4th Dimension

This week, I came across an intriguing series titled "adolescence" . full of drama and excellent subject matter that made me think about the plight of young “adolescent" India. India has 253 million adolescents, the largest in the world, teeming with potential energy. One might believe this generation stands on the cusp of greatness, poised to lead India into a luminous future. And yet, the harshness of reality intervenes: India’s adolescents are dying in tens of thousands, not through war or famine, but through a systematic betrayal perpetrated by social media, unhelpful educational institutions, and an insidious consumerist culture. Let me share why I am saying so… between 1995 and 2021, 134,735 adolescents aged 10–19 years died by suicide,  an average of over 5,180 per year. In 2021 alone, 10,730 adolescents under 18 ended their own lives — marking a 42% increase compared to the year 2000. Suicides are rising not only among 15–19-year-olds but also among younger ado...

I came across an intriguing article by Duvvuri Subbarao titled "Has IAS Failed The Nation?” made me reflect on the most interesting subject, bureaucracy in India, something very close to the heart of Indian governance and yet so far from its brain: the Civil Services. More specifically, why they began with the promise of nation-building and somehow evolved into glorified WhatsApp forwarding departments with fancy stationery and painfully slow Wi-Fi. Post-Independence, we had dreams. Big ones. Dams, democracy, development. Nehru spoke like a poet, Patel acted like a surgeon, and somewhere in between, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) was born, our very own homegrown bureaucracy. It was supposed to be the steel frame of India. Spoiler alert: today, it’s more mild steel—looks shiny but bends under pressure. Let’s rewind and see how we got here. When the British left, they bequeathed to us three things: tea addiction, cricket obsession, and the Indian Civil Service-an institutio...

Yesterday, I met my ex-neighbour at a temple. Not just any temple. The Umiya Devi temple—the unofficial parliament for a certain caste’s community matters. He was beaming. Turns out, his caste group is organising a National Business Summit. Not a business summit. A caste-based business summit. For businesspersons of their caste only, thank you very much. Proudly, he informed me that he’s on the executive organising team. Big deal. Big pride. Big caste. And then it hit me. Again. My city just hosted a Global Patidar Business Summit. Before that, a Global Brahmin Summit. Add a couple of Yadav Yatras and Vaishya Ventures, and we’ve basically got an unofficial caste-based G20 happening every few months. Now, as someone who eats, sleeps and occasionally overthinks sociology, caste always felt like that stubborn stain on your white shirt. It fades, sure. But it never disappears. And yesterday, I saw why. Caste survives because it accommodates. It makes room for people who are left out by the...

Recently, I got an opportunity to visit the famous Bahucharaji temple with Limbach mā temples at Unva and Patan. At the same time, I also paid a visit to Ambaji temple in Gujarat. What stuck in my mind was the socio -cultural dimensions of these temples, rituals and goddesses which remained divorced from Brahminical and puranic frameworks. let me ask you something, if you ever find yourself in a dusty corner of North Gujarat or Saurashtra, or deep inside the rice belts of central Gujarat, and someone points you towards a neem tree wrapped in red threads or a stone smeared with vermilion near a dried-up well, don’t be deceived by the simplicity. You are not looking at folk superstition. You are staring at the living remnants of a subaltern theology—what the villagers might call Meldi no Maṇḍ, Momai na sthān, or Bahucharā no dero. These are not minor goddesses. They are the pulsing, breathing soul of local religiosity—sovereign, sensory, and disruptive. Before Temples, There Was Earth Th...