Growing up (I feel like I have been saying this a lot, of late), everyone around me did not much agree to this idea of mine. In the typical fashion of the Indian household, there was always coffee, tea and bread at home; and you could always make a quick run to the nearby bakery for desert and cake. This preference did not always sit well with me, but ah well, there was always coffee, tea and bread at home.

During my postgraduate days (which almost feel surreal 2 years ahead), I was introduced to the wealth of knowledge that coffee connoisseurs held. This, beget by the same person who restarted running for me (and my most ardent substack supporter ), dipped me forehead deep in the literature and practice of making coffee.

Coffee tastes (or notes to be precise) can be categorised into 9 different tones:

• Fruity,

• Sour/Fermented,

• Green/Vegetative,

• Roasted,

• Spices,

• Nutty/Cocoa,

• Sweet,

• Floral, and

• Other.

For the average Joe (like you and I, dearest reader), the most accessible guide to this can be found on the label of the coffee bean, with a valve in the packaging that lets you smell the tones to decide on your preference. The evolution of these tones from the pre-roast, roast and prepared drink is a lifecycle of olfactory metamorphosis that I think everyone should experience, atleast once in your life.

When I moved into Bangalore, oftentimes contested as the current “Coffee Capital of India,” I was introduced to Nerlu Cafe by Madhav. From the earlier grouping of nine tones, my all-time undisputed tonal winner had been “Sour/Fermented” - and I was specifically recommended to try the Citrus Cold Brew as something that would “probably change your life.” I took my first sip of Citrus Cold Brew on 26th April, 2025, and arguably my life has changed since then.

As I started frequenting Nerlu on a once per week basis initially, proximity and convenience played a huge role. It’s situated 950 m from where I stay, which for me is a 6-7 minute run, a 10 minute auto ride in traffic or a 15 minute walk depending on my mood. The routine of taking an auto to reach it and exiting with a brisk walk appealed to me as a part of building a mental habit.

Borrowing from a Substack (by ) I read whilst writing this piece,

Nerlu means shade or shadow or shelter in Kannada, an aspect considered very important when growing coffee. And the cafe gets this message out nicely by highlighting that the Arabica coffee is a shade growing plant and that their coffee shop hopes to be an umbrella for several Indian roasters that don’t have a retail space to sell.

After probably my 50th cup of Citrus Cold Brew, sitting in the shade of the interior roof, further shadowed by a canopy above it - My mind started believing of the space as a reset point. Faces, especially Baristas I passed around started greeting me in familiarity and eventually every one of my friends had been forced (sometimes) with physical pulling to the cafe.

After more than a year now, I think I have crossed my 100th cup of Citrus Cold Brew, finished 14 books sitting here, tasted practically everything on the menu and recommended a few crucial decisions (or so I would like to tell myself) on the brewing process of my main drink. I have been poached an uncountable number of times by friends who have simply landed themselves at the place to find me, and I have worked on important pieces of professional work sitting there.

I tend to be socially anxious, and find it difficult talking to people beyond necessity. However a few weeks back I finally acquainted myself with the Head Barista (who also happened to be from NE, India like me!) and have since been showered with two free drinks and a notebook as a present. These smaller tokens have further made me confident onto the desire to talk more in social settings, but more importantly has lodged Nerlu Cafe into the foundational layer of my memories in Bangalore.

If this article was written to lay a claim, it is this: Second spaces are important locations to set up in cities and geographies foreign to you. It is even more important for these spaces to be other than your living quarters and (if possible) located at a convenience from an access standpoint. Nerlu Cafe for me has been that spot where regardless of circumstance, event or calamity - I have found solace and reset. Beyond my self-based preferences I also think it is a fantastically curated and beautifully run cafe - as evident by my friends continuing to visit it without me at times (an atrocity, I know).

If I know you and you’re in Bangalore at the same time as this chapter of our lives, come find me at Nerlu, and your coffee’s on me. If I don’t know you and through some sheer calamity you get to read this, find me regardless and your coffee’s on me.

Written at Nerlu with “Be My Baby," by The Ronettes blaring on my headphones.

With love

It was the summer of 2015, and I was a few years overdue for new shoes. This was before the internet had entered my life, so the only brands I knew of were Nike, Adidas and Puma (with my fondness and awe occurring in that order); known to me only through the jealousy of seeing my peers carry them as everyday accessories or sports day specials.

I was mostly what one would call a closeted ungrateful child. Closeted in a manner, since my ungratefulness was a burden carried by my parents alone. The private and the public always stayed carefully separated in Indian households.

International brands like these were beyond what we could afford then, so this day was a special one. We walked into the store in a mall that had only opened a couple of weeks earlier (now sparsely visited 11 years since), and the fumes of an inaccessible capitalist society greeted us with indifferent eyes. The Adidas Alpha Bounce had just been released that day (yes, exactly that day!), and on the central shelf of the store, lay waiting, a bright red-black pair, fresh in smell and structure like a newly forged footwear with wings.

I wore that pair for 7 years, until I was in 2nd year of college with enough money collected by taking tuitions that I could afford another sports pair. Times in life weren’t ever particularly difficult, but a lot of things were looked upon as luxuries of occasional indulgence.

I never got into running on purpose. Particularly also because I was never good at sports of any kind. In fact, in retrospect I was never much good at anything except reciting poetry. But more importantly, I never knew running was an activity people could do. It was on a random evening in the December of 2022, that I stumbled across the Nike run app. In those days I lived on 1.5 GB a day, so with much mental math of cost and benefit, I downloaded the app.

I do not remember my first three runs (except that my shoes tore up on the third run), but I know I felt something that first time running, enough that I ran for three days consecutively and complained about the pain for a week.

However, like most things that cause physical pain, I did not continue running much that year. My body did not immediately acclimate itself (though I dearly wished it had). I did not run much in 2023 (26 Km), nor much in 2024 (0 Km).

When I left home in 2023, I met a bunch of athletic friends in college who ran, and identified themselves as runners (weirdos, ugh). For a while I would steer away from conversations about running, or turn my face away as I saw them taking laps around the campus. Accepting their identity around running, meant facing the failure of my own in trying to be one. Ignorance surely is temporary bliss.

I remember one random day mumbling something about running to my (dearest) roommate Suhas (he used to run, I hope he does still). A week went past and one uncanny evening he invited me to run with him. Eventually I ran a couple of times that year, both with Suhas and my dearest (2) friend Madhav (the 26 odd Kms of 2023). But, running was just my seeking of company then, and I did not continue doing it much longer alone.

In 2025, I found myself in a new city and a new life. I rented my first apartment, I opened a new bank account in a city other than home, I curated a space which I continue to call my own. I built my life back from scratch, one single screw and coffee bean at a time. In the midst of such decisions and experiences, I started running again, this time alone. I have continued to run since, with every incremental month racking up more kilometers than before. I did a few 5 and 10 K races and have a half marathon lined up for September. I am not a good runner by any means, but let’s be real, there is no way I would agree to be anything else but a runner; so we make do with the chips we have on our table.

Taking this incredibly porous route to describing how I restarted running is important. Not only because context is the palette of a colourful painting, but also because now what I have to say about the subheading of this article will seem a clearer stroke.

When I run, I do not think of anything apart from how happy running makes me feel. Running was not easy, not bodily, nor informationally about the things the sport involves. When I run, I think of the trees waving at me in encouragement, about dodging the bikes and occasionally racing the idly driving car (I always lose in the longer stretch). I do look at the numbers, but mostly as a modicum of growth. My distance, my cadence, my heart rate and my pace are nothing more than the instruments of growth. A toolkit that helps me rely on literature of those who ran before me or run alongside me in some corner of the world.

That said, even without the trackers or the numbers, I run because now I can. If one thinks therefore they are, I run therefore I am. I have new shoes now which are dedicated only to running, and a few accessories here and there which were mostly indulgence and not the most necessary. But hey, I buried a small lifetime in this small activity I spend 30 minutes a day on.

I run with the bulk of messages and thoughts of my day, and the wings on my feet fly to cover lane, neighbourhood and city, one at a time. Finally then, my breath catches up to me, I log my numbers and walk back home; a little disappointed that I am not running anymore.

When I run, I smile like an idiot. I have never enjoyed being an idiot. It’s fantastic.

I want to run till I am 80.

I seem to have not escaped the joy of captivity.

Moving out of home has been a voyage across the universe - if the universe were a clustered mass of social circumstances and depravity. I lived at home for 20 years and it has been 3 years since I moved out; and what has changed starkly for me is the absence of the rot.

Mummy used to take me to the nearby market to find fruits I would hesitantly eat. Hesitant out of the fear of having caught them at a point of their lives before they learnt sweetness or after they grew tired of it.

My kitchen no longer sees these stages of their lives, for they are either bought with enough preservatives injected into them that maturity is forced, or I grow impatient of the slightest fester and throw them out.

Abba used to occasionally buy fruits from the market, too. They occurred in a random pattern of good and bad picks as he learnt his way over the years to spot them like mummy did. I grew up watching them, much like they grew old watching me.

They do say one bad apple spoils the bunch, but I have always spotted the bushel spoil in gangs, afraid to corrupt or dissent in solitude. I have friends now who hold me up when I am afraid to dissent alone. I dissent, too.

My living room no longer has a basket of fruits with flies dancing in controlled chaos. There are no fruit flies in my living room. The solitude of the modern migrant goes beyond human companionship.

Over the years, till the day I had left, our kitchen back home saw less and less of a filled fruit basket. I used to blame the rot for not eating them; mummy blamed me for the rot because I didn’t eat them. In some forms, with words barely making up reason for this, the rot seems to have putrefied within me.

I escaped tasting the rot till the rot was inside me. Now I taste like it. I taste like home.

Perhaps in the journey of agricultural reform, we seem to have forgotten that fruits are best procured unripened. That the wait of commonplace practice continuing for as long as civilization has existed cannot be undone in the pursuit of the fast pace gratification we seem to purge towards. There were many joys in the raw mango and much skill in cutting blemished parts of the rotten banana. There are healed wounds on my hands that vouch for this skill learnt.

In that regard, we are a mess. Unsure of which parts of us to patiently ripe and which parts to cut away. I cut a mango the other day and ate the fruit around the seed. I ate a banana for breakfast today after carefully chopping away its foul spots. Apples are a season away. I am a book of my memories, I am the rot I tried to leave behind. I still need to learn how to bargain with the vendor.

It’s my first time being away from home. 3 years is not nearly enough to teach me to fly in controlled chaos. Yet.

Hometowns, in my opinion, have a strange relationship with ambition. They not only dictate one’s comprehension of the global continuum (or simply put, your exposure to the world), but also control and mediate the proximity of your exposure and quite directly, the starting point of everyone’s stories. It acts as the quintessential tagmark for your identity in the treacherous fabric of social reality. Your hometown, or even an absence of one, tells everyone who enquires about this quotient of your life as to who you are and what demographic profile are you to be clustered into. Such profiling may be wholly unintended, it is subconscious for the vast majority and conscious for the few.

This may be complimented by stimuli of your other internal and external projections. Your hometown describes (at least in the majority of non-diverse micro-societies of the world) your ethnic makeup, visual phenotype, your accent, your attire, et cetera. One is constantly ridiculed or pedestaled by this web of information and forms the variables of answering who you are to the other.

However, one factor (and my favourite one at that) that only emanates largely through deliberate sharing of desires is ambition. Interestingly, ambition seems to still follow traditional patterns geographically. Or rather allow me to claim that ambition is greatly allowed in specific mannerisms depending on the social juxtaposition of your ancestry and geography.

Now I do wish to make such a claim clear in terms of its limitations. Societies are largely global and diverse in today’s day and age, and as such some of my earlier points like visual phenotype and accent may never come to pass in the metropolitan migrant-hubs of the world. However, why the following visualisation still holds true, is because cities and towns largely have certain personalities or personas that inhabit them. The personification evoked upon the mention of London, is widely different from a New York, and in that likeliness, singular personas exist. My claim elaborates that these personas in daily life are social belief systems, biases, mass consciousness and morality that shape many individuals’ characters.

Borrowing from this notion, allow me to expand this lens and link cities and their related histories to the social biases of ambition.

Indian cities are a great example of this case (and currently the only case I can properly make given my own limited exposure). Cities like Delhi, given the epicenter of its own curation, are more globally oriented. Eavesdropping in such cities remains concentrated around subjects of commercial commodity, studies abroad and administration upholstered by the National sentiment; which does trace back onto what we know of the city as well. Delhi has held regime to the larger conquering establishments of history in the country (at least in the past few centuries) - it held court to the Delhi Sultanate, to the Mughal powers and the major duration of the colonising forces of English conquest. As such, if the bodies of our ancestors kept their score, this land of plunder so mirrors the ambitions of the people who call it their own point 0; Delhi likes to confuse growth with power.

My own experiences in Delhi have been astounding in hearing the phrase “Do you know who my father is?,” which seems the conflict-default for many within the diaspora the city ushers in. There is admittedly the triviality of such a statement, yet alongside also offers a rudimentary peek into how the majority in the society perceive daily realities. In the socialist sentiment of the Indian subcontinent, wherein trust begins at home and rises upwards through the government and onto God - the legislatives play a huge role in maintaining the character of a societal parent. Delhi, while closest to the parent, unfortunately seems to have breached the idealisms of the eldest child. Law and order struggles to maintain moral standards and power reigns free to simulate individual benefit. In retrospect, if personal contact is what gets things done, I would never blame the daily Delhite for remembering their comparably more successful parents during any conflict (a haunting scare).

Under this rubric, it may be apt to say that Delhi labels socially-acceptable ambition as an accumulation of power. Where power strictly revolves around collection of wealth and control (or connections) of/in governing entities or organisations with stakes in public management (like law and order). On proximity for success, it is unbiased as long as the travelling individuals fulfill the earlier criteria.

We next land in cities like Kolkata or what contemporaries label “the city stuck in time.” Such cities exist in many of the prolifically diverse regions of the world (and we can play the Atlas of cities to find them and continue for hours at end). Kolkata is a city that simply embraces the righteous calamity of humanity’s moral compass. It is a city known for its deep historical epicenters of revolution, and the ‘kutsunugi-ishis’ (stepping stones) of liberal leftist philosophy. However, history has also borne witness to communities that accelerate thought and rationality far beyond the medians of their time. They either perish, outcast or simply isolate to retain the progress of their own selves. Kolkata astounds the national sentiment through its sheer progress in thought, rationality and curative ability. The newer sentiment in Kolkata however, sees progress exclusionary with proximity to their homes.

I remember the key phrases of “Revolt, Rebellion, Resistance and Revolution” marred across walls in Kolkata. The reminder of the sacrifices taken to set the city into motion are deeply entwined in the present consciousness of its inhabitants. However still, Kolkata is littered, in a very literal sense and in terms of social ostracisation of larger opinions that may seem common against the rest of the country. One may also mistake such a behaviour as intolerant, however I seemed to have preferred this over being tolerantly immoral.

Kolkata defines ambition in close relations to the process of revolution, such as assignments to posts that either mirror the allowance of such a process (like administration, banking and law) or in fields that facilitate the process of revolt (such as academia or even hospitals when it comes to safety). Some of my acquaintances joke further that the only respectable (by their definition) occupations in the city are Doctors, Engineers and Government Officials. On proximity, Kolkata has expanded its horizons to view succeeded-ambition as settling overseas.

Contrast it to newer cities like Bangalore which, at least in the historical calendar, are still in the January of their modern settlements. Very few call Bangalore their point 0 - and most within are migrants to the same. Now, every story is about a migrant, every person specifically so - but for the lens of this particular article, let us assume that a migrant is only one whose ancestry in a geographical root is less than 3 generations old. As such, Bangalore is a city of migrants focussed in living and earning well. Which also maps true - with a municipality barely more than 2 decades old, Bangalore had to boast its ability of mastering innovation to justify its paradigm in India. The eavesdrops in newer cities like such, is entirely around coping to the global order, around meditations, exercise, running and eating healthy. People from Bangalore are deeply ambitious, but do not necessarily harbour the conquering spirit. The ghost of indulgence flows free in the city.

In repetition, if eavesdrops is the parameter of judging how interesting cities are, Bangalore has regularly disinterested me, and yet occasionally stupefied my standards of what may be humanely possible. I have possibly met the most unusual (in this setting, a fairly better intention of the word) people in my life who cross the borders of high achieving, highly functional and deeply moral people. Also a fairly interesting idea of ‘what’s in a name,’ when your daily conveyance of residence is Bangalore, yet administratively a Bengaluru. The policy debates of a nation rarely find attendance in conversation of public good, as when compared to city naming.

Cities like Bangalore see wealth as a standard. There are far too many startups or finance-bros in the city for it to matter anymore. Ambition is no longer individual, but rather a collective consciousness. Thus, life is rendered limited to its pleasures and every modality like money is seen only as the mechanism of achieving that luxury. So while everyone devoid of such pleasure focuses their motto in acquiring it, many already have accumulated what in the national context is “wealthy enough,” and have channeled their own versions of mid-life crises (quite literal in the intention of mid-life). Proximity is obsolete in cities like these.

Another entirely different history is Guwahati. Guwahati follows a system of sub-nationalism or state centered nationalism, wherein, the ideal emotive loyalty of the people is oriented inwards, rather than outwards. This may be a little clearer with an example: With the past three cities listed previously, their societies are deeply linked with the cognisance of the outside world and hence consider the external reality (external from the point of the city) as a facilitator of their internal systems; in much more simpler terms, the outside world exists, but the city and its people come first. However, sub-nationalist states retain a certain cognitive blockage of the outside world, wherein society treats and emphasises the immediate vacuum of the state as the only reality that exists (or they bother to pay heed to). As such, even within the same country, the components of such a society, be it language, social morality, social biases, infrastructure, politics (etc.) is characteristically different than the neighbouring regions.

Guwahati sees ambition as accumulation of wealth, ability to indulge in secret and close proximity to heritage. You would, as such, rarely find conversation where congratulations of success ends with a full stop. Almost every time, without fail (if you hold heritage within the larger state) the positivity is coupled with “You must contribute to our people and find growth along with this society who has ushered your existence.” It’s possibly a strain for a people who envision the other’s growth as being coupled with leverage to ascend themselves. A boon for the lazy, and a weight for the independent.

Through the last four examples, I attempt to offer you a rubric of sorts, with no intention or ability to be comprehensive. Cities and their related ambitions clustered through a couple of proportionality equations. An illustration of this is proximity. Cities like Nagpur, Chennai, Guwahati (etc.) socially envision ambition to be directly proportional to proximity to their genesis point, i.e. the social vision of growth is deeply harboured in remaining/staying in the city in question. Contrast it to cities like Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar, Kochi, (etc.) where the social perception of growth begins when one exits their genesis points. Then, are cities like Gurgaon, Bangalore, Chandigarh (etc.) which are either transition spaces for individuals during the limbos of their careers, or a so-called safe space for those beginning or retiring at a certain stage of their lives. Regardless, these cities detail the virtues of hope, care or wisdom as primaries.

Finally however, are the cities who cannot be categorised by the proximity variable - eg. Mumbai, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad (etc.) which while can be force tagged into the 3 proximity clusters before, do not necessarily behave as rigidly as the others. Added to such a framework are also cultural cities like Lucknow, Jaipur and the like - whose social framework is embedded in remaining in the penultimate page of a history chapter. These cultures are focussed in maintaining standards and social bias is more widespread as a threshold standard than a majority event.

In summary, here’s my larger case: If in everyday interactions, our supposed personas of cities often justify our normative prejudices against people who inhabit them, such unsubstantiated claims may benefit with some structure. For it is true that those personas exist, and it is false how we have been nurtured to label out of them. Ambition has been a curious desire to understand while politely eavesdropping in spaces across cities mentioned here - and while this rubric has not yet matured, it has broken biases I earlier held. To speak freely, I feel happier with the biases of my own experiences than borrowed opinion. What do you think?

The months of December and January are strangely met in the capital city of Assam. The air in the city decides to be charismatically cold, much to cater to the aesthetic pleasures of the hilly folk — yet uncatalogued enough for every mainlander to be surprised. These are months of transit, with run down streets, smoky soot and occasional murky puddles drifting into sight as the gateway of the seven sisters opens its door. A solitary loom, a station almost to the vast politics and unimaginably diverse populace that the region hosts.

I came home this transit season, also a visitor to my home. With bags wide open and clothes stationed upon racks, unfolded and unsorted — ready to leave at a moment’s notice. My room whose nook and crannies were servered into the crevices of my memory fail to realise that their openings were long shut to make way for newer homes. I felt uneasy in a space I used to long to return to, such may be the trials of my expeditions.

The streets of this city are evergreen with red splotches of areca nuts, characteristic of its name. Guwahati’s etymology lends the meaning of the “rows of areca nut trees.” A meaning planted into the pan stalls and daily life of the elders (dare some younger folk call it an addiction). Question of the day: does a good neighbourhood make a good pan shop, or does a good pan shop make a good neighbourhood?

Life in this city has seldom accelerated beyond the comforts of safety for its people. Transportation continues to be sparesely connected, Uber Champions habitually show adolescent defiance to company rates and cottage industries remain the new fad as it did all those years ago.

Large scale corporations still struggle to lodge its feet into daily life of the state. After serving station in multiple cities in the mainland, sometimes I still sit in uncertain breath of whether that’s a good thing. My work-from-home title that I have temporarily fought for, finally attains the truer meaning of this framing. Common working spaces are unheard of in the city, and local grocery stores thrive like Foxtail orchids in spring.

I went solo cafe hopping the other day and casually stumbled upon one near the pond called Dighalipukhuri, some 20 minutes away from home (a mental travel equivalent of what Delhites prepare themselves when travelling from Jama Masjid to Qutub Minar). The newspaper ‘The Hindu’, in an article in 2018 wrote that “Dighalipukhuri is to Guwahati what Jantar Mantar is to New Delhi — a place to launch an agitation from.” Dug up according to legend for the svayamvara (matrimonial tradition) for King Bhagadatta’s daughter Bhanumati, it also historically attains the title of Duryodhana’s pond (individuals from the Hindu Epic, the Mahabharata).

Fighting for an identity has been deeply seeped into the minds and learnings of the Assamese peoples. A culture deeply proud of their ancestral tradition and equally suffering against time for their attempts of preserving its unique potpourri. The petrichor (smell of soil after a downpour) of the valley, the sudden uttering of “Tejimola” when I see a Lotus or the Kaji Nemu (Citrus Limon) I shall carry when I leave are fragments of what it means to be hosted by this land.

Strangely these days, when I walk the ends of the city (for unlike the metropolis’s of India, this is a city you can walk almost anywhere and still save your breath for a fight) I find myself jolted by the pollution of supposed economic growth and staggering traffic of reckless laziness. There seems to be more cigarette shops and their accompanying litter is riddled across the pavements of yonder.

As Urusla K. Le Guin once wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

The city etched in the deepest crevices of my memory, though painted over still strides along in support to the camaraderie of its people. I know my neighbours both by face and name, and the grocery in my house isn’t a 10 minute click of my phone. I pack by bags tonights knowing full well the previous claims are ones I will shed in habit and action as I fly out. Yet I leave a city knowing its character much like I know my own. A solitary loom, a station in this vastness. An identity that shall remain untouched.

Originally posted in Medium.

Ceaseless is the infinite ocean;

Within the solitary fragments of the abyss we call reality; some of us — previously spoiled little brats of delusional winters are lost to the imaginary confinements of a mundane life.

This of course is no testament to our abilities or seclusions due to lack of confidence, nor is it an excuse for lonely evenings spent alone with a book and the oceans they weep. For some of us — we just forget to live.

“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.”.

We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.”

We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was a youngling (or brat, in fact), a solitary loon bequeathed beneath a summer moon (Vikram Seth owes that grand decadence), the ends of the threads of reason were rarely a subject of much thought. Time therefore decided to be a bastard, and I found myself a teenager, in a class of English Literature asking away to my guide, “What is ego?”, unaware to be held guilty of practice in near days and weeks — months and years — lives that wept to — my soul of fear.

Rarely does one encounter in a universe as probational and competitively hungry, a reason to sit at the ledges between steps eagerly enjoying the crowd that passes by; some hurriedly sprinting — few terrified and creeping— hardly any fearful, yet climbing — and most, confident yet dallying. The mountains and the forests of this sultry dearth have embraced my soul to the longings of recognition; yet its dear embrace turns into the bludgeoning axle of burning desire that engulfs you until you relapse to the hateful spirit and starvation of pride. First I was daunting to living life, next they held me neck deep in the waters of fearing hate, lastly where do I stand in the grand scheme of things? In a universe as ceaseless and surpassing as our own, who are we but insignificance personified.

Ceaseless is the infinite ocean; Dwell not from within it.

As man invented infinite scrolling to cross the silence of infinities; when faced with ordinary nights, restless sleep schedules and empty chats, I recur back to a certain doctrine we call Vagabond; curated by the genius that is Takehiko Inoue.

“The way of the sword”, “invincible under the sun”, “demon child” were words readers have sought throughout the lands. But what strangles your musing of life are panels such as these:

At the point of writing this article/confession/secret/letter, this train of thought has died down — a once raging flame now sitting at the ledge of reason hoping for nothing but a easeful future to long for, and good company to hold the candle as you look for the switches at night. Towards that end, take what you may from this piece, hope that our mistakes never overlap, and I pray I make those that fate has sent your way in hopes that your list of regrets dissolves out.

We usually end sentences with full stops “.” as punctuation dictates, but I’ll end the next with a comma “,” so that this journey of retrospection never ends.

Abruptly, but with love;

Godspeed and farewell,

Originally posted in Medium.

My dear boys, I was already getting anxious waiting for a letter from you; wherefore my delight was so much the greater yesterday when I received your dear lines. It is now ever the nicest thing to know that you are hale and hearty.

If you have the time, do take lessons in both music and language but do not overstrain yourselves.

~ Sergeant Nicolas Simberg

Through the long standing queues of history and parenthood, humankind has paradoxically always returned to the sufficiently fine tuned accords of art and music. Not to be confused with recent standards of our spotify playlists; To be or not to be, is not the question.

In through the annals of time, us species of sinewy ligaments and obnoxious snoring habits have proved time and again that we are quite magnificently — a peculiar type. Chasing backwards over a universe stretching time lengths of a north of 13.8 Billion years, it shouldn’t be any surprise when I inform you in probabilistic accuracy,

You will never amount to anything in your life.

Yet if you are one of kinds we label as the rebels, I shall not wish you godspeed, for such delusion doesn’t really exist. Talking with the fallacious language of mathematical comparison (from the book ‘Welcome to the Universe’),

Take 100 billion hamburgers, and lay them end to end. Start at New York City, and go west. Will you get to Chicago? Of course. Will you get to California? Yes, of course. Find some way to float them. This calculation works for the diameter of the bun (4 inches), because the burger itself is somewhat smaller than the bun. So for this calculation, it’s all about the bun. Now float them across the ocean, along a great circle route, and you will cross the Pacific, pass Australia, Africa, and come back across the Atlantic Ocean, finally arriving back in New York City with your 100 billion hamburgers. That’s a lot of hamburgers. But in fact you have some left over after you have circled the circumference of Earth. Do you know what you do with what you have left over? You make the trip all over again, 215 more times!

In the expansive universe that stretches at a rate of 73.24 ± 1.74 (km/s)/Mpc, us creatures are mewling specs of nothingness who claim the rifts of spacetime as our personal marker-pen stains. Well no, you goofy little scatterbrain; if the universe was as big the sun, we’d still be as insignificantly small as muons and quarks.

But dearest author, every drop makes an ocean, every quark and muon imprints its own little foot mark into the fabric of space, time, spacetime and life!

And you’re not wrong. But the fact remains that in the grand scheme of life, ideas, philosophy and existence, (ergo space, time, spacetime and life!)

You will never amount to anything.

Alas, this magnanimous drudgery too brings forth its own little cup of caffeinated realisations. If we are insignificant enough to amount to no change in the vast continuum of space, time, spacetime and life(!), every single fault line, every iota of damage we deal, every nook and cranny of farts we leave, every incessant groaning we harbour, every glimpse of a loved one avoided, every silent curse, every loud yawn, every moment of helpless misery screaming to the universe that, “Oi there mate, its turning a bit rude now, eh? Turn the knob a little and drown in your sleep please, will you?” will never amount to the same level of damage that we all perceived it would.

Which makes things simple. We are not burdened by the sins of our forefathers, for they were as insignificant as are we, if not more so.

4584 Known comets in the sky

1,900,000,000 Number of known asteroids

7,836,600,000 Population of the Earth

1,000,000,000,000 Comets in the Oort Cloud (Just outside our Solar System)

200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars in the galaxy

And a few other sets of bazillion numbers all pointing towards the nothingness of the pale blue dot we call home.

So the next time you feel you’re in the most disastrous situation on Earth, when your heart beats faster than every perceivable entity in the cosmos, the motions of the merry-go-round spins and your head feels dizzy, the scrumptious sounds of the nearby restaurant makes your stomach growl and your bank balance strictly declines;

Remember that the oceans lash mightier and the chasms echo farther than the depths of your problems — they too shall pass, remember that your heart may beat faster still upon entering plains of planets you may never see, remember that you’re rather better off spinning at those speeds than the planetary crushing speeds of Jupiter, and lastly remember that in the worldly pleasures that shall be denied today, there’ll always be that one point in your lives where everything shall be worth it.

You will never amount to anything in life. That’s one burden I’ll take off of your shoulder.

But, this small period of hell you’re dreading?

This surely will pass.

Originally posted in Medium.

(Note: Truth be told, the author rather likes apples and any deviation from its said-existence would result in him hypothetically picture nuclear warfare upon resulting society)

Contrary to the author’s own upbringing, today’s day and age has its first introduction of children and toddlers to the least naturally occurring kind of Apple — the technical savant kind. The other day the author quite gloriously saw his cousin dribble porridge over his iPad and his aunt gracefully labelling the incident as: cute. (13.8 billion years of evolution only to watch that impudent frog watch “Baby TV” and spill porridge over a $750 tray. Cute.)

The second noticeable lore of the apple introduced to our lives probably comes through the dis-exhibition of faith through the acts of Adam and Eve, who set the ripple of sin and death by consuming the Holy Fruit (albeit its true accuracy to being an apple is indeed debatable) from the Tree of Knowledge; mythically whilst under the influence of the “great dragon… that ancient serpent… the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Thus they disobeyed the direct instructions from God who strictly forbade them to forego the consummation of the fruit during their otherwise eternal time in Eden. (Thank you Adam, it seems to be a rather jolly grand time on earth this time of the year).

The third, and quite possibly most dramatic sense of the term comes through complex science and the bump over the head of Newton. (“But, gravitation physics isn’t complex science.” — is what our proof readers remarked.)

(Yeah, right.)

But, as lacking in inspiration as apple trees are, it boils over a painful question over what a gore troglodytic bum Newton was to have that as a source of his discovery. But historically, the fact of the apple falling on Sir Newton’s head was the cornerstone of the source of his genius revelation which led him to ultimately lay the framework of the Laws of Gravity in 1687 in a book called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).

Ignoring the author’s desk mate in standard 8th, for whom Newton seemed to have played God over his sandbox and invented gravity, the entire narrative of the apple falling over his head was a mere fable used to dramatize the event. Which was successful in creating what may be regarded as one of the greatest misguidance which of sorts did seem to have worked out for science.

Thus, in through this brief tale of the holy, the technology and the history of the apple, one may recur to the earlier mentioning of the disaster to the succession of the throne of the mango fruit. It may bear results (fruit?) to move through the annals of time as a harbinger of destruction, the radicalization of generations or even something as minute as the chasing away of the profession of needle enthusiasts, but the apple is one of unordinary existence.

“The king of the fruits, therefore, is a lousy king, one of those who wear the crown courtesy their progeny but have no capabilities to grace the throne. The mango is no match for the apple in taste, texture, varieties and uses. It’s not for no reason that it is called aam (Hindi: ordinary). I would make a case for replacing the mango with the apple as the king of fruits, but the apple of Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Hera’s garden and of Eve’s temptation is too unconventional to be a king.”- Quote: Ruchika Sharma

So in the mannerisms of the common, our true King shall but be reduced to chase the inevitable. The true Presidency of the one deserved shadowed under the guise of chasing the ordinary. The death of regimes, the failure of guaranteed success, the end of generations.

Cute.

Originally posted in Medium.

I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg,

Ron stole Meggie’s heart away, and I got Sidney’s leg.

– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Dubious? The most revolting thought that daily mornings greet the author is a grave inability to teleport. Yes, a rather universally accepted dibs-called superpower; the very abhorring complex science behind teleportation is actually quite seemingly mind boggling, and possibly depressing. Solving the distressing situations of life can just be the snap of one’s fingers and several multi-million dollars worth of equipment away with teleportation. Late for an interview? Why, just teleport there instantly. A family gathering you’d like to avoid? Why, just teleport them all atop Mt. Etna (author’s recommendation). Let’s briefly touch the surface of the very science of teleportation and learn deeply about the author’s obsession towards puking.

Teleportation in layman terms is the ability to disappear from one place and then reappear in the exact same condition at another location. Sounds pretty straightforward until one actually sits down and tries to figure it out. Realistically, teleportation can be achieved for quantum subatomic particles (super small thingies which huddle together like ants until they form the basis of every material object in existence), but teleporting real life objects, like a cellphone or maybe even a human is rather difficult in theory and much more so in practice.

Quantum teleportation (again, quantum just means extremely small), is an achieved physical process that transfers the quantum states of matter from one place to another. This allows one to relay information (not matter) from a sender’s point to a receiver’s point. This forms the basis of quantum networking (an advanced form of potentially futuristic technology which, if developed in near years would maybe bore its applications to the very internet itself for example, where it would be reduced off time limitations when loading data). Maybe watching YouTube at 4K will finally be possible for the average Joe.

In current worldly aspects, Quantum Teleportation has been achieved in multiple experiments across the world. Initially first discussing its possibilities in 1993, to achieving a teleportation of independent single-photon qubits (roughly refers to light particles) across a distance of approximately 1400 Km; amongst other numerous successful experiments.

But why the puking preference?

In order to hypothetically be able to teleport objects between two places, the common accepted concept is that the very quantum particles or atoms in one’s being (or constituting an object) are ripped apart (thus, at the molecular level); transported to a receiving point, and finally reconstructed into an exact replica. In Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, teleportation has been rightly quoted as “Not quite as fun as a good solid kick to the head”. So, addressing to the reader, the you that enters the teleportation pod (for coolness sake let’s assume there is such a pod like structure) won’t remain the same person that’ll come out of the other end. Thus, multiple teleports would rather shamefully mean the me who initiates my relatives to be sent atop Mt. Etna would not have the pleasure of witnessing said event from the bottom. Assuming such events, the author makes an educated guess that teleportation would thereby, apart from achieving a crisis of identity, also unfortunately involve — puking.

Reference topics for interested readers:

• Quantum Entanglement

• The Second Quantum Revolution

• Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect

Originally posted in Medium.