New Delhi [India], January 26: Everyone keeps pretending this is complicated. It isn’t. The number has been stable for decades, and the arguments around it are mostly coping strategies dressed up as productivity theory. Adult humans need roughly eight hours of sleep. Not “six to seven.” Not “whatever works for you.” Eight. Nightly. Repeatedly. Forever. The variability people cite exists at the margins, and almost no one lives there. You can survive on less. You can function. You can even perform. That’s the trap. Sleep deprivation is generous that way. It gives you just enough rope to believe you’re the…
Author: Kanhaiya Suthar
London [United Kingdom], January 26: Robbie Williams now holds the record. Sixteen UK number-one albums. The Beatles are at fifteen. That’s it. That’s the fact. Everything else is people negotiating their feelings about it. Different eras. Different rules. Different consumption habits. All true. Also, besides the point. Charts are not philosophy seminars. They’re ledgers. Numbers go up. Records fall over. Nobody asks whether the fall was tasteful. What makes people itchy isn’t that Robbie Williams beat The Beatles. It’s how he did it. Slowly. Publicly. Without ever becoming sacred. He didn’t vanish into legend. He didn’t die young. He didn’t…
New Delhi [India], January 26: Tea is still a booming business in India because it never needed permission to exist. That’s the part most entrepreneurs miss. Tea doesn’t care about branding decks, pitch days, or lifestyle adjectives. It’s there at 6 a.m. in chipped cups, at railway platforms smelling like burnt milk, in offices where nothing else works but deadlines and caffeine. It’s infrastructure. People confuse that with opportunity and then wonder why they get chewed up. India didn’t “discover” tea as a market. It inherited it, absorbed it, ritualised it. Tea isn’t consumed here; it’s leaned on. Emotionally. Economically.…
London [United Kingdom], January 24: Emily Dickinson still feels modern because she never tried to be legible. That’s the part people keep circling without saying out loud. She didn’t smooth the edges. She didn’t explain herself. She didn’t care if you “got it,” and she definitely didn’t care if you liked her. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—” wasn’t a clever line. It was an operating principle. That alone puts her closer to the present than most writers embalmed by syllabi. She wrote like someone who understood the mind is not a neat place. Thoughts interrupt each other.…
New Delhi [India], January 24: Jaun Elia did not arrive in India quietly. He arrived amplified. Through a microphone that was not his. For most Indian readers under thirty-five, Jaun Elia did not come from libraries, serious Urdu study, or the long lineage of Progressive Writers. He came through Kumar Vishwas. That is not an insult. That is a logistical fact. Cultural transmission rarely cares about purity. Vishwas didn’t reinterpret Jaun. He recited him. He named him. He repeated him on stages that reached places where Urdu poetry had not travelled in decades. Small towns. College auditoriums. Televised mushairas. You…
In ordinary, civilian life, society has made a fairly clear judgment without ever holding a formal meeting about it. Guns are treated as dangerous, uncomfortable, and in need of constant control. Bows, arrows, and swords, meanwhile, live comfortably in museums, sports, hobbies, stories, and backyard conversations about “cool historical stuff.” This isn’t because people are inconsistent. It’s because these tools interact very differently with normal life. Bows and swords existed alongside daily routines. People farmed, traded, raised families, and argued with their neighbors while these weapons were present. Most of the time, nothing happened. That mattered. Their presence didn’t turn…
Cambridge (Massachusetts) [USA], January 24: Taylor Swift has been explained to exhaustion. Charts, eras, reinventions, crowd sizes, revenue numbers. None of that is especially illuminating anymore. What actually matters is quieter and a little less flattering: she learned how to stay present without pretending growth is tidy. Most pop careers stall because the artist clings to a version of themselves that once worked. She didn’t cling. She adjusted. Repeatedly. Sometimes awkwardly. Early on, she was dismissed as temporary. A teenager with a guitar, a country accent that came and went, emotions that sounded pulled straight from a notebook you wouldn’t…
New Delhi [India], January 24: Mirza Ghalib is treated like a relic. Framed. Sanitised. Quoted on calendars and WhatsApp forwards as if he were some polite uncle who happened to rhyme well. That version is convenient. It’s also false. The real Ghalib was argumentative, broke, vain, deeply insecure, intellectually arrogant, emotionally reckless, and almost permanently irritated with the world around him. Which is precisely why he still matters. Especially now. Especially here. India has a strange habit of embalming its thinkers. Once they’re dead long enough, we bleach out the mess and keep the aesthetics. With Ghalib, we kept the…
London [United Kingdom], January 24: People keep asking for comparisons because they want closure. A clean answer. Something they can screenshot and feel done with. International travel doesn’t work like that, and neither do credit cards once you leave your home currency and whatever consumer-protection fantasy you’re used to. So yes, this is listical. But don’t mistake that for comfort. 1. Chase Sapphire Preferred / Reserve These cards don’t try to impress you abroad. That’s their advantage. Visa network. No foreign transaction fees. Payments go through without commentary. When something breaks—flights, luggage, connections—the protections usually trigger without you having to…
Oxford [United Kingdom], January 24: We keep using the wrong verbs. Save. Reverse. Fix. As if the planet were a dropped phone screen and not a system with momentum, inertia, and a memory longer than ours. As if we didn’t already cross lines quietly, one data set at a time, while arguing about tone and timelines. The planet doesn’t need saving. It will be fine in the way rocks are fine. What’s unravelling is the version of the world we built our lives around. Stable seasons. Predictable coastlines. Agriculture that behaves. Insurance that makes sense. Cities where summer doesn’t feel…