Category: Musings
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Feeling Seen
I see the photo on my Pattu’s Instagram story first. It catches me by surprise. I am at the window holding Felix our puppy, watching the birds and the bees flitting about. Felix had been cranky. I was holding him the way I would a fussy baby. Rocking imperceptibly, every part of me focused on…
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I Ran Nineteen Years of Myself Through the Matrix
I ran nineteen years of my own essays through a script that measures sentence length, reading grade, and how often I interrupt myself. What the numbers caught, and what they could not.
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The Color Sanguine
This week I have been hard at work plumbing the depths. I sifted through years of correspondence, pored over pictures, marinated in memories from over three decades ago. Some of what I found startled me. I hold grudges. That one evening in Feb 2001 when I stood at the intersection of MG Road and Brigade…
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The Long Count
Nithya Raman is closing the gap one counted ballot at a time. On the slow, invisible labor of the women still waiting to be seen, and the work that outlasts the wait.
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The Refusal to Translate
A response to the argument that every major Indian writer lives abroad and writes from memory. The real variable isn’t geography. It’s whether the publishing chain between you and the reader lets you keep the sentence intact.
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Nithya Raman, Okra, and the Brown Woman’s Second Act
I wrote about Rini Sampath in April. Nithya Raman is the next part of the question. The first act has a script. The second act has none.
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On Sōseki, K-Dramas, and Twenty-Five Years
After dinner I walk to the window and look up. Tsuki ga kirei desu ne: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it. Sōseki’s translation of I love you, the K-drama that revived it, and twenty-five years of pointing at the moon.
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The Morning I Downloaded VS Code
Six in the morning. The study. The Instant Pot was set for rice. Saathi was at tennis. The girls were somewhere in the house with their coffees and their phones, each of them in a different room. The coffee giving out wisps of steam. On Threads, for about a week, people had been talking about…
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Two Hours on a Monday Morning
Two days before, my morning briefing arrived in the format it had been taking all week. A plain text summary in my inbox at seven in the morning, generated by an automation I built in Claude Code earlier this month. The part I want you to see, verbatim, looked like this: 📤 PUBLISHING TODAY No…
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Nine Point Six Percent
I was browsing the settings menu in Claude Desktop. Not hunting. Just opening drawers, like you would in a kitchen looking for scissors. Under a customize option, tucked into a plugin panel, there was a Marketing section. The other plugins I had already set up sat out in the open. This one was behind a…