Silent Corner

I watch from afar,

where shadows sit heavy on the edge of the room.

Habits grow like ivy – unquestioned,

entitled vines curling around what once was simple.

I say nothing.

Silence is safer than storms.

 

When I speak,

my voice feels foreign to the air

the weight of subtle things,

too delicate to carry on casual tongues,

too sharp to rest easy in the heart of another.

 

So I brood.

A quiet ritual of sorting grief

in a world that mistakes stillness for surrender.

When asked what’s wrong,

I reach for words that vanish mid-thought,

and the distance grows again.

 

Old wounds echo

not in pain, but in the memory of misused trust.

To be known was once a danger,

a vulnerability bent into a weapon.

So now,

I build walls from the inside out.

 

Connections knock gently

I hesitate to open.

Not for lack of longing,

but for fear of finding

another hollow space where presence should be.

 

And so I shrink

into moments that ask little of me

a shared laugh on a flight,

a quiet meal,

the pulse of new streets beneath worn shoes.

These are my offerings to joy small,

but mine.

 

I do not reach far anymore.

I have learned the art of stillness,

not as peace,

but as protection.

And in that stillness,

I survive.

 

Vishal Gupta

3^rd May, 2025

Samvaad

The Hindi word for conversation is samvaad. It is a beautiful word. The word samvaad is composed of two parts - sam meaning same or equal, and vaad. The origin of the word vaad is interesting. In the colloquial sense, vaad simply means voice or noise or loudness. Therefore samvaad literally means the same level of loudness. This means in Hindi, a conversation cannot happen unless all parties are equally loud, or rather, have the equal voice. This simple word sows the seeds of democracy and dialogue in the spirit of the language itself. This is also the root of many shouting matches that we see as a natural part of being an argumentative Indian.

 

But let's dig a little deeper. The word vaad shares its root with the word vedna which means an expression of pain. Both these words in-turn share root with the word vadini which means the one who expresses. In Hinduism, the Goddess Saraswati, the Gooddess of wisdom and art, is often called veena-vadini, i.e. the one who expresses herself with the music of the veena instrument. The purest meaning of the word vaad is expression. And not just simple expression, an expression that carries wisdom and beauty. Samvaad means dialogue, where all parties are equal, informed, and the expression is tasteful. Unless these conditions are met, samvaad cannot be said to have occurred.

 

Samvaad also requires sam, i.e. agreement of base axioms. Without a foundation, there can be no dialogue. For samvaad, there needs to be a common standing ground. A broad consensus. The ability to acknowledge that even if there is a difference of opinion, there is no difference of intent. Without that base point of meeting, it is not just a difference of opinion, but a difference of ideology. A difference of opinion can be reconciled, negotiated, and compromised-with in pursuit of common objectives. However, a difference of ideology cannot be reconciled because the objectives pursued are different. In such a scenario, samvaad is not achieved. What is reached is matbhed. There is no reconciliation in matbhed.

 

Even in English, the word "conversation" carries a similar depth. The word "conversation" itself has the same roots as the word "convert". Conversation comes from the Latin words con meaning together and versare meaning turn. The idea of a conversation requires the ability to exchange and entertain ideas with an openness to change one's own. If there is only imposition of one's own ideas, it is not a "conversation" but a narration.

 

In both traditions, Indian and Western, the idea of conversation points to more than words exchanged. It is about equality, reciprocity, and the willingness to meet one another in the shared space of understanding. To have a samvaad is not just to speak; it is to listen, to allow expression to find balance, and to keep alive the spirit of democracy.

The Harbour Line – Motion vs. Meditation

I stepped off the train in Ajmer before dawn, the platform still cool and quiet under a pale wash of sodium lights. There were no speakers to announce anyone’s arrival, no shuffling tide of sleeves checking for tickets—just a few men leaning against columns, wrapped in shawls, silently smoking beedis. I exhaled and realized I hadn’t even noticed my own heartbeat slowing. In Mumbai, you’re always running—sometimes literally, chasing the last train or the next opportunity—but here, in Ajmer, time seemed to have taken a leisurely detour.

Mumbai is defined by motion, by the relentless pursuit of naukri, jhopri, chhokri: a job that might pull you from half-way across the country, a slum‑quarter you’ll learn to navigate, and the dream of sending your children out of that cramped kholi into a life you never had. Every corner is a deal, every handshake a calculation. Efficiency isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the tide that sweeps you forward. The crazy stupid things you do—catching three trains in two hours to save fifty rupees of fare, sleeping on office couches, skipping meals to meet deadlines—become badges of honor, proof that you can thrive in a city that demands your all.

Ajmer doesn’t work that way. As I wandered through its winding lanes toward the Dargah Sharif, vendors swept the steps with brooms, not hurrying, but with a quiet deliberateness born of routine. In Mumbai, the bartender at a five‑star lounge barely registers your presence if you stay past your fourth drink; here, in Ajmer, a chaiwalla asked about my hometown, my work, my travels, as if the conversation mattered more than the sale.

But there’s a blunt edge to that simplicity. Ajmer can be rude in ways Mumbai isn’t: a shopkeeper refusing to quote a price until you promise to buy, a rickshaw driver hauling you to the wrong mosque because he “doesn’t like outsiders,” a glance that smolders with impatience when you speak in Hindi tinged with a Mumbai twang. In a city that moves slowly, there’s less impetus to absorb new customs or accommodate difference. Mumbai’s cacophony forces you to confront diversity—language, religion, class, ambition—because you literally bump up against it on crowded platforms and in ever‑packed trains. Ajmer may offer serenity, but it can feel insular, as if its welcome mat is permanently rolled up.

In Mumbai, business isn’t just driving force—it’s the oxygen. Every conversation circles back to profit margins, market strategies, or side hustles. The city hums with the calculus of commerce: real estate auctions, IPO chatter, the latest disinvestment news. That intensity makes things happen: new startups sprout, skyscrapers rise, fortunes are made (and lost) within a quarter. Yet the same force that powers Mumbai’s engine also sucks its soul dry. Rare is the moment when you’re not lurking on your phone, scanning stock tickers or email threads, fearing that pause will cost you your edge.

By contrast, Ajmer’s heartbeat is leisurely—more in tune with the call to prayer than a balance sheet. People operate on proverb time: “Kal kare so aaj kar, aaj kare so ab”, but somehow everyone interprets it as “do it when you feel like it.” Deadlines blur and trivial emergencies vanish. There’s room for detours: a sudden detour to the Ana Sagar Lake, a spontaneous sit‑down in a courtyard under a neem tree, a shared paratha with strangers who become friends over a single cup of chai.

And yet both cities come with their sets of perks and perils—and more often than not, the problems are the price you pay for the benefits. Ajmer’s unrushed pace gifts you peace, but it also stunts big‑picture opportunities. Medical specialists are scarce; a simple surgery can require weeks of waiting. Rickshaw speeds crawl, and job options outside the khakhi‑shirt brigade feel limited. If you crave progress, you might find Ajmer’s simplicity suffocating.

In Mumbai, progress arrives on schedule, but at the cost of sanity. You learn to socialize through WhatsApp groups; family dinners become conference‑calls squeezed between board meetings. Girlfriends become side projects you hope to launch once the IPO hits. You trade work‑life balance for work‑survive balance. The daily crush of bodies in local trains becomes a metaphor for life itself: everyone fighting for a foothold, jockeying for space, determined not to be left behind.

Yet you can’t isolate a city’s perks from its problems any more than you can expect a person to sharpen one dimension of their personality without dulling another. The friend who’s the life of every party might also miss appointments; the drone‑like colleague who never socializes may never miss a deadline. Mumbai’s ruthless efficiency coexists with unforgiving loneliness; Ajmer’s warm rhythms mask undercurrents of parochialism.

When I boarded the train back to Mumbai, clutching a cup of chai from a street stall—sweet enough to mask the city’s bitterness—I felt both worlds within me. In Ajmer, I’d found a momentary refuge: a reminder that life need not be an unending sprint. In Mumbai, I’d leave behind the luxury of slow mornings, but regain the thrill of possibility.

Perhaps that’s the paradox of urban life. You can’t have the best of both worlds—at least not without cost. If Mumbai is a ceaseless marathon pushing you toward every horizon, Ajmer is a calm shoreline inviting you to rest. Both require trade‑offs: a pulse‑quickening race that fuels dreams but feeds stress, or a gentle breeze that soothes the soul but stifles ambition.

In the end, I carried a sliver of Ajmer’s stillness back to the roar of Mumbai’s tracks. And every time I pause in a frantic morning, I remember those slow‑sipped chai cups under neem trees. Both cities made me richer—Ajmer for teaching me the art of being present, Mumbai for showing me how far a dream can take you when you refuse to stop. Perhaps the real lesson is that no city, like no person, can be perfect. We must learn to live with the things that make us who we are, knowing that our strengths and our flaws are forever entwined.

Infinity is Zero

In the beginning, there was nothing. And the universe was at peace. Then, in a tiny little planet, the first speck of life dared to rise.

It was a microscopic tit-bit, floating in a volcanic ocean that itself floated inside a universal void. It was the first time the universe created something different from itself. The first time “self” stood apart from the infinite. Until then, there had only been an endless oneness – a vastness with no boundary, and no need for a definition. But with that first trembling speck, a boundary was drawn – organic from inorganic, self from other, life from death. And with that line began the greatest journey of all – the journey away from the universe, or back to itself?

The Rise of the Self

As life evolved, it perfected the art of separation. The smallest microscopic life had the beginnings of “senses”, but no real free will.

Trees arose, rooted deeply into the earth, connected to each other through hidden mycelial webs – but still a part of the universe, each other, and the soil. It was impossible to tell where the roots ended and the soil began.

Animals tore away from the soil. They became mobile, hungry, and alert, their sense of ego sharpened. The need to preserve the “self” grew, even if it meant killing another. Senses directed action. There was independent thought, and independent life. Loneliness arose for the first time.

And then came humans, the greatest masters of separation. We did not just eat or move – we named, owned, enslaved, created, passed on, immortalized. We built layers and layers of meaning, identity, and culture. The “self” swelled into something monumental, at time even monstrous.

What began as a single boundary between organism and universe became a fortress of ego. Life was separated from the universe, and learnt to exist in isolation.

Entropy

The same story played out at the cosmic scale. The universe began with unity. In the singularity of the Big Bang, there was no space, no time, no matter. A pure point of nothingness, and everything. Then expansion came, and with it, structure. Galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually life. Order emerged – but so did disorder. Entropy, the measure of chaos, became the law of the cosmos.

But entropy has only one conclusion: return.

After the last stars burn out, when the last black hole radiates disintegrates into the last photon, the universe will dissolve into a flat, silent void. No gradients, no forces, no distinctions. No space, no time. Just like the moment before the Big Bang. The beginning and the end are mirrors. Entropy, in its final maturity, is not chaos but peace. The heat death of the universe is nothing less than liberation into nothingness – moksha.

The Greatest Sin

Religion confirms. In the Garden of Eden, when all was innocent, humanity’s fall comes through knowledge. Eating the fruit of knowledge separated man from God, and the self from the universe. Awareness was exile. From that moment, humanity had to labor through suffering, history, and civilization in order to earn the way back. The arc of the Bible is not one of progress, but of return – from paradise, through alienation, back to paradise.

Eastern traditions echo the same rhythm. Buddhism sees ignorance not as a lack of knowledge, but as clinging to it. Enlightenment is not accumulation but cessation. The Upanishads insist: you are not this body, nor this mind, nor even the knowledge you think you hold. “Neti, neti” – not this, not this – until all that remains is the silent whole – the atma.

Christianity calls it God, Buddhism calls it nirvana, Vedanta calls it Brahman, Physics calls it the void – all point to the same: the loss of self, the loss of knowledge, the return to the universe.

Mathematics

Mathematics, too, encodes this riddle. Zero and infinity are opposites, yet they reflect each other. Divide by zero, and the result is infinity. Push infinity down into infinitesimals, and you arrive at zero. The circle closes.

Calculus thrives on this paradox: the infinite steps that converge into nothingness, the infinitesimal fragments that sum to infinity. In both directions, the human mind meets a wall. Beyond that wall, there is silence.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem whispers the same truth: a system can never explain itself fully. Knowledge can never complete itself. The supreme knowledge is the recognition of its own impossibility – which is to say, the supreme knowledge is surrender.

Language

If knowledge is exile, then language is its first weapon. To name is to divide: this from that, me from you, sacred from profane. Language lifted humanity out of the ocean of being and gave us history, philosophy, and law. But it also tore us away.

And yet, in its deepest wisdom, language knows its limits. The Upanishads fall into silence at the highest truths. Zen teachers use paradox and nonsense to unhook the mind from words. The Tao Te Ching begins: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” At the summit, language bows out.

Technology – our latest flowering of language and logic – carries the same irony. Algorithms divide us into ever-narrower selves, yet they also weave us into one global consciousness. The cloud is a strange prototype of the cosmic mind. We are building the machinery of separation, only to find that it mirrors the unity we lost.

Psychology

Individually, the story repeats. The infant begins without separation – no sense of self, just raw immersion. Slowly, the ego develops, boundaries harden. The child learns to say “I,” and exile begins. The adult becomes a fortress of memory, desire, identity. But through meditation, through surrender, the layers can be peeled away. Enlightenment is not discovery but return – a child’s innocence regained, but now conscious.

Even in modern science, psychedelics and neuroscience show us that the sense of self is not permanent. It can dissolve. People feel most “alive” when they loose a sense of self – in art, in work, in love. And when it does, people report the same thing sages have always said: oneness, unity, peace.

The Paradox

Here is the paradox. To return to nothing, we must strive. To dissolve knowledge, we must use knowledge. To lose the self, the self must make the effort. Scriptures, philosophies, even this essay, are ladders. They are meant to be climbed, only to be discarded.

Zen calls this the finger pointing at the moon. Useful, but not the moon itself. The Bhagavad Gita calls it nishkama karma – action without clinging to the fruit. One must build the self in order to let it go.

The entire story of life, of civilization, of the universe, is one great detour – a spiralling journey away from the whole, so that the reunion may be conscious. Without separation, no return. Without exile, no homecoming. Without knowledge, no surrender of knowledge.

The End is the Beginning

The first speck of life arose as a division. The last breath of the universe will dissolve that division. The alpha and the omega, the aadi and the anadi, are one and the same.

Everything we call history, knowledge, civilization, progress, is nothing but the journey back to nothing. The trees knew it by remaining still. The animals forgot it in their hunger. Humanity complicated it into philosophies and scriptures. But in the end, all paths lead back to the same ocean.

When the last black hole sighs into emptiness, when the last thought ceases, when the last name falls away, the circle will be complete. Nothing will remain. And the universe will be at peace again.

The Harbour Line - Chhakke

I first heard it long before I saw her: two sharp claps, disjoint echoes reverberating through the carriage, cutting through the drone of conversations and the clatter of steel wheels. In an instant, phones slipped into pockets, chatter trailed off, and commuters lifted their heads. That double clap is the Chakke’s signature herald: an auditory beacon announcing their arrival and commanding a respectful hush.

She stepped aboard with the easy confidence of someone born to these rails. There was no plea in her outstretched hand - no tremor of shame - only the quiet insistence of a sovereign demanding her due. As she advanced down the aisle, most passengers reached into their wallets without a word. Ten and twenty‑rupee notes fluttered into her palm, offered willingly as if buying not charity but a shield against the day’s coming storms.

After each offering, she pressed her fingers lightly against the donor’s forehead: first across the brow, then near the crown, bestowing a blessing in place of thanks. That invocation felt like a small benediction, a private moment of grace amid Mumbai’s relentless hustle. For a heartbeat, the city’s frenzy: the screech of announcements, the glare of overhead lights, the crush of bodies, receded. Commuters closed their eyes, savored that sacred pause, then watched her glide onward, hand outstretched to the next passenger.

Legally, Hijra - India’s third gender - gained formal recognition in April 2014, when the Supreme Court declared that fundamental rights must extend equally to transgender citizens, granting them self‑identification and reservation in education and employment. Yet social acceptance lags far behind legal mandates. Many Hijre are cast out by family and community, leaving them with few options beyond traditional roles: blessing births and weddings, begging (‘dheengna’), or surviving as sex workers (‘raarha’).

In most Indian cities, the Hijra who turn to sex work face harrowing violence: routine police extortion, forced unprotected encounters, and the threat of arrest under antiquated laws like Section 377. This often leads to a hardened culture where the Hijras try to harass the society back. The asking for alms is not just a voluntary assertion of existence; it’s a fight for acknowledgement. A 2018 study found that police in Mumbai and other major cities regularly extort transgender sex workers, driving them to riskier practices that heighten HIV and other health risks. Yet on the local trains, you’ll never see a Chakka raise her voice or brandish a threat. They recognize a head‑shake for “no” and simply step away - an unspoken code of respect that Mumbai’s commuters have learned to honor.

That silent understanding is hard‑won. Mockery is a line that cannot be crossed: laugh at them, whisper jokes, or snatch away their dignity, and you’ll feel the chill in their gaze - a quiet fury more unnerving than any shout. But decline to give, offer only ridicule, and you risk more than social censure; you risk scoring an enemy who carries her community’s collective memory of every indignity ever suffered.

Each morning on the Mumbai trains, the Chakke transform the carriage into a living theatre of resilience. Their presence is woven from the crazy stupid things that the city demands - dancing for small fees at neighborhood weddings, reciting scripted blessings for what feels like pocket change, or offering companionship for an indeterminate cost. These aren’t desperate acts; they’re assertions of identity, fierce declarations that even at society’s margins, they deserve space, respect, and recompense.

Beneath those claps and blessings lies an entire social universe: guru‑chela households governed by elders (gurus) who provide shelter, guidance, and rudimentary education in Hijra Farsi; clandestine networks that circulate news of police crackdowns, safe routes through the city, and sources of donated food or clothing; and informal collectives that offer legal referrals and crisis support for those facing violence or eviction.

When the Chakka step off at the next station - two soft claps of their shoes on the platform - there’s a collective exhale. Phones reappear, conversations resume, and the carriage returns to its usual din. Yet something fundamental has shifted. Each blessing, each ten‑rupee note, has been a tiny act of rebellion: a refusal to be erased, a ratification of personhood in a city that often reduces its inhabitants to numbers and deadlines.

In Mumbai, a city defined by motion and survival, these moments of stillness matter, Chakke remind us that dignity is not a passive entitlement but a fragile covenant, maintained by countless small exchanges. Their morning rounds are more than a plea for alms - they are a testament to the human capacity for resilience, community, and quiet defiance in the face of systemic exclusion. And in that suspended second - when a palm meets a forehead and the carriage falls silent - you glimpse the true pulse of this metropolis: a heartbeat that sings, against all odds, for every soul brave enough to claim it.