hopeless frugalities of daily, despite the natural world and its rapid succession of events. What I am resting most is despair, a gentle eased sense of letting go that threatens obsoletion of words if I let it. I am trying to read more — a shift naturally aided by my inclination to anything else but words. Another thing I find joy in resisting is the fast agile digital world. Books – there is where I rest my frail curiosities. It has, I have discovered lately, become difficult to relearn to focus. The fragmentation of attention has been taken too far. So I refused indulgence in the medium of fragmentation with vengeance — totally without reprisal.

It grieves me that things had to come along this winded weird way. As if the incessant news of death, scathe, and dominion was not enough, the new broadcast has all been about AI replacing the human capabilities (more like incapabilities — lightning speed outputs and tandems of probabilities in the fraction of cost, because the AI slave doesn’t feed a family, pay bills, and buy health insurance, or even rest) without government policies reassuring us otherwise. The digital work world is flooded with agentic AIs that can do almost anything that a person can do albeit faster and cheaper. What has been even more dehumanizing are the conversations around AGIs that will eventually make knowledge work completely unnecessary. This new threat to my survival (writer and designer), has warned me of the harmful simplicity of abundance which cannot be distributed for public good. The billionare’s relentless pursuit of profitability has run into terrains of wilful disregard for accountability.

Exposed to an endless debate of experience and exposure — my mind outgrows itself in every argument. I am forced to reconcile with the possibility that the state of human now is more synthesis than being. We are proudly becoming a byproduct of our own mirages than beings of consciousness, whose mysteries we still struggle to understand. We are now Homo Syntheticus rather than Homo Sapiens. An assembled species of fabricated neurosis, unfiltered influences, synthetic expectations, and borrowed identities — running a race in which the finish line promises absolute loss of being. Heartbreaking is the precipice of civilizational ascent from where a few powerful look down upon the rest and refuse us even the human privilege to err. And all this is being done at a detrimental speed causing fast deterioration of the natural world. Depleting water tables and polluting them at the cost that we are not yet ready to pay.

The capitalistic disregard for the essence of life (consciousness and nature), turn me inwards in a purgatorial rage. The shadow lines of which keep mentoring my attention for change. My prescient will is retracted to the tangibility. Imagination flooded by the visions of green, azure, brown — the texture of elemental grace of Earth that absolves our collective transgressions. The colors and textures of nature sit defiantly under the inner cupola of the holy that is part of the whole. To me, it seems easier to merge into the roots of life than to live in abstractions of the world, and also to create from the same place. ‘If only I could hold a piece of land without the imposition of human structure above it’, I thought to myself. In this comical economy, this little acquisition is out of question. Necessary commodities are touching astronomical price points, let alone pieces of land in an overpopulated country like mine.

These mindless maladies of machinations makes me wonder of the excessive nature of everything in our world that rots under the weight of its own expectations. Will the greed for novel experiences ever saturate, as we fast-track towards self-annihilation? Can we ever have enough? I am forlorn for an answer which, even before its arrival, has already inclined upon denial. However grim our circumstances might be, the way is always through. There is no avoiding the prevalence of the technologies as there is no denial of the wars splitting the axis of the world and collapsing our economy. Both are happening — these apocalyptic outcomes of imagined fear and fragmented human minds. As we navigate its waves, we will learn together how to breathe under its currents and survive its vile accusations against our human weakness.

To such inane human sorrow whose existence has now to be demonstrated by will, the antidote can only be found in imprints and details that are organic — the inner scapes of dreams and memories, the rumbling voice of dissent that doesn’t let accountability slip, the virtue of beauty by which divine designs are identifiable. These three pillars are prominent friction point for the algorithmic systems precisely because these realms do not comply to the human-made frameworks. The mystical structure of our own being is ultimately the only tool to dissect with, the grief of obscuration in an automated world.

Memory is reticent to the other-worldly aspect of time, through which some events negotiate without protocol. It will be two years since my father passed away, but when I close my eyes, I still see him glide through the gleaming tinge of our old house lamps, breaking silence with his lucid movements. Are those movements still living in some textured realms separated from now by the probabilistic branching of time or are they just images sparsing in my memory, I know not.

His lingering announces the progression of grief and love, memory and dreams, following each other’s lead — like blind baby shrews, treading through dangers of navigating the world, holding each other’s tails. Each time he appears at the corners of my liminal interiors, even as a ghost, a visceral familiarity holds me in comfort and knowing. A realm opens up which any vapid derivative of binary system cannot reduce into patterns.

This interlocution between memory and dream is what fascinates me and gives me hope in the prejunctional human intelligence to be far greater than just a bunch of accumulated skills. Our intelligence is both organic and chaotic in its evolution, congenital and learned, practised and experimental — all at the same time. These labyrinths of inner worlds are vast and quietly existential — a challenge to human tendency to label and categorize. Imitating something so mysterious is largely impossible, even if the registers of emotions and architecture of the intelligence can be replicated. But what animates these registers and flows through the architecture of life is not material in nature. To imitate organic intelligence, one needs to birth consciousness, which by definition cannot be birthed or destroyed, only dispersed like seeds through the forest of life by that which we neither understand nor control (a.k.a God, creator, anima, divine, universe).

Sapiens succeeded the last three hundred thousand years against the lash of every age’s biggest tribulations. There is something inadvertently human that stands in the face of all adversities and proclaims victory. What is it, I thought, that is ardent and ancient — something that we still carry in the epigenetics of both body and memory? The composition of dissent and resistance that rises through each molecule of consciousness, and spread like wildfire across our world. What is it that binds us in eternal relationship with the elements of our natural world? From the sea to the mountain, from the forest to the desert, through which God speaks to us when we are ready to yield. What is it that has driven Jesus to roam and fast in the desert and made Buddha sit motionless under the bodhi tree — for several weeks. The constant whirling meditation of action and inaction — that lives eternally through us — of which we are but mere vessels.

When the divinity permeates through the edifice of mundane, a new impulse is ushered. The impulse is akin to life itself. It moves in fractals, imbibed in the fabric of life — the impulse of creation, and the urge to create. So innate to everything animated by the life forces that we can hardly locate its origin. The antithesis to the megalomaniacal machinations, if there is one, is in the reclamation of this creative force. Manifesting in forms of art, language, music — in the most unconventional of ways — by decimating rules and limitations imposed by institutional formulas. By breaking laws of colors, strokes, grammar, rhythms — challenging the colonial conventions set in place to gatekeep that which humans have been doing since centuries. These are the very institutions that foster the underbelly of capitalism. It is by these very conventions of institutions, that corporations legitimize their freehold on human intelligence and demand production out of us like we are machines.

Reclamation of human agency and brilliance lies in rejecting the system and its rules. Because it is precisely on formulas and patterns that AI is trained. It is in the experimental avenues of creativity that we will find a break from the inundated synthetic information generation. It is in our endless pursuit of truth in myriad forms — with confidence, with faith, with love for the world we cohabit — that there is a slight chance that artistic dissent will shatter the glass towers of corporate greed. These monuments of deride built on suffering of you and I, on our sweat and blood, a loud jeer to our intelligence, to our work that brings us closer to the divine. They will come crumbling down if we refuse them our creative dexterity.

As I progress in my path of creating slow and deliberate work like a book built word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, I realise that the only threat to my intelligence is my own inability to laugh at the serious congeniality of AI. Beyond the falsehood of invincibility of this tech, intellectual freedom is quietly waiting in sheer dissent, in vitrified resilience, in anger transmuted into agency — sedimenting into a voice that is so singular and divergent that nothing about it can be generalized, formulized, or copied. It is in the essence of history and ancestry, in the genetic makeup and creative forces of the universe that unique footprints of resistance will emerge, and they take forms in the riveting tales of humanity narrated by you and I.

To persist in the apparently lonely but ultimately uniting folds of creative life, I insist that we go out of our ways to search for hope in the hopeless, joy in the joyless, aid in the aid-less. To steal spark from the stars of collective imagination, to dare breathe beneath oceans, to stagger away with our joints asunder into the respite of beauty and justice, to stir up imagined happiness in the foolish pursuit of holding lamp to the Sun. And do well to remember that through our connection to the natural world — in the language of ocean waves and torrents of winds, rooted-molten pastel of living forests and scorching duststorms of deserts, God is waiting to talk to us.

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“Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.”

― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

Namaste Friends,

I have been planning to post the second issue of the Khasi anthology series, which is already drafted, but kept postponing it because apparently not even two weeks can pass without the world hurling itself into dissonance even more than before. I blame it all on the anima of stories—they have their own imperatives and cosmic moments of revelation.

What I am telling you today is not usual or ordinary in any sense, though it oddly fits the fractured times we are simultaneously sailing through. To those of you who are reading this, I am grateful. For in you, my story finds a place.

In the bitter cold of December 31st, 1999, we were dancing our way to the cusp of midnight. We planned to dance into the new millennium, but things did not turn the way we planned—like things never do. That night was a threshold, a fragile suspended moment between the probable and inevitable. It was the night when death closely brushed by us. That night my father had his first episode of myocardial infarction, a fancy word for heart attack.

I remember the dumb stupor that propelled the night into the relentless grasp of grief. The music blasted through the big box Solidaire speakers, their massive wooden bodies rumbling with 90’s pop as I watched my mother at a distance, running frantically to and fro, crying, almost about to faint—an arresting tragic sight unfolding in the midst of what was supposed to be a celebratory night. I stood there aghast in fear and reluctance. I was having fun, we were stepping into the millennium, I was only 7. A child who just wanted to live. I turned pale in horror at the sight of a few men rushing my now almost unconscious father away somewhere on a motorbike. I was stepping into a millennium of sorrows. I cannot stop thinking about what a perfect poetic mirror it was of our collective collapse. Looking back now, the grief was all too symbolic of the world as it stands now, devoid of its pretentious progressiveness and stripped of its fading narrative of equality and democracy.

My father lived that night, only to pass away 24 years later on a distant day, under dissimilar circumstances. But something else died that night. It was my worldview of permanence. I knew then what I now believe to be an absolute empirical truth of reality—the one we live in and share as a collective. Nothing is permanent. People, places, ideas, notions, feelings, philosophies, politics, governments. Everything is shifting, morphing, evolving or devolving—constantly, inadvertently.

I have lived as a migrant all my life. I have carried the nomad in my soul as I drifted from one part of the country to another. Growing up in mixed communities meant for me dressing in identities rather than internalizing them. I was as much raised by the Syrian Orthodox missionary church1 and school in central India as by my family. Central India is a queer cultural kaleidoscope of indigenous customs and migrants from the rest of the country who each spoke different Indian languages at home, worshipped vastly different pantheons, and celebrated varied festivals. My bedtime stories were riddled with the presence and magic of a faraway land2 where these stories had originated, transferred from lips to ears, entrenched in psyche for generations. My mother spoke in the tongue of those who roamed barefoot through the black-soiled wetlands and marshes of the eastern peninsula—a land alien to me, raised amid red sandy dunes and rocky uplands.

These stories felt foreign to my waking life, where I was fostered by a multicultural chrysalis. All my life, I felt like I stood at the outpost of my own being, a place where identity clamored against conditioning. Where I was told I needed something solid on which to place my foot. That I could not cohabit with the ghosts of multiculturalism. But I questioned it all, because I did not feel solid or sure. I felt like a progeny of this and that, a legacy of the arid central landscape and its cultural offspring, both indigenous and immigrant. Everything influenced me, but nothing took hold of my heart with clenched fists.

I was abandoned in the orbit of my own solitude for refusing to affiliate with those limiting social boxes. It made me inhabit the world begrudgingly. It made me wonder if it was more important for society to uphold ideological righteousness than embrace a hurting child. It made me an eternal exile to the land my ancestors called home. A vagabond to those who followed the teachings of St. Thomas. An outsider to the traditional iron ore smelters, the Agarias3, who were indigenous to the state. I remained, firmly, a permanent outcast to a society that liked labels, hierarchy, and order.

Like my ancestors, I too lived in places that did not, in society’s definition, “belong to me.” But I did not seek belonging in terms of ownership. What I craved was acceptance of my multicultural values. I wanted the world to see what I could see in my own heart—a beautiful rich tapestry of landscapes, stories, and cultures. A person blessed by many gods and goddesses, and possessed by none. It made me wonder about my ancestors, how isolated and strange they must have felt moving through this world. Their identities, like the rivers they left behind, flowing forward in all directions, seeking acceptance without the coercion of assimilation. I can imagine my foremothers and fathers drifting across vast wetlands and forests, plateaus and plains, sometimes outrunning beleaguering invasions, at other times passing like ghosts through the ruins of droughts and famines. Through the gossamer fabric of time, meandering and pondering on what has now become only an idea, a haunting—home.

Even when some of us never moved towns, cities, or countries, the entire human race is migratory in nature. At least one of our ancestors moved and survived some terrible predicament in some faraway land that is now foreign to us. The times are irrelevant—it could have happened in the prehistoric era, it could have happened at a time that predated the concepts of national and state borders, or during the premodern or colonial period. It could have been centuries ago in Asia or Europe. It could have been decades ago in Syria or Iraq. It could have happened in 2022, in Ukraine. It could have happened yesterday in Bangladesh4. Someone might be fleeing persecution, someone escaping a deadly plague, someone leaving behind a homeland drowning due to rising sea levels, some might be looking for better prospects of life in a country that promises social mobility. We know nothing of their tribulations, of their heartbreaks.5 If we knew how hard it is to leave behind all that makes us who we are, we wouldn’t blame the ones who migrated, for we would know what they did was a precept of their path. They carry a little of their culture into their new world, and that blending has always been happening since the beginning of globalization and trade. We are all immigrants of the world, passengers and passersby even. Travelers, if you will. In this realm of living, we are temporary. Then to what purpose are the proclamations of ownership and legality?

Who decides the legality of a human being, and by what right is the authenticity of their crisis debatable? Who owns Mother Earth—the real one, who predates the imaginary lines of nations and states? Who decides in which corner of her abundant body each child is to root their tents? Who partakes in understanding the frivolity of her changes, what she keeps and what she destroys? Who monitors the ethics of immigration? Because the last time I checked, legal systems were still engaged in their punitive bureaucratic games. Humans have built systems that are incapable of such universal empathy, understanding, wisdom, and justice. And yet humans are not.

Throughout history, those who hold power have enjoyed impunity while questioning the humanity of those crushed by their machinery. But if we as individuals cannot speak without agendas or self-interest, we become part of that machinery—a reactionary validation of the violence designed to provoke our rage.

If we want to create a rupture in the machinery of exclusion, first we need to ask ourselves—can we actually speak without provocation, tell without insinuation, rise without spectacle? Can we stop lingering at the outstation of our own judgments? Can we look at the being before we meet the human? Are we willing to carry the weight of loving this world despite its impermanence?

I know at this point you might want to wave your fist at me—
”What do you know about risk? What have you ever lost?” or “People paid with their lives, and what did survival ever cost you?”

My simple response: Everything.

Everything that made me feel whole. Every certainty I clung to as a child. Every version of home I tried to build and watched dissolve. The luxury of belonging without question. The comfort of a single story, a single language, a single god. The illusion that permanence was ever mine to keep.

Like water, I have learned to move through the world—settling nowhere completely, carrying traces of every shore I’ve touched, forever in transit between what was and what might be. This is the inheritance of migration: to become a repository of ghosts, a living archive of all the homes we’ve loved and left behind.

Life often feels like the making of a sand mandala. The monks spend days bending over grains of coloured sand, placing each one with devotional precision, only to undo the entire mandala in a single, deliberate gesture. It is a practice of wisdom that the work is sacred precisely because it will be undone. What matters is the devotion with which we participate before we let it go.

Dear Friends,

I have been spending my days amid the foggy haze of midwinter in Kolkata. It is that time of the year when Earth’s surplus transforms each boulevard of the city. Street sellers gather in their makeshift tarpaulin shacks to display their golden, date-jaggery–filled containers. The winter mist causes the date tree bark to ooze in relentless retaliation for being wounded. The sap is collected in buckets and transported regularly to city vendors in wooden carts from countryside farms.

A technicolor array of winter yield—sapotas, water apples, kohlrabi, Chinese cabbage, fenugreek greens—stands displayed, inherently representing a kind of wealth that cannot be accumulated, only harvested and shared within the community. Date jaggery, this fresh winter abundance, is a symbol of the impermanence of Earth’s bounty. It is a lesson in humility, the ethics of sharing, and the necessity of proactiveness amid constant shifts in nature’s cycles. If not processed and shared within a short duration, it spoils. It is the kind of wealth that makes everyone rich by flowing equally in all directions, all at once.

Date jaggery is traditionally used in making Sankrānti sweets. Here too, it is shared generously among beloved ones—friends and family alike. A yearly milestone to celebrate interdependence and the collective nature of human societies.

In northern India, the end of the winter harvest is celebrated as Lohri, a festival of fire sacrifice to the gods. People of the neighbourhood gather around a community bonfire and burn natural offerings, symbols of what they are ready to let go of. It reminds us that whatever is born of this world and passes through a life cycle is a holy sacrifice to the divine. That whatever emerges from the soil and returns to fire1 remains in service to life on Earth.

This decade of my life is advancing in haste, as if time itself is warping around these significant years. Swaying between schedules and priorities, meeting some expectations and failing others, has become the texture of these days. In the deserted inner-scapes of hope, suspended in the liminality of this dreaming world, I have begun to question my relationship with the world and its countless inhabitants.

I find myself wondering about my resting place in the movement of time. I am trying to find a language to communicate with nature. I have not found the key yet, but there are hints—in the songs of wind, light, water, and living beings. I suspect it does not reside in one thing alone; it is interspersed through all that the cosmos has created. It is not an easy path, to form a new language and its grammar, but it is my personal burden. My journey entails these tasks.

We are at a pivotal point in our planetary crisis. The oceans are warming beyond normal thresholds. The toxicity of soil and water tables is perilous. Forest fires are becoming more frequent, and we stand at the crux of fossil fuel extinction. To live another forty years will mean to live in a world more fragmented, more violently at war over resources, because we built it upon extractive and transactional relationships with the planet.

The language essential to sustaining a reciprocal relationship with existence is fast devolving. Our techno-extremities are disconnecting us from the life that flows through everything. The eternal whirl of matter and space that manifests life demands more than attention. It demands to be held in silent understanding—in the forgoing of ego, in the abandonment of self-profit. Unless we arrive there, the sharp edges of broken existence will be held against the proverbial throat of humanity, threatening to bleed us dry.

I do not have all the answers, but my life is wilfully designed to seek a few of them and to live within those widening frames. My heart aches for the suffering we have invited upon ourselves because we refuse to see the truth, even when it blazes before us like the sun at summer’s noon. Avoiding it is like drinking water from a poisoned pool. It will slowly lead us into spiritual morbidity. It will corrupt our self-inquiry, blur our moral lens, break our innate compass to empathise with the pain of our own species, let alone that of the rest of the living world.

The truth is simple and difficult: we are always in relationship with one another. We are made of earth and water; solidity and flow coexist within us. At different moments, we are called toward one or the other, and all we can do is respond with acceptance.

We are made of each other. You and I are shaped from the same source, poured into different forms because life is too abundant to be held by one vessel alone. In essence, we are the same. This knowing is no longer rare. It should be enough to end our wars, to stop the hoarding of resources, to choose compassion over violence. Harm inflicted on another body is harm returned to the self.

There is a knowing in me as clear as an unperturbed lake and as encompassing as our shared sky. I know that I am a daughter of this planet, a sister to its beings, a steward of what exists. I am as much born of this world, of the Earth, as I am of my mother and father, of my ancestors, who remain in constant conversation with our great green mother, even those who have transcended the physical realm.

Divine is my destiny to serve this planet, and great is my burden to behold its brokenness. It reflects my own being—mired in the pain of truth-telling and fractured by the sight of cruelty eroding what is tender and necessary in us. Yet, held by the love I have received from this world and from beyond it, I have chosen to revolt against despair. To be broken without surrendering to hopelessness. To love without doubting the worth of what stands before me.

I embrace our broken world until the last exhale of light. It is the only way I know how to carry—and to carry well—this temporary burden of being alive.

When I was a little girl, my parents would let me sleep on our sitting room sofa while a movie ran its course on our box television. My memory recollects those faint footsteps tiptoeing around the couch, and the dialogues streaming seemed like gibberish to my toddler senses. I remember the feeling of receding into a vast ocean of nothingness and the ghostly sweep that gently levitated me and placed me on my bed. My being was made with the lightness of a feather, or so it seemed in the hands of my guardian. It was my father who always carried me.

I wonder if the last moments of life felt the same to him—being held comfortably and carried gently into rest as his body released its earthly limitations, his senses levitating. I prefer not to talk about it often, but I was present in his last moments. He died right in my arms. I did not let him go. And after all this time, I still cannot. It is a childhood debt, yes. But it is something far bigger than that, far more powerful, that fated me to hold my father at that sacred threshold. This all-encompassing, ever-present, heart-widening, oceanic love that I carry now, which in his absence looks a lot like grief. The fabric of time is twisted at its will—the father-daughter role reversal. When I entered life, he held me, and at his exit from life, I held him. The endless conundrum of who carries whom. Am I, the daughter he birthed, also his death mother? Did I deliver him into the realm of eternal rest? Can I ever be that significant? I, who cannot properly mother even myself, wobbling through this space-time.

Sometimes the moments of our greatest misfortune and misadventure are our greatest, if not the only, teachers in life. Sure, some people might meet true god-men or god-women who walk on water and turn tears into stones, but not most of us. For us, our teachers stand cross-armed at the edge of a tattered life event, waiting for us to pick up the remnants of our humanity and look them in the eye to learn the lessons. Our teachers are relentless shadows haunting our memories and wringing our hearts till we burst into compassion, till we set ourselves free.

I have been spiraling through these stairwells of grief, entering the darkness and emerging into the afterglow, only to enter into darkness all over again. There are bridges, even sheltered shacks, while nearing its raging shore. I tread carefully, avoiding being consumed whole by the endless, bottomless sea. The world down there feels strangely quiet, only occasionally galvanized by the shadow of perpetual loss. I see angels of mercy guarding its shores from phantoms and ghouls of suffering. Self-destruction is stationed there too, like a gas-fueled furnace that turns wood into low-ignition charcoal. Everything burns slow, everything destroys to bring forth something new.

Cigarettes caused his death. There is art in that — the act of lighting a cigarette, creating a pulse of release from the burdens and complexities of living, of blowing out the frustration of a troubled marriage, of the burdens of caring for and loving those who cannot care for themselves, of holding down a job that barely sustains you from financial obliteration and the social fabric of life. There is more art to smoking than to using GPT to generate art. There are nuances in breathing with presence and riding the dopamine shift that lifts you slightly before making you want to barf. There is fear in that, and the pursuit of escape; from loneliness, from abandonment, from addiction and genetics that promise cancer. There is denial in that; to life and its beauty, to love and its miraculous capacity to heal, to facing oneself in the darkest of their midwinter noon. Cigarettes cause death not just by cancer, but by trapping one inside a perpetual loop of artistic imagination of escape where there is none.

It is not my fault that I am human, that I carry the epigenetics of abused, starved, violated, colonized ancestors. It is not my fault that they whisper to me, that I carry them as I invent more ingenious ways to free them, that I strive to teach them a different way of being, while experimenting with the limits of the social privileges I inherit and am capable of creating. It is not my fault that sometimes I repeat their mistakes, of habitual asking for answers without relaxing into the unknown, in both my knowledge of death and its denial. The cynic and the poet coexist; they are not the best of friends, but they begrudgingly agree to collaborate. It makes me tread landmines of paradox more often than I would prefer. They flick my preferences through the air. My peace is mostly in surrender.

Grief still rages on the shores of my being. But like an ark, it carries me into a certain kind of existence that remains untouched by death. In the temporary realm of human perceptions, there is no spirit as permanent as death. However, grief, like a north star, promises a different journey. It takes me into the realm of dreams, where the sleepless Gods are vanguards to those we lost. I have touched this deathless place and met my father there several times. I am wandering again inside these corridors of grief’s ark, negotiating with its keepers for a promise or a peek. Anything substantial is hard to come by, but one of these days I shall fling open one of those doors and storm through to make my place in someone else’s museum of memories. You should come find me when it’s time. I will stay there, I promise, in your ark of grief.

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Namaste Friends,

As the screeching brightness of the day blazes through the subcontinent, the nights acquiesce to the quiet multitudes of early monsoon showers. I have been sleeping in intervals, my mind restlessly wandering from one vivid dream to another. I am in a season of life that pulls me relentlessly into activity, only to leave me hollow. I bemoan the dreariness of constant happening, yet there is a sense of an obsidian-sharp awakening in this clench of unease. I crave solitude in its inspired commune with nature, only to find myself in the isolated inlands of loneliness where spirit mires in dread, and hope seems to be in constant conflict with survival.

I have been investigating loneliness. Not the philosophical wrestling, but the direct experiential nuance of its blatant force and sharp aches. I have let myself sink into the bottomless pit of the biggest pitcher where loneliness looks like liquid water — shapeless in a negative space, assuming the form it is poured into. This mutable quality — its very capacity to fill diverse contours of experience, intrigues me. So I was thinking, given this inherent adaptability, why not pour it into the unsuspecting mould of nature awareness? How about juxtaposing loneliness with wilderness? It is rather more appropriate to say, I am experimenting with loneliness. I am living in its strange quarters, while it speaks to me in hushed murmurs of the ageless. It reaches out to me from beyond the material facade of our brittle glass world — so frail, so easily shattered at the slightest fracture. The ghostly voices of time itself talk to me now.

There is a quiet danger in engineering your life around other people’s needs that no one warns you about. When the well-structured scaffolding of noise around your inner dwelling of emptiness melts away in static indifference — the volatile illusion of meaning instantly evaporates. I am living through the isolation of some of those experiences right now. I want to reach a place deeper and quieter to put all that in order, to transmute it. So as I sit here, amid the frenzy chorus of crickets and katydids, muffled thunder roaring away in disdain, and rain drumming on my galvanised roof — I dream of last winter. In this lucid suspension between loneliness and presence, I am finally scattering on the floor the memories of Shillong — looking for a place to rest my loneliness. Tucked away in the womb of the East Khasi hills, the numinous town cradled in its restful slumber — eternally a beloved child of this motherland. It speaks to me in tender visions of cozy winter evenings, of dimly lit streets, and neatly tucked-away garden homes waiting in solitude for their residents to return from work.

It is curious to observe that the word for anything can contain the whole range of experiences that surpass the word itself — sometimes even the polar opposite of what the word actually means in literal sense. Indeed, as I write of loneliness, I am drawn back to the first night in Shillong—a night of re-connection and belonging, highlighting this very capacity of an experience to hold its apparent opposite. Each one of us is home to such suspicious polarities. Joy and sorrow are always dancing together in our inner worlds.

After what felt like a lifetime of suffering, my husband and I found a perfect little window to stop fading behind the steely exteriors we so gracefully wore for everyone else. In the midst of Shillong’s God-bidden forests and star-abundant sky, we allowed ourselves to come undone. The night we arrived was still cushioned between grief and awe. It was our first trip together since baby Vinnie (our ginger cat) left the earthly realms to wreak havoc across the rainbow bridge.

Oh, how we adored that little devil! He would have loved the mountain air—lifting his snoot to catch its crispness. No doubt, he would’ve tried his luck befriending the owl that hooted from deep within the bamboo grove our neighbors had nurtured. The squared, tiled terrace garden would have made the perfect playpen to satisfy his boundless curiosity. But most importantly, he would have loved to chase his sister (our other baby Maya) away from the warmest spots in the room, for it was freezing out there in Shillong in January.

The fragility of existence in its infinite possibilities is already an isolating, if not sobering, experience. There is something elemental about being in this lonely raft of existence, rowing through the timeless tides of personal and collective history, memory, and experiences. Maria Popova names this elemental angst in her exploration of the human malaise of loneliness:

“Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience.”

In the same essay, Popova delves into Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson’s categorisation of loneliness into three categories — two of them time-bound, and the last one beyond the effigies of time. These distinct forms suggest how loneliness can stretch across the dimensions of our lives:

“the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls ‘the profound loneliness of being close to God.’”

This sounds very similar to the First Noble Truth — Dukkha — that the Buddha insisted we look upon for the cessation of suffering.

“What the Buddha saw was that suffering is not the exception, but the rule. Not the interruption of life's party, but the music that always plays in the background. It's the itch behind pleasure, the hangover hiding behind the champagne,”

writes Elie, the creator behind The Mountain.

“Dukkha is not just in the heartbreak and funerals, it's in the perfectly lit family photos, in the promotions, in the weddings. Because every joy is hostage to impermanence”

Maybe the realm of loneliness, heartbreak, and sorrow is incumbent upon us and inevitable, hidden behind all facades of happiness. Maybe what we call chronic fatigue and depression colloquially, is in fact the body’s psychosomatic awakening to this deeper layer of existence — a curtain being drawn back from the illusion of eternalistic thinking. Perhaps opening to dukkha is like surrendering the rage we hold against the fire for burning us—and instead, recognizing that this is simply what fire does.

I will tell you more about Shillong’s history, culture, Khasi myths, and eco-theology, but not in this essay. Here, let me just take you into the experience of Shillong instead of the words that people often associate with it. The Upper Lumparing neighbourhood, where we boarded, was a quaint, picturesque, welcoming community — often reflective of Khasi hospitality. By the time we arrived, the sun was descending below the horizon; it wasn’t that late, but we were in the Easternmost part of the peninsula. Dusk arrives early here, and with it does the biting cold.

We hid ourselves beneath layers and decided to explore the neighbourhood, mostly in hunt for some traditional Khasi cuisine. The city cascades ever so sharply up and down, with sometimes steep, rough boulders cut and arranged as stairways — a couple of dozen steps both ways. There were cozy little homes on both sides of the public stairway, their gardens blooming with camellia, petunia, jasmine, varieties of orchids, and the majestic poinsettia. The night air serenaded us, and we floated down the stairways in a dreamlike haze.

The downtown market was mostly closed, with its old crooked walls forced into the shape of buildings — they stood in dazed bewilderment at our arrival. Right opposite the dilapidated quarters stood some towering old pines and oaks. Their leaves rustled in the silence of the night at the faint, ghostly passage of wind. Disturbed crows nestling within the canopies announced disapproval at our unwelcome arrival after dark near a forested land — dwelt by gods and beasts alike. There was no food to be found, but on our way back, we held hands while kicking dust off the road, laughing at our disappointment and hunger. Exhausted from our hike back, we stumbled upon a corner shop, right next door, whose hardworking owner made sure no one in her neighbourhood slept hungry. Sometimes the things we go so long searching for are right in front of us.

As I take you down this memory lane, let us stay here for a little longer. In this space between sorrow and hope, in this luminous loneliness of quiet awakening. I am yet to carry the spell of what I perceive as loneliness's essential, pliable nature and turn it into a chosen solitude of sacred creativity. I am yet to face the vast and bellowing wilderness of Khasi forests. For now, I am lingering here to study my inner polarities — between the part of me that is isolated at the reckless turning of the world and the one that goes hunting for solitude like a famished soul searches for food. I want to feel this delicious human affliction of curiosity, wonder, rejection, loneliness, and an instinctual need for silence. This derision of ego—so flammable in the quest for greater questions—offers no promise of better answers, only a fleeting dissolution into the visceral awareness of the ever-constant now.

Until then, there is just restless surrender to the elemental blithe and beauty, similar to what Rockwell Kent felt, one too many winters ago, in the wilderness of Newfoundland:

“The moon has risen and illuminates the mountain tops — but we and all our cove are still in the deep shadow of the night. It is most dramatic; the spruces about us deepen the shadow to black while above them the stone faces of the mountain glisten and the sky has the brightness of a kind of day.”

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Namaste friends,

A lifetime ago, when I lived in Dehradun, I would gaze at the distant beauty of the Himalayan foothills clustering together in the misty horizons of the Garhwal valley and wonder about the future—my own and the world’s. I dreamt of all the places I would see,…

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Namaste Friends,

The subcontinent is awakening from its short winter nap, and spring is on the cusp of bloom. Winter, like a visiting guest, is ready to leave this place in a vapid spur, and I am caught up in a melancholic daze at its withdrawal. I spent the whole winter skinny-dipping in nostalgia and worried anticipation. It was more difficult than in years prior because my mother was unwell and mostly alone—at an age when she deserved none of it.

I have been so worried and split between caregiving and working that I hardly noticed as winter passed by. And now, as it stands at the door, waving back at me, I cannot help but cry at the passage of time. It is this irrevocable loss of the limited treasure of time that awake…

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"These days, there are angry ghosts all around us. Dead from wars, sickness, starvation, and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse. So what. So's the whole damn world."
— Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke

Namaste Friends,

We launched ourselves into a world of uncertainty the moment in history we decided it was wise to let an elected few control the global fate. I admit that in times like ours, when our collective anticipatory grief for the world yet to come has taken desperate turns, we humans have often found some solidity in faith. Whether that faith is steeped in religious, political, or sectarian ideologies is of small consequence. Yet the seed of our faith has always manifested in ways far beyond our individual influence.

Take, for example, the juxtapositions of the medieval plague and w…

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September has arrived, unprovoked yet dancing on the cusp of shifting winds. It is a doorway between the vanishing luminescence of the long summer, riddled by monsoon, and the autumn resting on the crisp northern winds. By the end of September, the southern winds will slowly withdraw as the warm, moist, tropical atmosphere of the Bay of Bengal becomes swaddled in blankets of morning fog. The kash grass will sprout like hope, drinking in the morning dew, while the faint fragrance of shiuli lingers in the air like a ghostly herald of autumn.

Everything in autumn is lucid. The fertile land subtly surrenders to nature’s cycles of rest, the critters and crawlers prepare for long periods of inactivity, and the sun lingers feebly, casting longer shadows through the semi-bare branches of the deciduous sheesham and pipal, which once sprawled across the landscape.

I long for autumn, more so now that it looms near the precipice of transitions. I long for the northern winds to soothe the fatigue left by summer's restless stirrings. I am waiting for the still, pregnant pause through which healing seeps, unpredictably and unmeasured. I wait to rest and to heal, even though I spent the summer doing just that.

As Georgia O’Keeffe writes in her letter to Russell Vernon Hunter:

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.

Yet, I cannot deny that the illusion of self has been my primary object of contemplation. Now, I find myself in the afterlife of the self I had long awaited.

The monsoon is now waning, with sporadic showers midweek, either at noon or at night. The air hangs suspended, gently stirred by a breeze, until the sun jolts the peaceful morning into a chaotic burst of activity. As the morning progresses, the moist air turns humid, and the day drifts into a haze of rituals—bells ringing, prayers filling the air—attempting to hold the mind in a spiritual siege.

One quiet morning, when the neighbors were away with their bells, baby, and breakfast, I heard distinct, high-pitched interludes of “piu-piu". Assuming it was my cat preparing for her usual morning shenanigans, I called out to her. Maya didn’t respond with her scornful trill like she usually does, which meant she was either eating or taking her morning nap in the study. A moment later, I heard the sound again and traced it to the balcony. There, on the handrail, sat a beautiful chatak (pied crested cuckoo), tilting its head and holding me in its gaze.

In such everyday miracles, human life intersects with the divine, though we often remain oblivious due to our preoccupations. Yet, in that brief moment, an acknowledgment of existence passed between us — two beings (the bird and I) who travel through the doors of life and death alike. The microcosm of our exchange was rich in silence—the kind that speaks louder when one quiets the inner chatter.

In ancient Indian poetry, like Kalidasa's Meghadūta1, the chatak holds spiritual significance, symbolizing deep yearning, much like the Portuguese concept of saudade—a love that lingers even after everything is lost. I, too, harbor a deep longing for a place in this world that I love but can no longer touch—a past, a dream, an imagination? I’m unsure. All I know is that it feels like I have memories from a time that doesn’t exist, yet feels real.

Could this winged visitor be a sign from the universe, offering reassurance against my fear of abandonment, of dying without ever having known what "home" truly is? Since this brief encounter, I haven’t stopped thinking about the nature of arrivals and omens. In the words of my sister, Freya Rohn:

I tend to seek out omens in times like this—not necessarily with belief, but rather as hints that might point to a line of thought, might echo something in the whir I can’t help but sort through. A feather in an unexpected place on a walk; the appearance of an unfamiliar bird at the windowsill. Some kind of hard mercy to shrive the mind.

My friends who have known me for a while are aware of my deep love for Hayao Miyazaki. Only a few weeks after my father’s death, Miyazaki’s long-awaited film The Boy and the Heron was released in my city. It was difficult for me to venture out during those early months. The stranger I had become to myself was slowly leaving my body, one day at a time, making room for the awareness I truly am. It felt like a kind of death at the time, but looking back now, I see that it was a necessary phase of transformation.

My husband insisted that we shouldn’t miss this movie, as it touches on familiar themes of grief, especially over the loss of a parent. After all, the film’s original Japanese title, Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, literally translates to How Do You Live?—inspired by, though not based on, the book of the same name by Genzaburō Yoshino, which Miyazaki has mentioned as his favorite childhood book. It’s fitting, isn’t it, that he named what is supposedly his last film after a book he cherished as a child? When we reflect on our lives, don’t we often return to our childhood selves, to re-evaluate our journey and the choices we’ve made?

Miyazaki uses the symbolism of doors and hallways more liberally in this film than in his other works. In Miyazaki's world, doors often represent a passage between the material and the transcendental. Hallways, I imagine, symbolize a psychological space for contemplating the many choices one makes. This symbolism likely reflects Miyazaki's own life and the choices of his past. But I think the question Miyazaki posed by the end of the film wasn’t just about his past; it was about us and our future—the generations he’s leaving behind, the ones who will survive him and inherit his art. In the midst of my personal tragedies, Miyazaki’s question felt direct and genuine. It was a pure moment of sublime interaction between artist and fan, where the artist speaks not from the vantage of his art but from within the psyche of his fan.

The part of me that resonated with the artist asked myself: What now? Now that the doors to the past have slammed shut with the finality of death, now that the world feels like it’s spinning out of control, now that I’ve internalized the reality of my own impermanence—how do I live now?

The space between morning and dusk isn’t a dimension of time; it’s a dimension of space—filled with myriad shades of purple and blue. As the stormy depression sweeps through the Bay of Bengal this week, this liminal space, belonging to no particular time, seems to wait endlessly for its observers. I yielded to the universe’s call to be seen and understood on the last stormy night, when the sky almost spoke in inundated tongues of silence—of secrets from eons past, of starless nights that once loomed over the lands of my ancestors.

On such a night, I think of my father and his need to be held and understood in his loneliness. I think of my own presence, and wonder how long it will take for me to fully arrive. I remember another night like this one, when I was returning from his cremation. The old, dilapidated bungalows2 lining the archaic boulevards of the city beckoned to me in the quiet of the night. These ghostly colonial remnants — once villas of Zamindars3 —stared at me through empty, unhinged windows, hidden behind the hanging shoots of centuries-old banyans — doors open and gasping with a faint recollection of the past.

As we sped past them in a blur, I asked myself: if they could speak, what stories would they pour into the liminality of this timeless space between morning and night?

It is silly that we humans attach so much value to arriving at a destination when the whole story unfolds during the travel. We are so governed by the clocks, by the mirrors, by the mechanisms of trap created by our own minds — that we often forget time and beauty are concepts to be perceived, not judged. When we judge rather than experience, we fail to fully grasp them. Time is infinite, and beauty is seamless in the gravity of one’s presence, in spaces where there is no separation from what one is observing. But for those who analyze, both are limited.

I dream of a life beyond clocks and mirrors, where the lens of observation isn’t a mechanism to weigh us all by the same scales of numbers or symmetry. A world where we can live by the whimsical order of nature, where gravity and time aren’t divided into dimensions, and where labels are abandoned for a higher sense of beauty that is inherent and universal.

I am not sure such a world is waiting to be born, or if she can even be conceived by those of us who might survive the catastrophe of our collective greed. But if her arrival is destined, I imagine she will evolve far beyond the principles and metrics of the West, beyond the standardized systems and the exoskeleton of post-colonial frameworks on which the current world is built.

I am convinced that such a world is possible. I have touched it now and then, from the periphery of my grief—soft frills of a veil between the material and immaterial. Losing a loved one brings many moments of harsh truth, like the times when their belongings need to be packed or given away. As I arranged my father’s things in a large suitcase, each item spoke to me in those quiet moments of reconciliation. The silence hung like a shroud of melancholy over me as I touched his shaving kit, glasses, perfume, faux leather belts, and the soft cotton shirts he had neatly ironed with his own hands.

I don’t remember if I cried, and it doesn’t matter. All the tears in the world could not contain the grief of a loss so final. Surviving those moments and living with them, too, requires a kind of courage—soft, yielding, and necessary. I’ll admit I’m not good at it. It’s been five months since my father’s passing, and I still cling to his things as though they contain him, even though I know better. Not long ago, I fought bitterly with my mother over his winter clothes, which he loved so much that he hand-washed each one, even when he was so terribly sick. Every fiber and thread of those sweaters holds my father’s love, and I’m not ready to let them go—not yet.

The body may be limited in its abilities and existence, but love transcends the physical realm of our five senses. Love, like the world we await, is a dimension of hope, vision, and the toil of today. It permeates through space and time, making its presence felt even in the grim desolation of the present. I have shifted the veil and touched the deathless; I know it’s there, and I’m not ready to let go of that vision.

As I walk through the doors of this house, I think of her memory, her past, and the everyday unfoldings and eventualities she has witnessed. Whose eyes will she catch in the visceral passage of time? Whose quietened heart will her windows speak to? What fragment of someone’s imagination will I become when they look at this house — a haunting shadow in their living experience, should they choose to walk through these doors? Though my experience and that of the future passersby are separated by eras, our experiences of love and loss are rooted in the same shared human ancestry.

Just as I interacted with the old, dilapidated house, my eyes awash with tears and my heart heavy with grief after witnessing my father pass through his final rite of life — the smoky curtains of fire, I felt a profound empathy for the long-dead inhabitants of those homes. They, too, must have faced insurmountable grief. That moment jolted me back to the present, dissolving the doors of perception. I was awakened to the beauty of walking through this city, which is over three hundred years old.

I realized then the futility of our assumptions about the degree of our separateness—between past and present, between them and us, between the knowable and the unknowable. It doesn’t matter what labels we assign or how long we deny it; all of this existence is interconnected.

Friends and family patted me on the back, reassuring me that I was brave for walking through the doors of fear, loss, and the eternal hauntings of the past. But is it really me who walked through them, or is it the timeless, ageless knowing that endures beyond all tragedies —a generations-old light that shines through—an inheritance?

The great silence of the unspeakable reality has many voices that whisper through the mundane. It has something to say—in the shifting of light and the shadows it casts, in the eclipses of the moon, in the stillness of the atmosphere before it breaks into a storm, in the weeks-long incessant downpours demanding pause, demanding attention that we are still inadequate to give. It has something to say, but are we ready to listen?

It has been more than a month since I last posted. Tragedy after tragedy has found us. On the two-month anniversary of my father’s death, I lost one of my cats. He was four and a half years old. He developed a hemoprotozoa infection. Just four days before he died, he was his usual, playful self. His departure was so sudden and traumatic that I am visibly struggling to find ways to integrate all of this as I navigate through my waking life.

I hope you, my friends in the colder parts of the planet, have been soaking up the grace of the summer light. Here in the Eastern Ghats of India, the monsoon is making its way through the Bay of Bengal, bringing with it torrential rain and storms. The anticipatory mating calls of the magpie robins at the windowsill cannot be missed, even for city dwellers. Mynas and crows have been arriving with higher demands for grains and crackers to feed their hatchlings. The little ones are harbingers of the monsoon winds and the season of survi…

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I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being so patient with me. Your subscriptions and kind comments have been my rock, helping me stay afloat through my personal storms.

This essay might feel a bit disjointed and all over the place because I feel incoherent and scattered in both my body and brain. I have edited it for clarity and flow, but if some parts of my layered thoughts seem messy, I want you to know that I intended to present myself as I am, embracing the chaos as much as I love perfection. Strength is not always the absence of vulnerability.

I feel in my heart an ancient stirring of grief, of profound losses and collective pain. I feel the oblong body of bereavement encircling the planet as it ecli…

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Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed th…

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Thank you for your presence and the light that you share with this world. I am grateful that you are here at Berkana. I see you.

Days are shorter here in the south now, but they still seem a tad bit longer than on the eastern coast of the subcontinent. The Tropic of Cancer (one of the Euclidean lines of the European conquest) dissects India right in the middle, forming two climatic zones. The central region is sub-tropical, while the north is temperate to highland climate, and the south is tropical in nature. Due to such variations, the experience of winter varies across the country. You could be sipping piña colada in Goa or enjoying hot chocolate in Shimla, depending on whether you want to spend Christmas in a port city of the former Estado da Índia (Portuguese State of India) or the former Himalayan outpost of the Britis…

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Just remain in the center, watching.
And then forget that you were there.

Lao Tzu

Dear Reader,

Two months have elapsed since I last wrote, and not a single hell has broken loose, nor have its horrendous hounds haunted me to the depths of self-loathing, as I had imagined might occur during my absence from Berkana. Needless to say, my anxieties are rooted in a deeply ingrained fear of failure. I believe that this knowledge was foundational, imparted during my schooling years - 'Show till you Grow.' Okay, I made that up, but seriously, doesn't the hustle culture always emphasize the importance of, well, hustling? The fact remains that hustling is exhausting and saps one's creative spirit. I do believe in rituals and practices that foster discipline to maintain a habit. However, the reality is that the state of flow necessary to capture the creative impulse cannot be manufactured. Art is crafted by the way you live, the spaces between one moment and another, which the Japanese refer to as '…

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A few weeks ago, I was sleepwalking through life. My eyes were blindfolded by the comforts of mundane simplicities of ordinary life. My heart closed upon itself like a reluctant bud that refuses to awaken from its peaceful slumber because opening up demanded complete presence and total participation. Engaging actively with the present moment was not something I was ready to confront yet. I was aware of this state of consciousness but unaware that it could be practiced into being. The proof of its natural occurrence was all around me, in nature and within its endless cycles of birth and death, there is an affirmative breaking open that is happening to evolve everything to its full potential. The …

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I have news, I have figured out the logistics, and Berkana is now a paid newsletter! As much as I desire that you lovely readers must have unlimited free access to my archive, pursuing a creative life is a trying road. Your support will ensure that I can be on the path of analyzing cultural truths through the lens of forgotten history while being able to afford that coffee that helps me stay up and write. So please consider upgrading to paid if you await my monthly releases. It will motivate me to write frequently and prolifically to shake things up and also to make them accessible to a wider audience. For now, all new posts as I release them will be open for a week before the paywall starts showing up.

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Upgrading to paid will enable you to access: 

1. Subscriber-only posts and full archive

2. Post comments and join the community

3. A paid-only chat space to share moments of awe from stuff I read or see on the internet or IRL. 

4. Evocative photo essays from the places I go, to the thing…

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Dear Readers, 

Welcome to Rumination Station of Berkana! I am skipping the part where I start by acknowledging our first step into another year of experiencing the complex world around us through our subjective lenses and jumping straight to the point. The holidays were spent wisely, working and evolving some mental frameworks in guise of busy days. The one I wanted to explore is the one that has manifested through my subconscious many times here at Berkana as literary work - interwoven strings of karma with the mother archetype.

I am amused by the pattern in which consciousness flows, from memories onto inspiration onto manifestations into a body of work, like a cascading waterfall. A coup…

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Traveling through Eternity  

Many years ago when I was struggling to see myself as a writer creating a significant body of work, I sometimes felt like being sucked into a vortex filled with vipers. I was silently suffocating in the false narrative of who the world expected me to be, shoved down my throat. It took me many years to realize that the only way to defeat total decimation of self, the only way to travel through eternity, to fall into a peaceful suspension of immortality, is to create. To lose my sense of identity in the pursuit of telling the truth through words that can stir and evoke. Words, that do not quietly hang around the living room, hosting an atmosphere of civility. Unpretentious, assertive, loud, and necessary words. I realized that to redeem myself from the cold bassinet of existential angst, I had to write. 

Ever since I was a child, I had a strange fascination for words and their ability to make us wonder. The trans…

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Indian monsoon lasts longer than usual. During October and sometimes even in November, moss and mushrooms reign over old apartment fences. The charade of migrated birds marks the break of dawn, each one speaking of the obtrusive nature of the cities. In their distinctive chirp, they complain of the tall glass buildings with entangled cable wires messily hanging about. The birds speak of their hindering existence in our shared world. The rain frequently arrives, most days without warning, and the land yields without protests like one who meets a mercurial lover after an indefinite period of longing. If you travel through the Indian subcontinent, you will observe similar weather in a different combination of cultures with their unique food and humidity level. Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, and India - the entire subcontinent knows that we are not different people, we only tend to differ from one another. We speak in different tongues,…

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