Dregs of Yore

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...

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 ...

There is one life-altering event that visits almost every human being sooner or later: the death of one’s father. It arrives like a tectonic shift, even when expected, even when “prepared” for. As someone who has borne the loss of both parents, I still find my father’s passing an unfinished grief. I cannot give a neat, psychological chart explaining why the grief of my mother has found a place to rest while his still wanders in me, but suffice it to say that the difference is, at least in my case, very real and very vast. I look around the world and one of the things that appalls me exceedingly is the depth to which the masculine is considered to be dispensable. Many people who have lost a father might be able to relate to this feeling. The mother’s role, radiant and undeniable, is celebrated, rightly so. When juxtaposed with this, a father’s appears lesser, because a lot of his contribution is implicit and only understood much later. Perhaps that is why, when he is gone, we are startl...

My mother grew up in a household where obedience was not merely praised but enshrined. Parental authority was the first principle and the final argument; deviation was a breach in the natural order. A “well-behaved” daughter was considered not only virtuous but complete. Dreams, especially for women, were not outlawed but still exiled, kept at the margins like inconvenient truths one pretends not to hear. After her college education — lauded in theory, rendered meaningless in practice — she entered a soft-edged captivity typical of her time. No chains, no raised voices, just a steady, suffocating insistence that a woman’s sphere ended at the perimeter of her home. The world outside was treated not as hostile but irrelevant, a place that existed for men and newspapers and public announcements. One simply did not step out unless escorted by permission, purpose, and propriety. A woman with a profession was a breach of decorum to a system that did not need to punish because it had perfecte...

There are moments in life when the passage of time forces you to reconsider your past, to revisit things once held dear with what you’d like to think is clarity of years that have since passed. One such moment occurred when I revisited The Motorcycle Diaries , a film that first made an impact on me when I was seventeen. At that time, the film seemed like a revelation — a vision of youth’s romantic idealism and its potential for world-changing adventure. It was a story of a man before he was a man, before he was history, before he was anything more than a boy on a road with an old motorcycle and a friend, journeying across the Latin American continent, discovering his purpose.  When we are young, the world seems like a map of injustices waiting to be set right, and Che Guevara holds up a mirror to the indignation of so many. He was a boy who looked upon suffering and swore, silently but with unshakable resolve, that he would not be content to simply look. I remember walking out of t...

Imagine standing on a random street corner in an Indian city like New Delhi or Bengaluru where the air carries the dust, exhaust fumes, and the smell of peanuts being roasted on roadsides. Scooters graze past pedestrians, vendors shout over the honk of buses, a stray cow loiters beside a billboard advertising the latest smartphone. If, into this lively, pulsing scene, you stand, asking random passers-by an equally random question — say, “Why are sea turtles dying?”—  the answers would be many and mostly wrong. This, of course, is precisely why such an exercise would be worthwhile. One person would assert, with the complacency that only ignorance can afford, that “It’s climate change, of course! Everyone knows that.” Another, less confident, would mutter that they have no idea. A third, seeking refuge in levity, might suggest that “sea turtles are given to fits of suicidal insanity and like to fling themselves in the way of sharks.” A cynic would declare that “people die every day, ...