While It Rains

नफ़रत: बंधन का बोझ जब खुदी अज़ीज़ों के जज़्बात से जुड़ी हो, ( Jab khudi azeezon ke jazbaat se judi ho ) जो अपनों की बंदिश बने, वही मुसीबत हो। ( Jo apnon ki bandish bane, woh hi musibat ho ) वो बंधन प्यार का न रहे, नफ़रत का ही बन जाता हो। ( Woh bandhan pyaar ka na rahe, nafrat ka hi ban jaata ho. ) पर उस क़रीबी को तोड़ दिया तो ( Par us qareebi ko tod diya toh ) मेरी पहचान में बचता क्या है? ( Meri pehchaan mein bachta kya hai? ) Translation : When the self is scaffolded by dear ones’ emotions. Whose benign shackles become a source of misery, my love feigns turning into hatred. But if I break that bond, what is left of who I am?

       Stories, often a tool for description that has a narrative, a structure and flow. But seldom do we realise them as not just the kind we read, hear or see, but the ones we live. Everything we feel every desire, fear, hope, or heartbreak is, in some form, a narrative absorbed through our senses. Stories shape us. They teach us how to love, what to fear, who we are, and even what to long for. And more often than not, we mistake these borrowed scripts as our own. Stories are unique to humans and their strength, this collective strength more often is conformity. We absorb tales through culture, religion, media, and upbringing. But when the narrative of every short story we come accross are bound by bigger make believe stories of power, money, survival, and greed, maybe the player might as well once step behind to understand the narrative of the frontman of these Squid games of Identity. Every passing day becomes a process of adaptation, subtly shifting ourselves to...

     For the longest time, I believed the world was driven by the survival instincts of states. Wars, as Realists thought, happened because borders were threatened by Anarchical structure, identities were wounded, or ideologies clashed. International relations appeared to be a series of defensive reactions in a chaotic, unpredictable world. But over time, I’ve begun to doubt that narrative. When I observe global politics today, when I look at the endless wars, the diplomatic deadlocks, the shifting alliances, and the sudden peace deals, I no longer see states merely trying to survive. What I see is something far more disquieting: economies pretending to survive. These are not systems surviving through real production, equity, or tangible value, but economies that are performing survival, held together by the illusion of stability. It’s a carefully maintained mirage, where what matters most is not the well-being of people, but the appearance that capital is flowing, that c...

        There was a time when I believed that experiencing poverty, really living it, was a rite of passage. Something you go through to earn wisdom. Maybe even to feel more human. That belief led me to a night train journey, ticketless, slipping through compartments, sleep-deprived, watching others like me shuffle silently to avoid being fined. For a moment, I felt I had tapped into something profound, the rawness of human endurance. But hindsight is ruthless and honest. That night could have been spent in a cabin, with people I love, resting, talking, living. If I had spent my skills, not just my time , on making money, it would’ve been a memory of warmth, not weariness. That’s when it struck me: money isn’t for material happiness. It’s a tool to buy quality time. Mental peace. Safety. Stability. Better experiences. People who struggle passively often find a strange comfort in blaming the system. It's easier than decoding it. But real struggle is not in surrenderin...

  Political science is the master science. -Aristotle. Evolution is the only permanent truth. Makes sense when seen through the theory of an ever-expanding universe. Within this dynamic, the advancement of humans in all fields is nothing short of a marvel. But I believe that only in the field of political science, we are not quite at par with the pace of evolution witnessed in other disciplines. And that too is ironic, given that political science is what holds the architecture of all other fields together. If political institutions collapse, so does everything else. Since the 1600s, political science was reduced to a means for economics, whether through the lens of social contract theory, idealist welfare models, or Marxist interpretations. But the growing political apathy of our times, as Herbert Marcuse foresaw, calls out the dangers of reducing humans to one-dimensional beings, increasingly shaped by individualism and the idea of the ‘economic man.’ This disconnection is especi...

 Traversing the Tirumala hill on a four-wheeler, I moved along a tar road carved and maintained with calculated effort through the rough terrain. Through the glass that shielded me from the wind, I caught vivid glimpses of the various techniques used to preserve the route—methods engineered to resist natural erosion, which, if left unchecked, would gradually reduce the sacred hilltop to debris. In that moment, the sheer human will encoded in this effort struck me. At one bend, I saw a man working with concrete and steel, blending into the rhythm of the terrain. This brought to my mind Howard Roark—the fiercely independent architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Roark’s creative integrity represented the pinnacle of individual genius shaping the physical world, and here too, I sensed a similar quiet assertion of human superiority over nature—not in conquest, but in preservation. Yet, unlike Roark’s lone pursuit, this man’s labour wasn’t driven by personal vision alone. This was ...

 There’s a quiet but haunting irony tucked into Darkest Hour,  not in the grand speeches or wartime maps, but in a fictional moment on the London Underground. Winston Churchill, isolated by the weight of a nation’s fate, steps into a train car. He is surrounded by ordinary citizens, faces of London’s working class, the very people whose lives hang in the balance. As the conversation unfolds, he begins to quote the poem "Horatius at the Bridge" by Thomas Babington Macaulay: “How can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?” Strikingly, the last line is completed not by Churchill, but by a Black man sitting in the carriage.  Human evolution and the long arc of civilization have been oriented toward one purpose: living better. Every political system, technological innovation, and economic reform has been justified in the name of a better life. Yet here, in the depths of a war narrative, the message pivots to dying b...