Good morning or good evening, depending on where you are. Today I am writing about how I realized I want to be a writer and why I do not regret any of my decisions despite the fact that many of them forestalled my writing career.

In a previous essay I wrote:

… at Stanford I found my political, intellectual, and artistic orientation. Just as my older cousin warned, there were no prizes waiting for me at the end of this considerable effort.

- from “Failing and Sailing Towards My Dream”

Indeed I had graduated with no special recognition or even a job offer (much unlike my peers). However, I had an insight into what made me feel alive (an expensive insight one could say! Sorry mom and dad). The insight was: I want a life dedicated to discovery wherein I run alongside that perpetual motion machine we call creativity. I want the freedom and space to observe, listen, read, ponder, write, ask questions, edit, refine, publish, and discuss. I could repeat these ten steps until my dying breath.

So if I had this insight then, why did it take me so long to realize that I want to be a writer? What stalled me — and what might be stalling you — was a confluence of factors: indecision, the wrong voices in my ear, a fear of risk and failure, genuine curiosity, and a sizeable amount of self-belief. I thought I could be anyone or do anything. I tried many professions: technologist, UX researcher, product designer, startup founder, tech policy specialist, community organizer, and artist. I imagined divergent futures: a PhD in comparative literature at Oxford, living as an artist in Mexico City, eco-farming in India, or working at the U.N. on technology ethics.

Then — around the age of 27 — questions started to form inside me. Where did I really want to live? How would I live? What was my true calling? Maybe you, dear reader, had thought all this through before the age of 27. Good on you! I had not. At least, not in an honest, clear, and fearless way.

So to start, where did I want to live? Well, I was already in San Francisco, but I was curious about other places like New York, London, Paris, and even India. But when I was 27 it was the year 2021 and Covid was ongoing so it felt too risky to leave the safety of a known place where friends and family lived. So I decided to stay put. But how would I live? This pesky question of “how” nettled me. I had an art studio in the Mission (a neighborhood in SF) where I moonlighted as a visual artist. I made large-scale charcoal drawings and wrote poetry that wove through the illustrations. I showed in several small and medium-sized art shows throughout the Bay Area, but most of my time went to the work I did at a tech startup — the startup’s mission was to rebuild public trust in the news which was interesting and important — but was I spending enough time making art? Art was also interesting and important.

In search of some peace and answers I went on a roadtrip with two friends to visit a few unseen national parks. We drove to Glacier in Montana, Yellowstone, Big Sky, and Grand Teton in Wyoming, and concluded in Moab, Utah. During that roadtrip I ended my long-term relationship with the startup. We made it three years but the 2020 elections were upcoming and I had to break from the company rule that all employees remain politically neutral. Once the roadtrip finished, I moved back home to Portland to remotely volunteer for the Biden campaign. I did community organizing and ethnographic research, specifically trying to understand who the South Asian American community was, politically. What were our values and how did those values translate into our politics? I spoke with peers, aunties and uncles, and grandparents about their fears and hopes for themselves, their families, and the broader nation. These conversations never left me. I loved hearing people’s stories and asking questions that led us to new places. Is this what I wanted to do with my life, be a community organizer or a politics reporter?

How interesting and important!

I could not, however, live at home for too long lest my parents and I turn our verbal tussles into physical ones, so I packed up and returned to the only place I knew: San Francisco. I rented from my sister and lived with two roommates.

I wanted to work on political issues, that much I knew, and the crisis of our time seemed to be climate change. I read online that someone with a design background could become an urban planner and help design climate resilient cities.

How interesting and important!

Especially since climate change would further impoverish the Global South which included my beloved India. And so I started writing applications for a Masters in Design with a focus in urban planning. While writing these applications I began to wonder, should I also look for a product design role in tech just to see what’s out there? This is when I found a role at the Wikimedia Foundation as a designer for a special projects team called Abstract Wikipedia whose mission was to make all of Wikipedia’s knowledge accessible in every language.

How interesting and important!

I got an offer from Wikimedia shorly thereafter and began working on Abstract Wikipedia. About a year in I realized that designing interfaces for highly technical users was not my strength, and so I requested a transfer, which was granted, and I started on a new team called Trust and Safety Tools. Little did I realize that I was about to stumble into yet another manifestation of my passion. Trust and Safety, it turns out, is an emerging field within tech that addresses user safety, privacy, ethics, and security, but the history of the field is rooted in the role American technology played in disrupting the integrity of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

How interesting and important!

I immersed myself in the field for more than a year and became utterly fascinated by all the ways technology could become a vector for harm and abuse - the harm and abuse of individual people, entire communities, or large systems - and what could be done to design technology that was safer, more robust, and more reliable. I self-proclaimed as a “Trust and Safety designer” and felt I had finally found a home in responsible technology. The home, it turns out, was the right one but my role within it needed to change. In 2024 I started writing on Substack about technology (“The Imperative of Responsible Technology”), politics (“To Understand Politics You Need to Understand People part 1”), and the human condition (“Ozempic and beauty”). No one asked me to write and definitely no one paid me. I wrote anyway, for hours on end, to an audience that primarily consisted of family members.

And then what happened?

Between 2024 and now I wrote almost every single day. Through wedding planning, work deadlines, pregnancy, and postpartum I kept writing. Sometimes just small notes on my phone, here and there. Other times a journal entry would bloom into an essay. Occasionally I sat at my desk and hammered out five pages on pregnancy as a metaphysical experience or human versus artificial intelligence. I am grateful for Substack because it gave me the little audience I needed to keep going. Some days all it took was the thrill of hitting publish and texting the link to a friend who responded with “beautiful 🫶” (shoutout Colin!). I found myself thinking about what to write, constantly. As I pushed out my baby I thought “I have to write about this.” I was a woman in love.

During my pregnancy I joined a writer’s circle called Bereket Writers. I have to credit my circle (Sachin and Reini!) with giving me the structure, feedback, and motivation to start my first novel. Suddenly I was in a whole new territory. The depth, creativity, and complexity of novel writing enraptured me in a way that no other discipline has ever done. And then, of course, there is the matter of the heart. As I wrote the novel, I began to live with the characters in my head. They became constant companions and brought more joy to an already joyful project. On some random cold evening in San Francisco while writing the novel in bed next to my husband, with a woody candle softly flickering on my sidetable, I thought “I could do this for a living.”

That is when it finally clicked. I knew what I was born to do. I was born to write.

What next?

We all know the saying “when one door closes, another opens” but what if life is not a building with doors? Buildings have blueprints. What if life, instead, is the woods? A dense yellow wood with many paths and we are meant to take the road less traveled. “Making it” as a writer will require risk, patience, perseverance, and courage: in other words, the journey will be painful. Am I ready to face the pain? I look to writers like Zadie Smith and Arundhati Roy and think “well their life looks nice”, but I cannot bank on knowing what to expect. Part of the allure and experience of the road ahead is its mystery. In creative work we are better off when we listen closely and follow wherever we notice mystery. For example, when I started this piece I was going to title it “that ship has sailed” and write about everything that I once wanted to do but can no longer (e.g., being a war correspondent for the New York Times). I ended up writing about the one ship I have boarded. Instead of putting pen to paper on where I’m going, I wrote about where I’ve been. If I were to reject my past that would be a rejection of my present and future. I need all three to understand who I am, and I need to understand who I am so that I can understand the world, not for some heady intellectual pleasure but for the very urgent task of doing my job as a writer, which is to say, to observe, listen, read, write, ask questions, edit, refine, publish, and discuss.

In the many weeks, months, and years to come you can expect me to write about quite literally everything. India, family, diaspora, having a homeland, belonging to a nation, borders, wars, violence, ahimsa (non-violence), and much, much more. But these are all big topics and often they are happening somewhere far away from where I live, which is San Francisco. So it is incumbent of me to also write about the two dominant ideologies of the region which comprise of the water in which I swim: Silicon Valley capitalism versus American progressivism. There is a lot of writing to be done. I hope that you will join me here, on Substack, and in the future you will give my debut novel a chance.

If you can recall from earlier, for the last decade I have been trying to hear what the universe is telling me, and while the road has felt comically circuitous, I have always had the sense to look for what was interesting and important. In the end, our real power is not in the choices we make — because who is to say that it is us making them — but in the stories we tell about why we made them.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Anger raised me

When I was thirty weeks pregnant and riding the bus in San Francisco the bus driver mistakenly asked me to “get the heck up” and make room for senior citizens.

When he singled me out - me, a vulnerable woman trying to get from A to B in an unfriendly city - every stream of anger I had held at bay in the past month broke through and came forth, frothing. I was pissed off.

My feet hurt. My groin was aching. I hadn’t slept well in days. I remembered my mom telling me that when she was pregnant with my sister, our relatives would not stop visiting her, and each of them expected her to cook and serve. My grandmother had cooked for and served even more relatives while managing a farm.

I was pissed - millions of women, through space and time, who carried life in their bodies in a hostile world were pissed - and all I could choke out was “I cannot.”

Today this newsletter - or this literary space, as I like to think about it - is dedicated to anger of all kinds. Anger that is muted. Deep-seated, rip-their-guts-out anger. Anger that is subdued and festers until we become rotted with grudges. Nowadays, we might dismiss anger as unseemly, immature, toxic, or violent, but we and our nations are still enveloped in it. Mankind has been angry for a long time and continues to be. In America anger sits beneath the surface, purring like a predator. Then along comes a demagogue who can whip that anger into a frenzy which is then released at the ballot box. In India, anger is center-stage, perhaps more so than ever under right-wing BJP rule, but this anger must share the stage with ancient cultural values like ahimsa (non-violence) and shanti (peace).

Anger raised me. It was always in the room with us, either yelling or napping in the corner. Anger was a part of daily life, as familiar as driving to school or having dinner. The clever child that I was, I learned how to detect and thwart it, or hide and recover from it, but I was never sure if I had successfully warded it off. After all, how is a child to know how to save her own soul? As I grew older I began to suspect that I had not, in fact, warded it off. Unlike most American teenagers I could not afford any volcanic eruptions, but I felt them stirring inside me. So instead, I taught myself how to show no anger at all, ever. In college, in the most convoluted of ways that only humans are capable of, I managed to express this anger through a side channel: righteousness. I became adept at being angry on behalf of someone else; those with “less power”, the way I saw it. This is not to say my feminism, anti-racism, or socialism was merely reactionary - quite the contrary, I was principled and a student of these schools of thought - but it is also true that self-righteousness was my chance at being angry without actually being angry.

Today, in 2026, I am a mother with a baby, and I am sad that I am still an “angry person.” If you know me, you might not believe it, but it’s true. I seem calm (“Your daughter gets her chill nature from you, right?”), but the anger never goes away. There is no healing or shedding. The kind of anger I have in my bones is a corrosive kind, where one is meanest to the people they love most. Now, I am not worried that I will call my daughter names or give her the silent treatment; my worry is the opposite. What if I am too calm? What if she never sees me angry?

When I get angry it’s usually about being unappreciated. Whether it’s my husband, my family, a friend, or the workplace, when I feel unseen or misunderstood, I become fiesty. When I pondered this, I came to realize that when someone shows us their anger - however frightening it may be - they are also showing us their vulnerability. And if I can show my daughter that I too get angry and frustrated and upset, as we all do, then she will see that I too am a person, like her. So, as strange as it may seem, the volatile anger I grew up with was, also, adults showing their weakness to their children. It gave me a keen sense that adults were people too. Is that so bad?

Making anger make sense

The other day I thought I would stop for an innocent coffee at Cafe Trieste, a historic cafe in the heart of Little Italy in San Francisco. Most mornings you’ll see tables filled with retirees who “voted for LBJ” and remember the moon landing. The man ordering coffee ahead of me -elderly, white, and dressed like the member of a rotary club - was insisting that he was being overcharged.

“It was $3.05 just last Tuesday. Why is it $3.50?”

The barista - an older, kind of Westernized looking Asian gentleman who might also be the cafe manager - explained that for a 16 oz it was $3.50 and for a 12 oz it was $3.05. But Rotary Club was not having it. He called it “ridiculous” and “a rip off” in a loud voice, all the while jabbing his finger at the barista-cum-manager who then said, “Well, you don’t have to come here.” He said it with a small laugh to ease the tension, but you could tell he was frustrated and he meant it, and old Rotary Club picked up on the serious disrespect. He exploded.

“You asshole! Moron! How dare you speak to me like that! I will go elsewhere! Idiot! Asshole!”

When people yell, I freeze, because I somehow feel that they are yelling at me. My blood becomes adrenaline. Forget yelling, when someone is visibly grumpy or abrasive I tighten up. My heart races.

He kept yelling, and I could tell he was beyond reason which is when I waited for the racial slur. Usually when a person sees that their explosive anger is of no use, there is one final attempt at revenge and some kind of slur is usually how they get it. Surprisingly and admirably, it never dropped.

“So much anger”, I thought. Over 45 cents. But it wasn’t about the money was it? It was first about the principle of being cheated. Then it was about being disrespected while everyone else watched. Lastly it was sheer frustration at the other’s audacity to challenge him. My mind did all this math in a split second.

Rotary Club made his way out of the cafe and down the sidewalk, his walker vibrating as he pushed it over bumps and cracks. I looked after him, feeling a mixture of disdain and pity. As an Asian, I am hard-wired to show elders deference and quite a bit of respect. But Rotary Club was way out of line yelling like that, right? Not to mention the sheer vitriol in his insults. But maybe Rotary Club was on his final leg, literally, and just wanted a cup of coffee to ease the day? Perhaps he was all alone in this world, his spouse and friends having passed on. Or maybe his body ached and his mind was foggy and all he wanted was some coffee and a little respect. I really felt for him. Something about his anger told me that it was less about the coffee, and more about what was happening on the inside.

So much of what we feel is a result of what is happening in us rather than to us. When I was a child I thought the feelings of adults were my responsibility, and to this day I try to make anger make sense. I try to solve it, to trace it backward until I can find the precise moment when something went wrong. If I can understand it, perhaps I can move myself out of danger and back into peace. Unfortunately, sometimes anger has no rhyme or reason. Other times, the only way past anger is through it.

The lunatic inside me

I once was in a regular series of meetings with the Stanford Board of Trustees on investment responsibility. I became very skilled at introducing myself to every board member at the start of the meeting, while they had their coffee and free breakfast, and during the meeting I would sit in a power pose, elbows on the table, fingertips touching, and a furrowed brow on my face. I thought I probably looked pretty serious, like a student worth listening to. I also gave a private musical performance for Bill Gates (yikes, I know), and explained the meaning of the song to him. I had coffee with Rev. Jesse Jackson who refused to answer any of my questions. Most recently I had a private chat at the Golden Gate Club with former Crypto Czar David Sacks.

I have been in the room but not of the room.

How can I be otherwise, when I am a middle class Indian-American woman from suburban Oregon with strong roots in rural South India? But I have learned how to maneuver in places of power. In these settings I am an imposter for a number of reasons - my ideas, experiences, informality - however, my temperament is a secret differentiator.

“They don’t know there’s a lunatic inside me,” is what I am thinking.

To quote my family, I have “villager rage.” I get mine from my grandfathers, uncles and aunts, cousins, you name it. It is an unfiltered kind of rage, they tell me, something inherited from people who farmed, lived close to the land, and never learned to make themselves palatable.

Divine and furious

“How can Hindus be so angry?” I’ve always wondered. “Why aren’t we more calm, like Buddhists?” We are vegetarians after all, and we sort of meditate and are kind of ascetic. We even end our prayers with:

Om shanti shanti shantihi

Peace in our body, mind, and speech, while awake, asleep, and dreaming

But our mythology is full of violence. Durvasa muni’s wrath was an instrument of God. The goddess Kali uses her anger to restore Dharma (cosmic balance). Hers is an “anger that rises against the darkness, ego, injustice, and ignorance that imprison every soul.” Shiva, the Destroyer, is known to transform and renew the cosmos with his anger, allowing for old cycles to end and new cycles to begin. Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu, disemboweled the demon king Hiranyakashipu in a rage.

So we say

Om shanti shanti

but also,

Durvasa, Kali, Shiva, Narasimha

On her Grammy-Award winning album Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé warns a woman who has wronged her:

“Jolene, I know I’m a queen, Jolene
I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana (don’t try me)”

When I first heard that lyric I knew exactly what she was singing about. Maybe the lunatic in me isn’t uniquely an Indian villager. Maybe I’m a Creole banjee bitch, and Beyoncé is a South Indian villager. Our rage is part of our lineage, and we have inherited a way to be both divine and furious.

There are some people, like my husband or my friend Maya, who are unflinching in the face of rage. It might even gear them up for a good tussle. Me? Oh, no thanks. I don’t know how to tussle. I know how to keep the peace or implode. That’s it, and therein lay my issue. I want my daughter to see me angry because anger can compel us to confront what needs confronting. Anger can be what compels us to find a way through a situation when we desperately want to go around or above. You know, I want to be a successful writer, in the sense that I produce a body of work I am proud of, and I do what I can to share it with the world. But to do this will require facing down my fears and shortcomings, one of which is being direct with people, even when I or they are angry. My motivation is also bigger than just me. I want my daughter to see me be angry because I also want her to see me be brave. If I can show her, I can show myself.

Back to the bus

But then there is the anger I cannot solve. The fury unleashed on Gaza, in Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia; on undocumented immigrants here in the United States; on Muslims and tribal groups in India; on women around the world. What am I supposed to do with an anger this large? What can one person do when the thing making you angry is a war, a government, a culture, a history?

There is a saying that can loosely be attributed to Russian writer Leo Tolstoy:

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Tolstoy is saying that people are extraordinarily interested in reforming other people and society, while being remarkably reluctant to examine their own conduct. We are inclined to demand changes from institutions, governments, and spouses, while unwilling to make changes in ourselves. I might have an opinion on capitalism, technology, or war, and I might proselytize and organize around this opinion, but changing my own greed, ignorance, and cowardice is the more difficult, less glamorous work. I am not suggesting that any of us can personally stop a war through an act of individual self-improvement, but we can decide what kind of people we want to be while living through one.

Part of knowing what to do about the world’s anger has been knowing what to do with my own anger. How to really feel it, understand its various forms, and either let it out or keep it in as needed. As a young mom, I am focused on improving myself for the sake of my daughter. When I was pregnant with her I could barely voice my discontent with a bus driver. Today, if I were on that bus again, with her in my lap, and the driver asked me to give up my seat, I would find it in me to swiftly and firmly say no. She might see me sweat and flare my nostrils, but she won’t see me scream or disrespect the driver. Then we would both sit on the bus, my heart still racing, maybe hers racing too, divine in our discontent.

Update (Oct 14, 2026) — I am now lucky enough to write full time.

“A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.” - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

In a world of incessant and invisible data collection, what does privacy mean? You, we, I; we have been robbed of the default privacy enjoyed by our parents and grandparents — my grandparents grew up without electricity so they were off the literal grid. This alone we have not had enough time to grieve, and yet we must grieve for what we barely ever had. We yearn for it. Every person on earth yearns for it. It is human instinct, after all, to want protection. Whether you are using the bathroom, crying, or having an argument with your spouse, privacy creates the conditions that allow the vulnerable self to simply be.

Nowadays many of us are navigating a world in which we can trade a little privacy for a little opportunity. Perhaps you post frequently on LinkedIn about your career, have a Substack, share personal updates on social media, or log your runs on Strava. The more you share, the more doors open, but the tradeoff is that our careers, activism, fitness, personal lives, and more are now subject to the gaze of others. It is this gaze and what it does to our very soul that must be articulated; when every aspect of one’s life is captured, measured, or shared there is no space to exist. No memory of living undetected. One is performing constantly, the corporations profit from the performance, and political actors benefit from the distraction.

As I wrestle with how much or how little to share about my own life, I am also wondering how to preserve my daughter’s privacy and, subsequently, her innocence. She is currently five months old and utterly delightful. What is perhaps most delightful is her complete unawareness of just how cute she is. In this brief window, she is unburdened by self-awareness or expectations, and yet, and yet, when I whip out my phone to take a photo of her, she pauses and stares at the lens. How does she know? I could not tell you, but when her infant eyes — full of wonder — settle on the lens I feel a rush of shame. A voice inside me says she has a right not to be seen, not by others, the lens, or herself.

It is too late for me, but not for her. I am inundated with images, videos, and Zoom calls where my face is mirrored back to me with a nauseating amount of resolution (I would love to return to a time when I was not so physically aware of myself, but I digress.) My daughter’s lack of performance is all the more precious in a performative world. She brims with a magic that is not only worth protecting, but learning from. What if I could be as present as she is, I wonder while she babbles. What if I could focus on her the way she focuses on me? In her dark round eyes I see myself more clearly than any technology could capture.

And so I wonder if I should take photos of her at all, and if so, who should and should not have access to those photos and how to restrict their circulation?

In South Asian culture there is an ancient concept known as “drishti” or the “evil eye”. It is a belief that should someone look upon you with malintent — such as jealousy or greed — it can lead to bad luck. Many Indians put black threads or dots on their babies to protect them from drishti, which is wise. Do you ever really know what someone is thinking when they look at you, let alone your baby? In today’s context, drishti has a new meaning for me. It is about preserving my child’s right not to be perceived, and in turn shaped, by any kind of harmful gaze, be it the camera lens or others looking upon her image.

I was made aware of the male gaze, the upper-caste gaze, the elder gaze, and the White gaze from a young age. Even today, despite my best efforts, I notice myself silently critiquing others for “slovenly” behavior or unkemptness (a major faux pas in Indian society). I remember being a third grader and telling Andy not to pick his teeth, Brian not to fidget, and Michael not to drag his feet. Why should they have a pass if I did not? There was, thankfully, no online audience to perform for, but I still performed on a smaller scale. Like a dancer moving through space — which I was and still am — I was aware of every inch of my body, from the tips of my fingers to the splay of my feet. So while I was not a child actor, in a way, I also was, and I desperately want my daughter to be more free. Not because social graces are all bad — in fact, knowing how to exist in the public realm is quite important politically, spiritually, and socially — but a social construct that teaches us to behave counter to what we feel inside is not a grace at all. It is a cage.

While writing this essay, I came across the work of D.W. Winnicott, a historical psychoanalytic thinker and pediatrician from the mid-1900s. I was interested in his theory that humans have a True and False Self. The True Self is spontaneous, creative, and feels real. It emerges when a caregiver responds sufficiently to the expressions of a baby. According to Winnicott, if the caregiver fails to respond, the baby learns to mask her true self by becoming less demanding. Instead of her environment adapting to her, she adapts to her environment. It is interesting that for one’s true self to emerge, they need the presence of another. Presence is quite different from gaze, and perhaps they are at odds with one another. In this early period of consciousness a baby realizes she is either not alone in this realm or she is, and I want my daughter to know she is not alone, that I am right here, conscious and beside her, and because she is never alone, the struggle of life is worth living.

Aside from drishti, why else would I not share pictures of her in group chats or on social media? Does it truly matter if others see her image? What actually matters is how we — her parents, family, and community — look at her, right? Alas, it is not so simple.

As a writer, it is incumbent that I believe in the power of words. When I see an image, I ascribe it certain language. “That cappuccino looks tasty,” I might think. Like spells, the language we use to describe what we see shapes our reality. That cappuccino then lives on in my mind as “tasty”, whether it actually is or is not. Extrapolate that to the image of a person and you come away with a cornucopia of description. An image of a smiling person lives on in my head as “that person is happy and content”, whether they actually are or not.

Novelist Salman Rushdie spoke about this phenomenon once. When Ayatollah Khomeini issued a “fatwa” against him for writing The Satanic Verses it created a version of him out in the world that was entirely separate from him. He called it his “shadow self”. It was not him, but the narrative that surrounded him. They made him a critic of Islam, and a seditious, grim, and dangerous man. He was none of these things, per his own admission, and when people met him they were surprised by his sense of humor and the ease with which he wore his Muslim identity. Nowadays, we all have “shadow selves”. Images and videos of us that become a separate entity, over which we have no control.

And so, I am extremely hesitant to take and share photos of my daughter because I do not want her to have a “shadow self” before she has had the chance to become a real self. People who endlessly post their children on social media — which is a lot of people — relinquish that child’s privacy and selfhood. This may sound abstract, but someday that child will have to make sense of and reckon with the narrative that surrounds them, however big or small it is. They will have no control over it, and God forbid it looms larger than the real self.

I was a sophomore in college when Mark Zuckerberg said at a technology conference that “privacy is no longer a social norm”. Around that time the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Both men had a gross (or convenient) misunderstanding of human behavior — I believe people will always want privacy even if they accidentally give it away — but it ushered in a culture that became very confused about what it wants. The technology platforms muddied the culture. Do we want data privacy or social privacy? Do we want social privacy or external validation? Do we want external validation or to be known?

It is quite clever, actually, to frame privacy as a “norm” versus a right, because norms are much easier to shift. But privacy is a right, and like all rights, it creates the conditions we need to be human. If we think of privacy as a wall that protects us from surveillance, within those walls is not only the freedom to dissent, but the psychological and existential condition one needs to be a complete person. As people we can be fallible, fickle, and downright ugly, and it is our negative qualities that complete us. If we are unable to know that side of ourselves, we lose access to that humanity.

Without privacy, we are always on display. There is no freedom to be imperfect; the gaze of an audience — be it a social media following, an employer, or the state — shapes us into selves that are reactions to an audience, not reflections of an inner self. It is this most precious inner self that I am protecting when I refuse to post my daughter on social media, share her photos too widely, or capture her too often on camera.

We think the opposite of privacy is sharing every thought and being known by everyone, and we think that being known by all — essentially fame — will make us feel as if our life was worthwhile. But I know — and I think you do too — that there are limits to what we want the world to know. That there is much about ourselves that we wish to keep to ourselves. What I want for my daughter, I want for all children. For their childhood to be protected from all gaze, most of all their own. As they are becoming the people they will be for the rest of their lives, let them experience this reality without interventions that take them away from the moment. Let them be completely safe, completely private, and completely free to imagine, experiment, change, grieve, pray, create, contradict, and become.

Privacy creates the self.

Hello dear readers! As always, thank you for returning to this space where we think, question, and explore various topics together. Together in the sense that I write, you read, and together we make some meaning of it all.

Today I am writing about intelligence, which is a vast topic that cannot be devoured in one sitting. So, please assume that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I invite you to build on my thinking, do your own explorations, and share back what you find.

To start — there is quite a bit of excellent conversation about democracy these days, isn’t there? Of course it’s a byproduct of the conditions in which we live.

Is America still a democracy?

Is late-stage hyper capitalism at odds with democracy?

Is democracy a guise for imperialism?

All around the world (my beloved India included!), democracy is in crisis. This crisis raises important philosophical questions such as, is every person’s interests actually represented in the governance of our nation? Can we be a democratic society if we are not an equal society?

Since I was a little girl, America sent me mixed signals in response to this question. At times it felt fair and meritocratic, such as when I was accepted into Stanford, The Wikimedia Foundation, Khan Academy, and other hallowed halls of knowledge. No one cared who my family was or who I knew, unlike India, where my cousins need to “use their connections” for “a seat” at university, medical school, a job —you name it.

Then at times America felt segregated, and unfairness is inherent to segregation. For example, I was in the “advanced” track since third grade. The tracks have narrowed since then. The American education system told me I was special and smart, but my empowerment came at the price of another. How can a nation be democratic if it silos its children before they are old enough to ride in the front seat? Does democracy not begin with our children, who need to be taught from birth that they are participants in and transformers of the world around them? And is a belief in their intelligence — in the most holistic sense of the word — not a prerequisite? To believe in democracy is to believe in the intelligence of people. It is easy to call people lazy, dumb, and effectively worthless. Deeming them as such rids us of the responsibility we have to one another. It is much harder to acknowledge their intelligence because then the real work begins. The work of providing fertile conditions for their intelligence to flourish.

Education is the medium by which this flourishing can occur. I write the way I do because of the wonderful humanities education I was afforded, but once I left school, all intellectual infrastructure fell away. I was left to fend for myself.

This is where, in America at least, the conditions for intellectual vitality deteriorate, leaving the population vulnerable to technology that profits from people’s lack of critical or creative thinking. It feels like the tech industry has flooded the market with consumer technology that alienates us from our intelligence —be it gambling, consumerism, or slop— while simultaneously building technology that supplants human intelligence all the while whose genesis is the summation of our knowledge. It feels like a nail in the coffin that says “I made a form of intelligence superior to yours because I decided it was a better investment than you.” I am speaking, of course, about large language models.

Commodifying, instead of cultivating, intelligence

Different forms of intelligence —emotional and social, raw processing power, street smarts, and creative genius, to name a few— all require cultivation. This happens through education, to a degree, but it demands a lifelong commitment. Therein lay the challenge. Our formal education stops, but our cultivation should not.

Cultivating one’s intellect is not easy or obvious. For example, you may think that because I write regularly, I am not tempted by distractions, but once I left the academic nest I too was susceptible to FANY (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, YouTube). I would add TikTok to that illustrious list.

The place inside me that I thought was safe and hidden is their user persona, and they know exactly how to reel me in. The more I engage with their platforms, the flatter and more predictable I become and the more money they make. Even lazing is not safe. Unless I go hide in the woods to laze, I will reach for my phone or the remote. And then it’s game over. With no government regulation in place, there is nothing standing between me and the technological corporations that want my attention. We all know about the “attention economy” by now, so why then have we done absolutely nothing about it?

To start, I think we should remove the shame we ascribe to our own behaviors. The reason television and social media enrapture us is not because we are lazy and stupid —even though we are often told this— but it is because we love stories, humor, questions, poetry, commentary, cuteness, visual beauty, and human intrigue; all this is the stuff of human life! For example, I keep my phone in grayscale so that the world looks more vibrant and attractive. Whenever I remove the grayscale filter, the colors on my phone appear super-saturated, and the world looks dull. Of course we love the colors and images on screens. We are part of a colorful world, after all, where carpets are burgundy, flowers are deep purple, and plants are hues of green. Our ability to resurface from screens and re-engage with life —be it literature, cooking, sports, gardening, you name it— is how we become intelligent again. These activities are unpredictable, un-curated, and undesigned which, I believe, strengthens not only the mind but, more importantly, the spirit. It is on us to choose an existence outside of technology and to participate in the world again.

Our fight in the 21st century is for the right to cultivate our human intelligence, not purchase it via tokens, so that we might remain curious, alert, and moral.

So then a simple question started buzzing around my head like a gnat. Often people —especially in Silicon Valley— will make the case that AI can “augment” our intelligence, but is this actually true?Does technological advancement make people smarter? Am I any more intelligent than my grandmothers? Do I have more knowledge and capability than them because of technology? What do I know that they did not, and what did they know that I do not? Are you any more intelligent than your grandmothers? Are any of us?

The grandmother model (of intelligence)

I had the privilege of intimately knowing my grandmothers (I speak my mother tongue, a crucial ingredient when connecting with an Indian grandparent). Both grew up on farms in pre-industrial South India, in Havyaka Brahmin communities. They were imbued with agricultural, spiritual, medicinal, practical, and cultural knowledge.

They knew how to plant and harvest rice crops even if the fields flooded, and how to keep safe if they saw a King Cobra. They could stitch clothes from pillow cases and curtains, mend illnesses with smoke, herbs, and spices, and prepare meals for their large families without the aid of electricity or running water. They too made mistakes (one grandmother was notorious for remedying ear pain with hot garlic oil), but through years of repetition, mistakes, and learning they gained wisdom slowly and continuously. There was no artificial demarcation between the classroom and the world.

They married young, gave birth to all their children at home, expanded their joint families, spoke multiple languages, memorized hundreds of Sanskrit mantras, and knew how to perform elaborate Hindu rituals for various occasions. Their multidimensional lives turned them into beings of multidimensional knowledge.

It is interesting to me that I am the one with the elite education yet it is my grandmothers’ knowledge I am most curious about. It often feels as if I left home to seek knowledge, only to return from where I came to find it. As of late, my issue with formal, digitizeed knowledge is it has been transcribed into a system (LLMs) that tries to predict how I want to think. It does not know what Sumati and Lakshmi knew. It does not know the ways in which they thought. This makes their human intelligence all the more rare and fascinating to me. I used to ask them lots of questions —I’m sure they loved that— on topics ranging from agriculture to theology. They would answer, but they were cryptic; they never “spelled it out” for me the way teachers do. It made me think that their internal understanding was also cryptic. That they had made sense of the world in ways that left room for mystery and faith.

I am by no means disparaging science, literacy, or pedagogical guidance —my grandmothers would have loved to attend more school— I am noting that learning, creativity, and knowledge exist outside of institutions, and in the age of AI these subaltern forms of knowledge may be more valuable than they have ever been before. In our modern, Western context, women like my grandmothers would be thought of as “oppressed women”, and they did, indeed, experience an oppression I cannot fathom, but “oppressed” is not who they were. I feel that oppression wins when we assume its impact is all-encompassing and absolute. Oppression was an aspect of their lives, but it did not define them. I may have more freedom than they did, but they had more meaning inscribed into their lives. I, on the other hand, need to write a newsletter to find mine.

I may have Google, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT at my disposal but these archives of information do not transpose knowledge onto me. Our tools are modern but the process by which we become knowledgeable is old. My grandmothers might have lacked my extensive —and expensive— formal education, but they knew, more or less, everything they needed to know about the water they swam in. Information became knowledge through application. So no, technology has not made me smarter than them, it has only deluded me into thinking I am.

Humanize humans, rather than rank them

Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire argues in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that education can either assume knowledge is given to the pupil or is within them. He challenges us to see the goal of education as humanization, not smartness. People have, says Freire, “an ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human”. The fearsome power of education is that it shows us what we are worth and that we can transform the world.

The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they [the oppressed] and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.

Freire worked as an educator in the world’s poorest places, from towns and cities in Brazil to Portuguese colonies in Africa. He wrote extensively about how peasant populations think of themselves as uneducated and, therefore, unintelligent. Having volunteered as an educator in India, some of what he describes I can understand. I also see the inverse in San Francisco, the epicenter of AI and where smarts are the currency of the land. Professionals here are known for their intelligence more than any other quality, but where has all this so-called intelligence led us? What I see is intellect as a resource for self-promotion, not a medium for self-discovery or collective liberation. It is wielded for the acquisition of a job and an ascension within the corporate or startup environment. The effect of this type of monoculture is devastating to intellectualism. It may appear that intelligence is abundant, when in actuality all the ideas have come to resemble one another.

The culture does not have to be this way.

When I first came here I too wanted to be smarter than. Gradually I found more happiness, motivation, and meaning in curiosity and intellectual integrity. What I want now is not to be smarter than anyone. What I want is to write, and to write extremely well.

Take the song “Get Low” by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz. When you hear it, you wonder how this song did not exist before it existed. It was waiting to be discovered. Think of the film “The Devil Wears Prada”. Perfection. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill?

Where do these works of art come from? It is a question with no answer because ultimately art —and creative pursuit more broadly— is mysterious and divine. It cannot be distilled into an algorithm. My task now is not becoming smarter than machines but exploring how to become more fully human through the creative process. It is a time to pursue qualities more elusive than intelligence, such as dedication, focus, sensitivity, humility, and maybe even a connection to the divine.

There is a neurological phenomenon known as “habituation” whereby the human brain becomes immune to the familiar. For example, if you are told every day that you are lazy and dumb, you will not only believe it without question, but you will cease to notice there is an alternative. We become habituated to the positive and negative norms around us. It seems to me that in the last twenty years or so we in America have habituated to intellectual laziness, which manifests as a reactive, angry, and disillusioned culture.

If you know me, you know I am an ardent believer in the Hindu —or Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain depending on your reference point— concept of Dharma, which can be understood as “cosmic order” or duty. We each have a destiny and a role to play and the sooner we can uncover what that is, the sooner we can achieve Moksha or enlightenment.

There is a well-known philosopher from ancient India, Patanjali. He wrote:

 When you are inspired by some great purpose… all your thoughts break their bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and a wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

As always, I remain an idealist. The agitation and restlessness in the culture is not our permanent state, it is a season, but unlike earth’s seasons it will not pass on its own. We will each have to find our “great purpose” and usher in the spring after a long, bitter winter.

I wake up when I wake up, and I am always on time. Some people call the time early. That is their problem, not mine. My morning consists of stretching, coffee, breakfast, and then I go for a run. After that, I shower and get ready for a day of meetings in the Financial District. These days, however, I am late to my morning meetings. These days, while I am sipping on some hot coffee and taking a bite of buttered toast, I look across the way and see the woman next-door in my window. Well, to be specific, I watch the woman next-door, and she is holding a baby. A real live baby. Her baby, I guess is the correct way to say it. Since about two months ago I have been watching this woman regularly. I call her ‘mom’ for short. I had never noticed mom in the window before. We had never crossed paths on the sidewalk. I never saw her trudging up our hill with a gym bag or running down the hill with an iced coffee. She must park her car somewhere in the neighborhood. She probably knows that mine is the bright red Porsche with the license plate “cocktail”.

Has mom had her breakfast, I wonder with a mouthful of toast. But she is bouncing baby with both arms, so I am not sure how she would feed herself. Is it possible to bounce a baby and butter some toast? I guess first she would need to take the bread out of the pantry. How do you open a pantry with no hands? Could she lift her foot, loop her foot through the handle, and pull? Or maybe the night before she had kept the bread out, in anticipation of needing it in the morning. But then how do you get the bread out of the plastic bag? And then there is the question of the butter, of course. The butter would be in the fridge, in the dairy compartment, so someone would need to open the fridge, the dairy compartment, pull out the butter, and remove the wax paper, and only then is the butter ready to be sliced into a pat. Oh but she needs a knife. Maybe she skipped breakfast.

Mom is usually in a purple or blue night dress that appears to have slits in the breast area. Did she cut those slits herself or do they sell night dresses with breast holes? Some days one of the slits is tied shut with what appears to be a rubber band. Sometimes mom’s hair is scraggly and hanging around her face. This seems to excite baby, which grabs fists full of her hair. It looks annoying to me, but mom seems to find it funny. After some bouncing, mom sits down on their white couch and nurses baby. She always taps her phone when the nursing starts, and taps it again when nursing ends, so I assume she is timing the nursing.

Some days, mostly Mondays and Wednesdays, I return home during lunch time to check what mom is up to. I put on John Mayer and eat a bowl of rice and salmon with some greens while mom coos at baby in-between bites of whatever she scarfs out of a bowl. She keeps baby in a kind of bouncing chair, and it flails its arms and legs. After mom eats, baby eats. Unfortunately, sometimes baby is crying while mom is trying to pop her breast in its mouth. In that frenzy, mom knocks her phone to the ground. While I wash my rice, salmon, and greens down with some strawberries, I watch mom hold baby against her breast with her right arm, pressing baby tightly to her chest so as to not drop baby, and with her other arm she bends down and reaches for her phone. I can see her fingers crawling towards the phone, like a spider. Occasionally it has fallen within arm’s length, but many a time she needs to lunge at the phone with her foot. Once she gets a grip on the phone, she drags it in. Can this damage the phone? Maybe not, since they have a carpet, but the carpet might scratch the phone screen a little. Just as she snatches the phone off the ground, sometimes baby has popped off her breast and begins to cry again. This time even louder, since its breakfast got interrupted. Mom quickly reattaches herself to baby, and restarts her phone timer. Does mom have time to shower? Who watches baby while she showers? Does she have to place baby down somewhere and does this make baby cry? Does mom shower while listening to baby cry? Is her shower long enough for soap, or does she only have time for a quick rinse? After her shower, does she nurse baby naked so as to quickly calm it? Is it possible to nurse while standing up or does mom sit down somewhere in her bedroom? If she is still sopping wet, do her bed sheets also get wet? How much milk do babies need anyway? Does baby ever stop crying for milk and smile at mom instead? “And when it does smile, does mom feel immortal, because her love for baby extends beyond the body?” I wrote in my journal. “Her body might die, but the love between them is infinite and timeless?” I recall reading that somewhere.

Outside their front door is a pile of shoes. Multiple hiking boots and running sneakers, and a pair of flip flops. I’ve seen mom slip into the flip flops and hurdle down the stairs to open the front gate for grocery delivery. I eat ice cream after lunch whenever it’s an afternoon where mom is nursing baby on one side and her face is in her other palm. Should I go over there and help her? I could cook. Does she cook? Maybe at night when baby is sleeping? On occasion while nursing, mom is hunched over, reading a book. Does she read the classics or prefer “how-to-be-a-mom” type books? Mom looks fairly young to me. Maybe thirty-two or thirty-three? It is rare to see her generation reading. Do the books remind her of when she too lived a life outside four walls? Are they a portal to a world from which she is now closed off?

On the evenings where I am working from my kitchen I look across the way to see if mom is in her living room, but she is never there. I assume she and baby are asleep somewhere in their house. When baby sleeps on mom’s chest, can baby feel when mom runs a couple fingers over its soft cheeks, gently pinching the plumpness of its face? Do babies have dreams? Do moms?

I don’t blame us. We all need some faith in our lives and a connection to that which is greater. Some call it God, here we dream of that mythic status called “unicorn”. Islam requires prayer five times a day. Hindu Dharma asks for a morning and evening puja. In Catholic school we prayed every morning, lunch time, and before dismissmal. Buddhists meditate daily. Religion is, at its core, a continual reminder of what we cannot see; it helps us find that invisible, spiritual thread tying our soul to Heaven.

In San Francisco that thread is tied to the magic number “one billion”. We pray every time we start a new company that somehow, someway, despite the unlikeliness, we will get rich and a little bit famous. I see prayer reflected in the eyes of YC founders on Muni, their heads bowed and firmly fixed on Slack or SuperHuman. Billion-dollar companies with billionaire founders make billions of money for billion-dollar funds. Tech founders and their teams grind themselves to the bone in the hopes of breathing that rare oxygen found only at unicorn altitudes. Employees at “Big Tech” companies religiously flock to their respective temples for stock options and bonuses. It’s not that we worship money — in fact many of us are minimalists — it’s that we worship the dream. What began as a tool for building software has been evangelized so thoroughly and profusely that it has become the ideal. And so, all who are baptized in Silicon Valley surrender their imagination to the idea that bigger is inherently better. Welcome to the Church of Scale.

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Scale as optimism

The first rule in the Church of Scale is optimism. Thou shall dream of a better future for yourself, says the Church of Scale. A future in which you will not be a worker, you will be the boss, and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams, which will enable you the freedom you always wanted. Thou shall reach the status of saint, also known as millionaire or billionaire, if thou follows the laws of scale. Thou shall have historic impact on the world if thou follows the laws of scale. This means that thou shalt also believe that every problem, even the intractable one, has a solution; it’s only a matter of time.

As people it is only natural to crave opportunity and the ability to rise above one’s station in life. At dinners, park walks, and cafes around the Bay I overhear excited murmurs from dreamers.

Optimism is attractive. Optimism means there is a future worth living for. Some might even call that a Heaven worth striving for. However, the location of optimism matters. In the Church of Scale optimism belongs to the individual founder or technologist. In Chekhov’s short story The Student, optimism is found in the heart of the individual but located in the collective, across generations.

“And now, shrinking from the cold, [the Student] thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better…

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered…

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor — he was only twenty-two — and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous, and full of lofty meaning.”

Chekhov sees the poverty and injustice around him. However, his character finds happiness despite life’s obvious sorrows. He finds happiness in the feeling of aliveness, a feeling that is passed down generation by generation.

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Scale as ambition

If “optimism” is the first commandment, “ambition” is the second. The height of professional ambition in the Valley is building a successful company; like all religious zealots, we aspire to reach a rare mythical status and we call it “unicorn.” To become a unicorn one must totally and completely surrender to the idea of scale. Bow down at the altar of scale and maybe, just maybe, you could become a unicorn. Maybe, just maybe, scale is the inevitable technological destiny of your product. This shapes every decision made about the technology, from its minute features to its larger architecture.

If you question what ambition itself could mean, you will never reach the gates of the New York Stock Exchange.

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The hidden cost of scale

As of late, I see all around me a frenzy to dig, yet again, for California’s gold. The pursuit of wealth, prestige, and influence is the Valley’s past and present story. There have been blips in time where democracy and social good— e.g. Facebook, Twitter — or excellence — e.g. Apple — or experimentation — e.g. NVIDIA — were posited as our objectives. Of course, there are always idealists in the mix with the purest of intentions, we would perish without their integrity and inquisitiveness, but those at the top and the ever-vast majority are practical people who know a gold mine when they see one.

When everyone around you is scrambling to find that one river that sets them up for life, it’s a dreary feeling to sit, watch, and wonder. No one feels they are doing enough. If they are at a startup they think perhaps they should go to a bigger company. If they are at a bigger company perhaps they should try for an AI lab. Everyone wants more. Exactly how much more, it’s unclear. People look back on career decisions with regret. They shake their heads dismally, seeing exactly where they turned right instead of left and missed the chance to become an overnight millionaire.

I too think about wealth. I can see it there, waiting for me to grab. But there is no free money. California’s first Gold Rush left its rivers and estuaries contaminated and the Indigenous population either enslaved, exterminated, or displaced. “Open AI or Anthropic could IPO tomorrow and there will be 10,000 new millionaires in the city” people say excitedly but with a twinge of jealousy. Into which rivers are we dumping mercury this time? When those 10,000 become rich, whose enslavement or displacement is the price?

The hidden cost of scale is not only what scale leaves in its wake, it is what scale does to the imagination. If America’s technological hub only thinks at scale then it only solves certain problems, sees certain opportunities, and aspires to certain futures.

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What resists scale

While I feel weary and dreary about the tech zeitgeist, AI forces into focus the beauty of human variation and randomness. For example, you know how you can just tell when a piece of writing has an AI voice? What then is the unique texture that a well-trained writer develops? What is voice and where does it come from? What are its boundaries and tenets? Why does Zadie Smith sound so different from Toni Morrison, who sounds nothing like Chekhov, who sounds nothing like Arundhati Roy, who sounds nothing like Dickens, and so on and so forth? Is written voice like a thumbprint, such that every person has a unique one?

And so the artist’s response to AI and scale must be that elusive quality we call “voice”. Our stories, films, poetry, and painting must possess a quality that makes them uniquely ours. This looks like Rosalía’s newest album “Lux” or Salman Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children.” Both works of art could have only been made by the artist, and yet so artfully crafted that they resonate with anyone.

I believe now is the time for artists to investigate, more seriously than ever before, craft and voice, and to embody the antithesis of whatever technology is reaching towards. If the Valley is enamored with longevity, we artists must become enamored with mortality. If the Valley is enamored with machines that can outperform people, we artists must fiercely evangelize literature and stories that strike at our human complexity and brilliance. If the Valley is enamored with automation, we must focus on the devastatingly precise and arduous nature of craft. If the Valley is obsessed with money, let us artists think about what all else is needed to make life whole. If the Valley is made of profitable, repeatable software, let our art be fragile, particular, and human.

When we lay dying, we won’t be thinking about Anthropic or Open AI or Google or Microsoft; we’ll be searching for the eyes of our husbands and daughters, hoping for one final glimpse to carry us for eternity. Then we will find our place among the only billion we care about — the billions of stars in our night sky.

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The year is 1994. In seven years, terrorists will attack the United States. Seven years after that the economy will tank and many will lose their homes. Eight years after that a demagogue will rise to power in an upswell of right wing populism and occupy the White House. Four years after that a global pandemic will stall the world and millions will die. Had someone said all this to my mom, I wonder if she would have wanted me. In another universe, she is prudent, and I never exist.

She must have, instead, turned off the television and opened one of the Kannada short story collections she likes. Or maybe she called Anita and they talked on the phone for a couple hours about filing taxes, where to buy Indian spices in Portland, the sewing class she was taking at Joann Fabrics, and how Anita’s mom was doing and could she send Jayashree her Bombay green chutney recipe please? And then possibly Jyothi would stop by with some puttu and black-eyed peas curry since these were my dad’s favorite, and she likely sat down for some chaiyya, fried snacks, and a chat. Did Jayashree know that Jyothi’s daughter had started crawling? And those tulips she had planted were blooming in pink, yellow, and red. How easily flowers grow here in Oregon, without much effort at all. You plant a seed, add some water, and nature takes care of the rest.

Then Jyothi must have left, leaving Jayashree to step out into her own garden bursting with vanilla beans, blueberries, cherries, golden berries, strawberries, and honeysuckle. She might have closed her eyes and looked up at the blue sky, letting the spring sun coat her face. The wind would have blown through next-door neighbor Bob ajja’s mermaid chimes, and she would have inhaled deeply. The air in Oregon was so clean. In Delhi people were starting to wear masks while running errands.

It was almost time to pick up her daughter from kindergarten. Anarghya would likely prattle in the back of our Honda Civic about Clifford the Big Red Dog, her newest friend Chloe, and the field games she played at school. These Oregon kids had playgrounds nicer than the hospital in which Jayashree had delivered her first daughter. If there was a birthday at school, her six-year-old would take a break from being serious and roll down their window, brandish the bubbles wand she had been gifted, and furiously pump her little arms to create as many incandescent, floating, soap pockets as she could.

That evening Jayashree, her small daughter, and her husband would sit at a round wooden table in a house that was considered quaint in America but roomy and fancy in India, to a meal of chapati, aloo curry, and a cucumber-carrot salad. They would have many more such family dinners until Anarghya was off to Stanford where she would be the first person in the history of their family to study higher education in the West.

Anarghya would become the first woman in the family to be fully financially independent.

She would never need to appease, tolerate, or cower in front of a man to ensure she had a roof over head, food in her belly, or a place in society. Anarghya would, years later, have a few kids of her own.

Jayashree did not worry about having her second child, she just needed to plant the seed and nature would take care of the rest.

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So you’re afraid to have a child

I look around me and see a generation afraid to have children. Not hesitant, intimidated, or perplexed by the possibility, but fearful. Fearful and resistant to the idea of bringing someone into this world— this horrible, violent, unfair world that is fast melting at the poles, burning on the coasts, and drowning in the south. Not only are we afraid of the harm that may befall our child, we are afraid of what that child might learn. Indeed, he or she might learn that the moral arc of the universe may or may not bend towards justice, but either way the arc is too long to tell. I understand this fear. I have felt this fear. Then I listened to a conversation with German filmmaker Werner Herzog.

Herzog’s mother fled to a village during World War II with a baby Herzog, just a two-week old newborn. There she raised him. There was no plumbing, electricity, or father. Only the assail of bombs and the bleak future of a war torn, fascist Germany. Herzog goes on to become one of the pioneers of new German cinema and a fantastic artist.

What if his mother had chosen not to have him because the conditions were so grim? There would be no Herzog or his mission to make new images for a new time. He was created despite his country being at war, and he became the very person who would help Germans see themselves and their society in a post WW II light. His films are dedicated to pursuing “ecstatic truth”. He traveled the world from Germany to South Sudan to Mexico to Philadelphia to Crete to find this ecstatic truth, but he ultimately says that his Art, which he thinks of as poetry, is not about telling the truth, but about telling stories. His films “feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams”, all the while he was mother’s.

I am not saying you should go ahead and have a child. My meditation on the subject is neither about the economy nor the nation, nor is it a plea to populate the earth. This is a rescue mission for souls at sea who might need a way back to shore. Every sentence, a line cast out.

There is also the question of whether one should think this much before having a child. Perhaps we overthink this one and should just let it be, as people have done for ages. But we are not those kind of people, are we? Who around here does anything without thinking anymore? We strategize and optimize. Some of us call it “being intentional”. Still God laughs at our plans and swirls His finger in the water in which we swim. The thrust of faith required to have a child is no different than falling in love and committing to one person for life. It is ultimately an exercise in improvisation.

If you amble down the hill I live on in North Beach, onto Broadway street, and meander towards the Broadway tunnel you will see a daycare on your right. There is a sign above the entrance that says “the future of the world is in this classroom.” We see children everyday in our cities and towns, some of us notice them more than others, but rarely do we think of each one as our own legacy. Someday you and I will be gone and they will be what’s left, and they will decide what becomes of a world that was once ours. So perhaps you don’t need to have a child at all so long as you find a way to see all children as yours. The Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Min fought for decades and only 24 years after his death did Vietnam unify as a communist nation. We say we want a revolution, but revolutions are intergenerational projects.

The earth my daughter inherits is not the same one I inherited. It is damaged by the very species I adore. Wildfires engulf the West Coast after dry, scorching summers. The rest of the world now regularly drowns in floods, typhoons, and hurricanes. But it is still hers to inherit and steward. The cosmos are hers to ponder. And the ecstatic truth of life is hers to live.

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Dear reader,

Five weeks ago I pushed my daughter out of my body in fifty-one minutes. I had thrust her into this world and instructed her to live—but how?

A commoner among Olympians

“What are you afraid of?” my coach goaded. “If you faint in the pool, we will pull you out.”

On a whim, my parents had signed me up for the most competitive swim club in Oregon while in the sixth grade. For years I stayed on. I did not enjoy the sport or the team all that much and became a mediocre competitor, but I was too stubborn to quit. During grueling training sessions, I never stared down the Minotaur that lives within. I could not bring myself to suffer that much. At least, not for swimming.

I would chat with Michelle, Conor, or Blaise — some of my teammates who qualified for the Olympic Trials — and I would wonder, what do they have that I am missing? Is their Minotaur different from mine or is there a lost edge to my soul? I wanted, so badly, to know how do they go there? I was an A.P. student, none of them were. I had read the unabridged version of “Les Miserables” in third grade. I would soon be accepted to Stanford University. What did these jocks know that I did not?

When I arrived at Stanford I joined the crew team as my older sister had done. Yet again I was a commoner among Amazonian blonde women capable of feats that pummeled mine. I yanked that oar with all my might and slammed my legs down with each pull, but I was the slowest and weakest on that team too.

After graduation I needed a way to stay fit so I began to run marathons and ultra-marathons, which required ten-mile training runs after ten-hour workdays. In torrential rain and wearing the wrong gear, which almost always chafed my body red raw from thighs to boobs, I hobbled along the Embarcadero, in the darkness, to complete my miles and my penance. The Bay Area is the land of triathletes and fitness freaks, many of whom would fly past me on the road, a pleasure that I was denied. Still I ran, much like I rowed. Like how I swam. A bit slow but ever steady.

To society I might have appeared tough, brazen even, but I knew the truth. I had either stumbled or been forced into swimming, rowing, and running, and so I participated in these activities but huddled in the corner of my mind where I felt comfortable. I failed spectacularly at navigating that labyrinth within us that we call the mind, and every time I faced the Minotaur I was defeated. I was quick to blame genetics or my vegetarian diet, but frankly, dear reader, I didn’t give a damn.

It Runs in the Family

“Don’t be a sacrificial lamb,” my sister and I chanted in unison as we shook hands. We were referring to the line of women in our family, especially on our mother’s side, who offer their sanity and bodies up for slaughter. My great-grandmother birthed thirteen kids — and cooked and cleaned for them too — while managing a farm. My grandmother died young due to the stress my grandfather caused her. My aunts are regularly on their feet for 20 hours a day. If my mother had a mission statement, it would be “I don’t need anything, I’m fine.” If medieval torture methods were tried on my sister, they might get frustrated when she says, “Is that all you got?”

The women in my family survived in sink-or-swim environments. It would be wrong to deem them masochistic, but at some point suffering became akin to living. “I will not sacrifice myself,” is my mission statement.

Not only did I inherit tenacity from my bloodline, my upbringing unfurled it. When we were children, my father would regularly take my sister and I on hikes that were not suitable for small legs. He did not consider Sunday, or Monday through Friday for that matter, to be a day of rest. I remember hiking the tallest, toughest climb in the Oregon Columbia Gorge at age eight. It was a twelve mile round trip with 6,000 feet of elevation gain. I cried the whole way down. When we went night skiing, I would be suited up in second hand gear. I would shiver and tremble on the ski lift, closing my eyes to focus on breathing and, through sheer mental will, staying warm. I would then telemark down dimly-lit, steep, icy slopes in cross-country skis because we did not own downhill skis. I would request he turn up the heat in our Honda CRV as we drove home, but he often refused so as not to “waste the car’s energy.” As a teenager, I backpacked in the Himalayas with him and on day one we lost our way and had to seek shelter in a cave where we shivered through the night with no spare food and little water. In the morning we whistled as we cleaned out the cave and did sun salutations on the rock where we had slept. In college I traveled in the Amazonian rainforest with two different Indigenous tribes. After a month of travel, I landed home at Portland International Airport where I strained on the toilet for an hour with tears streaming down my face as I leaned against the bathroom stall and drenched myself in sweat. I had not had a bowel movement in over a week.

At the age of thirty-one, as I set my sights on new summits, my eyes shine with sunlight that reflects off glaciers atop mountains, yet they remain fixed on the line between tenacity and masochism.

How Discomfort Changes Us

“On a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt?” asked the nurse about my contractions.

Does it hurt like a set of eight one-hundreds with five seconds rest in between? Does it hurt like palms bloody with blisters as skin rips on each yank of an oar that I plunge into frigid, choppy seas at 5 AM? Or maybe each contraction is like the final mile of a 30-mile race; my hips, knees, and ankles scream in protest as I pound them into the ground again and again.

I considered my options before deciding that childbirth was a new paradigm of pain. To start, there seemed to be no escape. No way to slow down or soften the knife that stabbed me in the abdomen. Then there was the added layer of the unknown. For how long would the knife stab me? One lap around the track? Twenty? Lastly, there was my concern for my baby. I could stomach the pain a while longer, but how was her little body faring inside? Was she feeling the stress that I felt? I knew the longer I labored naturally, the safer it was for her, but my sister, standing by my bed, said “Don’t be a sacrificial lamb.”

I wanted to last as long as I could, so I closed my eyes during every wave of contraction. The waves crashed again and again, never easing their blow. I thought it would get easier. It did not. I thought I might faint.

“What are you afraid of?” my swim coach goaded. “If you faint, we will pull the baby out.”

Afterwards I asked my husband, “Do you think childbirth hurts animals just as much?”

“Maybe not because their lives are so much more uncomfortable than ours. They probably have a high pain tolerance.”

“It’s true,” my dad said. “Our ancestors didn’t have soft carpets and slippers. They walked barefoot. Like your uncle Hari who runs marathons barefoot.”

“Like the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico,” said YouTube. “They live their lives climbing mountains, often walking three hours just to visit a neighboring friend.”

In a time where convenience and comfort are sold to us at every corner, when we choose discomfort, we enliven a part of ourselves kept numb. If I had never grown accustomed to physical pain, I might have remained numb to the miracle of childbirth. Not only are we sold physical ease, we buy services and products that provide emotional and psychological cushions as well. Our media silos train us to flinch and writhe in pain from political difference. Ubiquitous screens with curated narratives help us detach from an unpredictable reality.

What do we lose when we are no longer able to tolerate even the most minute of pain? What do we gain when we are the ones to choose it? It seems to me that discomfort and suffering are vital to the human experience. That without them, we never see the incandescent face of the other side of the moon where we are promised joy, relief, and satisfaction. If I am never cold, what good is a warm fire?

My daughter screamed as they pulled her out. “That’s it, my girl,” I tell her. “The womb was nice, I know, but welcome to the thrill of living. We risk, we suffer, we lose, we gain, we learn, and we love in the hopes of doing it all, again and again.”

Being Present with the Pain

I have now moved into a new neighborhood — the one where moms live. It is a place for women who have carried and birthed children, and have learned, lived, and been utterly, beautifully remade by it all.

“Every woman who warned me about postpartum, I assumed was exaggerating,” I sheepishly explained to the lactation consultant as she hooked me up to an electric breast pump. Plastic suction cups yanked at my nipples again and again, like one would milk a cow. Each tug had a small sting to it.

“It shouldn’t hurt,” she told me.

It was either this or my baby would go without breastmilk.

“I can’t feel a thing,” I assured her. “In fact, you can crank up the dial.”

Dear reader,

These days I think quite often about America, India, and the global stage. What kind of a nation is America today and what is it becoming? What about India? Around me, here in San Francisco, is a swirl of conversation about technology, war, democracy, and culture. It makes me wonder, is a nation made great by advancements in these areas? But then my mind naturally drifts towards my area of interest — people. Whether it is technology, war, democracy, or culture, it all comprises the decisions and contributions of people. I generally write about women. This time I want to write about men. What kind of men does a great nation require? I’ll stick to the two nations I know fairly well, America and India.

Reading the Mahabharata as Subversive Text

The abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement reshaped the United States. India secured independence through satyagraha and ahimsa. In 1960s America and 1940s India, the people bent the nation toward a moral horizon. Christianity and Hinduism gave both movements, and the people, the spiritual courage to struggle. Religion feeds culture, culture expands religious practice, and we enjoy the remarkable fruits of that period today.

Nowadays it seems that Christianity and Hinduism are tools for tearing down what they once propped up.

In modern India, Hindu fundamentalism rules. It dictates who India belongs to and how everyone else is to be treated. I am related to about one hundred believers in this ideology. I have discussed issues of religious freedom with them, and it is clear to me their religious faith is entwined with bigotry, which indelibly shapes their moral character.

During the Swadeshi movement for Indian liberation, Hinduism gave the people an inner strength. Now it gives them a perverted kind of strength. Perhaps we cannot call it strength at all. It gives them a sense of superiority, is more accurate. It validates their need to feel superior. Men in my family might laugh at a woman like me who writes entire newsletters on feelings, but what they don’t realize is that I am writing about the very matrix in which they live.

Hindu men, and particularly Brahmin men, feel good about themselves because of their Hindu-ness, male-ness, and Brahmin-ness.

Rather than becoming enlightened minimalists who serve society — the path of the Hindu swami — Hindu men, and particularly Brahmin men, have become more self-absorbed and concerned with wealth and power. Their Hindu-ness, male-ness, and Brahmin-ness all become tools for serving these ends. In such a time as this, what is considered nuanced and sophisticated religious text can easily become propaganda. That is what we see has happened to the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata is an ancient Hindu epic about the Kurukshetra war between two clans of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fighting for the Hastinapura throne. At the heart of the story is a beautiful woman named Draupadi who, like Helen of Troy, is the spark that ignites the war. Draupadi is wife to all five Pandava brothers. The eldest brother, the Pandava King, gambles away Hastinapura to the Kauravas, and, in an act of desperation, he also wagers his wife, Queen Draupadi.

The Kaurava leader — Duryodhana — is delighted to win Draupadi. Overcome with manly glee, he slaps his thigh and beckons her to sit on his lap in front of the royal court of men. Some say it was not his thigh he touched but a more centrally located organ. He then attempts to disrobe Draupadi by pulling her saree. She throws her hands in the air and prays to Lord Krishna who comes to her rescue. Her saree extends forever and poor, horny Duryodhana is unable to complete her humiliation, despite his best attempts.

It is easy to claim the Mahabharata as a story about violence, glory, sexual prowess, and fraternity. It is much more difficult to wrestle with its true central theme — Dharma. Dharma, or duty, is the moral logic that provided structure and order to the ancient Indo-Aryan world, which was an honor-based society.

For me, the war is not the center of the story, but Draupadi’s humiliation and the questions it raises regarding Dharma. In what kind of a society is it considered honorable to wager a woman? What are we to make of the silence of all the respectable men in the royal court who witnessed her humiliation but did not intervene? (The third Pandava brother, Bhima, is said to have at least roared in anger and swore to disembowel Duryodhana; a promise he keeps) Does Draupadi’s shame have no meaning in this society? If she, the adored queen of Hastinapura, was treated as such, what can we assume about the lives of ordinary women in the kingdom?

Hindutva men, living in 2026, are known to say “Duryodhana was not such a bad guy” and “what he did was not so terrible.” Draupadi’s humiliation means nothing to them, just as it meant nothing thousands of years ago to the court of royal men. This tells me that Draupadi’s humiliation is not an ancient scene. It is a modern, domestic one. Many Indian women still live inside a story where they are wagered, silenced, and sacrificed. We call it tradition, but really it is the preservation of male order — a system that stabilizes itself through women’s silence. A system in which men suffer too, given that they are unable to form healthy, happy bonds with women.

The Hindutva men are incorrect in their interpretation, of course, because there would be no Mahabharata if what Duryodhana had done was minor. The Lord God Krishna would not have intervened if morality was not amiss in this scene. To avenge Draupadi, the Pandavas (especially Bhima), along with Krishna, go to great lengths to win the war.

In this way, the Mahabharata can be read as a subversive text about the humanity of a single woman and how Dharma was wrongly interpreted by powerful men. This makes the Mahabharata not some text about Indo-Aryan greatness, but a treatise on the failures of Indo-Aryan society.

What About the American Religion?

I was raised in the Catholic education system and have respect for Catholicism, especially the Ten Commandments and the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

However, just because I respect aspects of the religion does not make it immune from my doubts. I was curious if there was a story in the Bible that mimics Draupadi’s humiliation and what that story might tell us about the foundation of the religion.

Well, I did find such a story and it’s called “Levite’s Concubine” (Judges 19-21). It is a story in the Hebrew (or Jewish) Bible, which is called the “Tanakh” or the Old Testament.

A Levite (a Jewish male from the Tribe of Levi) and his concubine are traveling through the city of Gibeah, which belongs to the Benjamite tribe. A group of “wicked men” in the city want to gang-rape the Levite. He gives them his concubine instead. The next day she dies. As an act of revenge against the Benjamite tribe, the Levite dismembers her body and sends her remains to the other tribes of Israel to incite their anger. This launches a war between the tribes and the Benjamites. Throughout this story, the concubine (who has no name) never speaks. Only the men speak, but she is the moral center.

Both Draupadi and the concubine are wagered between men and used as propaganda in war, and it is male moral authority that deems all this acceptable.

This is the same male moral authority that protects members of the Modi regime, such as former MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and Lok Sabha member Prajwal Revanna, despite evidence of their sexual crimes. The same authority that tells Hindu men that raping and dismembering Muslim and Dalit women is honorable. The same authority that saw fit to repeal Roe v. Wade in the United States.

It Is Personal, Actually

I know many great men. They are men who see women as equals, and who know that greatness is not contingent on their ability to intimidate, humiliate, or control. They know it is not measured by the size of their bank account, organ, or influence. Wise men who know we are all measured in the same way — by our ability to know and master ourselves. To know when to listen, and when silence is betrayal.

They are half our population, ladies, and we cannot hope to understand ourselves, or life, without also knowing them. The greatness of any nation, tribe, or community rests in how tightly we are able to link arms and carry one another through life. I say this as a woman who has been carried by great men. Men of caring and sweet nature. My father is one of those men. So is my husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law. It gives me comfort that these are the men who will help me raise my daughter so that someday when she asks, what makes a great man, I simply need point to them.

Dear reader,

When my sister and I were children, my father would spin beautiful Kannada prose to enchant us with bedtime stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. These stories contained lessons on morality and cultural values, so they served us well. My father was a new immigrant to America, which is a lonely experience, and passing Kannada onto us was his way of constructing not one, but two friends.

On the eve of childbirth, a fear has arisen in me. What if I am unable to teach my daughter Kannada? What if I am the lone Kannada speaker in our household?

Parenthood, I am beginning to understand, is an oscillation between fear and generosity, selfishness and selflessness.

Inheritance Without Domination

I used to think about language in quite an egotistical way, if you will. I thought myself superior because I am bi-lingual. Language was an art form to master, through which I could have maximum command over my heritage, unlike my peers.

Now, thirty-seven weeks pregnant and on the brink of motherhood, I am not so interested in teaching my daughter Kannada so that she can impress relatives or outperform classmates with her big brain. I want Kannada to be a source of self-knowledge for her. A path for her to connect with her people and new paradigms of emotion and expression. I believe what I am shedding, on her behalf, is a residual competitiveness that is rampant in Indian-American communities. You might say “how wise”, but really I have pregnancy to thank. It has made me feel softer, gentler towards all things, including language. Now, I am lifting the lid on the ways language can be a medium for care and understanding.

Aside from the type of language she knows (Kannada, English, or my husband’s mother tongue Telugu), I am concerned with the style of language that will envelop her.

I grew up in a raw ecosystem, you see. My parents’ shared their unfiltered thoughts with us, which certainly created a closeness in the family, but sometimes, when words flew like bullets, I did not make it out unscathed. Outside of the home, I am able to recall, with clarity, the ways in which the world told me I was wrong. The wrong size, color, and demeanor, as many girls around the world are told everyday by their families, communities, and institutions.

“If only you could be more dignified, decent, and selfless” was a catchphrase of several uncles.

To my disappointment, nowadays I am all three, and I do not know if it is of my own desire or theirs. Am I calm and well-spoken because I want to be, or because I kept bumping into the guardrails of patriarchy? I have no way of knowing, but I am damn certain my daughter will have the freedom to find out.

In India and America we still see, all around us, attempts to control young women, be it their opinions or body, both of which shape their destiny.

What Ends With Me

I remember on September 18, 2020 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of metastatic pancreatic cancer, my sister was curled on the floor and I sat beside her, rocking back and forth nervously. We lived in California, so our reproductive rights were intact, but what of all the other American women in Republican states? As we predicted, the Trump-appointed Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and millions of women lost a human right. Women in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia to be exact.

Imagine you are a woman living in South Carolina and, after weeks of agonizing and amid nausea, fatigue, and other first trimester symptoms, you decide to terminate your pregnancy at thirteen weeks. You take a pill and have a painful miscarriage. You flush your fetus down the toilet. By this point I would bet you are pretty broken inside. Then, days later, the police are at your front door, here to arrest you for breaking the law.

This ongoing, local human rights crisis is at the forefront of my mind while I enjoy a blissful pregnancy. It is a strange feeling, to know that my daughter will be the first in her lineage to be granted a comfort in her body that none of us had, while also knowing there are active forces in the country which oppose such an idea.

The Weight of Other Mothers

We all intellectually know that we are born and will die, and this phenomenon is an unknowable miracle, but to house another life is an embodied way of knowing such a thing. Just as I can physically feel I am a link in a generation, I can feel myself as a link in the circle of life. This sense of responsibility and wonder is accompanied by grief and indignation at how flippantly we treat human life, especially some lives.

As of early 2026, thousands have died in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, and, most recently, Ethiopia. So many in these conflicts were so lovingly carried to term by a mother who had dreams for that baby to be safe and loved. When considering the horrors these mothers and fathers endure, whatever feeling lay beyond grief, I am there. Surely there is someplace I can put this grief? Into action, perhaps?

The conundrum of pregnancy is that it makes you more and less radical, if such a thing is possible. On one hand, it is harder for me to attend local protests or canvassing efforts. I am much less involved at the grassroots level. However, because I am home most of the time with my feet up, I am reading and writing more, not to mention more alarmed by climate change, wars, and other disasters that would make the future uninhabitable for our children. My grief, then, metabolizes into a sense of responsibility. Why are we building technology that reduces the cognitive function of our children, I wonder? How can our society stomach the mass deportation of families, I fume. Yet, I am more aware than ever that having “radical politics”, whatever that means in our deeply privileged bubbles, is also a risk. I have a child on the way, after all, and a responsibility to her. Does she need me to stick my neck out more or less? I do not know. Putting myself on the frontlines once seemed glamorous, and now is frightening.

Yet again I oscillate between fear and generosity, selfishness and selflessness. Where I am certain is, be it wars, global warming, or the erosion of a literate society, there are men who pray several times a day, only to open their eyes and wield power in ways that harm our children. They might pray for absolution or wisdom, receive neither, all the while pregnant women like me pray to no God but gain an audience with Him anyway.

Nonviolence, Outside and Inside

I grew up in a Gandhiwadhi household, strayed from it temporarily, and, in part during my pregnancy, have returned home. A core tenet of Mahatma Gandhi was ahimsa, or non-violence, which has never seemed less in vogue on the political right or left. Older generations may be surprised to hear this, but, from what I can tell, millennials and Gen Z do not buy-in to civil disobedience as an attitude. Ahimsa is seen as soft, polite capitulation. If the Right is sending the Proud Boys to the march, we are sending Antifa. If they want to colonize us with force, we will rise up and decolonize. The “by any means necessary” approach is embraced.

You might say it is easy for a pregnant woman to espouse ahimsa. After all, I am in my most vulnerable state, therefore, I crave peace, but it is not peace I crave, it is justice. Justice through just means, such that our environments are not dominated by fear or suspicion.

Just as Gandhiji intended, I aim to practice ahimsa in public and in private. The language and rhythm of our home will have peace and justice, even if the outside world cannot always provide it. Ahimsa can become a spiritual and social practice for my daughter as well, one which she can beckon at a moment’s notice.

This week I am preparing myself for childbirth. I have been told it is a painful and, essentially, violent experience to the body. This may be so for some women, but I want to imagine a different possibility for myself. I imagine my baby telling my body she is ready to leave. My cervix joyfully widens to allow her to pass, and my uterus passionately squeezes her out. She then joins us on this side. I know that if I breathe, relax, and trust both body and baby, it is quite possible the birthing experience will be as it was intended; a release, a relief, and the greatest of all first encounters.

My daughter will be swaddled in my arms, and I will tell her in the dulcet, folk tones of her mother tongue:

ninna tande matte nānu ninagāgi kāyuttiddevu

Your father and I have been waiting for you

Dear reader,

Today was a disappointing day. One of those “oh dear, that nightmare became real” kind of days that feel surreal. At thirty-one, I have accumulated enough disappointments to look back on and see patterns. I have found that true disappointment lies not in what the universe dishes out, but in how I respond to the dishing. Did I pause or lash out? Did I learn, forgive myself, and move forward or wallow in a stew of self-pity and shame?

Life is full of disappointments. I do not mind them, nor do I expect otherwise. What I do mind is that, in American culture specifically, we keep our disappointments to ourselves. In Indian culture, people are quicker to express their disappointments. They are known to flippantly say, “I got married too young and I was never able to realize my ambitions.” Heavy, isn’t it? And yet it is shared freely, without shame or caveat. Such statements are not followed by “but my life turned out great.” There is an acceptance that some aspects of life have no silver lining and that is just fine. It is my belief that when we share our disappointments with one another, we accomplish much. Firstly, we rob them of their power because often what we keep secret remains a source of shame. Second, it humanizes us, both to ourselves and to others. Expressing disappointment is an act of vulnerability and, usually, if we allow ourselves to be seen by others, they are more likely to show themselves to us as well.

I am all for positivity, and am by no means advocating for everyone to constantly weep and complain. In fact, I dislike when people overshare because it feels performative, just like false optimism. I am simply interested in those genuine and intimate moments where we let down our guard and admit to another that we are neither perfect nor invincible, and indeed we too are capable of being sucker-punched by life.

I would go so far as to say that if one cannot express their disappointments to another, they are likely unable to metabolize disappointment at all. Now, if we cannot metabolize personal disappointment, how in the hell do we expect our society to metabolize disappointment? What I mean is, when our leaders and institutions — be they educational, media, financial, religious, governance, or health-related — let us down, if we each mourn and suffer privately and not together, how are we supposed to learn and evolve as a society? What are we to do when it’s not “a child left behind” but all of us?

If we do not metabolize disappointment publicly, we risk silent grief, which morphs into rage and populism. Disappointment is inevitable, but silent grief, also known as loneliness, is not.

Metabolizing disappointment

During disappointments in life, I am prone to feeling a deep amount of sadness. It sits in my body, sometimes for days or weeks. I mourn my idealism and the loss of trust, but I do move on, sometimes in a mere 24 hours. Then I bumble through what happened, what was fair, unfair, and in my control. Then I share my disappointment with someone I trust, to think it through with them but also for comfort and companionship. Lastly, I sift away the sand and dirt to find whatever nuggets of gold or silver I unearthed in this effort. This the currency I take with me into the future.

I want to share with you, dear reader, two institutional disappointments I have felt recently.

Silicon Valley, social media, and generative AI

In Silicon Valley, we encourage one another to look forward and never look back.

The only thing that matters is the future… I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.

– Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Waymo and Google X (Source)

Not only is this attitude a denial of reality, it is a misunderstanding of Waymo itself. Waymo is not some spontaneous new phenomenon; it is an evolution in transportation. We evolved from vehicles pulled by horses to gas vehicles driven by humans to electric vehicles driven by a computer, and every change in transportation has had ripple effects on other aspects of human life, from the design of our cities to the way we think about distance, travel, and time. I so wish these teams had in-house philosophers or sociologists to shape the technology and its release into the market with more intention.

Mr. Levandowski is not alone in his mindset. Silicon Valley only ever wants to press onwards, come rain or shine. I am not opposed to this type of resilience, but sometimes I think we mistake pigheadedness for resilience. If we only ever “look forward”, we skip the important emotional work of pausing, reflecting, and learning from failure. A healthy society sits with its disappointments. We share them, and we learn together.

I have personally been the most let down by Facebook. It was the Silicon Valley success story while I was at Stanford between 2012 and 2016. Everyone wanted to work there because it had the secret sauce. You would get to build a more connected and democratic future with smart, passionate people while getting rich (I can still picture President Obama sitting next to a young Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook Town Hall in 2011).

Unfortunately, this was too good to be true. In their desperation to be a billion-dollar company, they designed the business model for how to surveil users, frack attention, and sell data at scale. The degradation of democracy and human rights was avoidable — including the disastrous information ecosystem we find ourselves in.

Have we heard Meta’s leaders express regret or disappointment? I want to hear their grief and regret, but I also think we need to create the cultural conditions for this to be possible. In our current climate, another’s vulnerability becomes leverage, which only leads to more people with their guard up, grieving their failures in isolation.

The mistakes that were made with social media were, in part, moral failures which we clearly have not metabolized as an industry because I see us making the same mistakes with generative AI. However, instead of banning the technology altogether or flying “full steam ahead”, can we consider two lessons from the disappointment that has been social media? The first lesson being, addictive digital products alienate people from themselves and one another. They cause more loneliness and less community. The second lesson is that data privacy is nonnegotiable in a free society.

The American Dream

I can name person after person who is living the American Dream. I see it all around me. I am not speaking only of economic mobility, but rather of agency and the opportunity to experiment and forge a unique life path. My parents, in-laws, and extended family have done exactly this, which would not have been possible in India. I know so many immigrant women who want to live in America, not their motherland, because of that so very coveted agency and dignity that all people seek.

For many, however, the American Dream has failed them. Whether it is economic or cultural disenfranchisement, the institutions have let them down. I have not experienced disappointment on such a catastrophic plane, but I can imagine it causes immense cynicism, rage, and apathy. The people’s disappointment needs to be taken seriously, and not just the disappointment of factory workers in the Midwest but the disappointment of women who want access to abortions, parents who work multiple jobs to provide for their children, Black and Latino youth who want access to high-quality education and employment, college graduates who were promised stimulating careers in knowledge work, and so many more Americans that I need not explicitly name.

My wish is for all this disappointment to be aired out in peaceful and life-affirming ways that bring people closer to one another. This care we can show for each other is cultural kindling for national hope.

I simply cannot do it all

I am still afraid to be fully seen in my disappointment. I put positive spins on failures rather than admit that, sometimes, life just sucks. A great disappointment recently was realizing that, while on the cusp of motherhood, I simply cannot give attention to everything and everyone all at once.

I am limited to watering one priority at a time.

With my new baby comes less time and energy for writing, reading, family, friends, civic engagement, hiking, cooking, travel, you name it. So here I am, grieving with you publicly, dear reader, on the limitations of reality. I simply cannot do it all. Will you forgive me?

Dear reader,

Over the weekend, in a sun-soaked apartment, my close friend and I did pelvic floor exercises. We took deep breaths to unlatch new degrees of movement.

“Not everyone can tell, but I’ve changed a lot in the past few years,” I confided in her.

“How so?”

“I’ve found myself shifting away from slogans. Yes, I want ICE out, but I also want to find other ways to say ICE out.”

“Why?”

She always knew what to ask.

“Slogans are just so… boring,” I confessed.

“What are you going to say instead?”

“Well, let me ask you this. Do you think it’s possible to hate ICE but not love the people they are targeting?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it’s possible to love the people they are targeting and not hate the agency?”

“No.”

“So, do you think the heart of our struggle in America is learning how to love one another again?”

She rolled onto her stomach and let her head rest on her arms while she looked at me.

“Do you think we have ever known how to love one another?”

I smiled at her head of curly brown hair. The conversation had just gotten interesting.

Decent and Indecent Language

As a fluent Kannada speaker, it is all too obvious to me that language contains worldviews. In Kannada, for example, we do not say “I am sad,” we say “sadness is happening to me”, which positions the self as dynamic versus static.

A decent language can breed a decent culture, which we can all agree is desirable. What is considered decent? Well, the language I gravitate towards is clever, vivid, and lyrical, but it could still be indecent. It is the language of Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy. Decent language is in its own category. It can take many forms across race, gender, and class, but at its core, it is thoughtful and humane, above all else.

It is my belief that during the Obama presidency we shifted towards a decent national language. It was also calm and erudite, much like him. Phew. This language permeated the Democratic Party, press and the internet and, because language travels across boundaries, it seeped into us regular folk.

Then, in 2016, Donald Trump exploded onto the scene and gave us permission to unleash our unfiltered thoughts. His language, both online (his Twitter handle) and offline (his podium during rallies), made America foam at the mouth. He gradually expanded his influence across American language with shocking words, buffered by comedic delivery. He encouraged not free speech per se, but mindless speech, and so we saw a resurgence of inhumane language that I had thought vanquished. Indecent language, and therefore culture, became fashionable.

Now, we are in the eye of a storm that started ten years ago and we have another three years to go. After President Trump, will Vice President J.D. Vance carry the torch? I believe so, and his indecency is far trickier to name:

“What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists? It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room, they hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for him... This is the animating principle of the American far Left. They are arsonists, and they will make common cause with anyone else willing to light the match.”

- Vice President J.D. Vance, 2025

Vance does not make clear who or what is considered “far left”, even though it is his responsibility to do so. I know what he’s “getting at”, for example “Islamists” is likely a code for the vehemently pro-Palestine and “gender studies majors” means queer feminists, but in truth, our Vice President (yes, he is our Vice President, whether we like it or not) has named caricatures and not real people. He artfully weaves stereotypes into a coalition and names them as the enemy and their ideology as a kind of monstrous “hate” that wants to burn the world down. I expect more precise and humane language from a Vice President and am not willing to accept less.

Now, let us forget the politicians and look one another in the eyes. Poor Mr. Vance is heir apparent to the MAGA movement and burdened by this great responsibility. You and I, not so much. There is no need for us to be indecent towards each other. What is the way forward, towards a decent language and a humane American society? (The combination of ICE raids in Minneapolis and the release of the Epstein files has, incorrectly, made me feel like there is no decency left in the world.)

Decent language is the precursor to a decent world. In my version of Genesis it is written:

God said, “Let there be language”; and there was light.

God said, “Let there be light”; and there was language.

Who is the Enemy?

The events unfolding in Minneapolis have gripped the nation’s attention and mine. It unleashes a flood of feeling in us, from sorrow and fear, to confusion, anger, and fascination. As with all news, it is told to us as a story with certain characters. Had you heard of the “domestic terrorist” and the “illegal alien”?

Surely Alex Pretti and Renee Good are not “domestic terrorists”, I thought to myself after watching footage of their killings. A terrorist is someone “who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims”. Both of them were, indeed, unapologetic and even aggressive in exercising their right to protest (braver than I), but neither of them was causing “unlawful violence”, that too against civilians. In Alex Pretti’s case, he was actually protecting a civilian. But there is power in labeling them as “domestic terrorists”. It makes them the enemy on the inside. Do we accept this designation lying down or will we refuse them? Do we abandon America altogether, or do we stay and fight a battle on the intellectual plane?

The term “illegal alien” was codified by Ronald Reagan in 1986 and had been used in media and legal conversations for decades prior. In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter helped popularize the term “undocumented immigrant”, which The New York Times adopted. This push and pull over the term is proof that language is powerful and dynamic. Whoever controls language controls power in society because when you bend language to your will, you also bend reality. In truth, there is no “correct” term for those who cross the border illegally and build a life here. Both “illegal alien” and “undocumented immigrant” are accurate, the question is, which language is most humane towards the subject matter?

It is on us, the American people, to push for language that preserves the humanity of a subject matter, which in turn preserves our own humanity. To me, this is what it means to fight for what we love.

A Language of Love

Regarding ICE and Minneapolis, this moment undoubtedly looms large, but it is also part of a continuum. It is part of the larger question of who belongs in America and which Americans’ well-being matters. Does America belong to the wealthy or the majority? Will it belong only to the White or to all of us who claim the identity “American”? Here again I look to the power of language and how language unlocks our imagination. In Britain, for example, I would be a British Indian (no hyphen). Here in America, I am Indian-American which is its own category of person. But what if I drop the hyphen? I would be an Indian American, which is an American who happens to be Indian.

Let us take it a step further — what if I am just an American? After all, I have no legal ties to India, not even an Overseas Citizen of India card. When I drop the hyphen I am not dropping my food, language, skin, clothes, holidays, music, religious identity, or Eastern values. I am, instead, beckoning all of this richness into America. And why not drop the hyphen? It is not always necessary to wait for the welcome mat to be rolled out, and as Frederick Douglass said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

I am, indeed, delighted to be part of the Indian diaspora, an Oregonian, and a Northern Californian, but I want to feel like I belong in this country as well. I want to feel like there is a place for me in our national imagination; a place for a creative, kind, and nature-loving socialist. This brings me to my original question, who is a friend and who is a foe to America? Who is the American worth protecting and who is disposable?

I have to come clean that for the last ten years I have had rage in my heart. Rage against different demographics that I learned to see as the enemy. I know what it means to hate, or nearly hate, an entire category of people. How I felt back then was the result of living in too insular an environment. So, it is because I have traversed a formidable terrain to arrive at where I am today that I know the value of redemption. One does not abruptly arrive at a language of love, it is the reward at the end of an expedition.

I was happy to see this baby reunited with his father, and I believe that the language of love, which will be the language of the future, is one that cradles life as precious as this.

Dear reader,

You may know this already, but in case you didn’t, the American child of traditional, Indian immigrants is forever pulled in two opposing directions—like a minnow who has swallowed two baits from two different fishing lines. She gobbled both and is now yanked from one side of the bank to the other, in a kind of tug-of-war between individualism and collectivism.

I wrote to you recently about pregnancy and motherhood, so you are aware that I am examining the themes of individualism and collectivism in a new light. Individualism is suddenly looking quite feminist. Oh but look at the nobility of maternal responsibility.

During times like these I wish I could ask my parents for guidance, but alas they were the children of 1960s South India where one’s path was fixed and laden with dharma, or duty. My dad deviated from the norm a bit—he loved rock climbing so his adventures led him slightly astray—but he too, ultimately, walked the path of dharma. My parents—the same caste and class—got married at an acceptable age, moved around India for work, and settled in America with two kids.

My life and its challenges, both past and present, are quite different. Of course, my immigrant community taught me a sense of dharma but, living in America, I also tasted individual freedom. I explored what to study, where to live, who to befriend, who to marry, and what to pursue in my career. Now, yet again, I am free to choose the kind of mother I want to be. I sit at the intersection of family, society, and self.

What does it really take for us to live together?

Since college, I have not lived alone. I moved from co-operative housing to family homes, from eclectic shared houses with artists and musicians of all ages to pandemic-era domesticity with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and newborn niece. Each phase carried me through a different version of communal life, eventually leading me to my current home in North Beach.

The different homes required varying degrees of patience, grace, selflessness, and good faith. Wouldn’t it have been easier—smoother, cleaner—to live alone? Perhaps, but I see intrigue in the messiness of human cohabitation. It also gets easier with discipline. For example, the more I patience and grace I give myself, the more effortlessly I give patience and grace to others.

My preoccupation with collaboration and interdependence scales to the biggest projects in our society—public infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, and, in essence, democracy. For any form of socially progressive innovation to occur—such as Khan Academy (my current employer) or Wikipedia (my former employer)—or for grassroots movements to be successful—Black Lives Matter, MeToo, Occupy Wall Street—human beings need to know how to collaborate harmoniously and sustainably.

Dear reader — I spend 10–20 hours on each letter, and I believe the work is worth paying for. I also believe that paying to read changes how closely we read.

If you’re a regular reader (there are now 258 of you — thank you), I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber, not because I asked or out of obligation, but because each essay feels worth about $2 to you.

Who better to learn from than us Asians?

In 2023, my boyfriend and I bought a townhome in North Beach and asked my former roommate to live with us. Between 2023 and 2025 the three of us operated like a small joint family.

We shared a space in one of the densest parts of the city. Her partners and friends would come and go, as would our friends, family members, and colleagues. We cooked, cleaned, and paid the bills together, supported one another through emotional hardship or one-off emergencies like getting locked out of the house at night, and gave each other space when needed.

I know American liberals, especially Californians, will leap at the opportunity to call a situation like this a small “intentional community” or “commune”, but those concepts come with a connotation that doesn’t fit us. Culturally, our household was too Asian to be what is understood as commune culture.

Cleanliness

Cleanliness was first priority. The house was never, under any circumstances, dirty or putrid. Shoes were not to be worn indoors, trash had to be taken out promptly, and bathrooms were to be spick and span. What does it take for a house to be truly clean? It takes consistent labor and care. What does it take for labor to be fair? It takes everyone’s equal participation.

What made our home uniquely Asian, per my perspective, is that we never had meetings or prolonged discussions about, say, cleanliness—it was unspoken and understood. We rarely had to tell someone to clean up after themselves, and on the rare occasion that someone did forget, another member of the house would execute the needful. They would do this without need of recognition or praise.

The kitchen

Our house has a small, city fridge. In this fridge we kept enough groceries for three athletic adults, all with different dietary habits. The other day I gingerly pulled out a carton of blueberries that I’d kept on top of my roommate’s box of gochujang paste. I knew that the longer I kept my carton on her box, the longer it would be a disturbance to her. So, logically, I ate all the berries in one fell swoop even though I did not want to. What I actually wanted was to savor them since blueberries from Luke’s Local cost an arm and a leg. Now before you applaud my heroism, I recall this incident because it was a tiny, invisible gesture in a series of gestures. Meanwhile she was, silently, washing my dishes, tossing my moldy food away, and dusting my crumbs. All the while my husband was moving her laundry from the washer to the dryer, reminding her to take her keys in case she forgot them yet again, and making his coffee in the dark so as not to wake her in morning.

Sweeping under the rug

In many Asian cultures, it is the default to think of others. This is warped by gender and class dynamics, so it is often Asian women who greatly shrink themselves down. Nonetheless I find the intentional shrinking of self to be noble. In our small, joint family there were moments where we chose to let sleeping dogs lie and it held our family together. Perhaps I am lazy, or tired from remote work and professional communication, or delusional in assuming that—after a while— people who live interdependently can actually “just get each other”. Yet I feel in my bones that anticipation and intuition is its own ethic.

My family’s joint families in India

In India, and in Hindu society specifically, the joint family is the default condition. It consists of grandparents, a son and daughter-in-law, and grandkids. The grandfather is the head of the household and with control of the household comes control of property. A good Hindu son is one who stays home and serves his parents and a good Hindu daughter marries into a family and serves her in-laws.

On my mom’s side the joint family consists of my grandfather, grandmother, grand-uncle, grand-aunt, two uncles, one aunt, and two cousins. For the South Indian town in which they live, it is an abnormally crowded situation. On my dad’s side, my grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, and cousin live together. Both families work because everyone is playing their part. Those at the top of the hierarchy sacrifice less but, as I have observed, no one gets by unscathed. Some form of sacrifice via tiny, invisible gestures is absolutely necessary and when those gestures peter away, the threads of the family come loose.

Every summer when I visit India I stay with the families and am, lovingly, absorbed into the structure of the household, but undoubtedly there is a structure to abide by. As I have written in my essays Good Hindu, Bad Hindu and How I found feminism in Hindu tradition, knowing when to obey versus break tradition is not easy when you value relationships. Sometimes I choose relationship over ethics. Other times I choose ethics. It is a constant, unending dance.

Joint family as a South Asian institution

Urbanization and Westernization in India is eroding the joint family. A joint family cannot thrive if its young people want the same freedom enjoyed by many in the West. This is a concern of the Hindu right and, ironically, my own but there is a divergence, I promise. From what I have seen and experienced, a joint family provides a sense of belonging and social safety. When it is fair to all, it can be the building block of a society. However, in many, including my own, the lack of agency for women is staggering. I personally insisted to my cousin that she not move in with her in-laws for such reasons. Therein lay the predicament of the human and feminist condition. We need one another, and we need one another to behave.

Exhausted by communication culture

Many years back, while living in a co-op, I struggled with a culture of over-communication. “But that’s their culture” I thought and so I abided by norms that I disliked. I disliked when others expounded on the physical or emotional labor they had done for me or when asked if they may touch my possessions or enter my room. It felt unnatural. I drowned in a tsunami of explicit, therapy-like communication. Possibly they were trying to make interdependence work but were not raised in interdependent cultures and, therefore, required incessant communication and, much to my discomfort, confrontation.

I preferred then, as I prefer now, for communication to include body language, facial expression, tone, and shared context. I want to live in a culture of emotional and social intelligence where folks know how to read between the lines and have observed one another well enough to anticipate needs. For example, I know that my husband and roommate cannot read my mind but I expect from them a high degree of intuitive behavior because—per my view—I am constantly intuiting their feelings and needs accurately.

Modern American life, liberal or conservative, teaches us to center ourselves too aggressively. In San Francisco this can look like career ambition. Not all, but many, are in hot pursuit of career success. Relationships with others, the self, and the earth be damned.

It can also look like the hot pursuit of moral purity.

Most invisible of all is the rugged individualism that breeds amid technology-enabled convenience. You need no friends to help move furniture, family to cook you meals when sick, or a neighbor to drive you to the airport. You have Taskrabbit, DoorDash, and Uber for all that. But in truth we are responsible for so much more than ourselves.

It feels good to have reshaped and continued a practice my family has handed down to me. My home is not complete without my husband or my roommate. It requires patience and discipline, but what else can one expect when carrying the weight of ancient wisdom?

Dear reader,

Our information landscape is filled with strong opinions, strongly held. Have you noticed? Over the holidays I considered my place in the landscape and decided on this—fewer essays, more letters.

Why a letter over an essay? Well, an essay is, fundamentally, an argument and arguments are one-way offenses. What I write here is not on offense or defense. I write well-researched inquiries full of feeling. I write to you with curiosity, wonder, and gratitude for the world in which we live, in the hopes that the same world becomes the subject of your own amazement.

Now onto the meat of the matter.

In 2026 I will wade into battle. I will attempt to deliver and recover from labor. I will raise a baby while writing bi-weekly letters on the human condition. I will attempt to neither neglect her for me, nor I for her.

Finding peace in battle

Despite my efforts at optimism, throughout my pregnancy I have been asked “are you scared to give birth?” and “are you nervous about becoming a parent?” The culture has shifted to where courageous women feel comfortable sharing their negative experiences with pregnancy and postpartum. “All the good hormones go away, leaving you depleted”, they have told me. The message is clear—modern pregnancy, postpartum, and working-motherhood will break you.

I understand what they mean. I have feared for my unborn baby, my sanity, and that I am not strong enough to recover physically. Before pregnancy I was one upright pillar in a marriage that requires two, but what if this pillar crumbles? Then what?

I have heard from other mothers that much of the “modern village” is missing-in-action and there is a guilt one feels for wanting more than others are willing to give. As someone raised in a collectivist immigrant community, this particular iceberg chilled me to the bone.

Lastly, there are the hopes and dreams we have for ourselves outside of motherhood—an artistic pursuit or places in the world we want to see. Our husbands, fathers, and brothers cannot relate to our condition and neither can the women who love us but have not experienced this particular aspect of human life.

Despite it all, I have challenged myself with weaving the hardship of the last trimester, childbirth, and postpartum into the most peaceful time of my life. Here is what I have in mind.

What do we mean by peace? Can there be peace amid the chaos of hormonal changes, late night feeds, diaper changes, and toddler tears? Can peace coexist with new responsibilities? Is it foolish to expect peace when walking into battle?

This is where my inner life comes in.

My inner life is, of course, the world that lives inside my mind. It is where my emotions, thoughts, conversations, imagination, memory, and stories reside. It has not always been the picture of peace it is today. Fear and anxiety have, instead, clouded the world inside me.

Let me begin with childhood. There were moments of peace in our household, but our household was mostly like the sea. Some days calm, some days stormy, and some days a pure delight. I feared the wrath and disappointment of my strict Indian parents. I disclose this not for your pity, but to illuminate that I know what fear is and I know what fear does. Where there is fear, there can be no peace. One of the worst side effects of fear is it causes us to flee from our inner life. My teenage years were muddled with doubt and confusion. I wanted to be someone my parents approved of but also, who was I really? What were my likes and dislikes? And why was I here? I did not have answers to these questions when I began college and college itself added fear. The stress of the Stanford environment managed to combust what were identifiable fears into nameless, all-pervasive anxiety. Again I was left with no answers to the meaning of my own existence. As a Stanford alumni I was tasked with “saving the world” and yet my inner world desperately needed resurrection.

Dear reader — I spend 10–20 hours on each letter, and I believe the work is worth paying for. I also believe that paying to read changes how closely we read.

If you’re a regular reader (there are now 250 of you — thank you), I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber, not because I asked or out of obligation, but because each essay feels worth about $2 to you.

My 20s had little peace. Peace requires sleep, for starters, and my unhealthy habits collided with the very reasonable fears of a politically conscious young person. I feared what global warming would do to our planet, being trapped in a capitalist system and surveillance state, alienation from community and self, World War III, and mass shootings. I was so afraid of these possibilities that I could not watch shows like Black Mirror lest they completely unravel the bit of fight in me.

Then there were personal fears. Fear of rejection, heartbreak, worthlessness, and pain. While I could name these individual fears, I could not name their sum. It was a sleepless monster for which I was no match. As anyone who has experienced anxiety knows, at some point you simply become afraid of the anxiety itself and every moment you are awake is a moment it could strike. Such were my woes.

Around the age of 27 the tide began to change. I soothed my nervous system, journaled, began to understand my thought patterns and destructive habits, developed stress management practices, and bit-by-bit crawled out from the pit of fear and anxiety into the light of day. As I focused on fortifying my peace of mind and mental resilience, I became more capable of facing sizable political questions. I did not need to flee from them. I learned ways to untangle them and, in doing so, I learned more about myself.

In his essay “Flight, An existential conception of Buddhism”, Scottish Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor writes that fear and anxiety are different.

“Fear always has a particular entity in the world as its object. The sensation of fear can be eliminated either through removing oneself from the object (flight), or through disposing of the object itself (fight)… Anxiety, on the other hand, never has a particular entity in the world as its object. In this sense it is said to be ’objectless.’ The sensation of anxiety occurs as a disclosure of the fact that we exist at all. It emerges when we glimpse our life standing out of nothingness, hovering precariously between birth and death.”

Batchelor reminds us that the Buddha too was overwhelmed by existence. However, “instead of evading the underlying realities of human existence… he courageously faced these realities and absorbed himself in untangling their mystery.”

When I stopped fleeing my personal and political anxieties and, instead, began to examine them with curiosity and self-compassion I became less afraid of what I was discovering. I liked who I found and honed in on her interests, strengths, and desires. I began to see where she fit in, in the broader struggle for justice.

Now at 31, married and pregnant, peace is a daily practice. Where I used to rush and run, I amble. I used to gulp, now I chew small meals, slowly. My mornings once resembled the start of a race and now I rise without an alarm at all. I am relieved and fortified by the slowness of body, mind, and time. In an ironic turn of events, when weighed with more responsibilities than ever before, I am at peace with life. When weighed down by dozens of new pounds and throbbing headaches, I am at peace. My heart is working harder to pump blood and my uterus is pushing on my diaphragm which leads to shortness of breath and yet, peace. They tell you that peace is a feeling of lightness and looseness. Well, my body is heavier and tighter than ever and yet—somehow—like rays of sun spilling into a room through a window, peace has found me.

I was nervous about declaring peace with the last trimester and postpartum. It is my wish, yes, but to say a wish out loud is to spoil its magic. A wish should be kept a secret, should it not? And yet, I made my wish the title of this letter, for you to see. So, consider this the opposite of secretive magic. It is the magic of sharing.

In a previous post, I had written about how pregnancy is a spiritual experience and a site of rich philosophical inquiry. In relation to Buddhism I yet again find myself baffled by how excluded women have been from the annals of theological and philosophical history. The Buddha was, ultimately, a man who had the freedom to abandon society to seek enlightenment. As a woman carrying life there is no longer an option where I can isolate myself to seek enlightenment. Instead, I must seek enlightenment amid motherhood. As I asked earlier, is it foolish to expect peace when walking into battle? Or is the heart of battle exactly where peace can bloom?

To use the language of Buddhism and Hinduism, there is a new Dharma for me to follow. The Dharma of a mother. I am tasked with seeking enlightenment not as an individual disconnected from others, but as a person inextricably linked to others. This would be the Sangha—or community—in which I exist.

Bachelor writes that “in order to actually resolve the problem of anxiety and overcome the tendency to flight, it is necessary to put the Dharma into practice… It is a process that affects the whole of one’s life: behavior, thinking and awareness. It involves a discipline composed not only of meditation, but also of a new social awareness and ethical conduct.”

It took me 27 years to stop fleeing from myself. It took me 27 years to sit and examine, with discipline and integrity, my personal and political fears. As my sense of self clarified so did my values and thus my politics. I walked into the battlefield to find peace at 27, and I am doing it again at 31. My last trimester has been peaceful. I expect my labor, delivery, and postpartum will also be. Just as there is great meaning in committing oneself to one’s political values, there is great meaning in following one’s Dharma—or duty—to others. On the other side of my duty to my daughter is peace.

Pregnancy as physical and organic

For the first time my uterus has contained a life inside of it. My blood volume is growing. My hair and fingernails are growing. My hips have widened significantly, fat has accumulated everywhere but most notably in my thighs, and apparently my abdominal muscles are separating to make space for the baby. I am biology in motion. I am also embodied wisdom in action because there are no explicit instructions relayed to my brain. My reproductive system is acting on its own, just as your immune system fights diseases without your knowledge.

My mind has always resided in my body, despite the world’s efforts to thwart me. I am present and aware while I dance, hike, run, and sing. I know this is not the case for all women but, for me, life has been an embodied experience despite the passport I hold to the land of the abstract. I give credit to my culture and upbringing, and to my roots.

In Indian culture we walk barefoot in the home and eat with our hands. We sit criss-cross on the ground while relaxing or singing, and each time I sit down I notice the pressure of the earth against the bumps in my ankles. I notice how my hips need to stretch to accommodate the seated position. Every Sunday I oil my hair with coconut oil and, if I’m lucky, a family member does this for me. Fingers have been rubbing my scalp and yanking my lengthy, black hair for a long time. I burn incense every day and the smell excites my nose. I eat food that contains tang, umami, and heat, all of which stimulate my tongue. I adorn my wrists with gold bangles and my nose and ears shine with gold hoops. I can feel them when I move around; bangles which clang when I type or run my fingers through my niece’s hair, and earrings that press against my upper cheeks when I wear headphones. I could sooner separate from my body than I could separate from my Indianness or woman-ness. I am all of it, all at once.

This connection I feel to my body was ruptured during my first trimester. I survived day-to-day, but to do that I needed to survive, day-by-day. I took naps on our blue couch in a sun-soaked living room, praying to fall asleep before I drowned in another wave of nausea. While my body screamed for food, I wanted nothing. I had no desire to eat. I wanted to sleep my woes away. Then came the weight. Black bean burgers, cheese quesadillas, bowls of cheerios, Greek yogurt with fruit and honey, bags of Hot Cheetos, boxes of donuts, slices of pizza, plates of pasta with red sauce, and deli sandwiches paraded into my mouth like a Thanksgiving Day float. My insatiable hunger was unforgiving to my physique and slapped on layers of fat all over my body, like slabs of clay on a human-sized figurine. My knees and ankles protested but they had no say in the matter as I made them march daily for forty minutes. My knees and ankles were soon joined by my lower back. They threatened to go on strike but I negotiated better hours. Just as I had won over my joints, my gums began to bleed unexpectedly and my bladder learned to sing gleefully at midnight, 2AM, and 4AM. As I scrambled to regain control of my organs, my hypothalamus decided to hit the gas on my libido.

I had gone from a woman in charge of her body to a woman at its mercy.

Pregnancy as metaphysical

For most, the term “philosopher” conjures the image of a wizened, bearded man. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Voltaire, Sartre, Nietzsche, or Karl Marx. My exposure to Eastern philosophy conjures images of Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Swami Vivekananda, and Rabindranath Tagore. Up until today I worshipped them. I know of some women philosophers, such as Simone de Beauvoir, but let’s be real — philosophy is a field entirely shaped by men.

And yet!

And yet none of these men have carried life or given birth. The notion that they, and they alone, might penetrate the mysteries of human knowledge and existence without having experienced pregnancy is laughable. If metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, examines the relationship between the mind and the body, how in the bloody hell would this field consider itself complete without the contributions of women who have carried human life?

In our twenty week ultrasound the sonographer at the University of California San Francisco hospital showed us an x-ray image of our daughter, sleeping in my belly. You could see her tiny heart beating in her tiny frame. In the 1997 movie “Contact” Jodie Foster floats in space and looks down on earth and whispers “they should have sent a poet”. I personally did not need to go to outer space to say that.

Naturally we pregnant women do not understand what is happening to us. I have no clue where this baby came from, just as I have no clue where my grandfather went when he passed away this year. Birth and death remains a mystery even to those most proximate. However, the experience of conceiving, carrying, and delivering a baby is as information-rich and transformational as any spiritual revelation or epiphany a male scholar may have had.

Can I dismiss 2,500 years of philosophical history because almost none of it was conceived of or written by women who have experienced pregnancy? Where is that knowledge, I want to know. Where is the knowledge on what it means to sacrifice one’s own body and sanity and yet still to have hope, joy, fear, and grief? Pregnancy is relearning what it means to breathe, as the organs inside you expand and squeeze your lungs. Pregnancy is the art of secrecy for the first three months. You pretend to be the same and yet you are being remade from the inside. Pregnancy is nothing less than a new plane of human existence, so I want to trace just one feeling from the plane.

The feeling is grief.

Grief is a new feeling for me. The tip of the grief is for my own mother. During my first trimester I was so averse to the smell of Indian food that my husband was only allowed to cook while I was gone and with all the windows and front door open. In her first trimester, my mother cooked, cleaned, and hosted guests all the while vomiting out back. She was twenty-four or twenty-five at the time.

In addition to debilitating nausea are debilitating emotions. I cry nearly every day, sometimes in the shower with my head against the shower pane. My tears are not sad but a release. Then I wonder, who comforted my mother while she cried? Likely not my now-wonderful but then-gruff father. Likely not a soul.

Lastly, I consider the disrespect I slung her way during my wise guy teenage years. Her grief then becomes my grief now.

One layer deep into the grief is a grief for all mothers and grandmothers who carry, deliver, nurse, nurture, raise, feed, wash, change, and protect babies while everyone else in the family is busy with their own interests. In Indian families the selflessness of the women makes it unclear where the needs of the child end and where the mother or grandmother begin. My grief is also for caregivers in war zones, refugee camps, slums and ghettos, or small rural towns where unemployment, food insecurity, and drugs warp life into a living hell.

Their grief becomes my grief.

For the last two years pregnant women in Gaza have looked up at the sky wondering which missile will bring a swift end to their maternal bliss. On October 7th thirty-eight children were murdered, with three of them between ages 0-3 and four of them aged 3-6. Forty-two children were abducted. Many became orphans. It is a trope for female politicians to position themselves as protectors of children. Nancy Pelosi did it. Hillary Clinton did it. Even Kamala Harris, a woman who has not had kids of her own, did it. Republican female politicians are all over this schtick. I am waiting for the role of protector to evolve from political posture to unshakeable ideal. I am waiting to find someone who centers the value of human life in their politics. My faith lay in wise women who have given birth to children. When you know what it takes to make a life you’ll think twice about taking one.

My grief ends in grieving for the loss of innocence and the preciousness of life. There is a small person inside of me who now has a heart, lungs, kidneys, a liver, a brain, and, most importantly, listening ears.

Every night before bed my father would tell me a story from the “Mahabharata” or “Ramayana”. The story of Abhimanyu from the Mahabharata haunted me as a child:

Abhimanyu was born to the [warrior prince] Arjuna and Subhadra, the sister of Lord Krishna. It is said that he learned the art of breaking into the Chakravyuha (a complex military formation) while still in his mother’s womb when Arjuna was explaining it to Subhadra. However, before Arjuna could complete his explanation, Subhadra fell asleep, leaving Abhimanyu unaware of the technique to exit the formation. This knowledge gap later played a crucial role in his fate.

The story of Abhimanyu could be a lesson on arrogance leading to downfall, but it is also a story about the responsibility of parenthood. Abhimanyu’s innocence was corrupted early and he suffered the consequences of his father’s negligence. He ends up dying, alone, in battle.

My daughter is listening to us now. I am not sure what knowledge to give her at what time. How much knowledge is too much, too soon? When I grieve for the loss of her innocence it is likely I am grieving the day I lost mine.

Pregnancy as intellectual

An intellectual is considered to be a person who studies and comments on the nature of society. This would have to be a person who, to an extent, has lived in society and experienced its various facets. However, in modern American society it is often someone who has read about society more than they have traveled through it.

When I suggest that you picture an intellectual who comes to mind? Another bearded Aristotle perhaps? Or a swami, like Swami Vivekananda? Or perhaps even a poised literary woman, such as Jane Austen or Toni Morrison? But does a tired, emotional, pregnant woman come to mind? Her belly is swollen and mind is hazy. “Women’s brains actually shrink during pregnancy”, a reliable source told me. “But they do expand after birth”, I was reassured.

Just as formal education, visiting a museum, or reading a book is an intellectual experience, so is pregnancy. It is neither historically nor presently thought of in this way, but who better to observe and comment on modern society than the pregnant woman? That too, the pregnant, working woman? (She may work within the house, as my mom did.)

She is expected to do intellectual and physical labor eight to ten hours a day while hiding or belittling her condition. She returns home to a single partner but no village to comfort her. Her mother lives far away, her sister also not close by. Her aunts and female cousins thousands of miles away. Her friends are available, yes, and some call and others text, but they too are busy. Too busy to pause and organize their lives around her. Too stretched thin to give with generosity.

She accepts these terms gracefully but who better to notice the shortcomings of modern American society than her? She is overworked, alone, and carrying new life. Her community is far away, distracted, and relatively unconcerned. She wonders, is this the best we can do?

Being a working woman presents a unique set of challenges. Being a working woman who is pregnant presents an intersectional challenge. I am not proposing an entirely novel idea. Black Feminist Theory advocates for the marginalized in society to be placed at the center of our concerns because when we learn how to protect and uplift the vulnerable, we protect and uplift us all.

All pregnant women carry with them great knowledge on the nature of modern American society, be it about the healthcare system, the safety and stewardship of new life, and the busyness and fracture of a capitalist society.

Above all, we notice where society shows us care. We especially notice where that care is missing.

A prism of insights and knowledge

This is my last essay of the year and it was an absolute privilege to write. Pregnancy is difficult, a blessing, heart-wrenching, life-affirming, and tumultuous. I cried when I felt my daughter kick for the first time, and I cried at my desk at 7AM when all I wanted to do was vomit and sleep but my team did not know I was pregnant and there were deadlines to meet.

I knew pregnancy would be deeply physical and spiritual, but I was wrong to assume it would not be intellectual. Pregnancy deserves philosophical study. Not by means of microscopic examination or through sterile poking and prodding in a lecture hall. It should be gently held in the fingers and turned in the light, like a sparkling diamond. After all, it is the product of women who have compressed coal into a prism of insights and knowledge.

The state of the country feels grim. The world, grimmer. The future? Oh forget about it. One is either cynical or delusional. Except I want to know about you, dear reader. What would it mean to dream beyond the realm of what you believe is possible for you and you alone?

When I dream on my own behalf I see freedom. Freedom to expand and shift my perspective without arbitrary constraints on my imagination. Freedom from the rat race mentality I see all around me in Silicon Valley. This year I have written about location, accents, pluralism in a time of censorship, grief of the nonhuman, ahimsa or non-violence, Hinduism, materialism, consumerism, childhood, baby fever, failure versus potential, third culture feminism, technology, design, focus, how to care instead of control, and Ustad Zakir Hussain. What a joy it was to write widely and with reckless abandon! To look back at all the essays as tributaries connecting to a single water source but the water does not flow into a dam to generate power or through fields to grow crops. It is clean water made for the cups and bottles of people.

My dream is only half complete each time I write. It is you, dear reader, who completes my dream. I am an imperfect creator but you and your interpretations — whether I like them or not — complete that golden circle of creation.

In the fall of 2024 I began to write more seriously about Israel, Palestine, people, and politics. I knew very little about the politics of the conflict when I began yet I was confident that I could uncover some meaning underneath it all. That series, called “To understand politics you need to understand people”, was my awakening. I wrote to make sense of what I was hearing and learning and what I had seen and felt in the past as someone involved in various justice efforts. The Hamas-Israel War as some call it, or Gaza genocide as others call it, struck every nerve in me. It triggered an avalanche of questions and concerns related to my interests in decolonialism, ahimsa, and the weight of language. While balancing a full time job, I wrote until I was spent. After I published the series I felt I had unlocked a place inside of me. I wrote feverishly from 2024 up until this very day. I lived some life and let my life tell me who I was. Turns out, I’m a writer.

The new era of art will be art only you can make

Of course the universe would release large language models (LLMs) right as I decide that writing is my calling. If LLMs can generate text is there any point to creative human writing, I fretted briefly. It was an uncomfortable question but I am glad to have asked it because it made me think quite deeply about what Art is and why we make it.

People already pay for mass produced art objects. Think of a Frida Kahlo mug, any chair from IKEA, or an AI-generated image. Why not have all art be fully automated? AI can indeed mass produce writing, imagery, and video, just as assembly lines mass produce shoes, televisions, and cups, but this only demarcates more clearly what Art is. Art is a reflection of human taste, sensitivity, emotion, and expression.

A work of Art can only have been made by that person. The process of creating strong, compelling, stirring, resonant, or mesmerizing Art is, ultimately, an unknowable process. We do not know what it is that unlocks that magic door behind which great Art reside.

I cannot define exactly what makes a work of art “great”. That is a fact that you will have to accept, dear readers (especially readers of mine who are scientifically oriented). Not everything can be measured. For example, you are alive and conscious are you not? You have a soul, I presume. What is the measure of that soul? Does it have a weight? A size or shape? No? But it (and you) exist, do you not? Similarly, the quality of wonderful Art — be it fiction, poetry, music, or film — is immeasurable and, therefore, cannot be replicated by machine intelligence.

Spinning up an original thought seems to me like pottery. I am not too familiar with the craft but have taken a class or two. I have used my hands to shape the bowl. Placed my fingerprints all over the soft clay. I know it takes knowledge, skill, practice, patience, and attentiveness to create handmade pottery. Original thought is no different. Every single person has the potential to shape and guide their thoughts into a form that is uniquely them. When we cede this inherent ability to another person or — god forbid — to AI, this is an unimaginable loss. It is the same difference between a person that is living and a person that is dying. Both bodies are alive but only one mind is awake.

It is my opinion that from original thought comes great Art. Take storytelling, for example. Where did you wake up today? Why there? What did you eat today? Why that? Where did your food come from? Who did you interact with today? Do you like, love, care for, despise, or simply tolerate them? How has the weather around you changed recently? Do you live in the midst of any kind of battle, be it the battle for neighborhood, a country, an idea, or a personal value? Are there any children in your life? What are you teaching them? Do you have a cultural heritage? What does it mean to you and how do you practice it? Have you witnessed any wickedness lately? What about kindness and courage?

I am asking you, dear reader, to have faith in these questions and the world of human stories that spring from them. There is no need to have blind faith in that which has no consequence for you, but are you willing, at the very least, to have faith in yourself? To have faith that your life, which is your story, matters? And if your human story matters, so do all the others.

Perhaps this will be what defines the Arts in the 21st century — Art that takes people where they cannot go on their own. To a place where their own humanity is central.

Friction, iteration, and slowness

Never, in the history of anything worth reading, was the first draft worth a damn. We create, edit, re-create, and keep editing until we have arrived at what we were searching for. Ocean Vuong gets it.

This process applies to anyone who does any form of original or creative thinking. A security engineer, a nurse, the manager of a bar, a mother of three, a rice farmer, or a student. We are all creating and editing drafts of our thinking until we reach satisfying conclusions. An LLM is the opposite of this. It is like the “smartest” person you know, who has a confident and speedy answer to any question. It leaves no room for wonder or ambiguity. The machine is smooth and designed to provide an answer, not demonstrate the means by which we come to know anything.

I am not suggesting that you question an LLMs ability to solve certain kinds of problems. But when it comes to answering complex questions with subjective answers, it is as unoriginal as anyone who answers in clichés with a polished tone. The question is never what does the LLM or a person know, it is, are they aware of what they do not know and do they know how to find and produce new knowledge, insights, and possibilities?

It goes without saying, I did not use an LLM to write this essay. I have never considered using AI while writing “Making meaning from feelings” because it would be like using scissors to glue bits of paper together or telling a friend to meditate on my behalf. I was raised not to step on books because knowledge is sacred. I cannot now step all over this piece of paper on which I write.

Duende, that thang, wajd, and rasa

According to different spiritual traditions an artist has the potential to channel a kind of spiritual ecstasy. In Sufism they call it wajd, in the ancient Indian tradition we call it rasa, in Spain they say duende, and according to high priestess and Neo-soul architect Erykah Badu, Black musicians call it “that thang”.

Across cultural traditions and historical timelines, Art is not considered valuable or even “alive” in and of itself. Wajd, rasa, duende, and that thang occur when the Art is brought to life by the artist and the audience.

Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca said of duende:

The duende is a power and not an act, it is a struggle and not thinking. I have heard an old master guitarist say: ‘The duende is not in the throat; the elf climbs inside from the bottom of his feet. “That is to say, it is not a matter of faculty, but of true living style; that is, of blood; that is to say, of ancient culture, of creation in act.

In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says:

Rasa is a fusion of word and meaning,
that bathes the minds of readers,
with savor of bliss.
It is the truth of poetry,
shining without cessation.
Clear to the heart,
it is yet beyond the words.

This is my second to last Substack essay of the year (now, now; don’t weep) so I wanted it to be one that gives closure to all of the ideas put forth in 2025. At the heart of this publication is the desire to find within life, and all its feeling, some kind of majestic or nurturing meaning. If you read this publication you are likely a bit of a dreamer yourself. If what I have written here has taken you to any place in your imagination that you thought not possible then we have achieved some manner of whatever we want to call it — duende, rasa, wajd, or that thang — and my job here is done.

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It is with great hesitation that I write about patriotism. Here I am, a thirty-one-year-old woman with the capacity to carry only a Labrador, attempting to lift an entire elephant. But it’s election night in America and the elephant in the room is calling my name. I must lift it. Or at least lift its trunk.

In my life thus far I have had little exposure to true patriots, but patriotism is an inescapable aspect of American life. I have voted, volunteered for political campaigns, pledged allegiance to the flag, and stood for and sung the national anthem. But am I an American patriot? Who is? Is the meaning of patriotism static?

This evening - of all evenings - is a night of patriotism even if, for many, it feels like the night of rebellion. Is the new American patriot the man who New York City has elected as Mayor? The man now at the center of a city at the center of a country that remains the center of the world.

Far away on the West Coast, where I live, the patriotic fervor of Silicon Valley vibrates at a different frequency than Mr. Mamdani. There is, as of late, a performative strain of patriotism spearheaded by Paypal Mafia members and technology leaders like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Technology branding has pivoted from the pro-democratic patriotism of the 2010s to an era of “defense” technology or “American dynamism” which is another way of saying technology for war. It is the patriotism of capitalists that seeks to invent wars in order to sell weapons.

The hawk is the patriot and a dove is, well, a communist most likely. It’s us-versus-them, with them being China. And maybe “them” is Mr. Mamdani as well.

But I am not so cynical, dear reader. I still believe that the true American patriot is the pacifist and peace-lover. The citizen who criticizes her country because she loves it, as James Baldwin once said. They are those who want to build the infrastructure for an educated, healthy, and egalitarian society. Democracy-mongers, if you will.

The hawkish apparatus in the Valley is sinister but as I shake off both the heebie-jeebies and the pageantry of power-grubbing technologists, I wonder, can I pledge allegiance to the flag if the flag stands for the people?

The Power of Storytelling

The story we have all been watching unfold in New York is literary. It is clever, complex, imaginative, courageous, and deeply human. Unlike literature, it is also storytelling with great immediate value. The Mamdani story has proven, to me at least, that democracy is alive and well. Decisions about who leads us are not made in smoky backrooms, but in the thirteen miles one might walk from the southern end of Manhattan to the northern tip. It is storytelling that might actually, hopefully, change the lives of people without the time to read. Tonight and in the days to come we celebrate a modern American story, but it is also connected to American stories we have been telling for a long, long time.

Depending on who you ask, the history of the United States is either a tale of net heroism or net wrongdoing. I wonder if we have forgotten that within heroism there are heroes, anti-heroes, and tragic heroes. This is why Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, published in 2019, is so fantastic and necessary. It exploded ideas discussed in labyrinthian leftists spaces into public consciousness and gave birth to a new American story. One in which White protagonists are mostly anti-heroes and Black protagonists are a mix of heroes and tragic heroes.

The 1619 Project is one example of how the American imagination changes with storytelling. It was slightly preceded and followed by other wildly popular creative efforts such as Ta-Nahesi Coates’ “Black Panther” and “Captain America” comic series and award-winning novels like “The Trees” by Percival Everett.

Today we are in a cultural moment where the story itself is picked apart. The left has been accused of taking historical revision “too far” and telling stories which alienate the “Americans who built this country”, but one need not read further than “People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn to know that leftist ideology is founded on the idea that most of us contributed to building the country, regardless of race. It was a select powerful few who architected division among us, benefited from racialized capitalism, and abandoned the collective.

Debates around Americanness came to a head in 2024 when we re-elected the man who started the birther movement, a conspiracy-theory-fueled campaign predicated on President Obama’s unAmericanness. We, as a country, very intentionally did not elect the bi-racial daughter of immigrants.

In her long-form essay “The Idea of America” Hannah-Jones writes about her father who always flew the American flag outside their house because he felt that Black Americans have every right to claim the prosperity and success of the American project.

“He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible… Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world… Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom… It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

Perfecters of Democracy

When Mr. Mamdani proudly speaks in Arabic or puffs his chest out and tells Muslim-Americans that they are not only welcome in New York City, they are part of it, I see someone trying to perfect democracy, not undermine it. When he speaks openly about the dehumanization of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza, I see someone trying to perfect democracy, not undermine it. President Biden might have run the first leg of a relay in which we “fight for the soul of the nation”, but the leader I see grabbing the baton is not the anointed Vice President Harris or any other establishment Democrat. Hopefully Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Chakrabarti complete their handoff.

I asked at the start of this essay a fundamental question. To what do I pledge allegiance? In our Declaration of Independence it is written that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and ‘‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. The operating word here being all. All Americans, regardless of race, gender, religion, class, or ability, deserve ‘‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. If that to you is a radical idea then Mayor Mamdani, and all of us who throw our support behind his movement, might be radical patriots ourselves.

the Indian context

I want to fly away from America for a minute and look at patriotism in India, a beast I do not pretend to understand but a perspective I am continually learning about.

Arundhati Roy, a beautiful writer and someone I trust on the subject, has been a vocal critic of Hindu Nationalism and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for decades and it was her recently published memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me” that made me feel gravely serious about the insanity of patriotism. She writes about the 2002 Gujarat riots, cited by many scholars as a pogrom where Muslims, including Muslim political leaders like Ehsan Jafri, were hacked to death and burned. I have known about the 2002 Gujarat Riots ever since Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. He was Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 and many accused him of abandoning his Muslim constituents and, in fact, tacitly encouraging the riots. Reading Roy’s reporting on the riots was difficult. It was difficult because I didn’t want to believe that such violence could happen in a place I love so much and in the name of Hinduism.

Since 2012 I have been volunteering at a Hindu ashram for orphans in Udupi - my mother’s hometown in South India - and our greeting at the ashram is “Jai Sri Ram” and when we depart we say “Ram Ram”. How could someone cut off the arms and legs of a living, breathing human being while saying “Jai Sri Ram”? A greeting of peace that I have said to small, abandoned children. How can that be, my brain screams in terror.

I know the term “patriot” can be the armor for foot soldiers of hate so it is not without great hesitation that I use the term “patriot” to describe myself. Well actually forget about me, but think of the public high school teacher, a nurse who comforts sick pregnant women, or a local government bureaucrat who ensures people get their Snap benefits somehow, someway; I want the word “patriot” to apply to them. Certain words contain volumes of stories. In a time where we fight ethno-nationalism in defense of civic nationalism, “patriot” contains an entire ocean.

In Conclusion

“The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded,” said Leo Tolstoy, an artist living in tsarist autocratic Russia and author of “War and Peace”.

As the parable goes, various blind men feel different parts of an elephant and identify it not as one truth but as many different possibilities. Between the three of us we may conclude, exuberantly, that we know it to be a snake, a spear, or a wall. We mistake the small part we see for the entire creature, but the wisest among us knows deep down, uncomfortably so, that even though we are so sure of what we are touching, it is still quite possible that we are blind.

San Francisco

The Bay Area is the kind of place that few should dare to write about because it is not so vast, mysterious, or ancient that it is unknowable, like a Mexico City. It is also not so small that its essence can be found in a single album, like Compton in good kid, m.A.A.d city. To write from a Bay Area perspective and to write about the Bay Area is to write in many divergent directions at once — like a compass that cannot find north.

Modernity in the Bay Area is ripe with battles over who belongs where, who can live where, and who is safe where. It’s a hodgepodge of who’s and where’s and the borders between them spark debate, indifference, tension, disdain, fear, loathing, curiosity, solidarity, and amusement.

As a resident of thirteen years I am able to write quite elaborately about the concentration of power and privilege here while clashing those ideas against the realities of human suffering and alienation that many must endure, for there cannot be gross wealth without gross poverty. With my left hand I can write about how data and design will build the future and on my right side I look out the window and see all the people who cannot partake in it.

The magic of this place is, on any given day, I can forgo futurism and look to an iconic past. I can hear and capture the echoes of the Black Panther Party, the hippies, and the technologists, not to mention the confluence of lessons and stories from labor, anti-war, and racial justice movements. Hell, even Mark Twain came to San Francisco once. There is history here, undoubtedly, and the mythology writes itself. Of course, this is what I see when I look at the Bay Area. What do you see, dear reader?

To write from a modern San Francisco perspective is to write about the arts and communities of color. From the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music in the far north of the Bay, to folk bands and dragon parades in Chinatown, to institutions like SomArts that host the works of Pinoy, Chicano, Black, and Indigenous artists, to the Malonga Arts Collective in Oakland, to all the arts programming happening in the heart of South Bay South Asian communities — to live in the Bay Area is to live amid the hum of exuberant artistic expression.

Lastly, on a personal level, the Bay Area is two sides of a coin. The side facing up is reckless youth, brazen adventure, sleepless nights, whirlwind romance, and co-dependent community. It is becoming an aunt to not one but three babies. It is finding my way back home through a boy I met in Lafayette Square Park.

The other side of the coin is the natural beauty of the land. Long trail runs in Marin, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, running through marshlands in South Bay or hiking the Stanford dish, summiting Mount Diablo via road bike, swimming and skiing in Lake Tahoe, or a humble walk through Golden Gate Park. There was life inside the four walls of Edwardian homes but also outside amid trees, mountains, and lakes.

I count myself as quite lucky to live in San Francisco. I aspire to create art worthy of this place. Some artists like to paint landscapes. Others take photographs. Architects shape the terrain of a place, musicians turn its sounds into melody, and directors find its visual stories. The writer is the one who delves, obsessively, into a singular sentence like, “To write from a Bay Area perspective and to write about the Bay Area is to write in many divergent directions at once — like a compass that cannot find north.”

Oregon

Alongside San Francisco you will see, in my bio, that I claim to “write from Oregon”. I visit my home state several times a year and do indeed write from this location, but what is the Oregonian perspective exactly?

Oregon is a lesser known part of the United States so, separate from its inherent qualities, it is partially defined by its invisibility within the country. There are millions of Americans who have no clue about Oregon. This gives us a sense of independence from the other states. My other home state, California, is in constant conversation with its east coast rival, New York, and southern rival, Texas. With no nemesis, projections, or the need to prove anything to anyone, Oregon is free to define itself on its own terms. What we do in Oregon influences no one. We are free to be weird. Or rustic. Or agrarian. Or blue collar. Or feminist punk. Or Indian-American. Or tree-huggers. Or geeks. Or athletes. Or undefined.

When one travels abroad it would be a waste of breath to let your inquirer know that “you are from Oregon”. My family would always say “near California”. In other words, Oregon is not “on the map”. The map constitutes whatever Hollywood and globalization as exported as the cultural cachet of the United States and Oregon never made the cut. My guess is that it was too agrarian. How can a farmer planting filberts in the Willamette Valley compete with Audrey Hepburn in Manhattan?

Oregon is where Lewis and Clark ended their expedition across the United States. It was a sign that their journey had, finally and mercifully, come to an end. If one is not familiar with Lewis and Clark and the Oregon trail, then you surely must have heard of Nike? Indeed running culture, begat by the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman, and Phil Knight, is a vein that runs through the state’s forests, mountains, and valleys. Without running and hiking, the state’s natural world would remain unknown to its inhabitants. Without the natural world to explore, the state’s inhabitants would resemble any other group from any other random place.

A piece of Oregon that I do not yet know is the contemporary and historical stories of its Indigenous people. More on this at a later time.

So, what then does it mean to write from the Oregon perspective? It’s not necessarily that I want to write about nature, running, “keeping Portland weird”, or farming, although all these topics are fantastic terrain for creative inquiry. Rather it is that Oregon has sparked in me an interest in writing from the perimeter and with a degree of anonymity and humility. Oregon is, as I hope to remain, on the outskirts of mainstream society. It has not yet been, as I hope to remain, completely subsumed by the commercial imagination or the thirst for power. Its separation is what makes it a jewel.

I am also able to sharply contrast Oregon with a place like the Bay Area which remains a seat of power and a place of immense wealth. Powerful places are interesting for very different reasons from places that are not. Power is visible and large; if one was to write about California — as I do — then one must write about Silicon Valley or Hollywood. Both scream for attention. Without that presence, a writer has to go in-between the cracks of a place to find their subject matter. To write about Oregon, or from an Oregonian perspective, is to crawl into the small, intimate, and quiet to tease out a seed that can bloom. If the challenge of writing about California is like trying to capture an explosion on a single page, writing about Oregon is like trying to catch a moth with chopsticks. They demand very different skills, temperaments, and instincts.

Knowing a place is kind of like being in love. It is not a cliché. Love is a personal experience to each and every one of you. It might be the black birthmark above your beloved’s navel or the exact angle at which his feet splay when he is standing still.

Knowing a place is like knowing what it means to be of a particular identity. For me, sometimes being Indian is as tiny and personal as driving home in the morning from a coffee shop while picking my teeth with my tongue and I find the tiniest fleck of garlic in my molars which, when I bite down, fills my mouth with a garlic aroma and I am reminded that I ate some garlic chutney pudi for breakfast.

You can read about a place and factually know what there is to know about it but, until you’ve lived there, you don’t know how the air smells. Or how sunlight passes through trees on an autumn afternoon.

South India

Oh South India, the place from which I am furthest removed but is closest to my heart. A place more vast and complex than the Bay Area but agrarian and strangely humble like Oregon.

I’ve written about this before but in case you were not aware, dear reader, my family is from the Western Ghats — a mountain range in the south western corner of India. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and wider extended family live in and around the region. We are at the same latitude as the Amazon so it is a biodiversity hotspot. Oh how lush and green is the land where my umbilical cord is buried. There is no place on earth that I consider more precious than a small town in the region known as Udupi. Growing up I would be in Udupi, Mysuru, Madikeri, and Putturu June through August without fail, and it was pure bliss.

So, what does it mean to write from South India. For one, it means writing in a particular tradition. Ours is a folk culture rooted in storytelling and oral tradition. So, whatever I write, I always read it out loud to ensure it has a rhythm. As if it were meant to be a poem all along. The South Indian literary tradition is owed to writers like R.K. Narayan, S.L. Bhyrappa, Arundhati Roy, Kumud Pawde, B.R. Ambedkar, Jayakanthan, Kalki Krishnamurthy, and Devaki Nilayamgode. I am far from an expert in South Indian literature but an eager student putting pen to paper.

Lastly is the North-South divide. Whatever you know of India may predominantly be the culture, history, landmarks, traditions, aesthetics, and food from the north. The southern region remains lesser known to the West and, I would argue, to much of the Indian diaspora. For example, you might have heard of the holiday “Diwali”. Well, in the South we say “Deepavali” and it is historically not a major holiday.

Perhaps you have attended a so-called “big Indian wedding”? Well, per South Indian tradition there is no Sangeet, Haldi, or Bharaat. We have adopted those customs for fun and, often, for the entertainment of Western and Indian guests.

You may know certain Indian male names such as Arjun, Harsh, and Vishal. But in the South those names have the letter “a” attached to the end. They are Arjuna, Harsha, and Vishala.

To write from South India is an excavation.

So, in conclusion

I hope you have stayed with me thus far, dear reader, as I find my way from one place to another. My footprints leave a trail to follow, but I promise this trail leads to somewhere.

At the heart of writing is a question about the act itself. Why do you write? What is worth writing about? Who are you, what do you have to say, and why does it matter?

In an age where many of us — but not all — are moving in between cities and there is less value placed on place, there is a high horse I have mounted with a smug grin. I have submerged in each place long enough to have given myself to it. Have you?

I have broken off pieces of my heart and scattered them around town. I feel a pang near the University of California San Francisco Mission Bay hospital where I laid eyes on my niece for the first time. My stomach writhes in nostalgia when I drive past the evergreen trees flanking my elementary school. My worries dissipate when I step into the hot humid air of Udupi. My happiness and my sorrow rises and falls with the trajectory of my beloved. If San Francisco suffers, I suffer. If climate change suffocates Udupi, I suffocate with it. And, someday, if that catastrophic earthquake rips Oregon apart, I too will come apart at the seams.

I write because I cannot not write. But also I write because I have tethered myself to these places and the people who live there, and with places and people come stories. I write to grapple with those stories in their totality. Be they stories of people who swim against the current or those sinking beneath the waves. I swim or sink with them.

There once was a sad Indian man.
He had no wife, friends, children, or siblings in a foreign land.
He lived all alone in a great big house.
His parents were nowhere to be found.
He prayed all morning for peace,
worked all night in lieu of sleep,
talked to anyone near him,
but not even God listened.

You bled through hardship,
and a provincial world that gave you no recognition.
I thought at least you would understand
my daredevil ambition.
We surpassed tradition
as our dreams came to fruition.
Waiting for no authorization
was our main transgression.
We are not so different, he and she —
so why then do you not bow before me?

The sad Indian man was quite wealthy,
money earned through business.
He might have cut some corners,
but it was never personal — just business.
His wife, friends, children, and siblings had fled;
only his parents’ absence was excused because they were dead.
Sometimes he wondered what his younger version would be doing, given more optionality —
maybe he would not be scrambling steep slopes constantly.
Whatever the case,
the sad, oldish Indian man
needed me,
on bended knee,
to feel less lonely.

The young, brash woman bided her time
through decades of wracked nerves.
They argued openly, then not at all,
once his back began to curve.
She had known him since she was small,
watched him build through his own insistence;
now she watches his empire fall,
as she writes her institution into existence.

You bled through hardship,
a provincial world that gave you no recognition.
I thought at least you would understand
my daredevil ambition.
We surpassed tradition
as our dreams came to fruition.
Waiting for no authorization
was our main transgression.
We are not so different, she and he —
so why then do you not bow before me?

This grand statement did not come from an everyday person, a columnist, an artist, or any other type of relatively normal person (however you might define normal). It came from one of the most powerful men in America, Vice President J.D. Vance. A man in the President’s ear about domestic and foreign matters. In other words, a man with the means to fulfill his promises. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, I say don’t underestimate this man either.

In his speech at the Claremont Institute, V.P. Vance delivered a smart narrative that accomplished what he does best — turn a haunted house into a rustic home. He couches his ideology in cutesy anecdotes about his little family life lest he spook anyone with sentences like, “There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal, or at least socially parasitic, that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left.”

It seems we have wandered too far from the White, Christian, and male stronghold we once were. To underline and circle this point in red they had Charlie Kirk —a major player in redefining the American cultural landscape— as Master of Ceremonies for the event.

Obviously Mr. Vance’s understanding of America is not my own. Given the active presence of Black people, Indigenous people, and the ever-changing White identity that slowly incorporated the Italians, the Irish, and the Jewish, was the White, male Christian ever the sole being in this land or the sole being to build the nation? Regardless, I found Vance’s speech interesting because it raises a question that we all get to ask —who defines the American? Is it we the people or is it the so-called statesmen?

Americanness is culture and, to an extent, culture cannot be controlled or manufactured along one cohesive vision. Of course, powerful figures can use state power to enforce certain policies, such as mass deportation or defunding DEI programs in the public and private sector, but also culture is amorphous, grassroots, and always changing. Culture is change. Culture is changed from the top-down and bottom-up (which reminds me — I recently listened to this intriguing pod about community-based efforts to preserve and grow the Lakota language).

Walled institutions, corporations, and governments respond to the tone of the people, but the people don’t exclusively set the tone. Those on the inside respond to those on the outside, but also vice versa. So, how will we, the people, respond to the modern conservative agenda?

For example, we sit in the milieu of a political moment that is rejecting multiculturalism, but how then are we, the children of multiculturalism, supposed to live? How are we supposed to know ourselves and build our multicultural futures? You see, I am multiculturalism. I am bi-lingual, proudly so, and interested in gaining more fluency in more languages. Languages and cultures are paradigms and being able to switch between them is a wonderful kind of multidimensional travel. I also call the Bay Area and California home. This place is a thriving economic, technological, and multicultural powerhouse — how can America’s future exist without us?

Mr. Vance, it seems, feels that adherence to sameness —through those who can trace ancestry back several generations— is the solution:

“And that’s why President Trump’s immigration policies are, I believe, the most important part of the successful first six months in the Oval Office. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It’s hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.”

But in the same breath he says, “My lovely wife is the daughter of immigrants to this country, and I am certainly better off, and I believe our whole country is better off for it. But we should expect everyone in our country, whether their ancestors were here before the Revolutionary War, or whether they arrived on our shores just a few short months ago, to feel a sense of gratitude. And we should be skeptical of anyone who lacks it, especially if they purport to lead this great country.”

Who defines gratitude Mr. Vance? You?

when I (briefly) rejected my own mother

There are some moments that stay with you forever. For me it was a Tuesday in Oregon at 3pm. My mom was driving my best friend and I, sophomores at the time, home from school. The best friend was then, and is still now, a Brainiac. She was old enough and smart enough to know better, and so was I, and yet we didn’t. On the U.S. 26 highway the Brainiac had the brilliant idea that I should ask my mom to say certain sentences out loud.

Have her say, would you like a milkshake?

I remember where in the red Toyota Camry I sat. I was behind my mom so I could see her face in the rearview mirror. She was focusing on driving and luckily couldn’t see mine.

Amma, can you say “would you like a milkshake?”

She obliged without missing a beat and the Brainiac —the one girl who I spent every day with— squealed in delight. I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat but managed to grimace at my friend. I knew neither my mother nor her accent were laughable. I knew that the way she spoke English was an uninteresting fact. It was simply the way she spoke. Nothing funny about it. I knew it was the same English that had asked Mrs. Rabe, the third grade advanced math teacher, to give me a second chance to prove myself. The same English which signed me up for swimming lessons, dance classes, Girl Scouts, tennis lessons, science bowl, and music classes. The same English which had arrived on a visa and survived long enough for a green card and eventually citizenship. Then I heard that same English through the ears of my best friend, as if it were a mistake that needed covering up. I cursed my own ability to not only see, but hear from different perspectives. Empathy is not always a boon, clearly.

My mom didn’t really care then and doesn’t care now. Her English was too busy moving mountains to notice the malicious immaturity of an American teen. Well, I should say teens plural. It wasn’t my mother who felt any shame about who she was — it was I who felt that shame. I was young and weak. I think about that moment often to remind myself of my humble origins. I may be a proud Indian-American daughter today but I am also the prodigal son who lost faith and then returned home. It is an odd feeling, being ashamed of a difference that you can’t even detect.

A thread that I pulled from Vice President Vance’s speech and a conversation between Ezra Klein and conservative political theorist Yoram Hazony is that at the heart of modern conservative anxiety is a concern about cohesion. Too much diversity leads to a lack of cohesion because the various groups don’t feel a loyalty to one another or to the country. I don’t disagree with the desire for a harmonious society, but I disagree that nationalism —or the pledging of allegiance to the state— is the answer. I am more invigorated by the idea of strong, citizen-led local communities and political leaders with global-minded attitudes.

In the moment where the Brainiac insulted my mom and me, at just fifteen years old I knew how to keep the peace. Don’t confront the Brainiac, don’t explain to her why her requests are rude or how they make you feel. Be a rose, not a thorn. Somewhere between 2008 and 2016, however, the culture shifted and I submerged into my thorny nature. I learned how to prick the Brainiac. I told her exactly how she made me feel and then some —I didn’t care to mince my words one bit. I grew into an entangled mesh of a plant who protected herself and her mom but in the process forgot that the Brainiac was her friend. That we attended school together and solved math problems side-by-side. I forgot that we sat at the same lunch table and shared snacks and jokes. My anger was stronger than our friendship, but nowadays my love is stronger than my pride.

So, years later, I have found myself at the doorstep of the magical s-word; multiculturalism demands solidarity otherwise it does indeed lead to fracture. I have lived that fracture. I have also lived to see its repair.

you don’t belong and no, you don’t belong

I grew up in a Hindu community in Oregon. We worshipped and celebrated all our festivals without worry. I spoke Havyaka at home, learned Indian classical music and dance, and we shopped at the local Indian grocery store. I also was a Girl Scout, attended a Catholic school, and volunteered in the broader Portland community. Was I any less American than Adam who played Little League, cheered for the Steelers because he moved to Oregon from Pittsburgh, attended Church on Sundays, and ate Reese’s Puffs cereal for breakfast? And even if you say that I am less American, which honestly says a bit more about you than it does about me, does it really matter? I am a different kind of American than Adam. And so what now?

Mr. Vance, and those of his ilk, make it seem like we must choose between little Aishwarya and little Adam when it has already been proven to us that this is a false dichotomy.

“...if you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? … If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even thought those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

Like the majestic redwoods in California or the labyrinthian Everglades of Florida, America might be better represented in a set of dizzying ideals, such as those laid out in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. This is not to say that ancestry is irrelevant. I respect people’s ancestry, be that European settler (or “pioneer”) ancestry, African chattel slave ancestry, or Native American ancestry. I feel a deep reverence for my own —despite some family members who find it silly— so who am I to deny others a claim to theirs? I wonder if we might bring one another into the fold across the vast historical differences that separate us before the so-called statesmen pick us off, one-by-one.

lost in translation

Anthony Bourdain visited a restaurant in Chinatown near our house and declared it excellent. On a whim my husband and I visited the joint, but it was too busy so we went next door. Just as tasty and half the price. I indicated to the elderly Chinese waitress that I wanted green beans. It was clear to me that she didn’t really understand what I had said so I pointed at a picture of green beans to underscore my order. I excitedly awaited my green dish and she brought me a plate of spicy, cold, tangy noodles. I ate them, obediently.

The Über driver who picked us up from SFO had a severe limp. He also didn’t speak a lick of English. Spanish? he asked. No, lo siento we replied, both students of middle school French. He had recently arrived from Venezuela, was all we could gather. As we neared our house we struggled to let him know where to drop us. Not all the way at the top of the hill. Not full way up. No up. Here, here. Gracias! He more or less understood but, with heavy bags and a long travel day behind us, we silently wished he had dropped us exactly where we wanted.

At the bottom of our hill is a lovely, blue-walled Italian bakery run by Hispanic staff. One fine afternoon I had wanted a single shot cappuccino (a double is too much for my fragile nervous system). I knew by her facial expression that my request for one shot, not two, was not fully processed. I drank whatever she gave me, no questions asked.

The modern conservative narrative is that these minor inconveniences are indicative of a larger problem and a dangerous future. These immigrants are in an English-speaking country and, therefore, should learn English. Okay, but what if they learn English but their accent remains thick? What if they learn English and perfect their accent but their cooking smells foreign? What if they learn English, perfect their accent, and abandon their cuisine, but their religious beliefs differ from Christianity? What if they become exactly like you, then will you accept them?

I say all this to illustrate that there is no universal line at which an immigrant becomes American beyond their acceptance of the identify itself. My cousin who immigrated from India and has lived here for twenty years feels American. His wife still feels Indian. My sister who immigrated here when she was two years old doesn’t feel American except when she travels. My mother, who has been here almost forty years, feels “half-American” and “half-Indian”. Those who have never left America —so roughly 25-40% of the country— might never contend with their national identity at all except during the Olympics or presidential election season. They are, instead, proud (or sheepish) Oregonians, San Franciscans, and Seattleites. Some Americans don’t pledge allegiance to any place but only to particular communities. Other pledge allegiance to no one at all.

We are indeed messy and varied, but that is what a free society is. Disturbingly and engrossingly messy and varied.