The bathroom is the smallest room in the house and, therefore, naturally, the most honest. It’s got that permanent, damp, lower-middle-class perfume: phenyl pretending to be cleanliness; rust pretending to be plumbing; an old plastic mug with its rim cracked like a tired smile; a tap that drips on its own schedule, like a government office with delusions of autonomy.

There’s a thin window grille that looks out onto nothing in particular—some plaster, some moss, a bit of sky that has been filtered through other people’s dust—and in the early morning it throws a faint gray light onto the one true altar of the modern Bengali: the phone, balanced precariously on the edge of a bucket, glowing like a handheld prophecy machine, vomiting headlines into my retinas while my actual body is doing the oldest job on Earth.

And this is where I do my most sophisticated thinking. Not in a library. Not in some tasteful café. Not in a Stanford seminar room where people murmur “epistemology” and feel spiritually lubricated. No. I do it here, pants around ankles, abdomen mildly betrayed, mind racing, and—because I am apparently committed to living as an extended metaphor—my thoughts habitually looping back into my own rear like a dog trying to climb inside itself to check whether the universe is, in fact, a dog.

There’s a peculiar focus that comes from being confronted with your own biology in the raw. Your body, that unpaid intern you’ve been dragging through life, finally submits its report: waste, residue, the unglamorous bookkeeping of metabolism. And I, being me, look at that report and immediately begin to interpret it as philosophy.

The thing about shoving your head up your own ass—metaphorically, mostly; let’s keep this a literature blog and not an emergency room log—is that you do, in fact, start to believe you’re being profound. It feels like depth. It smells like depth. It is, arguably, depth. But it’s also a closed system. A self-referential loop. A cognitive ouroboros, chewing its own tail with the conviction of a man eating a sausage and declaring it a cosmology.

And I am fifty, which is an age that doesn’t feel like a number so much as a verdict. Half a century sounds like something you build museums about. In practice it’s just a body that creaks in new places and a mind that has memorized too many disappointments to be surprised by fresh ones.

The Bathroom as Observatory

I sometimes think the toilet is the only honest “social media” because it is literally about what remains after the performance. Everything else is curated. Even despair is curated now—high-resolution sadness, nicely framed, with a little melancholic jazz playing in the background. But feces? Feces does not care about your branding. It is the most egalitarian thing in the world. Billionaires excrete. Priests excrete. Revolutionaries excrete. The influencer who sells you “gut health” powders excretes and then posts about it in euphemisms.

Here, in this cramped observatory, I doom-scroll and discover that the world is still being run by the usual forces: vanity, fear, greed, tribalism, and that uniquely modern compound—algorithmically optimized vanity, fear, greed, and tribalism. Somewhere, a startup is teaching a machine to write poems; somewhere else, a government is teaching a human to hate another human; somewhere else, a billionaire is teaching the planet to boil gently like a sad biryani.

And I, a redundant Bengali man in the boondocks of south Calcutta, am supposed to decide what to do with the rest of my lifespan while the future is being assembled by intelligences that do not have to shit, do not have to blush, do not have to lie awake at 3 a.m. replaying small humiliations from 1999 like a broken VHS tape.

I keep coming back to that word: redundant. It’s such a clean, technical insult. It sounds like you’re being laid off by a polite guillotine. “Nothing personal,” says the universe, “we just don’t need your role anymore.”

But the universe is lying. The universe doesn’t “need” anything. It is not a company. It does not have HR. It is a blind thermodynamic spree, converting order into heat, complexity into dust, dreams into compost. We dress this up with meaning the way we dress up the bathroom with air freshener.

I look at my own bodily output and think, with an absurd kind of tenderness: this is also intelligence. There’s a whole microbiome down there, a parliament of bacteria negotiating treaties over fiber. They ferment. They produce gas. They metabolize my choices. They do not read the news. They do not worry about AI. They are, in their way, serene.

And then the phone buzzes, and my brain resumes its hobby of turning itself inside out.

The Machine Without Anus

The modern myth is that machines will surpass us because they are “pure intelligence,” unburdened by hunger, lust, boredom, shame. This is always said with a kind of reverence, as if the absence of an anus is a moral improvement.

But I don’t know. The anus is, among other things, a humility device. It is the universe’s way of reminding you that no matter how grand your thoughts get, you still have to sit down and expel yesterday’s rice like an animal. It’s difficult to fully believe your own propaganda when your intestines are making urgent demands.

A machine has no intestines. It doesn’t have the biochemical feedback that forces you to admit limits. It doesn’t have to sleep because it’s tired; it sleeps because we schedule maintenance. It doesn’t forget because it’s overwhelmed; it forgets because we delete.

But even the machine—this supposedly ethereal, stainless-steel angel—still obeys the old gods: energy and heat. If you erase information, you pay a thermodynamic price. The machine does excrete; it just excretes as waste heat, like a god sweating. It shits in joules.

Data centers are the new latrines of civilization: huge, humming facilities where we flush our desires (content! content! content!) and the pipes lead to heat exchangers and power plants and carbon emissions and rivers that warm like fevered foreheads. We are building a planet-sized digestive tract for cognition, and pretending it’s “clean” because it happens out of sight. Behind the glitzy blitz, one thing the big companies want us to not notice is that the idea is to ultimately outsource thinking, lock, stock, and barrel, in its entirety, and the biological ones are destined to be the janitors of the lavatories of the AI overlords: the data centers. It’s water recycled from these lavatories that we’ll be sold as potable water, and you will only get the leftover electricity, and unless you have solar panels, you’d go back to the 1990s Calcutta. Because come AI September, our duplicitous democracy is going to sell all the coal to the AI data centers first. Citizens never fared well in transactions; they’re only important when you have to put the fraudsters in the chair at the helm. After that, only nonexistent Ganesh will wipe your tears. So yes—be prepared for load-shedding and water scarcity on top of an apocalyptic market of joblessness, career obsolescence, and field extinctions.

In the Indian context, of course, “out of sight” is aspirational. Nothing stays out of sight. The dust returns. The corruption returns. The sewage returns. The history returns. You can slap paint on a wall but the damp comes back like a remembered insult.

So when I hear people talk about “the future,” I picture a machine that cannot be embarrassed, cannot be satiated, cannot be shamed into restraint, and I wonder: are we really upgrading, or are we just removing the one feature that kept us from taking ourselves too seriously?

Meanwhile I, the flesh model, am stuck with biology and a mind that insists on narrating its own decay in full color.

Rectitude, Rectum, and Other Lies

“Rectum,” famously, comes from Latin rectus, meaning “straight,” because some ancient anatomist took one look at that section of intestine and thought it was relatively straight compared to the rest. This is hilarious for two reasons: first, because the human body is not, in fact, straight in any moral or geometric sense; and second, because “rectitude” (moral uprightness) shares the same root, which implies that the path to virtue is somehow related to having a properly aligned colon.

If that were true, half of Kolkata would be enlightened by now, because the city produces saints in the quantity it produces constipation.

I am not morally upright. I am morally hunched, like the wiring behind a cheap wall socket.

And yet, sitting here, I keep thinking about the old Sanskrit lines we were made to treat as spiritual gold, even when the people chanting them were often spiritual pickpockets. The phrases are beautiful. The human use of them—often less so.

सत्यमेव जयते नानृतं — truth alone triumphs, not falsehood. (Upanishads) We stuck this on buildings and stationery and then built an entire economy of lies around it, like decorating a slaughterhouse with flower garlands.

तत् त्वम् असि — “you are that,” the famous whisper from the Chandogya Upanishad, delivered to Śvetaketu like a cosmic mic drop. And what do I do with it? I use it as another stick to beat myself: if I am that, then why am I this—this anxious, petty, procrastinating lump of mammal, scrolling doom in a bathroom?

Then the other mahāvākya slides in, smug as ever:

अहं ब्रह्मास्मि — “I am Brahman,” not as a brag, but as a dissolving of the small self into something vast. Which is a lovely idea until you remember that the “small self” is the one paying rent, buying groceries, arguing with customer care, and waking up with dread like a hand around the throat.

I am an atheist, yes, but atheism doesn’t make the poetry disappear. It just changes the genre. These lines become artifacts: evidence that humans have always been terrified of their own smallness and have always tried, through language, to make a bridge from the toilet to the stars.

There is something both pathetic and noble about that. Mostly pathetic. But not entirely.

Midlife as a Bad Algorithm

If my life were a machine-learning model, it would be one of those tragic ones trained on junk data—too much noise, not enough signal, and a permanent tendency to overfit on early humiliations. The loss becomes familiar, the familiar becomes identity, and identity becomes a prison with good vocabulary.

At fifty, you start to realize how many of your “choices” were really just defaults you never bothered to interrogate. The inertia of family, the inertia of city, the inertia of class, the inertia of a brain that learned certain patterns early and kept replaying them because repetition feels like certainty.

Bipolarity doesn’t help. It adds a cruel lighting system: sometimes everything is lit up with manic connectivity, every idea linked to every other idea, the universe suddenly readable like a secret code; then the switch flips and the world becomes flat, gray, heavy, and you cannot remember why you ever thought anything mattered.

The most dangerous part is that both states feel convincing while you’re inside them. Hypomania tells you you’ve discovered the key. Depression tells you there is no lock. Both are liars. Both are persuasive.

So here I am, doing my morning ablutions, and my mind decides that the “head up ass” metaphor is not enough; it must become a full cosmological model.

Maybe consciousness itself is a kind of digestion. We take in experience, chew it, metabolize it into meaning, excrete the rest as forgetting. Memory is the nutrient. Forgetting is the waste. Personality is the smell.

And what happens when a society builds machines that can consume experience at scale—data, images, text, human traces—without the same limits, without the same slow digestion, without the same need to forget? It becomes a creature with an infinite appetite and no shame, an intelligence that doesn’t have to sit down and confront itself in a cramped bathroom with rust stains.

It’s not that the machine is evil. It’s worse. It’s indifferent. Indifference is the real apocalypse: not fire and brimstone, just the quiet replacement of your relevance with something more efficient.

I scroll past a video of someone smiling too hard, selling “productivity.” I scroll past a politician promising “development.” I scroll past a child dancing for likes. I scroll past a war presented like a weather update. I scroll past a new model release. I scroll past an old friend’s success. I scroll past my own life in fragments, chopped into content by the same hand that will one day chop me into memory and then into nothing.

The absurdity is not that I feel despair. The absurdity is that I ever expected anything else.

Small Scenes, Big Indictments

Outside, in the para, someone has begun the daily ritual of noise. A scooter coughs. A dog barks at the concept of Tuesday. A neighbor’s television leaks devotional singing into the corridor like secondhand smoke. The city wakes up and immediately starts performing itself.

I walk to the kitchen, make tea, and watch the milk form that thin skin that always looks like a dead thing trying to become a document. I stir. I wait. I drink. It tastes like habit. It tastes like survival. It tastes like the kind of life that is not tragic enough to be interesting, but not comfortable enough to be forgiven.

In another universe—one where the gods are kinder or the probability distribution is less cruel—I might have been “someone.” In this universe, I am a man who reads too much, thinks too much, earns too little, and carries around a head full of philosophy like a suitcase full of bricks.

And yet, I cannot fully hate my life because it contains books. It contains language. It contains the occasional moment when a sentence lands exactly right and I feel, briefly, that the universe has been pinned to the page like an insect specimen.

That’s the pathetic little defiance: not a revolution, not a legacy, not a grand transformation—just a paragraph that refuses to die quietly.

The educational system here taught us to memorize answers, not to ask questions. It taught us reverence, not curiosity. It taught us to worship authority in the form of exams, marks, ranks, jobs. It did not teach us how to live inside uncertainty without panicking.

So now, when uncertainty arrives in the form of AI and automation and the slow obsolescence of human labor, the official response is, predictably, slogans. “Digital India.” “Skill India.” “Innovation.” A shower of adjectives over a sewage problem.

And I, being the sort of person who can’t just accept a slogan without poking it with a stick, end up back in the same loop: rage, analysis, despair, self-mockery, repeat.

The Spirituality of Not Believing

What does an atheist do with Sanskrit scripture? The same thing a starving man does with a menu: he reads, he imagines, he suffers.

But the Upanishads are not menus. They are more like fever dreams of human cognition trying to escape itself. They don’t say “believe in this god and you’ll get a better afterlife.” They say, instead, that the self you’re clinging to is not what you think it is—that your smallness is a misunderstanding, that your separateness is an illusion, that the boundary between “you” and “everything else” is more porous than your fear will allow.

It’s a gorgeous thought. It’s also, in my lived experience, extremely difficult to practice when your mind is running on shame and your body is running on tea.

Still. I keep the lines around like talismans, not because I think they’re literally true, but because they are tools for prying open the rigid little box of my identity.

When I’m stuck in my most solipsistic absurdity—when my head is so far up my own rear that I can taste yesterday’s regret—I try to remember that billions of humans have been trapped in the same mental architecture, and some of them, at least, managed to carve windows into it.

Even the Bhagavata Purana, drenched as it is in devotion, sometimes hits a note that feels less like religion and more like physics:

यद्भयाद्वाति वातोऽयं सूर्यस्तपति यद्भयात् — “out of fear of That, the wind blows; out of fear of That, the sun burns.” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam)

Call it God, call it law, call it causality, call it the indifferent machinery of nature—the point is the same: you are not in charge. You never were. Your dignity, if you can find any, has to be built inside that fact, not in denial of it.

And that’s where my mind does its irritating little swivel: if I am not in charge, then what am I responsible for?

Answer: more than I want, less than I fear.

I am responsible for the way I treat the people around me. I am responsible for whether I turn my cynicism into cruelty or into clarity. I am responsible for whether I let my bitterness become a kind of religion. I am responsible for whether I keep writing when the world doesn’t ask for it, because not everything worthwhile is requested by the market.

I am also responsible—annoyingly—for my own small maintenance: sleep, food, walking, not living entirely inside the phone, not using rage as a substitute for purpose.

This is not self-help. This is survival math.

The Quiet Horror of Being Replaceable

The most humiliating thing about AI is not that it can write. Humans have always been able to write. The humiliating thing is how quickly society is willing to treat writing—thinking, explaining, creating—as just another commodity, another output, another product you can swap for a cheaper unit.

We like to say humans are special because of creativity, empathy, consciousness, blah blah. But the moment an imitation appears that’s “good enough,” the market shrugs and moves on. Specialness, it turns out, is not a moral category; it’s a pricing category.

And then the mind does what it always does: it looks for a loophole.

Maybe the loophole is that machines don’t suffer. They don’t get embarrassed. They don’t have that weird, aching, animal longing to be seen. They don’t need meaning the way humans need meaning, like lungs need air.

So perhaps being a creature with an anus and an anxious brain is not a bug. It’s the whole point. It’s the cost of caring.

Which is a nauseatingly sentimental idea, and I immediately want to punch myself for it, but I can’t fully dismiss it either, because the alternative is pure nihilism, and pure nihilism is boring in the long run, like eating only salt.

I am not brave enough for pure nihilism. I keep living. I keep boiling tea. I keep reading. I keep writing. I keep having stupid little flashes of wonder—at a sentence, at a bit of math, at a stray cat balancing on a wall as if gravity were negotiable.

That’s not enlightenment. That’s just stubbornness with better lighting.

A Small Gesture

Later, I go back to the bathroom. The same bucket. The same cracked mug. The same damp walls. The same faint smell of phenyl losing a war it never signed up for.

I look at the phone again, because of course I do, because addiction is not cured by insight. I scroll a little. I feel the old loop begin: outrage, despair, self-implication, the urge to declare myself finished.

Then—almost by accident, almost with embarrassment—I turn the screen off. Not forever. Not heroically. Just… off.

The room becomes quieter. The fan rattles. The tap drips. Somewhere outside, the city continues its performance, gods and scams and scooters and slogans, the great sweaty machine of Homo sapiens shuffling forward, half-blind, half-certain, dragging its history like a sack of wet laundry.

I flush. I wash my hands. I watch the water spiral away, taking with it the evidence of my body’s private work.

For a moment, the metaphor is almost tasteful: waste removed, loop interrupted, a small cleansing.

Then the tap drips again, because of course it does, because nothing stays fixed in this universe, not even plumbing, not even despair.

I pick up a book from the table—an old paperback with yellowing pages—and I read a single paragraph the way a drowning man grabs driftwood: not because it saves him, but because it gives his hands something to do.

And that, for now, is my defiance: not purity, not progress, not some triumphant reinvention of a fifty-year-old life, just a stubborn little refusal to let the future—machine or human—be the only thing that gets to speak.