Up to 150 species go extinct daily. The acquisitions of businesses, housing units, and family heirlooms on Facebook marketplace transpire every minute. Class-action lawsuits are decided with impunity, giving life sentences, severe fines, or nothing at all. Flowers bloom. A girl laughs. Scientific discoveries regarding free, unlimited energy, rising sea levels and long-term psychological effects…
There is a strange pride people carry in exhaustion now. You can hear it in school hallways, office elevators, family dinners, even casual conversations between friends. “How have you been?” “Busy.” The answer arrives almost automatically, often followed by a tired laugh that sounds suspiciously close to achievement. Nobody says it plainly anymore, but somewhere…
Domesticate culture. Doemesticate identity. The ideal wife in India is seen running around in circles at her husband’s house and then continuing her rounds at the temple while circling Gods like Krishna, Rama, and Hanuman chanting mantras for the wellness of her husband and children and never once for herself. While they bathe Lord Shiva…
Freedom is seldom peaceful or even more rare for explanations. We speak of it as if it were path Or a ray of light— as if it were expansion,individaulity or possibility. But freedom does not arrive like a gift, wrapped in a pretty wrapper or guarded to be unbroken. It tears. It confounds. But what…
There is a certain type of magic involved in the process of uprooting your entire life from one place and resettling into another. It is a quiet, nondramatic, even ubiquitous type of magic. Romantics would probably call it ‘the magic in the every day’. Which is weird, because the months leading up to the few…
The medieval danse macabre is often understood as a moral allegory: a skeletal Death leading kings, maidens, priests, and peasants alike in a grim procession toward the grave, reminding viewers of mortality’s universality. Yet this interpretation, while accurate, is incomplete. The power of the danse macabre lies not merely in its didactic insistence on equality…
What even is the purpose of human existence if not to exhaust it in the pursuit of true art and perfection? Let not the word define its constraints, one who is proficient in their craft, who is, by layman’s terms, ‘good at what they do’, is an artist. ‘Art’ is, of course, a colloquial term…
This piece is a response to Tales from the Café: A Novel—the second book in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. The series hinges on a cafe that allows one to travel back—and forward—in time. This is possible only while sitting in the chair, one which is constantly occupied by a ghost, and that…
“If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.” Henry Kissinger, former United States Secretary of State, and a political scientist, said this. He was involved in the Vietnam War, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, for negotiating…
The dust specks only dance for the light I allow them. I am the sole curator of this self-inflicted museum, responsible for its quiet and its failures. I look at my own wrist, not as skin and bone, but as a blueprint carrying a design I did not ask for. My body is a brittle,…