The rice cooker clicks from cooking to warm with the calm finality of a judge who has seen too many cases and has stopped believing in anyone’s innocence, and in that tiny sound—plastic button, spring, little thermostat inside doing its obedient physics—I feel the day collapse into its usual shape: four walls, a ceiling that has the expression of someone who’s heard your excuses before, a floor that remembers every footstep like a resentful aunt, and me, thirty centimeters from a phone, pretending I’m “reading,” when really I’m grazing.

Rice and dal and mustard oil, and tea. The holy trinity of not-dying. Not starving, not collapsing, not spontaneously combusting into a cautionary tale that would briefly entertain my neighbors before they returned to their serials and their God and their WhatsApp groups where everyone is a constitutional scholar, epidemiologist, and military strategist, all at once, all incorrect. The rice cooker is the closest thing this room has to a benevolent deity: it asks for nothing, it does its job, it doesn’t require me to abase myself in exchange for a miracle. I put in water, rice; it returns edible certainty. That’s the whole sacrament. No incense. No hypocrisy. No choir. Just starch.

And still my head aches, a slow, bureaucratic throb—less “dramatic migraine heroine in a period film,” more “underfunded municipal office with one functioning fan.” The kind of headache that doesn’t knock you out so much as it keeps tapping your shoulder to remind you that consciousness is rented property and the landlord is petty.

I do the thing I always do when the pain arrives: I start bargaining with the universe like an illiterate trader at Sealdah station, offering it increasingly ridiculous concessions. Fine, I won’t dream big. Fine, I won’t even dream medium. Fine, I’ll just stay in this room and be quiet. Fine, I’ll stop expecting dignity from a system designed like a meat grinder with a glossy brochure. Just—please—let the inside of my skull stop feeling like someone is inflating a balloon behind my eyes.

The balloon inflates anyway. The universe, as ever, accepts no coupons. I sit on top of a bullshit heap of miserable ruminations ready to vomit up the local liquor of daily disappointments.

Doomscrolling, or: Chewing Cud in the Age of Fiber Optics

“Rumination” is one of those words that thinks it’s better than you, which is why I like it. It comes from the same family as cattle chewing cud—ruminare, to chew again—an image so profoundly unromantic that it should cure the whole world of its obsession with “overthinking” as some kind of tragic intellectual glamour. Overthinking is not a poet in a garret; it’s a cow in a field, patiently re-masticating yesterday’s grass because the stomach is a complicated committee and nothing gets approved on the first pass.

That’s what my mind does in this room. It chews. It returns. It revisits. It drags up the same bitter grass: money, time, lost years, future that looks like a corridor ending in a blank wall. Chew chew chew. Swallow. Regurgitate. Chew again. Congratulations, Homo sapiens—you evolved language, music, mathematics, and the ability to simulate possible futures, and you used it to mentally gnaw on the same anxieties until they became flavorless pulp.

Then, because one stomach isn’t enough, I add the phone: the external cud-generator. Doomscrolling is not even chewing; it’s letting the world’s worst buffet conveyor belt slide past your face and forcing yourself to taste every dish, including the ones clearly labeled POISON—FOR DISPLAY ONLY. War. Scam. Corruption. Collapse. Someone’s curated happiness. Someone else’s curated outrage. A new AI model that will “change everything” (which is always true and never in the way the excited men in hoodies mean). An influencer explaining mental health in the tone of a man selling detergent. A politician smiling with the serene confidence of someone who will never stand in a government hospital queue.

The phone is a machine that turns attention into income, and my brain, bless its shabby little neurons, still behaves as if attention is food. Every swipe says: maybe the next one will resolve the tension. Maybe the next one will provide the missing key. Maybe the next one will explain why my life feels like a book with the last hundred pages torn out and replaced with blank paper.

Instead it provides: more tension. More missing keys. More blank paper.

And the four walls politely observe this ritual. They have seen it before. They will see it again. They are, in their own damp way, eternal.

Headaches as the Body’s Editorial Feedback

A headache is an editorial note from the body written in red ink across the margin of your day: This paragraph is too long. This metaphor is collapsing. Stop clenching. Drink water. Move. Breathe. It’s the body saying, in its blunt animal dialect, what the mind refuses to admit: you are not a floating intellect; you are a bag of wet chemistry with posture problems.

So I inventory the usual suspects the way a tired detective inventories the usual criminals. Dehydration—tea is not water, you fraud, it’s caffeinated leaves pretending to be comfort. Screen glare—blue-white light hammering the retina like an impatient creditor. Neck tension—the classic modern prayer position, head bowed to the glowing rectangle, spine converted into a question mark. Air quality—some neighbor burning something unspeakable, turning plastic into a smell that should be illegal in any moral universe. Sleep—a patchwork quilt of half-naps and bleak awakenings, the bipolar rhythm section messing with the tempo.

Sometimes the headache feels like my brain is staging a protest against my life, picketing behind my forehead with little signs: WE DEMAND BETTER NARRATIVE STRUCTURE. WE REQUEST A FUTURE WITH SOME PLOT. STOP FEEDING US ANXIETY AND FRIED NEWS.

But protest doesn’t mean victory. Protest just means you’re alive enough to complain.

The depressing part is how small the triggers are. A missed glass of water. A couple hours of scrolling. A neck held at the wrong angle. We like to imagine suffering has grandeur, that it arrives on a black horse with thunder and violins. In reality it arrives on a scooter, double-parked, honking.

Brick, Cement, and the Comfort of Mediocre Engineering

The building does not collapse. This is one of my daily miracles, so modest it’s embarrassing to call it a miracle at all. It just… remains standing. Brick and adulterated cement, sure—everything here is adulterated, including hope—but still, the thing holds. Gravity is a ruthless accountant and yet this tenement keeps making its payments.

There’s something almost philosophical about that: the world is held together by a vast amount of barely adequate work. Not heroic work. Not artisanal work. Barely adequate. The electrician who did a quick job and left. The mason who cut corners but not too many corners. The plumber who sealed the leak but didn’t bother to clean the mess. The rice cooker manufacturer who decided this particular piece of plastic could be thin without being fatal.

Civilization is, at least in my corner of South Calcutta’s boondocks, an elaborate balancing act performed by underpaid people who are tired and distracted and sometimes corrupt, and yet the lights come on often enough that we call it “normal.” The ceiling doesn’t fall. The rice cooks. I don’t starve.

And into this thin slice of stability, the mind pours its grand tragedies. Limited life. Limited dreams. Another long meaningless Bengali day. Meaningless—yes—but also, irritatingly, not entirely unsafe. Which makes the despair feel… indulgent, in the way only a self-aware depressive can appreciate: I am drowning in a puddle while other people are in oceans.

Then the other voice arrives, the cruel one that sounds like my own voice but older and meaner: So stand up, then. Walk out. Do something. Why are you still here, rotting in a room like a forgotten potato?

And I want to answer honestly: because the room is a compromise between despair and panic. Because the outside world is expensive. Because my confidence has been eroded by years of nothing clicking. Because hope, after a certain age, becomes a high-interest loan. Because I’m afraid of being humiliated again in new and inventive ways.

Because, if I’m being painfully frank, there is a strange safety in knowing exactly how the day will disappoint you.

The Timeline, or: A Human Being as a Stack of Dates

I can reduce my life to a neat little chronology, which is the kind of trick that looks impressive until you remember that a mosquito has a life cycle too.

1984 to 1992: North Calcutta school years, English-medium corridors where the language of empire was repurposed into the language of ambition, and ambition was repurposed into the language of anxiety. You learn early that the exam paper is God, and God is a set of multiple-choice questions with negative marking.

1992 to 1994: St. Xavier’s, higher secondary, the city pretending to be sophisticated while still stepping over the same open drains, the same old feudal software running under the new GUI. I remember the feeling of being bright and brittle, a brain on a pedestal made of fear.

1994 to 1998: Jadavpur University—engineering as an arranged marriage between you and the future, negotiated by parents, society, and the terrifying prestige economy. You study, you compute, you pretend the world is logical because the alternative is to admit it is run by mood, money, and muscle.

1998 to 2000: UTSA, San Antonio—America as a bright supermarket of possibility where even failure comes packaged neatly, with air-conditioning and a polite receipt. I can’t romanticize it; it had its own loneliness, its own humiliations, but it also had a clarity: work leads to pay; rules mostly mean what they say; systems sometimes function.

2000 to 2002: first job, startup life, the intoxicating belief that your brain can buy you a future. Youth has a special kind of arrogance: it assumes time will cooperate.

2002 to 2014: UTHSCSA and the VA in San Antonio—years of competence, of being useful, of contributing to something larger than my own inner weather. The strange dignity of having a role that other people recognize as real.

2014: back to India, Hyderabad, startup failure—the return as a kind of reverse migration not just of the body but of the expectations, and then the long smear of “nothing clicked since then,” a sentence that sounds simple until you try living inside it.

Now: South Calcutta boondocks, lower middle-class shanty background, a room that contains the relics of past identities like fossils: books, cables, old devices, old ambitions, all of them quietly accusing me of having once believed in trajectories.

The timeline reads like a graph that rises, plateaus, then drifts downward into static. The depressing trick of middle age is that you start seeing your own story as a dataset: trendlines, regression to the mean, outliers that no longer feel like exceptions but like the last flares of a dying star.

And yet I am still here. Still sentient. Still capable of making tea. Still capable of reading. Still capable of noticing how ridiculous it is that a creature made of water and calcium spends its days staring at a glass rectangle, refreshing despair like it’s a sports score.

Mythology as an Interface, Reality as a Backend Error

India is excellent at mythology. We produce it like rice. Every lane has a story, every deity has a franchise, every suffering has a moral, every failure is either destiny or sabotage. The mind loves this because mythology is a user interface: it gives buttons to press. Pray. Donate. Obey. Blame. Wait.

Reality, meanwhile, is backend code written by interns.

I’m an atheist, but I’m not immune to the seduction of old words. Sanskrit has a way of making even emptiness sound prestigious. Someone says “सत्यमेव जयते”—truth alone triumphs—and it rings like a bell in the skull, a lovely slogan, a noble engraving, until you look around at the daily operating system and realize truth often loses to money, muscle, and the sheer stamina of liars. (Also: the quote is from the Mundaka Upanishad, which is part of the Vedic corpus—so there, I’m at least citing the correct shelf of the ancient library while I complain about the modern one.)

Another voice, older than my cynicism, whispers “यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह”—from there, words return, along with the mind, unable to reach it. The Taittiriya Upanishad pointing at the ineffable, the thing beyond language. I read it and think: yes, there are things words can’t reach, and one of them is the precise sensation of being a reasonably educated man in a collapsing attention economy, watching the future congeal into a shape that doesn’t include him.

Then there’s the fatalistic comfort people like to extract from “karma” the way they extract oil from seeds: grind, press, filter, sell. Karma, in the popular imagination, is a cosmic accounting system where everyone gets what they deserve. Which is adorable, if you enjoy fairy tales with administrative staff. The universe doesn’t do HR. The universe does not conduct performance reviews. The universe just does physics and probability, and occasionally it lets a tumor grow in a saint and a palace rise around a thief.

If there is any “karma” here, it’s social and mechanical: incentives produce behavior; behavior produces institutions; institutions produce outcomes; outcomes get baptized as destiny so that nobody has to take responsibility.

My own responsibility is not exempt. I can blame capitalism, the Indian education system, political rot, global inequality, the algorithmic colonization of attention—each of which deserves its own detailed indictment, with footnotes and exhibits—but I also have to admit the smaller, uglier truths: I avoid discomfort. I choose the familiar pain over the unfamiliar risk. I let days leak away because a leaking day is quieter than a shattered one. I doomscroll because it gives me the illusion of participation without the cost of action. I read because it’s safer than being judged. I fantasize because reality sends invoices.

The Phone as a Portable Apocalypse

The modern miracle is not that we have infinite information; it’s that we have infinite provocation. The feed is designed like a slot machine: intermittent rewards, variable reinforcement, tiny jolts of novelty. In the old days you had to travel to be overwhelmed. Now you can be overwhelmed in bed, in your underwear, with rice on the “warm” setting.

And the content is not neutral. It tugs at the oldest parts of the brain: threat detection, social comparison, tribal alignment. Outrage is sticky. Fear is sticky. Envy is adhesive. The algorithm doesn’t care if you become wise; it cares if you remain engaged, which is a polite word for hooked.

Sometimes I imagine my room as a laboratory and my phone as the apparatus, and I am the unfortunate specimen, a midlife Bengali male, subject to repeated microdoses of catastrophe while a graph in Silicon Valley tracks my reactions. The data point labeled “Suvro” spikes whenever the feed shows collapse, corruption, betrayal, humiliation—my favorite flavors, apparently. I am, in this sense, complicit in my own poisoning: I keep licking the knife to see if it still tastes like blood.

I wish I could say I stop. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I put the phone face-down as if it were an insulted guest. Sometimes I stare at the rice cooker and think, this is more honest than the internet. The rice cooker does not pretend that boiling water is “content.”

A Brief Visit from the Hypomanic Tour Guide

The bipolar texture is that some days the mind is a dead fish, and other days it is a fireworks factory run by raccoons.

On the more electric days, everything connects. The rice cooker becomes a metaphor for governance. The headache becomes a critique of attention economics. The cracks in the wall become a treatise on entropy. I start drafting sentences in my head with ridiculous confidence, as if literature were a faucet I could turn on, and history, etymology, neuroscience, colonialism, and personal shame would all arrange themselves into a perfect expository spiral.

And then, because the universe enjoys symmetry, the mood shifts. The energy drains. The sentences die mid-breath. The grand structure becomes rubble. The same brain that an hour ago felt like it could explain the whole world now struggles to wash a cup.

This is the part people don’t romanticize because it isn’t cinematic: the constant editorial process of living with a mind that can’t decide whether it’s a prophet or a paperweight. I delete drafts obsessively. I rewrite. I second-guess. I reread my own paragraphs and feel that special mixture of embarrassment and defiance: yes, it’s melodramatic, but it’s also accurate to the sensation.

The irony is that the writing—this messy exorcism—sometimes stabilizes me. It gives the doomscroll brain an alternate treadmill: words instead of headlines. A private logic instead of the feed’s predatory chaos. I can’t fix the world, but I can at least arrange my despair into sentences that have some spine.

The Modest, Unheroic Defiance of Making Tea

I don’t have a neat ending because the day doesn’t have one. The rice cooker remains on warm, as if warmth were a philosophy. The headache, having made its point, loosens slightly, like an angry bureaucrat taking lunch. Outside, the city continues being itself—half miracle, half scam, all noise.

There’s a small patch of comfort I don’t trust but still use: the fact that I can, at any moment, choose a smaller ritual than doomscrolling. Wash the cup properly. Open a book and actually read two pages without jumping. Sit on the edge of the bed and stretch my neck like a creature that remembers it has a body. Put mustard oil on hot rice and smell that sharp, earthy sting that says: you are still here, you animal; you still eat; you still metabolize; you still persist.

Somewhere in the ancient library of Sanskrit, someone wrote “असतो मा सद्गमय, तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय”—lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light. Beautiful. Aspirational. Also, if I’m honest, a little too grand for my Tuesday morning room with its damp corners and cheap paint.

So I translate it into my own smaller, more believable liturgy: lead me from the feed to the kettle, from the headline to the cup, from the doom to the breath.

Then I turn the phone over—screen down, like a sulking child—and I stir the dal slowly, watching the surface swirl into a brief galaxy, and for one unimportant minute I let the universe be no larger than a spoonful of lentils and the faint, stubborn warmth of rice that refuses to go cold.