I’ve been trying to calm my nervous system. That’s my goal for 2026 — learn to regulate myself, stop letting external circumstances pull me under. That’s why the meditation. But let me tell you why it’s been so difficult to actually do that.

I had previously written about a fall out with my family that left me wounded, in my piece ‘Notes on Being a Disobedient Daughter.’ While I was still recovering from that rupture, my external circumstances only tested me further.

On the 1st of January this year, I was moving from one place to another. I was quite looking forward to it for I was going to get a room for myself. I had hired brokers for the first time, believing I could choose ease even if it meant spending more. I was promised a room of my own with my own bathroom. After months of family chaos, emotional manipulation and caregiving stress, a room of my own definitely felt like it meant something, a space for me to be able to finally breathe and put myself back together piece by piece.

To my surprise, what instead happened was, I showed up with all my belongings and was told: different flat, shared bathroom with six strangers, higher rent, and if you don’t pay right now you don’t get keys at all. The brokers disappeared. I felt like I was held hostage – pay more than agreed or have nowhere to sleep on January 1st.

Around the same time, a friendship I cared deeply about changed once feelings entered the room and couldn’t stay there, and that shook my sense of self-worth. I’m still navigating what it means.

But I chose not to suffer alone.

I didn’t try to manage everything by myself. I reached out for support again and again and my friends showed up in the most beautiful ways. One stayed up till 2 AM over the phone while I cried. One let me repeat the same thing over and over until I got it out of my system. One ordered food for me while one sent me money without being asked.

Recently, a colleague of mine commented how I have a “keep going” mentality and how he finds that to be inspiring. I had written about how this became my way of surviving in my piece ‘Reparenting Myself so My Children Never Have to Recover From Me’. Keep going earlier meant keep going alone, keep pushing through and never stop. While now, I’m learning a different way to keep going which is to pause, let myself feel all the emotions, rot in my bed if I have to, reach out for help and let others hold me for a while.

Which brings me back to the meditation. Visualizing roots growing from beneath my feet, imagining myself hugging a tree — that’s what made me cry on the metro. Because the tree keeps going through seasons. It sways, it bends, but it doesn’t get uprooted. And it’s not alone, its roots are interconnected with other trees underground.

When I sat down with my therapist after all of this, something had shifted in me.

I heard myself say something I didn’t expect. I told my therapist I was still processing the heartbreak, still dealing with the aftermath of the scam, but that I had this. That I was ready to work on the deeper stuff — my belief systems, the foundational patterns we’d been putting off because I was always managing the latest crisis.

She paused and asked what had changed.

I thought about the metro, about the meditation, about the friends who stayed on the phone at 2 AM. I thought about the tree swaying but not falling.

“I’m learning that being grounded doesn’t mean nothing shakes me,” I told her. “It means I can be shaken and not lose myself.”

I don’t know if I’ll always be able to do this. I don’t know if the next crisis will test me in ways I’m not ready for. But I know I’m not doing this alone anymore. I know I have roots now -- some I grew myself, some my friends helped me build.

And I know that even when external circumstances try to uproot me, I’m learning to sway instead of break.

The meditation is still on my phone. I still do it on the metro some mornings. And sometimes I still cry when I imagine hugging that tree. Maybe that’s what being grounded looks like for me right now – swaying, wiping my face before my stop, getting on with my day, and trusting that what’s holding me is still there, even when I can’t see it.

It’s not just about the tree. It’s about remembering I’m part of a forest.

But it has also been a week since I stood up for myself, even though it meant rotting in my bed for days afterward. An emotional rupture happened. But for the first time, I did not let it turn into a psychological one. I did not join the voice that was already hurting me. I did not abandon myself.

I was also called a “disobedient daughter.” And that was when something quietly clicked.
I am disobedient. I will always be. But this time, I say it without guilt.

What was my crime?

I said I would not agree to marry someone just because I have to. I said I would not continue a conversation that treated my life as negotiable, my body as a transaction, my future as something to be decided for me.

That’s it. That’s what made me disgusting. That’s what made me a disobedient daughter.

Not cruelty. Not betrayal. Just the audacity to believe that my life belongs to me.

Marriage, for daughters like me, has never been just about love or partnership. It’s the final proof of obedience. It’s how families demonstrate that they successfully raised a compliant daughter, one who will accept what’s chosen for her, who will prioritize family honor over personal desire, who will transfer seamlessly from one form of ownership to another.

Saying no to that doesn’t just disrupt a conversation. It disrupts the entire plan. The plan where I exist as a bridge between families, a carrier of caste purity, a performer of respectability.

My refusal to marry on command isn’t personal defiance. It’s a structural disruption.

And that’s what they can’t forgive.

And I needed that clarity, because shortly after, I found out they’d shared my phone number with a man I’d never consented to speaking with.

After I said no. After I set a boundary. After they called me disgusting for refusing.

They went around me.

They handed my contact information to a stranger as if it were theirs to give. As if my ‘no’ was just an inconvenient opinion they could override.

That’s when the discomfort turned into something sharper. Not just hurt but violation.

Because that’s what it was. A violation. Not violent in the way we typically name violence, but violent nonetheless. The message was clear: Your boundaries don’t count. Your consent is optional. Your body, your access, your life, those belong to us, not you.

And if you refuse to cooperate, we’ll simply act as if you never said no at all.

This is what obedience culture does. It doesn’t just demand compliance, it punishes refusal by demonstrating that your autonomy was always an illusion. That your ‘no’ can be bypassed, worked around, ignored. That you were never really in control of your own life to begin with.

For a long time, obedience felt like survival. Obedience kept the peace. Obedience meant being loved, or at least not punished. Obedience taught me to shrink, to swallow anger, to apologise even when I had done nothing wrong. It taught me that being a good daughter meant being quiet, agreeable, grateful, and endlessly accommodating.

This time was different.

Had this happened two years ago, I know exactly what self-abandonment would have looked like. I would have cried uncontrollably. I would have rushed to apologise just to make the discomfort stop. I would have taken responsibility for emotions that were not mine. I would have turned the anger inward and convinced myself that I was the problem. Shame would have filled every corner of my body.

I would have disappeared.

This time, I still felt the urge to disappear. I would be lying if I said I did not. My body wanted to curl in on itself. My nervous system was overwhelmed. The grief was heavy and physical. But I chose presence. I chose to sit with discomfort instead of running from it. I chose to be fully angry without becoming cruel to myself.

I did not self soothe by self-blaming. I did not try to earn my way back into love.

I reached out for support again and again until I actually received it.

One night, while crying to a friend, I watched something else unfold that broke my heart in a different way. As I spoke about what had been said to me, she quietly shared that she often hears her parents say they should never have let her study. That they should never have let her get a job. That her independence was their biggest mistake.

What struck me was not just the cruelty of it, but how normal it sounded to both of us. How familiar. How many women carry versions of this sentence inside their bodies. How conditional love becomes a tool of control. How quickly pride turns into punishment when a daughter stops complying.

That moment made something painfully clear to me. This is not just about individual families. This is about power.

Obedience has always been one of society’s most effective tools. It is how control is disguised as care. It is how authority maintains itself without having to raise its voice. Especially for women, and especially for daughters, obedience is sold as virtue. Disobedience is framed as failure, selfishness, disrespect.

But disobedience is also how cycles break.

Being a disobedient daughter, for me, does not mean being reckless or ungrateful. It means refusing to internalise shame that does not belong to me. It means not sacrificing my mental health to preserve someone else’s comfort. It means choosing truth over approval. It means understanding that love which demands erasure is not love at all.

bell hooks writes that care and love are not the same thing. That someone can feed you, clothe you, worry about you, and still not know how to love you in ways that protect your dignity.

I think about that often.

My parents learned how to care. They learned responsibility, sacrifice, duty. They learned how to provide. What they were never taught was how to love without control, how to care without ownership, how to stay connected without demanding obedience.

And when I refused to continue performing as the daughter they needed me to be, the care remained, but the love, such as it was, revealed itself as conditional all along.

That context helps me understand them. But it does not undo the harm.

Understanding is not the same as absolution. And compassion does not require self-betrayal.

This is where reparenting becomes essential, something I wrote about earlier in ‘Reparenting Myself So My Children Never Have To Recover From Me’.

Reparenting myself, in this moment, looked like staying with myself even when it was unbearable. It looked like reminding myself that being hurt does not mean being wrong. It looked like offering myself the protection I was never taught to expect. It looked like saying, you are allowed to exist even when someone disapproves of you. It also looked like telling myself the lack of emotional support I was looking for was circumstantial and not personal.

I am writing this knowing how heavy it feels to put it out into the world. I am aware of how vulnerable this makes me. I am aware of the silence I am breaking by speaking. But I am also aware of what staying quiet has cost me in the past.

This time, I am choosing not to shrink. I am choosing not to disappear. I am choosing not to make myself small so that someone else can feel powerful.

If being a disobedient daughter is what it takes to stay whole, then I will choose disobedience every time.

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if this rupture will heal or if I’m okay with it not healing. I don’t know if my parents will ever see me as anything other than disobedient, or if the man whose number I never wanted will respect my silence.

But I know I can’t go back to disappearing.

I know I can’t make myself small again just to be called a good daughter.

And if that makes me disgusting to them, then maybe disgust is just what they call a daughter who refuses to be owned.

Slowly. Uncomfortably. And out loud.

Some relationships in this story are shaped by illness, dependency, and long silences. I’ve written what I could, as honestly and gently as possible.

But this year, I’ve been suspiciously quiet about my Wrapped.

Because every top song, top artist, and top album on my list is… Tamil movie music.

And the funny thing is, I genuinely love it.
I always have.
But I’ve never been vocal about it, because I’d rather be known as someone who listens to jazz, post-rock, or something “tasteful,” than someone who enjoys what many people (including me, until very recently) dismiss as cringe Tamil songs with questionable lyrics.

That’s where this story begins.

1. Long

Growing up in a Tamil Brahmin household meant one thing was non-negotiable: paatu class. Carnatic music. I started at age five and continued till I was fifteen. I only stopped because my voice changed and I couldn’t hit the high notes like the other girls. And if I wasn’t the best, I didn’t want to do it at all.

I loved singing. I still love singing.
But perfectionism killed my art long before adulthood did.

Nothing ever came close to the feeling of performing Carnatic music… except the violin. I learnt it for a while and quit because I wasn’t instantly brilliant at it. Meanwhile, my brother performed on stage with confidence and ease, and I silently punished myself for not being as good.

Music has been in my life for as long as I can remember, but so has the pressure to be extraordinary at it.

2. Deep

This part is harder to admit:

My relationship with music has never been neutral. It has always been shaped by caste, class, and the quiet hierarchies I absorbed long before I understood them.

Carnatic music was considered “pure.”
Jazz was “sophisticated.”
Post-rock was “intellectual.”
Tamil kuthu was… something to hide.

One of my fondest memories of my dad is him blasting the wildest kuthu tracks while driving, or dancing to them fresh out of the shower. And I remember frowning at him, not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I had already learnt to judge it.

I was in school. Listening to Green Day made me feel cooler, more accepted, more “above” the sounds I grew up with. And I didn’t question where that hierarchy came from — I just lived inside it.

Now I realise my father understood something I didn’t: that joy doesn’t need refinement. It doesn’t need cultural approval. It doesn’t ask for permission.

But I spent years letting music become a performance of who I wanted to be.
I curated taste like identity.
I used “good music” as a way to signal class, education, belonging.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’m sitting with:
my music taste was never just taste. It was performance.

The hierarchy I internalised , Carnatic at the top, kuthu at the bottom, wasn’t aesthetic, it was social. It was about distance. It was about saying, “I’m not like them.”

And I benefited from that.
I used it.
I let people think my playlists made me superior.

So when I say I’m “learning to let go,” I don’t just mean letting go of perfectionism. I mean letting go of the need to prove I’m cultured, refined, or respectable through what I listen to.

It has taken me a long time to accept this simple truth:
loving something joyful does not make me any less intelligent.
Enjoying kuthu does not diminish my sophistication.
Pleasure does not need permission.

I still catch myself curating playlists that signal the “right” kind of taste.
I still hesitate before admitting my Spotify Wrapped is just Tamil film music.
But I’m learning.

I’m learning to build playlists that feel honest, not impressive.
To choose joy over performance.
To love what I love without needing it to prove anything about me.

And maybe that’s the real work, not just accepting my taste, but understanding why I needed to perform it in the first place.

3. Weird

This is where it gets strange.

For the longest time, I listened to music alphabetically.
Not by mood.
Not by desire.
Not by how my day was going.
Just… alphabetically. A to Z. Every time.

I refused shuffle.
I refused chaos.
I refused the possibility of surprise.

It wasn’t discipline. It was control.
It was perfectionism disguised as order.
It was system over feeling.

If I couldn’t control my anxiety, my family’s expectations, my confusion about who I was supposed to become, I could at least control my music.

Every song had its place.
Every artist had their turn.
No surprises. No choices. No wanting the wrong thing.

Because here’s what I couldn’t admit: choosing meant revealing desire. And desire felt dangerous. What if what I wanted wasn’t sophisticated? What if it wasn’t “cool”?

So I removed choice entirely.

But yesterday, I reorganised my entire library into playlists — moods, genres, “songs that soothe me,” “songs that hype me,” “songs that remind me of him,” all of it.

And for the first time in years, I didn’t force myself to listen to whatever came alphabetically next.
I chose what I wanted.

This sounds small, but it felt like emotional liberation.

Organising my library into playlists was really me saying:
“I’m allowed to want. I’m allowed to choose joy. I’m allowed to feel.”

And honestly, it’s the healthiest thing I’ve done all month.

Music, relationships, and love

Music has shaped my life in ways no other art form has.
Some of my closest friendships were formed over shared playlists and late night recommendations.

Music brings me joy like nothing else.
Concerts feel like meditation.
Playlists feel like storytelling.

My love language, genuinely, is making playlists for the people I adore. There is something so intimate about curating sound for someone you care about.

Maybe because my own music taste has always felt like a mirror—messy, contradictory, striving for perfection while yearning for freedom.

Eclectic, yes.
But more importantly: honest.

Maybe Spotify Wrapped wasn’t embarrassing me this year.
Maybe it was freeing me.

I’m learning to stop performing taste and start listening to desire.
I’m slowly letting my playlists become more me—fun, chaotic, emotional, unpredictable.

A little bit Carnatic, a lot of kuthu, plenty of jazz, some funk, some indie, some post-rock, and everything in between.

Here are a few songs that have carried me recently, in no particular order (because I’m learning to let go):

• Madai Thirandhu — Yogi B & Nakshatra

• Your Hand in Mine — Explosions in the Sky

• Breezin’ — George Benson

• Rasathi — A.R. Rahman

• Dheemtahnakka Thillana — DSP

• Frangipani — Kaber Vasuki

• A Love Song — EGO-WRAPPIN

• Celestial Nymph — Agam

• Tiwayyen — Tinariwen

• N95 — Kendrick Lamar

Sometimes people get visibly awkward, like the word therapy is a confession instead of a commitment to knowing myself better.

I’ve been consistent with therapy this past year, but getting here took a long time. Years of trial and error, years of sitting with discomfort, and honestly, years of paying money I sometimes didn’t have just to finally find a therapist who felt safe, structured, and actually useful.

And I know that process requires privilege, patience, and a kind of stubborn emotional agency.

But therapy hasn’t just helped me feel better. It has reshaped the way I understand myself, my patterns, my childhood, and the people I come from.

Because here’s something we don’t talk about enough: therapy is political.

Let me explain by taking a small detour.

There’s this friend of mine who knew me two years ago and now again in a work setting. He recently told me he can see the change in me, that I’ve become less stubborn, more grounded, calmer.

He asked me what changed.

I remember saying, “I learnt how to unlearn.”

At the time I meant it sociologically. But now I know therapy helped me exercise that muscle too.

Most people think resilience means pushing through everything. For me, resilience was a mask. Outwardly I looked like a high performer who handled everything, but inside I was running on very low self-worth.

A lot of my struggle with self-worth goes back to childhood.

I had to become the adult in the family at fifteen while also being the youngest. My father’s accident changed everything overnight. I learnt to anticipate other people’s moods before they even said a word. My teachers praised me for having good interpersonal skills, but you can guess where that came from.

I learnt to be hyper independent.

I was praised for never asking for help, for managing everything on my own.
That was not strength. That was survival.

Growing up that way felt normal. I carried that survival mode into adulthood. What I didn’t realise was that all that strength had quietly shape-shifted into anxiety. I was always overstimulated, overwhelmed, trying to keep up, trying to hold everything together.

My mother is often praised for being strong and selfless, for sacrificing everything to care for my father. But all I see is anxiety and exhaustion. I see how patriarchy shaped her, trapped her, applauded her for self-abandonment.

And I grew up absorbing all of it.

Therapy didn’t just help me set boundaries. It helped me see that boundaries were never modeled for me. My mother gave and gave until there was nothing left. That is what gets called sacrifice, devotion, strength.

But I see it now for what it is: self-abandonment dressed up as virtue.
And I was repeating it without even knowing.

It took me a long time to understand that these patterns weren’t personal failings. They were wiring.

When I eventually found out I was neurodivergent, it was like someone finally handed me the missing map to my own mind. I finally understood why I felt like an outsider almost everywhere, why masking felt second nature. But knowing all this didn’t make anxiety disappear. If anything, the years that followed were even harder.

By the time 2024 arrived, I felt like I was running on fumes. There were days I genuinely wanted to give up on everything.

2024 was the year everything caught up with me.
The year that humbled me.
The year that cracked me open.
The year that forced me to face myself in ways I had avoided for too long.

And strangely, it was also the year that brought me closer to who I actually am.

Only after breaking did I finally learn to feel. I was lucky to have a circle of friends who held me through it. Even recognising such friendships took unlearning and boundary-setting.

Now, at twenty-seven, I cry all the time.
In therapy, with friends, on random Tuesdays for reasons I can’t fully articulate.
And I cry while knowing that someone else is working three jobs and cannot afford to feel. Both realities are true. Both realities are shaped by the same systems. And I still don’t know how to hold that without dismissing my own healing or erasing their struggle.

If anything, crying has become one of my biggest strengths.

In a world that copes through avoidance, withdrawal, and ghosting, choosing to feel has become my rebellion.

I know better now, and I still struggle. I preach rest and I still feel guilty taking it. I talk about boundaries and I still over-give. I understand these systems intellectually and they still live in my body. Healing isn’t linear. It isn’t a destination. It is the daily practice of catching myself mid-performance and asking: Who taught me this, and do I want to keep doing it?

Which brings me back to why therapy is political.

It is political not because it explicitly talks about systems, but because it shows you how those systems live in your body.

The first time my therapist asked me what I do for rest, I froze. Not because I didn’t understand the question, but because rest was something I had always felt I had to earn. If I hadn’t been productive enough that day, if I hadn’t checked enough tasks or answered enough messages, rest felt like stealing from my own future.

Even now, when I take an afternoon to do nothing, there’s a voice keeping score: You only worked four hours today. You didn’t finish that piece. You slept till 9. You don’t deserve this.

That voice isn’t mine. It is capitalism’s.

It is the same logic that says your value is your output, that your worth is measured in achievement, that if you’re not producing, you’re disposable. I absorbed that so deeply that even therapy became another task to optimise. “Good job, you’re healing efficiently.”

But therapy taught me something I am still learning to practice: rest isn’t earned. It is required. (I wrote more about this in “The Quiet Rebellion of Slowing Down.”) And believing otherwise is not a personal flaw. It is how these systems survive, by convincing us that our exhaustion is our own fault.

The same pattern shaped how I understood love. I believed love had to be earned too. That if I anticipated enough, accommodated enough, I would finally deserve to be cared for. But that is not love. That is a transaction, and I was always the one in debt.

These are not separate issues. They are the same system operating in different rooms of my life. Capitalism taught me my worth is my productivity. Patriarchy taught me my value is in what I give. Both taught me I do not inherently deserve care. I have to earn it.

And therapy is political because it is the place where I learned to say: No.
I deserve rest because I am alive.
I deserve love because I exist.
Not because I have earned it.

Therapy didn’t make me unaware of these systems. It changed where I begin.

And beginning honestly also means acknowledging this:

The same systems that traumatised me are the ones that now charge me to heal from that trauma.

The same systems that gave me access to healing are the ones that deny it to most people.

I benefit from caste privilege, class privilege, and the stability of formal employment.

My healing is built on a foundation that systematically excludes the very people who need it most.

Holding that truth is uncomfortable, but it is necessary. It makes healing complicated, but it also makes it real.

I moved from wanting to fix everything outside me to understanding that my starting point is always myself. I don’t mean everything comes down to individuals, the same way climate change doesn’t come down to one person. But healing does require personal responsibility.

Change begins with one person deciding to stop repeating what hurt them.

This has been the biggest commitment I’ve made to myself and to the people around me.

I’ve learnt to set boundaries.

I’ve learnt to voice my needs, even though I still hesitate sometimes.
Like the day I finally asked my landlord to fix the fan regulator in my room. It sounds embarrassingly small, but that fan only ran at high speed and it genuinely disrupted my comfort. Earlier, I would have silently adapted, convinced inconvenience was the tax I had to pay for taking up space.

But that day I said, “Can you please get this repaired?”
And it hit me: this is what healing looks like.
Not grand declarations, but tiny permissions I once denied myself.

I’ve learnt to accept love, not just give it.

And I’ve learnt that healing is not self-indulgent. It is responsibility.

There are still days I try to be there for someone when I can barely be there for myself, but I am learning. Some days healing is collective. Like recently, when something heavy happened and I called a friend from work just to figure out logistics for taking leave. In the middle of the conversation he paused and asked, “But how are you feeling?”

Moments like that gently pull me away from my old self.

This is where parenting becomes political too, which I will explore in another piece.

Because therapy, at its core, is reparenting.

Reparenting myself has been the toughest thing I have ever had to do. And while I have moved from needing sessions every week to every three weeks, I know I still have a long way to go.

Reparenting myself is the most political act of all because it interrupts generational patterns instead of passing them on. It means choosing awareness over autopilot. It means choosing care over continuation. When I heal myself, I am not just becoming a better version of me. I am becoming a gentler ancestor.

I often joke, which my therapist doesn’t exactly appreciate, that I want to give up on healing and just be toxic. But the truth is, the only thing that keeps me going is knowing that I am playing a role in breaking the cycle of generational trauma.

And if healing has taught me anything, it is this:

I am becoming the adult I needed.
And I am terrified that I might actually succeed.

I’m a woman born and raised in India. I’ve lived in major cities even though I’m originally from a small town. I was privileged enough to grow up exposed to English media and books (thanks to my elder brother), so sitcoms became my first window into “adulthood.”

You know the ones I’m talking about. Everyone is ridiculously fashionable, they live in massive apartments they can’t really afford, and they hang out in cafés all day while somehow maintaining thriving careers. As a teenager, I watched those shows and thought, Yes. That’s who I want to be.

Meanwhile, my town didn’t even have a mall back then. It still doesn’t.

And here’s the funny part: I genuinely believed the only difference between me and those characters was that they lived in big cities and I didn’t. What I didn’t realise was that adulthood in India comes with its own chaos, one that no sitcom prepared me for.

When I finally moved to Bangalore at seventeen, the first thing that hit me wasn’t freedom or glamour. It was the noise. The traffic. The complete disregard for public space. It was my introduction to a reality I still grapple with: the absolute absence of civic sense.

Then came Chennai for a bit, and now Mumbai. Whatever initial excitement I had has morphed into this constant low-grade annoyance that makes me wonder: what happened to civic sense? Does it even exist? Are we hallucinating it?

Let me give you some context. Diwali was more than a month ago, and I still wake up startled in the middle of the night because someone randomly bursts firecrackers at 2 AM like it’s a personal hobby. I live in a shared apartment with nine other women in their 20s, which means silence is a luxury, not a baseline.

Some mornings, I wake up at 4 AM and sit by the window simply because that’s the only time the world around me feels quiet. Like the country finally stops spinning for two seconds and lets me breathe.

This brings me back to civic sense. I’ve noticed how Indians, as individuals, tend to carry this deep sense of entitlement about… well, everything. Parking on footpaths. Throwing garbage from a moving auto. Cutting queues like it’s a birthright. Talking loudly on the phone in public spaces and getting offended if you give a side-eye.

And I don’t think this is just “bad manners.” A lot of this behaviour comes from something older and deeper, the caste system. When a society is built for centuries on hierarchy, privilege, and the belief that some people’s time and comfort matter more than others’, that conditioning doesn’t disappear. It becomes muscle memory. It becomes culture. It becomes “just how things are.” And no one teaches us otherwise.

I also know my lens is shaped by class; what feels like chaos to me is also livelihood, improvisation, and survival for many.

And unlearning that conditioning is slow, uncomfortable, and deeply personal, but it’s the only way anything changes.

Then suddenly we’re adults living in cities with millions of strangers, all of us overcrowded and overwhelmed, carrying these invisible hierarchies into traffic, queues, streets, homes, and public spaces.

So maybe civic sense isn’t about “why don’t Indians know how to behave?” but “who taught us we didn’t have to?”

And honestly, individual behaviour doesn’t emerge out of nowhere. It’s shaped by systems or the lack of them.
If institutions don’t reward discipline, you don’t get disciplined citizens.
If rules don’t apply equally, why would anyone respect them?
If no one enforces accountability, why would anyone choose it voluntarily?

My recent trip to Indore made this even clearer. Indore is the cleanest city in India. For years now, the city has built a collective sense of ownership around cleanliness and garbage disposal. People care. People follow rules. Public space actually feels shared.

Everyone keeps saying it’s because of “good education,” but I don’t buy that. I say this as someone who lives with nine very educated women, all of us with degrees, jobs, stable incomes, and somehow, we still don’t segregate waste, talk loudly at all hours, refuse to put on headphones, leave dishes in the sink, and treat the house like the bai will magically clean it even though we don’t have one.

Education does not produce civic sense. If anything, privilege often makes people feel more entitled.

It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s “default setting” from This Is Water: how all of us move through the world assuming we’re the centre of it unless we choose otherwise. In India, default settings feel even stronger: my time, my comfort, my convenience.

Unless something nudges us out of that default, good systems, accountability, or even basic empathy, we live like we’re the only ones in the room. Or the only ones on the road.

Which brings me to the real question:
Does India lack civic sense because individuals don’t care?
Or because institutions don’t make it matter?

Because in Indore, when the system worked, people rose to meet it.
When dignity entered the equation, so did discipline.

So what does that mean for the rest of us?
Do individuals behave badly because they don’t care,
or because nothing around them tells them they should?

Sometimes I think India runs on this strange paradox: we are deeply communal in culture but wildly individualistic in behaviour. We love the idea of society… as long as someone else is maintaining it.

Maybe that’s why it feels exhausting to live here as a young woman who craves order, silence, walkable streets, and basic shared responsibility. Maybe that’s why I wake up at 4 AM to sit by the window, because that’s the only time Mumbai shuts up.

Honestly, it’s getting exhausting.

But I also know this: when the system works, people rise. When dignity is built into institutions, people participate.

I’m not going to pretend to be patriotic just because it’s polite. I don’t love my country unconditionally. I love parts of it, and I’m exhausted by the rest. But silence doesn’t change anything. So I’ll keep naming what isn’t working and do my part, however small, to make my own corner a little more liveable.

Because sometimes loving a place means refusing to romanticise it. Sometimes it means telling the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Until then, I’ll maintain my sanity, with both the noise in my head and the noise outside, by ranting on Substack.

The concept of identity has always been of interest to me. This interest began when I first read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, an imagined community is a nation, a politically defined group of people who, despite rarely knowing each other personally, feel a deep sense of belonging and connection to one another.

Over time, I’ve started to think that maybe we relate most strongly to the identities that feel attacked the most. For me, that’s always been my gender. I identify deeply as a woman because that identity has often felt like the one I needed to defend. It could be the other way round too. For some, identity brings pride and belonging, especially when it comes to religion or caste. But that’s never been me. I’ve never felt proud to belong to something powerful. I’ve mostly felt protective of the parts of myself that felt fragile.

As I’ve grown older, and especially after my Master’s, I’ve moved from identifying strongly with my gender to observing how gender plays out in everyday life. My academic lens made me question things that once felt like personal experiences. I began asking: why does gender matter so much in the first place? What purpose does it serve? Of course, how gender is experienced varies widely -- by class, caste, and culture. I can only speak from where I stand.

These observations on how gender quietly shapes freedom, friendship, and risk are what led me to write A Reflection on Friendship, Gender, and Everyday Adventures.

I remember once coming across a comic strip where an alien tries to understand the concept of gender during its interaction with a human being. It was confused. Why would one’s anatomy or perceived role dictate how they behaved or were treated? The comic was meant to be humorous, but it left me questioning so much. How much of what we take as natural about gender is actually just learned performance? Why do we hold onto it so tightly?

That question also changed how I view men.

When I first started calling myself a feminist, I was angry. Angry at men who didn’t acknowledge their privilege, who could walk through the world with a kind of ease I would never have. That anger was important; it woke me up. But over time, I began to see that it wasn’t men themselves who were the enemy, it was patriarchy. And patriarchy harms everyone, men included.

Now, I find myself noticing something that makes me uneasy: misandry disguised as feminism. I see it online and sometimes even among people I know, this blanket resentment towards men that passes off as empowerment. It pains me because I truly love the men in my life, each in their own way. My father, my brother, my male friends, my queer best friend, all of them have taught me something about care, humour, or love. My queer best friend, especially, has expanded my understanding of masculinity, showing me that it can be fluid, soft, expressive, and nurturing.

When we talk about empowering women, I’ve come to realise it’s not about exclusion. It’s also about acknowledging men, their struggles, their humanity, and their capacity for growth. True empowerment isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s about raising the emotional literacy of everyone, because we all live under systems that have taught us half-truths about who we’re allowed to be.

I understand that many of these men have been nurtured to be a certain way. They’ve been taught not to cry, to stay composed, to hide tenderness. While it can still be frustrating, like when the men in my life forget my birthday or don’t remember something important I’ve shared, I’ve learned to stop calling it a “men problem.” I’ve met women who do the same, and men who don’t. Maybe not all emotional distance is gendered. Maybe it’s about emotional awareness, and the different ways people learn (or aren’t taught) to express care.

I’m also the little sister of a big brother I love deeply. We’re both neurodivergent, which has made me even more attuned to the different ways people are shaped by their circumstances, their wiring, their worlds. I see now that there’s no single way to be human. There’s just a lifetime of unlearning and re-learning what it means to connect.

That said, understanding someone’s conditioning doesn’t justify their choices if they hurt someone else. Empathy doesn’t mean lack of accountability. You can understand why someone is the way they are and still believe they need to do better.

Reading All About Love by bell hooks also changed how I think about all of this. It’s one of my all-time favourite books. She writes about love not as a feeling, but as an action, as something rooted in care, responsibility, and honesty. That book taught me that love, whether romantic, familial, or communal, demands both compassion and accountability. You can love someone and still hold them to higher standards. You can critique systems and still hold space for people caught within them.

Sometimes I still feel the heat of that old anger, especially when I see women dismissed in meetings or jokes made at our expense. And sometimes, it’s not just abstract frustration, it’s deeply personal. Recently, I was asked to stop travelling for work because of my gender. The reason given was that men at certain sites had been making me feel unsafe, and rather than addressing their behaviour, the solution was to restrict my movement. I remember the anger that rose in me, hot and helpless, at the unfairness of it. That feeling of being punished for someone else’s lack of accountability. The fear of how my behaviour might be questioned if I pushed back too hard still lingers.

Of course, misogyny still exists and it’s exhausting. It’s in the jokes that aren’t funny, the double standards, the way women’s pain is minimised or aestheticised. Those things frustrate me deeply. But the answer can’t be more resentment. It has to be awareness, dialogue, and responsibility, because otherwise we recreate the same systems we’re trying to dismantle.

And maybe if we didn’t let gender matter so much, if we stopped treating masculinity and femininity as cages, we could make more room for those who want to be fluid about it. Maybe all of us are a little queer in our own ways, and it’s only the system that keeps forcing us back into binaries.

While acknowledging injustices based on gender is important, I don’t know if holding on too tightly to gender as an identity is always necessary. I’ve begun to wonder if maybe masculinity and femininity matter less than we think they do. Maybe liberation begins when we stop letting those labels define how we connect or care.

I who have known men, in all their contradictions, and who is still learning to love them, gently, through the flaws that make them human have also learned this: compassion doesn’t excuse harm, but it can soften the world just enough for healing to begin.

I was that kid who wanted to change the world, not out of ambition, but ache. Maybe it came from the whacky Indian movies where the hero saves everyone by the end of the song. Or maybe from being too sensitive for my own good.

I was that kid who went around school “creating awareness” about that viral Kony video on YouTube back in the 2010s. It really bothered me. That video, and so many others like it, made me realise how cruel humans could be. From there, I went down a rabbit hole of worrying about “global warming.” It wasn’t theoretical for me; it came from love, from this ache that I specifically had for dogs and other animals who were suffering because of what people were doing. I was generally affected by the suffering of other people as well.

This eventually led me to sign up for every volunteering drive I could find: feeding street dogs, adopting two of them at home (something my mom still holds against me), quitting a high-paying corporate job because I felt so distant from the person I always wanted to be, doing a Master’s in International Development, and now working as an English tutor and an Impact Analyst.

Coming back to “making a difference.” I’ve always been a bit of a rebel and, at one point, quite stubborn too. Back then, every injustice would set me off. I carried so much anger. It also made me a bit of a snob toward anyone who didn’t know better or who made ordinary human mistakes.

Over time, though, life has had a way of humbling me. I’ve had to unlearn and then re-learn, over and over again, thanks to the very experiences that once made me restless.

But my biggest takeaway over the last year has been this: revolution starts from oneself, with healing and slowing down. Let me explain.

Remember how I mentioned being that over-enthusiastic kid in school? That probably also came from a place of wanting to be different, wanting to be seen and heard. From wanting to find her own community. From wanting to belong to a world that often felt so alienating.

This meant that I grew up as a high-functioning individual, always trying to prove herself. As an adult, this paved the way for anxiety, self-criticism, and constant burnouts. My heightened sensitivity to the world around me only made my anxiety worse.

This time, I did something I’d never done before. I paused. I went back to therapy. I let people in, the ones who only wanted the best for me. And for the first time in years, I stopped running.

I discovered a lot about myself, not to be a “self-aware queen,” but to learn how to sit with all versions of myself without judgment. It has been a rollercoaster of a journey ever since. It was, however, not easy. Slowing down was the toughest thing I ever had to do. It’s still a work in progress. Giving myself permission to rest without guilt is something I’m still learning how to do. But this process has also come with some thoughtful lessons.

Every morning I try to sit by the window in my room with a cup of black coffee in my hand and just look outside without any judgment. I let myself get distracted by a cat on the streets of Mumbai without worrying about my never-ending to-do list. I let myself be interrupted by a friend’s call in the middle of work. I tell myself it’s okay if I can’t meet a deadline for once.

I’ve learnt something profound. This has been my biggest rebellion yet: to slow down in a world that doesn’t pause for me. To notice the insects and plants around me when I’m constantly told I have bigger things to worry about. The more I slow down, the more I realise I’m not separate from nature. I am nature. The same universe that carved out mountains and oceans is alive within me. We are all made of stardust, literally. Did you know that humans and mushrooms share more in common than mushrooms do with green plants? We even share about 20 percent of our genes with a banana. It sounds funny, but to me, it’s become a quiet reminder that I’m a participant in the great unfolding of cosmic evolution, not an observer of it. My climate action begins here, not from a place of guilt or urgency, but from belonging. When I remember that I am nature, protecting it stops feeling like a duty and starts feeling like self-preservation.

So much of life exists in what we usually walk past and never give a second thought. A weed growing through concrete. A myna drinking from a pothole after the rain. The tiny patterns on a leaf that mirror the veins in my own hand.

This also means that I’ve put down my armour and I don’t pretend to be the strongest person in the room anymore I let myself cry in front of another person. It didn’t make me weaker. It made me real. I tell the world I’m not okay without any second thought. I don’t feel shame in showing vulnerability anymore. I’ve learnt that the world needs softness and I’m okay being the person who finds strength in her softness.

This has also been my biggest takeaway and guiding force when it comes to my journey of climate action. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all slowed down, if the world caught its breath for just a moment. Maybe that’s naïve. But it’s the kind of naivety I want to protect. I’m okay being a little “too much,” a little sentimental, a little tender, like the weed that grows through concrete, quietly insisting that softness can survive anywhere. because maybe what the world needs most right now is more of that.

The first time I truly noticed it was with a nickname. My nieces, after much deliberation, decided I should be called Bambi. I liked it, agreed happily, and thought nothing more of it. Later that day, one of them and I sat down to watch TV. I stumbled upon Scrubs, a show I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. In the very first episode, the main character gets nicknamed Bambi. Small, random coincidence - but it made me smile.

That’s the thing with synchronicities: they’re rarely grand revelations. They’re tiny sparks. But once you start noticing them, they begin to form a pattern.

A few weeks later, I had a different kind of experience. I’d started keeping a gratitude journal, and one entry was about my cousin who had come to see me off at the airport. It felt significant because I’d been fiercely independent since I was fifteen. I was grateful for the kind of love that says, “You don’t have to carry everything on your own.”

Not long after, I was at another airport, about to move cities. Around that time, I had matched with someone on a dating app who happened to live there. On the day of my flight, he offered to meet me at the airport. I said yes. Thanks to him, I managed to wrangle my ridiculous amount of luggage and settle into a new place with surprising ease.

Our connection didn’t last long, but to this day, I remember him as the person who made that transition gentler, not as a coincidence, but as a reminder of the kind of support I had just written about.

That was the moment I stopped taking these moments for granted. I began to see not just coincidences, but patterns of kindness, help, and meaning, as if life itself was answering me back. Every film, every book, every stray line of dialogue started to feel like it had arrived for a reason.

Which brings me to airplanes again.

My quest about free will didn’t actually begin on an airplane. It began in a classroom. One of my students and I were unpacking Oedipus Rex, a play that refuses to let you escape the question of fate versus free will. Another student brought me The Memory Police, where entire objects, and eventually memories themselves, vanish from a community’s consciousness. What does choice even mean in a world where reality itself erodes?

At the same time, my personal life was spiralling: work stress, a long-anticipated trip where I was supposed to go see my best friend cancelled at the last minute, recovering from dengue, and my father being hospitalised with a lung infection. This has been my life for as long as I can remember - always something going on. But this time, with these texts echoing in my head, I began to question life more deeply. What do I really control, and what is already decided for me?

And then came the airplanes. A friend once joked I was “jetsetting everywhere” when he saw my travel calendar. On flights, I usually read or write, but recently I found myself browsing in-flight movies. Out of all the options, I chose The Matrix (1999). The last time I’d tried watching it, as a kid, it felt like gibberish. This time, I gave it a shot. The Matrix is about a man who discovers the world around him is a computer simulation, and that he can choose whether to stay asleep in illusion or wake up to a harsher truth.

Meanwhile, on the ground, I was deep in YouTube rabbit holes about free will, choice, fate, determinism, all of it. Two weeks later, on another flight, I pressed play on The Truman Show. In it, a man’s entire life is secretly a reality TV set, controlled by others. The climax is when he realises the truth and decides whether to walk away.

Suddenly my daily life felt like a syllabus on free will, delivered piecemeal through students, books, and airplane screens. Synchronicity had turned an ordinary month into a crash course on the biggest question of all: are we free, or are we scripted?

Here’s what I took away.

From Oedipus Rex, I learned that circumstances often have their own momentum. You can resist or bargain, but some outcomes are beyond your control. The Memory Police sharpened that lesson, when even memory and reality itself can vanish, what power do we really have?

The Matrix and The Truman Show both offered a different kind of freedom: not the power to control the script, but the courage to face it honestly. Neo chooses to see the simulation for what it is. Truman chooses to walk out of his fabricated world. Both remind us that the point isn’t whether the world is fair, it rarely is, but how you show up within it.

My therapist often says: “The first step is accepting that life is unfair.” That hit me differently after these encounters. If circumstances don’t matter, if so much is already outside our grasp, then perhaps the work of living isn’t about bending fate to our will. It’s about persisting, about learning how not to let external chaos dictate our inner being.

And maybe that’s why I’ve stopped obsessing over the question of “free will.” I don’t know if I’m free or scripted - but I do know I feel lighter when I stop fighting the question itself. These days, I find myself asking something gentler: not “Am I free?” but “Am I at peace with what is?”

And maybe that’s what synchronicity has been teaching me all along. The little winks don’t answer the question, they just remind me to stay awake to the patterns, to trust that even in the randomness, there’s meaning to be found.

Maybe magic does exist in our everyday lives, and all we need to do is pause and look.

The truth is: I couldn’t imagine myself in such a story.

I’ve always believed that movies, like any form of art, reflect the society they emerge from. Growing up in a small Indian town, I saw how gender roles shaped not only our responsibilities and freedoms but also our friendships. Manjummel Boys is set in 2000, but its essence - male friends being reckless, testing boundaries, risking themselves for each other felt timeless in a way I couldn’t access.

Watching the men in the film decide to enter a restricted cave knowingly courting danger, my immediate thought was, “Men being men.” That thought carried both judgment and resignation. I’d seen the pattern since school: boys tossing water balloons in the corridors while we girls sat in groups, chatting, careful not to draw too much attention.

Even when I moved to Australia for my Master’s, freedom had its limits. I remember one night at a pub near campus, the queue was too long, and by the time we’d waited, it was close to midnight. Even though we were a group, we didn’t want to risk walking back to our dorms that late. So we left. It wasn’t just about being women; it was also about being Indian women abroad, hyper-aware of what it meant to walk home in the dark.

The only “adventure” I really went on in Australia was a university-organized trip to Bright, Victoria. And even then, I went because it was structured, safe, and monitored. Now that I’m back in India, I realize nothing has really changed. I still can’t picture myself on a spontaneous, risky trip with my female friends. That gap between male and female friendships - between adrenaline and caution, is one I keep noticing.

But I also think about the kinds of “adventures” my friends and I actually go on. My best friend and I often scrapbook together - cutting, pasting, doodling, our version of building worlds safely on paper. Another friend and I recently went to get haircuts, which turned into its own little act of rebellion because she was getting her hair coloured against her parents’ wishes. We laughed about how risky it felt, sitting in a salon chair with foils in her hair, but in its own way, it was an adventure. These are the spaces where my friendships live: in scrapbooks, in salons, in places where risk is present but intimate, tethered not to caves or cliffs but to the quiet negotiations of everyday life.

Over time, I’ve also noticed how differently my male friends experience friendship compared to my female or queer friends. When I write them letters or compliment them, they often tell me they’ve never had a friendship like this before. One male friend was genuinely surprised to hear that my queer best friend sometimes stays on hour-long calls with me to help me pack clothes before a trip, because my ADHD makes me freeze up and feel dysfunctional. For me, that kind of support feels natural, it’s how care circulates in my closest friendships. For him, it felt unimaginable.

I don’t think this is because men don’t need care or intimacy, but because patriarchy has taught them to devalue it. As bell hooks reminds us, patriarchy wounds men too, cutting them off from vulnerability, tenderness, and the radical possibilities of love in friendship. If my female friendships sometimes feel “limited” by caution and vigilance, my male friends’ friendships are often limited by the absence of emotional care.

Female friendships, of course, carry their own power. They are refuges, spaces of care, and sources of resilience. They are where I’ve learned to name patriarchy, to find solidarity, to put sisterhood before societal expectation. They’ve given me safe places to express myself without judgment. They may not look “adventurous” on the outside, but they are radical in their own way.

Still, societal power dynamics place women at a disadvantage when it comes to friendship. The fear of harassment or violence hovers, shaping our choices. A “girl’s trip” isn’t spontaneous; it requires permissions, planning, constant vigilance. Even in groups, we remain conscious of the possibility of being violated. The everyday reality of safety dictates the boundaries of female friendship in ways that male friendships rarely account for.

When I contrast that with the film’s cave-diving bravado, I wonder: how much of this difference is “personal preference,” and how much is conditioning? How much have gender norms already written the script of our friendships before we even step into them?

This is where feminism, for me, has been transformative. Since high school, feminist writings have taught me to see my friendships not as “less than” but as political spaces. To choose sisterhood over societal expectation is, in itself, a radical act. These friendships help dismantle rigid gender norms, reminding me that bonds of care are not a consolation prize but a form of resistance.

And yet, Manjummel Boys lingers in my mind. Not just for what it portrayed, but for what it left me questioning. Why do men’s friendships get to be associated with risk, loyalty, and adventure, while ours are forced into the language of safety, intimacy, and refuge? Both are true, but both are incomplete.

Friendship, after all, is where we practice how we want to live. And until public spaces feel equally safe for all of us, the stories of friendship in movies and in life, will remain unequally told.