On moving on from tough loves;
On finding newer, greener pastures;
On missing home & the language(s) that makes it

At the start of 2026 we had a month-long spell of no wifi at home, and an arctic blast outside. At the time I was so frustrated but also manically trying to find poetry in the experience. It was during that boredom that I managed to finally migrate out of substack, leaving behind the convenient pastures, those very well-trodden lanes. I moved to Buttondown because primarily I wanted to challenge my own writing rhythms, every few years I switch up blog platforms (wordpress > tiny letter > substack > buttondown) to question and keep the brain agile. In addition to this, for the last couple years or so Substack had been given me tech troubles; I never received any of my own newsletters on email.

After I sent my first blog from Buttondown, I got 3 emails, 4 whatsapp messages and 2 Insta DMs from friends, school teachers and acquaintances saying they had missed my blogs and were happy that I’d started writing again. I was ecstatic — people could see why I had switched! (Even the strongest of us need some form of validation.)

But the switch also came with its own, anticipated, corollaries. I missed access, like that sweet convenient ding that I could rely on each time I pressed published on my substack and saw my newsletter/blog pin itself automatically at the top of the feed. Plus substack’s internal wiring helps promote(?) the blogs sometimes to rather unsuspecting corners. If my friends, acquaintances, school teachers, even my husband, weren’t receiving my blogs, some odd stranger/bot from a far off corner of substack would find my words and leave an encouraging remark or repost to troll.

Online life can be a leveler.

Other than that, I missed that I felt like belonged to a community on substack, which in itself is an empty feeling in retrospect. Because there was never any community to begin with there; all the people I was connected on the platform were ones I was connected off it. I email regularly with many of substack writing pals, from before we all got onto the cesspool. We exchange notes, encourage each other, read drafts, find mutual topics of interest.

So in effect what existed was an empty feeling, a placeholder for the real community. Once out of substack, I increased my emailing frequency with these friends, found more time in my calendar and even perhaps figured out how to reduce screentime. Buttondown as a platform is much neater, it is slowtech, and saddles you with a delicious backend support team.

The one form of writing I had found sorely lacking on substack for my five years there was writing from more Indian writers, journalists, bloggers. 2024 onwards I saw a spurt in those. I do miss occasionally chancing upon blogs written in Hindi on substack and while I’ve asked people to send me links to them, those still remain few and far in between. And I don’t just mean any kind of random writing — but proper, good old Blogspot or Wordpress grammar of literary life writing done in Hindi. If you know any of those, please send me links?

This end of August will be two complete years since I moved out of Delhi, out of India and also two years since we went back home. We were caught up, priorities shifted. We took the winter break to go to Italy instead of going home, because the exuberance of youth. But now the missing weighs on me, so I find myself pulling out Hindi novels by Kedarnath Singh, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mahashweta Devi, Nirmal Verma. I sleep with my fingers tucked in between the oldest Kedarnath Singh paperback but I also amble away on substack searching for modern day writing from India. Iwant to read about Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore but not in a way that those viral substack bloggers chisel out either immensely sorry or unrelentingly ecstatic Instagram-esque blogs from these cities.

This morning I went for my silly mental health walk and came across shrubs after shrubs of varied greens. Snapping pictures, the thought of the heatwave back home passed my mind. At the end of the day when I sent the pictures to a cousin, my mother and a bestie, their responses surprised me. My mom was more interested in showing off the current state of her garden, my bestie found the blossoms “beyond gorgeous” and my cousin said “it’s just like Bangalore”!

As silly as this remark was, it’s also so accurate because the current weather in Gothenburg is like peak Bangalore pleasant weather, it’s how my experience of Delhi’s monsoon was from 2017-22, it’s how the city and sky would look in my adolescence during those heavy summer rain days. The greyness contrasted by all these vibrant array of colours. Each time I post a picture of these jacarandas or dandelions or blue bells or amaltas on my instagram stories, friends from India send hearts, as if in acknowledgment. “These are our flowers, but you can enjoy them too,” they seem to be implicitly saying.

One has to have immense Stockholm Syndrome to miss Delhi, but I miss the people, the stories, their silly faces. Us collectively braving the heatwaves from our separate quarters in Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune. “Us marinating in the broth of our own beings,” as 2021 Anandi would write. Us wallowing in self-pity, seeing no end to the heat in sight, chilling with near frozen beers on the terrace garden of a friend, or in the backyard balcony of the ground floor I lived in for five years.

Rain-washed slick streets of Gothenburg, minus all of its Teslas and Volvos and boys zipping by on scooters do remind me of quarters of Bangalore I’ve visited, lanes and bylanes of Bombay that’ve homed me, and parts of Delhi I’ve been proud to call home. Pune comes close to configure this specific lightness of weather, light, greenery and general levity on the street level. People cycling, kids playing in parks, aimless crowds outside the corner pizzeria: just multiply all this activity by 100 and viola you have your buzzing, big, boastful Indian megapolis.

If only.

That said reading some blogs from writers back home (or not), some of whom I’m lucky to call friends brings me some measure of solace. Sharing here in the hope to spread that comfort:

1. Now that I am living one of my many dreams, is it really worth it: Debjit Banerjee, writer and photographer, has been blogging about his life (reading, photographing, writing, cycling) from the lap of the Himalayas, the lanes of Bombay and comforts of Delhi. Read him for that pause that we so often forget to take.

2. home language, world language: Journalist Meghna Rao’s blog is a catalogue of curiosities ranging from the literary to language to Bangalore musings. I took special delight in this essay about her language roots and their evolution over the years in the US and India. Also, her recent piece about Bangalore gave me the precise flavour of the city!

3. Loving strangers: Bombay-based film critic Rahul Desai’s substack has been a springwell of surprisingly cathartic writing. He writes grief the way some of us live it. It’s raw, vulnerable writing that sometimes cuts too close to the bone and maybe that’s why I’ve found myself wandering to his blogs again and again.

At some levels, I find myself stuck in the period between 2005-18. I listen to music from that era, rewatch Hindi, American, French movies from then. On Google photos I find myself palming back over and over to the phase of 2014-18 which I believe was my most poorly paid, but also most creatively abundant phase. I feel that with life moving on, years feeling less endless than before, I’m losing my grip on my own share of creativity.

I read books, but don’t writing enough about them. I watch movies but don’t critique them nearly enough. I visit places that I’ve wanted to but feel something amiss, like a connection with my own self. Like most of us, I wander solemnly alone in the alleys of this AI-addled internet, sometimes with a completely blank mind. Whatsapp chats don’t buzz, SMSes don’t ping, iMessages with once besties just don’t arrive. Insta DMs are free of any curious stories or spicy gossip. No one calls to check in. No one messages “out of nowhere” to wonder “how are you? it’s been long”. I’ve officially forgotten how to use air quotes in life, in text.

Sometimes I wonder if those bored, moneyless, creatively bursting afternoons were better. I’m surrounded by high res photographs that are devoid of meaning, endless carousels of texts that lack meaning or at least connection. All this connectivity to what end! What a morbid way to end the blog but reading these essays and others by these writers gives me hope, courage, even that push to pick up the diary and pencil. But the words, they don’t come.

I did write a couple of things I’m pretty happy with this year:

1. A prescription for randomness; Psyche (more coming soon)

2. Is Gothenburg a Reader’s Paradise; Art Review

Hope you enjoy reading these & the blog! Send some good vibes my way & maybe drop an email/text?