Disgrace and I

Disgrace is an elegy, one that mourns but does not shame, one that engages in ethical deliberation without reeking of smugness or sanctimony. 

On Shaving

My struggles with facial hair

Ganga at Banaras

The Ganga is pregnant again with little accidents of purity- Urns and lamps throb up and down in her flesh, as children, Floating away from the prayers gathered to powder the dead. I sit, starving, my father beside me We are made family at last by Our shared incomprehension  of god and love & death....

Love Song

I fill my afternoons with the patience

Shalimar

long & thinning, like a parent’s marriage.

Tonight is a nervous breakdown with line breaks

Uncertain, unnerving as An old postman learning to write An Email.

Grappling with Gandhi

Gandhi is a national myth who is quoted more often than he is understood.

What we talk about when we talk about GDP (Short answer: Fraud.)

Last Monday, on 31st August 2020, India’s GDP figures for the April-June quarter were published, and everyone, including those without any education in economics (like me), became an expert in the subject. WhatsApp University uncles celebrated the government’s success in limiting damage by pointing out that the US economy contracted by 32 percent, while the...

There is no such thing as Overpopulation, Part 2.

Note: The point of this article, or of part 1, is not to argue in favor of everyone making a dozen kids. I only wish to underline how the real issues at the heart of both poverty and climate change remain unaddressed because we are more than willing to point our fingers at “population”. Pointing...

There’s no such thing as overpopulation, Part 1.

Let’s be clear. There’s no such thing as overpopulation; there’s only undergovernance. Of course, if you are an environmentalist or a Sanjay Gandhi, you are likely to squirm at this statement. But it is true. The term “Overpopulation” seems to suggest that there must be an obvious limit to human population sizes and that currently,...