Turning 41

 I used to write taking-stock posts at the end of the year, but since I haven’t done that in a few years, might as well do it on the occasion of my birthday. And, what a year it has been! This time last year, I didn’t any of the three people who would go on to become my closest friends in the ensuing months. I was glad that I had crossed off the adulting milestone of buying a car before I turned 40. Now I am in Cambodia, and I don’t have any intention of buying a car or even a scooter any time soon. My current location is as different from Western Massachussets as you can imagine, and Instagram posts about fall colors from friends there do make me nostalgic. I can feel like a different person from a year ago, even though I am still trying to figure out how exactly. Aspects of myself that befuddled me and occasionally troubled me don’t weigh so heavily any longer. The people I met, the experiences I had during my last year in the US have given me fresh eyes to look at love and relationships.

 I haven’t built a community like I did during my final year in the US, but I am far from a recluse. Yesterday, I read a post from Ester Perel that said “love sits on the crossroads between choice and chance”, and I take that to mean platonic love as much as romantic love. The search for love in whatever form, my “say-yes-to-everything” phase, doesn’t feel like an ordeal. At the same time, I have a better sense of which self-care practices work for me, independent of whether I am in community or not. I have gained the realization that it is easy to get distracted in our hyper-online world, and sometimes the difference between feeling blue and feeling upbeat is the amount of time spent doom-scrolling. Yoga, writing (blogging and journaling), sending and receiving voice-notes, and spending at least a few hours outside the house are the pillars of my self-care routine.

 

Taking Agency

My Disaffection With the West

I started writing this post yesterday as a lookback on my first week in Phnom Penh, but I realised that I didn’t have much to say beyond what I had said to friends and family in phone calls and voice-notes. You can only grumble about the traffic and the lack of ceiling fans so much before you bore yourself. But today I read two essays which helped me better articulate my deep disillusionment with the West. The first article says something new and interesting about a topic on which it feels like everything that can be said has already been said. Western intellectuals have rightly accused of moral cowardice, intellectual dishonesty, rank hypocrisy for their silence after Oct 7. But, as the author pointed out, moral cowardice is a choice, moral stupidity is an instinctive response to a truth that is too difficult to comprehend—that the international liberal order is rotten to the core. Confronting this truth would entail rethinking one’s belief about the nature of Western society and one’s place in said society. The denialism that this dissonance births are deeply troubling to someone who is not from the West. The other article was a memoir by an Indian writer who was lured to the West by the promise of an intellectual life that Western universities are so good at selling. He, like I, had no illusions about empire, but felt like they could carve space for themselves in Western academic to do meaningful work while enjoying a comfortable standard of living. That space has been squeezed to such an extent that it feels impossible to escape the slime. We were well-read, well-educated, progressive post-colonial subjects that were primed for a world that no longer existed. The only way out is to leave, unless one has compelling reasons to stay.

Things of the West that I will miss

 I have written about how this life change feels more momentous than the previous two ones because I am leaving the West. Whether this change will be temporary or permanent I don't know. Yes, I feel a deep sense of faigue and disillusionment with life in the West, so much so that I don't even feel like visiting for the next few years, even though some of my closest friends live there. That said, I will miss many things about living in the West, which I am going to set out today, in rough order of significance.

1) Living in a temperate climate: If one believes there are two type of people--people who feel too hot or too cold--I am defnitely the former. Yes, I come from the hottest country in the world, and Cambodia cannot possibly be hotter than, say Delhi, but I will miss being in a temperate climate and not having to worry about whether the sweat from my back thighs is drawing an outline of my  underwear. I will also miss living in a place which has seasons, not just for variety but also to serve as a bookmarks for the events in my life. 

2) Nature: I have been fortunate to live in places that combine the cultural and social possibilities of large town/small city living with access to nature. The Hague has the sea, Bristol has acres of rolling green spaces, Northampton has the bike path and small hills around. It remains to be seen whether I will keep up my running habit in a bustling city which seems to be as flat as a pancake. 

3) Public libraries: I am not someone who buys a lot of books, so i was spoiled by great public library systems in both Bristol and Northampton/Amherst.

4) Hippie pursuits: I ahve had the good fortune of living in places with a strong alternative cultural vibe. My views about it are not uncritical but i will miss the oportunity to dabble in stuff such as contact improv and clowning. 

5) Conveniences: This one needs little explanation.

Airport Blog San Francisco August 2026

 I haven’t written a blog post in a while and an airport blog in a year and a half. It hasn’t been for want of blogging material. My life over the past six months was fertile ground for blogging ideas. But, I was processing my experiences in different ways—therapy, journalling and conversations with close friends, one of whom I met more than two months after my last blog post. But, it feels like we have been friends for much longer, as we spent a lot of time together during the past four months. To be honest, I didn’t feel the need to blog. I do enjoy blogging but a part of the draw is that it is a succour for my loneliness. And, I felt less alone in the past few months because I felt like I was part of a village. But, now its time to leave, and when I said goodbye to the village a week ago, it was heart-breaking. I can’t remember feelings so desolate about leaving a place since the end of my time at ACJ eighteen years ago. To a lesser extent, at the end of my time at ISS. If I had known at the time that it would be last time I would see my closest friend at ISS, it would have been different. At the same time, it feels like the right time to say goodbye to the West and seek my fortune elsewhere. I don’t think I will be visiting the West any time soon. So, in a sense this farewell feels more momentous because its not just the end of two years of living in the US but the end of 12 years of living in the West. This also means that I won’t see some close friends who are tethered to their lives here. That is the fate of the nomad. People you won’t see for years or ever again take up space in your heart. In the middle of a mushroom trip last week, I blubbered to a friend, “If only we could all live next to each other forever”. But, if bonds of friendship were the only thing tugging at our hearts, we would find a way. Would I have tried harder to stay if I had known that I would become part of such a loving village in my final few months in the US? I am not sure. My time in the US has been great for my personal growth and I will always be glad I moved here. I am not an ambitious person in the conventional sense of the word. But, I am curious about what I can offer the world, and that is what is pushing me eastward.  

ER Visit

I had abdominal pain come on last morning and get worse over the day. After much internal debate and some prodding from chatgpt I decided to go to the ER. I knew enough about abdominal pain that appendicitis is a risk, and because it was in my lower right quadrant, I knew it was a concern. I was nervous, since it was my first time seeking emergency medical help anywhere in the world. Unplanned visits to the doctor anywhere in the world involve a lot of waiting, unless you are dying and in some places even if you are dying. A chatgpt query told me that I should prepare for a 4-6 hours visit as a best case. If I had appendicitis, it could be as long as 24 hours. I mulled whether to get an Uber but decided to drive myself. If it was a short visit, I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of a snowy night waiting for an Uber. When I reached there, the waiting room was so sparsely occupied that I had double-check if it was the ER. No chaos, no patients waiting on stretchers, nothing that would make for good drama on a TV show. All the medical staff I encountered were friendly and solicitous and I didn’t have to “advocate” for myself. I knew that they would do a blood test, physical examination and a CAT scan and this exactly what they did. No appendicitis, but I did have an inflation of the colon. I was free to go, and the only treatment would be a dose of antibiotics. So, I did have something, but it did not serious, which, to me, sounded like the best possible outcome. As I told my friend, its nothing serious AND I do not feel like an idiot for going to the ER. It was not the end of the story though. My decision to go to the ER was vindicated because my pain got worse after I got home and ate something. I was able to sleep but this was definitely enough pain to make an ER visit a no-brainer, especially if appendicitis hadn’t be ruled out. This morning, I woke up feeling sore and groggy, with the pain level unchanged from the previous night. But, I was not feeling anxious. I felt like this was a chance to take a break from matters of the head and the heart—career uncertainty and my dating life. In good health, few people are able to switch of from these worries without feeling guilt, especially career problems. But poor health is a good justification to take a break without guilt. I am not out of the woods yet and maybe the illness will take an unexpected turn. But, for now at least, I am grateful for being able to hit the pause button on these problems.

Working ThroughVs Expressing Feelings

Which feelings should one “work through” and which feelings should one express? I am conflict-averse by nature so received wisdom holds that I should get better at asserting my boundaries. But in at least two instances in recent weeks, I swallowed my feelings and decided to digest them instead of expressing them, and thanked myself later for it. My feelings have been so volatile lately that I can’t trust them to stay in place long enough for me to act on them and not regret it. So what is to be done? Firstly, I might be using the terms feelings wrongly, at least according to some people. Emotions are mental states (sadness, jealousy, etc) while thoughts are interpretations of these mental states, and feelings are physical manifestations of those mental states. There is a lot of work out there urging people to pay attention to their “physical” feelings instead of getting swept up in emotions and thoughts. I read a book not that long ago titled Radical Acceptance, which has a central message of accepting every feeling without resistance and observing it instead of judging it. To pay attention to the parts of the body that feelings manifest as physical sensations. My problem is all my feelings seem to emanate from the  right lower abdomen. And, I am not sure how that knowledge helps.

Resisting Fascism

I had ambitious plans of working yesterday but then I checked the news and those plans went out the window. An ICE thug shot a protester dead in Minneapolis. She was a white female US citizen, widely considered the least threatening demographic and most deserving of protection from violence. Yes, this is not the first person ICE has killed and ICE has been brutalizing immigrants for months. But, if ICE can shoot a white woman in public, with a clear recording of the incident, with impunity, who knows what they can get away with. I have written before about how fascism is unfolding differently in the US and in India. In India, the fascist regime has slowly suffocated democratic institutions, taking them apart brick by brick. No need for shock-and-awe if you have a right-wing population that is broadly supportive of your agenda. And, fascism has to be resisted in the streets because given enough time, fascists neutralize the courts and make sure they don’t lose elections. When fascists control the state, resisting fascism becomes an extraordinarily risky business. But people have always done extraordinarily risky things for love and faith (not necessarily the religious kind). In India, not many days go by without reports of so-called “honour” killings, which is when members of an upper-caste family kill their daughter and her low-caste husband/lover as they believe their romance sullies their family’s “honour”. I read a statistic somewhere that, around the world, women are most at risk of being killed by intimate partners. But, I don’t imagine there are many places where they are at risk of being killed by their fathers and brothers. Honour killings are not a widespread phenomena in India but the very fact that they still happen is an abomination. However, news reports of honour killings fill me with both revulsion and hope and admiration. Hope and admiration for the young lovers who know that they could pay with their lives for loving the wrong person but still do. Humans have always done things that any rational risk assessment would rule out.