What do I know

There's this bit in Indian Matchmaking, where Akshay's mom is sitting with her kitty party friends, and they're all nodding in agreement at her distress at not finding the appropriate daughter in law. They ask her what her options are. First, she says she wants only "business family" girls because those are good girls. Then she lists her options: One prospective daughter-in-law is from Udaipur, one is from Delhi, and a third is from Calcutta. One of the other ladies expresses approval. "Calcutta girls are good." They all agree. Calcutta girls are good. In many ways, the story of the Calcutta business family girls is also the story of where I come from. We're raised to be paraya dhan , good looking and obliging. We're constantly watched, judged and chaperoned, and told that if we make mistakes, or are seen to exercise agency it could damage our chances for the future.  We are raised to  make diwali gift bags and plan baby showers, and the

Okay. Now a bubonic plague is emerging out of Russia and China. And the permafrost, ice that contains and protects us from ancient inactive viruses, is melting. China wants to establish global supremacy and India is directly in its line of fire. The economy is in freefall. What if we look back months from now and see that these were the good times? At home, safe with the people we love, eating what we want and shit posting on social media. What if now is the window we have to seriously enjoy ourselves? What would we do differently now? I'm thinking about this. I don't yet have an answer. Like Alia Bhatt says of questions she asks herself in Highway. "Sochke batati hoon."

I am petrified of social media. In the past I have:  - gone private when I feel like I'm getting too much attention  - deactivated my account before a controversial story is published  - actively refrained (with 80 percent success) from posting about holidays and friends and highlights that would misrepresent my life. Broad strokes, these are my reasons: I don't like being seen by so many people with such little context. I don't like how people get social brownie points by pulling each other down. I don't like the extreme emotions. I don't like the things people infer from posts and use against each other.  I definitely do not like the noise. I don't like it. But I am comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings. In fact, that's how I process them. Writing is my process of understanding. I am able to speak out the different forces in my head. I am able to see myself without judgement. It made perfect sense for me to write and share now: I've been

The best metaphor to explain pain I've read is this: the nerves are the reporters on the ground sending valuable insight to the brain about what is happening. The brain is the editor who interprets those signals. The pain you feel is the op-ed published in a newspaper. I'm very, very early in understanding the literature on pain, but I do understand that it is an opinion the body is screaming out to you as a messenger of last resort. Pain is the body saying, hi hello ladies, whatever you're doing is not working out for me. This is serious. Pain is body saying, pause, take stock, introspect. Ask why. Ask what. Editors sometimes underplay stories, sometimes over play stories, sometimes completely misdirect you. Only the rarest editor gets it bang on. Such is the business of pain. Your brain could be telling you you're on fire when you're not, your brain could be telling you it's nothing when you're on fire. You're probably doing both. Eventually

I have not worn a bra for three years now. When I tell women this, they inevitably ask me about the logistics of living life without a bra. How do I contain my boobies? I don't. I do what men do: I put on a shirt. Here's a little story about how I got here, why this is not revolutionary at all, and why we have all been scammed. *** The women in my family are quite petite; you know, the kind who did "I must I must increase my bust" exercises in school. I was not like them. By very early puberty it became apparent to my litany of body-shaming aunts that I was an early-developer. This was a source of tension between my mom and me. My first memory of this is when I was eleven. My brand new breasts had emerged over the summer, and I was dragged off a tennis court by her because I'd "forgotten" to wear a bra. (I hadn't forgotten, I  was pretending. I think she knew this.) I remember not understanding why. The next memory I have is of watching

For seven years, all I’ve thrown at my disease is effort. A few weeks before I turned thirty my rheumatologist and I were talking about stress and all the smaller ways they manifest; waking up not feeling fresh, migraines and headaches, stiff muscles, teeth grinding, jaw pain. What’s also called secondary pain; pain that isn’t explained by the diagnosis but is auxiliary to it. What would’ve been symptoms of stress are aggravated by the SpA. Well anyway, where we landed was on why a lot of people exiting their twenties suddenly discover that throwing effort at a problem does not solve everything. Slogging is not always the solution. Because our bodies slowly run out of all those hormones and excess energy. And that no matter how much we try, sometimes throwing effort at a problem is counter-productive. He talked about how there's a lot of merit in the not-solving of it. In finding a way to make the non-solving bearable and wait for the case to crack itself open. I have found very

You know I have this fear: That one day my SpA will be so bad I'll struggle to navigate an airport. I'll be one of the young people on a wheelchair, strapped to a buggy with old people, being shepherded by aircraft crew, while everyone else gets to browse the bookstore and choose breakfast dosa. Someone will manage my hand-luggage and I'll be ferried by a much healthier flight attendant my age. I'll be the first to board and the last to alight. Maybe someone I know will see me like this. And I'll smile lamely and wave from a wheelchair. Maybe I'll have to talk sitting. Or unstrap myself before standing up to talk hoping nobody had noticed. Please understand that I laughed till my stomach hurt while writing this. Out of feverish nervousness or because it's really funny I don't know. It's tough, having a chronic, incurable, progressive, degenerative disease. I've lost many things to it already, I don't even know them all. But here's a

Have you read My Year or Rest and Relaxation? Oh please do. But that's not why I'm writing this. Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a short essay in the Guardian about the book. About creating a protagonist who just wants to sleep through the misery of being unloved and alone. Anyway, in the essay she writes powerfully and evocatively about why being inside during a plague involuntarily sucks so much: “Doing time” is what we call a sentence in a penal institution. I like to recall what a former prison inmate told me when I asked him what it was like living in solitary confinement: go into your bathroom and lock the door and don’t leave. I tried it. About six minutes in, I started to panic. If I was any good at meditation, maybe I could have actually left my body. I told myself to imagine sun-kissed beaches, puppies, my living room, my mother’s hands, a field of flowers. But the entrapment laced every thought with menace. I got dark inside. Even as someone who has made a career out of

I'm on the wrong side of the learning curve of a project I'm working on right now and completely consumed by self-doubt. I'm so, so, terrified of putting something out into the world that's so far away from my comfort zone. Rohan says that a little bit of self-doubt is good, but not too much. As if anyone can calibrate feelings so well and dial it up or down seamlessly. But I know that people do get better at it. Because anyone I know who has made anything worthwhile has gotten better at it. Because all the trillion books I've read about writing talk about it. They also say (usually in more elegant words) that managing the fear of being crap is essential to any degree of continued artistic success. Too little and you get cocky, too much and you never make anything. ( FYI I belong squarely in latter group) Rohan was watching Kanan Gill's latest during lunch and I was there for a bit. He talks about art rated "time-pass". How was the movie? Time

This pandemic came to me in the middle of a full-blown splondylo-arthritic flare. For the first time it's my heel. When foot meets floor, it feels like it was hit by a cricket bat two days ago. Anyone who understands this disease will now what I'm talking about, and how scary it is when a new part of the body is attacked. It's horrible. And at a time when I would benefit from looking after myself first, tending to myself first, I'm so distraught about the plight of migrants. About doctors I love, and doctors who have kept me alive and well. I worry about the economy; and investment leaving the country and bad loans. About bad laws. About data privacy. About consolidation of wealth in the hands of few. About the families in villages not receiving their remittances. About the old and lonely and sad. About friends with fragile parents, friends working too hard, friends not feeling ok, family not feeling ok. For a while the overwhelming worry has been building and

For a good rheumatologist, in my opinion, what you want is the intersection of scientist and philosopher.  This is a tough one. It requires the rigour of reacting to empirical evidence. It also requires looking at the greater patterns of the universe. How many people do you know like that? I've had some bad rheumatologists. After my initial diagnosis by a GP,  the first rheumatologist I met was in a fancy hospital in a fancy country. He gave me multivitamins, calcium tablets, and told me that he could surgically burn the nerves in my lower back so I wouldn't feel pain. (This does not work). I had turned 23 the previous week. The next doctor  I met was at a fancy hospital in this country, and he told me that this diagnosis was impossible. Get this: because women simply didn't get this disease. (In fact the male-female ratio is closer to 70:30. In fact poorly gendered data based on poorly gendered medicine is something I will keep coming back to). He asked me if there wa