Riddhi Dastidar

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...

The Meal of Lord Candlestick by Leonora Carrington Before I was a writer I was a very sad girl. In my early twenties I spent a not insignificant amount of time consuming self-help/life-coach style material. Think Brené Brown¹, Martha Beck (both intelligent and useful imo), but also more random She-EO girlboss personalities whose names I forget now. My inroads into this sphere was a fellowship at Teach For India. As part of being a transformative teacher in under-resourced classrooms, TFI...

My friends and I are in our mid-thirties to forties. We've achieved a reasonable level of career-success, self-knowledge and skills at this point. Also the requisite hopes and heartbreaks of relationships that ended, sometimes in terribly traumatic ways, sometimes in cruelly ordinary discontent or distance. I know only a handful of people who have no desire for romantic companionship. This desire for a happily-ever-after, drummed into us by societal expectations and/or the human longing for ro