Insight

2023: A Year of Highs, Lows, and Everything In Between 2023 has been a weird one. I think I was forced to contend with a little bit of everything this year – some spectacular moments and several underwhelming ones. If you asked me to rate it, I’d probably just say, it’s been alright. The Weight of Time For starters, I feel old. Not in the clichéd "older and wiser" sense, but genuinely tired. Most days, it felt like my battery was draining faster than it could recharge. For the first time, I can admit to experiencing both physical and mental wear. I had to unplug from social media and news more often just to regain a sense of control. I needed help navigating bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. Toxic workplace culture and grappling with solitude took a toll on my mental health. Oh, and a third round of COVID didn’t help. Thankfully, I recovered quickly, but the first half of the year felt overwhelmingly fragile. Small Steps, Big Impact Self-awareness has always been a strength of...

I used to watch a lot of cinema, back in the day. My flat mate had a keen eye for good quality cinema and would somehow find movies that struck a chord. We would watch movies from all over the world, English, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Iranian, Korean, Russian, it did not matter. Every week we would go find a movie to watch. Cinema is extremely popular in my home country. Movie stars enjoy a god like status, and it would be an uphill battle for someone to get a ticket on the first week for a showing if the movie has a top star in it. Names like Rajnikanth, Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachan, invoke such a passionate response from the audience. When I was younger, I have gone to movies with my friends just because an actor was starring in the film. Nothing else mattered, films had a set template for the most part. It was always a case of good getting the better of evil, some romance and comedy strewn between the scenes to appease the familial crowd and some dance numbers to keep the young men...

I had watched this documentary on Netflix a couple of years ago called Wild Wild Country. For those of you who are not familiar, the show is about Osho and his followers (popularly known as Rajneeshees) and their attempts to transform a remote US town into a haven for themselves. I was extremely intrigued by the blind devotion shown by the members. I wanted to try and understand what drove them to make these choices in their lives. These people seemingly would fit the definition of the word cult like a glove. Oxford dictionary puts the meaning of the word cult as “a small group of people who had an excessive amount of admiration for a particular person and had practices that were regarded by others as strange or sinister”. How many times have we read reports of cult leaders being arrested for criminal behavior? Despite that people refuse to believe that their leader can do anything wrong. I am thinking about the riots in northern India that unfolded after the conviction and ...