This is a really bad idea.

What do you get when you combine a lazy writer with an unrealistic new year's resolution for consistency? Precisely, this.

And away we go.

It’s the third day of the new year, and I’ve finally decided to get my shit in order. Time is a man-made construct designed to sell Kingfisher calendars to beer bellied, middle aged uncles, my mind tells me halfway through the first sentence. I try my best to shut it off because it’s 11pm on a Tuesday and I absolutely cannot afford to be thinking of Kingfisher calendars right now. Or uncles, for that matter.

Now would probably be a good time to tell you why I’m doing this. I’d been toying with the idea of starting a weekly newsletter since quite a while, and the dawn of a fresh new year seemed like good timing to start this weekly expedition of words into the scattered playground of cat memes and Pritam lyrics that is my brain. I’m just being dramatic, that’s just a pretentious way of saying I procrastinated doing this for months until I finally found a reason to drag myself to my keyboard to belt out this paragraph that is clearly going nowhere.

Now that the bakchodi is out of the way, let’s get real: I really wanted to do this, but I wasn’t sure I had what it took to do this, and I emphasize, consistently. Because consistency is hard. And it’s weird. It comes to you in the form of a BeerBiceps reels while you’re scrolling Instagram at lunch time, or as a familiar dryness at the back of your mouth every morning to remind you that it doesn’t matter how much rizz you have, you need to brush your teeth every single day. As that one omnipresent Tumblr screenshot of a random Bojack Horseman scene reminds us, the hard part is not doing something. It’s doing that thing every, single, day. And boy if that isn’t infuriating. Despite being someone who struggles a lot with consistency, I’ve never really tried to make it my friend. Instead, I’ve been pretty content keeping it at arm’s length, like a work acquaintance who you see everyday but don’t talk to unless it’s their birthday or the start of a new year. A birthday, or a new year. And that, my dear reader, is why we’re here.

Also, I lied. The bakchodi is never out of the way.

If you’re still reading this, get up and go buy yourself a KitKat, you deserve it. How you still have the attention span to read three paragraphs without your hands physically wandering to your phone to check if that one emotionally unavailable talking stage has texted back, is beyond me. And for that you deserve a KitKat. Go on, it’s on me, main GPay kar dunga badme. Because as you munch on this somewhat questionable combination of wheat flour, milk chocolate and sugar that resembles a neatly hammered asbestos roof, let me tell you a secret: Instagram reels are making you impotent. I’m kidding, they aren’t. Probably. But they are probably making you dumb. There’s probably a metaphor here somewhere about how watching people your own age get mildly famous by doing the wrong steps to Chikni Chameli might have an adverse effect on your own mental health, but I don’t think you want that right now. Because life is tough, those assignments are draining your will to live, and that talking stage still hasn’t replied back. So if those mildly addictive fifteen second clips are helping you cope, then what’s the problem? Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, certainly not a fresh faced newsletter that doesn’t even know if it’ll have a second edition next week. So lay back, bite into that KitKat (across the wedges or along them, don’t let society tell you how to enjoy your processed calories) and fire up some good ol’ fashioned reels. You deserve it (or at least lie to your brain that you do).

As iconic German philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche famously said,

Sabke dimaag mein apni apni social media breakdown analysis wali video essay chal rahi hai. Sab saale Bo Burnham banna chah rahe apne dimaag mein.

Fuck okay, bohot gyaan pel diya. Substack tells me that “Readers love clarity” so apparently I’m supposed to tell y’all how frequently this will keep happening, and what to expect from future editions. Truth is, I’m clueless about both. But the hope is, and hope is a very important word here, that I’ll keep writing at least once a week. And maybe, just maybe, (I’m not making any promises here, it all just depends on the amount of trauma I’ve experienced in said week) these will keep getting funnier.

So if you haven’t entirely regretted the time you spent reading these ramblings, maybe give the newsletter a subscribe, and share it with those meme-sharing, trauma-dumping living organisms you call friends. It’d mean the world to me. (Maybe not, but I could certainly use the dopamine)

Have a great week ahead, and here’s a tweet to cap things off.

and a photo in case you couldn’t comprehend all that brain rot in one go:

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