Everything I think About

  What Colour Are the Oranges? Photo credit–Sarthak Kanswal (Self)   What Colour Are the Oranges   Every evening, there is this really beautiful little ritual on the streets of Laxmi Nagar market. The lights of the shops shine like an over enthusiastic stage lamp, scooters speed elegantly through any possible gap in the traffic, and people move with the peculiar rhythm of our beloved capital- Delhi, with half hurry and half hesitation. Everyone is in a hurry, as if they are running out of time, though they are not quite sure what it is that they are waiting for.   In the middle of this beautiful moving but strangely stagnant theatre, there stand two children, holding flowers and carrying a peculiar spark in their eyes. The boy usually carries roses wrapped in plastic printed with tiny red hearts, the sort of wrapping that can manufacture romance if it tries hard enough. The girl carries the lotuses with her, though hardly ever sold, maybe they don’t hol...

We Call It Love It is tempting to believe that love is mysterious, spontaneous, and purely emotional and spiritual . Yet beneath this poetry called romance there exists something far more mechanical, a brain, a brain that is  quietly evaluating signals of "attractiveness". Human beings often choose partners who are considered attractive ,romantically attractive, Not “attractive romantically,” but attractive, romantically. In other words, attraction precedes romance rather than emerging from it. Thinking about this inevitably brings to my mind " The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins(one of the few papers on evolutionary psychology) . The book famously argues that genes propagate themselves by influencing behaviors that increase reproductive success. From this perspective, humans are not simply searching for love; we are essentially searching for mates , even if that search is disguised under the of pursuit of the desire to be loved. Perhaps this explains why peopl...

  A Dog At St Stephen's College Romanticizing His Melancholic Solitude. Picture Credit: Sarthak Kanswal(self)   My VSCO Profile A lone dog lies stretched across a green bench in our beloved college, occupying it with the casual entitlement of a creature that has temporarily inherited the world, or at least the bench. The bench, something designed for human rest, for a small period of time becomes the private throne of this beautiful animal, who is almost a student of this college without clearing cutoffs, just by luck, geographic luck they call it. The dog appears as if it is romanticizing its own melancholic solitude, something many of us do (I certainly do it very often). Sitting alone, one begins to look backward at the day that has passed, then further back at the life they already lived or could’ve lived, and inevitably forward again toward the uncertain shape of the future or the future they could’ve had. Benches like these become small observatories for introspecti...