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.