NoMad Vloggers

Every morning, the Delhi Metro runs its own little sociological experiment, and I happen to be its unpaid, mildly nosy observer. Most of us are exactly where you'd expect us to be: thumbs scrolling on autopilot, eyes glazed over a reel we won't remember by the next stop, or talking loudly enough that the entire coach is now looped into our personal business — right up until the tunnel eats the network and cuts us off mid-sentence, leaving us staring at a frozen call screen like it personally betrayed us. And then, somewhere in that crowd, there's always one . A kid with a book open, headphones nowhere in sight, phone nowhere in sight — completely somewhere else entirely. Not performing calm the way people perform productivity on LinkedIn. Actually calm. I've clocked the same thing at parks and picnics: no phones passed around for photos, just paperbacks, real eye contact, and conversation that doesn't pause every ninety seconds for a notification. Frankly, it's ...

The first thing I think of when I open my eyes is switching off the AC. It's been running all night, quietly eating into a bill I'll dread at the end of the month. We have air conditioners in every room of our home — for comfort, for the upgraded lifestyle we've earned, to keep pace with the social strata we now belong to, and because Delhi's heat leaves us no real choice. We run them so that after a punishing day, we can steal five or six hours of sane sleep. I started writing this after seeing a quote on Instagram, loosely attributed to Ramachandra Guha — I can't verify the source, so take the attribution with caution. But it stayed with me, because it captures something true: life has become harder to simply survive in the last ten years, even for those of us who are supposedly winning at it. The Win That Doesn't Feel Like One I have a graduate and a master's degree from top universities in India. Nine years of work experience. I live in Delhi with my fa...