Dregs of Yore

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The Heretic of Ayodhya

By Sadhika on February 26, 2026

In the long corridors of epic memory, dissent slips in quietly, wearing the robes of a sage. One such voice rises in the Ramayana . Not in the battlefield, nor in the court glittering with intrigue, but in a forest clearing heavy with exile. There, as Rama prepares to honour a promise that has cost him a kingdom, the sage Jabali offers something startling: an argument against dharma itself. Jabali’s speech is among the most philosophically subversive moments in Sanskrit literature. He does not tempt Rama with pleasure or power. He tempts him with reason. He begins with a blunt summation of the human condition: “एको हि जायते जन्तुरेको हि विनश्यति । एकोऽनुभुङ्क्ते सुखदुःखं नास्ति कश्चित् सहायवान् ॥” “Alone a being is born; alone he perishes. Alone he experiences joy and sorrow; there is no companion.” This is the language of existential solitude. Jabali reduces the human condition to biological arrival and departure. The scaffolding of lineage, obligation and ritual continuity is s...

The Dangerous Democracy of the Sacred

By Sadhika on February 05, 2026

Indian mythology has an amusing habit of refusing neat moral categories. Its villains pray well, its gods make mistakes, and power, when earned through discipline, is distributed with a troubling fairness. Few figures reveal this better than the Asuras . To reduce them to “demons” is not merely inaccurate; it is intellectually lazy. The Asuras are something far more unsettling: they are seekers who succeed. In the Vedic imagination, the line between Deva and Asura was not originally moral but metaphysical. In the Rig Veda, the word asura is used with reverence, meaning “lord” or “one who possesses vital power ( asu )”. In the Rig Veda, Varuna himself is praised using this title: “King Varuna, the Asura, who knows the paths of birds flying in the sky, who knows the ships upon the ocean” (Rig Veda) Here, Asura signifies sovereignty, cosmic intelligence, and authority, not malevolence. It is only later (particularly in the Puranic crystallisation of cosmology) that the Asuras become antag...

My Father's Scooter

By Sadhika on February 02, 2026

A s far back as my memory reaches, my father’s comings and goings belonged to an old scooter, the sort that carried middle-class men to and from work in the early years of this century. It belonged to a time when machines were allowed to age alongside men, when usefulness was a stronger virtue than appearance. It stood in the aangan of my house like a loyal pet, patient, uncomplaining, its metal body dulled by years of sun and dust. It had learned the shape of my father’s hand on the handle, the precise pressure of his foot on the kick-start, and the rhythm of his mornings. Together they formed a small economy of trust. It was a dull, indifferent colour—neither proudly black nor whimsically blue—bearing the soft dents of a life lived fully. The paint had faded unevenly, lighter where the sun struck hardest, darker in places my father’s knees brushed against daily. Rust gathered near the footrest like moss, reminding you that nothing remains untouched by weather. The headlamp flick...

The Lost Hands of India

By Sadhika on January 20, 2026

The old world does not end with a bang or a riot of sound. It slips away soft-footed, like sugar swirling into warm tea—sweet for a moment, then gone without a trace. In the old bazaars, where the sun filtered through lattice roofs like sifted grain, there used to be a man who sold bangles. He called out in that rhythmic singsong that echoed across courtyards like the laughter of a household rich in daughters. His voice is gone now. And the lanes, once littered with women in bright sarees bargaining over glass and colour, lie silent, paved and drained of memory. In the India that rises now—glass-towered and software-slick, scanning QR codes and air-conditioned into sterility—there is no room for the knife sharpener either, his whetstone wheel clattering behind a rusty bicycle. Now the knives grow blunt and disappear, their edges worn down by years of bread and bone. We don’t sharpen anymore; we replace. There’s no place anymore for the puppet master with his wooden stringed ...

On Negotiating with Authority

By Sadhika on January 11, 2026

Over the years, I have come to suspect that one of adulthood’s lesser understood initiations is learning how to agree and disagree with one’s parents in proper measure. It sounds simple, even banal, but the actual attainment of this equilibrium is anything but. In one’s twenties, such balance rarely arrives through deliberate introspection. More often, we are propelled into it by experience: a sudden betrayal, a financial collapse, a brush with mortality. These eruptions of life have a levelling effect, sweeping aside the insistence of youthful certainties. Voluntary maturation, by contrast, is slow and stubbornly resistant. And nothing guarantees its appearance in one’s thirties or forties either. Maturity is less an achievement than a diminishing appetite: for absolutes, for vindication, and for moral spectacle. The passage into moral adulthood does not obey developmental timetables. Aristotle called virtue a hexis : a practiced disposition, not a milestone. To reach it requires a su...

An Excess of Possible Selves

By Sadhika on December 28, 2025

A few mornings ago, I sat down to work as I always do: at about ten, in the backyard, winter sunlight pooling gently around my chair, my laptop balanced on my knees. The scene was familiar enough to feel automatic, yet something essential was missing. I could not begin. The ordinary rituals of my working day—emails, brief decisions, the small acts of delegation that usually require no thought at all—felt strangely inaccessible, as though the mechanisms that normally carry me forward had stalled. This was not because my work had suddenly become demanding. On the contrary, I have spent years arranging my professional life to be as frictionless as possible, so that I am untroubled by the need for sustained intellectual effort. Much of what I do now proceeds by habit rather than concentration. I chose this deliberately: a role that is stable, repetitive, and less intellectually challenging; one that leaves mental space for reading and writing, and allows me to exist, most days, largely on ...

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