So I wrote about it.

The ideas I wanted to convey in the piece were:

1. History is complex.

2. Don’t take history lessons from movies.

I love writing. I take everything I write as a creative writing challenge. The challenge here was, how can I convey these two ideas in an interesting way?

I chose a personal anecdote to drive the point and deliver the final punchline. You set something up and then you pay off. My payoff was an acerbic insult.

In my defence, I was calling anyone who takes history lessons from movies, an idiot. I thought, who would own up to such a thing, right?

Well, some people did, and they did let me know that they were upset, in comments and in DMs.

I am not a confrontational person. I do not usually trade insults. And I definitely don’t want to upset people. I write about goofy everyday topics and try to make people laugh.

Making internet people angry is not my vibe.

But something else happened with that piece of writing. This 500-word note was the most-read thing I’ve ever written.

Once I realized that, my first thought was, “Maybe I should write more of this ‘edgy stuff’.”

I am not going to lie, I was really tempted.

Then it occurred to me, the algorithm wants me to churn out such content. This is how everything around me is curated. Everything I consume is not only channelled but also shaped by the invisible hand of technology.

Songs are made so that they have a hook to be played in pubs.

Choreographers are designing dance steps that can be performed for reels.

Podcast discussions are tailored to cut ‘clips’ from provocative questions.

Every form of art is being shaped by the medium of delivery. Even when writing essays on Substack, I have started tailoring my writing in a way that a neat excerpt of the piece can be quoted later as a Note. (Like this one.)

I have been pitching TV shows and movies to production houses for a while now.

I am not naive. I understand that every writer thinks they have the best idea ever conceived, but the kind of template of “what works” that the platforms peddle really gets my goat.

In all our lives, the best moments while experiencing art are often when we encounter something and say, “I never knew this was even possible.”

I think every person who is creating some form of art is feeling their hand being forced into making something that will get as many eyeballs as possible.

Makes you wonder.

What about the art that we will never be able to see? The art that is currently being sacrificed at the altar of chasing virality.

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As a person with an enviable track miles, I feel personally entitled to weigh in on improvements in the new trains. So I checked them out.

One of their proud, futuristic features is automatic locking doors. This tells me everything there is to know about the highly educated morons who designed these trains, none of whom, I suspect, have ever attempted to buy a samosa during a two minute halt at Valsad.

Because everyone else knows, the high point of any train journey, is the sacred olympic event called, “Baahar dekhkar aata hu”. This is when the daredevil alpha males of every family, (banking in on their primitive urge to hunt food for their family) leap out of the train, locate a vendor and buy snacks of questionable temperature, while their dependents inside the train have a mini heart attack.

You can’t take that away from us.

This is what happens when you let career babus design a train. Men who have studied locomotion entirely through files. They sit in their air conditioned offices with a creative intellect of an aluminium foil, and come up with lousy taglines like “Indian Railways - Lifeline of the Nation”.

As a person who spent 20 years as a professional process improvement guy, I have some ideas.

Problem Statement 1:

It’s night time. The train is hurtling at 120 kmph. The coach is swaying vigorously. And there you are, attempting a delicate origami performance with the bed sheet on the berth.

First you connect the right corners of the bed sheet to make a perfect berth shaped rectangle without it licking the floor. Then you spread the sheet, and it slides. You tuck one end, the other end escapes. You lean forward to correct it and the train reminds you who is in charge.

When you finally lie down, the sheet has already peeled away in quiet defiance.

Throughout the night, your time is spent negotiating a treaty between your midriff and that unforgiving raxin surface, which is cold enough to be one of the moons of Jupiter.

Solution:

Install large buttons along the side of every berth and provide berth sized bedsheets with corresponding buttonholes. Once you button the sheet all around the berth, it stays in place.

Problem Statement 2:

If you are lucky, you will have, in your bay, an uncle who snores like an auto rickshaw trying to climb a flyover in second gear.

A snore that starts as a whistle which quickly escalates into a chainsaw, finally detonating without any warning. A snore so unrhythmic that keeps you on the edge of your seat for the next round of outburst.

This would happen to you, if you are lucky.

If you are unlucky, you won’t get a single snoring uncle in your bay. You will get two.

And you will be caught right in between these two Lovecraftian monsters arguing over territory.

Solution:

In the IRCTC website profile for passengers, provide a checkbox for snorers.

If checked, the algorithm will club all snorers into a special, fully soundproof compartment next to the engine. A coach designed with reinforced walls and industrial insulation.

Problem Statement 3:

It has often been speculated, what exactly is inside those enormous canvas bags stacked beside the attendant’s berth. Most people assume they contain blankets.

That is what they want you to think.

I know the truth. I can tell you, but frankly, you are not going to like it.

They contain the severed toes of passengers who slept in the berths next to the door. Seats 2, 3 and 69, 70.

These berths place your feet in proximity to the coach door. Every time the door open at 2:43 am it claims toes of unsuspecting passengers in their mechanical metal guillotine.

I am not saying it happens often. I am saying it happens enough for the attendant to maintain inventory.

Solution:

Allot these berths to kids whose legs do not reach till end of the berth, or people less than 5 feet tall, or tall people who watch loud videos in train without headphones.

Problem Statement 4:

There are three statuses of tickets in Indian Railways:

1. Waiting List

2. Confirmed

3. Schrödinger’s Ticket

   In 1980, an official of Indian Railway launchd a experiment where a subject was asked to lie down on a berth only partially, half of one butt cheek rested on the cushion and the other half floated into the quantum unknown. The goal of the experiment was to find out, at what precise point does a person both have and not have a seat. Hence a new status was formed. You might know the third status as RAC (Official Full Form as per Ministry of Railways - Randomly Assigned Co-Sleeper)

In an act of generosity, the ministry decided that such tickets will be charged a full ticket fee.

Solution:

Sharks,

Our product solves the floating-butt crisis. Your gluteus maximus no longer lives in uncertainty.

Market size? Every RAC passenger who has stared into the ceiling at 2 am wondering, “I paid full money for this?”

For 10 percent equity, I offer you the chance to end half-butt capitalism.

Problem Statement 5:

This is a political problem. It is an injustice that I cannot turn a blind eye to. Once I share it with you, you won’t be able to unsee it too.

Two chains descend from the upper berth like identical twins to hold the middle berth but only one does lifting part. How can we allow this?

I don’t want one overworked chain and another pretending to contribute while it dangles lazily.

Solution:

At this point, there is no other choice than to sponsor a rebellion for the berth chains. We only rest until weight is equally distributed. Only then we will know that justice has been suspended properly.

Now that I have established myself at as a creative tour de force, I think I have earned a right to give a new tagline for the Indian Railways.

Indian Railways - Raat me cover kar legi

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Update on my book: I am half way through editing the first draft, but what I fear is the new ideas I get while editing.

Will be publishing another excerpt next week.

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1. Create a routine

Even though I never had a routine, there is one thing I always did before I read these books.

I would wake up at 4:00 AM every morning and ask myself the question, “WHY?”

As per the latest psychological research on distractions (mostly done on lab rats trying to avoid being electrocuted), routines train your brain to anticipate work at a fixed time.

So now, I have a routine. I wake up early every morning. I butter a slice of bread and put it to toast. I make myself coffee, sit at my work table and ask myself the question, “Seriously, WHY?”

2. Reduce Decisions before you start

It’s not like you don’t go for a run because you are lazy. You don’t go for a run because your brain is avoiding making decisions about which T-shirt to wear, picking the right socks, and whether tomorrow, the first day of the Hindu calendar month, is a good day to start running, instead of today.

If you reduce your decisions and keep your T-shirt, shoes and socks ready the night before your run, you will hear a high-pitched voice of a woman yelling, “Why the hell are your socks and shoes kept in the middle of the living room?”

3. Work in short intense sprints

The idea is to work in intense sprint without second guessing yourself. You set a timer and finish the task at hand first. You can always fix mistakes later.

As a writer this means, I lock myself in a room and tell myself, I will just type for an hour. No fixing spelinddg milkstaes. No corrected grammaring. Don,t bother about the right punctuation; Just keep typing whatever comes in your head without stopping. Just type whatever you are thinking. Why is my nose itching so much? Should I see a doctor? What is happening. Somebody. Help. Please.

4. Delay Gratification

This one is so important that one of the billionaires in India has got “Delay Gratification” tattooed on his arm.

In a recent podcast, he said that the tattoo helps him while he is picking stocks.

I call bullshit.

I say, “There are pills available for your condition. Just talk to a doctor man.”

5. Keep a tab of what distracts you

So here is what I did. I took a notebook and listed down the reason every time I got distracted. I did it for a month. At the end of the month, when I sat down to chart out the top reason for distractions, I was shocked.

Because, I couldn’t find the notebook anywhere.

6. Finish what you start

[complete this point by adding a joke by tomorrow end of the day]

8. Track your progress

Wait, was this the 7th point or the 8th point?

G. Always be consistent

One of the books summarised consistency very aptly.

Consistency functions as an antidote to attentional atrophy.

If like me, you have no idea what the word atrophy means, you can always pick up your phone…

9. …and Google the… oh wow a notification on Insta

Radhe Radhe Guruji….

Hey USA what’s new with you…

10 hidden gems in pondicherry that you did not know about

What’s your name mam. Give me one reason why you both fight…

So what’s your take?

3 actors that destroyed their career..

Bhola bhala tha, seedha saadha tha main…

10. I think I am tired now. I’ll just lie down for a while. Wait, what’s that smell?

Oh, Shit. The toast.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book:

The book is a well researched, academically informed investigation into modern work practices and their cultural implications. (Seriously, it has diagrams and everything. Even footnotes.)

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IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, and you have two left feet, the hardest step in the garba is the one you have to take to enter the circle. You just stand outside wondering, “Do I really want to know what ‘being inside a washing machine’ feels like?”

But if you overcome that initial hesitation, garba can be quite inviting (at least in the first phase where the tempo is slow), it just lets you in.

At first you are awkward, when your feet move stiff, your mind is hovering outside and keeps asking questions, “How do I look?” “Oh I am sure I look stupid” “Everyone is laughing at me.”

And while you do that, you just walk in the circle, trying to avoid collision and to avoid being the reason the whole circle derails. That much you can manage, you concentrate on following the rest of the group.

Once you keep doing that for a while you realize “Jeez… these steps I am taking, they match with the beats of the music. I can do this, it is amazing how my steps have joined the conversation.”

But you don’t know what to do with your hands.

The melody of garba is simple rhythms, six or eight beat cycles, repeated endlessly until your body figures them out, they carry you forward and backward and make you turn and make you twirl.

The lead singer throws a line and the chorus singers answer. The lead singer throws the line again, and now you join in too, because you’ve learnt the response. This pattern of call-and-response singing between lead singer and the crowd is like inhaling and exhaling. This is when, during a garba, the boundary between the performer and the audience slowly starts to evaporate.

II

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, after spending some time in the circle, you will start anticipating the claps before they land. So now you know what you need to do with your hands, you clap in sync with everyone around you. It’s a pretty neat trick and you have learnt it. Now, you are not just answering the call from the singer, you have become a part of the percussion section.

Then, you will get tired, because you don’t do this every day. Your heart beats faster and tells you to take a break and to catch a breath. You look for an exit and you move out of the circle.

And then, for the first time, you see the dance from outside as someone who was part of the same machine, who struggled and survived. You are not a mere spectator, you were a participant who stepped back and is looking at the instrument at play. You revisit your own moves, you rehearse improvements in your head.

The tempo changes and beats get faster, you dive in again and within no time you are back in the groove. You’ve been doing this for a while now, these are practiced movements. The steps are now easier, they’ve moved from your head to your muscles.

After a while, you start gasping for breath again but this time you don’t stop because your body says ‘let’s keep going and see how long we can push it’.

And that’s when it kicks in, what athletes call the ‘Second Wind Phenomenon’. Your body now starts adapting to the increased energy demands and switches to different fuel sources. Endorphins flood your bloodstream. It is like you have achieved a power up, the heaviness lifts. What felt like effort now feels like fuel.

As you move along you realize that your breath, and your body, and your hands, and your feet, and the claps, and the drums are all synced up, not just with the music but with everyone else around you.

III

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, you will cheer when the tempo changes for the third time. It is at its peak now.

This is where you achieve the state which psychologists call ‘Entrainment’. The moment when your body surrenders its private tempo and merges with the crowd. Your pulse leans toward their pulse. Your foot hesitates half a second to fall in line with the others and then it syncs, permanently.

The music is no longer outside you. It’s inside. It’s tugging your muscles. It’s steering your breath. The circle pulls you in. You are not dancing alone. You are part of something bigger.

A primal sense of unity.

You are now part of an ancient tradition, of gathering in circles, of surrendering to cyclical music, of beats of drum.
Of Dionysian rituals in ancient Greece.
Of Native American powwow dancers.
Of Sufi whirling Darveshes.
Of Brazilian capoeira.
Of Italian Tarantella.
Of Balkan Hora.
Of Candomblé.
Of Samba.
Of Bihu.

And you forget where you are. You stop worrying. About steps. About Music. About what email you have to send tomorrow.

At that moment, someone outside the circle may look at you, shake their head and maybe laugh at you. But you won’t notice. Because you’re getting cleansed. You’re inside the washing machine.

And inside, it’s glorious.

What?

do yuw yaave waaher?

I CAN’T HEAR YOU. TOO LOUD!

Do you have water?

No, they took our bottles.

Large arena concerts are like spending time on Dadar foot over bridge during peak hours. Voluntarily.

Assuming you’re not rolling in cash, you’ll go for the second-cheapest option in the standing zone. (You always go for the second cheapest option)

You have two choices:

Option 1: Arrive so early you practically help assemble the stage. You’ll watch the roadies set up the lights, tune the instruments and run soundchecks for so long that by the time the headliner hits their first chord, your legs are already cursing you.

Option 2: Arrive just in time, only to find yourself miles from the action, watching the whole thing on a Jumbotron. And you are standing next to speakers the size of an apartment, slowly going deaf. (Seriously, always carry earplugs.)

Personally, I avoid large arena concerts like they’re the plague.

But I love live music events, provided they meet certain criteria.

Are you fan enough?

When a friend asked me if I was going to the Coldplay concert, my honest answer was, “I only know, like, 3-4 songs by them. What am I supposed to do for the other 2 hours? Interpretive dance?”

My rule of thumb is simple: only go to a concert if you can confidently sing the top 20 songs from the artist’s discography. Anything less and you’re just standing there, clapping awkwardly pretending to enjoy something you are hearing for the first time.

I get that some people enjoy discovering new music at live gigs. Not me. I prefer the old-school method of finding new songs. Long drives with the music on shuffle, or that magical moment when a friend says, “Oh, you like Maati Baani? You should check out Ankur Tewari.”

I was once dragged to his live gig by a friend who loved Ankur Tewari. I had heard about him for the first time.

We were right at the front, close to the stage, which sounds cool until you realize you couldn’t sing along.

It was a long day at work and I was tired. Ankur was belting out hit after hit, the crowd was losing their minds, and I was barely holding onto mine.

Then it happened. Ankur said, “And here is this one!” and launched into “Mohobbat Zindabad.” The crowd went berserk. And me?

Did I tell you that I was hearing Ankur Tewari for the first time that night? Did I tell you I had a long day at work? Did I tell you that I was tired? Did I tell you it was late at night?

So when Akur started, “Main Kaha, Tune Kaha…”

I let out a huge “I’m-about-to-hibernate” kind of yawn.

Ankur Tewari’s eyes met mine. And in that moment, I experienced pure, unbridled, visceral hatred, unlike anything I’d ever experienced before (or ever since).

I do not want to do that to any artist ever.

This is why I stand by my belief: live music should come with a guarantee of comfortable familiarity.

Case in point, Dua Lipa’s concert. Why do you think the most epic moment in her Mumbai concert wasn’t from her singing one of her chart-topping hits. It was when she played a mediocre Bollywood remix. Imagine being Dua Lipa, pouring your heart out on stage, only to see the crowd explode with joy for a track which is not yours and no one bothers to listen to on its own.

At that rate, the only way Coldplay can go viral in India is if they throw in a mashup.

Picture this: they’re playing “Hymn for the Weekend”—
“Put your wings on me, wings on me…”
And then, out of nowhere, the song switches to “Dum Maro Dum”

“DUNIYA NE HUMKO DIYA KYA?”

The crowd roars back: “GHANTA!”

Chris Martin would probably retire on the spot, but that’s the kind of moment that breaks the internet.

To Improvise or Not to Improvise, that is the question.

The best reason to go to a live music event is to listen to artists perform unique versions of their own songs that you can’t hear at home.

Some, like Justin Bieber lip sync and some like Hariharan improvise so wildly that the song you loved is now unrecognizable—a jazzy interpretive version of song you did not sign up for.

Somewhere between these two, lies a magical sweet spot where the performance feels fresh but still resembles the song you came to hear.

Like when a ghazal singer goes, “ye ek sher jo record me maujood nahi hain” you go:

Improvisation in qawwalis is nothing short of a tense Quentin Tarantino scene, you don’t know where it’s going, but you’re thrilled to be along for the ride and you know there is an explosive payoff. They’ll deliver the misra (first line of a sher) and then take a detour into an elaborate side quest involving jokes, stories and possibly a philosophical debate.

Meanwhile, the music hums in the background, patiently waiting. And just when you think, “Wait, did they forget where they were going with this?” they bring it back. They hit you with the second line, perfectly timed to the music reaching its crescendo, and you feel like you just witnessed the universe align.

I genuinely pity anyone who hasn’t experienced this live. It’s pure burst of ecstasy.

Passing the mic

Unless you are the Freddie Mercury or Jacob Collier, passing the mic can be a risky affair during a live event.

It works great, until the audience gets shy, and the moment turns into awkward silence with background music.

I was once at a Shankar Mahadeven concert and in between Mitwa he passed the mic and the second time the crowd just went silent after realizing they couldn’t sing the high notes.

And in that awkward silence, one guy just yelled “Breathless gaa!”

There was no recovering form that for the rest of the event.

The stupid Encore business

I think I am in the minority here, but I hate this Encore business.

I hate it when singers do the whole “Goodnight!” and leave.

And then few moments back, they return to the stage with, “Just kidding, we’re back!”

Just give it to me straight. I didn’t come here for a musical peekaboo.

And over the years, this nonsense has escalated. One encore isn’t enough anymore. Now it’s double, triple encores.

Honestly, it’s exhausting. I don’t even know if anything is final anymore.

When you say it’s the last song, mean it. Play your final song, drop the mic and let us leave on a high.

Lights out. The end. Go home.

Escape Strategy

Speaking of going home, my anxiety starts creeping in during the final song of every concert. That is when I start planning my escape strategy.

Organisers love to discourage driving to the venue—“Limited parking available. We advise you to use public transport!”

Great advice, except Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium is conveniently located 2.5 kms away from the Jawaharlal Nehru metro station.

So now you’ve got hundreds of people spilling out of the venue, faces glued to ride-sharing apps, discovering the joy of a 5x surcharge.

It’s like the Hunger Games.

So, what is the point of a concert anyway?

Live concert is not just about music.

It is to experience a performance of an artist you love, with the people you love.

It’s a chance to find out what your idol is like as a person. Do they lose it over technical glitches, or are they patiently point at their mic and keep jabbing their finger at the sky until the sound guy finally fixes it?

It’s about hearing that one song you’ve heard a thousand times, but when it’s performed live, you rediscover its magic. Suddenly, you’re in love with it again, and you want to play it on repeat on your way back home.

It is to find out that you still have no clue what the base guitarist actually does.

It is to experience musicians as musicians. Experimenting, riffing, and expressing themselves, and singers being singers with rough vocals (none of that autotune shit), screaming their head off so that you can feel the energy.

And most importantly, after a concert you feel more connected to the music when you listen to it later. It’s no longer the catchy song you hear on your iPod. No, it’s that song. The one you heard live, front row, with the person you married. You hustled to buy tickets from a tout outside the venue for 1/10th of the original price because you spent all your savings on that wedding you just had a week ago. Now every time you hear it, it’s not just a song, it’s your story.

That stays with you forever.

***

An old man in his late 70s, wearing an all white kurta, dhoti and pagdi is being helped by someone.  They are trying to escape from the epicentre of the action.  The old man’s hand is cupped on top of his right eye, from which blood is gushing out, over the face, on to his entire kurta.  He calmly says, “It is still inside”. As he walks, he is tripping at every change in the elevation of the ground beneath his feet.

A young man’s face is completely red and drops of blood are dripping from his chin.   His friends drag him aside and ask him, where does it hurt?  He says, he doesn’t know.  They are searching on his face for the wound. They pull him aside and he crouches to put his head beneath the outlet of a hand pump.  His friend hurriedly pumps water on his head.  His face washed, there are no visible cuts seen. They shuffle through his hair and find it on his head.  As soon as the cut is washed, a spout of blood oozes out from it and blossoms over his head like a time-lapse video of a rose blooming.

A teenager has his upper lip torn right upto the nostril. It makes his upper incisors and gums visible with the flesh from his lips dangling over his mouth.  When he coughs, the flaps of the flesh rattle and a mist of red is sprayed in front of his mouth.

The game is simple.  There are two teams. You select yours, pick up stones from the ground and throw them at the people on the other side. You are a winner if you go home without needing a doctor. That’s it. That’s the game.

But then there are weapons.

Teams usually up the ante by using “Gofan”. A Gofan is a long rope with a flap of leather or cloth right in the middle.  A stone is placed in the flap and the two ends of the rope and held and swung around till it gathers momentum and with a jerk, one end is released.  The stone travels like a bullet.  

Throughout the year, it is used by the members of the Bhil tribe to scare away birds from their fields. Not today.

On the surface, it looks like an event for testosterone filled men to blow off steam. But when you talk to these people, they tell you about this heightened sense of alertness that they experience as they dodge every oncoming stone. It is a primitive anthropological need for the men un-domesticate themselves. 

There have been attempts to stop the Raad. 

Few years back, the district administration decided to take strict action against the event and put an end to this madness. But even for the police, the choice between following an order from a DSP sitting in a government allotted civil lines bungalow and enforcing that order on a gophan swinging mob is an easy one.   They stay away. Raad happens, year after year.  The emergency wards in hospitals are always busy during holi.

Then there were those who tried to change the game. They said, why use stones? They suggested the use of dung cakes instead. 

Dung cake is flattened and dried cow poop used as fuel in villages.  It is light in weight.  It hurts when you get hit with one but not as bad as a stone. 

Playing Raad with dung cakes took off.  Until some genius came up with the idea of lighting up the dung cakes and playing fire raad at night.  Since then, the burn wards have been busy during holi.

*

The teenager whose upper lip was cut, his father has found him, he’s beating him black and blue.  

The young man with a cut on his head is sitting alone on the steps of a closed shop. His wound is clearly not worthy of anyone’s attention.  

There is a guy whose forefinger is deep into the old man’s eye socket trying to reach the stone.  People around tell the old man to go and see the doctor, but our  “mad-eye-moody” here thinks “it’s no big deal”.

Happy Holi!

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