What’s the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?

The Kindness I Could Never Repay

There are some acts of kindness that arrive so quietly that, at first, we scarcely recognise their magnitude. They do not come wrapped in ceremony or announced with trumpet blasts. They appear as a hand extended when we are stumbling, a chair offered when we are tired, a patient ear when our words have become tangled, or simply the reassuring presence of someone who refuses to let us feel alone.

The kindest thing someone has done for me was not a grand gesture. It was something infinitely more precious: someone stayed when leaving would have been easier.

There have been moments in life when confidence has deserted me, when circumstances have seemed heavier than my ability to carry them. In such moments, advice is not always what we need. Sometimes we need somebody who will sit beside us without trying to repair us. Someone who understands that silence, too, can be an embrace.

I remember the profound kindness of people who believed in me when I had begun to doubt myself. They did not necessarily say extraordinary things. Sometimes it was merely, “You will get through this.” Sometimes it was a smile, a phone call, a message, or an unhurried conversation. Yet those apparently ordinary gestures became small lamps in dark corridors.

Perhaps that is the secret architecture of kindness. It makes no noise while it is being built, but its shelter can last for years.

We often measure generosity in material terms—what someone gave us, how much they spent, how much they sacrificed. But the rarest gifts are frequently intangible: time, patience, forgiveness, trust and understanding. Money can purchase comfort; it cannot purchase genuine companionship. A thousand words of advice may be forgotten, but the memory of someone who simply stayed can become part of one’s emotional inheritance.

Kindness has another remarkable quality: it often outlives the person who offered it. A gentle word spoken decades ago may still echo within us. A teacher’s faith may continue to shape a student’s life long after the classroom has disappeared. A friend’s forgiveness may teach us how to forgive ourselves. A stranger’s generosity may alter our understanding of humanity.

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that life is not ultimately remembered by its possessions, achievements or accolades. We remember how people made us feel. We remember those who saw our imperfections and did not turn away; those who recognised our silence and did not demand an explanation; those who offered dignity when circumstances had taken some of it away.

The Sanskrit wisdom, “परोपकाराय फलन्ति वृक्षाः”—trees bear fruit for the benefit of others—captures something profound about a meaningful life. The finest human beings, like generous trees, give shade without asking who deserves it.

And perhaps the greatest kindness is to make another person believe, even for a fleeting moment, that the world is still a good place.

I have received such kindness.

I may never be able to repay it adequately. But perhaps repayment is not the purpose. Perhaps kindness is meant to travel forward, from one human heart to another, like a lamp lighting another lamp without diminishing its own flame.

So, when I think of the kindest thing someone has done for me, I do not think of a gift that can be held in the hand.

I think of a presence that held me together when I was quietly falling apart.

And that, I believe, is one of life’s most beautiful gifts: to be remembered not because someone gave us something, but because, for a little while, they made life easier to bear.

If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?

If Money Were No Measure: The Job I Would Still Choose

If salary were the same for every profession, what job would I be doing today?

It is an intriguing question because money, for better or worse, has become the great architect of our choices. We are often taught to ask, “What does it pay?” before we ask the more consequential question: “What does it mean?” Remove salary from the equation, and suddenly the façade falls away. What remains is inclination—the quiet voice within that tells us where we truly belong.

If I could choose again, I would still choose to be a teacher.

Not merely because I have spent much of my life in classrooms, corridors and school assemblies, but because teaching is one of those rare professions in which the currency is not money but influence. A teacher does not simply impart information; he leaves fingerprints on the future.

I have always found something almost sacred about the moment when a student’s eyes suddenly light up with understanding. A difficult concept, which had seemed like an impenetrable wall a moment ago, becomes a door. The teacher watches it happen and realises that education is not the filling of a vessel but the lighting of a lamp.

Perhaps I would teach Physics again. There is poetry even in Physics—the universe speaking in the austere language of equations, stars obeying laws written long before humanity learnt to read. To teach a young mind about gravity, light, motion or the immensity of space is, in some small way, to introduce that mind to the architecture of creation.

But I would want to teach more than Physics.

I would teach curiosity. I would teach resilience. I would teach a child that failure is not a verdict but a comma in the sentence of life. I would encourage questions rather than merely reward answers. And above all, I would try to convince young people that education should not end with an examination. The real examination begins when there is no question paper, no invigilator and no prescribed answer.

Perhaps, with salary removed from consideration, I might also choose to be a writer—or better still, remain both teacher and writer. The classroom would give me people; writing would give me solitude. Teaching would allow me to shape thoughts in conversation; writing would allow me to preserve them against the erosion of time.

There is an indescribable pleasure in putting a thought into words and watching it acquire a life of its own. A book can travel where its author cannot. It can enter a stranger’s room years after its creation and whisper something that perhaps the reader needed to hear that particular evening. What greater privilege can a writer ask for?

Yet if I had to choose only one profession, I would return to the classroom.

Because teaching offers something that a payslip cannot measure: the possibility of becoming a small but permanent part of someone else’s journey.

Years later, a former student may remember a sentence, a lesson, an admonition, a moment of encouragement—or simply the fact that someone believed in them when they did not believe in themselves. The teacher may have forgotten the incident altogether. The student may carry it for a lifetime.

That is the peculiar magic of education.

So, if tomorrow every profession came with exactly the same salary, I would not chase prestige, power or comfort. I would look for meaning. I would walk back into a classroom, pick up a piece of chalk—or its modern equivalent—and begin again.

For ultimately, the best job is not necessarily the one that makes us rich.

It is the one that makes us feel useful.

And if I could spend another lifetime doing anything at all, I would choose to spend it lighting lamps.

Share a hobby you’ve picked up recently — what got you into it?

When the Mind Finds Its Music: The Quiet Joy of Returning to the Keys

There are hobbies we acquire, and there are hobbies that quietly find their way back to us. Recently, I have been spending more time with music, particularly the harmonium and keyboard. It is not entirely a new pursuit; rather, it feels like an old friendship being rekindled after years of silence.

What drew me towards it was perhaps a simple longing for something that does not demand achievement. Life is often measured in outcomes—deadlines met, responsibilities discharged, targets accomplished. Music asks for none of these. It merely asks that we listen.

When I place my fingers on the keys and allow a familiar melody to emerge, something changes within me. The world, with its incessant clamour, seems to retreat a little. A tune from an old Hindi film, a bhajan, or a few phrases of Hindustani classical music can open doors to rooms long forgotten. Music possesses that rare alchemy: it can turn memory into melody and solitude into companionship.

Perhaps that is what attracted me most. In an age of notifications and hurried conversations, music offers an oasis of unhurried time. It teaches patience. A note cannot be forced into beauty; it has to be understood, felt and allowed to breathe. Even a wrong note has its lesson—it reminds us that perfection is not the prerequisite for joy.

I have also discovered that learning an instrument is a humbling experience. Knowledge gathered over a lifetime does not necessarily make one’s fingers more skilful. The hands must begin again, slowly and honestly. There is something profoundly democratic about music: the instrument does not care about one’s position, past achievements or age. It simply waits.

Sometimes I play merely to listen to the sound filling the room. At other times, I try to reproduce a melody that has remained somewhere in the recesses of memory. And occasionally, when the notes fall into place almost effortlessly, there is a fleeting moment of grace—the kind of moment for which hobbies are perhaps invented.

What began as an attempt to occupy my time has gradually become a way of inhabiting it.

I think that is the greatest gift of this newly renewed hobby. It has taught me that retirement, solitude or the passing of years need not signify an emptying of life. There are still melodies waiting to be discovered, pages waiting to be written, and mornings waiting to be given meaning.

Perhaps every human being carries an unwritten song within. We spend much of life listening to everyone else’s music. A hobby, sometimes, is simply the courage to hear our own.

And so, I continue to play—not because I hope to become a great musician, but because, for a few precious minutes, the world becomes quieter and the soul remembers how to sing.

What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

When Chance Whispered My Name: The Strange Mathematics of Coincidence

There are moments in life when coincidence ceases to feel like coincidence.

It arrives quietly, without announcement: a name appearing after years of silence, a forgotten song playing at precisely the moment one is thinking of someone, a chance meeting in a place where neither person had any reason to be. We usually dismiss such events with a smile and say, “What are the odds?” Yet sometimes the odds seem so improbable that the rational mind is left standing at the threshold of mystery.

The strangest coincidence I have ever experienced was not dramatic. No thunder rolled, no stars rearranged themselves in the heavens. It was an ordinary day, made extraordinary by an almost impossible alignment of circumstances.

I had been thinking about an old acquaintance whom I had not seen or spoken to for many years. There was no particular reason for the memory to surface. I had not looked at an old photograph, heard his name, or encountered anything connected with him. Yet, quite inexplicably, his face returned to my mind with unusual clarity.

I wondered, fleetingly, where life had taken him.

That evening, I went out for an entirely unrelated purpose. In the middle of the crowd, amidst hundreds of unfamiliar faces, I heard someone call my name.

I turned.

There he was.

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. We simply stared at each other with the astonishment of two travellers who had unexpectedly discovered that their roads, thought to be permanently separated, had somehow crossed again.

We laughed. We spoke of the years that had passed, of people we had known, places we had left behind and the curious geography of memory. But beneath the conversation was an unspoken question:

Why today?

Had I somehow anticipated the meeting? Had his presence stirred an invisible thread in the fabric of memory before I became consciously aware of it? Or was it merely an extraordinarily improbable accident?

Science would probably favour the last explanation. Our brains are remarkably good at finding patterns in randomness. With billions of human interactions occurring every day, improbable events are not only possible but inevitable. Given enough people, places and moments, coincidence becomes almost mathematically unavoidable.

And yet mathematics does not always satisfy the heart.

Carl Jung called such meaningful coincidences synchronicity—events connected not by obvious cause and effect, but by significance. Perhaps that is why some coincidences linger while others disappear immediately. A hundred accidental encounters may mean nothing; one may leave us quietly wondering whether the universe had briefly leaned towards us.

Perhaps coincidence is life’s way of reminding us that we do not possess the complete map.

We like to believe that life is governed by neat sequences: cause followed by effect, decision followed by consequence, yesterday leading logically into tomorrow. But existence is far more labyrinthine. A delayed train, a changed route, a cancelled appointment or a spontaneous decision to step into a particular café can alter the entire trajectory of a day—and occasionally, perhaps, a life.

The weirdest coincidences therefore fascinate me not because they prove that destiny exists, but because they expose the limitations of our certainty.

Maybe there is no cosmic hand arranging every encounter.

Maybe there is.

We simply do not know.

And perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what makes coincidence beautiful.

Life occasionally produces a moment so perfectly timed that we cannot help but pause. We look at the improbable intersection of people, places and time and feel, however briefly, that the universe has whispered something directly into our ear.

I have learnt not to demand an explanation for every such moment.

Some mysteries are not problems waiting to be solved.

Some are simply stories waiting to be remembered.

And whenever an unlikely coincidence crosses my path, I smile and think: perhaps life, in its own wonderfully eccentric way, is reminding me that not everything meaningful has to make sense.

What’s a book you never finished but still think about?

The Books We Leave Unfinished: Why Some Stories Refuse to Leave Us

There is a peculiar kind of book that we never finish, yet somehow never forget.

For me, it is not necessarily the book that defeated my attention, nor the one whose pages became tedious. Sometimes, an unfinished book remains unfinished precisely because it has entered some deeper chamber of the mind. We close it, place it on a shelf, and move on with life—but a sentence, a character, a landscape or an unanswered question continues to knock softly at the door of memory.

Perhaps the book I never finished was Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I began it with the solemn enthusiasm with which one approaches a great mountain. The pages seemed to contain not merely a story, but an entire civilisation—love and war, ambition and despair, history and destiny, drawing rooms and battlefields. Yet somewhere along the journey, life interrupted. The bookmark remained between its pages, an accidental monument to an unfinished pilgrimage.

Years passed.

Curiously, I never forgot the book.

I remembered the sensation of entering its immense world. I remembered its questions more than its answers. What governs human destiny—our choices, historical forces, chance, or some mysterious conjunction of all three? Can love survive the vanity of human beings? Does history belong to the celebrated figures who appear in textbooks, or to the countless ordinary souls who quietly endure it?

Perhaps this is the strange magic of an unfinished book: completion is not always necessary for influence.

Some books we finish and forget. Others we abandon halfway and carry for decades.

There is also something profoundly human about leaving a book unfinished. We like to imagine ourselves as creatures of completion—we finish courses, journeys, conversations and chapters of our lives. Yet reality rarely offers such neat punctuation. Friendships remain unresolved. Dreams are postponed. Questions accompany us to old age. People disappear before we have said everything we wished to say.

An unfinished book mirrors that imperfect architecture of existence.

Sometimes I wonder whether we abandon certain books because we are not yet ready for them. A book encountered at twenty may appear opaque, while the same book encountered at sixty may suddenly seem to be speaking directly to us. The words have not changed; we have.

That is perhaps why some books wait.

They sit silently upon shelves, gathering dust but not surrendering their meaning. One day, we may return to them and discover that the person who opened the book years ago is no longer the person turning its pages today.

And perhaps that is the real reason I still think about the book I never finished.

It reminds me that not every journey is measured by reaching the final page. Some journeys matter because of what they awaken within us. Some stories remain unfinished because life itself has interrupted the reading.

Maybe, someday, I will open that book again.

And if I do, I will not begin from where the bookmark lies.

I will begin as an older reader, carrying with me all the years that have passed between the two pages.

Because sometimes the books we never finish are the ones that finish something within us.

Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?

A Holiday Beyond the Horizon: My Dream Vacation in the Wizarding World

If I could choose any fictional world for a holiday, I would not hesitate to pack my bags for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Why settle for a postcard-perfect destination when one can spend a fortnight where staircases move, portraits speak, trains disappear into enchanted landscapes and a simple wand can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary?

A holiday there would begin, naturally, at King’s Cross Station. I would board the Hogwarts Express with the anticipation of a child and the curiosity of an explorer. As the train slipped into the countryside, I imagine the landscape becoming progressively more mysterious—mist curling over distant hills, ancient castles appearing beyond the trees, and perhaps an owl flying alongside the carriage as if it had a message meant only for me.

Hogwarts would be the centrepiece of the adventure. I would wander through its echoing corridors, examine the moving portraits and lose myself in the enormous library. I would attend a few lessons—not necessarily to become proficient at magic, but simply to experience the delicious absurdity of learning subjects such as Charms and Transfiguration. Imagine failing an examination because one’s feather stubbornly refuses to levitate!

Then there would be Hogsmeade: a village seemingly distilled from a winter dream. I would sit in a cosy corner of the Three Broomsticks, drink a mug of butterbeer and watch snow settle upon the rooftops. There is something wonderfully liberating about entering a world where adulthood momentarily loses its authority and imagination becomes the currency of the day.

But perhaps the greatest attraction would be the Forbidden Forest. I would venture into it cautiously, because every enchanting world needs a little danger. Among ancient trees and silvered shadows, I might encounter centaurs, magical creatures or something altogether inexplicable. A proper holiday, after all, should leave behind a few stories that sound unbelievable when retold.

And then there would be Diagon Alley—a paradise for the incurably curious. I would browse eccentric shops, purchase a wand, inspect magical curiosities and perhaps spend an unreasonable amount of time in Flourish and Blotts. In such a place, even window-shopping would feel like an expedition into another dimension.

What makes this fictional world so appealing, however, is not merely its magic. It is the philosophy beneath the fantasy: that wonder survives when we refuse to become entirely practical. The world of Harry Potter reminds us that courage is not the absence of fear, friendship can become a form of strength, and even the most ordinary person may possess an extraordinary capacity for goodness.

Perhaps that is why I would choose this world for a vacation. We travel not merely to change our surroundings but to recover something within ourselves. And what better place to rediscover curiosity than a universe where the impossible is simply another word for Tuesday?

I would return eventually, of course. The real world would still be waiting—with its clocks, bills, traffic and sensible explanations.

But I would return carrying a wand, a pocketful of memories and, hopefully, a little of the magic I had almost forgotten was there.

Some holidays give you photographs. The best ones give you back your sense of wonder.

If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?

If I Could Return to One Moment in History

Some moments belong to history; others belong to the human conscience.

If I were given the improbable privilege of turning back the hands of time and standing, even for a few minutes, inside one historical moment, I would choose 15 August 1947—the dawn of India’s independence.

Not merely to witness the lowering of one flag and the raising of another, but to feel the pulse of a civilisation awakening after nearly two centuries of colonial rule.

I imagine Delhi before sunrise: the air heavy with anticipation, the streets filled with ordinary people carrying extraordinary dreams. Somewhere, a mother might have whispered a prayer for a future she would never see. Somewhere, a young freedom fighter might have stood silently, remembering comrades who had sacrificed everything but would never witness the freedom for which they had struggled.

And then, at midnight, history would have crossed an invisible threshold.

India was not simply becoming politically independent. It was attempting to reclaim its voice.

I would want to stand there and listen—not merely to the speeches, but to the silence between them. For history is often recorded in proclamations, treaties and dates; yet its deepest meaning resides in the emotions of those who live through it.

I would look at Jawaharlal Nehru delivering his celebrated “Tryst with Destiny” speech and wonder what those words meant to the millions who had endured poverty, imprisonment, discrimination and uncertainty. Independence was a magnificent promise, but it was also an immense responsibility.

Yet I would not wish to remain only in the triumphant moment.

I would want to walk through the following days and witness the paradox that accompanied freedom: celebration on one side and Partition on the other. The same dawn that illuminated hopes also cast long shadows across Punjab and Bengal. Trains carried not only passengers but grief; borders were drawn on maps, while human lives were torn from familiar landscapes.

Perhaps that is precisely why I would choose this moment.

History rarely offers us uncomplicated victories. The birth of a nation can simultaneously be a celebration and a wound. Freedom can arrive carrying both flowers and ashes.

If I could return, I would not attempt to alter history. I would simply observe, listen and learn.

I would ask the people of 1947 what they imagined India would become. Did they dream of an India without hunger? An India where education reached every child? An India where caste, poverty and prejudice would gradually lose their grip? Did they imagine technological progress, bustling cities and a nation capable of speaking confidently on the world stage?

And perhaps I would ask one more question:

“Have we fulfilled the promise you made to the future?”

That question would be uncomfortable—and necessary.

Seventy-nine years later, India has travelled an extraordinary distance. Yet history reminds us that political independence is only the first chapter of freedom. A nation is truly free when dignity is not a privilege, education is not a luxury, justice is not selective, and opportunity does not depend upon the circumstances of one’s birth.

I would therefore return to 15 August 1947 not because I believe the past was better, but because the past gives the present a mirror.

Standing there, amidst the flags, speeches and dreams, I would perhaps understand something profoundly simple: every generation inherits a freedom that another generation struggled to obtain, and every generation must decide what it will do with it.

I would return to that dawn carrying no desire to rewrite history.

I would return only to listen.

And when the clock finally brought me back to the present, I would hope to carry one message with me:

Freedom is not a destination reached on a particular midnight. It is a promise renewed every morning.

Ink Beneath the Skin: The One Word I Would Carry Forever

If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?

Ink Beneath the Skin: The One Word I Would Carry Forever

If I had to get a tattoo right now, I would not choose a name, a date, a quotation or an elaborate symbol. I would choose a single word:

“Still.”

A small word, almost austere in its simplicity, yet capable of carrying an entire philosophy of life.

Still means many things. It means quietness, but also continuity. It suggests something that has not been swept away by the storms around it. A tree may bend in a tempest and still remain rooted. A lamp may flicker in the wind and still give light. A human being may be bruised by life and still choose to rise the following morning.

That is the tattoo I would want—not merely an ornament on the skin, but a reminder etched into the body of something the mind too easily forgets.

Life has a peculiar habit of taking away what we once believed indispensable. Years alter our faces, circumstances rearrange our priorities, people enter and leave, ambitions change their names, and yesterday’s certainties become today’s questions. Yet, somewhere beneath all these alterations, there remains a quiet self that whispers: Continue.

Still.

The word would remind me that endurance is not always heroic. Sometimes it is simply getting out of bed when the heart would rather remain beneath the blanket of yesterday. Sometimes it is opening a book when the world has become too noisy to read. Sometimes it is writing one more page, taking one more walk, listening to one more piece of music, or watching the evening sky without demanding an explanation from it.

I have always believed that the most profound battles of life are fought without witnesses. No medals are awarded for surviving disappointment. No applause follows the private decision to begin again. Yet those invisible victories often constitute the architecture of character.

Perhaps that is why I would not choose a tattoo that declares I conquered. I would choose one that quietly says, I remained.

There is something deeply Indian in this idea. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of steadiness amidst the turbulence of circumstance—the sthita-prajna, the person whose wisdom is not easily shaken by pleasure or pain. One need not proclaim such steadiness; one must cultivate it. A tattoo, then, could become less decoration and more a personal sutra—a thread of remembrance worn close to the skin.

And why the wrist, perhaps?

Because the wrist is where time is measured.

Every glance at it would become a small encounter with the past and a quiet instruction for the future. The word would sit there like an old friend:

Still here.

Still learning.

Still hopeful.

Still creating.

Still becoming.

Age, I have learnt, is not merely a number accumulated by the calendar. It is a library of departures, discoveries, mistakes, recoveries and unfinished sentences. The temptation is to believe that certain chapters have closed permanently. But perhaps life is less like a book with numbered chapters and more like a river—always moving, occasionally changing its course, never entirely abandoning its source.

So, if I had to get a tattoo today, I would choose neither rebellion nor vanity.

I would choose remembrance.

One word. Four letters. A lifetime of meaning.

Still.

Because the greatest declaration is not that life never wounded us.

It is that, despite everything,

we are still here.

When Two Paths Quietly Become One

How did you meet your significant other?

When Two Paths Quietly Become One

Some meetings are announced by destiny with trumpets; others arrive so quietly that we recognise their importance only much later. I belong to the latter kind.

I did not meet my significant other in some cinematic setting, beneath a dramatic sunset or amid a symphony of violins. There was no thunderclap announcing, This is the person who will change your life. It was, in fact, an ordinary meeting—almost deceptively ordinary. Yet life has a curious habit of concealing its most consequential moments beneath the cloak of the commonplace.

We met when neither of us perhaps understood how profoundly a single introduction could alter the geography of the years ahead. At first, there was no grand romance. There was conversation, curiosity, a gradual recognition of temperament, and that elusive comfort one occasionally discovers in another human being—the feeling that silence does not need to be filled.

What drew me was not merely appearance, charm or the superficial sparkle that often masquerades as affection. It was something quieter: a certain steadiness of character. There was warmth without pretence, strength without arrogance, and an ability to make an ordinary moment feel less ordinary.

Love, I have come to believe, does not always arrive as a storm. Sometimes it is like dawn. The sky does not suddenly explode with light; darkness simply begins to retreat, almost imperceptibly, until one realises that the world has changed.

Our relationship, too, grew by degrees. Conversations became longer. Familiarity became friendship; friendship acquired tenderness; and tenderness slowly became a bond strong enough to withstand the inevitable weather of life. We discovered that companionship is not merely about sharing laughter. It is also about learning each other’s silences, respecting differences and remaining present when circumstances cease to be kind.

Years have taught me that a significant other is not necessarily the person who completes us. We are not half-souls searching for another half to become whole. Rather, the right person walks beside us while we continue the lifelong work of becoming ourselves.

There are moments when I look back at that first meeting and marvel at the strange architecture of fate. How many apparently insignificant encounters pass through our lives without leaving a footprint? And how extraordinary that, occasionally, one encounter becomes a doorway.

Perhaps that is the real mystery of love—not that two people meet, but that among millions of possible encounters, two lives recognise something in one another and decide, consciously or unconsciously, to remain.

If I were asked today how I met my significant other, I could describe the circumstances. But circumstances are only the prologue. The deeper answer lies elsewhere.

I met someone who gradually became familiar, then precious, and eventually indispensable to the story of my life.

And perhaps that is how the finest love stories begin—not with a dramatic declaration, but with two ordinary people meeting on an ordinary day, unaware that destiny has quietly turned the page.

The Sacred Art of Touching Feet: When Respect Becomes a Gesture.

What’s a cultural tradition from your country that you love?

The Sacred Art of Touching Feet: When Respect Becomes a Gesture.

Every culture possesses certain traditions that survive not merely because they are ancient, but because they continue to whisper something meaningful to the human heart. In India, the tradition I have always found particularly beautiful is touching the feet of elders as a gesture of respect and seeking their blessings.
To an outsider, it may appear to be a simple physical gesture. To me, it represents something far more profound: the graceful acknowledgement that wisdom is not always acquired from books, and that age, experience and the lessons of a lived life deserve reverence.
There is something almost poetic about the moment. A younger person bends; an elder raises a hand in blessing. For a fleeting instant, generations meet—not through argument or instruction, but through silence. The gesture seems to say: I honour the journey you have travelled; may some of its wisdom illuminate mine.
Indian civilisation has traditionally understood knowledge as an inheritance. The Guru-Shishya tradition, our scriptures, epics and countless oral traditions all reflect an abiding respect for those who have walked the road before us. Knowledge, in this philosophy, is not merely information to be acquired; it is wisdom to be received with humility.
And humility is perhaps the most beautiful dimension of this tradition.
We live in an age that sometimes confuses confidence with certainty and youth with omniscience. We celebrate speed, novelty and disruption, occasionally forgetting that experience is a library no search engine can fully reproduce. To bow before someone older is not necessarily to surrender one’s individuality. It is to acknowledge that one’s own perspective is incomplete.
There is also something deeply egalitarian about the emotional principle behind the gesture. The blessing that follows is not a transaction. It cannot be bought, measured or quantified. It is a moment of goodwill—an older hand resting above a younger head, silently wishing that life may be kinder, wiser and more generous.
Of course, traditions must evolve with time. Reverence should never become servility, and age alone should not become a licence for authority. Respect must be reciprocal. The young deserve to be heard, just as the old deserve to be honoured.
That, perhaps, is the distinction between tradition and ritual. A ritual is something we perform; a tradition is something we understand.
What I love about this Indian custom, therefore, is not the act of bending itself. It is the philosophy concealed within that movement—the gentle reminder that we are not self-created beings. We are the inheritors of languages, memories, sacrifices, ideas and values that preceded us.
In a world increasingly enamoured of the new, there is dignity in remembering the old.
Perhaps that is why I still find something profoundly moving in the sight of a young person bending respectfully before an elder. It lasts only a second, yet it contains an entire philosophy of life: remember where you come from, honour those who walked before you, and receive wisdom with a heart humble enough to learn.
Traditions such as these are not chains binding us to the past.
At their finest, there are bridges between generations—quiet bridges across which wisdom travels.

The Day I Would Steal from Time

If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?

The Day I Would Steal from Time

If I were given a strange, impossible gift—the power to turn the hands of the clock backwards and relive one single day from my past—I would not choose a day of achievement, applause or triumph.
I would choose an ordinary day.
Perhaps that is the peculiar cruelty of growing older: we spend our youth waiting for extraordinary days, only to discover that the days we eventually miss most were astonishingly ordinary.
I would choose a day when life had not yet acquired its full weight. A day when the morning seemed endless, the afternoon unhurried and the evening carried no anxiety about tomorrow. A day when I did not know that some people I met would eventually become memories, that certain places would disappear, and that some doors, once closed, would never open again.
I would wake before the world became noisy.
I would listen carefully to the sounds that once passed unnoticed—the stirring of the morning, the distant voices, the rhythm of footsteps, perhaps the call of a bird perched somewhere beyond the window. I would not reach immediately for a telephone or worry about messages waiting to be answered. I would simply sit there and allow the morning to exist.
How rarely we inhabit the present while it is actually happening.
When we are young, we are forever leaning towards the future. We want the next class, the next examination, the next promotion, the next journey, the next achievement. We are impatient to become someone. And then, almost imperceptibly, the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and we discover that we have been rushing through the very life we wished to preserve.
If I could relive that one day, I would slow everything down.
I would look more closely at familiar faces. I would listen when someone spoke, instead of preparing my reply. I would laugh without wondering whether the laughter was worth remembering. I would walk through familiar streets as though seeing them for the first time.
And I would pay attention to the little things.
The smell of food being prepared. The warmth of sunlight on an old wall. The sound of rain against a roof. The rustle of pages in a book. The melancholy beauty of an evening sky. The peculiar comfort of a place that felt permanent only because I did not yet know that nothing is permanent.
Perhaps I would also say a few things that I once left unsaid.
That is one of life’s most persistent tragedies: we often discover the right words after the moment in which they mattered has passed.
I would say, Thank you.
I would say, I am sorry.
I would say, You mattered to me.
And perhaps, to some people, I would simply say, Stay a little longer.
But time does not negotiate.
The ancient Greeks imagined Chronos as the inexorable force of time, devouring everything in his path. The Indian imagination, too, has long understood the terrifying majesty of Kāla—time as both creator and destroyer. We may build monuments against oblivion, write books, preserve photographs and fill cupboards with souvenirs, but time remains undefeated.
Yet perhaps there is another way of understanding the past.
We cannot return to yesterday, but yesterday can return to us.
It comes in the fragrance of rain.
In an old song.
In a forgotten photograph.
In the turning of a page.
In a particular evening light that suddenly transports us across decades.
Memory is time’s secret rebellion against disappearance.
So, if I could relive one day, I would not try to change history. I would not correct every mistake or rewrite every decision. I would not attempt to manufacture a perfect life.
I would simply experience that day more completely.
For perhaps the greatest illusion of youth is believing that happiness announces itself.
It rarely does.
Happiness is often disguised as routine. It sits quietly at the breakfast table. It walks beside us on an ordinary road. It waits in an afternoon conversation. It hides inside a familiar melody. It accompanies us through days we barely notice.
Only much later do we recognise them as treasures.
If I were granted that impossible day, I would therefore make myself a promise: I would not take a single moment for granted.
And when midnight finally arrived, I would not plead with time to give me another day.
I would simply whisper, Thank you.
Because perhaps the purpose of reliving the past is not to remain there.
It is to return to the present with wiser eyes.
We cannot relive yesterday.
But we can live today in such a way that, years from now, when memory comes knocking, we will have a beautiful day to open the door to.
And perhaps that is the closest thing we have to travelling backwards through time.

What’s the last movie that made you cry?

When the Screen Became a Mirror: Why Pather Panchali Made Me Cry

There are films that entertain us, films that impress us, and films that quietly enter the chambers of our memory and refuse to leave. Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s immortal 1955 masterpiece, belongs to the last category. The last movie that made me cry was not a sentimental blockbuster, nor a carefully engineered tragedy designed to extract tears. It was Pather Panchali—a film whose emotional power lies precisely in its refusal to manipulate emotion.

Ray does something remarkably difficult: he makes us weep without telling us when to weep.

Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel, the film follows the impoverished Roy family in rural Bengal, particularly the children Apu and Durga, as they discover the world with the curiosity that only childhood can possess. Yet beneath their innocent adventures runs the persistent undertow of deprivation. Hunger, poverty, ageing, disappointment and death are not presented as dramatic spectacles; they are simply woven into the fabric of everyday existence.

And perhaps that is why the tears come.

I found myself thinking that poverty in Pather Panchali is not merely an economic condition. It becomes an atmosphere—a kind of invisible weather surrounding the characters. The family does not merely lack money; it is constantly negotiating with uncertainty. A little food becomes precious. A new possession becomes an event. A journey beyond the familiar becomes an expedition into wonder.

Yet Ray never allows poverty to become the whole story.

There is laughter. There is mischief. There is curiosity. There is beauty.

Durga running through the fields with Apu, the excitement of seeing a train for the first time, the rustle of nature, the monsoon clouds, the ponds and trees, the flickering rhythms of village life—all these moments remind us that even the most deprived childhood may contain islands of enchantment.

The famous train sequence particularly moved me. The train is more than a machine passing through the landscape. For Apu and Durga, it becomes a symbol of another world—a world of movement, possibility and horizons beyond the boundaries of their village.

They run towards it with wonder.

We, the audience, watch them knowing something they do not.

That is where Ray’s genius becomes almost unbearable.

The children see possibility. We see mortality.

The camera does not need melodrama. The landscape itself seems to whisper what the characters cannot yet understand. Innocence and inevitability walk side by side.

And then there is Indir Thakrun, the old woman whose frailty and loneliness are portrayed with extraordinary tenderness. She is not turned into a caricature of poverty or old age. She possesses humour, dignity, longing and an aching vulnerability. Her presence reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: societies often measure human worth by usefulness, while age quietly teaches us that every human being longs to be remembered.

Her death is devastating precisely because Ray does not manufacture a grand cinematic moment around it.

Life simply moves on.

That may be the cruelest thing about life—and perhaps the most truthful thing about the film.

People disappear, but the world continues.

The rain falls.

The leaves tremble.

Children grow.

The road remains.

I think that is what finally broke me.

Pather Panchali made me realise that tears are not always born from sorrow alone. Sometimes they emerge from recognition. We cry because something on the screen resembles something buried within ourselves—the memory of childhood, the vulnerability of the poor, the fragility of happiness, the inevitability of separation, or simply the knowledge that everything beautiful is transient.

There is something profoundly Indian about Ray’s cinematic sensibility. He does not treat life as a succession of spectacular events. Instead, he discovers poetry in the apparently insignificant: a glance, a meal, a storm, a child’s curiosity, an old woman’s tired footsteps.

It recalls the ancient Indian intuition that the ordinary world is not ordinary at all.

The Upanishadic imagination often asks us to look beyond appearances—to discover the infinite concealed within the finite. Ray achieves something similar through cinema. A village path becomes a metaphor for existence. A train becomes destiny. Rain becomes both renewal and destruction. Childhood becomes a brief country from which we are all eventually exiled.

Perhaps that is why the title itself feels so appropriate: Pather Panchali—the song of the road.

And what is life if not a road?

We walk it believing we are travelling towards something, only to discover that the road itself was the story.

What touched me most was Ray’s refusal to divide the world neatly into happiness and sorrow. His characters inhabit both simultaneously. Apu can laugh while living in poverty. Durga can dance in the rain even when life is already tightening its grip. Sarbajaya can love fiercely and still lose patience. Harihar can dream of a better life while being powerless to provide it.

They are not symbols.

They are human beings.

That distinction matters.

Cinema often asks us to admire characters. Ray asks us to inhabit them.

And once we inhabit them, their suffering becomes strangely intimate.

Perhaps this is the greatest achievement of Pather Panchali: it transforms strangers into memories.

When the film ended, I was left not merely with sadness but with a peculiar silence. It was the silence that follows the reading of great literature—the feeling that something has been said about life without ever being explained.

I realised that I had not cried simply because something tragic happened.

I had cried because something true had happened.

And truth, when it arrives without ornament, can be far more devastating than tragedy.

Satyajit Ray did not make Pather Panchali merely to tell us that life can be difficult. He showed us something more profound: that even amid hunger, grief and impermanence, life remains capable of wonder.

Perhaps that is why the film continues to breathe decades after it was made.

It reminds us that childhood is fleeting, beauty is fragile, poverty is cruel, love is complicated and death is inevitable—but none of these truths cancels the magnificence of being alive.

Sometimes a great film leaves us exhilarated.

Sometimes it leaves us thoughtful.

And sometimes, like Pather Panchali, it leaves us quietly wiping our eyes while staring at the screen long after the final frame has disappeared.

Those are not merely films we watch.

They are films that watch us back.

If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

The Sanskrit wisdom of the Mahabharata contains a profound truth: “Ahimsa paramo dharmah”—non-violence is the highest duty. Yet non-violence is not merely the absence of physical aggression. It is also the refusal to cultivate hatred in the mind, contempt in language and cruelty in institutions.

If I Could Erase One Page of History…

History is not merely a catalogue of dates, battles, coronations and treaties. It is humanity’s collective memory—the vast manuscript in which our triumphs and tragedies, our wisdom and our follies, are preserved. To erase a single event from that manuscript would therefore be an extraordinary act. It would not simply alter the past; it might rearrange the present and perhaps redraw the future.

If I were given such an impossible privilege, I would erase the Holocaust.

Not because it is the only terrible chapter in human history. It is not. History contains slavery, colonial atrocities, genocides, wars, famines, inquisitions and countless instances of man’s cruelty towards man. But the Holocaust represents something particularly chilling: the deliberate transformation of prejudice into policy, hatred into administration, and murder into a system.

Millions of innocent people were persecuted and murdered because of who they were. Jewish men, women and children were stripped of their dignity, their homes, their possessions and ultimately their lives. Roma and Sinti people, people with disabilities, political opponents and others were also persecuted and killed by the Nazi regime. What makes the Holocaust especially haunting is not merely the scale of the killing, but the machinery behind it—the bureaucratic efficiency with which human beings were reduced to numbers, categories and expendable lives.

The Holocaust reminds us that civilisation is thinner than we like to believe.

We often imagine barbarity as something primitive: the violence of an uneducated mob, the rage of a lawless society. Yet the Holocaust unfolded in one of the most culturally sophisticated countries of its time. There were universities, orchestras, philosophers, scientists, writers, engineers and doctors. There was literature and music; there were laws and institutions.

And still, civilisation failed.

That is perhaps the most frightening lesson.

Hatred rarely arrives announcing itself as hatred. It often begins with words. First, someone is described as inferior. Then as undesirable. Then as dangerous. Eventually, the language changes from they are different to they are the problem. Once a society becomes comfortable with dehumanising another group, the distance between contempt and cruelty can become dangerously short.

The Holocaust therefore belongs not only to Jewish history or European history. It belongs to human history.

If I could erase it, I would not erase its lesson. I would erase the suffering while preserving the warning.

But perhaps that is where the paradox begins.

Can we really learn from something that never happened?

If the Holocaust disappeared from history, generations might never understand how quickly prejudice can become persecution. They might never appreciate the importance of confronting hatred before it acquires political power. The absence of the tragedy could itself become a dangerous absence of memory.

And so, perhaps, I would choose a different kind of erasure.

I would erase the hatred that made the Holocaust possible, rather than erase the Holocaust itself.

I would go back to the moment when prejudice first became permissible; when propaganda began replacing reason; when people discovered that silence was more convenient than courage. I would erase that moment of moral surrender.

Because atrocities do not begin in concentration camps.

They begin much earlier—in jokes, stereotypes, casual insults, indifference and silence.

They begin when decent people convince themselves that someone else’s humiliation is none of their concern.

They begin when humanity is divided into us and them.

Perhaps history’s greatest tragedy is not that evil exists. It is that ordinary people can sometimes become accustomed to it.

If I could erase one thing from history, therefore, I would erase the first seed of organised hatred—the moment when human beings began believing that another human being could possess less dignity, less right to live, or less claim upon compassion.

But history cannot be rewritten.

Perhaps that is its sternest purpose.

We cannot undo Auschwitz. We cannot resurrect those who were murdered. We cannot return stolen childhoods, reunite shattered families or restore lives interrupted by hatred.

What we can do is refuse to allow memory to become a museum exhibit that we visit occasionally and then forget.

History should not merely tell us what happened.

But we can prevent tomorrow from becoming another yesterday.

It should whisper into our conscience:

It happened once. Do not allow the conditions that made it possible to happen again.

Perhaps, then, the real power to erase history lies not behind us but before us.

We cannot erase yesterday.

And if humanity ever learns to do that, perhaps the most beautiful chapter of history will be the one we have yet to write.

What’s a conspiracy theory you actually find believable?

The Paranoid’s Almanac: Conspiracy Theories That May Have More Truth Than We Think

There is something deliciously unsettling about a conspiracy theory. It whispers where history speaks in a measured voice. It joins apparently unrelated dots, suspects the footnotes, distrusts the official narrative and asks the impertinent question: What if the story we were given was merely the story we were permitted to know?

Most conspiracy theories are, of course, precisely what their name suggests—conspiracies of imagination. They thrive in the fertile soil between ignorance and suspicion, where coincidence is promoted to evidence and coincidence is dressed in the robes of causality. Yet dismissing all conspiracy theories as lunacy is itself a form of intellectual laziness.

History has an inconvenient habit of vindicating a few of them.

The important distinction, therefore, is not between people who believe conspiracy theories and people who do not. It is between claims supported by evidence and claims sustained merely by suspicion.

Some alleged conspiracies were once mocked before documents, investigations and admissions transformed them from fantasy into history.

1. MKUltra: When “Mind Control” Was Not Merely a Movie Plot

If someone had told you decades ago that the CIA had secretly investigated methods of influencing human behaviour, including the use of psychoactive substances and experiments involving human subjects, you might reasonably have thought they had been watching too many Cold War thrillers.

Yet MKUltra was real.

Declassified CIA records contain numerous documents relating to the programme and its subprojects. In June 2026, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform even held a hearing titled Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.

This does not mean every lurid claim about MKUltra is true. It means something more disturbing: the underlying premise—that intelligence agencies once pursued secret behavioural and mind-control research—was not a paranoid invention.

The lesson is profound. Sometimes reality does not merely resemble fiction.

It embarrasses fiction by being stranger.

2. COINTELPRO: The State Can Become Interested in Your Opinions

Another conspiracy theory worth taking seriously is the notion that governments have sometimes infiltrated, monitored and deliberately disrupted political organisations and movements.

Again, this is not conjecture.

The FBI itself acknowledges that COINTELPRO began in 1956 and was subsequently expanded to include organisations ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Socialist Workers Party and the Black Panther Party. The Bureau acknowledges that agents infiltrated groups, attempted to sow discord and sought to discredit organisations, sometimes where there was little or no evidence of unlawful activity.

That revelation should make us uncomfortable—not because it proves that every government is secretly manipulating every movement, but because it demonstrates that institutional power is capable of exceeding its declared boundaries.

The conspiracy theorist says, “The government is watching everyone.”

The historian says, “Sometimes governments have watched people they should not have watched.”

The historian wins because he has the documents.

3. Mass Surveillance: The Digital Panopticon

For years, the idea that governments could collect vast quantities of communications data sounded like the stuff of dystopian fiction.

Then came revelations concerning bulk telephone metadata.

The NSA acknowledges that its former Section 215 programme involved the compelled provision of telephone metadata—including numbers called, dates, times and durations—under court orders. The Obama administration also publicly discussed the controversy surrounding bulk telephone-record collection in 2014.

Notice the subtlety here.

The real story is not necessarily, “Someone is listening to every conversation.” That claim goes far beyond the evidence.

The more interesting truth is that metadata can reveal the architecture of a person’s life without necessarily revealing the words they speak.

Who calls whom.
When they call.
How frequently.
For how long.

A telephone record can become a shadow biography.

The modern citizen may therefore have less privacy than he imagines—not because someone is sitting in a dark room listening to every syllable, but because algorithms can infer remarkably intimate patterns from apparently innocuous fragments.

The future of surveillance may not require ears.

It may require mathematics.

4. Watergate: Sometimes the “Wild Theory” Is Simply the First Draft of History

Watergate is perhaps the ultimate reminder that conspiracy theories should not always be laughed out of the room.

A political conspiracy really did occur. There really was covert activity surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The scandal eventually reached the highest levels of American government, and President Richard Nixon resigned.

The FBI’s own historical account records the extraordinary role of the Bureau in uncovering the Watergate affair and describes the subsequent crisis of confidence and reforms.

What began as something that could easily have been dismissed as political paranoia became a constitutional crisis.

The important lesson is not that every political scandal conceals a Watergate.

It is that power does occasionally conspire.

And when power conspires, it usually does not announce itself with thunder.

It leaves paperwork.

5. The More Believable Conspiracy: Governments Hide Things

Here is perhaps the conspiracy theory I find most believable—not a specific allegation, but a general proposition:

Governments conceal information.

That is not particularly controversial. Governments classify documents. Intelligence agencies protect sources. Military organisations conceal capabilities. Investigations are sometimes conducted behind closed doors.

The FBI, for instance, maintains the FBI Vault, an extensive repository of documents released through freedom-of-information processes.

The existence of such archives is itself a reminder that the public record is not always created simultaneously with the events it describes.

History often arrives late.

Sometimes decades late.

And that should temper our certainty whenever somebody says, “There is no evidence.”

“No evidence” can mean two entirely different things:

There is no evidence.

Or:

The evidence has not yet become available.

Those are not the same sentence.

6. The Conspiracy of Money

Here is another theory that deserves more intellectual attention: powerful economic interests sometimes influence public policy more than ordinary citizens realise.

This does not require a secret room populated by billionaires wearing identical black suits.

It requires something much more mundane—and therefore more formidable.

Lobbying.
Political donations.
Regulatory capture.
Corporate influence.
Revolving doors between government and industry.
Control over information.

The machinery of influence does not need to be clandestine to be consequential.

The real conspiracy may sometimes be perfectly legal.

That is what makes it difficult to detect.

A bribe is scandalous because it is illegal. Influence exercised through legitimate institutions can be far more subtle.

Perhaps the most sophisticated conspiracies are those that require no conspiracy at all.

7. The Theory That Algorithms Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

This is the conspiracy theory of our age.

People sometimes imagine that their phones are secretly listening to every conversation so that advertisements can mysteriously follow them around the internet.

The explanation may be less cinematic and more unsettling.

Algorithms do not necessarily need to hear your private conversation. They can learn from your searches, clicks, purchases, movements, viewing habits, contacts, pauses and preferences.

From thousands of seemingly trivial decisions, a remarkably intimate portrait can emerge.

The modern algorithm is a kind of digital astrologer—but unlike the astrologer, it has data.

It does not need to know your soul.

It merely needs to know your behaviour.

And behaviour, repeated often enough, becomes prediction.

What I Would Not Believe Without Evidence

There are theories that remain fascinating but unsupported: secret societies controlling every government, the Earth being flat, elaborate claims that every major historical event was staged, or the belief that a single hidden cabal orchestrates virtually everything that happens in the world.

The problem with such theories is not that they are too strange.

Reality itself is strange.

The problem is that many of these theories are constructed so that nothing can disprove them.

If evidence contradicts the theory, the contradiction itself becomes evidence of the conspiracy.

That is an intellectual cul-de-sac.

A theory that cannot possibly be falsified is not necessarily profound.

Sometimes it is simply unfalsifiable.

The Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory

There is, however, one conspiracy theory I find particularly dangerous:

“Everything is controlled by someone.”

It is seductive because it converts chaos into architecture.

A pandemic becomes a plan.
A financial crash becomes a plot.
A war becomes somebody’s master design.
A political defeat becomes manipulation.
A personal misfortune becomes evidence of hidden forces.

But the universe is under no obligation to be coherent.

Sometimes things happen because millions of independent decisions collide.

Sometimes incompetence explains what conspiracy cannot.

Sometimes greed is decentralised.

Sometimes stupidity is sufficient.

And sometimes—perhaps most frighteningly—nobody is in control.

The Golden Rule of Suspicion

I do not think we should become believers in conspiracy theories.

I think we should become better interrogators of narratives.

Ask:

Who benefits?
What is the evidence?
What would disprove this claim?
Is there a primary source?
Are several independent sources saying the same thing?
Am I mistaking coincidence for causation?
Could incompetence explain this better than conspiracy?
Am I believing this because it is true—or because it is satisfying?

The last question may be the most important.

Human beings have an almost liturgical hunger for patterns. We dislike loose ends. We prefer villains to randomness and designs to accidents. A conspiracy gives chaos a dramaturgy.

But scepticism should cut in both directions.

We should be sceptical of the official story.

And equally sceptical of the unofficial one.

Perhaps the mature position lies somewhere between credulity and cynicism: a willingness to entertain extraordinary possibilities without surrendering our standards of evidence.

History has shown us that some conspiracies were real.

It has also shown us that countless others were not.

So I would keep the door open—but not remove the lock.

Because sometimes behind the door is a suppressed truth.

Sometimes there is merely a broom cupboard.

And occasionally, when we open it, we discover something far more unsettling than a conspiracy:

the world is complicated, power is fallible, human beings are unpredictable, and truth rarely arrives wearing a name badge.