Dregs of Yore

Dear Readers, I'm thrilled to share my latest essay,  The Enduring Question at the Heart of Gone with the Wind  recently published on Merion West. In this piece, I delve into a central theme in Mitchell's novel — one that tends to be eclipsed by the more charged discussions of race and ideology. I reflect on the two contrasting faces of virtue portrayed in the narrative, and comment on how the tension between them remains strikingly relevant today. Click  here  to read my full piece on Merion West. Or check it out directly on Merion West’s  website . Warmly, Sadhika. 

In the small cities of India in the late nineties and early 2000s — places neither smothered by the pace of the metros nor forgotten like the crumbling hamlets — Sundays carried the weight of rituals too gentle to be laws, yet too old to be questioned. Where I grew up, a city that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it was a town or metropolis, Sundays drifted in like a lazy cow on a narrow street — unhurried, familiar, and oddly authoritative. The week in India is a relentless machine. It groans into motion Monday morning, fueled by honking scooters, school tiffins, the slap of wet laundry, and the stubborn smell of boiling rice. But come Sunday, the machine grinds to a halt, as if the city itself had taken off its slippers and leaned back against a cracked cement wall. Fathers stayed home. Their presence was both comforting and inconvenient, like a large piece of furniture dragged into the centre of a room. They read the newspaper with such gravity, you'd think the nation dep...

It is one of the more perverse ironies of our times that, as society has become more tolerant, it has also become more hysterical. The acceptance of homosexuality has progressed at a remarkable pace, from criminalisation to celebration in the space of a single generation. Yet the manner in which this acceptance has been expressed in art, particularly in cinema and television, leaves one with the impression not of mature integration but of frantic compensation. There was a time—within living memory, though it already seems distant—when homosexual characters in films were either delicately implied or robustly ignored. It was not that their existence was denied, nor that audiences were composed entirely of reactionary yokels incapable of recognising coded gestures or subtle inflections. Rather, there was an unspoken understanding: that a character’s sexuality, like their digestion or their dentist’s surname, need not be paraded as the defining feature of their moral and narrative universe...

There was a time, or so I am told by the kind of people who become maudlin after a third glass of scotch, when politics was the art of the possible and friendship the art of forgiveness. That era, like the well-mannered dinner party and the respectable cardigan, seems to have vanished. We now live in a time when politics is the art of self-righteousness, and friendship the art of cancellation. The phenomenon is not merely observable in the puerile exchanges of university campuses or the echo chambers of social media. It has now entered the home, the café, the WhatsApp group. Friends—people who once shared secrets, sorrows, and cigarettes—now fall out over matters they neither fully understand nor have the means to change. That, to me, is the essence of the tragicomedy: that people will rupture decades-old affections over what some government functionary said about a trade regulation on national television. We ought not to be surprised. For politics has ceased to be the art of governanc...

To the women of the modern age —  I wish you self esteem so high you can still be humble.  I wish you boundaries so firm you can still be kind.  I wish you confidence so strong that you feel no need to weaponize your independence.  I wish you competence so great you can share your wealth with others, assured in your ability to generate more.  I wish for you to know the strength and grace of men once again.  Most of all I wish you the humility to know when such things are being offered to you, and the wisdom not to mistake them for oppression. There is something faintly tragic about the modern young woman who, standing in her own kitchen with love in her heart and joy in her labour, must wrestle with the suspicion that she is somehow her own jailor. She is not abused. She is not neglected. Her marriage, by every honest measure, is a happy one. She married for love, not arrangement. Her husband is the primary provider. He pays the bills, yes, but he also fold...