nothing's new nothing's new nothing's ne

hey yall just found out what happens when you press CTRL C and CTRL V synonymously

So i’m writing this byline, and i think, haha I should intentionally mispell the word for when two things happen one after another for comedic effect. So I write the word synonymously thinking I’ve done something, and when I get to this first paragraph, I realise I can’t remember the actual word myself. So now I’m texting people asking for that word, and now nobody knows it. I ask Google- and it gives me a trillion other options that are anything but the word I wanted. Successionally, Sequentially- similar but not as good- like a desperate situationship failing to get the taste of a wasted romance out of my mouth, my screen starts filling up with useless electronic vomit- what the fuck is Supervenient??? Now I’m starting to panic because I really need this word and apparently it doesn’t exist. Consecutive. That doesn’t even start with an S. Postliminary, No, we’re not in court. Back-to-Back. Nope, that’s a sex position. This is getting too much, and the anxiety is making me sweat. Sweat, is that it? Ugh I don’t know. I stop dangerously short of asking ChatGPT cuz well, self respect. Did I just invent a new word and then promptly proceed to forget about it? I ask a friend, and then another. And then a few of the dumb ones. No one knows. That’s it. It’s over. All those years of reading Bumble bios and small print calorific content- hell, all those decades of even pretending to read books - down the goddamn drain. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and drop my pen (I’m typing so this doesn’t really have any consequence apart from unnecessary dramatic effect). I brace myself, awaiting impact. The light brightens, I dream of a flash recap of my life before my eyes (I’m kinda young with little to no unique experiences, so it’s a relatively short one), and the Hans Zimmer score starts to pick up, until-

It comes to me. Like the husband in a semi-erotic, early 2000s thriller about infidelity- unannounced, abrupt, and ruining all the fun.

S I M U L T A N E O U S L Y

It comes, like the break of a new dawn, the crashing of a mammoth wave, and the ending of a sentence that has some really stupid metaphors that sound really serious but in reality are just a feeble attempt to distract you from an insecure writer’s rusty and dying comprehension skills. Also I intentionally misspelled the word mispell in the first line. Kya kar loge.

Anyhoo, hi. It’s been a while since we spoke. By we, I mean me. Despite what delusional container ships in the Suez Canal and Kaun Banega Crorepati might have convinced you, not everything in life is a two way channel. Like students in Ashoka and voters everywhere- you don’t get to have a say here. You think you do, and that’s very cute. But like, be fr. Or nah, I’m kidding- you’re always free to blast off in that poorly designed comment section below- because as a dedicated Substack writer, I always make it a point to never read that stuff. I know I just made this sound very authoritarian right now- but look out the window and that’s most things. Leaders with dictatorial tendencies are everywhere, and despots have a cold vice grip over everything you hold dear- country (countries, plural, for my tax evading audience bracket), culture, and in summary, everything around us. Be it Prime Ministers, Presidents or the half baked MBA dropouts who decided to air Severance as a weekly episodic saga instead of just dropping it all in one day- people in power want to control every single aspect of your existence and make you beg for droplets of dopamine fed through a IV tube that is actually nothing but the mutated colon of a decaying, decrepit society whose citizens once saw dreams of freedom and edible gujrati street food. This rotting dystopia is nothing but the results of one tyrant’s horrifying moral misdeeds- a man whose mind stretches so far beyond the fields of good and evil that every single decision he takes ends up as a heinous blot on human history with disastrous consequences. Many are afraid to name him, his identity nothing but hushed whispers in empty halls, but I will not be bullied- I am not afraid to take Jay Shah’s name.

Fuck that guy. Seriously, in the last 15 months that I have spent not writing, atleast seventeen have been incredibly fucked because the indian cricket team is in shambles. What are we doing? Our board is inept, our players are struggling, our broadcasters are gagged by the invisible red hands of Big Paan Masala, our audiences are starved, and yet, somehow in this hellscape that manages to burn and drown you at the same time, Jasprit Bumrah still manages to be god’s own favourite angel, defying reality and literally pulling magic out of his ass every single time he steps foot on the grass. Bless that man. We blow a lot of money on this sport for it to let us down like that. Entire GDPs of several sovereign states are spent just so a billion people can watch Gautam Gambhir be grumpy in 480p on shitty JioCinema UI which trips and falls over itself every two minutes because the JioFibre network you’re connected to is too unstable. And sometimes you can’t even have that because some stupid liberal forgot to pay their Adani electricity bill. Jeez, I feel like the problem is right in front of us but for some reason we can’t vote it out. idk.

So what I just did-the last two paragraphs your brain tried to speedrun through- was a vomit block. A vomit block is a hastily composed, unnecessary verbose and unwieldy section of text that only serves to annoy the reader, making them waddle through sentences and sentences of mental barf to eliminate all the stragglers, the casual fans. Now that most of y’all are gone, we can get to the real shit. So if you’re still here, congrats on still having an attention span. Also your shoes have last night’s chicken crispy on them.

I’ve been like, lowkey (yuck, I know), sad for quite some time now. It’s not too heavy, but it’s not too light either- it’s like that medium size Dominos pizza that is somehow always too much for one person but too less for two. And I don’t know what to do with it. It’s really disappointing- the sadness is like, incompetent and stuff. It doesn’t even do it’s job well. It doesn’t interfere in my day, it doesn’t leave me decapitated, it doesn’t handicap me from doing things I’m otherwise perfectly capable of doing. You’d think having a semi permanent manifestation of low hanging anxiety around your head at all times would sort of ruin things but really, it doesn’t. It just makes me do weird inconsequential shit- like zoning out for no reason in the middle of a hangout. Or going for a handshake when the other person wanted a hug. Or that period of the year between mid-January and mid-February where you don’t know if you’re supposed to shower with hot water or cold water so you just keep alternating, basing your decisions on vibes instead of actual hard data because pie charts remind you of pizzas and pizzas remind you that you’re still sad. When today is a bowl of the most mindblowing jhol momos you’ve ever had but tomorrow is a diarrhoea infested journey where the pavement is lined with regret and schezwan chutney. I watch in helpless horror as my weekends go from Sundays to sandas in a cholesterol surplus heartbeat. It’s a modern day Tragedy of Sisyphus if the stone was a Monday and the Sisyphus guy was stupid as fuck.

So there you go. This is what happens when I try- you get to watch me stumble through basic facts about myself while slowly coming to the realization that a newsletter doesn’t become a confessional just because your closure hungry ass wants it to be. Maybe the next one will actually be funny.

adding a song because i don’t actually hate yall, have fun