Dregs of Yore

The other day, I visited a newly opened vegan café in the city. Normally, I steer clear of those because I don’t care much for dairy-free coffee. Not to mention, when I eat out, I like to order chicken—real chicken, not something conjured up from chickpeas and wishful thinking. Nor do I relish the feeling of sanctimonious virtue pressing down on me while I eat. But I do have a weakness for new cafés, so, against my better judgment, I decided to give this one a try. The café made its stance clear from the moment I stepped inside. A ukulele-heavy rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine drifted through the speakers. Each song that followed stayed firmly in that lane—soft, breathy folk and country tunes lamenting the encroachment of concrete over grassy fields, the rain that no longer comes, fossil fuels that should have stayed buried, and the general inhumanity of humanity. Now, I like me a good folk song just as much as the next hillbilly, but what I do not appreciate is is the selective cura...

There are those who fit, who slip into the room like a hand into a well-worn glove. Then there are others. I have been the other.  I have spent years pressing myself into shapes I believed the world required. Sometimes I tried to dissolve into the crowd like sugar in tea. Other times, I styled myself a singularity—daring to be something different, to “be myself” (whoever that is). Both efforts felt like a borrowed coat: always slightly too large in the shoulders, never quite warm enough. Sometimes, in social groups, I watch. It is not surprising when they say it is the watchers who tell the stories. For as long as men have scribbled words onto paper, they have written from the point of view of the ones who stand at the edge of the firelight, always reluctant to step close enough to warm their hands. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, shuffling through his measured life in coffee spoons, knew it. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby knew it, even as his shirts, fine enough to make a woman weep, fluttered in the...

To the untrained observer reading a litany of Western media coverage on India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one could be forgiven for imagining the nation teetering on the brink of some dystopian, majoritarian nightmare. Tales of "Hindu nationalism," an alleged "persecution" of religious minorities, and ominous declarations of a democracy in decline dominate the headlines. Yet these portrayals, written often with the moral self-assurance of distant commentators, betray not only an ignorance of India’s complex socio-political fabric but also a lack of nuance essential for understanding a country that embraced diversity as a value, long before it became fashionable in the West. It is a curious conceit of the modern West to imagine that diversity and tolerance are their inventions, virtues exported to less enlightened parts of the world. India’s embrace of diversity is not a late-blooming flower nurtured by modern ideals of Western liberalism. Long before the Enl...