Dregs of Yore

Co-authored by  Shrankhla and Sadhika on August 28, 2025 Of all the deprivations visited upon modern childhood, none is so grave and yet so little acknowledged as the absence of other people. Those of us who grew up in fuller households know what today’s children are missing. We remember weddings where ten different families would squeeze into one house, sleeping on the floor, with cousins lined up like sardines. We remember giving up one’s own bed to an elderly uncle, and waking up to the sound of aunties and uncles gossiping arguing over tea. In those homes, very little belonged entirely to us. The bed we slept on, the food on our plate, not even our stories. Someone was always listening in, correcting us, mocking us, softening our triumphs with their own, or placing a hand on our shoulders when we faltered. It was infuriating. It was also how we learned that life is not designed for any one person’s comfort—least of all a child’s. Siblings taught us this brutally and tende...

It is one of the minor miracles of the developing world that trains run hours late, yet people still get where they need to go. Men gather at every family dinner to complain, and the complaint is always about the lack of punctuality — of the trains, the buses, the post, the pensions, the rains, and everything else that is perpetually late. The marvel is that despite this, weddings happen, debts are settled, and lives proceed without central coordination. I see this as an achievement of human adaptability rather than institutional competence. A driver will refuse to take a fare by the meter but will drive you across town at midnight because you are his ‘regular.’ One may curse the absence of customer service hotlines, but when your water pipe bursts, it is not a ‘ticketing system’ that saves you, but the plumber who answers your brother-in-law’s call.  Formal efficiency has no answer to such loyalty. This reliance on personal connection is frequently called corruption; in reality, i...

Inheritance is most often thought of as a legal machinery of transfer of assets by means of wills, trusts, and signatures on parchment. Yet behind every bequest, there lurks a more ancient question: what, if anything, do we truly receive from the past, and what do we make of it once it is placed in our eager or reluctant hands? Material inheritances are the least mysterious, but often the most troublesome. A house bestowed is never just walls and beams; it comes saturated with the disappointments and victories of those who lived within it. A watch passed down is not merely a timepiece but an artifact that mocks us, almost cruelly, by reminding us that we are outlived by time. Many who inherit feel, secretly, that they are inheriting not things but unfinished lives, even dreams. Every inheritance, however small, binds the living to the dead in a web of obligation. To receive is to be implicated in another’s life, to shoulder intentions that may remain obscure. Even the most modest of in...

A few nights ago, I had a strange dream. We were all huddled in my childhood home. My husband was there. So were my aunts, uncles, cousins — people who now live scattered across different cities and time zones. In the dream, we had returned to that home, but the world outside had changed. Monkeys ruled it. Not the occasional ones that swing past the balcony and steal leftovers from the trashcans outside the house. I’m talking about massive hordes of monkeys. They attacked humans, raided homes, overturned flowerpots, screeched into mirrors, and even flung steel lunchboxes down from windows with the flair of revolutionaries. Every few weeks, an alarm would sound across the neighbourhood, warning us of the impending invasion of a particularly violent troop of a few hundred monkeys. And every time that alarm rang, we would do the only thing that made sense: lock every door, board up the windows and gather in the puja room, and chant the Hanuman Chalisa together, and if we were lucky, the ...

There is a degree of absurdity in spending six or seven hours a day formatting spreadsheets that no one reads, replying “noted” to emails devoid of thought, and attending meetings where the subtext is always more telling than the agenda. And yet, here we are, well-fed, well-dressed, and spiritually undernourished. The mindless job: a phrase tossed about by twenty-somethings like an apology. “I work at X, but it’s just a job, you know?” We say it like we’re renting space in someone else’s life. And yet, the question is not whether the job is mindless, but whether the one doing it chooses to be. Here, Nietzsche’s camel arrives, burdened and obedient. In Thus Spake Zarathustra , the camel is the phase of the spirit that says yes—to duty, to discipline, to the heavy loads it must carry across deserts of drudgery. Most of us were once camels at work, and understandably so. We endured the rules, the PowerPoint slides, the lunch breaks cut short by deadlines. We thought endurance is nobility....