On breaking some bonds

People talk about karmic bonds as if they dissolve through insight or acceptance. They don’t. Most of the time, they end through exhaustion.

A karmic bond is difficult to leave because it doesn’t live in memories alone. It lives in habits of thought, in emotional reflexes, in the nervous system. You can understand why it didn’t work and still feel pulled back into it. Insight helps, but it doesn’t free you.

What keeps the bond alive isn’t love in the ideal sense. It’s unfinished business—things never said, choices never made, accountability that never arrived. The mind keeps returning, not because the connection was right, but because it was unresolved.

Breaking it is rarely graceful.

It involves repeatedly choosing against your own impulses. It means stopping yourself from revisiting old conversations, resisting the urge to check, compare, interpret signs, or imagine alternate endings. None of this feels spiritual. It feels like withdrawal.

There is also anger in it. At them, for their avoidance or inconsistency. At yourself, for staying longer than you should have. At life, for allowing something intense to exist without a viable future. This anger doesn’t mean you haven’t healed. It means you’re seeing clearly.

What finally weakens a karmic bond is not forgiveness or closure. It’s disappointment that you no longer override. The moment you stop excusing what hurt you, the bond begins to lose its authority.

You don’t break a karmic bond by reframing it as meaningful. You break it by admitting that it required too much self-betrayal to continue.

Even then, it doesn’t disappear all at once. It fades unevenly. Some days you feel free; other days you feel pulled back into old emotional muscle memory. This doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means the bond was real and deeply ingrained.

Eventually, something shifts. Not peace—just neutrality. The story loses urgency. The person stops feeling central to your inner life. You don’t need to replace the bond with something else; you just stop feeding it.

Permanently re tired

At 40-plus, I’ve discovered a superpower I never asked for: being permanently tired. Not regular tired soul tired, the kind that makes you question why people over 30 are still allowed to create drama. At this age, my bandwidth is so limited it might as well be prepaid data in a remote village.

Which is why I’ve officially decided: I have zero capacity to entertain sub-par behaviour from anyone. Colleagues, neighbours, relatives, that one overly enthusiastic cousin everyone is on notice.

Everyone… except my offspring.

Because motherhood apparently comes with a lifetime subscription to nonsense we never signed up for. So while I won’t tolerate adults behaving like toddlers, I will, paradoxically, tolerate an actual toddler trapped inside a teenage body—complete with eye rolls, mood swings, and a mysteriously empty fridge.

Avoidant behaviour

Yes  we absolutely do. Some love with words, some with silence. Some show up, some withdraw. But sometimes, what we call “different ways of loving” is actually emotional avoidance dressed up as personal style.

Take the now-normal behaviour of leaving someone on read or disappearing mid-conversation — not because you’re angry, but because “it’s not a convenient time.” It’s called emotional disengagement or avoidant behaviour. It’s when someone pulls back, consciously or subconsciously, to protect their own comfort instead of nurturing connection.

What does it do to the other person? It creates uncertainty — a quiet kind of rejection that says, “You’re not a priority right now.” It teaches them to self-doubt, to hold back, to mirror that same distance. Slowly, intimacy is replaced by caution.We may tell ourselves we’re just “busy,” but love doesn’t demand constant presence  only emotional responsibility. A quick message that says, “Hey, can we talk later?” takes seconds, but it says: I see you. You matter.

Because yes, we love differently. But loving responsibly means realizing that even silence speaks  and someone is always listening.

Friends vs Families

 Some people are born into families that nurture them, offering warmth, understanding, and support without conditions. But some of us, especially daughters raised in patriarchal homes, learn early that our real support systems often come from the friendships we build, not the families we’re born into.

Over time, I’ve come to accept that everyone is living out their own karma. Yet it still hurts to see how often love and respect are used as tools of silence. We’re taught to suppress our voices in the name of familial harmony, but isn’t that, in itself, a quiet act of self-betrayal?

There are also those who insist they act only out of love, untouched by material motives. But that, too, is a convenient illusion that protects them from the discomfort of truth. It’s easy to preach detachment when the balance of power or privilege leans in your favour.

For people like me, who have often stood at the losing end of this unspoken bargain, asking for what is ours becomes an act of rebellion. We’re called materialistic, greedy, or ungrateful labels meant to shame us back into silence. Yet what they call greed is often just fairness, and what they call love is sometimes possession in disguise.

There is something profoundly painful about watching greed wear the mask of care. But perhaps the greater sorrow lies in realising that love, when filtered through entitlement and control, loses its soul.

We educated our daughters but we don’t educate ourselves

We take pride in saying it  we educated our daughters.

We gave them degrees, good jobs, financial independence, and the right to make their own choices. We wanted them to be confident, capable, and equal. We told the world we raised “strong, modern women.”

But the uncomfortable truth is this:

We educated our girls, yes. But we never educated ourselves.

We forgot to teach ourselves what equality really means beyond hashtags, speeches, and token gestures.

The Illusion of Equality

In today’s Indian families, equality often ends where it begins at convenience.

We celebrate our daughters for paying their own bills, for contributing to family occasions, for stepping up when responsibility calls. We applaud their independence when it serves us when it makes the family look progressive.

A daughter pays her share for every birthday dinner, even the one her brother planned for their parents celebration . She doesn’t question it, because she believes in fairness. To her, equality isn’t an argument it’s a value.

But when the subject shifts to inheritance, to property, to legacy the air thickens with discomfort. Suddenly, words like “tradition”, “culture”, and “custom” emerge. Suddenly, equality has a 

“You’re married now; your home is elsewhere.”

“We’re not being unfair this is just how things are done.”

Just like that, the modern daughter’s equality gets boxed back into the old narrative. Conveniently. Selectively.

A Comfortable Double Standard

This isn’t about tradition. This is about convenience a self-serving bias wrapped neatly in the language of culture.

We want our daughters to act equal but not to claim equality. We want them to share responsibilities, but not rights. We want them to earn, but not to question.

We’ve built a society that congratulates itself for “allowing” women to study, work, and earn but balks when those same women expect fair inheritance or equal say in family 

What Kind of Equality Is This?

If a daughter can split expenses for family celebrations, why can’t she be trusted with an equal share of family wealth?

If she can take care of her parents emotionally, financially, and physically, why must her love be measured differently from her brother’s?

The truth is, we like the idea of equality  as long as it doesn’t cost us anything. As long as it doesn’t challenge the old order of comfort and control.

This selective morality is the real hypocrisy of modern India  a place where women are told they can have everything, except what’s always been quietly reserved for men.

Time for a Different Kind of Education

We don’t need to educate our daughters anymore — they’ve already learned to survive, succeed, and lead in a world that often underestimates them.

It’s the rest of us — parents, brothers, and elders who need re-education.

We need to unlearn centuries of conditioning that equate fairness with rebellion. We need to stop seeing equality as a threat and start seeing it as justice.

Because equality is not about whether a daughter needs her share it’s about whether she deserves it.

And she does. Always.

Real progress won’t come from social media posts celebrating our daughters’ degrees or promotions. It will come when we stop drawing invisible lines between love and fairness. Until then, our modernity is performative.

We’re a society that educated its daughters but forgot to enlighten itself.

We taught our girls to fly. It’s time we learned to stop clipping their wings.

Navratri and the Tragedy of Indian Women

It’s that time of the year again when loudspeakers turn into sleepless alarm clocks, pandals pop up at every street corner, and the nation collectively becomes the brand ambassador of the divine feminine. For nine whole days, we bow, chant, and shower flowers at the feet of the Devi. And then, on the tenth day, as if someone flipped a cultural switch, we go right back to catcalling her at the bus stop.

Welcome to the Great Indian Double Standard a tragicomedy performed by none other than the Desi Male.

Let’s face it: Most Indian men adore the idea of worshipping goddesses. The keyword here is idea. Real women? Ah, that’s where things get tricky. Suddenly the same man who is belting out “Ya Devi sarvabhuteshu, shakti-rupena samsthita” is also belting out an unsolicited “Hi baby, looking sexy” across the street. Talk about range.

The contradictions are almost poetic.

• Durga with ten arms? Revered.
• Your colleague asking for equal pay? “Arrey, why so demanding yaar?”
• Kali with her fierce rage? Worshipped.
• Your girlfriend expressing anger? “So much attitude, must be her ‘time of the month.’
• Saraswati, goddess of wisdom? Offered prayers.
• Daughters wanting to study more? Just get her married higher education is expensive . She is her husbands headache now 

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Indian men will touch their mother’s feet in the morning and then, by evening, be found squeezing past women in crowded pandals like they’re auditioning for India’s Got No Boundaries.

And let’s not even start on social media. Every Navratri, timelines explode with posts of “Jai Mata Di! Respect Women!” followed by reels of those same self-proclaimed devotees sharing “funny” memes about their wives’ shopping habits. Respect be damned 

The truth is, men in this country often want their goddesses in temples and their women in cages. A goddess who slays demons? Yes. A woman who slays in a boardroom? “Too intimidating.” A goddess riding a lion? Inspirational. A woman riding a bike? “Characterless. Your legs are showing !!!

So here’s a thought for this Navratri season: before picking up the thali, maybe put down the double standards. If you’re truly the masculine you claim to be, stop lying, stop pitting women against each other, and for heaven’s sake, stop thinking feminism is a threat to your manhood. Respect isn’t a nine-day ritual …it’s a lifelong practice :)