ideasmithy

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Feminist Thrills In Reading Crime Fiction - Unmana, Meeti Shroff, Kalpana Swaminathan

I had a personal revelation on reading & writing this month at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2025. The ‘Murder, She Wrote’ panel was hosted by Jane Borges and featured female crime fiction writers Kalpana Swaminathan, Unmana and Meeti Shroff. The spaces of publishing and crime fiction (just like graphic novels and academia) tend to be such brodoms, that I just had to attend. My revelation started…

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How We Treat People Is How We’re Feeling Inside

We need a way to ask the people in our lives, “Why are you so cruel in your thoughts of me?” Doesn’t this idea inform all human judgement and underline every relationship of our lives? We wonder why people treat us poorly. How we behave is determined by the emotional landscapes we inhabit. Let’s think about what we want instead, the opposite of cruelty in thoughts about us. That is kindness,…

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Fishing For Identity In A Moving Marol Village

The quest for identity comes from tangles in your beginnings. I suppose I’ll keep going back to Marol on this journey. I’m the first native Mumbaiker in my family. And this is a city of immigrants. How do I find belonging in place that like its seashores, is washed away and transformed with every wave? Who am I when where I grew up didn’t give me belonging? What is my relationship to my domicile…

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The Feels This Week: Culture Milestones For Mental Health

It’s exactly a month since I hit publish on the last ‘The Feels This Week’ post so I wonder if I should call this The Feels This Month. But oh, what an unhopeful name to assume that I’ll only have a handful of these sought out feels in a month. Like the last post, this one is also a rare moment of spontaeneity I allow myself. No editing, no re-reading, no polishing, SEO etc. Here goes what’s been…

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Who You Are By Where You Are: Mumbai ’s Location Politics

My Mumbai explorations have been mostly alone. I didn’t know anybody else who was as intrigued by Mumbai’s neighborhoods, subcultures, architecture or streets.  Listen to my reading of this post here. Neither of my parents is from here, and I grew up surrounded by those more focused on gender roles than city explorations. Womanhood was presented as delicate fussiness about sweat, dust and…

[ideasmithy]

Who You Are By Where You Are: Mumbai’s Location Politics

Read the post ‘Who You Are By Where You Are: Mumbai’s Location Politics’ here.

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Navigating A Flawed Mental Health Dialogue in India

Religion, Politics & Mental Health Mental health challenges are not new to humanity, even if the nature and triggers for those challenges have changed. Civilisations had different ways to cope with these cracks in our pysche. Religion was one of the primary spaces, being that it is the most common source of reassurance, hope & belonging. Unfortunately (and perhaps for the same reason), religion…

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The Indian Mental Health Circus: Is Therapy For India?

What Indian Mental Health Is Missing I recently listened to therapist Vienna Pharaon on The Grey Area with Sean Illing podcast, in an episode titled ‘Breaking Our Family Patterns’. What strikes me is that a good therapist has to firstly be humble and open to the way human nature is full of surprises. I don’t see that in the mental health rhetoric in India. This spans therapists, medical…

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Mad Men: How Midge in ‘SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES’ Shaped Don’s Love Life

Don Draper’s story is told more through his lovers than his campaigns. Midge Daniels, his first partner in Mad Men, stood apart. Was she his first real relationship? Did her independence and departure set the tone for his destructive path?

Was Midge the first Don mistress? byu/ideasmithy inmadmen The Don journey begins with Midge Mad Men’s Don Draper is best defined by his messy love life, affairs, wives and all. For a show purportedly about advertising, Don’s story is told more through his bedrooms than his campaigns. The fandoms continue to debate the best, worst, most significant and so on of the Draper partners. The pilot…

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The Feels This Week: Curating Comfort & Moving Moments

Curating moments of inspiration, music, and reflections that spark joy, soothe pain, and celebrate the beauty of simply being moved. The feels this week!

The title is from a show I remember watching as a little kid called ‘The World This Week’. No, this post has nothing to do with that show. But I have been seeking things that make me feel things that I like. Inspiration, amusement, revelation, affection, joy, happy nostalgia. Living is hard. But I can curate these feelings from the glut of media available to me. So here goes my list of things…

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The Gentle Goodbye: Embracing Clean Endings In Life

2024 was the year I embraced the art of the clean goodbye —free of regret, pain, and drama. Why do we make goodbyes so complicated?

Read the blogpost version of the episode ‘The Gentle Goodbye: Embracing Clean Endings In Life’ here.

[ideasmithy]

The Gentle Goodbye: Embracing Clean Endings In Life

2024 taught me the art of the clean goodbye. From objects to relationships to even death, goodbyes aren’t about coldness but about clarity and respect for the journey. Why do we hold on so tightly to things that have reached their natural end?

2024 was the year I discovered the gentle goodbye. Goodbyes without regret. Goodbyes without pain. Clean goodbyes. Why was it so hard? The emotional weight of symbols in goodbye I think it started when I let go of the uncomfortable bed I’d been using for ten years. After years of discomfort, it went in a flash. I realised in the minutes that it was being carried out of my house that I was…

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How Female Erasure (Mis)Shapes Our History

Female erasure in history means women like my aunt, my great-grandmother—and maybe me—are left unrecorded, our stories quietly slipping out of memory.

Read the text of the episode ‘How Female Erasure (Mis)Shapes Our History’ here.

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It’s A Wonderful George Bailey Goodbye To 2024

2024 brought grim lessons in resilience. My Christmas miracle was an invitation to a play - Akvarious Productions ‘It’s a wonderful life’. The story brought me warmth and gave me pause for the miracles that abound in my life.

What has 2024 been like? It feels wrong to say ‘difficult’ in a world that has experienced 2020 and 2021. Two years should be long enough to get over death, anxiety, stir craziness, isolation, terror. Shouldn’t it? It doesn’t feel even a bit like enough. Survival is not joyful. Resilience feels grim and scarred. Nothing inspires awe, nothing is wonderful. Life lessons from a difficult year I am…

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Review: The Island Of Missing Trees & Other Elif Shafak Books - Brown Girls Who Speak English

Review of three Elif Shafak books: If you know trees, you know there are worlds running along faster than a pair of eyes can keep up, even in the placid green.

What a gentle, loving book this was! It felt like the peaceful calm after the tumult of more frenzied books. Not that it lacks for drama. If you know trees, you know there are worlds running along faster than a pair of eyes can keep up. There is tragedy, romance, adolescent angst, friendship, grief, affection, family, ambition and passion. It is set in the aftermath of (and some during) a…

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The Safest City: Mumbai 26/11 Terror Attacks

In 2008, the city that raised me became a battlefield. This is my story of Mumbai during the 26/11 terror attacks. Through the eyes of one of its citizens.

I’d been performing stories about Mumbai on stage for a few years when Radiocity invited me to shoot with them. It was for an episode marking 10 years since the terror attacks on 26 November 2008. A story? Of course, I had a story. Like every other dramatic (and otherwise) experience I’ve had in this city, it taught me something about myself and gave me wounds that made me love the city harder.…

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How We Talk About Violence: The Bengaluru PG Murder

A Bengaluru murder reveals deeper issues of gender violence, victim-blaming & cultural conflicts. We need to reconsider how we think about violence.

‘Woman from Bihar brutally murdered in Bengaluru PG’ screams the article headline while TV news anchor hosts experts who opinie on the finance minister’s statement about more women in the workforce, question the safety of PGs, articulate the lack of empathy shown by the victim’s roommates as they watch Kriti Kumari die. Look for the latest news on violence against a woman and you might miss it…