Category: Substack

Fantasy has never really spoken to me. In college, in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, I had friends who were deep in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, in Dune, and things like that. And then even prior to that, I suppose, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, though I don’t quite remember when. And the truth is, I didn’t really ever get into any of them. There’s a particular richness, a sumptuousness even, of the worldbuilding, of the systems of magic, of the nomenclature and hierarchies of creatures, that made me deeply uncomfortable, or that I just couldn’t get into. I don’t know which it was.

That said, science fiction was always different. I know it in retrospect might seem inconsistent, but the truth is my father read Asimov, and I read the Foundation novels because they were on the shelf at home. And in a way, perhaps I’m backcasting the insistence, or the inclination, that consequences mattered, and that there was some kind of tether between the imagined world and what it actually could be. All of that meant I saw these as separate categories. And perhaps now I see them more as interconnected than not, but I never really thought to test that barrier, that difference in categorisation.

My daughter, who is now 12, loves fantasy. She always has. She also loves swimming, and swims competitively, which often means we spend long commutes in the car together, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late in the evening, many times in a day. She has been listening to and reading a series called Skandar, and so she wanted to listen to it in the car, and I ended up listening to it alongside her as well. The first was Skandar and the Unicorn Thief, and now Skandar and the Phantom Rider. It is definitely not a reading practice I would have chosen voluntarily, but it is our form of spending time with each other. And it’s 25 minutes here, 30 minutes there, a few times a week, back and forth, with the narrator’s voice carrying me into a world I am still struggling to map, but one that she is completely fluent in.

Before I started listening to Skandar, I thought unicorns were sunshine and happiness. But here, unicorns are wild. These are skeletal things that are immortal, these are flesh-eating things. It was all brand new to me. And in a way, a lot of what I thought I knew about the genre, I had to put down before I could even hear what the books were actually saying.

That said, for those of you who have read the book, and for those who haven’t, there’s this idea of the bond. In Skandar’s world, a rider is bonded to their unicorn at the hatchery. The true bond is recognised rather than made, and it forms because of who each actually is, their element, their temperament, the fact of the match. Nobody is choosing in that sense. The rider doesn’t choose, the unicorn doesn’t choose. It emerges from between them. The two of them are already what they are, and the bond kind of completes it, or names it.

Then there is the Weaver, and in a way, her technology is the forged bond. Forged not in the sense of a blacksmith and casting, but forged in the sense of bonds made where none were supposed to be, that are imposed by an external force, hers, and designed to serve her purpose. Forged bonds vaguely look like true bonds, because they function like them in surface ways, but they run on coercion rather than on recognition. And the book moves through this distinction without ever explaining it, which is perhaps part of why I could relate to it.

And actually, my daughter pointed something out to me on one of our drives. She said you can tell true bonds and forged bonds apart by the colour. True bonds settle on one colour, the colour of the rider’s element. Forged bonds never settle, but flicker and cycle between all the elemental colours, never resting on any one of them.

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On my first HYROX

 

A few days before the race, I went for a deep tissue massage.

Usually it’s excruciating. I brace for it. Every knot, every point of pressure — I fight it. That’s just how it goes. This time, nothing. There was pressure, yes. Tenderness. But no real pain. I kept waiting for it to arrive. It didn’t. It felt like something had loosened without me forcing it, like the body had done its work quietly, over time, and I was only just noticing.

I remember lying there thinking — is this what I’ve been carrying all this while?

The day before the race felt completely wrong.

Fridays are usually my heaviest training days. Full tilt. This one wasn’t. Carb load, don’t push, eat more, move less. By the end of the day, I felt slothful. Heavy in a way I’m not used to. Not tired from effort, just slow. Slightly guilty, if I’m honest.

The ice cream was excellent.

I remember thinking I should have eaten idlis. Something cleaner, more correct. But underneath all of that was this discomfort of not doing. Not exerting. Not earning the rest.

Race day. First station, the SkiErg.

Kabeer went first, then handed over to me. I settled into a reasonable groove — not pushing too hard, just finding a rhythm. And I couldn’t help looking around. People ahead of us, behind us. That constant scan of — are we okay, are we on track? And then I realised I had already recovered. Just like that.

The transitions were chaotic, which surprised me. I thought that would be the easy part — move from one thing to the next and it just flows. It didn’t. You’re coming off one station, trying to find your breath, figure out where to go. It never quite settled.

The sled push was a shock. In training it’s one thing. In the race, with the noise and the crowd and the adrenaline, everything around you is pulling you to go harder. I kept telling myself — stay at 70-80%, don’t burn out early. But that’s harder than it sounds.

The running is where I really felt it.

Watching Kabeer run is just different. He’s smooth in a way that’s almost annoying. That line kept coming to mind — slow is smooth, smooth is fast. He looks like he’s barely trying, but he’s faster than me even when I’m working hard. No strain in his body. He kept looking back, waving me on, slowing down, waiting. And there’s something slightly confronting about that — that my working-hard pace is his easy pace. But it also made very clear where the work is.

As the laps went on, something shifted — the runs actually started feeling easier. The second half always feels stronger, I’ve noticed this in training too. Burpees, sled pull, we split things roughly 50-50. Friends were cheering from the side, people from different parts of life showing up in the same place. That felt good.

Then the sandbag lunges. Man. Every step digging into the knees. I kept thinking I should have worn knee guards. Kettlebell carry, surprisingly, was easy.

And then — the wall balls. A hundred of them at the end is just brutal. Kabir has been rehabbing a shoulder and still stepped in and did his share. That was gutsy.

I did get annoyed with the judging. Same effort, different calls — it got to me more than it should have. But we kept going.

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… over 20 years and 4 hours.

 

If you grew up in an intellectual corner of the Indian internet, particularly around libertarian, market-first principles, Hayek, and all that, Amit Varma was someone you looked up to and someone whose clarity mattered.

I’ve known Amit over a nearly twenty-year arc, but we’d never sat down for a proper conversation until now. And finally being in conversation with him was just so wonderful. The four hours felt effortless and it was just such a natural conversation.

What surprised me most was how Amit helped me see my own story in a new way.

If there’s a single thing I’ve learned over the past decade from walking alongside many of India’s civil society leaders, it’s that sometimes the deepest work is just to stay. That presence is important. That sometimes you need to stay in the unglamorous work, in the moments where certainty has collapsed and where you don’t have the answers, and all you can do is hold the space.

This conversation made that visible to me in hindsight. I began with a faith in methods, first principles and frameworks, then pivoted to practice, where you try, fail, listen, and adapt. And perhaps now I’m in the phase of presence, where presence is what matters.

Here it is to share with all of you:

Episode 437: Gautam John is Figuring it Out

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Originally published on Substack on 10 February 2026. Read on Substack →

… still here…

 

The shape of absence definitely changed over the year.

At the start, it was an Ella-shaped hole. But it hasn’t gotten smaller. In a way, it’s gotten bigger. It’s gotten bigger in a way that encompasses us. We now live in Ella’s world.

I used to say that the tragedy is that Ella will be one chapter in our story, but to her, we were her entire story. I’ve realised that’s not true. We now live inside it. Or at least I live inside of Ella’s world in some way.

What I’ve learned about grief is that it can be debilitating, missing the absence. But it can also come back to you in those little moments where you’re doing something familiar and you feel an intense presence. Sometimes it’s almost somatic—feeling my hands in Ella’s double coat, her kind kohl-lined eyes looking at you, her basmati rice smelling feet, her cool nose nuzzling your ear. They don’t go away. They’re part of our story now.

A month after she passed, I told Shobitha I didn’t want to get over it. A year later, I understand that differently. It’s not about not getting over it. It’s making it a part of the everyday. There’s some version of me now that lives in Ella’s world. It’s different, feeling presence even when it’s not physical.

What this year has also done is offer me time to think of Ella at her best. Not just the last week. And that’s been lovely.

When I go for a run in Cubbon Park, I remember the Ella who used to run through the park without a leash and with terrible recall—so much so that I had to walk with cheese in my pockets in the vain hope that she’d come back. Never really worked. She’d roll in muddy streams and leave home white and come back brick red. The playful, growling energy that she had. The dog who loved hard and lived hard and went hard with everything.

The house still holds her. Her favourite corner will always be her favourite corner. Her collar is right there on our bookshelf. We still have her ashes. For a while I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

Maybe now it’s time.

The thing that really surprised us, but also made us happy, is Sparky.

He came into our lives six months before Ella did. For those six months, he was the only dog. When Ella came in, she had to fight for her space, and she did. For most of the thirteen years they spent together, they were genuinely playful, accommodating.

The first few days after Ella passed, maybe even the week after, Sparky was a little withdrawn. But he’s now come out of that shell as a new dog—perhaps the dog he always was. He’s calmer, friendlier with other dogs. He takes long walks to say hello to particular dogs. Maybe he’s just enjoying being a singular feature of our lives, the extra cuddles and the extra treats and the extra time. It’s beautiful to watch.

I will say that there’s nothing that’s had us think we didn’t make the right call, at almost the right time. With the benefit of hindsight, it was perhaps half a day too late. But just that.

Ella taught us so much, and continues to. ❤️

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Originally published on Substack on 7 February 2026. Read on Substack →

On structural analysis as a way to manage guilt

 

A few days ago, Deepinder Goyal posted a thread on X defending Zomato’s business model. Like everyone has pointed out, it was tone-deaf in places, self-serving in others, and what followed was the predictable pile-on. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about my response to it and unpacking what I learned about myself in the process.

I’m pretty good at finding the frame, naming the dynamic and arriving at a crisp, pithy take.

“Capitalism does capitalist things.”

“He didn’t create the brken labour market, he just built a business on top of it.”

“Zomato isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom.”

These feel true, and might even be true but what does it says about me?

Thankfully, I have friends who push back, and we have enough trust that we can debate without descending into the algorithmic acrimony that doing so on a public timeline would involve. One friend said that labour is cheap, it’s our strategic advantage in India, and the system has always been broken. My immediate reaction was: why is he offering an undergraduate argument dressed up as realism? I was screaming on the inside: take the red pill, bro. But at some point in the discussion, I had to ask myself whether I had actually taken it.

Being good at analysis—thinking you can see the system, name the forces, trace the historical arc—makes one feel aware. But does being aware mean one isn’t asleep? Because if I can name the problem as structural, it lets me off the hook for being a part of it. Being able to explain everything also excuses everything.

And my truth is this: I use these apps. I live in Bangalore. My life has been made easier by the same labour arbitrage I am busy critiquing. The delivery guy shows up at my door. I tip well, feel the awkwardness of the exchange, close the door and go back to my life, conscience assuaged. But being honest about complicity isn’t the same as doing something about it. It can just be a way of managing guilt enough to keep going.

“Tip well, be kind, delete the app,” I joked in one of the chats. A wry update to Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out.” But I haven’t deleted the app and I probably won’t.

I work in philanthropy and social change. The whole job is supposedly about making things better—supporting and building capacity, shifting conditions, playing the long game. And I believe in that work. I do.

But what I’m beginning to notice is that in my personal life, with friends, in these late-night chats about the state of things, I choose resignation more easily than I’d like. If everything is too broken to fix, I can keep sharpening the hot take.

So here’s what I’m left with at the start of this new year, filled with old discussions and familiar debates: what would it mean to be in the mess, not above it? To do something with the seeing, rather than letting the seeing be the end?

Admitting it is a start but caring has to mean more than seeing clearly.

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Originally published on Substack on 5 January 2026. Read on Substack →

On Grace, Attention, and Belonging

 

I spent most of 2025 writing about leaving abstraction behind and moving closer to the body, closer to people, closer to whatever happens when you stop trying to get to the point too quickly. I wrote about not overriding discomfort, about choosing usefulness over visibility, about letting things unfold at the pace they actually require.

And then, near the end of the year, I counted.

7,496 writing sessions across 155 days. 700 hours, not lost to my phone. 154 workouts. 162 hours moving my body. Weight dropped 7.3 kilograms whilst muscle mass increased.

The numbers are precise, almost confrontational in their clarity. They sit uneasily beside everything I’d been arguing for. Still, they’re hard to dismiss because they show repetition, commitment, and a year spent returning to the same practices again and again.

What they don’t answer is the question that began to bother me as soon as I saw them laid out and the questions I’m closing the year with:

Was I practising something, or was I documenting my right to be there?

Was measuring helping me deepen the work, or was it a way of earning a belonging I didn’t yet trust was already mine?

As I looked back, three words kept surfacing not, so much as goals I’d named in advance or values I’d tried to live up to, just what the year itself seemed to insist on returning me to. Each of them left traces in the numbers but also exposed a place where I was still working harder than I wanted to admit.

● Grace ● Attention ● Belonging ●

Ella

The piece that stayed with people most this year wasn’t about systems or practice but about loss. In February, I wrote about the days after we helped our dog, Ella, leave. I didn’t plan it, I wasn’t thinking about audience or resonance, only that the grief needed somewhere to go, and writing was the only place it would settle.

Everyone who opened that piece read it through.

I noticed that when I stopped trying to sound capable and wrote from the place where love and loss collapse into each other, people didn’t respond to the writing itself but to the honesty. Not admiration as much as recognition.

That’s the texture of belonging I keep coming back to now; being met without having to demonstrate usefulness, being seen because you let something real land rather than because you shaped it carefully enough.

The question that followed me for the rest of the year was quiet but persistent: could I arrive everywhere else the way I arrived there? At the page, at the gym, in relationships and without armour, without proof, and trusting that being human might already be enough.

Grace

If you look at my training data, the story appears simple. I started from almost nothing and climbed steadily through the year.

What the data doesn’t show are the negotiations on the mornings I wanted to push when my body was asking for restraint, the days recovery felt suspiciously like laziness because my plan said intensity. Progress happened, but only because I kept interrupting my own urge to override the signals that mattered.

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Notes on training as integration.

 

Something shifted in my training over the last few months, though I didn’t quite see it at first.

I’d signed up for HYROX; a fitness race that combines running with functional movements like sled pushes, rowing, wall balls. It meant my training had to integrate everything: running, strength, conditioning. But somewhere along the way, the goals changed me.

I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to before. How I felt hungry differently after different kinds of runsL some days wanting protein immediately, other days nothing for hours. How my heart rate variability told me things about readiness I’d been ignoring for years. How the quality of my sleep changed my power output in ways I couldn’t will my way through.

I’d spent decades training for marathons, for Olympic lifting, for strength. Each phase had one primary dial: pace, load, progressive overload. You knew what “better” meant. You hit the numbers or you didn’t. This was different. I wasn’t just integrating different training modalities but learning to read my whole system—physical, nervous, metabolic. This is also the first time my training mirrors the repatterning I’ve been doing in other parts of my life, learning to feel signals I used to override. Training stopped being about targets and became about coherence.

And then I realised what had changed wasn’t just my training. It was my relationship to my body, to effort, to what excellence even means.

This weekend I saw a thread about Shohei Ohtani, the baseball player, and something called the Harada Method. When Ohtani was in high school, he created a 64-cell grid with his goal in the centre: become the #1 draft pick. Surrounding it, eight pillars broken into specific daily practices.

The pillars weren’t just technical: body, control, speed, pitch variance. There was also: personality, karma, mental toughness. Under “karma”, his daily practices included: pick up trash. Show respect to umpires. Be positive. Be someone people want to support.

This high school kid trying to become a professional baseball player had built “pick up trash” into his training framework. Not as some motivational add-on. As an actual pillar of excellence, equally important to throwing speed.

I texted a friend: “Not identical, but feels very much in the same PIN code. True excellence is always ecological. Even in pursuing individual mastery, we can choose frameworks that embed us in relationship rather than extract us from it.”

Their response was immediate and sharp: “I cannot imagine having crystal clarity on what I want in 10–20 years, wanting it so much that I’d follow a method this regimented, and closing myself off to all the other wonderful things that might come along the way. It feels deterministic—an external, objective definition of success versus a fluid, subjective, internal one.”

They were right to push back. The Harada Method does look deterministic. Goal in the centre, 64 cells radiating out, daily checklists, measurable tasks. It looks like everything I thought I’d moved beyond. The kind of rigid goal-orientation that treats life as an engineering problem and looks like the opposite of emergence, of responsiveness and of the listening I’d been learning through my training.

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The Unglamorous Work of Making Practice Portable

 

I’ve spent years living between languages and landscapes. Not so much the ones I speak and more the ones I work in. There’s the language of practice that can be granular, contextual and alive with the texture of what actually happens when you try something. And there’s the language of pattern: abstract, portable, the version that travels beyond the room where it was born.

Good practitioners speak the first fluently, do the work, sense when something’s off, and adjust in real time. Good translators can bridge to the second in helping others learn from practice without reducing it into formula. The hardest job, the one I keep finding myself doing, is staying bilingual: close enough to practice to keep it honest, distant enough to make it legible to people who weren’t in the room.

Translation is unglamorous work that is mostly about fidelity in staying true to what happened while making it comprehensible to someone who doesn’t share your context. While you lose something in every translation, the question is whether what survives the crossing is still worth the trip.

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

― R.F. Kuang, Babel

Years ago, I was translating between platform logic and publishing tradition. I thought I’d made the shift legible by documenting the reasoning, built the scaffolding, walked people through the steps. But translation and adoption aren’t the same thing. I left and later, a funder arrived who spoke both languages natively, and the idea took root. There was sadness in that, and a familiar ache about who gets written into the story. I learned then what I’m still learning: usefulness and visibility are different currencies and translators rarely get the byline, but the work doesn’t travel without them.

What makes translation hard is that you’re always code-switching. When you’re with practitioners, you speak in specifics. Often about the things that went wrong, the small bets that didn’t land and the texture of a conversation that shifted everything. When you’re with people who need the pattern, you have to abstract: What’s the insight here? What’s portable? What can someone in a completely different context learn from this?

The risk is that you abstract too much and lose the thing that made the practice matter in the first place. Or you stay too granular and the learning never leaves the room. I’ve done both. The practice is finding the right distance at which you can be close enough to smell the petrichor yet far enough to see the weather system.

Writing helps, not as performance, but as the discipline that keeps translation honest. Writing drags ambiguity into the light without pretending it’s resolved. It shows your priors, what shifted, and why the next step might be smaller (or bolder) than the last. It’s how you make your thinking visible to yourself first, and to others second. It slows you down just enough to catch when you’re translating someone else’s experience into your preferred narrative instead of staying faithful to what actually happened.

There’s also something about rhythm. Translation can’t be a one-time event and has to be a practice, a sādhanā. You translate, someone tries it, something breaks or works in a way you didn’t expect, and then you translate again with more texture. The unglamorous part is the repetition: Are we repeating to deepen the insight, or just to reassure ourselves we understood it the first time? Are we making practice more portable, or just more comfortable to talk about?

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Or how we traded presence for proof

 

At first light in Nagarhole, the forest stirs as if half-awake. Mist drifts low through the lantana, the air still heavy with the night’s damp. Somewhere in the canopy, a langur coughs, then another answers as a kind of Morse code of nerves, one species relaying another’s unease. The forest exhales, inhales, and falls back into its long, watchful silence.

The jeep starts, diesel slicing through the quiet while the guide leans forward, scanning for tracks; the driver whispers into his phone. “Female tiger by the watering hole,” someone says. The engine hums a little louder, the air shifts, and just like that, the chase begins.

What unsettles me is the pace. Safaris once meant waiting and watching and listening and accepting the forest’s refusal to perform. Now they play out like speed runs. Six jeeps race down the red-dust track, each one desperate to be first at the sighting. Cameras the size of rifles hang from windows while eyes sweep the forest edge, hungry for stripes.

When we finally saw her—a tigress marking a tree near the water—it was from the tail end of a long line of vehicles on a narrow dirt road, nowhere to move. She appeared for three heartbeats, a flick of her tail, a glance that stopped time, and then she slipped away. Dozens of shutters had already clicked, the forest sighed, emptied of anticipation, and the day, it was decided, had been a success.

I understand the thrill. To meet that gaze, the amber stillness of something that owns the ground it walks on is unforgettable. Yet what saddens me is how quickly the encounter turns into proof—into an image, a tally, a story to carry home. The safari ends the moment it “succeeds.” Everything else—the hum of cicadas, the light shifting through the sal and teak—fades into the backdrop.

But a forest is more than a species, more than even a collection of them. It is movement and sound and pause: the rising heat that smells faintly of leaf decay, the metallic call of the greater racket-tailed drongo, the bark of a sambar that echoes for miles. It is texture and time, alive in ways that resist capture. Somewhere along the way, we have mistaken the experience for the evidence.

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote that “the whole world has been transformed into images of the world.” He was speaking of technology, but the thought followed me through those dusty tracks. Even here, in what we like to call the wild, we’ve turned experience into image. The tiger has become a symbol—an abstraction detached from the forest that sustains her, a sign of having been somewhere rather than being in it.

This is what I keep returning to: the drift from connection to abstraction. Abstraction itself isn’t the enemy—it helps us think, compare, and organise—but left unchecked, it hollows things out. It turns forests into carbon sinks, rivers into water resources, and tigers into sightings. Connection, by contrast, insists on presence. It asks that we slow down enough to be claimed by what we wish to know.

A day later, almost in the same spot, the forest offered something quieter. A rusty-spotted cat—no larger than a rabbit—was padding along the elephant-proof railing, muscles rippling under its dappled coat. It seemed to be shadowing a ruddy mongoose that darted through the undergrowth. The same bend, the same time of day, but this time no convoy, no radios, no crowd. Just us, and this small, perfect animal.

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Abstraction. Connection. And me.

 

I just published a piece for IDR about the limits of AI in social change work. It’s got frameworks, evidence, and careful arguments about where these tools belong and where they don’t. And it’s all true, as far as it goes.

But here’s what I didn’t write there: why any of this matters to me personally. This is the real story of why I cared enough to write it.

For years, I built platforms. Designed convenings. Created frameworks to help organisations think more systematically about change. I was good at it. People found it useful. But I had no idea what I was actually doing.

I was building externally what I couldn’t find internally.

All those containers for other people to belong in? I was creating them because I didn’t know how to belong to myself. The systems designed to hold complexity? I was building them because I couldn’t hold my own contradictions. The safe spaces for others? I was making them while performing a strength I didn’t always feel.

I thought I was leading. Turns out I was protecting myself through usefulness. Stay busy. Be reliable. Hold space for everyone else. Just don’t ask to be held yourself.

The work looked successful. The platforms functioned. The convenings happened. But my body was keeping score.

My neck hurt constantly. My shoulders were rocks. My back felt like it was carrying weight that wasn’t just physical. I assumed this was normal—you work hard, you travel, you sit in too many meetings, your body complains. That’s just how it is.

Then a Pilates instructor watched me move and said, almost casually, “You’re bracing wrong. Your whole body is trying to hold everything together.”

I stopped mid-movement. She was right. I was holding everything together—my posture, my projects, other people’s anxieties, my own uncertainty. Gripping when I should have been breathing. Bracing when I should have been sensing.

My physiotherapist said something similar a few weeks later. The tension in my shoulders wasn’t just tension. It was something deeper, something I’d been carrying for years. That’s how I ended up in therapy, doing trauma-informed work, finally starting to look at what I’d been so carefully not looking at.

Slowly, things started to shift. I learned to notice when I was reaching for control and calling it clarity. When I was trying to fix what needed to be felt. When I was rushing to name something that was still taking shape.

My body kept teaching me what my mind resisted: you can’t shortcut your way to wholeness. You can’t optimise your way to presence. You can’t think your way out of what needs to be felt.

And here’s the thing—the patterns in my body were the same patterns in my work. I kept trying to solve everything by building better systems, clearer frameworks, and more elegant platforms. And sure, those things had value. But they were also a way of keeping distance. Abstraction as protection. Scale as a way to avoid the intimate, messy, slow work of actually being in relationship.

Once I saw this pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. I watched myself in meetings, always prepared, always with an agenda, rarely leaving space for what wasn’t planned. I noticed how I responded to people’s struggles—jumping to solutions instead of sitting with their uncertainty. I saw how I led—projecting steadiness whether I felt it or not, rather than letting anyone see when I was unsure.

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