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The Truman Show Never Ended

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In 1998 a rather interesting film called The Truman Show appeared with what must have seemed like an absurd premise. A man lived his entire life in an artificial environment constructed by a television company while 1.7 million fictitious viewers watched him go about the rather unremarkable business of living. He ate breakfast, went to work, interacted with friends, and generally did everything that ordinary people do without imagining that anyone would find it entertaining. The remarkable premise was not the elaborate deception but the assumption that millions would actually want to watch the everyday life of another human being. Fast forward twenty-eight years to 2026. There is a woman named Sathi, like many others, who has approximately 1.2 million followers on a popular social media platform. With the support of her husband, she produces reels documenting her everyday life. She cooks, shops, spends time with her family, and does the thousand little things that constitute the ordin...
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When Reality Needs a Better Script

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I am restarting the blog. Perhaps “restarting” is too dramatic a word. Blogs, unlike people, have the considerable advantage of being able to disappear for a while without having to explain where they have been. However, in this return, I want to return to something that has driven much of my research for years—the story, or, if one wishes to sound appropriately academic, the narrative . Recent events have again reminded me that the more I look at everyday life, the more fascinated I become by the desperation of storytellers. We all tell stories. Sometimes we tell them to entertain. Sometimes to persuade. Sometimes to explain. And sometimes we tell stories because there is simply nothing else left to do. Reality, unfortunately, has never shown much interest in being coherent. Things happen without appropriate beginnings, satisfying endings, identifiable villains, or even competent scriptwriters. Yet we are expected to wake up the next morning and somehow continue living inside this b...
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The Collapse of the Promised Story

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One of the more fascinating features of human beings is their willingness to believe a story simply because they want it to be true. Not because the storyteller has a particularly impressive record of accuracy. The story is embraced because it fits an imagined reality, and imagined realities are often far more attractive than actual ones. Reality, after all, has a terrible habit of being stubborn. The promised narrative is usually easy to recognize. It arrives with confidence. Problems will be solved. Outcomes are all but guaranteed. The future is painted in bright colors and reassuring language. Those delivering the narrative position themselves as agents of change, architects of solutions, navigators of complexity. They know the way forward. The promised narrative offers comfort, and comfort is a powerful currency. The alternative stories - the ones filled with caution, uncertainty, probabilities, and unpleasant complications - are far less attractive. Nobody wants to hear from the l...
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Where the bodies are buried

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There is a commonly used expression that drifts through conversations with remarkable persistence: “I know where the bodies are buried.” I found myself using that phrase three separate times recently. The first occasion was with a close friend in the legal profession who was struggling through a couple of difficult cases, and I reminded him that every sufficiently complicated legal matter eventually arrives at the same point: find the person who knows where the bodies are buried. Somewhere in every conflict there exists a keeper of inconvenient stories, someone who remembers what actually happened before the official version was circulated. The second occasion emerged during discussions about a project I have undertaken - to write a living history of the Department of Communication, my home for nearly four decades. A senior colleague wisely reminded me that if I wanted the real history, I needed to locate the people who know where the bodies are buried. Then, it came up a third time,...
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The Newcomer’s Comfort, the Old Story’s Erasure

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There are moments in life when you get to do something that looks ceremonial from the outside but feels surgical from the inside - cutting through layers of time, memory, obligation, and yes, loyalty - to arrive at something that resembles truth. I recently had one of those moments. I had the opportunity to honor a person who, quite literally, made my life - as I know it - possible. Not in the performative, LinkedIn-endorsed, hashtag-gratitude sense, but in the inconvenient, historically verifiable, narrative-defining sense. The kind where if you remove that person from the timeline, the rest of the story collapses like a poorly written third act. In doing this, I was constantly reminded of the comment to an earlier blog from the pedestrian philosopher hiding behind anonymity, who offered this gem: “More like ‘Mentor’ is the bandage, notthe wound.” One has to admire the ignorance. Not the clarity, mind you - but the confidence embedded in a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Beca...
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Five Years In: When Narratives Refuse to Be Ignored

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Five years. One hundred and ninety-seven posts. It began in the furnace of lived experience - the second wave of COVID in Kolkata, the spring of 2021, a time when oxygen cylinders became currency, fear became routine, and narratives became survival tools. Layered on top of that was the theatre of state elections, because history, in its usual lack of subtlety, prefers to pile crisis upon crisis and then sit back to see who notices the pattern. Five years later, as another round of elections circles back, I have the opportunity to acknowledge five years of writing.  These numerous posts also elicited two hundred and thirty-seven comments that chose to show up in public on the blog site, and an uncounted archive of messages that arrived privately - some thoughtful, some generous, some irritated, and a few that mistook irritation for insight. This was never meant to be a quiet archive; it has always been a space where reaction - of any kind - signals that something landed, something u...
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Anonymous Courage

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Anonymous Courage Those who are regular readers of my blog would have noted that in a mildly entertaining turn of events, a supposedly anonymous interlocutor has been responding to my recent posts with admirable enthusiasm, apparently operating under the assumption that anonymity has rendered him unrecognizable . It is a charming belief. One almost hesitates to disturb it. Because, in truth, the identity is not particularly difficult to discern. The patterns are familiar, the voice is consistent, and the performance - how shall one put this -lacks the subtlety required for a convincing disguise. And just to make the exercise even more efficient, I have already been generous enough to identify the author as male, thereby eliminating roughly half the possible candidates in one polite stroke. One imagines the remaining pool is now feeling slightly uncomfortable. Out of courtesy, I have chosen not to identify him. There is a certain generosity in allowing someone the comfort of their cho...
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