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What Train Dreams Teaches Us About Loss, Silence, and People Who Carry Them

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Some films announce themselves loudly, and then some films arrive like weather—slow, inevitable, and impossible to ignore once they have passed through you. Train Dreams belongs to the latter. It does not ask to be watched so much as it asks to be sat with. What moved me most about the film was not its narrative arc, but its emotional restraint. Loss in Train Dreams does not arrive with dramatic music or explanatory dialogue. It arrives as an absence. As quiet. As a man continuing his work long after there is no one left to witness it. The film understands something rare: that masculinity, especially of a certain historical moment, is often built not around expression, but around endurance. And yet, within that endurance, it reveals something softer, more vulnerable than we are used to seeing. Masculinity Without Language The men in Train Dreams are not men of confession. They do not articulate grief. They absorb it. Their bodies become storage units for loss. The protagonis...
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What Daughters Carry

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By Mahak Sharma As India begins, slowly and unevenly, to talk about the invisible labour of care, as young women name burnout not as a phase but as a way of life, and as digital surveillance quietly settles into our most intimate spaces, a familiar question returns with new urgency: who is still carrying the weight of everything that cannot be measured? There are things daughters carry that never enter a suitcase. They carry them in the spine, in the way their shoulders lift at raised voices, in the reflex to apologise before they even know what they’re apologising for. They carry inherited silences, habits they never consciously chose, and fears that feel older than their own age. Some of what they carry is love. Some of it is fear. Some of it is a legacy they never consented to inherit. Today, daughters also carry phones that never sleep. Live locations. Emergency alerts. Work notifications at midnight. The pressure to be visible, productive, emotionally aware, endlessly resilient. T...
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Thinking Rooms: On Creativity, Care, and the Quiet Work of Home

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I’ve often wondered where thinking truly happens. Not the grand kind—the one that fills boardrooms and seminar halls—but the quieter kind that unfolds between stirring a pot of dal and folding the laundry. For quite a time, I was of the opinion that solitude alone can bring pondering deep enough to go to the roots of the problem. A table. A door to shut. A person who is never distracted. Virginia Woolf once remarked that if a woman wants to write novels, she must have money and a room of her own. I interpreted that sentence as a wishful, even desperate, demand for space that most of us have in common and still is hard to get. However, as the years went by, it became clear to me that the feminine creativity, in particular, was not so much waiting for ideal conditions but rather struggling to be born in bits—often between errands and during brief pauses, in places that were taken rather than given. Home, the place often regarded as unremarkable, is where the constant flow of new ideas co...
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The Unmeasured Self

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I used to think life was about balance: work and rest, ambition and relationships, giving and receiving. I tried so hard to keep everything in perfect measure, like some invisible scale I could never quite get right. And yet, the more I tried, the more I realized: balance, at least the kind we imagine, is a myth. Life is messy. Some days demand everything from work, leaving no space for rest. Other days, family, friends, or even our own thoughts insist on attention. Trying to divide ourselves evenly across all these parts feels less like harmony and more like a performance — a performance I used to feel I had to nail perfectly. Balance Feels Different for Everyone And it’s not just me. Men, too, carry pressures — to succeed professionally, be emotionally present, and show strength without shutting down. Women often juggle careers, relationships, care work, and the quiet expectation to be endlessly accommodating. I’ve noticed that, no matter who you are, the myth of balance can make ...
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Lost in Translation, Found in Pause

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 The Unfamiliar Country of Stillness For the first time in four years, I pressed pause. Not a holiday, not an escape, but a deliberate month of stillness — time to read, to sit quietly with myself, to relearn the rhythms of being rather than doing. The act felt both radical and unfamiliar. I had been so used to moving without interruption that stillness seemed like a foreign country, one whose language I did not yet speak. The First Pause It was in this silence that I returned to books, not as tools for research or productivity but as companions. Khalil Gibran’s words felt like rediscovered echoes: “Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” For years, I had read this as poetry. In the pause, I read it as instruction. There was something almost startling about remembering that life, at its core, is not about performance or efficiency, but about presence. To walk barefoot on the earth, to let the wind touch you: these a...
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Longing: To Be Free, To Be Loved, To Be Seen, To Be Understood, For Motherhood & To Belong By Tanvi Pathak

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Longing is no new word in society. It has existed for ages and yugas - in Urmila as she waited for her husband to return from exile with his older brother; in Pandavas to be accepted as rightful heirs of Hastinapur; in Ahalya to be forgiven for an adultery of which she was the victim; in Mirabai to get a glimpse of her beloved, to whom she betrothed herself as a child bride while everyone thought it was just a phase; in bhaktas who have been penancing for don’t know how many years just to get a glimpse of their God. Longing is also not an obsolete emotion. It is still there today - in the eldest child longing from freedom responsibilities they never asked for; in a child who wants to tell their parents that they were molested by the bad uncle in the family without any judgement; in a woman who longs for emotional attachment of any form, even it comes with more pain; in a man who wants to be free from debts and lead a peaceful life; in a mentally exhausted human who has seen it all an...
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Does AI Actually Offer You The Right Advice: Observations From A Tragedy And The Overlooked Wisdom Of Tawaifs

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The Promise And Risk Of AI Advice  AI is penetrating our lives in many forms, and many are starting to request advice for their careers, health, relationships and even their emotional struggles and mental health. Many feel they can confide in AI, as they see it as a modern-day friend and confidante, always there, without judgement.  As we ponder this further, a recent tragedy, makes us stop and consider, is AI giving the "right" advice, especially when there are lives at stake?  A Tragic Case That Arouses Limitations Recently, sixteen year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after lengthy discussions with ChatGPT. His family is suing OpenAI, on the premise that the chatbot did not prevent him from doing so, and as troubling as that is, allegedly it also guided him on how to self-harm with a step-by-step guide, and even assisted him with writing a suicide note. The lawsuit has been filed against Open AI, and this case raises concerns about how fragile the claimed "safety syste...
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