Tag:urbanization

Let me tell you something, my darlings: in this country we can organize a three-day wedding with elephants, drones, synchronized cousins and a choreographed sangeet, but we still struggle to say one simple sentence at the dinner table — “I see you.” That Ipsos survey saying Indians rank low on feeling loved by their partners? I’m not shocked. Not even a little. We are experts in shaadi (marriage), champions of samaj (society), lifelong servants of zimmedari (responsibility). But emotional fluency? Ah. That one we are still learning. Don’t misunderstand me....

Ah, reverse travel. Finally, a Lunar New Year plot twist I can get behind. For decades, the emotional blackmail of chunyun went like this: if you truly loved your parents, you would crawl across three provinces on a sold-out train, wedged between instant noodle fumes and someone’s restless toddler, just to appear at the ancestral dining table in time for nianyefan. Romance? Optional. Career? Negotiable. But reunion dinner? Non-negotiable. And now? The children say, “Mama, Baba — you come here.” I love it. Not because tradition should be thrown into...

Of course Indonesia scores high in love. Have you ever been invited to an Indonesian wedding? Three hundred guests minimum, aunties in matching lace kebaya, uncles guarding the buffet like national security, cousins taking selfies under fairy lights. That’s not just a party. That’s emotional infrastructure. When I saw the Ipsos Love Life Satisfaction Index, I didn’t blink. Indonesians understand something the hyper-individualistic world keeps forgetting: cinta is not just butterflies and candlelight. It’s makan together, mudik traffic jams that last twelve hours, and still choosing to sit next to...

Let me tell you something, my darlings: nothing exposes a society’s hypocrisy faster than the way it treats children. We can debate morality, religion, “family values,” and national honor until our chai gets cold—but when a child is denied a birth certificate because her mother sells sex, that is not culture. That is cruelty dressed up as paperwork. For years, children born in red-light districts have lived in a bureaucratic ghost story. No father’s name? No document. No document? No school, no exams, no proper healthcare, no future. Imagine being...

Let Auntie tell you something: if you really want to understand a society, don’t start in parliament. Start in a beauty salon. In Bangalore — that glossy tech city of start-ups, IPO dreams and young men who say “disrupt” too often — the real negotiations are happening under fluorescent lights, with a thread stretched between two steady hands. You call it grooming. I call it anthropology. When I first read The Goddess in the Mirror by Tulasi Srinivas, I smiled. Of course the salons matter. Where else do women rehearse...