Dregs of Yore

It has been the lot of a certain section of my generation in India to be the witness of a great many revolutions. I could extend this to millennials globally, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than among Indians born in the 1990s. These individuals, now in their late twenties to mid-thirties, form the bulk of the country’s working professionals.  The first of these upheavals was the economic liberalisation and globalisation of 1991 (which I have written extensively about in several of my other pieces), without which our childhoods would have looked very different. Next came the data revolution of 2016, driven, in large part, by a company called Reliance Jio, which was the first to offer free and unlimited high-speed data at scale. The third, still unfolding, is the AI revolution, which began reshaping professions and lived realities around 2023. Needless to say, our values were impacted drastically by each of these revolutions. I shall proceed to explain how. The first of t...

A mid-level government clerk who believes the grind of red tape is holy work, ordained by gods of order. He resents everyone who calls him corrupt, but secretly knows his tiny bribes keep his family alive. I will tell you something most folk don’t understand: they think the world runs on big men, ministers and bosses and them that shout from podiums. But it don’t. It runs because men like me sit for eight hours under the flickering tube light and push one piece of paper from one tray to another. I serve the god of order. Yes, laugh if you like, but every file that passes through my desk is a prayer. Every stamp, every signature, every stapled paper, without which the world would stop running.  I tell you it’s holy work. Without me, without us, everything falls apart in a rush. The flood comes when the gates are pulled wide. My job’s to keep the gates heavy, slow, hard to open. That’s the order of things. The god of order (though maybe it is just the old man in my head) whispers: Ho...

I exist, I suppose, in the middle of everything I despise and everything I depend upon. I live in my mother’s house, and I hate it. So hateful is my fate to me. Every room here reeks of her. Her devotion, her sacrifice, her fasting, her insistence that my life was worth her suffering. And I can’t escape it. I live here, breathing her air, eating her food, sleeping in the small room she gave me, and yet I hate her for it. Or perhaps I hate myself for the way I cannot leave. Even so, my hate is not as simple as you think. No, it is far more meticulous. I even amuse myself with it sometimes. I am quite fond of it. One could even say I love my hate. You think you know hate? Ha! You don’t know me. You see, it’s not that simple. You think this is just youthful rebellion, some fashionable atheism, some hip imported ideology I can paste on my face and walk out the door? No. It’s deeper. Filthy, crawling deep into the marrow of my bones. Do you know what it’s like to sit in the house that fed y...

Philosophers have argued a long time about how much of the future belongs to us. The Stoics told us to be ready for whatever comes but never to cling. The Existentialists said our plans are brittle things set against the dark stretch of time. Economists, perhaps the most hopeful of the lot, built equations to model risk and return. The idea of retirement hovers at the edges of my thoughts these days. It is both comforting and terrifying. Comforting, because it promises a pause, and terrifying, because it is a pause that lasts for decades and must be financed by the echoes of yesterday’s labour. And so I find myself turning to an unlikely companion, not a psychic or a wealth manager, but a machine. What follows are my learnings from that experiment: how I laid my life bare before an artificial intelligence, invited its contemplation of my future, while still brushing up against the oldest philosophical questions of how to live. The process begins with candour. You type into the chat the...

“What if a demon crept after you one night... and said: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’...” — Nietzsche, The Gay Science. What is it that changes—the song, or the listener? At 18, when the world is still raw with possibility, and the self has not yet calcified under the slow drip of compromise, to listen to Wish You Were Here is to hear a howl against the herd. The young one, godless and hungry, who played that track in his dimly lit room was not merely enjoying music—he was affirming life in the only way he knew how: by negating everything handed to him. Religion, career, duty, obedience—this he believed to be the sickly comfort of a world too cowardly to gaze into the abyss. Rock music, for this youth, was not entertainment; it was rebellion, pure, uncut and faintly Dionysian. In Wish You Were Here , he heard a lament for the ones who had dared to feel, to burn, and had vanished into the machinery of comp...