Conversations With Friends— % &It has been exactly three months since I came to Dhanbad. And it's been exactly three months of being friendless. There is no friend in this city. My parents, my only friends and company.— % &Starting 2025, I started an informal Zoom podcast out of the blue. I named it BoredCast as I was bored in the way most friendless people are. Even though I started it more like how every wannabe content creator starts a channel—with hopes of getting viral and starting a new trend, but over time, it ended up serendipitously serving a deeply personal purpose. That of keeping me sane.— % &BoredCast, for all its worth, saved me from the sink of friendlessness. In fact, it let me connect with far more friends than I'd have if I were in Bangalore, Delhi or Dharamshala, a place with actual friends. Friends I hadn't touched base in years. And despite only a handful of subscribers and barely any views, I do it with so much shiddat and joy. It's my daily khuraak of dosti, of bakchodi, of ideas. Time wasted with friends is time earned. — % &When you have two or three good friends in town whom you meet regularly, they become your everything. What happens with everyone else? They go out of sight, out of mind. Pretty much. Unless both put extra efforts to stay in touch. But imagine what would happen when one is emptied of a social circle. When you have no friends left in town? You'd form very little day-to-day social memory. Every memory of yours will be either personal, public or familial. The shelves reserved for people and conversations will remain empty. The buried memories from the past will surface, eager to be dusted and put like books on display.— % &Life rarely presents one with opportunity such as the one I got. Of a prolonged stay in a known city where there's nobody my age whom I know. No, don't even think about making new friends! I'm at an age where there's nothing more tiring than getting to know someone new. And yes, alone time, solitude, blah blah, I know, and I'm enjoying my fair share of it. How much can a man relish his solitude? Kar raha hun jitna karna hai. I walk, bird, make tea, read books, write, drive, play instruments everyday. Mann karta hai to dance bhi kar leta hun nahate samay. What else does one need to do? I don't want to be the Into the Wild guy who goes into the wilderness all alone only to realise the truth of life—happiness is real only when shared. And who better to share them with than friends? From distance, all friends look alike. They're not new or old, near or far. They're all old, they're all far and they're all equally memorable. They all make me remember them fondly.— % &That fondness grips me everytime I see an Instagram story of a long lost friend. I remember the good times. How we both discussed relativity and first love with the same thrill in the middle of the night in college. Or the shittiest of jokes both of us shared with each other. Or a funny comment of theirs that I still remember and laugh about. Earlier, in busier social days, I'd have reacted love on their story and moved on. Now, I react love and write to them too. I tell them how I find them interesting and how I remember something they'd said and invite them—no, not for a call, but for a BoredCast. It's my new call.— % &I tell how even though it's recorded, we only put out the interesting bits, and with prior permission. How I have a bunch of slam book like questions in case things get boring. And also how my cousin would join as a panelist if free to have an element of surprise and also wit. She adds a dash of humour, since mine is pretty basic. Most of them agree! It sounds fun to them. During the call, I spend less time catching up and more on random bakwas. And sometimes, two calls, one for catching up and then for BoredCast. We are silly, we laugh, we zone out, we don't talk about what we accomplished but we talk about where we failed spectacularly. We don't draw lessons. We just rant. We let it out and we listen.— % &For that's what conversations with friends actually is. It's there to make you feel less alone. And you hope, it makes your friend too feel so. For now they have someone to ping if they feel friendless. Or just bored.— % &
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Dream Walk— % &I was stopped in my tracks during my evening walk today. Usually, it happens when one spots a snake or a big cat lurking in the dark, but I spotted something as rare. A maroon Contessa drove out of the lonely alley out of the blue. All this happened so suddenly that I couldn't even think of taking out my phone to catch a documentary proof of my find. It felt like a dream, my mind playing tricks, hallucinating, in absence of any of these moving monuments from a glorious past in this sleepy small town of Dhanbad.— % &I had just taken a left turn towards an empty street, oblivious that two eerily familiar eyes would come my way. At first I saw the headlights peeping in the dark, two of them coupled like that of an owl on each side, and I wondered if it indeed was what I was thinking. It was. A frigging Hindustan Motors Contessa, that too in Dhanbad! As the car went past me, I turned around and chased it like a kid chasing the pied piper but to no avail. It felt like I had seen an owl not supposed be seen in Jharkhand and now the owl escaped for good. And I didn't know if it was a mere visitor or a resident. And for how long would it stay here.— % &I never imagined I'd spot a pretty old car in Dhanbad, that too in motion, and that too a Contessa, that too a maroon one, so bewitching that it'd fill me with longing.
The Contessa is the only pretty old car I wish to buy, for it promises a leg room for that no Padmini could offer and its long front makes it look no less than a gangster. It's a car which demands you to wear pointed leather shoes to go along with its style. It's not everyday like old Maruti 800s nor is it a family car from the past like Padmini. It's a car someone with taste would buy. For it smells of opulence even in penury. The only true sedan from Hindustan Motors, away from the aristocratic gluttony of Ambassador, a Contessa is a car with class, and because it never screams its superiority but just exudes it, it is a class apart.— % &What was supposed to be a 3k walk became a 6k walk as I tried to locate that escaping Contessa parked somewhere in the subsequent lanes while its driver with leather shoe stepped out for a smoke but it seems the driver took it out for a spin. After tireless back and forth around the lane, I managed to find a garage—a relatively longer tin garage among the many squarish ones—and figured it might be its parking as its gate flaps were open as if the car would come back anytime now. After a couple of rounds, I left for home, checking every car that passed my way for familiar owl-eyed-headlights. Owls come out in the night, don't they? But I didn't spot the the car again. To my surprise, I didn't feel too dejected and I only realised why later. I have birding to thank for that. Birding taught me that if you know the bird's nest, sooner or later, you meet the bird. With that hope...— % &How does a 10k tomorrow sound?— % &-
The Great Urge to Write— % &I didn't write anything in the last three weeks and I initially blamed it on not having enough time, on having my plates full. As it turned out, it wasn't any of that. Over the past three days, I have been writing regularly, my mind abuzz with both ideas and observations from living my everyday life, despite having my plates as full or empty as before. When I connect the dots, I could find just one reason behind my sudden need for expression. A book I'm reading is inspiring me to pick up the pen with an urgency that I didn't feel in a long time.— % &The truth is the weeks I wasn't writing, I wasn't reading anything worthwhile either. The tasteless work emails and a couple of Instagram posts rarely give us anything invigorating to make us sit down with our quills and burn the midnight oil. Writing isn't just about writing alone but also about reflecting. Nothing inspires one to write more than encountering a sentence so truthful and timeless (better still, paragraphs!) that makes you sit up and reread what you just sleepwalked through. This is something only great literature can do.— % &The book I'm reading is called The Tartar Steppe and it's an Italian classic from the 1940s. It's about a soldier who arrives at a remote border station in the Tartar desert and instantly wants to leave, missing the company and culture of the city he left behind. He finds everything too dull and bland. His seniors promise to relieve him in a day at first but it soon becomes months, and then years. His wait morphs into a sedimentation of self in one place, his yearning laden with dust, like all the other soldiers, whose lives are hinged on the wait for one great and glorious battle—which will give their lives meaning—a battle which never happens.— % &I find it a great metaphor to not only my life but every adult life. We get into something soporific—a boring job, an unfulfilling relationship, an uninspiring company—thinking we'd leave it after a while but slowly give into it, letting its ills spread through us like disease, making our dreamy selves sick, unwilling to change or break free. The book, like all great books, makes one question a lot of things. I'm left trying to figure what is that remote Tartar station in my life which might have become my comfort zone, suppressing all my yearnings. Is it running startups or choosing to remain in India or coming back home for so long? I don't have answers. Thankfully.— % &Because it's only when you don't have answers can you beckon your long lost friend that is writing. For writing helps—no, not always in arriving at answers but most times, in arriving at the right questions. But for the right question, one needs the right direction to think and that's where great literature comes to rescue. That's why even when our plates are full and we feel we don't have time to write, a book can pull us out of that inertia of wordlessness and worldliness. It shoots us in the wonderland.— % &When out of worthy questions, pick an old classic and let its authors pose their questions at you. As they did to me and rescued me from giving in to the ennui, time and again, without my knowledge. Hemingway asked the point of every long journey I took in The Old Man and the Sea. Kafka asked for how long I'd depend on my parents as a struggling full-time writer in The Metamorphosis. Rushdie asked me if my voice was stolen, would it be worth fighting for in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Barnes asked if I'd become like every old person I detested when I turned old in The Only Story. Lahiri asked if my relationships were an honest conversation short of becoming a temporary matter in The Interpreter of Maladies. And right now, Buzzati is asking me if I'm in a comfort zone of hopeless hopefulness in The Tartar Steppe.— % &My answer is hidden somewhere in the words that I'll write. Maybe not right away. Maybe in the words that follow. Or in the words that follow the words that follow the words I write many years later. Maybe there are no answers but more right questions. Perhaps, that's why we read and write. To let the author ask us their question and then to interpret and refine it further and further until it becomes the right question to ask ourselves.— % &
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On Changing Cities— % &Almost everything about us as adults goes back to our childhood.— % &Owing to my father's transferable job, I changed cities every three years while growing up. Schools changed, teachers changed, friends changed. Even hobbies changed. In one school, I was the best cricketer. In the other, I was the worst. In one school, I had the best English. In the other, I barely passed the subject. In one school, I played football regularly, and in the other, to my dismay, there wasn't a football ground.
In one school, Urdu was the additional language,
in the other, it was Sanskrit.— % &What do you make of a childhood that constantly uproots you and your relationships? You get detached. You start looking forward to moving. It gets you excited. For instance, now I have almost zeroed in on the decision to leave Bangalore for good and have picked a place to live along with my partner. I can't wait to carry on with the plan sometime in the latter half of the year when I go back. When you have grown up moving, the abandonment of old for something new becomes a part of your life. You don't look back. There's too much to look forward to.— % &And that's why every time I was rooted in one place for far too long, I would want to break free out of habit. The city would start gnawing at me, no matter how big or small it was. After four years in college, it meant taking a gap year to simply travel. Living in Bangalore since 2017, it meant running away from its m half-hearted clutch towards the mountains or forests every two years. This time, I have been away for seven months already—first three months in Dharamshala, next one month in Manali and the last three in Dhanbad and Kolkata, and I'm still planning where next.— % &My parents also changed cities frequently—they were the trigger rather—but I wonder how they could be so rooted in Dhanbad for the past two decades. Don't they miss their old ways? Why don't they feel like escaping like me? And that's when it dawns on me—they didn't keep moving in their childhood. They were pretty much stationed in one place, in one city, from birth till they were in their twenties. Papa was in Patna, Ma was in Hazaribagh. I reframe the question and instead wait for the morning to arrive to ask them:
How difficult was it to keep changing cities as young adults, newly married, leaving their homes and friends behind, when their home and friends meant one city?— % &-
Do you know what's the healthiest sign of someone with a good self-esteem? The time they take to say sorry is minimum.
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Her letters flew away in the wind today. Two days later, her words fell back on the ground with the rain.
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I can't overstate how important it is to be idle to be a writer. There's a reason why Tagore could be so prolific. He didn't need to go to work. As a zamindar, he could afford idleness. Same for Vikram Seth. He could vegetate/meditate for years in his mother's plush government quarters to write The Suitable Boy.
When you're idle, you scan everything you feel, you question every belief and you weigh every relationship—with people, place or the state. You closely watch life happen to you. You get to procrastinate and let ideas gestate and take shape over time. You get to chase a thought to its very end, by slowing it down and yet not letting it go with the help of writing.
I was idle in December. I felt everything deeply. I wrote down everything & everyday. But this January, I shook up my stasis. I took up consulting projects, projects outside of things I built, projects that reveal the fascinating new world of AI that I hadn't seen up close. And I got cut off from writing almost instantly. Not that I don't have the time to write—I lack the time to think. My thoughts don't stay with me for long enough to reach an end worthy of their beginning. They don't persist. They perish.-
As a writer, I don't ever wish to befriend authors. Not even those I look up to. Even conversing with them makes me awkward. A thick wall comes in between and I get clueless on what to talk about apart from their books or writing process.
I remember how during the 2023 BLF post-festival party, I met the novelists Amitava Kumar and Janice Pariat, and instead of having a regular small talk about this and that, I started telling Janice how her book was the first I took to Cubbon Reads, and instead of talking about the Patna connection with Kumar, I started asking him for tips on becoming a better writer. To my surprise, I turned into a coy fanboy of theirs and I hated that version of myself, especially because I'm not a big fan of either of them. I couldn't push myself to complete a single book by Janice, and the books by Kumar would have shared the same fate if not for them being set in Patna, my hometown.
I thought hard on why I act like this in front of authors and I found that I fear knowing them. I fear the flawed human in them would rupture the image I have concocted based on their words I read. While their measured writing might not disappoint me, they certainly will.-