I've felt like a refugee for the past 10 years of my life. Somewhere deep inside, I believe I am only travelling, searching for the safety of a home I once felt as a child. I moved from a city that I was born in to a place that is supposedly my actual 'home'. The impositions of this world cannot replace the familiarities of the past. And nothing feels more like home than the smell of that town where I spent my childhood. Even today, the mornings that are the best are when my

If life has ever presented you with a situation where you desperately wished for time itself to stop, as if it were doomsday, you'd want to stay and hear me out this one time. Not to feel lighter or falsely induced with a promise of a better tomorrow. But to view these events as a test of time. Or rather a greater test of our faith. I have found myself in the pits of despair and I found myself amidst the ruins of my shattered dreams. I have ruminated over the inabilities of m

Call it a boon or a curse: my mind is naturally prone to rumination, to replaying events. And these are not happy events I revisit. I don't just like to ideate — I devour thoughts for breakfast, pre-breakfast, post-lunch, and midnight snacks, like a hungry, hedonistic child who is never satiated. I am that helpless glutton who wants to get rid of his mindless craving for junky thoughts and lighten up his body to aim for more life-changing pursuits. But the flavourful temptati

I do oddly satisfying things — like sabotage what I love the most. I create elaborate plans for my own ruin and set aside time to lament what was ruined. I play hide and seek with myself sometimes. And disappear when I know someone is searching me. I convince myself that too good is not a good thing. And too much joy is not a state but the sound of the arrival of great distress I live moments from a different decade and play the role of a dead woman. I act like the Sultana of

One of my favourite books is by Paulo Coelho, The Spy, which follows the struggles of an exotic dancer, seducer, and spy named Mata Hari. Her body exuded such grace that the wives of smitten men were convinced she was a witch. She used all her charms to eventually mix with high-ranking officials of France, extending her services beyond the body and extracting valuable secrets from enemy nations. And when her true motives were exposed, she was shot by the same French nation sh

The need to mate for human survival are mere desires created for the preservation of the species. This is what science tells us. So every time you find a person sexually attractive — capable of participating in carrying forward your progeny — it is supposed to be pure biology at work. its worth wondering how this force that pushes humans to procreate, to create this wondrous thing called life — must be really great, isn't it? So great that a mother risks her own existence to

She is the prisoner of her own mind — the matrix, the processor of her system. The system she runs, runs on her. It accepts inputs based on the tests it ran. She mistakes herself for being the one chairing the control centre, building her own code and entering it. But she is far away, standing still on the other side of the glass pane, seeing someone else click 'enter'. The code defines her, but also confines her. It sends her signals that she calls thoughts. Her own thoughts

Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of feminist thought, has shaped many of my own thoughts about women and freedom. I often quote her and her anecdotes to justify my opinions in conversations that I hold, and it instantly boosts my credibility. In fact, if there's one book I keep revisiting, it is her most famous work to date — The Second Sex. A rather expensive book for my humble collection, but still worth it. Her views on existentialism and how she wove that with the gendered

From his youth, Kierkegaard seemed to sense that solitude was his natural condition. The most defining moment was when he broke up with the love of his life because he knew his deep melancholy would be torturous for his companion. He was a man who didn't believe in half-hearted love. And so he chose to devote himself fully to his first love — writing philosophy for the rest of his life. One could argue that he wasn't being sacrificial in his love but rather chose his own inte

Of all the things Allah has placed in our hands, none is more finite, more irreversible, or more taken for granted than time. This has been beautifully propounded in the holy texts, especially in Surah Al-Asr (Chapter 103) of the Quran, which warns of man's loss through time. Imam Al-Shafi'i famously remarked about this chapter: "If people only considered this Surah well, it alone would suffice them for their guidance." The mistake we often make is measuring loss in terms of

Attention moulds reality. I’ve been drawn to the metaphor of quantum theory as applied to life. On a personal level, it translates into a simple realisation: I am not merely a character in my story, but a co-writer of it. I don’t just inhabit a script; I compose it as I go, each day a page, each hour a line written into being. This feels true not only in grand, existential ways, but also in the seemingly insignificant. Our perception of the world quietly alters the reality we

For the longest time, I held myself back from expressing my thoughts publicly. I believed that my thoughts were only fit to breathe in the space of journals hidden in my drawer. What could possibly pique interest in the writing of a 20-something woman. I never officially composed a poem, published a chapter for a book, or authored an article for any magazine, except my local school magazine. In other words I wasn't a certified, crowd approved or acclaimed 'creator' person. Be

Yeah - witchy women. You read that right. Witches that wield their own intuition and mystique as spells on others. And this witchcraft puts the world at their disposal. Witchcraft — not the kind with broomsticks, crystal balls, or tarot cards, but the craft of alchemy that can seduce, shape or break a spirit. Women were born with it. There was never a need to learn it. Its like our souls couldn't contain all that mystical and occult insights so it flowed into the curves of ou

Reverence over fame is like the classic case of quality over quantity. One viral meme and boom — you have a hundred followers. But the result of a well-researched book written over a span of two years, the culmination of one’s academic life — when a work like that enlightens minds and tops best-selling charts, that’s not a “famous” author. He is, what we call, revered in literary circles. And to hold reverence among a handful of serious readers rather than tasteless crowds w

What is life but sum total of moments yearning for the ecstatic self to be lit with pride with a stronger reinforcement of faith in ones abilities? I know of no more fruitful way to make my each day of my existence count than to witness, by the dawn of dusk, a slightly newer, more nuanced, more aware version of myself. Each day becomes a quiet quest to reveal and lift into the light those parts of myself that have long been buried, waiting to become a part of something greate

In moments when anxiety attacks me, I start to think about something way more stressful at the grand scale. (Just to belittle the cause of the present stress you know.) Like super grand. Mostly intangible stuff. Maybe something more consequential. Say, the confusion of my identities. At this given time and place. Am I secretly considered a traitor by most countrymen (and women) for being a minority where strong belief in a single totalitarian society equals deep rooted nation

This write-up seeks to highlight the need for censorship despite the public sentiment favouringtowards freedom of speech. Free speech and censorship are concepts that evade different spheres of human activity - creative expression, political expression, and even religious expression. However, the forms of censorship that have become most relevant in an increasingly polarized country like ours is the censorship of political statements made with a tendency to induce religious s

For as long as I can remember, much of my early 20s has been spent ruminating over the unfortunate events of the past and dwelling on the possibilities of the future. My time was not my time. It belonged to the self-loathing diaries of yesterday, even as the clock ticked towards the future. Every act carried the weight of yesterday's sorrow. Each initiative was blurred with repeated doubts of failure. In a world filled with unpredictable full stops and untimely demises, fate

Is there even a male equivalent to the derogatory term 'whore'? That's a difficult one. The term used to describe a man lusting over multiple women should ideally be a manwhore. But it's not. The closest I can think of is a womanizer. And that places the word woman as if it were an object that is sought after. So men are described in relation to their own desire. But a woman is not described in relation to her desires — she is just outright boxed and humiliated for that same

I have always thought of my personality as something that belongs to me — a set of preferences and habits I arrived at, the accumulated evidence of who I am. Becker suggests something far less comforting: that character isn't discovered, it's constructed, and it's constructed for one specific purpose. To keep me from looking too directly at the fact that I will die. He calls this the vital lie. Not a lie in the sense of dishonesty, but a necessary fiction — the narrowing of a