Elevated States, Dissipated Fates

A room replete with countercultural photographs, Murano glass bongs, handcrafted wooden chillums, Delft ceramic herb grinders, freshly hand-rolled cigars, horn mixing bowls, and hand-painted porcelain cigarette holders in wucai palettes, where friends were articulate, accomplished, and firmly tethered to reality. So why, then, the substances? Was it exile within their own families, respite, dependency, illness, insolvency, betrayal, abandonment, or simply the pursuit of a more persuasive reality? Were they self-medicating, self-sabotaging, or merely self-editing? Was it relief, rebellion, or a chemically assisted search for belonging?

I arrived with an almost Socratic line of inquiry, only to discover that everyone was grappling with something—some sought elevation, others elucidation.

A scion of a philanthropic dynasty of considerable repute, whose name became synonymous with luxury hotels, real estate ventures, equestrian pursuits, fashion houses, and art patronage, he descended from a distinguished lineage of cultural achievement and political eminence—his grandfather was an accomplished painter, and his grand-uncle a former Prime Minister—a poor little rich boy who introduced a hint of aristocratic ‘herbology’ into his morning routine, as though self-sabotage were merely another wellness ritual.

With patrician finesse, he graduated from whisky to wardrobes, and from waltzes to wreckage, sampling the entire catalogue of respectable and disreputable distractions. Wealth had insulated him from necessity, but not from emptiness; it turns out despair accepts all currencies. There is something irresistibly comic about the affluent pursuit of oblivion: the poor often buy drugs to escape the world, while the rich, having seemingly acquired it, buy them to escape themselves. One flees hunger, the other satiety—different postcodes, similar voids.

I was first introduced to cannabis through a homeopathic dilution during a period when emotional anguish had begun to inhabit the body. I boarded the Belmond to England—a moving museum of 1930s elegance, where Wes Anderson-sque preserved carriages, Art Deco interiors, jazz cabaret, and champagne afternoon tea unfolded alongside the panoramic vistas of the countryside, as I delved into the nuanced resonance between floral preparations and emotional equilibrium.

During my stint in the hospitality industry, I encountered an upper-middle-class vice president of a restaurant group, the son of a High Court judge, who had risen to oversee restaurants across the country for a renowned chef and restaurateur, mastered the choreography of service and the theatre of fine dining. Yet his own appetite for “powdered refinement” blurred the finest line of all—the one between indulgence and accountability.

Behind the polished silverware, hand-finished porcelain, and crystal stemware lay the relentless demands of the profession: the unending carousel of flights and unveilings. The powder promised elevation but delivered a very public descent; when the #MeToo movement ushered in a reckoning, the carefully curated persona built upon culinary craft and cultivated charm, began to unravel—a reminder that even those who serve refinement can find their reputations left with an unforgiving aftertaste.

His adolescent son, an iconoclast and guitarist, orchestrated a “no-strings-attached” relationship, handing his muses guitar picks engraved with “pick me.” He pursued his own “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” hoping an acid-induced transformation would turn him into a psychonaut capable of transcending the creative limitations of the fretboard. He was chasing a higher note, but the real high lay in the composition itself. The serenade he sought through altered states had already been composed within the strings of his own instrument.

A part of my adolescence was populated by kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, and others entangled in hedonistic pursuits, alongside photographers masquerading as Ivy League graduates whose photographs of my friends were featured in tabloids.

Demographic factors contributed to the segregation of social circles, added the explanatory definition of the looking-glass phenomenon which became increasingly prevalent. These girls occupied the apex of their own human pyramid, elevated like cheerleaders in formation, subjugating others through superciliousness, pseudo-intellectualism, vacuous pretension, duplicitous virtue, social tyranny, catty derision, pejorative wit, promiscuity, and vindictiveness. Their envy was shaped by neglected attention, inherited scripts of womanhood, prescribed ideals, and the turbulence of fractured households.

One of them was a single mother struggling with the physical changes brought on during gestation and the stretch marks left behind; she faced an agonising chapter of motherhood as her child struggled through every developmental milestone. Rather than embracing her maternal stripes—the tiger marks of a body that had carried life—she sought to erase them, only to find herself caught between maternal sacrifice and the impossible calculations of love. In the end, the pursuit of cosmetic correction through corticosteroids created consequences no prescription could conceal—a tragic case of tending to the surface while overlooking the very cub she was meant to protect, leaving behind paw prints no apology could erase.

Financially, environmentally, spiritually, digitally, verbally, intimately, occupationally, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, many find themselves enervated—depleted by the weight of circumstances they did not create, yet are compelled to navigate. For those burdened by such challenges, constructive avenues of expression are often scarce.

The sacralisation of gynolatry, the malignancy of saffronised otherisation, and the profanation of womanhood find their most pernicious manifestation in the contradictions that permeate our social and political conscience. Here, women are reduced to insects, to be swatted and sprayed.

A young student dissident—of hybrid ancestry, queer, differently abled, of Islamic faith, of African descent, indisposed, socioeconomically disenfranchised, and displaced—takes to the streets to contest the political and moral underpinnings of a nation’s constitutional dispensation amid a state of emergency and the political anathematisation of the university she attends as “anti-national”. She was not only confronted by the coercive machinery of the state but also subjected to egregious state violence at the hands of the very institutions ostensibly entrusted with upholding her autonomy, intrinsic worth, and individual sovereignty.

During Navratri, the nine-night festival commemorating the worship of goddesses, some invoke Durga as the embodiment of indomitable courage, Kali as the harbinger of annihilation and renewal, and Parvati as the personification of unwavering devotion, affirming the omnipresence of Shakti in womanhood. Yet this veneration remains in profound dissonance with the material realities of those who endure gender-based indignities amid entrenched sociocultural conventions, whose dissent is persistently subjugated, whose bodily autonomy is transgressed, and whose constitutionally enshrined prerogatives are continually abrogated. What moral or spiritual coherence can a collective claim when its apotheosis of transcendent virtue remains so profoundly divorced from the indignities the very individuals are compelled to endure throughout the entirety of their mortal existence?

The invocation of Bharat Mata Ki Jai vociferously venerates the motherland as the epitome of sustenance, succour, and benevolence, even as the prevailing socio-political order repudiates the very principles it professes to uphold. The maternal womb, the primordial origin of every individual, stands in stark contradiction to a man-made social order that perpetuates women’s subjugation, compromises their bodily inviolability, and circumscribes their volitional sovereignty. The ultimate incongruity lies in a patriarchal order that apotheosises the maternal ideal as a civilisational archetype while withholding from women the deference and veneration that such exaltation ostensibly merits.

The spectacle becomes still more disquieting when student dissidents are herded into detention buses, deprived of their constitutional rights, and confined in custodial institutions for days precipitating functional neurological disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

In today’s India, anti-government and anti-national have become perilously conflated: dissidence against those in power is construed as antagonism towards the nation itself. Yet a government is not synonymous with the motherland, and dissent is not betrayal. The contradiction becomes more pronounced when those who once condemned the suppression of dissent appear willing to tolerate it when political convenience prevails, turning constitutional principles into instruments of expediency rather than commitments of conscience.

When even the act of wielding the tricolour becomes fraught with the prospect of prosecution, one must ask: what is the meaning of Independence Day if the very people who inherit its history cannot assert their constitutional rights without apprehension? What, then, are we commemorating: the emancipation of a citizenry from colonial subjugation, or the gradual curtailment of its fundamental rights?

During our formative years, summer camps and enrichment programmes served as sanctuaries of self-discovery, offering outlets for creativity, discipline, and emotional restoration. Needlecraft, literary pursuits, musical composition, horticultural cultivation, paper-folding, textile craftsmanship, photographic artistry, calligraphic inscription, cultural connoisseurship, equestrianism, household stewardship, gastronomy, theatrical performance, diaristic writing, balletic training, vocal expression, rhetorical discourse, sculptural modelling, pictorial representation, aquatic recreation, racquet sports, team athletics, instrumental musicianship, and language acquisition were not merely pastimes but instruments of becoming. They cultivated confidence, community, resilience, and well-being.

A former art mentor who was also a ceramist practised kintsugi on clay for a biennale, repeatedly restoring fractured sculptures and gilding their seams while tracing filigree over her own scars—restoration became adornment, a way of obscuring the aftermath of damage. Abandoned amid her mother’s grim prognosis, the dissolution of her marriage, and pecuniary hardship, she found herself reconstructing more than broken ceramics; she was piecing together a life shaped by the hands of fate that had moulded her form.

Some parents possess the willingness and capacity to listen, understand, and provide emotional stability, availability, and accountability; others, however, may be unable to offer these essential foundations due to familial constraints, limited resources, unresolved childhood trauma, or entrenched intergenerational patterns. Parental and peer influences play a pivotal and formative role in shaping an individual’s psychological and social development from childhood into adulthood.

In such circumstances, individuals may find themselves unable to articulate their emotional experiences due to limited emotional literacy, fear of judgment or punitive responses, and the pervasive social stigma surrounding mental health and vulnerability. The absence of timely intervention, coupled with the lack of a secure and stable home environment, can deepen their sense of isolation and leave their struggles unaddressed.

A farmer’s daughter from an Other Backward Class community emancipates herself from child marriage, sati, ghoonghat, female foeticide, marital rape, dowry, child sex trafficking, and honour killings. She is denied education and inheritance. Neither astrology nor supreme beings offer solace or salvation.

Coerced into religious conversion, veiled in a burqa, compelled to acquiesce to polygamy, and subordinated within a marriage that mandated five children while repudiating her autonomy, she found herself ensnared in an existence circumscribed by imperatives she had neither consented to nor the latitude to repudiate. From the observance of namaz in prayer rooms to adherence to halal dietary prescriptions, even her quotidian existence was subsumed by conventions she had never espoused.

Deprived of agency and subjected to marital infidelity, she remained imperilled by the omnipresent apprehension of physical depredations, while her husband immersed himself ever deeper in the clandestine labyrinth of the dark web and its extremist factions. Ramadan sirens, religious exhortations, marfa performances, and incessant azaans, compounded by the pervasive emanations of burning oud and tobacco, rendered even her sensory world an inescapable manifestation of her subjugation.

The demise of a pen pal in Iran under an authoritarian regime acquired a particularly poignant irony when her husband publicly condemned the assassination of its leader while denouncing analogous restrictions under India’s political establishment. His indignation at repression beyond its own borders sat uneasily beside his apparent acquiescence to coercion closer to home—a contradiction emblematic of a conscience selectively animated by ideology. Beyond the confines of domestic subjugation lay a wider apparatus of intimidation: morphed photographs appropriated for extortion, compromised accounts, physical surveillance, unsolicited lewd communications, and the surreptitious circulation of her residential coordinates.

Her husband’s calculated invocation of secularism as a pretext to insinuate himself into and infiltrate other communities’ religious festivals and places of worship, with the intention of fomenting discord, while excluding adherents of other faiths from his own religious observances and sacred spaces without reciting a patriotic song or applying vermilion, revealed a profound asymmetry in religious inclusion. His uncompromising adherence to monotheistic beliefs coexisted with an expectation of acceptance across faiths, while his ostensible commitment to pluralism belied his refusal to extend the same openness and respect to the beliefs and traditions of others.

This contradiction acquired further historical resonance against the backdrop of the vetti system, the displacement of ousters, the Razakar reign, restrictions on religious processions, the pillaging of villages, an escalating humanitarian crisis, the suppression of civil liberties, restrictions on access to education, the coercion surrounding meat consumption and the use of written and spoken Urdu.

His community is afforded considerable latitude to perpetuate its practices and transgressions with impunity, yet persists in portraying itself as aggrieved, even as its own conduct towards other faiths appears to contradict its contentions—a manifestation of selective indignation and self-exculpation. They claimed her conscience, yet neither acknowledged the consequences of their contradictions; she became the casualty of both.

My neighbour, gaunt and delirious, was a study in contradiction. He inhabited many worlds: a voracious reader who etched hand-poked body ink into his skin, pierced his eyebrow with safety pins, performed keg stands, composed poetry, gamed on his PlayStation, foraged for mushrooms, and peddled remnants of altered states in transparent, vacuum-sealed packets. He wore the armour of rock and metal, licked hemp wraps, rapped into his microphone, played the drums, and captured fragments of life through his camcorder.

He occupied the hours after midnight in aberrant rituals: breaking barrels at dawn in acts of misplaced hostility toward neighbours he despised, baking cannabis-infused confections, indulging in the phosphorescent allure of absinthe, and immersing himself in films steeped in mafia mythology and the macabre. By morning, the hot box carried an olfactory archive of wood shavings, ethanol, correction fluid, crisps, and the mildew-tinted remnants of his self-tonsured hair.

His body was a ledger of wounds, its marginalia marked by corrosive abrasions and cutaneous inscriptions—a life lived dangerously, a narrative entangled with his father, a notorious underworld kingpin from Bengaluru. The flat became a crucible of excess and artistry, inhabited by figures from the visual, literary, performing, healing, and culinary realms.

Later that year, I was introduced to the son of a cricketer, who initially bowled me over and eventually aspired to enter into a marital union. However, he possessed none of the prerequisites I deemed essential and was unable to provide what I required—let alone address the pertinent matters that arose, which necessitated a degree of prudence and discernment he did not possess. Over time, he began descending into a state of profound depletion, perspiring profusely and trembling involuntarily. Afflicted with hyperhidrosis amid sustained psychoactive substance use and recreational stimulant consumption his decline was further exacerbated by his mother’s habitual appropriation of his hard-earned income to sustain her chronic intoxication. My flat, by circumstance rather than design, became the locus of his convalescence—a conduit for his recuperation.

The patience and consistency required to navigate such circumstances can, over time, become profoundly draining, diminishing the capacity to nurture other dimensions of one’s own life that equally demand investment and development. Such a commitment can become arduous to sustain, as it must ultimately be a mutually sustained process.

Survival has a way of lowering the ceiling until we forget there was ever a sky above. Yet, even in moments of uncertainty, we find ourselves asking: Can we get through today? And perhaps that question itself is a reminder that hope remains. To embrace the present moment while continually evolving is a profound privilege; the ability to simply be while becoming is a blessing in itself.

Not as a verdict, but as an inquiry into duality: the very remedies sought for restoration can, in certain circumstances, become their own reckoning. Medicine may heal, yet its shadow reminds us that every intervention carries a consequence, every ascent harbours the possibility of descent. The graph of life is rarely linear; despite the peaks we chase and the curves we conquer, we are all tracing the same inevitable decline.

My parents and grandparents are the unwitting subjects of an almost obsessive vigilance: my consciousness is ceaselessly besieged by the minutiae surrounding them—the punctuality of their flight, their having had sustenance, their being ensconced comfortably, their possessions being safely stowed, the innocuousness of the stranger beside them, the prospect of their departure and arrival passing without calamity. It is not an impulse to circumscribe their autonomy; the merest possibility of an untoward eventuality can become physiologically overwhelming, transmuting apprehension into palpitations.

Yet this preoccupation extended far beyond the mere preservation of those whom I hold dear. It permeated the architecture of everyday life: tablescaping had to be meticulous, objects arranged from thin to thick, colours graduated with almost polychromatic sequencing; I delighted in neon-coloured Post-it notes, labels, and lists in which everything seemed to possess its appointed place. I found myself compiling lists for virtually every undertaking, as though order itself might confer some reprieve from the uncertainty that otherwise permeated the diurnal.

I am learning to confront this disposition with lucidity—to acknowledge my deficiencies, offer contrition without equivocation, receive admonishment without resentment, and remain assiduously receptive to every legitimate therapeutic avenue before conceding defeat. Obsessive compulsive disorder can so thoroughly infiltrate the quotidian that even one’s senses may seem bereft of their ordinary ease, and in its most grievous manifestations has been described as a gravely debilitating disorder; nevertheless, I refuse to reify the malady as identity. I would rather recast it as discernment: within my own distorted inheritance lies not merely a condition, but a heightened perceptiveness.

I endeavour to learn from the elderly, the infirm, the marginalised, those of diverse abilities, and the dispossessed, cultivating a gratitude sufficiently profound to perceive that even intractable tribulation need not extinguish compassion, dignity, courage, equanimity, or hope. Perhaps the very sensibility that renders one susceptible to perturbation may also engender an uncommon mindfulness of others.

In Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with a Needle, a needle traverses through manifold realms: it sews cloth, delivers a lethal elixir, offers relief from suffering through the restoration of flesh and the inoculation against disease. A study of survival, deception, and moral decay, every stitch conceals a secret, and every injection leaves a reckoning.

Sometimes, the remedy conceals the venom. Set In the aftermath of World War I, the needle becomes an instrument of prevention, subverting the optimistic trope of healing by revealing how individuals can be emotionally, physically, and spiritually disfigured by their environments. Set during a period of profound social upheaval in Danish history, the film depicts a chiaroscuro world of misogyny, abandonment, and squalor—Polanski-esque in its psychological unease—where the saccharine and the sinister exist in unsettling proximity.

Yet beyond this inner theatre lies the quiet possibility of ikigai—the Japanese philosophy of purpose and meaning—a counterpoint to the fragmented self-explored through Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Rather than a fractured identity, one might envision an orchestra of competing selves: the perfectionist, the provocateur, the performer, and the escapist each playing a different score, yet collectively composing a symphony of discord. Sybil epitomizes the dissonance of competing selves, while ikigai embodies the harmony found when those selves finally return to a shared rhythm. Not the pursuit of an immaculate identity, but the discovery of a purpose sufficiently capacious to reconcile the many selves one inhabits.

Often, as The Beatles remind us, we often get by with a little help from our friends—but some friends inspire ascension, while others precipitate descension.