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The Women Who Knew How to Read a Room

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There was a time when a woman’s education could be measured by how well she read a room. The tawaif knew this language intimately. To think of her only through the mujra is to miss the many worlds she was expected to inhabit. In the mehfils of North India, a tawaif was trained in music, poetry, conversation and etiquette. She was expected to know not only how to perform, but how to hold a room, to understand its mood, its silences, its hierarchies, and the people who moved through it. She had to know when a ghazal would say more than conversation could. When a glance was enough. When silence was safer, or more eloquent. When to draw someone closer and when to leave something unsaid. She was, in many ways, a reader of people. And perhaps that is what makes the tawaif such an interesting figure when we think about women and visibility. We often think of performance as something artificial, something that hides the “real” person underneath. But for the tawaif, performance was also a form ...
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Thoughts.

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  Koi umeed bar nahin aati, Koi soorat nazar nahin aati “Aa gayi, beta?” I have been thinking a lot about these three words lately. “Aa gayi, beta?” My mother used to ask me this when I came home. Back then, I never thought much about it. It was such an ordinary question, woven into the routine of returning home. I would come back tired from work, and there she would be—simply noticing that I had arrived. Now, after losing her, I understand that perhaps love often lives in the smallest sentences. We talk about grief as if it belongs to the big moments—the anniversaries, birthdays, photographs, and things left behind. But grief, at least for me, has lived more stubbornly in the ordinary. In the things I never knew I would miss. Coming home, for instance. I still come back to the same house. The same doors open. The same rooms wait. But something fundamental has changed. I no longer know if I am returning home in the way I once did. Because home was never just a place. It was also ...
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The Interview Question That Refuses to Retire

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Tradition, intellect, and modern ambition A job interview, at least in theory, is a measured conversation about competence. It is meant to assess skill, clarity of thought, and the promise of what one might contribute. Yet, for many women in India, it still carries a familiar detour, one that slips, almost casually, into the personal. “Are you married?” “Do you plan to have children?” “How will you manage work and home?” These are not always asked with hostility. Often, they arrive softened by politeness, framed as concern, or even curiosity. But their persistence reveals something deeper than intent: it reflects a way of thinking that continues to locate a woman’s professional identity within the boundaries of her personal life. To read this as a simple story of bias would be to miss its complexity. It is not merely about exclusion; it is about inheritance. We carry forward social assumptions long after we have outgrown the contexts that produced them. Education, while transformative,...
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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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