kirukkal.com

September 8, 2025

No rush, Monsieur

[if you’re wondering how our good reader ended up here croissants in hand, books still unread, the backstory is available in two equally unhelpful installments: part 1 and part 2.]

“Bonjour, monsieur. Voilà votre café crème… et votre Hemingway starter kit.”

(“Good morning, sir. Here is your coffee… and your basic tourist intellectual package.”)

The waiter smirked, setting down the tray: café crème foaming, orange juice bright as stained glass, and a pain au chocolat sweating butter through its paper sleeve. But the true relic, of course, was the paperback copy of A Moveable Feast, spine already cracked at page 36, the universal signal to every Parisian waiter that the guest believed himself the reincarnation of Hemingway, only hungrier and less published. The Good Reader stiffened, determined to look serious, as though the waiter’s sarcasm had been meant for the other thirty people attempting the same ritual that morning.

At 8:07 a.m., on the terrace of Café de Flore, the boulevard unfolded into theater. Women in sundresses rehearsed Instagram reels, pacing back and forth until their boyfriends got the hair flick just right. Men in linen shirts staged static photo shoots, clutching hardcovers as props, their faces tilted into the kind of fake concentration that suggested deep reading but was actually just mild sun glare. Tourists orbited the tables, selfie-sticks extended like medieval lances. Even joggers slowed, aware that every stride might end up in someone else’s “Paris morning vibes” reel.

And in the middle of it all sat our Good Reader, book open, brow furrowed, a man entirely convinced he was summoning Hemingway’s ghost through osmosis. This was performance art, with himself as the unpaid extra. And even as he underlined a sentence with priestly solemnity, there was already a telltale tremor in the air, the unmistakable prelude to failure. Paris had not yet defeated him, but it was warming up.

The Good Reader stirred his cafe creme, reverent as if channeling Hemingway through dairy. He sipped, frowned, and realized the grim fact: this was not black coffee. This was espresso disguised, padded with milk, foam, and Parisian attitude. He raised a hand.

“Excuse me,” he asked, vowels wilting in the humid air, “do you have… just black coffee?”

The waiter did not blink. He smirked the way only a Parisian waiter can, having seen this exact scene thirty times already that week.

“Non, monsieur. Ici, il n’y a pas de ‘black coffee.’ We have café allongé. We have Americano for tourists who miss their office mugs. But in Paris…” He placed another tiny cup beside the first with theatrical precision. “…in Paris we drink espresso.” Then he leaned in, delivered the line with velvet sarcasm, and in doing so baptized the Good Reader into the true religion of café culture:

“Here’s your espresso, monsieur. No rush, monsieur.”

breakfast in paris

The words clung like prophecy. No rush, monsieur. Half insult, half gospel, the phrase became the Good Reader’s refrain for the rest of his Parisian days. Every time he tried to hurry a waiter for the check, every time he opened Google Maps only to discover the average café stay was 2 hours 37 minutes, the city whispered it back: No rush, monsieur. This was Paris, the capital of lingering, the republic of loafing, the empire where art is born not in haste but in the holy slowness of small cups and large afternoons.

But how had he landed here, espresso in hand, Hemingway at page 36, performing seriousness while photobombing three Instagram reels? Rewind. Two days earlier, unread and overfed in Chennai, the Good Reader had boarded a British Airways flight to London with the posture of a man boarding the Ark: one man, one tote bag, twelve unread books. Somewhere over the Black Sea, between turbulence and reheated paneer tikka curry, he decided London was merely a foyer, a polite lobby to the true cathedral. Paris. Paris was where artists sharpened their pens, where painters invented light, where writers birthed manifestos between cigarettes and indigestion. He would not stop at London. He would tunnel under water itself if he had to. And in the 1920s and ’30s, Paris had been the heady crossroads of the Lost Generation, a magnet for starving artists and restless expatriates chasing cheap wine, cheaper rents, and the illusion that genius might be contagious. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, they had all brooded and brawled here, drinking their youth and their doubts into art. To the Good Reader, that history meant Paris was not just a city but a proving ground, the only proper arena where a reading pilgrimage could turn into scripture.

And so, like all great pilgrimages, it began at an airport bookstore. Heathrow, Terminal 5. A display table groaning under pastel thrillers, leadership manifestos, and cookbooks promising enlightenment through lentils. And there, gleaming faintly through the clutter: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. The thirteenth book of his summer, bought with the solemn conviction that it could only be read in Paris, on a terrace, with overpriced coffee and a smug expression. He tucked it reverently beside his other eleven volumes, carried them onto the Eurostar as if smuggling contraband genius, and emerged two hours later into the City of Light, unread but glowing with intention.

Back at Café de Flore, the Good Reader adjusted his paperback to page 36 of A Moveable Feast, convinced this would be the day his life changed. The sentence he underlined was Hemingway’s famous line: “There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.” He stared at it with solemnity, mouthing the words like scripture, and managed, before destiny intervened, to read exactly six additional lines.

Because the pain au chocolat was steaming. Because the orange juice gleamed in its glass. He bit. He sipped. He asked the waiter, foolishly, why the juice tasted so fresh. The waiter, without missing a beat, “Because, monsieur, it was squeezed twenty seven seconds before you walked in. No rush, monsieur.” The book closed itself. The pastry dissolved. The orange juice staged its own applause. Literature could wait; butter could not.

Upstairs, he discovered the restroom, not a restroom but a reliquary, wood-paneled and echoing with ghosts. He gazed at framed photos of Sartre and Beauvoir, their cigarettes burning like exclamation marks against the café’s long mornings. Hemingway had sat here too, brooding into notebooks; Fitzgerald had stumbled through; the entire 20th century had apparently stopped for coffee here, leaving behind wisdom, love affairs, and possibly overdue bills. The Good Reader, bladder empty but heart full, descended the narrow staircase like a pilgrim returning from the holy of holies.

He asked the waiter to take a picture of him, book in hand, brow furrowed, staged in perfect imitation of an intellectual lost in thought. The waiter obliged with the resigned air of a man who had done this 500 times that week. The result was convincing enough for Instagram, less convincing for reality. By noon, the Good Reader had abandoned reading entirely, retreated to his hotel bed, and fallen asleep in the full dignity of Hemingway’s page 36.

When he woke later that afternoon, sunlight slanting through Paris, he decided: today was for the Eiffel Tower. A place for love, yes, but also for books. If Paris demanded you either kissed beneath its iron ribs or read there, he would choose the latter. Romantic gestures could wait

Warnings echoed in his head. Everyone on the Eurostar, everyone he had ever met, even the Uber driver in London, had whispered of Paris pickpockets like priests warning of demons. Fear stricken, the Good Reader placed all twelve of his unread books in the hotel safe, along with his passport, wallet, and dignity. He carried his phone in his shorts pocket and A Moveable Feast book locked into a sling bag which he gripped so tightly it left a red mark across his chest.

The Paris Metro defeated him instantly. Hemingway, he thought, would have called it a clean defeat. Machines blinked in French, commuters surged like tides, and his card’s rejection turned ticket buying into slapstick. He gave up. Uber it was. He summoned a car and clutched his bag as though it contained nuclear codes.

The Uber glided through the city, a black Mercedes humming like a secret. The driver argued with his wife on speakerphone for twenty uninterrupted minutes, French syllables ricocheting through the car like cutlery in a drawer. The Good Reader nodded politely at the rearview mirror, then as the car turned and the horizon opened, he saw it.

The Eiffel Tower.

Sudden, merciless, rising dark against the blueing sky. For a suspended instant it stood there, its ribs black lacework, a shadow pinned against the last breath of daylight. The driver’s quarrel with his wife continued on in French, but the Good Reader no longer heard. He pressed his forehead to the window like a child, breath fogging the glass, his sling bag clutched so tightly his fingers ached. And just as his eyes adjusted, the Tower exhaled, the lights surged upward in a golden wave, dusk collapsing into radiance. A stray cloud caught the glow and blushed. On the ground, the lattice cast long, trembling shadows across the Champ de Mars, as if the earth itself were reading. Hemingway whispered it was Paris’s great witness; Barthes countered that it was “a pure sign,” swollen with meaning; Maupassant muttered his disgust; Cocteau called it “the miraculous lamp.” A chorus of literary ghosts, contradictory and insistent, rose around him as the Tower flared alive.

When he stepped from the car, the Tower swelled to its full impossible height, tilting over him like a manuscript written in sky. Around him, camera shutters clicked, a hawker rattled keychains, and still the avalanche of voices began.Proust murmured that memory itself bent inside its arches. Joyce snickered that it was the longest parenthesis in history. Whitman thundered that it contained multitudes. Shakespeare would have made it a rib of night, a stage for the moon. Rushdie would have spun it into a ribcage of light, delirious and excessive. Austen, dry as ever, might have smirked that it was universally acknowledged that a gentleman of fortune required a flat with a view. Tagore would have sung it as flame turned to monument, poetry hardened into prayer. Thiruvalluvar would have needed only two couplets, brief as lightning, eternal as law. All of them, living, dead, unborn, imagined, crowded into the Good Reader’s skull, collapsing centuries into one unbearable instant. The Tower was no longer structure but sentence, one endless line composed of all literature ever written and all that never was.

And that sentence resolved into one word, trembling across its iron ribs in luminous certainty, a word older than monuments, larger than cities, and still small enough to catch in the throat: amour.

The Good Reader mouthed it aloud, half whisper, half prayer, and felt the syllables stick awkwardly to his tongue, as if love itself required rehearsal. His eyes stung; a single tear slipped down, but it was not his alone. It fell on behalf of all the poets who had never seen this light, for the novelists who had died in dim rooms far from Paris, for every line that longed for a monument and found one only now.

He had not read all summer, not even past page 36, and yet he had read this.

Then the lights faltered off, sudden darkness, iron against sky. On again, blazing, as if the Tower itself had winked, punctuating the sentence. Full stop. He pressed harder against the night air, trembling, unread yet briefly redeemed. And in the hush that followed, the Tower itself whispered the only line that mattered:

This is literature. No rush, monsieur.

He stood motionless, chest buzzing, the Tower still burning on his retinas. For one suspended breath it felt as though even failure had been forgiven.

Then the tug.

The sling bag vanished. A pickpocket melted into the crowd, swallowed by the glow. Hemingway was gone. The Good Reader spun, helpless, then gave a small, rueful laugh. “Of course, Paris,” he whispered. He fumbled for his phone, snapped a crooked picture of the Tower, and stood blinking back a tear, unread, unlucky, but somehow lighter: the pilgrim of reading failure.

lazylens.com

(to be continued…)
September 1, 2025

The Atlas of Ghee and Gridlock

thiruvannamalai gopuram

Optional, but for those who like their comedies with a prologue, please see Part 1: A Summer of Good Intentions and Bad Attention.

It began, as all midlife revelations do in the year 2025, with a YouTube thumbnail: a woman in Santorini holding The Bell Jar like a wine glass, promising that travel had healed her reading life. The Good Reader clicked. And clicked again. And an hour later, algorithmically enlightened and fully caffeinated, he arrived at a conclusion so bold, so unearned, so obviously doomed that it could only be his: the problem was place. Not him. Never him. His unread summer was not a failure of will, attention, he told himself. It was environmental. He had been trying to read in the same stale corners where he paid bills, ignored text messages, and watched seventeen-minute videos on decluttering without decluttering. But what if he moved? What if, like the travel gods and booking apps and shimmering people of Instagram had foretold, a change in scenery could change everything?

And so, delirious with purpose, he packed his bags, not with socks or chargers, but with intentions. He would read where the air smelled different. He would annotate in cafes with wooden tables and unobtrusive jazz. He would become the kind of man who reads under foreign skies. Never mind that Austen never left Hampshire, Dickens barely crossed the Channel, and Tolstoy, that snowy colossus, wrote War and Peace without once visiting a curated riad in Marrakesh. The Good Reader was not interested in historical precedent. He was interested in possibility. In curated stillness. In Airbnb silence. In the slow-motion footage of himself turning a page while a tram passed behind him in Lisbon.

And so he departed, hopeful, unread, and chronically online, to chase literature across oceans. His first stop: Chennai.

So the Good Reader’s summer pilgrimage began in Chennai, that humid furnace of temples, traffic, and family obligations, where he arrived on a British Airways flight carrying not only luggage but also a dozen hardcovers. As he stumbled out of immigration, two taxi drivers instantly materialized, each shouting competing truths: one quoted 1,400 rupees, the other 700, about $17 versus $8, both assuring him with priestly conviction that their fare alone contained salvation. There was a philosophical question in it. Was the Good Reader worth double? Or was he, as he feared, the kind of man who would always choose the cheaper cab and therefore the cheaper fate? Before he could answer, the crowd surged, horns blared, and Chennai wrapped him in its dense, sweaty embrace.

The very first thing he read in India was Kanni Theevu, the serialized comic strip that has been running for sixty-three years in the Dina Thanthi newspaper. Episode #23,193. Yes, twenty-three thousand one hundred and ninety-three. That’s more than Proust, Balzac, and Dickens combined. This morning’s installment featured Sindbad, the once-classic adventurer, now inexplicably conscripted into something resembling a Rajamouli battle scene, flying about on golden birds with arrows sticking out of their feathers. It was magnificent nonsense, and the Good Reader thought: If this is literature in Chennai, I can stop worrying. The city is already reading for me.

It was the month of Aadi, when the goddesses descend from their sanctums and erupt onto the roads in twelve-foot banners, neon-outlined and serial-lit like cosmic billboards. Lakshmi gleamed beside traffic lights, Mariamman beamed over pharmacies, and Durga’s lion snarled above autorickshaws. Twice, in peak evening traffic, his car was engulfed by ritual throngs; and both times, in an act of supreme kindness, the crowd parted, waving him forward. The result was an accidental drive-thru darshan. For a surreal instant he found himself peering straight through the temple doors at the deity herself, chauffeured to revelation without leaving the back seat.

Day One was meant for buying local books. He would buy Indian magazines and dailies to read in India. He returned with India Today, The Hindu, a yellowing Ananda Vikatan, and, because the kiosk man smirked, Vogue India. He stacked them reverently, and prepared to read. But first, a mini tiffin for breakfast. And the pongal, golden, molten, ghee-laden, destroyed him. He collapsed into a seven-hour carb coma. When he woke, three aunties, two uncles, and a cousin he hadn’t seen since 1999 had materialized with more food. Reading was postponed, indefinitely, to the afterlife.

And yet, amid the assaults of ghee, he always found salvation in filter coffee. The slow drip of decoction, brewed like a lab experiment and frothed into steel tumblers, became his truest text. Each cup promised twenty pages of progress; instead, it delivered twenty minutes of jittery pacing and long essays to himself about what he would read later. Still, he drank cup after cup, a pilgrim in the Church of Decoction.

The days blurred: temples, traffic, relatives, food. Chennai was a city under permanent renovation, each street dug up, each corner sprouting a Metro Train pillar, as if the city were sacrificing the present so some future generation could glide smoothly forty years hence. Every cab ride was meant to be his silent reading hour, but instead became a rolling seminar: Vijay’s political entry, the price of tomatoes, whether cricket collapses were fate or foolishness. He nodded gravely, muttered “Ah, correct, correct,” and held his book like a tragicomic prop.

Once, he managed a walk. From Bazullah Road to G.N. Chetty Road, past Vani Mahal, he crossed Sangeetha and Geetham, two restaurants that had split like quarreling siblings, now competing with identical menus. At Sangeetha he ordered coffee; at Geetham, tea. Both tasted excellent, both arrived boiling, both sugared beyond mercy. The difference was academic: one was called tea, the other coffee. That walk, probably the longest he managed in Chennai, grounded him. Elsewhere, walking was impossible. KK Nagar was a chaos of potholes, encroached pavements, snarling traffic, and an absurd street-war over stray dogs. People shouted, groups split, alliances shifted. Our Good Reader, wisely, stayed neutral, knowing either side might bite.

He sought books again. The Tamil bookshop offered him little, yet staring at the rows of unfamiliar names he chastised himself. He stared at the Tamil titles, feeling the weight of his own ambition. Was he chasing literature, or just running from himself? He must change his attitude, return to Tamil contemporary writing, discover something beyond Sujatha’s science fiction and Ashokamitran’s humble novels. Driving past their houses, he remembered them with reverence, along with Cho’s satire and Jayakanthan’s radical prose.

On a drive to Kanchipuram, the so-called city of a thousand temples, he found that nearly all of them were undergoing renovation. Every gopuram was covered in scaffolding, slathered in a coat of ritual yellow fabric. Shiva, Vishnu, all seemed to have conspired to hold a citywide consecration clearance sale. The gods were still eternal, but their towers looked like construction projects from an overambitious municipal plan.

He tried English bookstores in malls. He tried. But the shelves carried The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, GRE prep guides from 2011. It looked like US Airport bookstores in exile, only dustier.

He sighed, bought yet another tote bag, and carried it to Kapaleeshwarar Temple, convinced that perhaps the gods would grant him a chapter if he only read in their presence. He settled cross-legged in a corner with his book, tote bag beside him like a loyal but useless squire. Almost immediately the temple loudspeakers roared to life. A man with a voice like gravel mixed with nasal syrup launched into a public sermon: simple life truths from the Thevaram, twisted into parables about grocery bills, cricket collapses, and unruly children. Every few sentences he broke into song, a thin, nasal chant of Thevaram verses that the microphone faithfully mangled and then blared for three kilometers in every direction. Each note ricocheted across the gopuram and into the Good Reader’s skull. Reading Julian Barnes was hard enough in silence; under the assault of devotional karaoke, it was impossible.

He shifted, hunting for quiet, and found a side space near the small shrine of Lord Shaniswara, where the sound was fractionally less punishing. There he discovered two temple cats playing tag among the pillars, their chase far more gripping than any plot in his unopened book. He noticed the devotees too: everyone walked in strict single file on a cemented path coated with some mysterious cooling compound, as if the temple floor had become a game board where stepping outside the squares meant instant disqualification. Curious, he sat down to observe, but within three seconds the stored heat of the ancient stone rushed straight through his dhoti and into his spine. He sprang up like a man electrocuted, though he later told himself it was all deliberate.

The real reason for his sudden leap was more persuasive: beneath the gopuram, volunteers were distributing hot puliyodharai in little cups made from pressed dry leaves. The smell alone collapsed his literary ambitions. He abandoned the shrine, the cats, the tote bagged books, and joined the throng, shoveling down the tangy tamarind rice with manic devotion. Once was not enough. He returned for a second serving, standing barefoot among strangers, cheeks bulging with holy carbs, taste buds singing Yaar Yaar Sivam, off-key but bliss-drunk. The book, once again, never left the bag.

Even Wi-Fi mocked him. In his bedroom, the signal wheezed like a dying harmonium. To catch a bar, he shuffled into the living room, where serials blared at max volume. He abandoned books and began reading people instead: their gossip, their WhatsApp forwards, their endless speculation about weddings. Chennai gave him not novels but serialized oral epics, complete with cliffhangers and filter coffee breaks.

Modernity added its own comedy. Swiggy, Zomato, Blinkit, Instamart delivered at such speed he suspected even literature might arrive boxed in ten minutes. It never did. Instead, always rava dosa. He ate, grateful, and stayed unread.

For variety, he tried five-star buffets. Two hotels in a week. Here he discovered India’s paradox of luxury: naans transcendent, curries mediocre, prices astronomical. Hospitality itself was the entree; waiters refilled plates like emergency responders, insisted he try aloo gobi gratin with tragic devotion, and treated him like a visiting emperor while serving dal that tasted suspiciously like dull rainy day in Seattle.

Doctor visits, too, became their own literature. His mother’s checkups resembled travel interviews: twenty minutes on Seattle’s rainy weather, five minutes on her blood pressure. Prescriptions came only from the in-house pharmacy, a plot twist nobody resisted.

And then there was first-day-first-show Rajinikanth movie. The cinema theater was temple and stadium combined: camphor, confetti, applause that bent walls. His book became a popcorn coaster, his glasses fogged from ecstasy. Reading had no chance against Rajini.

At Thiruvannamalai, the temple wasn’t a sanctuary but an ocean. Humanity surged in tidal waves; incense smoked like fog machines; chants thundered like amplifiers. To imagine pulling out Karl Ove Knausgaard was delusion. Reading here was not resistance, it was surrender, to sweat, to rhythm, to collective devotion. And then, unexpectedly, for a few minutes he forgot about tote bags, Goodreads lists, Knausgaard, all of it. He was just another body in the tide, pressed shoulder to shoulder, palms streaked with turmeric and vibhuti ash, chanting syllables he barely recognized. He was swallowed, shaken, broken open, and yet, in that surrender, he felt something astonishingly close to what he had come chasing: attention, undivided and absolute. Not on a page, but on a god glowing behind a curtain of incense.

Still, Chennai was not cruel. It engulfed him with kindness. Strangers guided him across roads. Relatives fed him as though he were a famine orphan. Doctors leaned in, curious about Seattle clouds. Goddesses glowed at intersections. The city whispered, “Don’t read me in a book. Read me directly”. It gave him sweat, gossip, ghee, coffee, neon, scaffolding, potholes, kindness. His books remained locked in their suitcase, noble tourists never stamped. The one text he read with full attention? A restaurant bill itemizing “pongal (extra ghee)” twice.

After twelve nights, which he generously rebranded as a personal Twelfth Night, the Good Reader boarded his flight. Shakespeare had banishment and disguise; he had tote bags and unopened books. Unread but faintly adored, he moved on to the next city, still incapable of finishing page one but fully committed to the sequel.

(to be continued…)

cross-posted to LinkedIn
July 27, 2025

Stamp-Size Thinking (or How We Lost the Long Thought)

It’s late July in the Pacific Northwest, the time of year locals call ‘summer’ which means the rain has been rescheduled to a more convenient weekend. The tomatoes in my backyard are suspiciously green, the sunsets arrive just before bedtime, and the only thing you can count on is the distant perfume of woodsmoke. Fingers crossed it’s from one of my neighbor’s barbecue, not the wildfires. Around here, the sunny season is longer than usual. We might get a full five days this year, maybe even six, if the weather gods are feeling generous. But summer does something rare, it lets your mind meander. It’s the season of daydreaming. Which is, incidentally, where this story begins.

There once was an age when a thought could really make itself at home. No rush, no calendar invites, no expectation to fit itself onto a post-it. A thought back then had ambitions, it wanted to be an epic. If you asked Socrates a simple question, he’d start stroking his beard, stare into the middle distance, and promptly answer with another question, then another, then launch into a debate so long you’d finish your hummus and start thinking about ordering takeout.

Socrates, for what it’s worth, would have made a terrible panelist on a Netflix reality show. Imagine: “Love Is Blind, but for Philosophy.” He’d filibuster every elimination. He’d want a fidget spinner to keep his hands busy while he wondered whether fidget spinners even exist or if they’re just the illusion of motion in a digital age. By the time he finished, the ratings would be gone, the host would have retired, and Netflix would be recommending a documentary called Talking in Circles.

But this is the charm of long thought. The sheer right to ramble, to contradict, to pause and, perhaps, change our mind. The ancient Indians, for example, took meandering thought to Olympic levels. Buddhist councils, they say, stretched on for months. Surely, after all that time, what emerged was more than just enlightenment. And then, of course, there’s the Gita. One epic long thought delivered in 18 chapters and hundreds upon hundreds of rolling, metrical verses, all while standing in the middle of a battlefield. Now, that’s commitment to an argument.

Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nehru and Patel, these were not men who shied away from a good, meandering fight. Their disagreements and agreements during Indian Independence were not just philosophical, they were over the very bones of a new nation: caste, representation, whether the village or the city should be India’s heart. Letters, pamphlets, endless back-and-forth, all in public and none of it blocked or muted.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, once looked at this tradition and gave it a name: ‘The Argumentative Indian.‘ Sen did not mean it as an insult but as a badge of honor, a recognition that India, at its best, was a place where argument and disagreement were not threats to harmony but its very foundation. Spirited, public debate was the operating system, not a glitch. The arguments themselves weren’t the magic. It was all the quiet thinking that came first, the slow-cooked ideas that made even the most heated debates worth having.

Somewhere along the line, we all got busier, and busier at being busy. The world sped up, and so did our expectations of thought. Where ancient debates took months and a good argument might outlast a monsoon, today even a traffic light feels too slow. Our machines got faster, our networks noisier, and a thousand little prompts, from news feeds to streaming shows now jostle for our attention, each promising instant answers, instant outrage, instant everything. The patient luxury of letting an idea simmer, toying with uncertainty, or tolerating silence has quietly become a rare skill, almost a rebellion. In the age of rapid refresh and ‘next episode’ countdowns, there is simply no space for a thought to unpack its suitcase and stay a while.

Once, knowledge was like a cathedral, spacious, slow to build, requiring patience and time. Now it’s a food truck at a festival, loud, fast, everyone elbowing for attention, and most things gone before you figure out what’s worth trying.

Here’s the bit that should keep us up at night. Civilization-changing thoughts have always taken their time. Let’s pick a weirdly odd but a perfect example. Take blood circulation, a concept so basic now it’s hard to imagine anyone getting it wrong. For centuries, people just assumed blood sloshed about inside you, as if your body were a washing machine set to ‘random.’ Galen, clever but mistaken, convinced the world it all sort of drifted this way and that. Then came Ibn al-Nafis, quietly suggesting there might be more to it. But it took William Harvey, to labor through the evidence, face down the doubters, and prove, slowly, painstakingly, in the face of ridicule and inertia, that blood circulates. It took over a hundred years of patient friction and debate before the world caught on. Every checkup, every diagnosis, every heartbeat today depends on the outcome of that long, stubborn argument.

That’s the point. Big ideas, the kind that shift the ground beneath us, need time and space and, most of all, friction. They need the long thought.

And it turns out, jobs that really matter (teachers, doctors, parents, engineers, the guy who has to explain your health insurance policy) rely on the long thought, not the hot take. The ability to sit quietly with uncomfortable facts, to listen longer than is strictly necessary, is not only rare but the one skill that sets you apart from the chorus of stamp-sized opinions.

So where, you might wonder, does the long thought hide out these days? I’ll tell you: in the pauses. In the margin notes on a good book. In the fifteen-minute shower where you forget you already washed your hair. In the suspiciously quiet evening walk, phone left at home, where an idea can breathe (hopefully the air quality index isn’t toxic).

Oddly enough, zebras aren’t black with white stripes, or white with black stripes. They’re actually both and also neither. Which feels about right for where the long thought lives. Not at the extremes, but somewhere in the blurry, undefined middle. The best ideas rarely announce themselves in bright colors. They arrive camouflaged, half-glimpsed, sometimes mistaken for something else entirely.

Some of my own longest thoughts have ambushed me during strange rituals or family routines that made no sense at the time. For example, every summer, during mango season, my aunts and uncles insisted that mangoes could only be eaten standing up, usually out in the courtyard of the village house. Officially, it was a kind of tradition, supposedly for good luck but I suspect the real reason was more logistical. Indian mangoes are juicier, messier, almost engineered for maximal chaos. With a surplus of children and a shortage of space, the only solution was to exile us outside, mango juice running down our arms, the cats looking on in dignified horror. For those few minutes, we weren’t thinking about anything in particular just savoring the moment, sticky and sun-soaked. But that’s exactly when the interesting thoughts would appear, slipping in sideways, hiding between bites.

The best thinkers are not the ones with the fastest thumbs or the loudest podcasts. Darwin took the same walk every day, letting his mind wander as aimlessly as his sandwalk. Virginia Woolf stared out the window for hours, half-dreaming sentences. Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He could spend weeks on a single page, letting the story ferment, letting each thought linger until it tasted right. Hemingway, too, famously trimmed and rewrote until his sentences were as sharp and clear as the morning after a storm.

So perhaps the only way to resist stamp-size thinking is not to shout louder or post more but to wait it out. To practice the long thought. Maybe even to make a little ritual of it: brew a cup of chai, stare out the window, put on some Chopin or A R Rahman, and let your mind off-leash for a while. If your neighbor thinks you’ve lost it, just say you’re channeling your inner Ted Lasso, optimistic and a little bewildered.

And if you’ve read this far, through all the digressions, metaphors, wildfires, netflix references, and the stubborn voyage of blood, then maybe, just maybe, you’ve given the long thought the homecoming it deserves. If your thumb is itchy to scroll try resisting it for a second longer. Sometimes, the best thoughts aren’t meant to be liked or shared. They’re meant to be lived with, returned to, and on occasion, scribbled on the back of a very…. very large stamp.

crossposted to LinkedIn.
July 12, 2025

A Summer of Good Intentions and Bad Attention

Italo Calvino (pic: guardian)

The Good Reader

There are still readers, real ones, endangered and elusive as those peculiar souls who savor airline food. More intriguingly, there are still good readers, the kind who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, even when a New Yorker piece from last April lingers in their browser tabs like a literary ghost. This summer, our hero, let’s call him the Good Reader, resolved to do what he had not done in a decade: he would read. Not skim, not scroll, not glance, but read, diving into long, fat, slow books with index pages and forewords by translators who once lived in Peru. The Good Reader, age 42, a man of many tote bags and even more abandoned reading lists, was no stranger to such ambitions. In 2016, he declared a James Baldwin spring. In 2018, it was the Ali Smith autumn. The Hilary Mantel winter fell apart somewhere around page 47. And the summer he planned to finally read Proust? That turned into a Netflix rewatch of The Crown.

The year 2025 felt different, or so he told himself it had to be. The world had hit cognitive rock bottom, with attention spans shorter than Twitter’s new 18-character limit. Even the best book of the year, a 28-page novella woven from speech transcripts and DALL·E prompts, was hailed as “brilliantly demanding” by The Guardian and “possibly real” by Electric Literature. So, the Good Reader made a plan, as all noble quests begin, with logistics. For location, he dreamed of a cabin in the woods or a terrace in Lisbon but settled, as all men must, for an Airbnb guest bedroom in Cannon Beach, Oregon. His devices included a Kindle Paperwhite for night, an iPad for annotations, and a notebook for analog dignity.

His book stack, which he dubbed his ReadStack™, comprised eleven titles, including Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, which he pretended not to judge by its title; Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which he bought after reading three glowing blurbs and one blistering Substack takedown; and the latest Booker darling narrated by a sentient climate model named Eos. He even checked Bill Gates’ annual summer reading list, just in case there was a surprisingly readable economics book with a pastel cover and a pun for a title. He posted this stack on Instagram, with filters, under #Bookstagram and #SummerOfSubstance, determined to break the curse of Good Intentions and become the Last Reader Standing.

The Thousand Tiny Defeats

It began on Day One, with the Good Reader brewing a French press, arranging his tools (Kindle to the left, hardcover to the right, notebook center, a Reynolds pen aligned like a weapon of war), and sitting with the posture of a man preparing to meet his gods. He opened the first book, an intergenerational novel about sugarcane farmers and quantum physics, read the first paragraph twice (lyrical, dense, possibly genius), and then a notification interrupted. It was nothing, just a Substack from a critic he admired, reviewing a book he hadn’t read, mentioning three others he now wanted to. He clicked, then clicked again, opening Amazon in another tab, detouring to Twitter (X), then Goodreads, then a hate-scroll, and twenty-six minutes later, he had read only 41 words. This was defeat number one. By Day Three, his defeats multiplied like tribbles: he highlighted a sentence in his Kindle but couldn’t resist asking ChatGPT, “What does this sentence mean in simple terms?”; he searched a character’s name and spent forty minutes reading about Hungarian naming conventions; the lawnmower roared just as the book got good; his boss messaged, “Quick thing when you have a sec?”; a group chat sent 47 unread messages debating whether the new Sapiens for Teens was any good; and his nephew emailed, a rare note he promised to read later, then forgot.

He tried audiobooks while walking, but nearly got hit by a delivery drone, his focus as fleeting as the steps he took. On Day Six, he read the back cover of a novel six times and wept quietly, not for the book, but for himself. He remembered Calvino’s Good Intentions, that charming 1959 essay about a man who went on holiday to read and returned with nothing but sunburn and regret. The Good Reader wasn’t just Calvino’s reader; he was the evolved, optimized, premium, late-capitalist, cloud-synced, neuro-fractured edition, Calvino 2.0. He was a man not merely undone by leisure, but obliterated by the relentless, hydra-headed swarm of content that defined his era.

The Mind: A Machine That Forgets to Sit Still

The Good Reader had not always been like this, or so he swore. There was a time he could read for hours, devouring novels thick enough to stun a burglar, sentences that began in one season and ended in another. He remembered reading The Brothers Karamazov on a train in India, with goats, a memory that had to mean something. But now, in the Summer of 2025, he couldn’t tell if his brain was a hyperactive toddler or a burnt-out server farm. Between the eighth browser tab and the ninth unread newsletter, he realized his brain was no longer a cathedral but an airport food court, with everyone yelling. The neuroscientists had names for this: attention residue, dopamine fatigue, task-switching costs. He had simpler ones: the blip, the ping, the doomscroll, the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, the TikTok about focus that lasted 29 minutes.

He was leaking cognition, and worst of all, he knew. He wasn’t dumb; he had read Birkerts, watched the first four minutes of Cal Newport on YouTube, and half-read five books about why he couldn’t read books. He was meta-aware, hyper-aware, a Borges story about a reader who knows he cannot read. His brain was a machine that once roamed fields and now twitched in cages, his thoughts arriving chopped, scattered, in TikTok-length fragments. Sometimes he thought, “I should read,” but forgot what, or why, or how. Reading, real reading, had become resistance, like baking bread in wartime, remembering your own phone number, or saying no to the algorithm. And he was losing the war.

The Pile Unread

When September comes, as it always will, it will arrive like a librarian clearing her throat, the summer slipping quietly out the back door, the light shifting just enough to make the Good Reader feel the loss. The Kindle, untouched and unbothered, will have updated itself three times while turned off, and the stack of books on the nightstand, once proud, soon quietly bitter, will grow a thin layer of dust and something deeper: a kind of existential judgment. The Good Reader will have read the forewords, the acknowledgements, the reviews of books he won’t read, a toxic Twitter thread that will swallow a debut author whole, and, on Threads, someone else’s quote from the very novel he meant to begin, which he’ll highlight, not in the book, but in a digital note titled “Must return to this. Later.” He will, in short, not have read.

Yet in the pile of the unread, there will be something that still hums: hope, shaped like a battered paperback, glowing faintly from a half-charged e-ink screen, or tucked between pages like a receipt from a summer that could still be salvaged. The Good Reader, for all his tiny, ridiculous defeats, will not stop wanting to read, and in the year 2025, that desire alone may nearly qualify as sainthood. When asked, perhaps on a quiet Sunday, over good coffee, with just the right measure of guilt, he will smile and say, “Reading? Of course. I just finished something wonderful last week,” though he will not have. “Which book? Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue,” he will add, though it won’t be. But he means it.

He doesn’t read Tolstoy, but he reads his nephew’s email. Twice. And that, in a way, is literature.

cross-posted to LinkedIn.
May 14, 2025

Nayakan – The first masterpiece

_{This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Nayakan. Watch the retrospective tomorrow on youtube.}

My maternal grandfather, was the most righteous man I knew. He saw the world in clean lines. You were either good or you were not. Yet for all his black-and-white convictions, there was one name he spoke of with a peculiar softness. Pettikada Rajendran. A man who, according to him, ruled Georgetown in Madras with nothing but a stare and a sly smile. My grandfather was a young bookkeeper at a textile shop in Parry’s Corner when Rajendran stopped him once on the road. “I see you every day walking to work. Keep good health,” he said. Years later, during a scuffle at a bus stop, it was Rajendran who stepped in to defuse the tension. “From that day,” my grandfather said, “we’d nod to each other in the evenings.”

Rajendran was, by most accounts, a petty criminal. But he had rules. He collected from the rich shop owners who underpaid and overworked and gave to the vendors pushed off the streets. When the police came for him one night, the entire street shut down in protest. “He was not right…. but he helped.” That answer stayed with me. It made no sense at the time. But years later, when I watched Nayakan as an adult and really watched it, I began to understand.

Velu Naicker was not a fictional fantasy. He was a distillation of hundreds of Pettikada Rajendrans. Men who rose from within broken systems and didn’t wait for justice to arrive but rearranged justice to fit their corner of the world. I may not be able to agree with them. But I understand the ache behind their choices. Perhaps Nayakan was Mani Ratnam’s way of walking closer to Pettikada Rajendran not to praise him or pardon him but to ask him gently why.

What’s most fascinating about Nayakan is how quietly it traces the anatomy of a man aging under the weight of power. It’s not a film of grand arcs or thunderous acts. It is a story told through gradual erosion. Every gain in Velu Naicker’s world is mirrored by a loss in his soul. The movie moves forward not as chapters but as scars. Five of them, if you look closely. With each personal loss, his father, his foster father, his wife, his son, and finally himself, Velu’s face changes, his posture shifts, hairline recedes and voice lowers. Kamal Haasan, in a performance that can only be described as haunted restraint, ages the character not through makeup but through emotional subtraction. You watch the man vanish piece by piece from behind his eyes.

Mani doesn’t give us a traditional rise-and-fall gangster story. He gives us a series of psychological thresholds. Each one is marked by a death and a quiet reinvention. First, the boy who sees his father beaten to death. Then, the young immigrant in Dharavi, still unsure whether to follow his foster father’s smuggling trade or escape it. Then comes the defiant firebrand, confronting police brutality head-on and marrying a girl who is forced to become a sex worker with a kind smile and godliness in her breath. Later, the matured don with oiled-back hair, glasses, and a kunguma theetral on his forehead, a man who’s learned to live with violence like it’s a second language. Finally, the elder statesman of the slums, slowed by age, undone by grief, squatting down as his grandson asks him the only question that matters. “Were you good man or bad?” That question is not just for Velu. It’s for all of us who watched him nod silently through his life, convincing ourselves that what he did was necessary, that he helped, that he meant well. But in the end, even he doesn’t know. All he can do is say “I don’t know” and disappear.

One of Mani’s most distinctive choices as a filmmaker is his ability to define his characters through absence. Not in screen time, but in what they withhold from others and from us. Velu Naicker doesn’t spend the film justifying his life. He doesn’t deliver monologues about revenge, poverty, or justice. In fact, he says very little. We are invited not into his thoughts but into his silences, which grow heavier with each passing loss. It’s in these withheld emotions that Nayakan becomes most haunting. It’s a film filled with unsaid things, and that is precisely where it derives its power.

But in a film defined by restraint, there is one moment where the dam breaks. When his daughter Charu confronts him, when she slaps Selva, his loyal right hand, and demands to know why this violence continues and why her father continues to be feared, the wound that Velu has kept stitched up for decades is finally touched. Not by a gun or a rival but by his child. Mani, the filmmaker who so often builds power through suggestion, allows this one moment of naked involuntary exposition. But even this isn’t written as exposition. It erupts naturally and uncontainably. It is one of the most human scenes in all of Mani’s cinema. Velu doesn’t argue with data or stats. He pleads with pain. “Ask the policeman who killed my father to stop. Ask the man who killed your mother to stop. Then I’ll stop.” It is in every sense a heartbreakingly reasonable justification for everything unreasonable he’s done. That’s the problem.

Because the scene doesn’t just reveal Velu’s worldview, it tempts us. It wins us over, and we don’t want to be won. We want to judge him. But Mani makes it nearly impossible. His staging, Kamal’s staggering restraint-turned-implosion, the camera’s refusal to cut away, it drags us to the very place we’ve been avoiding: empathy towards Velu. Not the kind we feel good about. This is complicated and uncomfortable empathy. You understand the man and how he got here. You even, for a second, believe he had no other choice. That’s the scariest part. You forget your moral compass just long enough to see his.

Mani and Kamal

When I first watched Nayakan, I was ten. It was just another Kamal film, one of the quieter ones, the darker ones, the grown-up ones. I didn’t understand much. I liked the songs, especially Nila Adhu Vaanaththumele, which had a folk beat to it. But what I remember most isn’t Kamal, Mani, or the myth of Velu Naicker. It’s a boy, a mentally challenged boy, the son of Police Inspector Kelkar, the man Velu had killed. The boy comes to Velu, unaware, and says “Mera baba mar gaya.” There was something about that, the absence of the grief and logic, the sheer innocence of it, that broke me. Mani has always known how to write children with unsettling honesty. They don’t act like film children. They act like they wandered in from real life. In that moment, Mera baba mar gaya felt more devastating than any violence in the movie.

Of course, back then, there were things I didn’t understand. When Velu breaks down after his son’s death, crying in that contorted way, I remember people calling it overacting, the same way they accused Sivaji Ganesan, a claim my father refused to accept. I grew up to love them both, Sivaji and Kamal, and to utterly detest the word overacting. Sometimes, when emotion is too big for the body to hold, it spills out in strange, ugly, beautiful shapes. That’s what Kamal did in that scene. Later, it was my father again who pointed me toward Andhi Mazhai Megam. He’d worked in Bombay in his early years, and the song made him nostalgic in a way he didn’t often allow himself to be. He said it was beautiful, just that. He was right. It is my favorite song from the film now, not Nee Oru Kaadhal Sangeetham, though I love that too, but Andhi Mazhai Megam, with its circular camera movements, its raw rain-soaked holi colors, and that swirling dance of joy and defiance. I only found out later that it wasn’t even scored by Ilaiyaraaja himself but by someone under his guidance. Yet it carried his mood and rhythm.

Today, watching Nayakan as an adult, after reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, after watching Coppola’s films countless times, after enduring a dozen Indian remakes, tributes, and loose inspirations, I’m convinced that Nayakan remains the most powerful Indian adaptation of that narrative. It is not just about grounding the story in Indian soil. It is about rebuilding the story entirely in our language, in our slums, under our street lights. Mani didn’t copy the Godfather. He refitted it and re-imagined it through the lens of Varadaraja Mudaliar, through the locales of Bombay, through the emotional currency of loss and obligation. Yes, Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar is a compelling attempt. Others have come and gone. But Nayakan still towers above them because it doesn’t apologize for being an adaptation.

For all the brilliance in the screenplay, for all the haunting silences and mythic structure, for all of Kamal’s near-perfect performance, to me, the true hero of Nayakan is P. C. Sreeram. The look of this film, the tonal architecture of it, is unlike anything made before it or since. Watching Nayakan is like looking at a photograph by Ansel Adams, where the dodge and burn, the highlight and the hush, can’t be replicated, only revered. What Adams did to Yosemite, P.C. did to Bombay. There is no other Indian film that looks like it, and I doubt there ever will be.

“We wanted to use a technique calling ‘flashing’ to reduce the colors. I had another idea. I wanted to give the film a ‘period’ look. But ‘flashing’ would have been expensive. So while grading, I played with the analyser to keep the colour to the minimum. Since we print on different negatives, there is no consistency. For the interiors, I decided on top lights which mellow the lights but increase the contrast. What I did with the analyser was only 2 per cent. The rest was achieved by the sets, the costumes, and lighting.¹⁴
P.C Sreeram about Nayakan’s period film look in Cinema of Interupptions

Both Agni Natchathiram and Nayakan were shot nearly back-to-back, yet Nayakan carries the mood like a stormcloud. The chiaroscuro, the glow off utensils and rain-soaked concrete, the 35mm intimacy, was pure cinematography gold. There is a shot when the lens widens, in that stunning zoom-out of Velu and Neela at the Gateway of India in Nee Oru Kaadhal Sangeetham. That shot alone made me fall in love with the camera. I couldn’t stop rewinding. I didn’t even know what telephoto lenses were, but I knew magic when I saw it.

If P. C. Sreeram was peaking with light and shadow, then Ilaiyaraaja, by contrast, was only just beginning to explore the emotional terrain he would later master with Mani Ratnam. Their partnership would peak with Thalapathi, their final collaboration. But in Nayakan, something raw, unfiltered, and extraordinary was already taking shape.

This was Ilaiyaraaja’s 400th film, and you could feel it. Thenpandi Cheemayile, with its aching voice and village lament, has rightly entered the bloodstream of Tamil cinema. But for me, the true moment was the moment between Velu and Neela in the brothel room. The camera glides gently around the bed’s mosquito netting, and the POV toggles, first Neela looking at Velu, then Velu at Neela. The music enters like a whisper circling each other just as these two broken people begin to recognize something fragile between them. Just like that, Mani, Raja, and PC find perfect rhythm.

Somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I stumbled into a Chennai theatre, maybe Jayapradha or Woodlands Symphony, to watch a screening of Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya. I knew nothing about it, except that Nihalani had directed Drohkaal, which Kamal had remade into Kuruthipunal, a film I admired, incidentally directed by P. C. Sreeram. I went in out of curiosity and came out changed. Ardh Satya was raw, rustic, and emotionally feral. It dealt with the same city, the same systemic rot, the same burden of rage that Nayakan would explore but from the other side of the badge. To this day, I can’t help but feel that its fingerprints are all over Nayakan, not in plot but in tone and texture, in the way men collapse under the weight of doing what they believe is right.

Some call Nayakan the peak of Mani’s career. I don’t. I see it as his first masterpiece, the one that announced not just a voice but a vocabulary. This was the film that drew a perfect line across Tamil cinema, before Nayakan and after. It stood dead center between commercial mass appeal and artistic ambition. A film with no full-length comedy track, no conventional heroism, yet it entertained, moved, and stayed. It made space for quiet and asked questions about power, loyalty, and what a man is allowed to become when the world gives him no choice. Mani would ask these questions again in Thalapathi, Guru and Raavanan each time pushing the edges of heroism further into shadow.

But this was where it began. Nayakan wasn’t just the start of a directorial journey but the blueprint for a generation of filmmakers who wanted to believe that you could do both, tell a story that mattered and pack the theaters.

Velu Naicker was not the hero we asked for. But for a broken world in a broken time, maybe he was the only one who showed up.