Riddhi Dastidar

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

Dear readers, I've just returned from Kochi where I taught an art-writing workshop for the Biennale, then spent a week trying to cram in as much art, food, and coast as I could. I'll make up for the tardiness of February's dispatch with March's newsletter before the end of the month. After the neat box-square of February, March feels like a long month. Like the year has really kicked into its rhythm, and there's much to be done. In Delhi the temperature is still bearable indoors thank god,...