Lagbhag jaihind

is the title of Vinod Kumar Shukla's twenty-page chapbook published in 1971, his public arrival in the world of Hindi poetry. It's also how I feel about the country at this moment, as the dust settles on Delhi's alleged flirtation with revolution.

Like many my age I was deeply skeptical of the whole thing, and only visited the protest site after the astonishing numbers and subsequent lathi-charge and police excess on 20th July. From Tuesday through Saturday I was on-site every day, unable to stay away, documenting and chatting with the crowd that spilled outside the cordoned off CJP site at Jantar Mantar. Most of the people I spoke to were first-timers at a protest; they'd travelled from Faizabad/Ayodhya, Patna, Jodhpur, Baroda, Goa, Chandni Chowk, Golf Links. I was asleep after spending the entire night at the site, when a journalist-friend called to tell me Pradhan had resigned. Nobody had expected it.

I'm sitting with my material, my experiences of that week and the dispiriting claims made to me about the CJP's patronage. I don't know yet how to feel.

*

It's been a rough six months for me, friends. There's a sign in the neighbourhood -- one of those I <3 NY offshoots that have sprung up everywhere so now we have I <3 Dwarka Sector 23 or whatever. Someone has stolen the 'I <3 CR' portion of the neon sign so now it just says: PARK.

That sums up my 2026 thus far. Someone stole my lights and now I'm just PARK.

Tooni -- the titular FAT CAT and logo of this newsletter -- died on the morning of 9th July.

After that impossible fact there's just silence. He was 12 and a half years old. He was the love of my life. About as long as there's been a Riddhi in Delhi, there has been a Tooni in the house she lives in. The house, the houses over the last 12 years have been of Tooni and Jeeves. Do you know what I mean? I want to write more about him at some point, but not now. Not yet, I can't. I need you to know that I named him Tooni because in Bangla fairy-lights are called 'tooni-bulb'. The cheapest, easiest way to bring some beauty into shitty student hostel rooms and first-job pathetic-stipend flats. Tooni was the light of our house. Our favourite thing. When I think of him, he is a light in my heart. Oh my baby boy.

I was reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in the week after his passing, because of course I was. Grief is a physical thing right? I want to cuddle Tooni about it like Didion wants to talk to her husband John about his death.

I can't eat. That's the most enduring grief symptom. I went on a pet-bereavement subreddit and found all my symptoms: nausea, loss of appetite, dissociation, guilt, bad sleep. People take edibles, up their SSRI dosage. I hit some kind of rock-bottom on Saturday after an art-event and went to my neighbour A's crying. She made me take a Clonazepam, and I finally managed to get some sleep that night.

There was another terrible season of the Ultimatum out and I watched all of it and got teary-eyed at the proposals. At the beginning of this year I inhabited a completely different reality. I'm really tired, guys.

I bought myself Lynda Barry's illustrated hardcover of What It Is. After wanting it for years I'm slowly reading bits of it every day. It's much weirder than the straightforward how-to comic manual I expected. Her answers are elusive and questions are haunting. She asks: What is a mood? Is it a place? Why do we say we are in it?  

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