Category: Personal Essays

Essays about my life and stuff

  • A Day Out in Ahmedabad

    Dear Reader, Yesterday I went out to spend some time on my own. It is important to me, especially as an INTJ, even though the MBTI is not much more scientific than astrology, that I spend some time alone. Even as a Pisces, alone time is crucial for me. And when the house is filled…

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  • Self-Meta-Critical Letter/Journal Entry

    Dear Reader, How are you? How’s life? Can you really answer these questions? You can reply to this email and the replies will automatically get posted as comments under the blogpost for this letter. And if you do that, I will definitely read them and reply and perhaps even continue the conversation. But the more…

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  • A New Year of Philosophy

    Dear Reader, The year is almost over. In a couple of days, we’ll be celebrating the beginning of a new year. I’ve never been one to celebrate New Year’s Eve because to me it feels too arbitrary. I think one’s birthday is a more accurate and personalized new year for a person because they’ve gone…

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  • The Tragedy of the Human Condition

    Dear Reader, I’ve been thinking about happiness. I believe that most people in the world are driven by happiness. Underneath it all, we all just want to be happy; even the psychopaths and the evil warlords. The problem, of course, is that we disagree on how we can achieve happiness. If only we could convince…

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  • A Recovering Anhedonic

    This is a tricky question for me because for years I was depressed and couldn’t feel happy at all. I was definitely experiencing anhedonia. I could only get excited about the prospect of doing something, like eating something delicious, but when I actually did that thing, I found it hard to feel anything at all.…

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    A Recovering Anhedonic
  • Good Manners and Propriety

    Dear Reader, When I was a child and we were learning about letter writing in school, they told us to begin each informal letter with some kind of sentence that informs the recipient of how you are and asks them about how they’re doing. One example I’ve never forgotten was, “I’m doing fine, and hope…

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  • Finding Something to be Grateful for

    Dear Reader, How quickly one week flies! It feels like I sat down to write the first ‘Dear Reader,’ letter just yesterday. I had planned to write a blog post every day but it didn’t turn out like that. And that’s fine. I’ve been trying to be more flexible and flow along with life. My…

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  • Expanded Perspective About Humans

    Dear Reader, I sit down to write this letter on a pleasant morning in Ahmedabad. December has officially begun and right now it’s a wonderful 16 degrees centigrade, which my friends in Ahmedabad find chilly but for me, coming from the Himalayas, it’s t-shirt weather. Two pigeons on the windowsill keep staring at me and…

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  • Indian Middle-Class Guilt

    I would like to be an artist. But something within me, stops me from expressing myself freely. I don’t know what I want to express or how I want to express it; but that’s something you learn by doing. It’s not that you think about what you want to express and have a clear picture…

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    Indian Middle-Class Guilt
  • Terrence Howard And My Own Delusions of Grandeur

    A few months ago, the actor Terrence Howard appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and expounded on his theories about math, physics, chemistry etc. His theories, and I’m being as polite as I can manage, were pure bovid excrement. He talked about how 1 x 1 can’t be 1 and should be 2. He talked…

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    Terrence Howard And My Own Delusions of Grandeur