“What is being called a generational shift is actually a fleeting, circumstantial phenomenon, and everyone has misunderstood it—whether they are celebrating it or panicking over it, including political parties. This badge of honour is being bestowed far too quickly. We say they are rebels. But are they really?”

"What is being called a generational shift is a momentary situational phenomenon, and everybody has mistaken it, the celebrating and the nervous alike, including the political parties. This badge of honour is being awarded far too quickly. They are rebels, we say. But are they really?"

"The accusation that the Gita is casteist and the accusation that it is misogynist both rest on roughly the same move: take a verse out of the sentence it lives in, and the sentence out of the chapter it lives in, and the chapter out of the text's own stated definitions, and almost anything can be made to say almost anything. The discipline this calls for is not loyalty to a text. It is the same discipline owed to any sentence before judgment is passed on it: read it whole, in its own sequence, before deciding what it was made to confess."

"The dowry demand is typically presented in public discourse as an anachronism, a stubborn remnant of a less enlightened India that education, urbanisation, and explicit legal prohibition have somehow failed to dislodge, a framing that mistakes the institution’s most explicit expression for a departure from it. But is dowry an aberration within the institution of marriage, or the institution’s own operating logic, followed to its economic conclusion?"

"The investigation into 2026 NEET-UG cancellation will produce arrests, possibly convictions, and a reformed NTA with a strengthened testing protocol; the twenty-two lakh students who sat on May 3 deserve nothing less. But the reformed examination will still fill its halls with candidates who do not know why they are there, whose years were arranged around a credential that was always standing in as a substitute for the self-knowledge that no curriculum, reformed or otherwise, has ever offered them."

“The mother being honoured today is the first person her children watched accept the settlement. The daughter who watched her mother’s labour go unnamed, unthanked, and unquestioned did not even consider that cooking may be a form of oppression. She learned something subtler and more durable: that this is what care looks like, that devotion does exactly this, and that a settlement accepted without complaint and carried with grace passes, in most households, for love itself.”

"Women’s reservation means little unless society first transforms the lives women actually inhabit."

"The Women's Reservation Act will soon reach implementation. More women will enter legislatures, which is preferable to the alternative. But the question being avoided in all this discussion is more uncomfortable: has anything changed in the relationship between a woman and her own sense of self? The hardest evidence against the adequacy of external liberation is not political. It lives in her inner life. That doesn't yield to legislation or to awareness of patriarchy as a social structure."

"A parent who has not questioned her own conditioning, who has not sat with her own fear and traced it to its source, who has not asked what she is outside her own social performance: such a parent has no light to offer. The state of the child is a faithful record of the state of the parent, and the relationship with the child cannot change until the parent begins to change what she is."

There is a reason the entertainment apparatus grows more elaborate, more expensive, and more omnipresent when the ground-level facts of existence are becoming harder to look at. Political theatre, religious spectacle, franchise cricket: the products differ but the mechanism is identical in every case, each offering the ego a ready-made emotional world to inhabit so that it need not examine the actual world it lives in.

"What makes this machinery particularly effective is that it finds its subjects already converted. By the time a young aspirant is old enough to question the direction he has been pointed in, he has already invested years, and the sunk cost holds him in place."

"On 8th March every year, International Women’s Day is observed, speeches are made, and achievements are listed. But the woman sitting quietly behind all of it, the one who has given and accommodated her way through life, is not waiting for a celebration. She is waiting, perhaps without knowing it, for permission to ask who she actually is beneath everything she was told to be."

"There is a question beneath the question whenever a society turns its full legislative attention to what a woman wears, where she walks, whether her voice may be heard in a public space, and how much pain her body may absorb before the law takes notice."

When a social arrangement is given the name of religion, it becomes nearly impossible to dismantle. You can legislate against it, protest against it, write constitutions that explicitly forbid it, and it will survive, because people will obey the law in the open and worship the belief in private.

"If one relies on events, shock is guaranteed, again and again, because most misdeeds never come fully to light. Scandals are not reliable teachers. If one understands the principle, shock loses its grip, because what unfolds is recognised rather than discovered."