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“I just want to this about that.”
― Steven C. Smith

An empty cricket ground at dusk, white picket fence in the foreground, floodlights and city skyline behind

The Undefeated

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A name that means unbeatable

On Thursday, a man named “the one who cannot be defeated” retired from cricket by reading out a list of his defeats.

His name is Ajinkya Rahane. Ajinkya means unbeatable. Parents in India do this. They pour a big hope into a name and hand it to a child who has done nothing yet to earn it. Undefeatable, they wrote on him, on a day when he was far too small to argue.

Then cricket went to work on the name, the way cricket does. He was dropped. He was written off. His team lost matches. He made mistakes, and he said so, plainly, on the way out. Cricket had shown him defeat many times, he admitted.

Two kinds of defeat

Look at the word itself. English is lazy with it. We use one word, defeat, for two things that are not the same.

There is losing. That is a scoreboard thing. It happens on one afternoon, it goes into the record, and then it is over. You can point to it. You can count it. It has a date.

And there is being defeated. That is a different thing. It is not one afternoon. It is what happens when the loss moves in and starts paying rent. When it decides who you are, and how you will walk into the next room.

Adelaide

Start with Adelaide, because it was as bad as it gets. India were bowled out for 36. Their lowest total in nearly ninety years of Test cricket. The match was over inside three days.

Then it got worse. Virat Kohli, the captain, flew home after that first Test for the birth of his first child. Mohammed Shami left the field in Adelaide with a broken arm and played no further part. The injuries kept coming, until the team was missing most of its first-choice bowlers.

Rahane took over a side that was losing, without its captain, and short of players. He led it to win the series. Two matches to one, away from home, sealed in Brisbane at a ground where Australia had not lost in over thirty years.

So the name was right the whole time. On the scoreboard he was beaten, in Adelaide and often after. In the place that actually decides these things, he never was.

Kipling and his two impostors

Rahane is only the latest to reach a very old idea. That victory and defeat are impostors did not begin with him, and it did not begin with cricket.

In 1910, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for his son. Most of it is one long sentence, held open by the word if. In the middle sits the line everyone remembers. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.

Impostor is the right word. Triumph and Disaster arrive in different clothes, and they run the same trick. Each wants you to believe the moment is the verdict. Both are lying. Those two lines now hang above the players’ entrance at Wimbledon, where every summer someone walks under them towards one impostor or the other, and mostly does not look up.

The older answer

The idea is older than Kipling, by a long way. It is there in the Bhagavad Gita. Verse 2.48.

Do your work, it says, standing steady, and let go of the result. Stay even whether you win or lose. That evenness is the whole practice. The verse gives it a name, samatvam, which means balance. It makes no promise that you will win. It says only that the outcome was never yours to keep, so hold on to neither side of it. Do the work well, and let the scoreboard do what it likes.

You are here for a reason. Give it everything you have. The winning and the losing will sort themselves out, and they were never the point.

That is easy to write and very hard to live. Which is probably why it has needed saying, over and over, for a few thousand years, in whatever room happens to be free.

And then, me

I should own up to something before I go back to him.

For some weeks now I have been occupied. Mentally, physically, emotionally, all three at once. This blog runs on a simple rhythm. Something new every week. That is the goal I set myself, and lately I have missed it, week after week.

So I lost. A small, private contest with the calendar. Perhaps that is a defeat. And yet here I am, at the page, writing this. Which is the same question I have been putting to everyone else. Once you have turned up, are you really defeated?

Cap number 278

He answered that question long before I thought to ask it. I am drawn to the quiet ones. The players who do not show off. Who stay out of the noise. Who never chase a fight or a headline. Rahane is one of them.

Which is why his words surprised me. He spoke of defeat, out loud, many times. My team lost. I made mistakes. Cricket has shown me defeat. And I kept wondering why. He is so far beyond it.

Consider the record. In 85 Tests he made 5,077 runs, with 12 centuries and 26 fifties. He led India to a series win in Australia, against the odds. He led Mumbai to their 42nd Ranji Trophy title, a national record.

A name that means unbeatable, and a career that spent nearly two decades earning it.

A man with all that does not need to speak of losing. He did anyway. And that is why I believe him about the one place he said he was never beaten. In the hearts of the people who watched him.

On Thursday he signed off. Cap number 278. Quiet to the end. Beyond defeat, and still honest about every loss.

PS: Here’s something I wrote years ago with a video that still gives me goosebumps. .

A wooden pallanguli board with tamarind seeds in carved hollows, placed on a dark desk.

The School of the Open Street

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A friend keeps a pallanguli board on her desk. Not as a decoration. As a reset button.

Between calls and deadlines, she scoops tamarind seeds from pit to pit. Two rows of small hollows carved into wood. It takes three minutes. It costs nothing. It works every time.

I watched her do this a few weeks ago. I did not say anything right away. Because something from decades ago walked in and sat down.

My great grandmother played pallanguli the way she did most things. Without fuss and without losing. She moved the seeds around the board as if the board had already agreed with her plan. I was six, maybe seven. I sat across from her, lost every round, and picked up arithmetic, strategy, and patience without knowing I was picking up anything at all.

My hands got it long before my head did.

The same tamarind seeds, by the way, could be rubbed hard on the ground and pressed onto someone’s arm. The result was a fine, sharp burn. I know this from years of personal research.

The Unsponsored League

The games we played in Madurai were never meant to be lessons. None of us thought of it that way. We had open ground, a big sun, no money, and nothing to do. The learning just showed up on its own.

Kitti

Kitti, or kitti-pullu (gilli danda in Hindi). A long stick, a short stick, and a bit of empty road. You flicked the short one into the air and whacked it before it landed. The other side tried to catch it. If they missed, you measured how far it went. The unit of measurement was the stick itself. There was no other.

Nobody said the word geometry. Nobody said judgment. We just played, and played, until somebody caught a stick to the head. The game stopped for a minute while the injured party made a decision. Cry, or hit back. Both were fair.

(I found out recently that in Galicia, Spain, there is a Liga Galega de Billarda. A proper league with fixtures, for a game that works on the same principle. . I watched a video of them playing on YouTube. Men in a field, flicking a short stick into the air, striking it mid-flight. I had tears in my eyes before I understood why. They gave it a federation. We gave it a bleeding forehead and were home for dinner as though nothing had happened. Of course. )

Goli

Goli. Marbles.

You crouched in the dust, curled your thumb behind the marble, and let it go. The thumb knew things the brain had not yet heard of. That a big marble is not always a heavy one. That angle matters more than power. That things travel in curves on rough ground.

Years later, we met all of this in a physics class and recognised it at once. Like running into someone from your old street.

Under the Madurai sun, with no cap, no sunscreen, and no worry about either, all that mattered was landing it on the right spot. The physics came free.

Pambaram. The spinning top.

You wound the string tight, threw it, and it landed spinning. Most boys could manage that. The jalli, if I remember the word right, was something else. The jalli meant scooping the spinning top off the ground onto your open palm while it was still going. The iron nail turning fast against your skin. Your hand learning not to flinch. It took weeks. It took nerve. The boys who could do it well were not just good. They were artists. Champions, and champions of champions, long before Ravi Shastri earned that title at Melbourne in 1985 and drove home in an Audi.

That was about the time cricket, proper cricket with television and trophies, walked into every Indian home and showed the street games the door. The street games were not lesser. They were just unsponsored.

When It Was Dark Enough

We played without watches. The sun told us when to stop. When it got dark, we went home. No clock. No notification. No battery running low. Just the sky, doing what the sky does.

These games lived in texture and sound. The weight of a marble in a curled thumb. A pambaram string pulled tight. Tamarind seeds dropping into wood with a soft click. The sharp sting of those same seeds, rubbed on the ground and pressed to skin. They left a memory in the hands, not the head. That kind of knowing lasts longer than most things taught in a room with a blackboard.

No cap. No sunscreen. No money. Just open ground, a big sun, and the whole afternoon ahead.

We were, it turns out, in a different league entirely.

Watch : Liga Galega de Billarda. Kitti with a passport.

Crispy masala dosa served on a banana leaf with tomato and coconut chutney

The World Ranked Our Dosa. We Have Feelings.

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There are times when your favourite wins and you feel great. And then there are times when your favourite climbs the rankings and you feel oddly flat. Take for instance, the case of the Masala Dosa. Sixth on TasteAtlas’s list of the world’s best pancakes. I should be happy. I am not.

Let me explain.

Dosa at the First Line of Defence

By the way, the masala dosa world ranking has been climbing this list. From 12th a couple of years ago to 6th now. More Indians eating, rating, telling the world what South India already knows and makes every day for breakfast. Fair enough.

I have eaten dosa in places that had no business serving one. Once, right at the Pakistan border in the Himalayas. After crossing signboards saying You are visible to the enemy. We stood at the barbed wire and looked through binoculars into Pakistan. The mountains looked exactly the same on both sides. Same rock. Same sky.

We turned around to leave. And there it was. A stall. A handpainted sign. Dosa Corner.

First line of defence. Settled.

150 Varieties, One Tawa

Taste Atlas notes“masala dosa has made the Huffington Post’s list of 10 foods to try before you die, alongside Beijing duck, moussaka, and BBQ ribs.“

Before you die? Many of us have been eating it before we could walk. A little late for the warning.I have consumed copious dosas in my life and I suspect that these dosa memories occupy more space in my brain than what has settled in my body.

Take for instance, one bright weekend morning in rural Tamil Nadu. Decades ago. A State Transport bus stopped on the outskirts of a small town. I stepped off not knowing where I was. And then I watched the man at the griddle. How he spread the batter. How much oil he used. How crispy he let the dosa get. I instantly knew where I was. The dosa is character and identity defining in more ways than one.

And then there was Nanguneri. A man asked me simply, how do you like your dosa? Not a formality. A real question. Almost a challenge in the midst of bustle and smells of a rural bus stand. I hesitatingly answered. He acknowledged my challenge with a stoic face and an incredibly precise dosa.

The dosa has not been standing still either. A place in Kochi has over 150 varieties on the menu, open till 1am. One is called Volvo. Another has chocolate. A third uses quail eggs. In Surat, a vendor spreads aam ras, mango pulp, in mango season instead of sambaar. Nobody thought twice. Nobody needed to.

At home it is sambaar and chutney. And here we must be clear. Sambaar. Not Sambur. Sambur is a deer. Sambaar is the real thing. Go to Madurai if you need proof. It will arrive in a steel vessel and make the argument for itself.

Which Dosa, Exactly?

So. The border dosa. The Nanguneri dosa. The midnight Kochi dosa with quail eggs. The Surat dosa drowning happily in aam ras. The home dosa with sambaar that is definitely not a deer. And they put it sixth. In a country where 99.99 marks out of hundred evokes an “oh no” response, sixth on a list titled ‘Pancakes’ is not a rank. It is an insult.

The ranking says masala dosa specifically. Fine. But what does masala dosa actually mean? A place in Kochi has 150 varieties on its menu? In Surat, a vendor’s answer involves mango pulp instead of sambaar. This is not one dish. This is an entire world. Does it not deserve its own category, where pancakes are welcome to come and try their luck?

There should be a list for dosas. Pancakes can appear somewhere in the middle.

We could even start a movement. The Dosa Janta Party. DJP, alphabetically next in line and some would say long overdue. The tawa as the party symbol, because the tawa does all the work and gets none of the credit.

But honestly, I do not want to be blocked, mocked, or chief minister.

Like most mornings, I just want one plain and crispy dosa.

A baby cot in an emptying room during renovation — on letting go of things that hold too much memory

The Art of Letting Go of Things (When Things Won’t Let Go of You)

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The man arrived at ten in the morning with a helper, a trolley, and a face that had seen too many dining tables to feel anything about this one.

He walked around it once. Tapped a leg. Looked at the surface with the practiced detachment of someone assessing timber, not history. Then he named his price. It was not the price you pay to take something away. It was the price you pay someone to do you a favour.

I looked at the table. Twelve years of breakfast. The dent where my daughter, age two, introduced her head to a hard surface and delivered her first proper howl. The chair she stood on, aged four, reaching for something she absolutely should not have reached for. The evening she ate her first real meal there, small fork, enormous concentration. The man with the trolley saw none of this. He saw four legs and a surface. I paid him to take it away. The room looked larger and felt considerably emptier than its dimensions suggested.

This is the problem I cannot solve. Acquiring is effortless. Disposal is grief dressed up as logistics.

The Ticket from Vegas

I have, somewhere in a box that has moved with me across three cities, a paper ticket from a trip to Vegas in 2012. Every time I reach for it to throw it away, something stops my hand. The ticket is not a ticket. It is a sealed jar containing whatever I was feeling on the day I stuffed it into my pocket. I do not know what that feeling was. I am apparently not willing to find out.

This is the part nobody warns you about when they talk about letting go of things. It is not disorganisation. It is attachment, distributed across a thousand objects, each one a small protest against the fact that time moves in one direction only. The New Yorker ran a piece on the heroic misery of trying to offload things. Its sharpest line: people prefer cheap to free. Meaning a price tag, however small, signals that something has been assessed and found worthy. Free signals the opposite. You cannot even donate your way out of the problem.

The Boxes

I have been thinking about the boxes. Not the contents. The boxes things come packed in. There is one on a shelf right now. Bright red. A perfume box, foam insert intact, carrying a faint trace of what it once held. The perfume ran out some time ago. The box did not. Too well made to throw away. Next to it, the moisturiser container with the elegant pump, long empty. And the iPhone box from two upgrades ago, because the cardboard was so clean.

If you cannot bring yourself to throw away the container, you were never going to throw away the thing inside it.

The Invisible Kind

A twenty-eight-year-old in that same piece offered a thought that stung: we have moved our accumulation online, he said. Digital purchases give the illusion of minimalism. The clutter is still there. It is simply invisible. Clay Shirky said in 2008 that the problem was never information overload. It was filter failure.

Free storage means no friction at acquisition, and no friction means no moment at which you pause and decide. The screenshots accumulate. The downloads folder fills. The brain does not distinguish between a drawer of cables for devices you no longer own and a folder of PDFs you will never read.

The Warehouse Economy

The United States has more than 50,000 self-storage facilities: warehouses you rent by the month for things you cannot fit at home and cannot bring yourself to discard. More of them than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway combined. One in ten Americans rents a unit. The monthly rent, paid quietly over years, often exceeds the value of what sits inside.

India is building the same economy now, and faster. What we are storing, in the end, is not furniture. It is a mental state: unresolved pasts, uncertain futures, and abundance without clarity.

Learning to Let Go

Clutter is expensive. It costs the mind more than we admit: the low hum of unfinished decisions, the guilt of things unused, the weight of objects that demand nothing and take everything quietly. In a city like Mumbai, where every square foot has a price, it costs the home too. Space given to things you no longer need is space you are paying for twice.

I am trying to change this. Genuinely trying, not aspirationally trying. Filtering at source, before things arrive rather than after. Keeping the memory and releasing the object. The dining table is gone. What I was trying to keep was not the table. It was my daughter at two, howling. That is still here. It requires nothing except the occasional willingness to let it surface on its own.

I do not have this solved. What I have is the intention to work on it seriously, and the humbling recognition that intention is not the same as action. If you have found a way through this, I am genuinely interested. Tell me what worked. Tell me what you have not been able to let go of, and why.

The dining table is gone. The Vegas ticket is still here.

We are both works in progress.

Green kinetic sand creature with googly eyes and antennae, looking mildly bewildered

What your IQ says about you. And what it doesn’t.

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Somewhere in the last few years, a two-word phrase crossed over from the clinic into the conversation. It used to live in test reports and psychology journals. Now it turns up in press briefings, social media posts, and the particular kind of political commentary that mistakes contempt for argument. The phrase is “low IQ.” And before we go any further, it is worth asking what IQ actually measures.

IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It is a number produced by a standardised test. The average score is 100. Most people sit between 85 and 115. Above 130 is considered exceptional.

The test was invented in France in the early 1900s by a psychologist named Alfred Binet. His original goal was modest and genuinely kind: to identify children who needed extra support in school. A welfare instrument. It was not designed to rank human worth. That application came later, courtesy of everyone who found ranking irresistible.

The Giga Society publishes a list of the highest verified IQs on record. The 2025 report makes for interesting reading. YoungHoon Kim leads at 276. Terence Tao, who won the Fields Medal and became a professor at UCLA at 24, comes in at 230.

Garry Kasparov, who held the chess world championship for over a decade and once made IBM’s supercomputer look nervous, closes the top ten at 190. These are extraordinary human beings, and the list is worth a few minutes of anyone’s time.

Then there is Christopher Langan, IQ 195, who spent years working as a bouncer. And Richard Rosner, IQ 192, who worked as a stripper before writing for late-night television. Genius and a stable career, it turns out, are not the same destination. Which tells you something important about what IQ actually measures, and what it quietly leaves out.

I have not taken the test. My IQ is therefore unverified, which places me in excellent company, since most people deploying the phrase “low IQ” have not taken it either.

This is the thing worth noticing. When someone reaches for those two words to dismiss another person, they are not citing a score. They are borrowing the authority of a number they do not possess, to settle an argument they cannot win on other terms. It is credential theft, performed in public, and repeated often enough that the audience has started to find it normal.

The phrase has migrated from the clinic to the commentary box, and in transit it lost the one thing that gave it any meaning: the actual test.

Alfred Binet spent years building a tool to make sure struggling children did not get left behind. He would have been puzzled to see it turned into a put-down. Though watching the crowd cheer every time it lands, I think he would have found the response more diagnostic than the test.

White sculpture of a seated figure on a garden bench, gazing sideways, with bougainvillea and trees in the background.

Someone Called Me Names

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Someone called me names last week.

Not in the way that requires an apology or a strongly worded reply. One name. Carefully chosen. Delivered with the quiet confidence of someone who has read more books than most people own.

The name was flâneur.

She is the kind of person who uses words like flâneur without checking if anyone is following. Well travelled, widely read, opinions that arrive fully formed and correctly spelled. When she says something, you nod first and look it up later.

She had just read two posts on this site. The one about paying attention. And the one where I photographed a feedback terminal in an airport washroom and asked who exactly goes to a washroom, takes out their phone, and clicks a picture of a smiley face survey.

I thanked her, because that seemed like the right thing to do. Then I went home and looked the word up.

A flâneur, it turns out, is someone who saunters through a city, watching the world pass by. The word is French, which is already suspicious. The French have a word for everything, and the word is always more dignified than the thing deserves.

What they were describing, in plain English, was a man sitting on a bench looking at pigeons.

I have done this and will not pretend otherwise. I have sat on benches in Madurai, Mumbai, Melbourne, and a few places starting with other letters. And watched people cross roads, carry things, argue with autorickshaw drivers, and eat standing up. I have watched all of this with the focused attention of someone who is not quite sure what he is looking for but is confident it will appear.

This, apparently, is a philosophy.

The flâneur, has an artist’s eyes. He sees shape, colour and size. He freezes reality to step back and see the beauty in the bustle.

I read that sentence three times. The third time, I was fairly sure I had been doing something profound without knowing it. The first time, I thought it sounded like someone who had missed their bus and made the most of it.

Both can be true.

There is something to it, though. The bench is not wasted time. The watching is not idleness. If you sit still long enough in any city, the city starts performing for you. People forget you are there. A man on a motorcycle will argue with a traffic light. A woman will feed a crow with the precise movements of someone conducting a ceremony. A child will find a puddle that has no business being where it is and step into it with complete commitment.

None of this appears if you are walking with a purpose.

Perhaps being a flâneur is just having no plan and dressing it up in French.

I am fine with this.

Green municipal waste bins on a street, a quiet reminder of what happens after someone decides to act

The Quiet Ones

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A couple of years ago, I was in Wayanad on a short morning hike. Pristine mountains. The kind of air that makes you feel briefly virtuous just for breathing it.

A friend was walking alongside. We were talking, as you do on such walks, about everything and nothing. I was doing what I always do in places like that: looking up. Birds, sky, the light doing interesting things through the canopy.

She was doing all of that too. Commenting on the birds, noting the trees, entirely present in the conversation. And also, without breaking stride or sentence, bending down every few minutes to pick up a stray pet bottle, a biscuit wrapper, an old phone cover abandoned on the trail like a small act of surrender. Each piece went into her bag. At the end of the walk, it all went into a bin.

No announcement. No pause for effect. Just a person who had decided, at some point, that this was simply what you did when you walked in a beautiful place.

I was, briefly, awestruck. Then mildly ashamed. Then back to looking at the birds.

Last week, a different friend told me about something she does at home. Every few months, she boxes up the plastic that has accumulated, wrappers, packaging, the soft plastic that no municipality will touch, and couriers it to EcoKaari, a Pune-based company that handweaves it into bags and wallets and things you would actually want to own.

Four times a year. A box, some tape, a courier booking.

I told a few people. The response, reliably: that’s a lot of effort.

Which is an interesting sentence. Because the effort is perhaps forty minutes. The time exists. We spend more of it each evening scrolling through things we will not remember by morning.

The issue was never time. It was importance. Microplastics are now found in human blood, in placentas, in Antarctic snow. The facts are not hidden. They are just, somehow, not quite inconvenient enough to act on.

There is a lot of talk in India about sustainable living. Reusable bags, organic produce, the correct way to feel about single-use plastic at a wedding. What there is less talk about are people like these two, who are not talking at all. They are just doing the thing, quietly, in the middle of doing everything else. No audience required.

Neither announced anything. Neither posted about it.

EcoKaari has upcycled over five million pieces of waste plastic. Every single one arrived because someone decided it was worth the bother.

Sustainable living in India, at its best, looks exactly like this. Unhurried. Unannounced. And entirely without applause.

By the way, this is not a sponsored or paid post. No one asked for it. These are personal observations about people I admire, written on a Saturday morning, thinking about better living.

_____________________________________________

There is a longer argument about why we do not make time for things that matter. It starts here: Are You Happy Yet?

A collage of traditional Ramayana masks mounted on a wall, including characters Anchara, Surpanakha, Lava, Sita, Lakshmana, Bali and Bishamitra, painted in vivid reds, blues, yellows and gold.

When the Mask Comes Off

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Batman is, in real life, a sad billionaire named Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is a teenager named Peter Parker who really should see a doctor about his wrists. And Superman — the most powerful being on the planet — goes to work every day as Clark Kent, a journalist who cannot spot an alien standing right next to him. The disguise is glasses, Clark. Just glasses.

But here is what we always get wrong about superheroes. The mask is not what hides them. The mask is what makes them. Take it away and Bruce Wayne is just a rich man with too many gadgets. Peter Parker is just a kid with a problem. Clark Kent is just a man who needs better glasses.

The mask is not hiding the power. The mask is where the power comes from.

Masks are not a new idea. The Ramayana worked this out a few thousand years before Bruce Wayne did. Those masks on the cover were spotted at the Kautilya Leadership Centre in Khalapur a while ago. They have been on my mind ever since.

Two real people understood this. One painted walls. The other wrote code.

The man who owned every wall

For thirty years, a person called Banksy put art on walls all over the world. Without asking. Without signing his name. Without telling anyone who he was.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's Girl with Balloon on a wall in London. A girl in silhouette reaches toward a red heart-shaped balloon. The words There Is Always Hope are written on the wall beside her.
Banksy, Girl with Balloon, London. Photo by Dominic Robinson. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A while ago, on a street in Marseille in the south of France, he painted a bollard casting the shadow of a lighthouse it could never be. The bollard’s own shadow stretches across the pavement for real. The lighthouse shadow stretches up the wall in paint. One shadow is true. The other is a wish. Across it, these words: I WANT TO BE WHAT YOU SAW IN ME.

Alt text (for SEO and accessibility): Banksy's I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille 2025. A metal bollard on a pavement casts a painted shadow of a lighthouse on a beige wall, with the words I Want To Be What You Saw In Me stencilled across it.
Banksy, I Want To Be What You Saw In Me, Marseille, 2025. Image via @banksy

I came across it on my phone a few months ago and stopped scrolling.

The bollard is nothing special. The kind of thing you walk past every day without noticing. But in the painting it becomes something. A beacon. And the sentence makes it personal. Not I am great. Just I want to be what you once thought I could be. There is a lot of feeling in that gap.

It hit me the way it did because I did not know who made it. No name, no story, no interview. Just the image and whatever I happened to be feeling that day.

That is not a coincidence. That is the whole plan. The missing name was the point. The anonymity was not modesty. It was the message.

The man who broke money

In 2008, the world’s banks were falling apart. Into this mess, a person using the name Satoshi Nakamoto put out a nine-page document. It described a new kind of money. No bank needed. No government involved. No single person in charge. Just a system that anyone could use and no one could own.

Then Satoshi disappeared. On purpose.

Because a name is a door. And governments are very good at finding doors. Satoshi left no door. You cannot arrest an idea. You cannot freeze a network. But you can absolutely freeze the bank account of the person who built it, if you can find them.

Both Banksy and Satoshi did what Bruce Wayne does every morning. They put the mask on and became something their real names could never have been.

The masks came off

Reuters published a story naming Banksy. His real name, his real face, his real life in Bristol.

The New York Times went further. A reporter spent a full year trying to find out who Satoshi really is. He hired a language expert. He flew to El Salvador to meet his main suspect. He built a database of over a hundred thousand old internet posts and ran them through an artificial intelligence programme. His conclusion: Satoshi is most likely Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer who has been a well known figure in the Bitcoin world for years.

Both denied everything. Both denials had the sound of something that had been practised many times before.

I read both stories and felt something drop in my chest.

The journalism was not the problem. The NYT piece is serious, careful work. There is one moment I keep coming back to. The reporter is sitting with Back in a hotel room in El Salvador and reads out something Satoshi once wrote: “I’m better with code than with words.”

Before he can finish, Back jumps in. “I did a lot of talking though for somebody,” he says. “I mean…” And then he stops. Goes quiet.

Three seconds. But in those three seconds he spoke like someone who had written that line himself. Like he knew exactly what it felt like from the inside. Then he caught himself. And the door closed again.

The drop in my chest had nothing to do with the journalism. It was about what the journalism did.

What the bollard knew

A named Banksy is just a man from Bristol. A named Satoshi is just a person a government can drag into a court. The Bitcoin crowd is not buying it anyway. They are not being difficult. They just know that once you name the magic, the magic leaves the room. Some things work better as mysteries.

Superman is Superman because you never see him burning toast in the morning. I want my superheroes to stay masked, thank you very much. Whatever form they come in. Some shadows are better left where they are.

A street dog sleeping on a sandy beach, curled into the sand, eyes closed, entirely unbothered.

Why Did We Believe the Story of the Seven Dogs?

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There is a corgi at the front.

Small, determined, walking with the quiet authority of someone who did not ask to be in charge but has decided, since nobody else is stepping up, to get on with it. Behind him, six other dogs move along a highway in Jilin province, northeastern China. One is a German shepherd, walking slightly stiffly. The others stay close, turning back every few steps, as if checking.

A man driving through spotted them, pulled over, filmed forty seconds from his car window, and posted it with a guess that they might have escaped from a transport vehicle. He had not seen any escape. He was simply guessing, the way you do when you have filmed something odd and need to say something about it.

Ninety million views on Douyin and Weibo within days. Douyin is China’s TikTok. Weibo is its Twitter. Then it went global. By the time the internet finished with it, the dogs had escaped a meat truck, protected an injured companion across hundreds of kilometres, and were nearly home. AI-generated movie posters followed. A trailer. Reunion scenes.

None of it was true.

The German shepherd was in heat. The other dogs were following their instincts, which are considerably less poetic than loyalty but considerably more reliable. Everyone lived a few kilometres away and had gone home long before the world finished weeping for them.

The story that wasn’t

Which raises the obvious question. Ninety million people watched forty seconds of dogs on a road and decided, collectively, that what they were seeing was an escape narrative. Not because anyone told them so. Because that is what they needed it to be.

Think about what was on the rest of the feed. Bombs. Borders. Bombasts. Cruelty delivered from respectable positions with great confidence. In that context, a corgi leading a wounded companion home is not a distraction from the news. It is a rebuttal to it.

The brain turns footage into story faster than the critical mind can intervene. This is not stupidity. It is the part of us that still believes things should work out.

The fact-check travels slower. By the time anyone found the German shepherd’s owner in Jilin, the story was already somewhere people needed it to be.

The dogs went home three days later. The corgi went back to being a corgi: walking around as if it owns the street, leading no one in particular, meaning nothing at all.

The story did not need the dogs anymore. It never really did.

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If you are wondering why we keep reaching for these moments, this piece has some thoughts: Are You Happy Yet?

Coffee in a grey ceramic cup beside an iPad showing a draft in progress, on a wooden café table

A Short Education in Coffee (Or: How a Simple Drink Taught Me I Knew Nothing)

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I grew up believing coffee came in precisely one legitimate form.

It arrived in a steel tumbler. Poured with mild theatrical flourish from one vessel to another. It possessed the authority of habit and the fragrance of morning. It was called filter kaapi. My mother makes it. There is, and remains, no higher benchmark.

Then, decades ago, a young man at a Café Coffee Day counter in Bangalore looked at me with professional patience and said, “Cappuccino?”

I had grown up in Madurai. Outside my mother’s kitchen, the only other coffee I had considered was at a small roadside coffee place called Visalam in Goripalayam. My mother gave hers in a tumbler and davara. Visalam served it in a glass tumbler. That, I had assumed, was the full range of possibility. Cappuccino was not a category I had prepared for.

What Avvaiyar Knew About Coffee (And Everything Else)

There is a line by Avvaiyar, the ancient Tamil poetess, that I have known since childhood.

கற்றது கை மண் அளவு; கல்லாதது உலகளவு

Katrathu kai mann alavu; kallathathu ulagalavu.

What you have learned is a handful of sand. What you have not yet learned is the size of the world.

I had known this line for years. I had also attributed it, confidently and wrongly, to Thiruvalluvar. The irony of misattributing a quote about the limits of one’s knowledge is, I think, what philosophers call “a bit much.”

In popular Tamil online folklore, the line hangs on a wall at NASA. I cannot verify this. But for rocket scientists to keep this in mind, however remote, is comforting anyway.

Going Down the Coffee Rabbit Hole

I came to coffee late. But when I did, I came properly. I ground my own beans. Chose them carefully. Waded in. And at each stage arrived confident I had figured it out, only to be shown, cheerfully, the next wall of ignorance waiting just ahead.

The world is not content with “coffee.” It insists on thirty-odd variations before you reach the door: espresso, ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, affogato, cold brew, nitro. And that is just the front end. Behind the counter lurk Arabica and Robusta, spoken of as rival football teams. There are tasting notes. Chocolate. Citrus. Stone fruit. Hints of regret.

And just when you think you have grasped the situation, someone whispers: there are beans that have passed through a cat.

Kopi Luwak. The Asian palm civet eats the coffee cherries, digests the fruit, and passes the beans. They are then collected, washed, roasted, and served to people like me. I first had it in Bali, sceptical and mildly horrified. It was extraordinary. Smooth, almost syrupy, with none of the bitterness I deserved. I have sourced it wherever possible since. Make of that what you will.

Couple from Kopi Langit Bali with their coffee range, Bali — where the Kopi Luwak education
Kopi Langit Bali. The beans were extraordinary. The education was free.

My first purchase was from a couple in Bali. They sold me the beans and threw in an education I had not budgeted for. They explained processing methods, drying times, and the difference between wild-harvested and farmed civet with the patience of people who genuinely loved what they were doing. I left with more coffee than I could carry and significantly less confidence than I had arrived with.

Then I wandered into a specialty café. It was not merely a place that served coffee. It was a temple. Baristas moved with the quiet assurance of neurosurgeons. There were championships. Yes, championships. People compete at making coffee. There are judges, points awarded for crema, and somewhere, I suspect, slow-motion replay.

Coffee, I discovered, is not a beverage. It is a civilisation.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect in a Tumbler

The less you know about something, the more qualified you feel. Beginners are condemned to confidence. I had consumed coffee daily for decades before I understood I knew nothing about it. The peak of Mount Stupid, as psychologists call it, has a magnificent view.

Coffee crossed continents before it reached your cup — from an Ethiopian goat herder through Yemen and the Ottoman Empire to the coffee houses of London, where one cup bought you a chair and the right to argue with strangers about everything.

Today, for the exorbitant price of an Americano in Mumbai, you get poor coffee, the Wi-Fi password, and access to the toilet.

The people who know coffee best are uniformly humble. Coffee taught me why. Every door you open reveals three more. The domain you think you have mastered is merely the room you are standing in. I once watched a man at a roadside kaapi kadai in Tamil Nadu who had clearly stopped thinking about coffee altogether. That is what mastery looks like from the outside.

Back to the Tumbler

My mother still pours her kaapi from height, cooling it with a practised hand. Smooth arc. No tasting notes. No championship ambitions.

I still think it is unbeatable.

But now, when a barista reels off a menu of ristretto, lungo, flat white, cortado, cold brew, and something called a nitro coffee, I do not panic. I nod gravely, as though I have always known.

Then I look it up, quietly, before anyone notices.

Avvaiyar would understand. I suspect she would also help herself to the coffee.