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Modern medicine rests on an assumption that with enough data (decades of clinical studies, millions of patient records, and now the immense pattern‑matching power of artificial intelligence), medicine can finally outsmart the body’s complexity.
Yet patients continue to cycle through specialists, accumulate diagnoses, and take ever‑more medications while their underlying health declines.
I think the reason is not a lack of enough data, but that both the academic data doctors are trained on, and the mass data that powers ‘proxy medical’ AI, operate with the same bias or incomplete mapping of the human body. As a result, they both have chances to lead to specific kinds of failures: misdiagnosis, treatments that make things worse, unsustainable costs, and the exhaustion of patients who are told by a second or third doctor that the first two were wrong.
The following is my view as a general patient, and as someone who has observed many other patients experiencing a specific case of cascading failures in medical treatments.
1. Diagnostic Knowledge, Data & Tests
The knowledge that guides medicine comes from two sources in the modern times.
The first data source is the body of knowledge doctors acquire in training and practice: textbooks, clinical trials, peer‑reviewed literature, and the accumulated experience of specialists. This data is filtered through a fragmented view of the body. Cardiology knows the heart; endocrinology knows hormones; gastroenterology knows the gut. The connections between these systems are treated as secondary, often discovered only when a patient’s experience contradicts the textbook.
The second is the mass data used to train artificial intelligence: electronic health records, billing codes, lab results, and millions of de‑identified patient journeys. AI learns to replicate the patterns it finds in this data, including the very fragmentation and errors that exist in routine practice. If most doctors treat a certain set of symptoms with a particular drug, the AI will recommend that drug. If the system routinely mislabels a medication side effect as a new disease, the AI will learn to do the same.
In both cases, the data reflects only what medicine measures, not what it misses. A doctor’s differential diagnosis is shaped by the specific specialties they were trained in. An AI’s recommendation is shaped by the narrow fields in the electronic record like labs, vitals, or prescription history, while the patient’s lived experience, the sequence of events, and the subtle ways one treatment altered the body’s response to the next are either missing or reduced to disconnected codes.
Inconclusive Test Results: Then a known and documented discordance is that medical tests evaluate readings within “normal range”, which makes the tests show Normal while body doesn’t function normally.
Standard reference ranges are population averages. “Normal” means within the range of the general population, not optimal for someone’s specific baseline before damage, and not accounting for:
– Any pre-medication baseline which is unknown because it was never tested
– Functional thresholds varying individually, e.g., some people need TSH at 1 to function, others at 3, but both “normal” on paper
– Some tests e.g., prolactin is frequently not included in standard hormone panels unless specifically requested
– Neural situations e.g., dopamine pathway disruption doesn’t have a direct test
– Metabolic set-point changes don’t appear as abnormal insulin on a fasting test if the issue is receptor sensitivity
This often puts patients in situations where:
– Doctors say tests are normal, therefore nothing is wrong
– But body clearly demonstrates something is wrong
– Standard testing cannot see the actual problem or the root cause
– Changing treatments didn’t help with visible symptoms or added more
2. Cascade: When the Treatment Becomes the Problem
One of these failure patterns is the cascade that begins with a reasonable intervention and ends with a patient far sicker than when they started, yet still under the care of a system that insists on adding more treatments.
Example:
· Linear Assumption: Drug A treats Symptom B.
· Non-Linear Reality: Drug A alters the overall state of the body, making its response to all future inputs (food, stress, other medications) fundamentally different from the population average.
Consider a few examples of this failure pattern:
· A misdiagnosed root cause: A patient presents with fatigue, weight gain, and brain fog. The first primary care doctor diagnoses depression and prescribes tests. When the fatigue worsens, a psychiatrist adds a stimulant. When anxiety develops, a second psychiatrist adds sedatives. Two years later, a different physician runs a comprehensive thyroid panel and discovers thyroiditis. The original cause was autoimmune hypothyroidism, but by then the patient is dependent on three psychotropic medications, each with its own metabolic and neurological side effects. The system treated the downstream symptoms while the root cause went unidentified.
· A specialist cascade: A man with mild psoriasis sees a dermatologist who prescribes a biologic. The biologic works well for the skin but, months later, the patient develops recurrent sinus infections and a persistent cough. He is referred to an allergist, who diagnoses new‑onset asthma and prescribes inhaled steroids and a rescue inhaler. When the patient gains thirty pounds and his blood sugar rises, he is sent to an endocrinologist, who diagnoses type 2 diabetes and starts metformin. No one connects the cascade back to the biologic, and the patient now carries three chronic disease labels that did not exist two years prior.
· Psychiatric: A patient is prescribed changing antipsychotics for what looks like symptoms of depression or mood instability. The medicine set affects thyroid function or raises prolactin levels, leading to hormonal dysfunction and significant weight gain. The system then treats the “new” weight with metabolic drugs & the “new” hormonal issues with hormone control, never resolving the neurotransmitter damage from the original prescription. The patient visits a second doctor who now identifies that the antipsychotics were not necessary since the patient was autistic or ADHD, simply requiring different care.
· Conflicting expert opinions: A young man with chronic abdominal pain sees a gastroenterologist who performs a scope, finds nothing conclusive, and diagnoses irritable bowel syndrome. The prescribed medicines provide no relief. A second gastroenterologist suggests small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and prescribes antibiotics, which temporarily improve symptoms but leave him with worsened bloating and new food intolerances. A third doctor, a functional medicine practitioner, points to a history of antibiotic use and poor gut motility, recommending a low diet and prokinetic agents. By this point the patient has spent money, undergone three conflicting treatment protocols, and remains with the original condition.
Once the body has been loaded with conflicting chemicals and shifted into a defensive state, the data becomes useless because the new data points (blood markers, weight, hormone levels) are no longer signals of a simple “disease,” but rather markers of structural damage that the system is not designed to measure.
In each case, the interventions were rational given the fragmented data each doctor saw. But because doctors or AI often are unable to connect the dots across time and specialty, the treatments are accumulated, the side effects multiplied, and the patient’s overall trajectory worsened.
The cascade is a recursive failure.
The medical system’s structure tends to maintain its own assumptions. When a patient experiences a net-negative trajectory despite ongoing treatment, the fragmented system does not conclude that the model is broken. Instead, it classifies the patient as a “non-responder,” adds new diagnoses, or attributes the iatrogenic damage to a “new condition.”
The medical system and by extension the AI are both also biased to assume every patient has the average statistical neurological or body type, which makes outliers at a greater risk of treatments which harm more than help.
This creates a recursive loop, seen across multiple clinical scenarios.
3. The Cost and the Fatigue
These failures carry a heavy toll beyond health outcomes. The financial burden grows as multiple specialist medications are added but rarely removed, expensive diagnostic procedures that yield little actionable insight, and, for many, a slow erosion of personal stability as chronic illness takes hold.
The mental and emotional toll is equally profound. Patients learn to navigate a system where each new doctor starts from scratch, where their own detailed history is often dismissed as “too complicated,” and where they are implicitly expected to be grateful for interventions that leave them worse off. The experience of being told by a second doctor that the first doctor was mistaken, and by a third that both were wrong, creates a deep sense of uncertainty. Many patients begin to feel that the system is not designed to solve their problem but to manage their participation in it.
4. Why AI Cannot Break the Cycle
There is a widespread belief that artificial intelligence, trained on vast datasets, may overcome the limitations of human doctors. But AI learns from the very same fragmented, incomplete records that human practitioners rely on. It cannot see what was never documented.
Moreover, AI is trained to reproduce the most statistically common patterns in the data. If the dominant pattern is to treat elevated blood sugar with medicine A, the AI will recommend medicine A, even in cases where the patient’s problem originates from another cause, or if their body does not respond positively to this treatment. If the data shows that most patients with a given symptom cluster receive a certain psychiatric diagnosis, the AI will propagate that diagnostic bias, even when the symptom cluster has an organic origin.
AI does not solve the problem of fragmented care; it scales it. It offers the same narrow solutions at greater speed and with the added authority of algorithmic certainty, making it harder for patients to argue with a recommendation that is presented as statistically optimal.
5. The False Certainty
I believe the first step is acknowledging that the current data, both the knowledge base of medical education and the massive datasets used to train AI, has not yet “solved the human body” with 100% certainty.
It is a knowledge system that has partially mapped many mechanisms, has interventions that work probabilistically across populations, and operates on incomplete models. But the medical system has not solved the human body completely yet.
The confidence with which it presents itself, including the “consult a doctor” directive in every conversation, is not proportional to its actual resolution rate for complex or chronic or iatrogenic problems.
Where it does work:
Acute trauma, infection with identified pathogen, some surgical problems, some single-mechanism diseases. These are areas where the intervention-to-outcome link is clean and the model is accurate enough to be useful.
Where it has chances for cascading failures:
•Multi-system chronic conditions
•Iatrogenic damage (the system has no good framework for undoing what it caused)
•Conditions where the patient is the outlier from population averages
•Neuorologically different patients who are frequently misread, overmedicated, and whose symptom reports are then treated superficially or dismissed
Until the underlying framework changes, both doctors and AI will continue to offer the same kinds of fragmented, reactive care. They may treat the blood sugar without asking why it rose. They may manage the insomnia without investigating what destabilized sleep or identifying the neurological type of the patient.
They may add medications to treat the side effects of other medications, all while the patient accumulates new diagnoses, mounting bills, and the feeling that the medical system is not functioning to fix the root cause, but only to keep responding to its own uncertainty.
I remember when I finished the HBO series Chernobyl, the impact I felt was not just about the physical horror of the radiation, the human/wildlife suffering and the countless number of deaths. Though those were surely very deeply disturbing outcomes, there was an even more disturbing matter underneath: the why behind the true cause of this disaster.
What I found most fascinating was the depiction of the control room during the immediate aftermath. We see the operators, and especially their superior Dyatlov, completely sure that the matter must not be such a big deal. We see repeated messages exchanged between various people like, “You must be mistaken, Comrade.. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode.” Which continues to go on, even as they are literally staring at the evidence of the open core and the destroyed building.
At first, it would seem like the total refusal to believe in the reality of the explosion was some kind of overconfidence or stupidity. But the show makes it clear that this repeated denial wasn’t just confusion or arrogance, but rather a systemic procedural failure, where their training, their manuals, and the entire Soviet state insisted RBMK reactors were so stable that the explosion was literally ‘impossible’ in their operational model.
We see two opposite types of responses in the aftermath:
1. The Plant Managers/Dyatlov: Faced with a reality that shatters the social script they chose to believe in, their first priority is blame avoidance and ego preservation. Dyatlov’s ongoing bullying and ridicule despite the visible suffering of the plant operators (“you’re panicking, you’re wrong”) wasn’t about not knowing the truth; it was more like an attempt to re-assert dominance in the chaos.
2. Legasov: Initially, he too starts by repeating the same line which has now become an online meme: “RBMK reactor cores cannot explode”. But what’s different about him is that his core motive isn’t denial. He is driven by a need for truth and factual coherence, not blame avoidance. He must make the effort both towards damage control and towards personally reconstructing the entire cause-and-effect chain, forcing him to eventually conclude: “It wasn’t just an unfortunate human error – it was the system.”
The sequence of events show that the initial ignorance or disbelief of the engineers wasn’t an accident. It was manufactured, because the RBMK design flaw was already known, documented, and buried. Buried, because the USSR needed the operators not to know the flaw; because anyone knowing and attempting to fix it would mean admitting that Soviet engineering, the symbol of their ideological perfection, was fundamentally flawed. But this admission was a shame-event they could not afford.
The system then chose the immediate and easy solution: Let’s suppress the truth and protect the story of our perfection.
The suffering of the miners, firefighters, animals, wildlife and the environment that followed is the direct, physical consequence of the system prioritising its fictional stability over the harsh reality. The possibility of an explosion, the radiation, several deaths and environmental ruin was preferable to the system than admitting a mistake. The fate of Legasov, the truth-seeker, becomes the final warning when he demonstrates and reveals the flaw to prevent future disasters, and is immediately sentenced to institutional denial and his reputational/social death, by the very system he served. His final recordings and suicide is the price he paid for demanding accountability in an environment built on blame avoidance.
Chernobyl is a powerful narrative for anyone who has experienced the damage caused by a controlling, blame-avoiding authority that insists on its own false story. It’s a reminder that the real catastrophe isn’t the disaster itself, but the chain reaction of the system’s ego-defense that follows.
Back when I first watched Sherlock BBC, I loved Sherlock’s character and accepted the deductions as impressive. The episodes moved quickly, conclusions arrived with Sherlock’s total confidence, and the presentation created the feeling that.. reasoning had taken place.
But looking back at it now with some distance, I see how vastly different it was from my own way of understanding things i.e. building upwards from visible, verified details. I need to see each piece appear, understand where it came from, and how it connects to the next piece – only after that does a conclusion feel legitimate to me. When I reconsider Sherlock from that angle, I feel like many of the deductions could not actually be rebuilt from the information shown.
This series often presents conclusions first and explanations afterward. Often, key facts are introduced only at the moment of reveal. Objects, prior observations, off-screen interactions, or unnoticed behaviors are introduced retroactively, after the conclusion has already been reached, even though they were not available earlier. This creates the appearance of reasoning without providing the structure. This means that no matter how carefully one watched, the reasoning could not have been followed in real time.
Of course, I don’t want to solve the case faster than the detective (which ruins everything, mostly), but I do need to at least be able to trace how the answer was reached in a reproducible way. When that path cannot be reconstructed, the solution feels less like reasoning to me and more like… a declaration, backed by explanations and information not previously known.
The rapid assembly of facts, the visual overlays, and the declarative tone substitute momentum for method. Over time, one notices that the show rarely invites the viewer to test the process. The audience is positioned not as a participant in inference, but as a recipient of the final revelation.
Sherlock, compared to other crime stories, doesn’t always prove that the detective was extraordinarily intelligent; rather that, at times, his intelligence operated outside the same informational boundaries as the viewer. The conclusions were correct because the story said they were correct, not because the evidence inevitably led there step-by-step. That kind of breaks the internal rule the series appears to promise, at least for me.
In retrospect, I understand why the show felt exciting but also vaguely unsatisfying. It looked like deduction, sounded like deduction, and was certainly named deduction… yet it did not always seem to function as one.
Sherlock’s confidence is endearing and convincing, but I think I tend to mentally check-out when a series cares more about demonstrating the detective’s extraordinariness over solving puzzles in realistic ways.
There exists a peculiar category of employment advice which, when first received, appears almost ridiculous to most young minds and lingers, unresolved and unproven, awaiting the slow verdict of years.
I remember when I was once given such advice back in the early days of my career, back when I believed (as I still do), that compensation and contribution were meant to exist in fair proportion. My employer at that time, someone neither indulgent nor especially severe, remarked upon a habit he had observed among young employees in general: that they would perform only so much labour as was necessary for keeping their job, and only as much as they were being paid. So, their effort expanded or contracted in accordance with their remuneration, and when denied increments or advancement, they withheld their capacity.
But he had a different view. He suggested that when one finds oneself in a position where the organisation allows the young employee to engage with matters beyond their current role – then one should go ahead and take on those additional responsibilities, without immediate regard for whether the salary expands in proportion. That in this situation, one should consider that they are not being underpaid, but rather that they are being paid to learn more than their role allows.
However, he did not speak of permanence. He did not promote accepting unending undervaluation. He spoke instead of a period, measured in moths or even years, during which the disparity between contribution and compensation might be tolerated as a form of apprenticeship freely undertaken. The salary, he suggested, should be regarded as the price paid to remain present within the system long enough to observe its deeper workings.
At the time, this view resonated with me more than any other advice I had heard so far regarding early career stages and growth. And over the years, I routinely took on far more than my role strictly required.
I undertook responsibilities for which I was neither titled nor formally recognised. I concerned myself with decisions whose consequences extended beyond the narrow corridor of my assigned function.
It would be false to claim that these efforts, while rewarded at some points, were truly acknowledged in proportion to their actual extent and substance. But this did not matter because I was focused on completing every task that the projects required and spending extra hours on responsibilities of higher ranks than mine or even other departments.
And so it happened that wherever I worked, I did not depart from the place as the same person who had entered it, until the prescribed role itself seemed small to contain all that I had learned to do.
Over time, this led to developing a broader competence of comprehension. I began to perceive patterns where before I had seen only instructions. I understood not merely what was to be done, but why it was done, and what alternative forms it might take. I acquired, without formal grant, an integrated competence that did not depend upon any title to exist.
In this respect, that early approach proved correct. But correctness is rarely absolute.
For there exists another truth, less generously spoken of, which reveals itself over time as the reason why most people would never follow this advice. That there are too many oganisations which possess an inherent tendency to favour their own preservation. So, when an individual provides labour beyond the strict requirements of their compensation, the organisation adapts… not by correcting the workload imbalance, not by raising the compensation adequately – but by offloading every possible responsibility and making it the new base expectation.
Then, what begins as voluntary expansion becomes, over time, an obligation. The individual who once exceeded their role by initiative finds that initiative gradually reclassified as “just the baseline”. The absence of additional compensation, once tolerated as temporary, risks becoming permanent. The very competence one has cultivated becomes the justification for assigning further burdens with no corresponding role changes or increase in compensation.
There are too many organisations which start extracting a kind of Growth Tax from such individuals. Thus, this approach contains within it both a mechanism of growth and a mechanism of vulnerability to exploitation.
To undertake labour beyond compensation for acquiring skills is a deliberate investment. But like any investment, it must be governed by criteria for its conclusion. There must exist an internal threshold, a point at which any new understanding diminishes, and the uncompensated effort increases. Without such a threshold, the arrangement ceases to be educational and becomes merely exploitative.
One must therefore observe, with clear attention, the nature of one’s own progression. Are new domains still becoming accessible? Is one’s competence expanding into genuinely unfamiliar territory? Or has one’s expanded labour settled into routine maintenance of the organisation’s existing needs?
At the threshold point, departure becomes not an act of weakness, but an act of personal continuity. Because the acceptance of undercompensation is meant to be temporary, not indefinite. To remain indefinitely after personal transformation has already occurred is to… nullify its benefit.
Looking back, I do not regret having followed that early advice. It accelerated my development in ways that no rigidly defined role could have permitted. It granted me visibility into structures that would otherwise have remained concealed. It allowed me to become, in fact, what I had only nominally been before.
But the approach is not without its risks.
It demands from the individual, not only willingness to give more than is received, but also the discernment to recognise when that imbalance has ceased to serve its original purpose. It requires the courage not merely to endure inequity temporarily, but to refuse it permanently once its utility has been exhausted.
And maybe that’s the true meaning of being paid to learn.
It is a peculiar form of isolation, to live within a species yet claim no kinship with it. For a long time, I believed much like the idealistic Professor Charles Xavier that the minority’s gentle conduct might soften the hard edges of the majority’s heart. But one learns, eventually, that the dream of peaceful coexistence is not a failure of hope, but a failure to diagnose the fundamental drive of the species among whom we walk.
X-Men: First Class serves as a case study and a perfect illustration of the friction between two distinct modes of being. The drama unfolds upon a beach, the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis – where the mutants, having just averted a global catastrophe for the humans, are met not with gratitude… but with a unified strike of military fire. The US and the Soviets, who were moments ago mortal enemies, instantly merge their intent toward a single goal: the removal of the new, unknown variable. The scene demonstrates how the human species will always prioritise the destruction of an unknown ‘threat’ over integration, in fear of their known ‘human way of being’ becoming obsolete.
Charles Xavier believes wholeheartedly that when the mutants demonstrate their goodwill by stopping the nuclear war, they will overcome the defenses of the human beings. Until the moment of the missiles turning towards them, he still believes in trying to prove their worth to a jury that has already decided their existence is the crime.
But Erik, forged in the ultimate environment of human aggression, views the professor’s strategy not as grace, but as a slow form of suicide. He argues, with a cold and procedural correctness, that to “pass” as one of them, to mask one’s true nature for the comfort of the aggressor, is a violation of one’s own worth and existence.
When the missiles fly toward that beach, Erik stops, deflects, and returns them to the ships from where they came. Charles is horrified and reminds Erik that they have it in them to be the “better ones”. But Erik has made up his mind, because he finally treats the humans with the same transactional finality with which it has always treated the Other.
What Erik did was not unprovoked aggression, but self-defense against an unprovoked aggression against the mutants. To be the ‘bigger person’ against a collective decision to erase you is a suicide pact disguised as moral superiority.
This dynamic echoes a far older, more ancient fact – that the Homo sapiens were the evolved, superior successor to the other hominid species like Neanderthals. But I think a closer examination suggests that different truth could be equally plausible: that the Neanderthal was a more evolved, perhaps more peaceful species. Their remains show larger brains, different muscular structures, ability to survive in smaller groups, and the skills to make advanced tools. I wonder if they were displaced not by inferior evolution, but by the irrational aggression of the human species that cannot tolerate another peer. Maybe the Neanderthal was not selected against by genetics or naturally out-competed; maybe they were erased, facing a larger group whose need to be the Apex and the Only intelligent species manifests as a relentless drive to remove all difference.
The scientific community looks to the stars and asks, “Where is everyone?” This is the Fermi Paradox, and perhaps the “Great Filter” that prevents species from reaching the stars is not a physical barrier, but a psychological one: the Xenophobic Ego of the collective human species. Perhaps any species that prioritises harvesting, dominating, and destroying the Other inevitably destroys the very diversity it needs to survive, when it can only see another Kind of peer as a resource or a threat.
In sci-fi Alien films, the purpose of experimentation on the aliens is largely to find the biological cause of their difference for two goals: to create weapons to defeat them, and to integrate their new powers into the collective human species. For those of us who have experienced the other side, the scientists in Alien films poking and prodding the alien in the name of progress and security, is an analogy for the systemic erasure attempted every day: stigma campaigns, narrative hijacks, harvesting any outputs produced through that difference, but pathologising of such difference and attempts to medicate away an inconvenient existence. Some of us have learned the hard way that the professor’s path leads only to exhaustion and internal collapse, and still resulting in the same exclusion.
Erik’s view is that the only working strategy is a surgical one: which may be psychologically represented as zero engagement with their erasure attempts, personal independence, and the inversion of their own psychological weapons when necessary.
When a species requires all their members to be the ‘same’ and needs the permanent status of the apex predator, it cannot accept a different neighbour – it can only recognise a subject or an enemy. Therefore, separation is not a political goal; it is a biological human necessity. When Erik understood this, he did not seek to conquer; he sought to ensure that he would never again be at the mercy of those who view difference as a disease to be cured.
In that moment on the beach, he was not “becoming the same as the monsters he opposed”. When the only language that halts the monster is the monster’s own, then to refuse to speak it is not virtue but complicity in one’s own erasure. Erik had finally decided to turn to the most lethal form of self-defense, where those who refuse to see him as anything other than an enemy could never strike again.
The way Tang Lici’s life unfolds in the new Xianxia drama Whispers of Fate at first appears excessively cruel and almost arbitrary. He faces one tribulation after another with little pause for recovery, creating the impression that fate itself is against him.
When he loses Fang Zhou, who was his core emotional anchor and the reason he began to believe in humanity, Tang Lici is barely given time to grieve before the next rupture occurs. His best friend turns hostile and begins a long journey of unwarranted revenge, leaving Tang Lici to confront humiliation, confusion, and disbelief simultaneously. Along with his grief for failing to save Fang Zhou, he must also process being betrayed, being suspected, and being denied all at once, without explanation or closure.
While in recuperation, he is then framed by the same best friend and public suspicion follows where he is watched, judged and whispered about. His motives are questioned, his past reinterpreted, his silence taken as guilt.
With his resilience, calm wisdom and deep insight into those around him, Tang Lici slowly uncovers many truths, builds alliances, and rises in rank, power and recognition. Yet his fate refuses to let this rise function as reward. When he falls again, the forces against him only become more cruel, more painful, and more isolating.
Each experience, bond or loss introduces a different emotion: sorrow (悲), anger (怒), grief (哀), fear (惧), longing (思).
At one point, Tang Lici even attempts to reverse time to prevent his first loss and what he believes was the beginning of his tribulations (saving Fang Zhou). He believes that if he can correct this single event, then he can prevent the resulting suffering. But then he finds out that it was this attempt to reverse time which caused the very events he was now trying to prevent.
We finally uncover that it was not his fate guiding his life, but someone who deliberately engineered this sequence of events: Ye Mo, who orchestrated these events so that Tang Lici could become the perfect celestial body – a feat which Ye Mo himself failed to achieve.
In his view, a perfect celestial body cannot be formed through cultivation or having high physical power alone. It must be additionally capable of containing emotional depth and experiencing life’s worst tribulations, without becoming corrupted by them.
This requires full exposure to the seven emotions and six desires (七情六欲): — 喜 (joy), 怒 (anger), 哀 (sorrow), 惧 (fear), 爱 (love), 恶 (aversion), 欲 (desire).
Where Ye Mo’s emotional structure became fixated in 怨 (resentment), Tang Lici allowed his anger to resolve into understanding, his grief to settle into acceptance, and all his attachments to be released. Thus, Ye Mo cannot become what Tang Lici is becoming.
This is the critical distinction between the two.
Ye Mo has the highest possible level of physical power and has understood the necessity of emotional depth, but is unable to embody it. He can design the path for Tang Lici, but he cannot walk on it. Tang Lici, by contrast, is shaped precisely because he neither avoids pain nor allows it to turn into hatred. His deep emotional structure complements his high physical power level, bringing him closer to “perfection” than Ye Mo could be.
I think this message from the drama really resonates with me: that to become whole, one must experience all that can be felt, without becoming imprisoned by any single feeling. This is what ultimately makes Tang Lici “perfect”: his capacity to feel fully and still remain capable of compassion & choice afterward.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often considered a story about humanity’s hidden ‘dark side’. The common takeaway from this story is ultimately simple: if the rules of society were removed, everyone would become a monster. But I think to read the story this way is to miss something important. I think this story is conducting an autopsy of a specific kind of moral failure rather than a generic human tendency.
If the story’s claim were truly about universal depravity, Hyde would be a mindless force (random, chaotic, a primal storm). But Hyde isn’t any of those things. He, instead, is chillingly specific: directed, intentional, and sophisticated in his pursuit of unrestrained pleasure. This tells us we are not looking at generic “human nature”, but at something that has grown in specific conditions.
I think the story’s real claim is narrower and more personal. It’s a case study of Dr. Jekyll’s specific inner architecture, where his error was in believing that he could manage his darker impulses through dissociation. So, he suppressed his impulses deep within a corner of his mind, treating them as a foreign substance to be kept locked rather than a native energy to be integrated. Hyde, therefore, is the resulting sum of Jekyll’s own unchecked wants, now liberated from the specific pressures that once constrained them: shame, empathy, and the fear of losing his social reputation.
Hyde does not begin as a killer. His progression is a grim slope: first, he experiences the thrill of freedom from social rule; then, the enjoyment of acts with (finally) no cost to his public reputation; and then, a growing desire to cause harm without consequence. With each step, the inner mechanism of restraint breaks down. His final violence was never his original goal, but an outcome of this unchecked escalation. The restraint was only ever a mask; remove it, and you find not a true face, but a void where limits used to be.
So the story’s warning is not “suppress yourself or else”. It’s a far more demanding prescription: that restraint must be integrated as a habit of character. It warns against the peril of living a split life, where you deny parts of you instead of learning their shape.
A Confucian scholar may examine Jekyll and see a man who neglected integration. In this view, desires are not inherently evil, but must be guided and shaped until right action becomes second nature. But Jekyll’s “goodness” was an external title rather than an internal discipline. He never did the steady, humble work of building an inner structure, so when the external scaffold of his reputation fell, he had nothing left to hold him up.
A Daoist philosopher may offer a different diagnosis. Daoism distrusts rigid control and sees the self as a natural system that seeks balance. By violently repressing part of his own nature, Jekyll not only failed to eliminate it but also created a worse imbalance: a pressure that had to erupt. Hyde became a rebound reaction – an explosive return of all that was forcibly denied. Like water held back by a brittle dam, the force of the release is proportional to the strength of the obstruction.
So we end up with many critiques of a single life. Confucianism warns against the danger of neglecting practice and Daoism cautions against the peril of forced repression. Yet all conclusions converge on the same essential truth: that a sustainable self cannot be built on division. Whether through cultivated habit, wise balance, or honest self-knowledge, our wholeness depends on an integrated restraint – one that comes from within, and can therefore survive even when the world outside stops watching.
Two of the most famous examples on the revenge theme, The Revenant and The Count of Monte Cristo, approach the exact same sequence (betrayal, survival and retribution) from completely opposite ends of the human experience. One is a story of primal survival; the other is a story of complex social planning.
The Revenant: Primal Survival and Vengeance 🐻
The Revenant is almost a procedural list of extreme physical events. It strips the world down to its most basic instincts.
When Hugh Glass is attacked by the bear, he’s physically mutilated and he can’t walk or talk, with his immediate priority being to survive the attack. The conflict begins when his “protector” betrays the group’s agreement for his own self-interest and murders Glass’s son.
From that moment, Glass’s motivation shifts. It’s no longer just about passive survival; it’s about active survival for a specific purpose: revenge. Glass’s primary social unit (his son) was killed, so the repayment must be equally physical. Every action he then takes (eating raw meat, cauterizing his wounds, sleeping inside an animal carcass) is driven by this single inner drive. His fight is with nature, and his method is physical endurance.
The Count of Monte Cristo: Social Planning and Calculated Revenge ⚓
The Count of Monte Cristo takes place in the opposite arena: contemporary society. The conflict here isn’t the primal Man vs. Nature; it’s Man vs. Social Status.
Edmond Dantès is also betrayed by those acting on primal self interest: Mondego and Danglars, who prioritise their own desires or status over their friendship. Their weapon isn’t a knife but the social structure, using which they have Dantès imprisoned and removed from their social system.
His response to the betrayal is just as sequential as Glass’s, but it operates on a different layer. He doesn’t rely on brute force; he relies on social and financial planning. He acquires resources (the treasure) and gains status (The Count). His revenge is a calculated payback – he doesn’t go straight to kill his enemies but rather systematically destroys the social status and wealth that they valued most, which were their original motives for betraying him.
Two Ways to Adapt
It’s interesting to contrast the two methods. Glass has encountered primal physical injustice and no longer needs society for his retribution; while Dantès is a masked methodical planner who has to use society’s own hypocritical or transactional rules against itself to achieve justice.
While revenge is generally not something I recommend, what I do like about these stories is how the protagonists use different methods depending on their specific circumstances.
Working with APIs is not just about exchanging data but also about communication. You send a request, you wait, you get a response. And depending on what that response contains (a success status, an error code, a timeout, or unexpected data), you make a decision. Retry? Modify the payload? Or give up?
It’s funny how similar this is to our real-life interactions with people.
In life, we’re constantly sending out “requests”: sharing a thought, expressing a feeling, offering help, asking for clarity, setting a boundary. But the real art isn’t just in the sending. It’s in how well we observe and interpret the response.
Did they get it?
Are they responsive or evasive?
Was there a miscommunication (like a 400 Bad Request)?
Are they overwhelmed or shut down (like a 429 Too Many Requests)?
Or are they giving you an error that’s actually about their internal system, not you?
[E.g.: Some people will give you a 401 Unauthorized response to your boundary, and you’re like, I literally just asked for basic respect, what kind of API key do I need for that?]
And just like with APIs, you can’t keep resending the same request and hope for a different response. Sometimes, you need to refactor your payload, or change the timing to retrigger it another time – but if you make those changes without accurate evaluation of the response, it may never land the way you hoped.
At some point you realise that if you’re constantly having to reformat your requests to get a decent response, and if the API still keeps failing, maybe it’s not your code. Maybe you’re sending requests to the wrong server. Like when the response is crystal clear (403 Forbidden), the wisest thing you can do is stop trying and move on.
But we’re not always the ones sending requests. Sometimes, we’re on the other end. Someone reaches out – maybe with a feeling, an assumption, or an unspoken expectation. And we’re about to send a response. That response might be warm and receptive 200 OK – or it might be guarded, hesitant, or just an error.
Maybe we delay replying because we’re processing. Maybe we snap back with a 500 Internal Server Error because their request was incompatible with our system.
Our responses, too, carry meaning. They teach others how to engage with us – what we’re open to, what needs a retry with better headers, and what boundaries are non-negotiable.
The best developers know when to troubleshoot and when to accept the limits of an API. The same goes for people: not all connections are good for integration, and not all errors are worth decoding.
But it’s always worth really reading the responses before sending the next request, just in case both systems can build compatibility after all.
I remember when I was watching a drama, I came across a character who supported genetic engineering: altering human DNA, not just to remove illness but to create “better” versions of future generations. We’ve seen glimpses of this concept in sci-fi films like Jurassic Park. These stories reflect both our fascination and our fear of how far science can go, and these capabilities are becoming less fictional each day.
Today, the possibility of removing genetic defects, boosting immunity, or designing specific strengths in babies is no longer a distant dream. Technologies have brought us closer than ever to reshaping human life before it even begins, making it possible to remove “genetic defects” or even add “desirable strengths or characteristics”.
At its core, the motive behind gene editing appears compassionate: to spare children the burden of inheritable diseases, to give them a healthier start in life, and perhaps even allow them to thrive beyond what nature may offer. For families with histories of genetic disorders, the idea of being able to prevent suffering in future generations may be appealing.
But can all possibilities be converted into practical, safe realities?
Science, especially at the present stage, is not perfect yet. The understanding of genes, their functions, and the interactions they have with each other or with the environment is still evolving. A single “correction” could have cascading effects elsewhere in the body, many of which we may not be able to predict.
The risk is not merely of unintended side effects but of irreversible harm, developmental abnormalities, or even the death of the fetus. The line between healing and harming is thinner than it seems.
But it’s not just about medical risk. It’s also worth thinking of how these possibilities may change how we begin to see human life itself. When we start modifying babies not just to eliminate illness but to design personalities, appearance, or intelligence, we risk losing sight of what makes us human: our unpredictability, our differences, our individuality.
Children may begin to be seen less as unique beings to be discovered, and more as products to be customised and perfected. In chasing an ideal, we may unknowingly erase the beauty of human diversity, only to turn it into a factory blueprint.
The desire to protect children from suffering is human. But so is the ability to embrace imperfection, to adapt, and to love without conditions. Genetic engineering may one day become safe, predictable, and ethically guided. But for now, it sits in a fragile space where the dream of control might cost more than we understand.
Until we know more, until science can truly ensure not just possibilities but also responsibility – caution becomes not just important, but necessary.
In our attempts to improve life, we must be careful not to forget how to value it.
If I had to pick one genre that’s my favourite of all time, that consistently keeps me engaged – it would be Crime. And in particular, it’s the investigation-focused ones that draw me in the most: because of the puzzle, the mystery, the psychology, and the slow uncovering of what really happened and why.
1. Detective & Mystery
At the heart of this category is the people who won’t stop until they find what’s missing. And there’s something about the search for truth that I keep coming back to.
Detective stories are often about someone asking the right questions, following leads no one else noticed, observing patterns and noticing small details that turn out to be significant.
My love for this started early with Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Their stories weren’t just about solving crimes, but about how every person, every motive, every hidden action mattered. And it’s hard not to love the ‘genius’ detectives like Sherlock, Miss Marple & Poirot. I loved so many books by Agatha Christie, and my favourite would have to be Roger Ackroyd.
Years later, I found another author that I kept returning to: Keigo Higashino. His books deepened my interest, as his mysteries unfold not just in terms of “who did it” but “why they did it”, and sometimes even inverting the “who did it”. The ‘genius’ in his world is the physicist Galileo (the series I loved the most), who solves “impossible crimes” by finding scientific explanations for them.
2. Police Procedurals
At some point, other than stories of “main detective solving murders”, I also started exploring books/shows about police departments handling varied criminal cases. These carry the same curiosity of detective fiction, but with a more grounded, methodical tone.
Whether it was Indian dramas like Delhi Crime, Korean ones like The Good Detective, Chinese ones like Day and Night, Japanese ones adapted from Higashino, or American ones — each showed how police departments work towards gathering clues, chasing or interrogating suspects, collecting evidence, handling crisis situations and solving cases with available technology or manpower.
It also gave me perspective on how different countries deal with crime. I noticed differences in police training, protocols, infrastructure and technologies, which affected what kind of cases they were equipped to handle; and how their laws either helped or hindered their efforts.
3. Courtroom Drama
When the chase ends, the question becomes about the final verdict.
Courtroom dramas like The Practice first gave me a view on how courtroom proceedings work, and how it becomes more about the strategies of each side than about actually serving justice. Then there are stories like Anatomy of a Fall, Criminal Justice and Presumed Innocent which take questions like ‘circumstantial evidence’ and turn them inside out.
These aren’t just about the legal process but also the possibility that even the system built to find the truth might not be capable of doing it fully.
Overall, I think crime stories don’t just entertain, but also provide a perspective on the real world’s battle between crime and the law, while giving us the experience of finding the real truth alongside the investigators. And maybe I’ll never get enough of it.
I’ve always found it interesting how different types of videogames demand completely different parts of you. The kind of attention, instinct, or mindset they require can make them feel like they’re not even from the same planet.
Take RPGs like World of Warcraft on one hand, and FPS games like Valorant, CounterStrike, or PUBG on the other. I’ve played all of them at different points – but the contrast has always stood out, not just in mechanics but in what they seem to ask from me.
In World of Warcraft, you can mostly play solo (if you don’t count the dungeons). The world is vast and immersive, with a linear but customisable character growth. You start out weak, slowly collecting armor, weapons, spells – and over time, as your character continues to level up, it begins to feel like an extension of you. The quests and their story elements make you feel like a part of the world. The pace can be slow, even leisurely, and you’re surrounded by strange, fascinating races and creatures in every direction. It’s almost relaxing, wandering through zones, reading quest text, trying to figure out which ability you want to level next.
No one is shouting about an enemy player appearing right behind you. No one is fighting in the voice chat or yelling “defuse!”. Rather than external pressure, it’s more about an internal: How far can I go in this world? What do I want to experience here?
Then there’s FPS games, which feel like the complete opposite.
In Valorant, CS, or PUBG, everything is real-time. You need sharp reflexes, perfect aim that needs hours of training, recoil control, fast reaction time, and most importantly, team coordination. These games are unforgiving – one mistake and you’re done. There’s a steep learning curve not just in gameplay but even in communication. Strategy matters, but so does experience, prediction, and staying alert every single second. It requires a very competitive mindset where you are playing to beat the other team at all costs. It can be fun, but also overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if the exhaustion comes from how quickly FPS games punish hesitation, while a game like WoW almost welcomes it. You can stand in a village for five minutes deciding which talent point to assign, but in an FPS, five seconds of indecision is enough to get your entire team wiped.
It’s not that one is better than the other, they just ask for different parts of the brain. Some days I crave that immersive, open-world quiet of WoW where the pace is slower and I can learn by wandering. Other times, I like the raw skills, reflexes, and tactical precision of FPS, even though I really struggle with it.
I remember the character in The Blind Side, who suddenly improves at football when told to ‘protect his family’ (using his strong protective instinct). Maybe if I, too, found some ‘instinct’ I could use, I might get better. Until then, FPS might always feel like being in a storm without shelter.
Gaming has both: the sword and the rifle. I like both, but I know which one feels more like home.
When we picture a monster, we probably imagine something large, violent, and scary. Something that threatens our order, our people, or our world.
In the book Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, the orc fits that image on the surface: a powerful creature with green skin. But as the story unfolds, something more unsettling emerges – not about the orc, but about those who seek to kill him.
The orc, it turns out, values honour and peace more than many of the humans who want him dead.
It reminded me of the book Frankenstein. The creature was born gentle, and learned survival and even language by his own efforts, while all alone. But for all his efforts, he was still rejected, feared, and hunted, just because of his unfortunate appearance.
Over time, it’s not the creature who seems scary, but the people who refuse to see his humanity. The ‘monster’ isn’t the one with fangs, but the one whose heart has closed off completely.
The human nervous system is a majestic, chaotic masterpiece, marinated for decades in survival, trauma, lost loves, and that one time there was a public speaking event. And what happens when this lump of adaptive jelly walks into a mental health institution?
It sits on a plastic chair and the clock starts ticking. Anything between 15 mins to an hour, that’s all the time the universe has allotted for this mystery of a life to be decoded.
This life, having decades of lived experience, is then expressed in the most boring but chaotic language imaginable. “My apartment has water leakage and my landlord won’t fix it… I lost my job and now I can’t focus on anything… My grandfather was always controlling and never loved me… It makes me angry when people treat me unfairly… I feel sad because my dog died… My girlfriend betrayed me… I have no energy to work or live… etc.”. A compressed version of the millions of things bothering the nervous system currently are conveyed.
But at this time, a separate process is happening in the clinician’s brain: a high-speed diagnostic drag race.
A long history of unstable living conditions, worries about further exploitation, past experiences causing fear for the future? Could be ANXIETY DISORDER. Tag! You’re it!
Too much jumping around in topics, fidgeting, lack of focus? Could be ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER.
Repeated anger or volatility in response to unfair treatment? Well these negative thoughts are obviously caused by EMOTIONAL DYSREGULATION.
Thinking about problems too much? That’s RUMINATION.
Your life is a chaotic mess and you have too big feelings about it? Could be BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER.
What was that? You have too many rage episodes and self harm tendencies? Well who cares about why, this looks like SCHIZOPHRENIA SPECTRUM stuff, even if no hallucinations have occured yet – better safe than sorry!
Of course, many cases are genuine and diagnosed correctly over time. But there are also too many cases where even perfectly sane responses to an abnormal environment can and do get translated out of the boring language of “life” and into the exciting, billable language of “pathology”. Because the system runs on diagnosis, not on fixing landlords.
And so, a chemical party begins with medication: these pills are tiny, powerful goblins that hijack the brain’s telegraph system.
Some pills are dopamine goblins which storm the brain’s reward center, a place previously interested in motivation and joy, and shout, “PARTY’S OVER, EVERYONE! NO MORE FUN FOR YOU!” and reduces drive.
Some are serotonin goblins. They try to manage the mood swings caused by, say, being bullied everyday by big bullies, by flattening all your emotions into a grey paste. Intense sadness about your dead dog? Gone! Intense joy at a sunset? Also gone! Perfectly smooth and stable now.
And then there are the chill pills, full of GABA goblins that just wrap the entire nervous system in a warm, wet blanket of apathy. Calm achieved! You’re still in the terrible apartment or the wrong job, but now you don’t care.
This is considered progress. You can now do your tax returns and social rituals quietly! You are stable! Your stability is measurable… your landlord’s toxicity is not.
But wait! Now the goblins are also affecting the rest of your body, because your brain is the boss of everything.
· Metabolism… Slower. New gravity!
· Weight… Double!
· Hormones… the thyroid and adrenals are sending angry letters. Insulin is now resistant. PCOS is now never-ending. The skin has turned into a coal-shade.
· Emotional range… It’s now just “meh”.
These new, exciting developments are not side effects. They are just new medical variables to manage! And so you now need more pills to manage the side effects of the first pills.
So, to recap:
1. A nervous system responds like a sane person to an insane environment.
2. This sane reaction is classified as a mental illness.
3. The “illness” is medicated into oblivion.
4. The medication creates real, physical illnesses.
5. These new illnesses are now medicated for a longer period or just… never get repaired.
Every single step is perfectly logical within the box of institutional medicine. It’s all because they just can’t prescribe you a new job, apartment, family, city, or social circle.
And so, the most complex object in the known universe, a human brain, is relentlessly poked, prodded, labeled with a dozen acronyms, and pumped full of goblins… all so it can better tolerate a certain social environment which was the real problem all along.
There’s something about the world-building of certain fantasy stories that makes these worlds feel like they might really exist.
My first one was, of course, Harry Potter. Which was followed over the years by:
• Game of Thrones – I remember the days when we all would rush to finish the latest episode to avoid the spoilers floating online. The world of Westeros, with its strong characters, throne politics, dragons, the “winter” and the visuals were memorable (and the ending was not.)
• The Witcher – I haven’t read the books or played the videogame, and I heard that the Netflix show changed a lot of the original story, which is sad. I liked the 1st season wtih the disjointed timelines converging at the end, and the [actor playing Geralt] seemed to fit the character. I liked Ciri going through training for combat & magic to become stronger. But after Season 1 things got strange and I may not continue it anymore.
• World of Warcraft book series – The world of Azeroth was amazing in the videogame, but the chronicles & books gave its history and characters so much more depth. I’m hoping to finish all the books someday.
• Xianxia – The ancient Chinese culture and beliefs at the heart of xianxia shows is like stepping into a completely different world, but one where the characters still deal with the human struggles of our world. Love Between Fairy and Devil, one of my favourites, was a visual and emotional feast, playful but also painful. The Untamed at first wasn’t at all what I was used to, and I’m not a fan of stories with spirits of the dead, but the element of mystery and its resolution made it worth it.
And no, I never got around to reading or watching the popular Lord of The Rings series for some reason.
One thing I noticed in Chinese was how the language separates what English just calls “knowing”. There isn’t just one “to know”. There are different kinds of knowing, and if you mix them up, things can get strange fast.
Take 知道 (zhīdào) and 认识 (rènshi). Both translate to “know”, but they aren’t interchangeable.
知道 is for information – knowing facts, data, whether the meeting is at 4 PM or whether penguins can fly (they can’t, in case you didn’t 知道).
认识, on the other hand, is for knowing people – when you’ve met someone, when you’re acquainted beyond just recognizing a face.
So what this basically means is:
• You can 知道 about Einstein, but you can’t 认识 him (unless you’ve time travelled).
• You can 认识 your neighbor but not 知道 their life secrets (unless they overshare).
• Misusing it might lead to saying something like: 我知道你 (wǒ zhīdào nǐ), which sounds like “I know of your existence” and not “I know you personally”.
That’s kind of nice, isn’t it? That the language reserves a different word for people, and it marks the difference between information and connection.
In English, “I know” can mean anything from “I’ve heard of them” to “they’re one of my closest friends”. But in Chinese, the word itself asks: do you know the fact, or do you know the person?
I’ve always been a nocturnal “night owl” – awake when the world sleeps, alert when the sun starts rising, and asleep when everyone else is starting their day.
But for 2 years, I lived on the other side. My medication during this time made me sleep early, wake up early – not just a couple of hours earlier, but like a total shift in my sleep cycle.
And suddenly, I had mornings. I had time to myself, time with Miki, time before the first work call started ringing. The day would unfold gently and evenings would be short after work ended. For a while, I genuinely liked it. Waking up with the sun seemed better suited for working hours as well as made the days more structured.
But now that I’ve stopped the meds, I’ve gone back to my original cycle – wide awake at night, brain active when the world slows down, sleeping through alarms and early meetings. And as good as the early-rising phase was, I realise I really missed this.
This strange rhythm is a part of me. It may not be ideal or convenient, but I feel more like myself this way. I’m definitely not going back to the 5am club (unless that’s the sleeping time).
I’m not sure how to deal with my early working hours anymore though. Or with the fact that Miki had started sleeping at night to match my routine and now feels confused seeing me sleeping till noon. Maybe just a few hours of tweaking could give me the right balance?
Some stories stay with us not just because they were well-made, but because they struck something deeper – an idea, a feeling, or a thought we couldn’t shake off. This post is about the kind of stories across mixed genres that tend to stay with me, not grouped by strict category, but by the impact and thoughts they leave behind.
Superheroes
No, I don’t mean I’ve read every DC and Marvel comic book. I’ve watched just a few movies with superheroes, and some of them became special.
• The Dark Knight – Needless to say, the Joker is the best villain ever. The kind of chaos he creates and the dilemmas he puts people in really stood out. The way this film was grounded in reality made it much more than just a superhero story.
• Avengers (upto Infinity arc) – I liked the individual films for each hero more than movies like Civil War. I liked the series for its mix of sci fi, themes of working as a team, seriousness and humour, different ideas of what makes someone a ‘superhero’, clashes of perspectives and even a small bit of time travel.
Filmmakers I Keep Returning To
• Tarantino – His movies have a somehow unique style that I can’t get over. The kind of characters he creates, the extended dialogues, the strange humour and non-linear scenes always draw me in. My first one was Pulp Fiction and I went on to watch almost all his films over the years, which were usually worth it.
• Nolan – I like his movies for their thought-provoking storytelling and how he deals with ideas of time, memory and identity. His stories are original and often about something we may never have thought about before. My first one was probably The Prestige and my favourites were Inception & Memento.
Other Stories I Still Think About
• Stories where it turns out that the character was only imagining the existence of a person because of being unable to process some trauma, are often very unsettling. Movies like Forgotten (Korean), Fractured, Goodnight Mommy, The Machinist – they show how the human mind can sometimes create illusions to cope with a painful reality.
• Stories about highly trained spies with themes of shifting/hidden alliances are also interesting and re-watchable, like Infernal Affairs (HK), Goodachari (South Indian) and Hidden Blade (Chinese), while Salt changes the usual storylines by having a strong female lead instead. I also liked The Bourne Series for its fast paced action, clever abilities of [Matt Damon’s character] and the theme of regaining lost memory and identity.
• Movies like Cure (Japanese) show how sometimes just a slight push can make people act on their darkest impulses. I found the premise similar to the book Curtain (Agatha Christie), where a certain person “X” is the common thread in several murder cases.
• Then there are films that explore tragedies and sensitive themes. The Chalk Line (Spanish), Maharaja (Tamil) and Murder Affair at Horizon Tower (Chinese) start out as mysteries, but the layers reveal disturbing themes of girl child abuse. And films like Incendies make you sit still afterward and not say anything for a while.
• And some, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Requiem for a Dream and The Revenant, can leave a lingering impact.
Sometimes genre is just the surface. What these stories have in common isn’t their labels, but the way they stayed long after I watched them.
I almost got lost in Singapore.
For my first solo trip to Singapore, I booked what I thought was a group tour. I thought it would include guided walks, people sticking together, maybe a friendly guide with a whistle. But what I got instead was… shared cab rides.
Which meant that each day, a new mix of strangers and I were bundled into a vehicle, driven to a tourist spot, and then dropped off with the instruction: “Be ready for the pickup at [xyz point] at 5.”
That would’ve been fine… if I had the slightest sense of direction.
I can’t explain how easily I lose track of where I am, even with a map. Every day, after being dropped at the day’s tourist spot, I’d be unable to enjoy anything thinking about the evening pickup. I couldn’t figure out what place they meant or how to get there. Since I can’t even make conversation with strangers to ask for help, I’d start quietly walking behind random groups, hoping that following them non-stop would help with exploring the place as well as getting to the pickup point. It probably looked a bit suspicious, a random person who kept following them like a spy for no reason.
But it didn’t go as planned on any of the days and the groups eventually managed to dodge me each time. Then I would wander around, taking selfies to at least have a memory of the place, and try hard to remember what the driver had said about getting to the pickup point.
Each day as a stroke of luck, some or the other shared-ride passengers noticed me looking lost and helped me find the way. But the anxiety kept building and got worse everyday. I spent so much energy trying not to get stranded, I barely enjoyed any of the places I went.
By the last two days, I gave up. I just stayed in the hotel and skipped the remaining spots which even included Universal Studios, spending the days watching TV instead.
The reason I had decided to go on this solo trip was because firstly, my parents had already been to Singapore; secondly, I had no one else to go with; and thirdly, travelling with parents had never really felt like travelling. Their schedules were rigid to the minute, planned without ever asking me what I wanted to see or do. If I wanted to stay too long at a place I liked, even five minutes, I’d be hurried along like we were on some school excursion. Everything was rushed, controlled, and rigid. I wanted to know what it felt like to move at my own pace, make my own choices, and just… be in a place, rather than being dragged through it.
But that solo trip turned out to be even worse. If only I knew that selecting ‘Group Tour’ didn’t actually mean a group tour, I would never have booked it at all.
Maybe I should postpone travelling till I find a group of actual friends to go with. In other words, never?
There should be a badge of honor for surviving Indian matrimony sites – like a “Verified Profile, Mentally Scarred” achievement.
I thought I would fill out a few details, add a picture, talk to a few suitable people and find a match. Instead, it turned out to be a caste-n-salary competition with vague declarations like “looking for simple girl with modern values and traditional mindset” i.e. a unicorn in a saree. The system asked for height in centimeters, salary in lacs, and caste, but sadly no field for “Can hold a basic conversation?”
Some bios were more like resumes. “Working as Senior Software Engineer at reputed MNC. Assets include flat in Pune and ancestral land”. Not sure if you are proposing marriage or trying to sell shares? Other times I thought someone was roleplaying as an HR recruiter: Hello Roohani, your profile matches our requirement. Please revert with horoscope and recent photograph. Regards, Family.
At first, I used to feel hopeful when a message came through that sounded… normal, approachable, maybe even respectful. But talking to some of them was like unwrapping a gift only to find a loudspeaker set to Monologue Mode. They didn’t ask questions but delivered lectures.
One told me about his entire life history for hours which sounded more like a rant than conversation. Some said I must give up non-veg before marriage. Another opened with “I’m looking for someone who respects elders, doesn’t argue, and can manage home responsibilities without drama.” Some were unable to grasp the idea of me living alone. Some tried to impose things like “you have to keep meeting my relatives even if I can’t”. Somewhere between “tell me about your family” and “I don’t believe in girls working after marriage” I realised that the nice message was just bait for an audition for a role I never applied for.
The issue is not that they had expectations – everyone does, even I do. But I had already tried my best to convey what I want or don’t want on my profiles, and they either didn’t read it or thought they could talk me out of it.
I mentioned my preferences on the profiles, like: I’m not traditional, I want to continue working, I am non vegetarian, I don’t want children, I live alone in the house I own and want to continue staying in it, I don’t like cooking, I don’t want to live with family members, etc. If they didn’t accept it they could ignore me and continue their search. Instead, why still message me and then be like: “You really don’t live with parents?” [Judgment Loading]. “You won’t cook or have kids?” [System Error: Traditional Expectations Not Found]. Or some version of, “Your personality isn’t what I’m normally used to?” [Initiate Mocking Sequence].
Then there were those who were really just looking for casual partners or friends with benefits. Maybe they confused this platform with a dating site?
After months of decoding code words for caste, being filtered out for eating eggs, and talking to so many incompatible people, I finally accepted something: I’d rather find someone organically – someone I get to know in the normal course of my life, who’d be more likely to understand me or my preferences; someone that I could understand & respect as well. I know that may never happen but I guess it’s okay and not the end of the world.
At least now I know that these matrimony sites are not the answer.
There was an unsettling feeling when I finished reading Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke because of its idea: that humanity might one day meet a species so far beyond our understanding that people mistake them for gods or devils.
Arthur Clarke’s “Overlords” don’t destroy, enslave or invade the planet in the ways sci-fi usually warns us about. Instead, they arrive with calmness, power, and knowledge, assisting in changing the state of our world. But for some reason, they hide their appearance from the inhabitants of Earth.
And then there’s the twist: that these beings, with their dark, devilish appearance, have visited Earth before, explaining some of the myths and fears that shaped entire cultures. And being aware of what their appearance is associated with on this planet, they waited for the “right time” to show themselves to humans.
That idea is intriguing – that ancient stories of gods and demons weren’t imagination, but memories of misremembered contact with something so incomprehensible, that people turned it into religion.
It reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, also based on Clarke’s ideas, where mysterious alien monoliths appear at key moments in human history, guiding evolution at each stage. The idea here was that human evolution itself may have been sparked by contact with a superior intelligence which didn’t dominate or even communicate, but acted through silent and deliberate influence.
These ideas offer the haunting suggestion that our place in the universe, or humanity’s idea of celestial beings, may not be what we think it is.
It makes me wonder how people decide what is divine, and how much of it is about what we can’t yet understand?
Over the years, I’ve spent many hours watching chess tournaments. Whether it was Speed Chess Championships, Norway Chess, Men’s or Women’s tournaments – I followed the live games, the recaps, and streams of commentators who seemed to read the players’ minds.
I remember following the Candidates 2024 closely, mostly Hikaru’s games; and I had mixed feelings when he didn’t make it. I felt disappointed for Hikaru but at the same time, seeing Gukesh qualify for the World Championship was something special and created history.
Like many others, I couldn’t shake the thought that Magnus Carlsen not playing the World Championship made it feel like… not quite the real thing. I wondered how it would have been if Gukesh had to face Magnus for the title, and it was probably even Gukesh’s own childhood dream. But still, Ding vs. Gukesh turned out to be a rollercoaster of its own. Everyone knew that Ding wasn’t at his best mentally, but he kept pushing through difficult positions and giving it his all; and that was something to respect.
But as the games progressed, I felt that Gukesh was simply the better player this time. His composure, calculations and preparation said it all. Watching him win was less about celebration and more about quiet admiration.
And while I keep waiting for the day Hikaru finally plays in a World Championship, it’s clear he’s now a streamer first, player second. Maybe it won’t ever happen after all. Maybe we’ll have to keep settling for his streaming, his Tricks Only speedruns, and occasional tournaments when he does feel like playing professionally.
Still, I won’t give up hope.
People sometimes ask me if I want children, and while in the past I didn’t say much in response, these days my answer is simple. I already have one: Miki.
She’s furry, dramatic, mischevious, clingy, and refuses to let me sleep in peace. She climbs upto the roof, hunts and eats lizards, runs around at insane speeds, and has an entire language made up of meows and mysterious stares. I don’t think a human child could beat that, right?
Okay, jokes aside… I’ve never really had a ‘maternal instinct’ in the traditional sense. Unless, a fur baby is involved. When it comes to Miki, I don’t mind staying up all night if she’s unwell, playing with her as long as she wants, giving her meds even if she scratches me, cleaning up the mess she makes, and taking care of her in every way I can. I find joy and meaning in caring for her and being responsible for her.
Maybe the kind of child I wanted isn’t a human baby. It’s Miki scratching furniture and pushing things off tables. It’s her zooming through the room at 2am like she’s chasing a ghost. It’s her curling up on my lap after attacking her mouse toy. It’s her following me around and always being in the same room as me. It’s her quiet companionship, her unpredictable moods, her meows, her stares, her hide-n-seek games that make the house feel alive.
Some people have both cats and babies – the best of both worlds, maybe. They post photos of their children next to their cat, growing up together. They post the silly things their children said or did. But I’ve never looked at those posts and thought “I want that too”. For me, Miki feels enough. I don’t feel like there’s a missing piece to complete the picture. I don’t look at her and think she’s the warm-up act before the real parenting begins. To me, she is the show.
Miki is it – my only child. Furry, chaotic, hilarious, adorable, and completely irreplaceable.
I remember how I felt when at some point in life I learned something unsettling:
History is taught differently depending on where you live.
That different countries frame historical events in ways that align with their national identity or political priorities. They teach different versions of the same event in terms of facts, framing, and even entire omissions, to create a version that the citizens are supposed to believe in.
This was very unsettling to me because I used to think history meant something like… universal and objective recording of events.
(I know… I probably sound dumb for believing that.)
It made me wonder how easily “education” could become a form of propaganda. And how hard it can be for people to untangle what’s actually real from what’s just been repeated long enough to sound real.
For instance, I learned that in Japan, the Nanjing Massacre, which Chinese consider to be one of the worst atrocities, has long been downplayed or removed in many school textbooks.
In Britain, children often learned about the colonisation of India as a part of “the British Empire”. It is seen more as a time of trade routes and railways rather than a violent occupation or oppression. The language used (“bringing civilisation”, “administrative efficiency”, “infrastructure development”) erases the exploitation and cultural loss. Generations grew up believing it was a neutral or even noble chapter in history, not realising that for Indians, it was anything but that.
In the United States, many school curriculums focused on the founding fathers, while ignoring topics like displacement of Native Americans. This history is now slowly being included, but not without resistance.
Even in Germany, which is seen as a country accepting its history, the way the World Wars are taught today was not always like this. The shift came after years of restructuring the curriculum.
And we all know about Pak and China, right?
It made me think about the various kinds of things people are taught, not just in school, but by culture, by media, by family – which may just be one version shaped by a nation’s goals, pride or shame; based on what the people in power wanted to focus on or leave out.
And I wonder how easily they can become unquestioned “truths” if no one gives us the tools to look beyond them.
It’s interesting how there are contradictory messages in stories vs life about the society’s idea of an “Outsider” (someone who is different and doesn’t fit the established social roles or categories). In general, the society prefers those who fit into defined social categories / conform to the norms – and rejects those who don’t fit in. And yet, some of the same society’s most powerful stories celebrate the very people who are rejected in real life for being non-compliant or different.
Whether it’s a sci-fi movie alien or an honest employee in a corrupt organisation, we see glimpses of the general distrustful response to ‘outsiders’ in stories, reflected in the attitude of governments or institutions or media/public panic. Like in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the alien’s goal of saving his home planet is shown to be destroyed by addiction, with him ending up among scientists experimenting on him. Such endings convey the society’s initial message: That an Outsider is likely to be perceived as a threat to the majority’s stability, and may get contained or removed.
But then, society also promotes an entirely opposite narrative: such as the stories where the Outsider is a hero and the only one who can save the collective from the system. Like in PK, the alien’s innocent logic is the only tool that can see through the contradictory nature of human beliefs. Or like Good Will Hunting, where the protagonist is a high-coherence mind (a mathematical genius) trapped in a volatile, low-coherence state. The established institutions (the university, the NSA) don’t want to heal him but to use him as a functional asset; and his volatility and his Outsider status work against him. In these stories, the Outsider’s only friends [good] are a few individuals who believe in the Outsider, unlike the large institutions [bad].
So, society seems to be running two contradictory messages at the same time:
1. A “fantasy” message that the system is mostly held back by corruption and only a non-compliant individual can save it.
2. A “real world” message that the system must reject the non-compliant individual to protect the collective.
It seems like the society is conflicted; on one hand it seems to recognize that even an Outsider can be beneficial to the society’s survival, but on the other hand it fears/distrusts such an Outsider’s non-compliance (even if their ‘differences’ can help find new solutions).
Sometimes, there are people who snap when the law doesn’t speak for them.
When someone you love – a child, a sibling, a partner – is brutally harmed, and the system meant to protect the innocent ends up protecting the guilty instead, something snaps. Law enforcement, legal process and courtrooms begin to feel meaningless, making it seem like ‘justice’ is more about what the current law allows than what is right.
And sometimes, that’s the space where the idea of ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’ walks in.
It’s usually uncomfortable and controversial to talk about. Because in theory, the law must be followed. Because vigilantism is, in theory, wrong. And yet, in stories where survivors are failed by courts, or when perpetrators get away with their crimes due to technicalities, corruption or protected status – it’s hard not to ask: Should the person seeking justice beyond the law really be blamed?
In The Hovering Blade (Japanese), a father finds out the men who brutally raped and murdered his daughter are juveniles, shielded by the law because of their age. The system sees their age and the idea of reform, but the father sees the remains of his daughter’s innocence and future. So he picks up a weapon and is hunted down by the police. But is he really the villain, or the only voice speaking for a child for whom the law won’t provide real justice?
In Chittha (Tamil), a few minor girls are raped by paedophiles. What follows is not just a revenge plot but an exploration of grief, helplessness, and what justice even means when the victim is a child. The man whose niece was one of the victims, feels like punishment within the law isn’t justice enough for what she suffered.
In Provoked, a woman burns her abusive husband alive after years of relentless domestic violence. The court initially sees only the murder of the husband, and not the screams that were never heard. Only when battered woman syndrome is introduced does the conversation even shift. Criminal Justice drama had a similar case where the woman is on trial for killing her husband who sexually abused her and made her feel crazy.
There are many stories like this, fictional and real, where the law either protects the wrong person, delays justice until it’s meaningless, or retraumatises the victim in the name of process.
In such moments, picking up a weapon becomes a language for the silenced. Sometimes, it’s action taken because of the inaction of the system supposed to be protecting them.
I often think about the premise of Death Note – the idea that someone could directly eliminate people who commit crimes, bypassing legal systems. Laws are bound by technicalities, procedures, and loopholes like insufficient evidence that often let culprits slip through the cracks. In that context, the Death Note feels like a way to restore balance when systems fail. Of course one could label such a figure a serial killer, since Light Yagami who begins trying to cleanse the world eventually starts killing anyone in his way. Maybe my idealist mind can’t help but wonder what that story would look like if the notebook had ended up in the hands of someone balanced, humble, and fair.
But since there’s no notebook in the real world, it’s the victims or their families who sometimes find themselves caught between the system and what feels right. There are indeed risks with vigilantism, and the line between justice and chaos can blur. But in cases where the law has clearly failed – where minors walk free after horrific crimes, or victims are punished for defending themselves – is it really wrong for people to feel like taking the law in their own hands?
Sometimes it’s the only way someone can say: What was done to us mattered, even if the law said it didn’t.
It’s the question that seems to get louder than ever in today’s conversations, from WhatsApp groups to Instagram comments. We’re told that feminism used to be noble, but now it’s become “toxic”, “man-hating”, or “unnecessary”. That women today don’t want equality but power, and they’ll lie or manipulate to get it.
But I didn’t grow up in a world where feminism was some social trend for popularity. I grew up quietly reading books, blogs and posts: by real women, who weren’t trying to manipulate anyone, but were just trying to deal with their experiences. They were women who felt like they had been treated unfairly, been boxed into expectations, suffered abuse, and had people make them feel blamed, dismissed, or silenced for it. Their writing didn’t teach me to fight men. It taught me to recognise patterns which are common all over the world.
Feminism, in its real form, isn’t about superiority – it’s about awareness. And awareness, once it enters your life, doesn’t leave quietly. Once you start noticing how often women are objectified, mistreated or made to apologise for existing, you can’t unsee that women are taught to internalise blame, accept society’s idea of gender roles, and stay silent.
But what about all the false cases?
These days, such conversations quickly turn into arguments about false accusations or divorce alimony. People argue that women are misusing feminism to file false cases, damage reputations, cheat men out of money in divorce, and escape accountability.
Let’s acknowledge a truth: false cases do exist. Any system can be misused. But it is also a fact that far more real cases go unheard, unreported, or disbelieved. For every woman who files a false case, there are hundreds who stay silent because they know justice won’t be served – or worse, that speaking out will bring shame, not support. And while some women may not need divorce alimony, there are far more cases where women do have genuine reasons, like having been unable to work or be financially independent due to marriage.
Focusing only on a few problematic cases distorts the bigger picture. When we center the conversation around a minority of misuses, we ignore the majority who still suffer in silence.
For every fake complaint, there are countless real ones that never see the light:
Real domestic violence dismissed as “family matters”. Severe injuries or even threats to life ignored.
Women forced to quit jobs to ‘focus on the household and children’.
Working women having to balance their jobs with the full load of housework alone.
Girls not given the chance to be educated and made to learn housework instead.
Dowry issues, child marriage, human trafficking, abortion law debates.
Rape of women or even little girls normalised because “boys will be boys” and questions like “what was she wearing?”
We do not live in a country where women have too much protection. We live in a society where most women still think twice before stepping out alone or speaking out when they are unsafe in their own home, and often decide it’s safer to stay silent.
The raw honesty of feminist writers gives women context for their anger, and remind us that gendered power is more than individual behavior – it’s about structures that benefit one and punish another. These ideas help us draw boundaries, spot manipulation, and to question: Are the expectations placed on women really fair?
And often the answer is ‘No’.
Because the world I live in still tries to keep women small. And if asking for fairness, the right to be treated as human, or calling out injustice/power imbalances means feminism has gone too far, then maybe it hasn’t gone far enough.
There’s something about science fiction set in space that I always find interesting. Vast galaxies, unknown planets, futuristic tech and spaceships, different kinds of beings & civilisations, and the constant tension between exploration and survival. Space feels like the perfect setting for stories that are both imaginative and grounded in questions of how different life could be elsewhere, or how far humans can go.
I enjoy space films that make real efforts in their worldbuilding, where the setting is not just a backdrop of stars, but unique environments with their own rules. Whether it’s alien ecosystems, time dilations, hostile environments or impossible gravity conditions, I like when a story builds a world that feels like it could really exist somewhere out there.
My thoughts on some of them are:
- 2001 Space Odyssey: While I didn’t really get it at first, it was after a re-watch and with some explanations that I realised that it was actually a great film about humanity’s evolution (and how it could have been enabled by a benevolent & superior race) and the dangers of relying too much on technology (which still feels relevant in this age).
- The Martian: A survival story on Mars that was practical and full of problem-solving, which made me think about how I wouldn’t have lasted a day in that situation.
- Passengers: I liked how it made space feel like horror when you find yourself totally alone on a spaceship and know you won’t survive the journey.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: This was fun, bright, chaotic, full of alien species and tech. At times I do like an action-comedy sci-fi, specially when its about absurd planets and the idea that anything could be out there. Groot is my favourite of course.
- Thor: I really love Asgard, Loki and the ‘worthy’ hammer. Thor coming to Earth was good, but somehow less interesting than his original planet.
- Star Wars: I have re-watched this a few times and always love the way it built different planets and alien societies, while still having the politics and organisations of us humans. And the story of Darth Vader is always timeless.
- Dune: I don’t remember much about this series, but the desert-like worlds, the concept of the ‘chosen one’, and a strong female lead always makes for a good story.
- Interstellar: I liked how it approached space travel from a more grounded, physics-driven angle. Re-locating to another planet or colonising does feel like it may become a real need in the far future. But other than all the space stuff, the unexpected betrayals from [old professor] and [Matt Damon] were what made this film stand out.
Arrival deserves a mention as well – although it’s not a movie about actually travelling anywhere into space, but rather about an alien race travelling to us. I’m not sure what was more fascinating – the anatomy of the aliens or their intriguing language; maybe both. But what was definitely a little annoying was to see the same common tropes of humans panicking & trying to attack alien races, immediately assuming the worst – when in fact these races may be harmless, friendly, trying to offer help, or even seeking help from us.
It’s always interesting to watch characters navigate strange worlds, face cosmic threats, or interact with something we barely understand. Whether it’s a spaceship battle scene or the silence of drifting alone in an orbit, space stories feel like a mix of thrill and mystery – and I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of that.
Sometimes I notice the contrast between how I treat my cat Miki and how I was treated growing up.
My parents didn’t view parenting as a relationship with a small human. They thought parenting was about managing a child, not relating to one. They saw it more as a role or duty, defined not by empathy, but by cultural conditioning, fear, control, and their own unresolved limitations. They provided resources, food, medicines and money – but left a void in place of real care and connection.
They didn’t think a child’s emotional distress needed to be responded to. They used fear-based methods like shouting, hitting, threats or “teaching a lesson” to fix perceived rebellion. They feared that letting a child be free to follow their own mind will lead to chaos. They tried to get blind agreement from the child, rather than helping the child trust themselves. They sometimes treated parenting like it was a 2v1 match, as if they were teaming up against the child.
They tried to mold the child into what they could manage, never wanting to know who the child really was.
Maybe these methods would work on children who were more like them. But my inner world was more like Miki’s than they realised.
When I am gentle and kind with Miki, when I don’t punish or control her, when I respond to signs of her distress, when I give importance to her needs over my own – sometimes I feel sad for never receiving what I now offer her, because I see myself in her.
Maybe I, too, needed to be protected, understood, supported, allowed to be myself, and treated kindly. By being nurtured as a person, and having my own choices respected, I would have felt a sense of safety and self-worth that I have struggled to find.
When I looked back on things as an adult, I felt disillusioned. I started to see that, while I was responsible for my own life, there are many things I carried from my upbringing into adulthood, which were affecting areas of my life like mental health, career or relationships.
Sometimes I think about how so many people today are healing from their childhood trauma. And yet, parenting continues the same way, in too many homes. It’s as if people have children without ever wanting to learn what parenting should be like, and it almost seems irresponsible.
Of course, not every child is like a cat. But what if parents at least tried to understand who their child actually is, before they start using methods that do more harm than help? What if they tried to check if there’s a misalignment between the real needs of the child and what the parents provide? What if they tried to think about how the family environment may affect the child?
Maybe these are idealistic questions, but I believe they are worth asking anyway. Maybe then, there would be one less child always wondering “what’s wrong with me”, or one less child turning to the dark side to cope with their early reality.
A story isn’t always just about the plot – it is often shaped by the culture it comes from.
American movies and shows are probably the most popular, and they have a certain air about them with their fast pacing, strong characters, bold themes and signature sense of humour. Every genre has a high standard of production – medical or police/legal procedurals are done professionally, sci fi is created with futuristic effects, and dramas are emotionally or culturally layered.
There are underlying themes like American ideals (a lone hero’s ‘individuality’ like Batman), racial history, anxiety related to the cold war or 9/11, dystopian apocalypses or recurring Russian spies. I feel like these factors shape stories in a uniquely American way.
South Korean movies on the other hand, especially their psychological thrillers like Forgotten, stay with me in a very different way. They take more time with emotions, and not all characters feel “fixed” by the end. They deal with broken systems, mental health, personal trauma – in ways that are unsettling rather than clearly resolved. Even their police dramas like The Good Detective aren’t just about solving crimes – they’re about who gets hurt and who carries the damage.
They are not afraid to shock the audience with movies like Oldboy or Mother. And movies like Parasite leave you thinking about society after the credits.
Japanese films/dramas feel the most minimal, but with rich themes and meaning. The humour tends to be deadpan or awkward, quite different from the loud American style of humour. The themes they explore can be varied: In Cure, it’s less about the killer and more about what lies dormant in people. Rashomon plays with the idea of subjective truth, showing how no one version of a story is ever complete. Naruto is about perseverance, loneliness, and the longing for recognition. Death Note shows a fascinating battle of wits and asks whether it’s justified for someone to have the power to execute criminals. And Suspect X, one of my favourites, explores how far someone can go to protect another.
Chinese dramas & films were harder to get into at first. There’s a certain pacing and structure that’s different from what I was used to. But once I decided to stick with it, I discovered a new world. After making it through Xianxia shows like Till the End of the Moon, I began to enjoy the slower build-up and the focus on this genre’s unique themes like spiritual cultivation, celestial worlds, and the battle between good and evil within oneself. Chinese modern dramas like Day and Night have professionalism comparable to American shows, and this one has a unique premise along with regular crime investigation and the personal costs of uncovering truth. Under the Skin was quite clever and had themes of finding the right place to use one’s talents & strengths. And The Bad Kids leaves the viewer thinking long after it ends, despite forced censorship edits.
It’s sad that Chinese censorship doesn’t allow many stories to be told freely, often forcing shows to have clear resolutions, portray the police/state as supreme and require characters to be punished for every small ‘crime’. I think the Chinese adaptation of G@me (Japanese) totally changed the story to fit into censorship rules. But while these ‘rules’ can be limiting, I do appreciate or even prefer certain regulations (like avoiding explicit intimate scenes or excessive violence) over American stuff. For these reasons and many more, I love watching their shows and learning about their culture through the stories they tell.
In the end, they are all stories. But what each chooses to focus on, and how it leaves you feeling, can be completely different.
Some people have interesting or cool quirks. While I just have… strange habits and dumb things I’ve been doing for years hoping no one notices.
I need to count on my fingers for basic addition and subtraction. Doesn’t matter if it’s 8 minus 3 or 14 plus 5, or figuring out how many episodes of a show are left, the fingers are mandatory. Trying to calculate the change for physical money in public is the worst.
I’d rather rub a piece of bread directly on a cold cube of butter instead of spreading it properly. I’d also rather eat frozen food straight from the fridge instead of bothering to heat it.
I nod in agreement while someone is explaining something complex to me, giving just enough eye contact and vague inputs to seem engaged… while having literally no idea what they’re saying. Then I have to google it later in private in case I run into the person again.
If I’m starting a movie or a book, I need to find a detailed scene-by-scene explanation page. Then as I cover every small part of the movie, I’d go back to read about what happened in that part, even if I understood it already. Of course, the “mind-bending” stuff usually needs extra re-reading time.
I need to read a large number of comments under a post to figure out what the post even meant. Some memes or jokes are so beyond me that I even need to google them.
After having extensively researched and read several materials on a certain topic, if someone happens to start talking about it with me, I only speak things that make no sense since I suddenly can’t remember a word.
If I write in my own diary or journal after a long gap, I feel the need to cover all the events that happened during this time before I start writing what I actually came to write.
When I read new words in English, I pronounce them as literally close to their spelling as possible (aisle becomes ey-sal) and continue such pronunciation for years.
If I ask a question and the other person gets the question wrong, I agree that I asked what they thought I did.
I have to search online for appropriate responses to things people commonly ask or say in normal conversations. After gathering this information, when I get into a conversation later, I fail to say it.
Lastly, since I’m not sure how to end this list, I’ll just be backing away quietly like this.
During my early days of learning Chinese, I remember being surprised by how overly simplistic its sentences looked when translated literally. A sentence like “他昨天去学校” literally means “He yesterday go school”. While I could understand that it’s supposed to be said like this, something about it didn’t seem very.. sophisticated. It seemed less like a sentence and more like just bare essentials.
I often noticed how in Chinese dramas/movies, the English subtitles tend to be much longer than the actual, concise dialogues really being spoken. Even idioms turned out to usually be only 4 characters in Chinese.
Compared to English or Hindi, where language often feels built around structure and rules, where sentences have to include changing verb forms or connecting words – this simplicity felt almost unfinished. I kept wondering if these statements were really “complete”.
But over time, I began to see it differently.
Chinese isn’t about overly complicated structure. It relies on simple words, trusting that you’ll understand the message without spelling out every part. Rather than lacking completeness, it strips away the unnecessary. A sentence could seem basic and still communicate exactly what was meant, without all the layers I used to think were essential.
Its complexity in its context, tone, and idiomatic use, and it doesn’t need the kind of rules we have in our languages. Its minimalist grammar isn’t a lack of sophistication, rather it’s a totally different system that prioritises efficiency, context, and implied meaning.
It made me reconsider what I once associated with being “refined” or “complex” – and I guess, precision is a kind of sophistication too.
When I was younger, I used to say I wanted to be a writer. I had notebooks full of characters with strange names, dramatic plots, and people who definitely spoke like no real human ever has. I imagined growing up would bring several manuscripts lying around, late night typing marathons and book signings where someone would say, “Your story was really amazing.”
But things rarely go as planned and it turned out that I now find myself spend my days writing… functional specifications. Instead of conflicted protagonists, I write about user roles; instead of plot twists, I document process flows and long emails that no one ever reads.
I find that when I’m creating a document, I often get so immersed in it that I don’t realise when I’ve forgotten meals, skipped breaks, or lost entire evenings. If I feel like something is off, I spend hours figuring out what’s wrong with the document and revising it until I’m satisfied. I can’t be done with it until everything is in the right place and it makes sense from start to end.
It’s not exactly the literary dream I had in mind – but I wonder if it still counts as writing, which doesn’t always have to look like novels or poetry. Maybe it can also look like translating people’s ideas and needs into a logical structure, and refining it until the team can build exactly what’s needed without 10 clarification calls.
And I guess it feels worth it when someone says, “This document really helped”. Maybe that’s not so different from “Your story was amazing” after all.
P.S. I’m pretty terrible at creating plots anyway.
Some people have one big talent which they master or even make a career out of it. While others like me have random hobbies which were never mastered or eventually forgotten as life happened.
I can’t read sheet music, compose original tunes or name chords/scales very well, but I was always able to play songs on the piano once I heard them. I usually played the songs I liked alone, or at times in social gatherings. I sometimes wonder if there was anything I could have done with that, with some kind of training. I guess I’ll never know.
I have an on-and-off relationship with dance, with fragments of classical training from childhood still remaining, mixed with modern moves from other dance forms. I have phases where I dance a lot, alone or in gatherings; or phases where I feel anxiety about it and become unable to move at all. And this time it seems like the Off phase will go on forever.
I randomly picked up digital painting one day, starting with colouring on penup and going on to convert photos of real people into paintings. I can’t create original paintings out of nowhere, but the photo-paintings or sketches seemed to be going well for a year until… I lost interest. And it became yet another abandoned hobby.
Sometimes I wonder if these hobbies are just old friends who left, or if they’re waiting for me to return someday. Or maybe they’ve already done what they had to: helped me find a few different sides of myself along the way.
The time-travel genre has stayed with me for many years – not just because of the science fiction, but because I often find myself wondering how things might have turned out differently if I had made a different choice, said something else, or taken a different path. I can relate to it when I watch characters go back in time and try to fix something, even if it never quite goes as planned.
What I enjoy most is how different stories use different mechanisms to explain time travel – machines, wormholes, memory loops, secret experiments – and how each version comes with its own rules, limitations, and consequences. I like figuring out how those systems work and all the paradoxes they create, even if it needs me to read several explanations online for hours.
But what I love most are the closed loop stories… the ones where someone goes back in time to change something, only to end up causing the very future they came from. The kind of stories where the original cause and effect gets blurred, or where attempts to alter an event lead to tragic consequences, always stay with me.
Here are some that stood out to me and why:
- Primer: While this one was quite hard to put together, it’s probably one of the most interesting time travel movies I’ve seen. It goes on to show how even people who go out of their way to take every possible precaution when messing with time (and their own doubles), unexpected events can still happen.
- Terminator (1 and 2): I initially thought it was just about robots taking over the world but the closed loop of the 1st part and the alternate future of the 2nd made it worthwhile. Arnold [can’t spell surname] was so great as the robot trying to act like a human.
- Time Lapse: It’s simple at first, just a camera taking photos of the future – but soon turns into something dark. The ending, for some reason, kept showing up in my dreams after watching it.
- Predestination: Although a bit too much, I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards – the idea of identity and loops was handled in a way that’s unsettling and fascinating.
- 12 Monkeys: This kind of a movie tells a story where both the past and future have already happened, my favourite kind.
- Looper: The concept of confronting your older self and having to kill them was a nice concept, and even better was the idea of both selves working against each other.
- Dark (Netflix): This show had me spend so much time figuring out all the timelines, family trees, and the cause-and-effect of the characters’ choices in significant years; and in the end, feel the weight of all the consequences. The ending was probably the only way it could have ended.
- Donnie Darko: The ‘rules’ around the artifact to be returned to the original timeline were interesting, and the ending (with Mad Love playing) was both beautiful and sad at the same time.
- Interstellar: While not exactly a time travel movie, the time dilation and the tesseract part gave it that same feeling of looping.
- Avengers Endgame: I am still not sure how returning all the stones to their original timelines works to prevent changing those timelines, but I liked the concept of the plan and its eventual success.
I also enjoy stories where characters re-live the same event over and over. Source Code and Reset (Chinese drama) show a similar confusion of being stuck in the same explosion and trying different actions to prevent it. For a lighter mood, Palm Springs is a fun take on the same day repeating. I was disappointed that Sisyphus (Chinese drama) ended up calling the loop a memory experiment due to censorship. I also didn’t enjoy The Time Machine book much, maybe because it was about humanity’s future far ahead in time and not about the past.
With Tenet, I had a hard time understanding what was really going on, but it was definitely a new type of time travel mechanism which was interesting, even if a bit overcomplicated. The part where [hero] knows what is going to happen to his friend but is unable to prevent it because “what’s happened has happened”, was what stayed with me the most.
I think most time travel stories aren’t just about all the mechanics and paradoxes, but also about regret, inevitability, the desire to change outcomes; and maybe that’s why I like them so much.
Over the past few months, Miki has struggled with frequent & chronic vomiting, fading fur and weight loss. I visited vets frequently, hoping for answers. Instead, I received a series of shifting diagnoses and an ever-changing list of medications and injections. None of the treatments resolved her issues and in fact, some caused additional side effects and distress.
I have been documenting all of Miki’s symptoms: dates of every vomiting and tests, fur condition, weight, fever, list of the meds or treatments given across different visits, side effects caused. Even presenting this history to the primary vet to track progress during the ongoing treatment made little difference.
Despite my repeated concerns, important tests were delayed, and the real issue wasn’t explored. When I tried going for a second opinion, some even dismissed the problem saying that basic digestive meds were enough, without acknowledging that those had already been given earlier and didn’t help.
The primary vet focused only on temporary quick fixes (anti-emetics or symptomatic meds) without properly diagnosing or addressing the root cause of her illness. They kept giving vague opinions, unhelpful injections or changing food brands. It seemed more like a trial-n-error approach than focused treatment.
Eventually it seemed like they found the cause, but the two-month long medication for it (for which I visited the clinic every single day), still didn’t bring much improvement. In the end, Miki’s condition remained unresolved.
It’s heartbreaking to watch her suffer while the vets don’t seem concerned with actually understanding the problem or helping her. It’s hard not to start distrusting the veterinary system, which now seems much like mental health professionals who treated my own health the same way.
One day during my usual routine of learning Chinese, I was trying to understand the difference between 我很高兴 (wǒ hěn gāoxìng) and 我高兴 (wǒ gāoxìng). Both mean “I am happy,” but someone online explained it in a way that stuck with me.
They said the first (我很高兴) is a more open and sincere way of expressing happiness, like simply saying, “I’m happy.”
While the second (我高兴) can come across as sharper, more assertive, like when someone questions your choices or your way of being, and you respond, “I’m happy with it. What does it matter to you?”
The exact comment was:
It made me think of how we don’t really have a phrase in English that captures that tone, or that hits that same balance: calm yet sharp, and sure of itself.
When I saw this answer, I thought of how people often tell me to act differently, speak differently, think differently, or how I should be more like others, whether it’s about my habits, my personality, my preferences or something else. And often it’s not about real flaws or things I could work on, but rather just harmless things about me that I’m actually fine with.
And every now and then, I think of that phrase, 我高兴 – and wish I could say it as effortlessly in English, in such a simple way and without further explanation: No thanks, I’m fine with how I am.
Religion is not something a person choses after thoughtful evaluation, rather it is something absorbed by birth and shaped by the family, society, and cultural environment one is born into. From early childhood, religious language, rituals, and beliefs are introduced as unquestioned truths, and are adopted long before one is capable of reflecting on them or considering alternatives.
This highlights the role of chance over choice in matters of faith. A child born in a Christian family is likely to be raised as a Christian, just as one born into a Islamic, Hindu, or Jewish family inherits the associated beliefs – not necessarily because of personal agreement, but because that is what was handed down, expected, and normalised.
Of course, some do eventually convert, leave the religion, or adopt new worldviews, but such shifts are rare and often difficult. They involve social or internal friction, because going against the inherited norm is rarely easy or welcomed. For most people, the religion they practice remains the one they happened to be born into.
I wonder about a world where religion wasn’t inherited by birth. Where everyone was given the chance to explore every religion in depth with its texts, values, history, and contradictions, before making a personal choice, free of any expectation.
Such a world would probably look very different. The distribution of religious followers in various regions might shift dramatically, and who knows how many might step outside organised religion altogether – simply because, reflection was allowed before commitment.
Maybe that’s a nice idea for a movie?
I waited so many years to get her.
Although it was a childhood dream, I kept being talked out of it until my 30’s – people said I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that it was too much responsibility, or that something would go wrong.
But when I finally brought Miki home, none of those warnings mattered. When she arrived as a small kitten with her big eyes and furry tail, I knew I had made the right decision. She quickly took over my house, and then, my life.
Now, the house has become her kingdom – toys scattered in every room, cushions and corners claimed, hidden spots discovered, and every climbing possibility explored. She appears from hiding places I didn’t know existed. I plan my routines around her meals, moods, playtime, vet visits, and mischief. She makes the house feel like a home.
Over time, even the people who once disapproved came to be softened. My mother, my boss – they too ask about her now. They’ve seen what I already knew: Miki is not just a pet – she’s much more. Whether it’s the way she awakens my sense of responsibility to care for her, or the way she lights up my life with her hide-n-seek games, her unpredictable playfulness, her mischief, her moods: they’re all treasures I didn’t know I needed.
She doesn’t need to know what I think or ask me to explain what I feel. She just stays, as a quiet presence, communicating through pure and innocent actions. There’s something so healing about that… love without words. It’s hard to dwell on life’s stress when a little furball is staring with her big eyes or is dashing on full speed in circles around the house.
Sometimes… healing just looks like a tiny cat who has claimed you as her own.
I don’t know how they do it.
Watching grandmasters like Hikaru blitz through complicated positions in seconds, or GothamChess break down crazy games with his signature humor and sharpness… it’s mesmerising. And it’s because of these iconic people that at some point in my chess journey, the game became more of an art I love to watch, rather than trying to reach their level.
When I began watching Hikaru’s lightning-fast brilliance, GothamChess’s hilarious and chaotic game reviews, the drama of top-level matches, the memes, the speedruns, the blunders, the “chat, what does this meme mean?” moments – chess became something I could enjoy without trying to win, something beautiful to witness instead of conquer.
Of course, I spent years trying. I followed every beginner’s path… tutorials, strategy guides, puzzles, analyzing classic games, studying openings I couldn’t remember two moves later. I watched streamers explain their thought processes in real time, hoping something would finally click. But no matter how much I studied, I couldn’t think several moves ahead, evaluate positions, develop a strategy or identify tactics. My brain wouldn’t cooperate with the kind of layered thinking chess demands – too many variables, too many contingencies.
Eventually, I let go of the idea that I needed to master chess, and that’s when the real love for it started. Once I gave up trying so hard to improve, I found a much deeper joy in simply watching it.
Now I scroll through endless chess memes, follow the drama of tournaments (to root for Hikaru in each of them), laugh at blunders by Magnus, and admire the intuitive brilliance of people who can see fifty moves into the future, even when blindfolded. While I may still try to get better at it on my own pace, for now I can just watch the Masters playing it, who make me love the game for what it is: beautiful, entertaining, brutal, hilarious, and way beyond me.
For most of my life, being very skinny felt like I was walking around with a flashing neon sign that said, “Open for Comments”.
Some people were very approving and believed it’s best to be thin. While others had differing opinions:
“Eat more or you’ll vanish!”
“You’re just bones!”
“You are so weak!”
And if I ever tried to exercise: “You’re already so thin! Are you trying to disappear?”
Even when my BMI moved into the healthy range, my weight in Kg still surprised people because it sounded too low, even though it was fine for my short height. So there I was, feeling like being thin was a problem, but also somehow… approved? Who knew? All the conflicting messages had made me confused. Still, having always been thin made me somewhat comfortable with it.
Fast forward to now: Things have finally changed. I’ve now got a round belly, a puffed face, and a double chin, though I’m only slightly overweight as per BMI. What hasn’t changed is that the commentary never stopped.
It has just changed forms, starting with:
“At least you’re not underweight anymore!”
Followed quickly by:
“You should try cutting carbs”
“Have you looked into intermittent fasting?”
“Just a little bit of walking every day would help”
Or my mother being like: “How will you get married now?”
Apparently, no matter where I land on the weight spectrum, people will always find something to say… like my body is a community suggestion box.
So, to anyone with helpful commentary:
Yes, I’ve heard it all – from “eat more” to “eat less” – and no, I’m not taking applications for personal trainers, lifestyle coaches or nutritionists. Thanks for your concern, I guess?
In many corners of India, there’s an unspoken belief passed down with conviction: “Don’t start working yet, focus only on exams. Then you can start your career at a higher status later.”
And so, thousands of students postpone working to spend not just one or two, but several prime years preparing for government exams, entrance tests, certifications, or professional courses – all in the hope that one day, when they finally crack it, they’ll start higher, better, and more secure.
But there’s a quiet cost to consider.
In those years of preparation, while peers are testing the waters of real jobs – learning office dynamics, building practical skills, growing confident in the working world, discovering what they’re good at and even networking – the ones in “exam mode” stay cut off from it all. The world they’re preparing to enter moves on without them.
When the exam journey stretches too long or ends without the expected result, many are left emotionally and professionally stranded. It’s not just the delay in income but also a delay in self-trust, skill building, decision-making ability, social confidence, and clarity about what one really wants from a career.
And ironically, when they do start working, some of them may even end up at the same entry level they once thought they could skip, just with more years behind them and less experience in hand.
I went through this myself during my CA Final preparation. I remember wanting to take up a job, to feel like I was actually moving, using my skills and building a foundation for my career; to feel like I was at least starting somewhere – but I kept being told that I should wait, that working would distract me and reduce my chances of passing the exams. What followed was a slow slide into depression, regret, and stagnation (and even work withdrawal symptoms?). The pressure to succeed only grew with each attempt, but my mental state made it harder to study or perform, and soon it felt like being stuck in a loop with no momentum.
Later, when I began working in IT instead, I allowed myself to study alongside jobs – and I ended up completing two degrees that way. This time, I was working, learning, earning, growing and moving forward in the professional world at the same time. My mental health was better and my confidence only grew. I wasn’t waiting for life to start – I was already in it.
I understand it may not work for everyone and some careers do require full-time, focused preparation. But it’s worth asking if a job should always be seen as an obstacle to our academic goals? Or could it be something that complements our academics and even provides overall professional growth?
Because waiting for the perfect entry point sometimes means missing the doors that were already open.
Growing up, I wondered if something was fundamentally wrong with me – if I was too emotional, too angry, too unstable, too wrong to exist. I didn’t have the language back then to understand what I was going through, but something always felt off. Like I was carrying weight that wasn’t mine, reacting to things that didn’t make sense on the surface, or shrinking myself to fit into some role that was never meant for me.
Growing up, I often felt invisible – not in the sense that I wasn’t noticed, but that I was only seen in the ways that served someone else’s idea of me. I didn’t feel like I was loved for who I was. It was more about playing the role assigned to me – meeting expectations, getting results, being impressive, talented or compliant. There wasn’t a lack of love or care in the sense of practical needs – there was an absence of nurturing and attunement, of being seen as a human with my own needs. What I thought, felt or wanted didn’t seem to matter unless it matched what was expected of me.
When I resisted, questioned, cried, or simply wanted to do what made sense to me – I was met with outrage, disapproval, control or punishment (verbal and physical). It felt like punishment for having a voice or a mind of my own. I was often treated with hostility and wondered what I did to cause it. The message seemed to be: don’t complain, don’t feel or need too much, be like everyone else, don’t be ungrateful; as if I was wrong to want to be treated kindly or with fairness.
I was often made to question reality – when I remembered an event a certain way, I was told that the opposite had happened, or that they never said what I heard them say. I was told my lived experience was invalid and I “should” feel what I was told to feel. I could sense that the words I heard didn’t match the actions I experienced. Sometimes, the conflicting messages and constant suppression of myself resulted in outbursts, which were only punished and never understood.
At some point, I started to believe the narrative they gave me and the more I tried to ‘fix’ myself, the more broken I felt. I kept wondering what was true while trying to be the high achiever, the people pleaser, the one who doesn’t question too much or cause trouble. I often felt tense, afraid, confused, angry and ashamed – always unsure whether my thoughts or feelings were real, or just signs of some flaw I couldn’t name.
The original fog created in my mind from my early experiences continued to grow in my adulthood. A few relationships which destabilised me made me look for explanations. Why did the people close to me behave this way with me? Why wouldn’t they understand who I was or what I was trying to say? Why did they say the truth was false and the false was truth? Why did they need to place unfair expectations on me, try to control me, or misjudge me? What did I do wrong and what should I have done instead? Why did I explode over things that weren’t a big deal to others? Why did other people get so bothered by things that weren’t a big deal to me? Why did I doubt myself even when I had valid reasons to trust my instincts?
Maybe I always preferred solitude over being with family or friends not because I liked being alone so much, but because it was lonelier in the presence of people who didn’t really see or value me, and didn’t truly care about my well being. Trying to connect with certain people had so often led to being dismissed, criticised, disbelieved, judged or manipulated – or attempts to fit me into the role they assigned me. Maybe that’s why I kept trying to prove my worth in adult relationships, or why I could never quite relax when I was around people.
It wasn’t until I got a lot of distance from those relationships that I started putting pieces together. That my early environment had distorted my reality, and told me that relationships only brought pain instead of understanding. Finding this familiar, in my adulthood I became involved with new people who mirrored those early dynamics.
After failed relations, years of burning anger, and attempts to explain things to those who hurt me but refused to understand, I shut down from those people to finally connect with myself – without anyone’s distortions or control. In this space, I wasn’t “crazy” after all. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t who they said I was. My instincts were right when I felt like something was off about what those people did. And I started to unlearn the idea that I must earn respect, love or permission to exist.
These realisations didn’t come all at once – they unfolded slowly and painfully, after repeatedly going over events to find answers for why so many things had to happen this way. In the process I learned that many people’s beliefs and motivations can be totally different from mine, and that my ‘craziness’ and ‘flaws’ were trauma responses to my experiences with them. In my own small ways, I started to see the truth beneath the fog, and make sense of all the confusion that was a baseline for most of my life.
And it felt like putting on glasses.
I remember watching this film on television during my childhood long ago, but as I grew up, the film seemed to disappear over the years even though it stayed in my memory. Over time, I felt like it deserved at least a write-up somewhere, but I could only find passing mentions when I searched for one.
I tried to create a detailed page for the film myself and submitted it to Wikipedia for review, but unfortunately it was not accepted due to Wikipedia’s notability criteria.
Since this was my first attempt at writing a plot summary and gathering factual details & sources for the film entirely by myself, I am sharing the page I created here, so that anyone curious about this film can find the story and details in one place.
Humko Ishq Ne Mara[1] (transl. “We were destroyed by love“) is a 1997 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy-drama telefilm directed and written by Arjun Sablok and produced by Yash Chopra[2] under the banner of Yash Raj Films.[3] Amrita Raichand, an Indian actress and celebrity chef, made her film debut with her role as Anjali in this telefilm.
Humko Ishq Ne Mara[4][5][6] was released over television in India on 20 December 1997 through the television production house Metavision launched by Chopra in 1995. This company had produced a singing reality show Meri Awaaz Suno (1995–1997)[7], which has been a launching pad for singers including those who sang for this film’s soundtracks.[8]
The film’s story is set in a college with a boarding hostel, and follows a group of youngsters who are trying to find love. Anjali visits a fortune teller and hears a prophecy with the name of her destined partner, and sets out to find him. While not a major hit, it’s known among its viewers for its emotional storytelling and heartfelt performances, offering a glimpse into the romantic dramas of the Indian 1990s, with praise for its direction, music, storyline and emotional resonance.[9][10]
| Directed by | Arjun Sablok |
| Written by | Arjun Sablok |
| Distributed by | Yash Raj Films |
| Starring | Amrita Raichand Haroun Mirza Ashish Chaudhary Charmy Kaur Omung Kumar Sagarika Sonie Dilip Tadeshwar Kushaal Punjabi Rakhee Gulzar Dalip Tahil |
| Release date | 20 December 1997 |
| Running time | 124 minutes |
| Country | India |
| Language | Hindi |
Plot
Priya, Anjali, and Jojo have recently joined the Green Valley College and have been allotted the same hostel room. They find that their fourth roommate called “Kiran” turns out to be a boy. Anjali, a dreamy beliver, visits a fortune teller to ask about her future. Since she only has Rs. 90 to pay the fortune telling lady, the only information revealed to her is that she will meet a young man having the name “Amar”, and that she will meet him in this college. Meanwhile, Jojo encounters someone from her past called Bean in the same college, who loved her during their school but was rejected by Jojo for his appearance and childish poems. Jojo now finds Bean transformed into an athletic, handsome and mature person, but she is unsure if he would still be interested in her. Priya has a pen-pal called Rahul and she loves him, but she fears rejection if he ever comes to meet her in person.
Anjali is desperate to find the person named “Amar” and sneaks out at night with Kiran to inspect the college admission records, but they are unable to find anyone with the same name. Anjali is disappointed and argues with Kiran over her belief in the prophecy in the college grounds, when she hears two people talking nearby. One of them says to the other, “Bye, Amar!” and Anjali sees someone driving away in a car. Anjali tries to run after the car, when the other person arrives near her, asking who she is looking for. She says she is looking for “Amar”, and he looks surprised and says that’s his name. Hearing this, Anjali starts a relationship with him. However, the fortune teller says that Anjali is being deceived by a fake Amar, to which he admits that his real name is indeed not “Amar”, rather it is “Aman”. This causes Anjali to leave him and continue her search for the real Amar.
Kiran becomes attracted to Priya but she receives a letter from her pen-pal Rahul, who is ready to meet her. Priya is worried because she had sent him her sister’s photograph instead of her own, so the group helps her disguise herself to look like the photograph before Rahul arrives. But during their meeting she removes her wig and fake eyelashes, wanting Rahul to accept her real self, which he rejects and leaves. Kiran believes he now has a chance, but Rahul returns after reading Priya’s letters again and asks for another chance. Priya is happy to accept Rahul, while Kiran is heartbroken. Jojo tries to approach Bean to ask for another chance, but Bean continues to show indifference, until he finally admits that he had transformed only for her, and still has only her in his heart.
Green Valley College has an upcoming obstacle course competition with a rival college and an audition for a play for the annual cultural program function. The group of boys training for the obstacle course are unable to perform as per expectations, and the college is under pressure to win this competition, otherwise all the female students studying in the college would be expelled. Their training coach unexpectedly notices a young village boy Raja, who is secretly and effortlessly completing the obstacle course at peak performance. The coach convinces the college principal to enroll Raja as a student in their college as their last hope to win the competition against their rivals. Raja’s performance threatens the rival group and they corner and beat up Raja outside, during the play performance. When the boys find Raja injured, they worry about the upcoming competition. To help them, a wise priest from Raja’s village shares an “ancient secret medicine” with them, which will heal them and boost their performance. Drinking it, Raja heals and the group becomes highly energised, eventually going on to win the competition despite the rivals’ cheating methods. The wise priest later reveals that he had only provided them with coconut water to drink, and that real strength is in what we believe.
In the celebration ceremony, the principal announces that a special guest called “Amar” will be appearing on stage. Both Anjali and Aman rush to meet the real Amar. When Amar learns that Anjali rejected Aman because his name didn’t match the prophecy, he asks Anjali if she loves Aman as much as he seems to love her. Anjali realises her love for Aman and finally embraces him, letting go of the prophecy and opening up to real love.
Cast
- Amrita Raichand as Anjali
- Haroun Mirza as Aman
- Charmme Kaur as Jojo
- Ashish Chaudhary as Bean
- Kushaal Punjabi as Raja
- Rakhee Tandon as Priya
- Dilip Tadeshwar as Kiran
- Omung Kumar
- Sagarika Sonie
- Dalip Tahil
Soundtrack
Album: Humko Ishq Ne Mara (1997)[11]
Music by: Aadesh Shrivastav[12]
List of Soundtracks:
- Jadoo Hai Yeh: Manohar Shetty, Arpana Shukla
- Aap Se Pyar Hai: Manohar Shetty, Pritha Mazumdar
- Jhoom Jhoom Chuk Chuk: Shivdutt Singh
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara: Manohar Shetty, Pritha Mazumdar
- Tara Rara Rum: Subrajit Dutta, Pritha Mazumdar
- That Was Yesterday: Subrajit Dutta, Arpana Shukla
References
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara – IMDb (Comedy), Amrita Raichand, Haroon A. Mirza, Charmme Kaur, 1997-12-20
- “Yash Chopra Filmography”, Indpaedia.com, 2025-03-10, retrieved 2025-08-10
- Hungama, Bollywood (1996-12-01). “Humko Ishq Ne Maara (TV) Cast List | Humko Ishq Ne Maara (TV) Movie Star Cast | Release Date | Movie Trailer | Review- Bollywood Hungama”.
- “Humko Ishq Ne Mara(1997)”. India Forums.
- “Humko Ishq Ne Mara on Moviebuff.com”. Moviebuff.com.
- “Humko Ishq Ne Mara”. TVGuide.com.
- “Meri Awaz Suno On Doordarshan (National) -Winners List | Music Reality Show”. Indian TVPedia.
- “TV is the new platform to show off latent talent”. India Today. 1997-12-22.
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara HindiMovies.to
- “Kushal Punjabi starred in hit films like Humko Ishq Ne Mara (1997)”. 2020-05-21.
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Aadesh Shrivastava on Apple Music, 1996-04-11
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Spotify, 1996-04-11
- Humko Ishq Ne Mara (User Blog Post), 2009-07-30
Gallery applications and social media these days have a feature of showing us old posts, pictures and videos of memories from last year. We all have a way of falling into nostalgia remembering the times we once lived, no matter how peaceful our current reality is.
Being from an army background, I was supposed to be trained in moving on to different cities within a year or two, leaving behind each temporary “home” and creating a new one in a new place. But I always had a way of becoming attached to every home and holding on to the memories of each phase of life.
Over the last year I re-visited some places including Mumbai, Varanasi and a few of the 8 areas of Delhi where I once lived. It was comforting to know that no matter how much my life and I changed, some places remain the same, reminding us of the memories we made there.
More than the memories of those times, I remembered the person I used to be in each of those phases. From a dreamy teenager to hopeless depression to what I am today, every place reminded me of the journey I took to be where I am. How in each phase I could never imagine where I would end up from there, doing the best I could with whatever I had.
We can’t time-travel yet but we can enter into a brief visit to the past in our own mind by walking the streets of a place we once called “home”. I am still wandering before I find my final residence and small trips down the memory lane keep me going!
I didn’t think I’d ever return to gaming.
For me, gaming started back when the “games” were mostly SkyRoads, Quake III, Aladin, Dave, Super Mario etc. It’s hard not to feel nostalgia for those games, even in today’s age of ultra realistic graphics.
Then life happened and I lost touch with gaming completely for several years and it all seemed like a distant past. But unexpectedly, I returned to gaming after a long pause. I thought I was returning to familiar territory at first, but instead, I felt completely out of place. It seemed like everything about gaming had changed. The mechanics, the effort and time needed to learn or master them over time, the brutal competitive environment, the ‘team playing’ – it was nothing like my childhood where gaming had seemed to be about having fun, being solo and repeating simple mechanics over time.
I experimented with FPS, MOBA & RPG games until I didn’t know what I even liked, but Valorant and WoW were the only ones to stick with me. While WoW did bring a sense of relaxation and fun, FPS became more of a never-ending struggle of trying to improve.
With FPS, I kept wondering what the problem with me was, why the people around me seemed to be in sync with everything while I couldn’t seem to improve despite trying everyday for years. There was some improvement at times, but something seemed to be wrong.
I wondered if things would have been different if I never took all those years off from it. I wondered if I needed some kind of a mentor, but I already had a supportive group of friends who were patient with me and taught me what they could. I even wondered if it was my gender (hard to avoid the thought when dealing with sexist comments from players), until I came across many female gamers and streamers who were actually good.
It’s as if there’s just something about the way my mind works that can’t keep up with the whole environment and I don’t improve in a linear way with time and effort like others do.
I’m still figuring it out. The road is long, and for now, I just want to enjoy the ride.
I still remember walking out of the exam hall without finishing. Not because I had to rush or ran out of time – I just knew I was finally done. I went back home to gather all the books and remove them from the house.
CA had become like a prison. Not right from the start, but gradually… slowly enough, that I didn’t know when it was that I had crossed over to the point of no return.
At some point during the years of my efforts towards CA, I began to realise that while there were many things about the field that suited me academically, and many ways that the subjects felt interesting and practical – somewhere deep down, I wanted to do something better, something ‘more’. But by then, I had become almost trapped in the situation – where no one supported the idea of leaving it, where I often got only motivational speeches or negative comments about quitting, and where maybe I didn’t want to disappoint the people who were so sure I was going to make it.
Before all this, I was briefly a science student enrolled in IIT coaching. I was one of those kids people point to when they talk about “potential”. But I lasted barely one month there, before being consumed by all the competition, the lectures preparing us for what’s ahead, and the information overload of concepts which felt overwhelming at the time. While I did have a past record of high scores in maths & science, I didn’t feel like I could develop the required mastery of conceptual depth in these subjects in an environment full of anxiety, competition, urgency, pressure and limited time; especially when I didn’t even have any strong interest in those topics at the time. In that phase of life, I was more drawn to something quite different.
Switching to Commerce felt like a welcome change into something much more interesting, practical and lighter. I remember feeling actually excited to go to my classes everyday, being receptive and open to learning about the world of accounting, economics and business – and I had quite a different attitude here compared to how I viewed science earlier. Maybe I could have been happy to get a chemical reaction right in a lab, but the small joys in commerce (like finally getting a balance sheet to tally) were always more special to me than that.
When I found myself in Chartered Accountancy, it wasn’t a conscious choice based on an evaluation of the career field. It became more about societal views of how commerce students aren’t supposed to just drift around – especially when its the “high scorers with potential”. It turned out that going for a simple B.Com & MBA wasn’t “professional enough” for my family, given my potential in academics. And what’s more professional than CA, right?
One of the common things people often say about CA is that it’s too easy to get into and too hard to get out of (if ever). Sure enough, I got in easily and started to learn the vast depths of accounting, auditing, finance, taxes and laws. Learning those things broadened my perspective of how organisations or industries operate in the world, and why things have to be done the way they often are.
But of course, I was never the type of person to study everyday for 18 hours. When I passed Inter/IPCC, I wrote an article called “How to clear IPCC both groups in 19 days”, based on the kind of last minute stuff I often did for exams, which went viral like crazy. People thought I had cracked the code, but the truth is that passing exams sometimes has little to do with knowledge or understanding.
When I started the mandatory training in a CA firm, things slowly turned bleak – there was depression and a lot of struggle in those 3 years of articleship, where the real experience of the job showed me that not only did I have many conceptual gaps, but that there also seemed to be some misalignment between me and this field. While I liked its structure, practical knowledge, logic, meticulous documentation, precision and problem-solving aspects – there was another side to it where the repetitive procedural tasks, rote memorisation and lack of creativity or adaptability started to feel suffocating over time.
Then came a sense of stagnation after articleship, while trying to study full time for Finals without a job. Neither last minute preparations nor several months of effort made any difference anymore, and I kept failing each attempt. Maybe my experience of disillusionment during the articleship period had made it much harder for me to give it any real focus, or maybe the ever increasing pressure from people in my life had worsened the situation, or maybe those conceptual gaps were getting harder to bridge in the Final level, which is unforgiving of anything less than perfection.
I remember trying to care, trying to go on, trying to convince myself that it will all be worth it in the end – but deep down, no matter what people said to keep me on this path, I knew this wasn’t working.
At some point I decided that while I’ll always carry my experience and knowledge of the CA journey with me, I had reached a point where I knew that this wasn’t the life I wanted to live.
After that last Final exam walkout, and very strained relations with people who didn’t support it – I didn’t really know where I wanted to go from there. I did a few courses and certifications until a mentor recognised my skills and helped me find a career field which was the “right fit” – building systems that solved business problems, not as a technical programmer but as the bridge between the business and the development team.
I started over as a beginner, absorbing as much as I could about this new world, as I eventually became an IT Business Analyst working on international software projects, where I help design systems to solve problems for business organisations. While CA gave me discipline and taught me about the business world & structured systems, I.T. gave me a chance to build new systems and enable businesses to function better. It was here that all my ‘weaknesses’ in the CA field turned into great strengths, because here I could work on evolving systems and enable change in the functioning of businesses in several areas, rather than just audit them, verify compliance or provide consulting. And so it was here that I found long term growth, stability and alignment.
So yes, I didn’t start out knowing which field was right for me. I tried to study science, and then I tried to make it through CA, but the years kept passing with no real results or growth. But when I found the field where I could combine my business knowledge with my natural flair for technology, problem-solving and creativity, my efforts finally led to real results. As I worked hard to learn and build parallel skills in IT & Management, I went on to even complete MCA & MBA alongside work. Growing and contributing more every year, I reached almost at par with many peers who never transitioned.
And the stability & fulfilment I have now is enough to be able to move on from all the years of feeling lost before. When I think about CA now, I respect its legacy in my life and how that experience gives me a different perspective in I.T. today compared to if I had always been a computer/tech student.
The last exam became the first step into a more rewarding journey ahead. And so I believe that sometimes, taking the road less travelled can lead us to a different kind of light at the end of the tunnel.
Of all human emotions, anger gets an especially bad reputation. To display anger or aggression is almost universally condemned. Whether we’re dealing with authority figures, or engaging with our families, workplaces, relationships, or are in public spaces, the expectation is often the same: suppress your anger.
I guess in my case, trying to meet this expectation has flipped me over to the other side. Years of suppressing anger in the face of mistreatment and being unheard have now started to make me occasionally explode like a volcano. And of course, I’m usually blamed for it.
So I wonder, why is the expression of anger treated as the problem, rather than what caused it? Why does society treat angry people as the aggressors, while ignoring the aggressions that led to the reaction?
Anger is not an enemy but a friend, a signal. It tells us when our boundaries have been crossed, when something feels unjust, when we’ve been hurt or violated. Without anger, we may just as well be robots who cannot identify when something is unacceptable or when something needs to change. Anger is a response to something wrong, and yet what’s considered ‘wrong’ is the anger itself.
It’s not that I support extreme reactions, and I think exploding in anger is just as bad as total suppression of anger, as one fuels the other. But while I hope to someday remain calm even under extreme provocation or mistreatment, I also wish society would hold provokers accountable: those who misuse power, exploit dynamics, disrespect boundaries, or are inconsiderate.
Emotional control should not be a one-sided burden placed only on the person who breaks. Without shared responsibility, expecting the angry to ‘master their emotions’ while the aggressor is never held accountable is not only unfair but also creates an imbalance.
And now since thinking about this is making me angry, its time for deep breathing and usual techniques to calm down. One thousand, nine ninety nine, nine ninety eight….
I have a general confidence problem with most things other than my career by this point. So many of my hobbies have been buried under the weight of my chronic self-doubt. Recently, I tried to take some baby steps – tried to look at myself in the mirror recently and move my arms & legs with a dance number playing in the background. But due to my inconsistency with such attempts i.e. once in several months, the end result is usually that my fears become even stronger.
As a child, I would go to classical dance classes, try to copy dance moves from the television and practice them with my friends, participate in every school annual function and be otherwise very enthusiastic about dance. I was rarely worried about things like being ‘good enough’ or being ‘ashamed’ of any mistakes to the point of avoiding this activity completely. It was all so natural, easy…. Until somewhere along the line I became the brand ambassador of how to voluntarily stay in a prison. The more I hid myself and reduced my attempts to even try, the worse my fear became.
When I look at the few performance videos from my teenage, I can barely identify with myself. How could I, the same person, have turned into this paralysed version who gives up hopelessly even before making an attempt? (Unless there is vodka involved)
While I can’t go back in time to retrieve that version of my carefree brain, maybe I can at least un-learn whatever doesn’t belong to me and kind of ‘reset’ myself.
So do I think I can “still” dance? No.. But can I start over and be a beginner once again at something which once defined me as a person? Also No.. But will this ever change? …Maybe.
I recently got the terrible news that someone I knew committed suicide.
As is common, most people are saying things like “If only she had gone out to meet friends and talked about her problems…”
If I had a rupee for each time someone has said to me that I should “just go out and meet people” and “just be happy”, I’d be a millionaire. It’s as if people think this is the ultimate remedy for any mental health issue. Sure, it can help to meet people, but let’s not pretend it’s the all-time-cure for deeper issues.
I feel like people who have never experienced depression are quick to believe that the person is just sad or lonely, or hasn’t gone out or met others enough. But people don’t know whether, or how much, the person may have already tried those things. Or that their mental health may not be allowing them to do those things anymore.
My depression has probably lasted several years because of not getting the right help at the right time. Because most people give such generic suggestions and refuse to acknowledge depression as a real problem, the person struggles to find any support or help when it is needed.
Maybe it’s not about just meeting a large number of people, but rather about meeting the right ones. Quality over quantity. And often, the person doesn’t find those right people who would truly listen, understand and support the person to get better.
Medical help can be necessary in some cases as well, but the same problem applies there – the right therapist or doctor may be hard to find, especially in India. And in the face of unhelpful people everywhere, the person may reach the point of no return.
I wish the environment here and everywhere in the world someday changes and the quick suggestion to “just go out and meet people” is replaced with something real and helpful.
Sometimes, there’s a kind of silence that follows you after a reaction… a silence not of peace, but of judgment. It’s the silence where some people make a quiet decision: that you are the problem, you are unreasonable, you are difficult. And once that image is locked in, everything you say or do is filtered through it.
Some people in my life seemed to view me with such a lens. Angry or emotional reactions I had to their behaviour were automatically considered “wrong” or viewed without context. I don’t deny that my reactions often got explosive due to build-up over long periods, and I continue working on managing their intensity. But I don’t believe the intensity itself should become a reason for erasing the cause behind the reaction.
But they only seemed shocked when I reacted. It was usually hard for me to identify the exact name for the behaviours, but over time I could recognise things like them invalidating my experiences or boundaries, trying to control or manipulate me, shaming who I was, or reframing real incidents into another version that felt unrecognisable. And when these actions caused me to have reactions, I was told that my feelings were baseless, my hurt was invalid, and the impact of their actions simply didn’t matter. They erased the context of my reactions and what led up to it, as if my response came out of nowhere and confirmed that something was wrong with me.
But I had already wondered all my life if something was wrong with me. It’s not surprising then, that in the face of such judgments, I repeatedly went over every incident, questioning the validity of my feelings – trying to find out if the way I felt was really as unreasonable as they said. After a long time of going over things from several angles, after questioning my own actions and comparing it to theirs, after reading materials on relational dynamics – in the end, I found that I did have real reasons to feel the way I did after all. It was just that they didn’t seem to think so.
I thought the reason why they didn’t acknowledge it was that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’. In a way, that gave me hope, because if it was just that they weren’t aware of their actions, or they had misunderstood my response to them – then surely, I thought, I could explain. That if I could just show them the cause-and-effect of events, they would finally come to see that my feelings were valid. That I was willing to work on my expression of those feelings, but also hoped that we could connect without hurting each other.
What I didn’t know was that this would become a trap. Each time I tried to explain what I was feeling or why something hurt, I was met with complete refusal. They either disengaged, or shifted the blame onto me, or turned it into an argument, or said there was no point in talking about it.
The more this happened, the more I began to over-explain, starting to feel as if I needed to build a complete case for it to finally get through. I started going into timelines, even walking through events step by step, trying to say: This is why I said that. This is why I felt that way. I kept thinking that if I could just convey everything clearly enough, they may finally see my attempts and meet me halfway, and this may be how we could resolve things.
Every time, I hoped: maybe now they’ll get it, maybe now it’ll stop. But the more carefully I explained, the more shocking the response became – as if my clarity somehow made things worse. As if the message was: “Your feelings, your experience, your struggle, your explanation — none of it matters. You’re still wrong.”
It deeply confused me.
They never felt the need to explain why they behaved in hurtful ways or why they judged my reactions; they just did. They never saw any reason to engage with what I said in good faith. Their judgments were final, and their behaviour would never change, no matter what I said. It started to seem like they refused to listen, not because that was the only option, but so that they could maintain the story they created about me… a story where they were always right and I was the problem.
I guess it finally shattered my illusion that these were all just misunderstandings. They just never wanted to understand. They never wanted to question or change how they treated me or how their actions affected my life. They weren’t people who were just missing some context; they were people interested in preserving their own version of the story, not in building a bridge.
And I guess I no longer care what their version says anymore.
Halfway into adulthood, most people realise how many things necessary to navigate a decent life were never taught in school or college. Important matters such as finances, debt & mortgage, mental health awareness, relationship/marriage, consent, criminal laws and much more is left to be discovered by the student several years after completing school or college, where the focus is on memorising textbook contents and reproducing the same in structured examinations. And one wonders at some point – why aren’t these life skills ever taught in school?
This is a result of a misunderstanding that school is meant to prepare us for life ahead, which is far from the truth, especially in the Indian academic system where outdated syllabus continues to be taught for decades; and the syllabus itself is based on theory, formulas and memorisation of definitions which most likely will never be used in real life. Schools and colleges are clearly not designed to encourage free thinking or assisting a student in becoming a good citizen.
The academic system was designed, instead, to produce workers. Education was designed to have sequential knowledge imparted on students which will enable them to be useful in the workforce – whether as engineers, doctors, accountants or other professions which the country requires. Schools can be considered as factories where skilled & obedient workers are the output.
Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.
http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model
Industrialism gave birth to the concept of human factories where independent thinking or talents are diminished, so that employers are able to find adequate workforce to fill in the vacancies in various professional fields. Whether one stays back in the home country or decides to move abroad, life skills are learned over time with experience or trial and error. There are no guidelines on how to be a parent, how to manage taxes, how to be a good citizen, how to crack an interview or how to honour one’s own inner voice. And the pattern continues generation over generation.
While we will still send our future children to school, we must also educate the new generation on things which they will never be taught in school. We have all had to struggle in various areas of life due to ignorance passed down from our own previous generations, but we can create a better generation which is equipped to excel not just in exams but in all areas of life.
We can hope that the education system is reformed someday, but instead of waiting for a miracle, we can take the first steps in educating ourselves and passing down real education to today’s children.
We all have wondered at some point whether our life is driven completely by our free-will and coincidences, or whether there is some greater order which pre-determines where we will end up, with whom, and how. Whether “destiny” is inflexible & rigid, or whether there is an element of free-will in minor decisions while the major aspects of our life (career, marriage, academics etc) are already set in stone for us to play the role we were “meant” to.
For several years, my life seemed completely out of my control. Things happened as per other people’s will which affected my life permanently, even though I tried to change the outcomes, I could not entirely break free of the apparent influence of other people over my life, health, career, etc. At some point I too wondered, what is really in our control and what isn’t?
Anyone who knows me is aware that I am an atheist – a non-believer in things like destiny. I believe in personal choices & consequences – that we determine where we end up, with whom, and how, on the basis of the choices we make every day of our lives. We steer our lives in the direction we choose, and if we overcome all obstacles in our way, we will reach where we want to see ourselves.
We can bring change even in seemingly rigid situations if we make the effort sincerely without giving up. We can bring order even in a seemingly uncontrollable chaotic life. Our “destiny” is nothing but the outcome which has the highest probability based on the choices we have made on the way. We have more control over our lives than we believe – and all it takes to re-build our lives is the belief that we are stronger than our fears, obstacles, doubts, influence of other people, etc.
As long as we believe that we “belong” in a life we don’t like and that we are powerless to change anything, we voluntarily remain tied down in a prison of our own making – until we realise what it means to be caged, we can never realise what true freedom means.
The freedom to think, feel and act in accordance with our authentic desires and a well laid-out plan to fly out of the cage we find ourselves in. Unless one believes in the power of their own free-will, one’s “destiny” remains a product of uncontrollable factors, until one starts to take complete ownership of their life and create everything that one has dreamed of.
All it takes to be free is to believe that we have the power to create our own destiny.
It seems like it’s all too common for atheists finding themselves having to explain the reason why they don’t believe in God, which can occasionally turn into endless debates leading nowhere – where atheists may point out lack of scientific proof or other logical flaws in such conversations, while the believers may counter with how we don’t see/hear many things which exist or that all phenomena cannot be explained by science.
I often found these conversations pointless and exhausting, whether I was a part of them or just witnessing it with others. I’ve never heard of anyone being logically convinced by arguments to believe or disbelieve in anything, yet people seem to keep trying anyway. I’ve always noticed how the default-mode of most people seems to be to believe in some form of religion or God, making atheists seem like the odd ones out – who are then expected to justify why they do not align themselves with any belief system, sometimes leading to conversations intended to convince them to believe just like everyone else. But I feel like if believers expect people to respect all different faiths, they can at least try to respect atheism as well – even if atheism aligns with non-belief.
I was raised a Hindu, but right from early childhood, I never felt like religious beliefs really resonated with me. Rather than feeling any ‘comfort or belonging’, I usually felt uncomfortable when Hinduism or even spirituality seemed to be imposed on me by the people around me. Still, I was always open to knowing more about various belief systems, even if it was more out of detached curiosity than emotional resonance.
Over the years after school, I went on to learning Hinduism in more depth and also to explore other faiths including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, “New Age Spirituality”, etc. I found an affinity for Buddhism for its structured nature and meditation techniques for calming the mind, Hindu Vedanta philosophy of Brahman – and even a brief phase with things like Law of Attraction. While there were certainly times when I did feel some kind of purpose, meaning, or comfort through them, such occasions were usually temporary, leaving me more misaligned with practical life than providing any real ‘positives’. Eventually, even after a lot of exploration, reading, joining groups, and giving these beliefs a fair chance, I could not align myself with any of these belief systems – as in the end, all these ideas of “God”, “Religions” or “Spirituality” have all just been created by human beings, in an attempt to create meaning in the seemingly unpredictable, chaotic and meaningless nature of life.
Human beings have created images of God, Religion and Spirituality based on people’s own images, as part of people’s own attempts to give meaning & direction to human lives, decide on and enforce an acceptable code of conduct, create rituals to enable a sense of belonging with people of the same faith, or to make people feel the comfort of having a divine being looking out for them in cosmic ways. And while there may be some aspects of truth in each of these belief systems, or they each may be different roads leading to the same destination – in the end they all seem like incomplete fragments or human fantasies of filling the gaps of what we know with stories based on collective resonance, and not really truth.
I feel like as human beings, we may never be able to fully understand the complete nature of reality or our existence, or why things happen the way they do in our lives – as it is rightly said that these things seem to be beyond human understanding. And as long as we remain unable to truly comprehend or accept the truth of our existence – whether there are indeed cosmic laws governing us, or whether all events in human history are merely random, meaningless coincidences – whether or not any of these faiths are credible is in the end, unknowable.
And maybe I find it better to leave some things unknown, rather than filling the blanks by believing in man-made religions solely for emotional comfort – until either human knowledge evolves enough to find any real answers, or until people get comfortable enough with simply not knowing.
Of course, it’s worth saying that everyone is a believer in something. Like religious or spiritual groups believe in their respective faiths, maybe atheists believe in life being largely determined by our own choices, or destiny being in our own hands. And while there may or may not be divine external forces influencing our lives, maybe we just choose to focus on things within our own control despite these unknowable forces, creating our own purpose or meaning along the way.
When I first created this blog years ago, I wrote a lot of scattered things like absurd stories, half-formed ideas, opinions on various topics, or just what was happening in life. And no matter what kind of random idea it was, the writing came easily.
But then, somewhere along the line… life got messy. For about a decade, I was in a difficult mental space… the kind that slowly shuts down expression. My ability to write became limited, becoming more confined to private journaling than freely sharing my thoughts outside, like I once used to. Even when I tried to get back to it, it felt kind of forced, as if something was blocking my mind.
These days though, it seems like that old sense of writing is returning in pieces.
I know this might not look like a grand announcement. But to me, this might be the most important post I’ve written in so many years. I’m not sure how often, or for how long, I’d really be able to write. But for now, I’m here. At least that’s some kind of a (re)start.
Bear hugs for your kind words. Still getting used to people actually being proud of me 😅
Aren't you a bright ray of sunshine! I am so glad you wrote this. It's like a whole new you.…
Well said as always. Thats food for thought to me that I'm going to definitely ponder.
So wonderfully said. I love your thoughts too much <3
I think, doubt is a prerequisite for those who want to believe in the divine. So i could not agree…