Life is a Verb

 

The monsoon arrives as a terrestrial reset, a violent grace that refuses the permanence of any human claim. In the lowlands, the wasteland is not a static geography but a recurring event. Each year, the sky bruises to a deep, heavy indigo, and the rains descend to dismantle the shanties, dissolving the mud-packed floors and stripping the corrugated sheets until the earth reclaimed by the water is indistinguishable from the chaos of the flood.

And yet, as the silt settles and the humidity begins its long, slow simmer, the inhabitants return. There is no mourning the lost structure with the static grief of those who own stone. 

Once the land is dry, they begin the labor of becoming again. They haul, they tether, they patch. To look at these settlements and see "poverty" is to see a noun—cold, fixed, and pitiable. To look at them and see the rebuilding is to recognize the verb. The shanty is not a thing but a persistent act of defiance against the inevitable.

This is the great, shimmering truth we spend our lives attempting to ignore: nothing is ever finished. We treat our identities, our griefs, and our triumphs as monuments—granite slabs we can polish and protect. But the universe has no interest in monuments. It deals only in currents. To cling to a "self" as a finished product is to attempt to dam a river with a handful of sand. It is the wise who understand that the eye must be wiped clean every morning, that to truly see is to witness the world again and again for the first time. The moment we name a thing, we stop seeing it and start seeing our definition of it.

To see the flow is to understand that stability is a hallucination of the slow-moving. If we zoom out far enough, even the mountains are a slow, subsurface wave. If we zoom in, our very cells are a frenetic exchange of energy, a constant dying and birthing that maintains the illusion of a solid "me." When we stop resisting this motion—when we stop trying to freeze the frame—we move from being the observer of the storm to being the wind itself. There is an exquisite, ungraspable beauty in this lack of tether. It is the freedom of the unfinished.

Even the finality of the grave is a linguistic lie. Death is not the end of the sentence but a shift in syntax. Life continues its conjugation in the memory that stings the eyes of a survivor, in the sharp, sudden cadence of words left behind in a dusty notebook, or in the haunting stillness of a photograph where a gaze still reaches out to touch the living. We are exhaled into the air, an essence that lingers in the lungs of those who follow, a quiet ripple in the collective ambient pressure.

We are not the house but the building of it. We are not the wound but the healing of it. In this wasteland of shifting tides and seasonal wreckage, there is no arrival, only the exquisite, terrifying, and holy momentum of the journey. Life is not a state of being we inhabit rather an action we perform until the very last breath—and then, it is an action that the world performs in our absence.

Four by Four

 

The shadow of the four-letter word is a long one, cast by the flickering candles of a thousand Victorian parlors and the stern, pursed lips of a century’s worth of schoolmasters. It is a phrase that arrives with a built-in recoil, a linguistic flinch. To speak of "four-letter words" is to invoke the blunt, the base, and the broken—the vocabulary of the gutter, the sharp exhale of the frustrated, the jagged glass of the tavern brawl. We have been conditioned to see these four-character clusters as the weeds in the garden of discourse, things to be uprooted, bleached, and replaced with the ornamental topiary of Latinate synonyms.

Yet, if we hold the phrase "four-letter words" to the light and turn it gently, the prism shifts. The shadow does not disappear, but it begins to describe a different shape. What if these words are not the pollutants of language, but its bedrock? What if they are not merely the markers of impropriety, but the smallest, most pressurized vessels of the human condition?

Consider the symmetry of the architecture. The tongue does not discriminate between the sacred and the profane when the count is four. Love sits on the same shelf as the crudest anatomical slur; fear occupies the same rhythmic space as the most visceral curse. We have spent an eternity separating the acceptable from the forbidden, categorizing our outbursts into neat piles of "grace" and "filth," yet the body experiences both with an identical, shivering intensity. The pulse does not check a dictionary before it quickens.

There is a strange, muscular economy to the four-letter word. It is a linguistic bullet, stripped of the aerodynamic fluff of suffixes and the self-importance of multi-syllabic pretense. To speak in fours is to speak in a state of emergency or a state of ecstasy.

Pain is a four-letter word. It is a blunt strike, a singular thud against the consciousness.

Glee is its high-frequency twin, a spark that vanishes as quickly as it ignites.

Pure and Rave, Tang and Loss.

These are not words that describe life from a safe, academic distance. They do not meander through the scenic routes of "unfortunate circumstances" or "momentary exhilaration." They strike at the center. They are the vocabulary of the bone and the gut. When we are reduced to our most honest selves—when the ego is stripped bare by a sudden blow or an unexpected kiss—we do not reach for the ornate. We reach for the four.

The tragedy of our linguistic policing is that by stigmatizing the "four-letter word," we have inadvertently cast a shroud over the tools required for an unfiltered life. We have been taught to fear the sharp edges of the tongue, forgetting that the same edge used to wound is the one required to carve out the truth. A curse is often just a prayer that has lost its patience; a confession is often just a wound finding its voice. Both arrive in that same, compact shape.

In the quiet observation of our own internal weather, we find that the "taboo" and the "tender" are made of the same vibrating material. There is a hidden symmetry in how we navigate our days through these monosyllabic anchors. We wake in dark, we seek the dawn. We feel the urge, we endure the halt.

Society insists on a hierarchy of utility, telling us that "nice" words are for the parlor and "bad" words are for the alley. But the mind is a lawless place. In the heat of a rave or the cold hollow of a void, the distinction between a profanity and a poem dissolves. 

They are both attempts to bridge the gap between the unspeakable interior and the audible world. They are fragments of a more honest, prehistoric vocabulary that existed before we learned to use language as a mask.

To embrace the four-letter word is to stop treating language like a costume and start treating it like a skin. It is to recognize that our "crude" outbursts are often our most authentic echoes.

By widening the definition, we reclaim the four-letter word as a tool of recognition rather than classification. We stop looking for the smudge on the page and start looking at the weight of the ink. If we allow ourselves to see hope as clearly as we see its cruder cousins, we realize that the brevity of the word is not a sign of its simplicity, but of its density. It is the diamond formed under the immense pressure of being human.

Ultimately, "Four by Four" is an invitation to inhabit the small spaces of our speech. It is a call to stop apologizing for the jaggedness of our expressions and to find the grace in the blunt. We are composed of these fragments—tiny, four-sided mirrors that reflect a different version of the truth depending on how the light hits them.

The world is loud, complex, and increasingly draped in the soft, suffocating fabric of euphemism. In such a landscape, the four-letter word—in all its forms—acts as a necessary puncture. It lets the air in. Whether it is the ache of a long-held secret or the fire of a new conviction, these words remind us that we are still here, still feeling, and still capable of speaking the truth in its most elemental form.

We do not need more syllables to be more human. We only need the courage to use the ones we have, unfiltered and unafraid.

An Intellectual Life

The Dehradun valley, a basin cradled between the ancient folds of the Himalayas and the aging Shivaliks, is a psychological landscape. To lead an intellectually rich life here is to engage in a constant, rhythmic dialogue between the sprawling external majesty of the Sal forests and the tight, intimate architecture of the interior self. It is a life lived at the intersection of height and depth.

In the valley, intellect is not a sterile, academic exercise. It is weathered by the humidity of the monsoon and sharpened by the crisp, biting air of a Mussoorie winter. An intellectually rich life in this terrain requires one to be a "literary naturalist." It means understanding that a book by Gerald Durrell or a poem by Mary Oliver takes on a different molecular weight when read under the shadow of the mountains. Here, the mind must mirror the ecosystem—diverse, resilient, and deeply rooted.

The richness comes from resisting the urge to let the vastness of the landscape diminish the self. When surrounded by peaks that have stood for millennia, there is a temptation toward a hollow insignificance. However, the true intellectual task is to inhabit one’s own body with a fierce, quiet presence. It is the practice of somatic grounding: feeling the soles of your feet on the rocky riverbeds of the Song or the Tons, ensuring that while your thoughts may scale the summits, your nervous system remains anchored in the immediate, physical "now."

To focus on relationship within this solitude is the valley’s greatest challenge and reward. In the city, relationships are often transactional or frantic. In the valley, they are slow-growing, like the moss on the north side of a deodar tree.

An intellectually rich relationship here is built on the capacity for shared observation—watching the winter line appear on the horizon without the need to colonize the moment with speech.

It involves treating the "other" not as a distraction from the intellectual quest, but as its primary subject. To love another in the shadow of the mountains is to acknowledge our shared fragility against the backdrop of the eternal.

Ultimately, staying rooted in one’s own mind requires a "fingerprint" of thought—a style of being that is uniquely yours. The valley offers the silence necessary to hear your own cadence.

"The forest does not demand your attention; it invites your presence. To be intellectually rich is to accept that invitation without losing the thread of your own story."

It is a life of deliberate containment. You allow the mountains to inform your scale, the forests to inform your complexity, and the rivers to inform your flow, but the hearth—the center of the mind—remains your own. It is the realization that the most profound peaks are not those seen through the window, but the ones climbed within the silence of a morning meditation or the margins of a well-worn notebook. In Dehradun, the mind finds its true altitude by learning how to stay home.

The Stories We Tell About Birds

We inherit language as we inherit weather: a climate we did not choose, yet one that dictates the very nub of our perception.

There is a profound, desperate vanity in the human impulse to name. Among all living things, birds seem to endure the most exquisite of our poetic projections. Perhaps it is because they exist in the liminal — creatures that navigate the seam between the heavy earth and the infinite sky. Or perhaps we envy their vantage point, their ability to look down upon our small, cluttered lives. More likely, we need them to carry the weight of the stories our own voices are too fragile to hold.

Consider the collective nouns we have fashioned for them — tiny, linguistic guillotines.

A murder of crows.

A conspiracy of ravens.

These phrases arrive with a gothic flourish, stained by centuries of superstition. We have chained the crow to the antechamber of death, casting it as a scavenger of souls. The raven is granted an even more sinister architecture: a plotting, unkind guardian of omens we lack the courage to speak aloud. The English language crystallizes these judgments into a single word, as if a syllable could ever encapsulate the totality of a life.

But the truth is a quieter, more tender thing.

Crows groom one another with a delicate, heartbreaking affection. They bring trinkets — shards of glass, silver foil, small buttons — to humans who show them grace. They recognize faces; they grieve their dead; they love for decades. To label a creature capable of such sophisticated loyalty as “murder” is not a description — it is a confession of human fear.

And the ravens? Far from being conspiratorial, they are the jesters of the high peaks, inventing games in the snow and mimicking human laughter with a tenderness that borders on the uncanny.

Language distorts the lens until we can no longer see the bird for the name.

For me, however, the most confounding inhabitant of this linguistic cage is the Owl.

In the West, a group of owls is a parliament. The word suggests a dignified silence, a gathering of ancient minds in deep, nocturnal consultation. Sacred to Athena, the owl is a symbol of clarity, a spiritual lighthouse in the dark. It is the elected custodian of the unseen.

Yet, this is not the owl that haunts the Indian psyche.

In Hindi, one of the most pervasive insults is “Ullu ka Pattha” — the son of an owl. A fool. A simpleton. It is an insult that functions as a cultural inheritance, whispered into the ears of children before they even know the weight of a wing. Here, the owl is shorthand for misfortune, for the socially inconvenient, for a strangeness that refuses to be tamed.

Perhaps we fear their swiveling, impossible heads, or the way their unblinking yellow eyes seem to strip us of our pretenses. Or maybe it is their call — that low, hollow percussion that sounds like a forgotten memory calling your name from an empty room. In our folklore, the owl occupies the uneasy hollow between guardianship and madness. It belongs nowhere completely, which means it haunts everywhere partially.

I return to them because birds mirror the human psyche in ways we are too proud to acknowledge.

We turn them into symbols because symbols are easier to carry than the messy, breathing complexity of a living thing. A crow is too much: it is social, mischievous, mournful, and wise. So we flatten it. We choose a single, jagged angle and call it the Truth. This is what we do to birds, to our neighbors, and ultimately, to ourselves.

These collective nouns tell me nothing of the birds, but everything of the people who named them.

A murder of crows tells me that humans fear the end so viscerally they project it onto black feathers.

A conspiracy of ravens tells me we distrust any intelligence that stares back at us with equal curiosity.

A parliament of owls tells me we believe wisdom is found in the dark.

But the Ullu tells me that silence can be terrifying when it reveals nothing we recognize. It tells me that wisdom, without cultural permission, is dismissed as idiocy.

We find it easier to call the unknown “foolish” than to approach it with humility.

The birds do not carry these burdens; we do.

Sometimes I wonder what collective noun we would choose for our own species, if we were stripped of our vanities. A confusion of men. A solitude of old women. A grief of families. A forgetting of nations.

Perhaps the truest would be this: a story of humans. For we live entirely within the narratives we weave, caught in the web of our own telling.

The owl remains my most faithful ghost because it defies every category. It is wise and foolish in the same breath, sacred and unsettling, an omen of loss and a beacon of guidance. It is the bird of the liminal world — the one we enter when we close our eyes and listen to the night-tide rising inside us.

It occupies the same terrain as memory: elusive, dark, strangely comforting, and vaguely threatening. It is a creature shaped by our misunderstanding, yet utterly undisturbed by it.

A parliament. An ullu. Wisdom. Folly.

It holds these contradictions without shattering. If only we possessed the same structural integrity.

In the end, our names for the world are merely fences we build to keep the infinity out. But the birds, like grief, like the sky, refuse to be fenced. The real wisdom of the owl is not that it knows more than we do, but that it moves through the darkness without the need to define it.

 It is free because it has no story for itself. It simply is.

 

On Silence

 

Silence is the gravity of my work. It is a primal instinct — the foundational element upon which every sentence is built. I have always found that the most profound human transactions occur in the wordless spaces between heartbeats. Consequently, the narrative rarely spills into the cacophony of the external world; instead, it unfolds within the hallowed, private theater of the narrator’s mind.

This creates a closed, almost claustrophobic intimacy — a room where the consciousness of the narrator and the reader meet. In this space, there is only the quiet, rhythmic collision of thought, memory, and sensation moving against the glass of the ego.

The characters who inhabit my books, drift. They pass through the narrator’s awareness like shadows moving across a sunlit floor — gradual, often wordless, and always carrying a heavier emotional truth in their mere presence than in any dialogue they might utter. They are the ghosts of our lived experience, felt long before they are heard.

This methodology is a deliberate act of sanctuary. The themes I am compelled to explore — the jagged edges of loneliness, the ancestral pull of the animal self, the quiet, persistent ache of the human condition — possess the power to dismantle a reader’s worldview. If I were to approach these truths with the blunt force of argument or the frantic pace of plot, the reader might recoil.

Instead, I offer the silence as a safeguard. I want the reader to feel held, to feel a profound respect for the sanctity of their own internal life. My intention is never to confront the world with a clenched fist, but to carry a small, steady flame into the dark corners of the rooms we all inhabit — the rooms we are often too frightened to examine with honesty.

For me, silence is the highest form of truth. It is the clearing in the forest where feeling is permitted to surface without the distortion of force. It allows the reader to breathe in tandem with the narrative, to inhabit the cadence of the prose until the distinction between the writer and the witness dissolves.

In that profound quiet, something essential is revealed. It is a truth revealed through presence — the simple, terrifying, and beautiful realization that to be silent is to finally, truly, be heard.