Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar, Author at Writers International Edition

The Taboo Behind the “Smart City” Called Kakinada

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When I got down in Kakinada in the early morning hours, I was expecting a rather difficult climate. Someone accustomed to the weather of a well-planned city like Mysuru rarely adjusts easily to most other Indian towns. Yet the heat and the air were gentler than I had anticipated. Perhaps a few years of living near Kerala’s coast had prepared me better than I realised. What I was not prepared for came later, as I walked towards the apartment where I was staying. I had to close my nostrils. There was no gradual build-up to it, no faint odour growing stronger with every step. It was simply there, all at once, the way a wall is there before you have decided to stop walking.

I did not think much of it that first morning. It was a new city, an unfamiliar lane, and perhaps an isolated problem. It was only a few days later, during an evening walk near the old Rangaraya Medical College with Dr Chandrashekhar, that the possibility of it being an isolated problem disappeared. A channel ran along the hospital boundary wall, carrying the same smell I had encountered on my first morning. Dr Chandrashekhar mentioned, almost without emphasis, that it had been running in much the same condition for as long as he could remember from his days as a student there. It was not a bad week or a bad season. It appeared to have become a permanent feature of the landscape, much like the old building itself.

That was enough to make me look beyond the particular lane and examine the administrative record behind what I was seeing. What emerged was a striking difference between the city described in official documents and the city experienced at street level.

What the Records Say

On paper, Kakinada Municipal Corporation presents a considerably different picture. The Andhra Pradesh State Portal has credited it with “exemplary waste management practices”, while the corporation has received national recognition under the Swachh Bharat Mission. Kakinada has also been part of the Government of India’s Smart Cities Mission for more than a decade. Initiatives such as “Return Gift” and “Legacy Waste Management” have been undertaken and publicly presented as evidence of the city’s continuing efforts towards urban improvement.

None of these claims is imaginary. The programmes exist, the recognitions exist and the expenditure associated with them can be traced through government records. The difficulty begins when that official picture is placed alongside the physical condition of parts of the city. A city may receive recognition for particular programmes and still have fundamental deficiencies in other areas of civic infrastructure. The question, therefore, is not whether Kakinada has achieved anything. It clearly has. The question is whether those achievements correspond to the conditions experienced by all sections of its population.

The Drainage Question

In several pockets of Kakinada, drainage channels function as open sewers, carrying wastewater along roads and residential settlements. In some places, families live only a few feet from them. The problem is particularly difficult to reconcile with the city’s Smart City status because Kakinada still does not have a functioning underground drainage system serving the city as a whole. More than a decade after its inclusion in the Smart Cities Mission, residents in substantial parts of the city continue to depend upon open drains that were designed primarily for storm-water disposal but have come to carry domestic wastewater as well.

The problem is therefore larger than the smell that first drew my attention to it. An open drain running beside a road may be dismissed as an ordinary feature of an Indian town, but the persistence of such a system in a city that has spent years within a national urban-modernisation programme raises a legitimate question about priorities, implementation and accountability. If underground drainage has long been recognised as necessary, why has the city continued to function without it for so many years?

When Infrastructure Becomes a Health Risk

The consequences of this deficit fall most heavily on the people who live closest to these channels. In several areas, low-income families live beside open drains, sometimes with infants and young children only a few feet from wastewater. Stagnant water and accumulated waste create conditions favourable to mosquito breeding and increase exposure to vector-borne diseases. The risks become particularly serious when drainage channels overflow during periods of heavy rainfall and contaminated water enters residential surroundings.

There is another vulnerability that receives less attention because it is not immediately visible. Where drinking-water pipelines run close to contaminated drainage channels, leakage or damage to either system can create the possibility of contamination. Municipal assessments have themselves identified the need to examine drinking-water pipelines in vulnerable areas. This is not a reason to predict a particular epidemic, but it is sufficient reason to regard the existing arrangement as a public-health concern requiring systematic inspection, monitoring and corrective action.

The people most exposed to these conditions are also often those with the least capacity to change them. A family living beside an open drain cannot simply move to another neighbourhood because the municipal infrastructure has failed. For a child growing up there, the drain is not an occasional civic inconvenience. It is part of the environment in which childhood takes place.

A Pattern Beyond the Drains

The drainage problem does not appear in isolation. Other aspects of Kakinada’s civic infrastructure reveal a similar distance between stated policy and conditions visible on the ground.

Despite years of sanitation campaigns, garbage remains visible along several suburban roads and thoroughfares. Where waste collection and decentralised processing do not function consistently, roadside accumulation and open burning become recurring problems. Irrigation canals that once formed an important part of the region’s agricultural landscape have, in stretches, become receptacles for solid waste and other pollutants. Traffic, damaged roads, construction activity and dust add another layer to the environmental burden.

Each of these problems can be assigned to a different department and explained as a local deficiency. Considered together, however, they raise a broader question about the way urban development is planned and measured. A city can produce successful projects, receive awards and report measurable improvements while significant parts of its population continue to live with infrastructure that should have disappeared decades ago.

This is where the idea of a Smart City becomes more complicated than a designation or a collection of projects. The quality of a city is ultimately experienced through its ordinary infrastructure: the water that reaches a household, the drainage that carries away its wastewater, the waste collected from its street, the air a child breathes and the roads people use every day.

Where Did the Investment Go?

The state’s recent approach to the Centre for approximately ₹200 crore under the Urban Infrastructure Development Fund for the construction of an underground drainage system in Kakinada makes the question more immediate. If approved and implemented, the funding could finally address one of the city’s most persistent infrastructure deficits. Yet the proposal inevitably raises another question: after more than a decade of Smart Cities Mission activity, alongside state municipal funding and sanitation programmes, why does Kakinada still require a fresh major intervention for infrastructure as fundamental as an underground drainage network?

That question is not, by itself, an allegation of financial wrongdoing. Establishing such a conclusion would require a detailed examination of financial and administrative records. But those records should be available for public scrutiny. How much has been sanctioned for Kakinada’s urban infrastructure during the past decade? How much has actually been released and spent? Which projects were approved, which were completed and which remain incomplete? What were their original estimates and revised costs? Which agencies were responsible for implementation and supervision? What explains the gap between projects announced and infrastructure actually delivered?

These are not unreasonable questions to ask of public institutions. They become particularly important when the physical condition of a city appears so different from the impression created by its official achievements. The answers should come from records rather than speculation, and responsibility should be established through those records rather than through political accusation.

What Accountability Requires

An independent sanitation and infrastructure audit would be an appropriate starting point. It should cover the city’s suburban and low-income settlements as well as the areas that receive greater visibility in official assessments, and it should be conducted independently of the municipal machinery whose performance is being examined. Its findings should be made publicly accessible, including the condition of drainage networks, waste-management systems, water pipelines and canal infrastructure.

The proposed underground drainage project should then have a transparent implementation schedule, with defined areas of coverage, expenditure, timelines and institutional responsibility. Progress should be measured not merely by administrative expenditure or project announcements but by the actual number of households connected to a functioning system.

The families already living along open drainage channels also cannot be treated as an incidental part of the infrastructure problem. Where rehabilitation becomes necessary, it should provide secure housing, sanitation, water supply and access to essential civic services rather than simply relocating people from one inadequate environment to another.

None of these demands is extraordinary. They are basic requirements of a city that wishes to describe itself as modern, sustainable and liveable. The issue is ultimately one of closing the distance between what has been promised, what has been reported and what residents actually experience.

The City Beyond the Smart City Tag

I am writing this from my balcony in Mysuru, days after returning from Kakinada, fresh from a nebulisation session that I now need each evening. Somewhere amid the smoke, dust and open drains of Kakinada, I developed a respiratory infection severe enough to require treatment. I cannot establish from my experience alone what caused it, and I do not intend to. My experience is simply the reason the environmental conditions I witnessed no longer remain an abstract matter for me. I was a visitor. I left. For many of the families I saw living beside those drains, particularly the children growing up there, these conditions are not something encountered during a short stay and left behind with the next train. They are part of everyday life.

Looking at a clearer sky from my balcony, I keep returning to the question of what a Smart City should actually mean. It cannot mean only the projects that appear in presentations, the awards displayed in offices or the statistics recorded in reports. A city is experienced at street level, beside the drains, along the roads, near the canals and inside the homes of the people who live there. A child’s access to clean air, clean water and basic sanitation should not depend on which municipal corporation happens to govern the street on which that child was born.

I hope this reaches the desks for which it is intended. I hope it is read as a record of what I saw, followed by questions that the responsible institutions can answer through facts and records. The purpose is not to condemn Kakinada. It is to ask whether the city that exists on paper is the same city in which its people are actually living.

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History of Rangaraya Medical College - an exclusive article

Rangaraya Medical College: A Legacy Carved in Community

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

Beyond the bustle of Kakinada’s evening traffic, I came upon a building that seemed to hold its ground with a kind of authority, old, weathered by decades, yet unmistakably dignified against the newer structures crowding the road around it. I was walking with Dr. Chandrashekhar, an MD student at the college, who had offered to show me around the campus. Until that walk, I had no real sense of the history sitting inside those walls, only a vague awareness that the institution had been there for a long time, the way most of us know a landmark exists without ever asking how it came to be.

It was already evening, well past the hours one would expect any real activity, and yet a number of people stood outside the hospital gates in scattered groups, waiting, talking quietly among themselves, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else. Something about that stillness, an old building holding a crowd of strangers even after its working hours had ended, stayed with me long enough that I went looking into its history once I was back home, curious to understand what this place had meant to the region before it meant anything to me.

Beginning that search, I assumed, the way most people would, that its history followed the predictable path of India’s legacy institutions, a wealthy king handing over a parcel of land, a government cutting a ribbon, or a single wealthy physician erecting a monument to his own name. What I found instead was something far more complex and worth telling properly, a story that deserves to be carried forward to the generations of students and patients who will walk these same corridors long after I have.

The genesis of RMC is an intricate mosaic of post-independence ambition, an unprecedented linguistic compromise in naming, an orphanage that moonlighted as a medical campus, and an intellectual lineage that stretches all the way to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s inner circle. To uncover the founding of Rangaraya Medical College is to explore a masterclass in community-led, private-sector resourcefulness that transformed coastal Andhra Pradesh for good.

The Problem of the Missing Physicians

To understand why RMC was built, one must look at the geography of the late 1950s. The newly carved state of Andhra Pradesh was grappling with a massive deficit of healthcare professionals. While elite medical colleges existed in cities like Visakhapatnam and Guntur, the fertile, densely populated Godavari districts lacked a dedicated medical training ground.

The idea to plug this gap did not originate in a bureaucratic office in New Delhi or Hyderabad. It was conceived by local visionaries who realised that if they waited for the state to build a medical college, a generation of students would lose out.

The initial spark came in 1955 from Dr. Mallavarapu Venkata Krishna Rao, a former Education Minister in the cabinet of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari during the era of the composite Madras State. Dr. Krishna Rao had the political foresight to know what it took to build an institution, but he needed structural and military-grade execution. He found his partner in Colonel Dr. Datla Satyanarayana Raju, known as Dr. D.S. Raju, a medical figure who had served as the personal doctor to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose during the Indian National Army trials and later became the Deputy Minister of Defence and Health under Jawaharlal Nehru.

Together, these two men decided that if the government could not immediately fund a public medical college in Kakinada, they would rally the public to build a private one.

April 2, 1958: The Historic Meeting at Pithapuram Road

The dream officially shifted from concept to reality on April 2, 1958. A meeting was convened in Kakinada at the residence of a prominent local citizen, Dr. Lakkaraju Subbarao. The gathering included Sri Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, then the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

The organisers faced a real hurdle. They had no land and no buildings to house a medical college, an enterprise that requires extensive laboratory and classroom space.

Stepping into this gap was the Maharajah of Pithapuram. In an act of philanthropy, he gave his consent to hand over an orphanage building complex he was running on Pithapuram Road. A space originally built to shelter and care for vulnerable children became the incubator for the region’s future doctors.

To formalise the community support gathering around them, the founders registered the Kakinada Medical Education Society on April 16, 1958. Its mandate was clear and ambitious in equal measure, open a fully functioning private medical college by July of that same year.

The Name: A Portrait of Gratitude

Perhaps the most striking element of RMC’s history is its name. In the mid-20th century, if a private citizen funded a college, the institution typically bore their exact name. RMC broke that convention through a gesture of gratitude from the Kakinada Medical Education Society.

As the society scrambled for seed capital, it received financial support from regional families, including Sri P.S. Raju, the Zamindar of Goteru. The larger breakthrough came from an industrialist from Tanuku, Sri Mullapudi Harischandra Prasad, representing the Sri Mullapudi Venkata Rayudu Memorial Educational Trust, who donated five lakh rupees, an extraordinary sum at the time.

Rather than allow the college to be named after him, Prasad deflected the honour. In response, the society crafted a portmanteau name that honoured Prasad’s own family lineage, drawing “Ranga” from his late brother-in-law, Sri Pendyala Sriramachandra Venkata Krishna Rangarao, the Zamindar of Dommeru, and “Raya” from his grandfather, Sri Mullapudi Venkatarayudu.

By fusing the memory of the brother-in-law and the grandfather, the society named the institution Rangaraya Medical College, a rare instance in Indian academic history of a college named not after the person who wrote the cheque, but as a multi-generational tribute to a donor’s family roots.

Overcoming the Lack of a Hospital

While the orphanage building was modified to host classrooms, anatomy halls, and basic laboratories, a medical college is functionally incomplete without a teaching hospital of real capacity. Building one from scratch would have taken years the society did not have.

The founders turned to the existing District Headquarters Hospital in Kakinada, a facility with its own history rooted in British colonial-era public health infrastructure. On October 14, 1959, after negotiation with the state, the Government of Andhra Pradesh officially notified the Kakinada District Headquarters Hospital as the formal teaching hospital attached to Rangaraya Medical College, bridging a privately funded college with a publicly managed clinical space, and giving students access to a wide and varied patient base from the outset.

The Haldane Connection

As RMC found its footing through the 1960s, it began attracting attention from unexpected quarters. Among the more remarkable chapters in its history involves the British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a polymath who renounced his British citizenship to become an Indian citizen and spent his final years working in the country.

Haldane developed a real respect for the grassroots medical movement taking shape in Kakinada. Before his passing in late 1964, he made his final request known, donating his body to the Pathology Department of Rangaraya Medical College for research and medical education. Haldane, who had famously written a poem on his own terminal illness, treating even his mortality as a final teaching tool, gave a regional medical college in coastal Andhra a striking form of validation, the mortal remains of one of the twentieth century’s most significant scientific minds.

The Shift to a State Institution

By the late 1970s, the financial burden of running a leading medical institution on private donations and subsidised fees had become unsustainable for the Kakinada Medical Education Society. To preserve the quality of education and allow the hospital infrastructure to scale with a growing population, the Government of Andhra Pradesh stepped in. In 1981, the state officially took over RMC, completing its transition from a private, society-run experiment into a premier government medical college.

A Legacy Carved in Community

Great institutions are rarely the work of a single force, and Rangaraya Medical College makes that case as clearly as any I have come across. It exists because an INA-connected physician, a former minister, a local landlord, an industrialist, and a Maharajah sat together in a living room on a spring afternoon and decided that the youth of the Godavari districts deserved better than what they had. The name on its façade does not represent a single ego. It represents a community’s way of saying thank you to a donor who asked for nothing in return, a piece of Kakinada’s own golden age of philanthropy, still standing, still treating patients, decades after the men who built it have passed on.

Walking out through those same gates that evening, I carried all of this history with me into the city outside. While returning, the streets of Kakinada were well lit. Beside the smell of the open drainage, people were already preparing to go to bed. I do not know how they manage to fall asleep so easily amid it all. Perhaps the chaos has simply become part of their life, absorbed so completely into the rhythm of the place that it no longer registers as chaos at all, only as home.

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In short: A quiet, weathered building near Kakinada’s evening traffic and a crowd of people waiting outside its gates after hours sent the author looking into the history of Rangaraya Medical College. What emerged was a remarkable story of post-independence community effort: an INA veteran physician, a former minister, a Maharajah who donated an orphanage building, and an industrialist who refused to have the college named after himself, choosing instead to honor his late brother-in-law and grandfather through its name. The piece traces the college’s journey from a privately funded 1958 experiment to a state-run institution, including its unlikely connection to British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who donated his body to its Pathology Department. It stands as a record meant to carry this history forward for generations of students and patients still to come.

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The Last Meeting Theory

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

As the ticket checker came to me and reconfirmed my name, I noticed a young man watching me from the berth across. Once the checker moved on, I let my face fall back into one of the books I had carried along for the long journey. I continued reading, though I could still feel him looking.

“Are you an author, sir?” he asked, after a while, moving closer to sit beside me. “I have seen the names of some of your books, and I went through your social media too.” Being recognised is a good thing, mostly, but the moment one starts placing popularity above peace, it turns into something heavier to carry. Whenever I travel, I choose the plainest clothes I own, since there is rarely anyone on these journeys I need to convince of anything.

I am still not entirely sure what made him open up the way he did, his life, his plans, and eventually, the concerns he had clearly been carrying somewhere deep for a long time. He spoke of a career he had chosen more out of family expectation than desire, a marriage he was still learning how to inhabit, and a restlessness he could not name even to himself. As I answered each thing he asked, I watched his eyes widen slightly, again and again. They were, in truth, questions offered back to him in a different shape, the kind that let a person reach their own answer rather than borrow someone else’s. I have found, over many years of these conversations, that most people already carry the answer they are looking for. What they lack is someone willing to sit across from them long enough for that answer to surface on its own.

A few hours later, his wife appeared and reminded him that his station was approaching. He rose slowly, began gathering his luggage, and as the train pulled in, he said goodbye and walked toward the door. It was only then that I noticed something unusual. We had never exchanged phone numbers. I had not even asked his name. He had not asked mine either.

This is not how these journeys usually end for me. If I were to go through the contacts saved on my phone, a great many of them would be people I first met exactly this way, on a train, mid conversation, somewhere between one station and another. Some of those meetings happened more than twenty five years ago, and the people from them are still close friends today, a few of them closer than that. I still remember the names of stations where such friendships began, the particular light coming through a train window, the small kindnesses exchanged over shared food, the addresses written by hand on torn pieces of paper before either of us owned a mobile phone. But this time, nothing. No name, no number, no promise to stay in touch. It was only afterward that a philosophy I had recently come across returned to me, one I had read but never truly felt settle into me until that moment. I have heard it called the Last Meeting Theory.

The theory holds a difficult truth. We never encounter the same thing twice, not even moments apart. Think of a river. I look at the water and say, this is the Ganga, or this is the Kaveri, and by the time the sentence has left my mouth, the water I named has already moved on, replaced by water that has never touched that stretch of riverbed before. The name stays. The river, in the only sense that actually matters, does not. This is not a poetic exaggeration. It is what a river actually is, a name we give to something that is never the same thing twice, moving continuously out from under the very word we use to hold it still. A philosopher in ancient Greece once said something close to this, that no one steps into the same river twice, since new waters are always flowing toward him. Long before that, our own sages spoke of anicca, the truth that nothing holds its form for even one full breath, that permanence itself is the illusion, not the exception.

Everything we think we return to carries this same betrayal. A flower noticed on a morning walk, admired in passing, may not exist by the time the same path is walked again, the plant itself gone, the ground beneath it changed, nothing left to mark where it once stood. Even a photograph, which we imagine holds a moment still, only holds the light that fell on a face that no longer exists in that exact arrangement, since the person in it has aged, however slightly, in every second since the shutter closed. We rarely think of any of this as loss, because we were never asked to say goodbye to it. It simply was, and then, at some point we did not witness, it was not.

Apply this to a person, and something in the chest tightens, the way it does with any truth we would rather not have named so plainly. Every person we meet, we meet exactly once, in the fullest sense of that word. The version of them sitting across from us on a particular afternoon, in a particular mood, carrying a particular set of concerns they may never carry again in that combination, will not exist in that form the next time we see them, if there is a next time at all. We meet people again, certainly, the same name, the same face, often the same affection. But we never meet the same meeting twice. Every conversation, however ordinary it feels, carries the possibility that it is the only one of its kind we will ever have with that person, whether or not we ever see them again in body.

This truth does not confine itself to strangers on trains. It lives inside the people we see every day, the ones we assume, wrongly, will always be available to us in exactly the shape we left them. A parent answering the phone this evening is not the same parent who answered it a year ago, a little more tired now, a little more given to repeating themselves, a year closer to an ending none of us like to name aloud. A child running through the house at this particular age, with this particular laugh and these particular questions about the world, will be gone within months, replaced by an older child who has already forgotten the exact way they once said certain words. We assume familiarity protects us from this, that because we will see these people again tomorrow, today’s version of them does not matter as urgently as a stranger glimpsed once on a journey. The truth runs the other way. It is precisely because we assume endless further meetings with the people closest to us that we so rarely give any single one of those meetings our full attention, and it is precisely the stranger, met once and never again, who sometimes receives the fuller version of our presence, simply because we knew, without needing a theory to tell us, that this was all the time we would ever have.

I did not truly understand this until that afternoon on the train, watching a stranger walk toward a door, realising only as it closed behind him that I would very likely never see him again, not because life had conspired to keep us apart, but because neither of us had done the ordinary thing people do to ensure otherwise. There was no tragedy in it. There was, suddenly, a window into something true of every meeting, whether we notice it or not, one that most of us pass through a thousand times in a lifetime without ever pausing long enough to look through it properly.

As the train continued its journey, I began watching the people who boarded and got off at each stop differently. I smiled at them. I let whatever love I could offer in a glance actually reach them, because I would very likely never see any of them again in this lifetime.

The train stopped at the station early in the morning. A few people were still asleep on the benches along the platform. Others were already walking briskly toward the exit. As I walked toward the gate myself, I tried to hold on to their faces a moment longer than usual. These were strangers I would likely never see again. Without either of us knowing it in advance, this had been our last meeting.

If we looked at every person, every place, every ordinary thing around us, as though we were seeing it for the last time, something in us would change completely. We would stop hurrying past what we barely notice now. We would begin looking at everything, and everyone, with all the love we have. Let it be the most bleoved one in front of you!

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In short: A chance conversation with a stranger on a train, one where neither exchanged a name or a number, becomes the entry point into a philosophy the author calls the Last Meeting Theory. Drawing on the impermanence of a river, a flower, even a photograph, and echoing both Heraclitus and the Buddhist concept of anicca, the piece argues that every meeting with another person, however familiar, may be the only one of its kind, since the version of them present in that moment will never exist in quite that form again. It extends this beyond strangers to parents and children, the people we wrongly assume will always be available to us unchanged, and closes with a simple shift: looking at everyone and everything as though it were being seen for the last time.

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Thirty-Six Hours to Kakinada: What Indian Railways Still Owes Its Passengers

1 Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

I was genuinely excited for this journey, the first long distance train trip I had made in years. There was a particular nostalgia in it too, a return to the era when the train, not the flight, was how a real journey felt. And this time the destination sharpened that excitement further. I was travelling to the state where I was born, decades ago, a place I had not returned to by rail in a very long time.

The train was scheduled for 5.05 in the evening. I reached the station by 4, only to learn it had been delayed by five hours, now expected at 10.05. Rather than sit at the station for six hours, I took a taxi back home and returned around 9.30, giving myself enough time to settle before boarding. It was only after I was back at the station that I heard the next announcement. The train would now arrive at 1.15 in the morning. I was carrying heavy luggage, and the idea of going home a second time and coming back again for a third made no sense. So I sat, at the station, for the hours that followed, and waited for a train that kept moving further away from the time I had planned my entire evening around. Since the day I booked, I have received a number of emails and messages from Indian Railway asking me if I need extra services, meals etc. I wonder why couldn’t they just send a message when the train was recheduled.

When it finally arrived and stopped, cleaning staff came aboard for a few minutes, going through motions that looked more like a performance of cleaning than the act itself. The compartment doors opened to very few passengers in Second AC. What greeted me inside was, without exaggeration, one of the worst coaches I have travelled in. Small insects, cockroach-like, moved along the berths and walls with no particular urgency, as though they, too, had come to expect this coach as their own. At some point during the journey, a mouse appeared, unhurried, crossing the floor of a coach I had paid a premium fare to travel in. This was Second AC, one of the higher tiers of Indian Railways travel, leaving aside Vande Bharat and its separate category entirely. I found myself wondering, seriously, what condition the sleeper and general compartments further down the same train must have been in, if this was what greeted a paying AC passenger. The coach itself, I noticed, was split down the middle, First AC on one side, Second AC on the other, sharing the same tired structure.

I do not fully know how I managed to sleep that night, given how far behind schedule the train already was and continued to fall. Tea, or anything resembling regular service, was rare, noticeably more so than on other trains I have taken. Through the night and into the following day, I watched the train pull into station after station, not to let passengers on or off, but simply to wait, stationary, while other trains were given priority to pass.

By early afternoon the next day, a middle aged co-passenger began walking the length of the compartment in visible panic. It emerged that his bag, containing his laptop, his essential documents, his cards, and the keys to his own home, had gone missing. He had been running a high fever through the journey and had fallen asleep with the bag kept close beside him, the way any exhausted, unwell traveller reasonably would. I remembered the train’s last stop, and a few passengers moving through the compartment around that time. Watching him search, increasingly certain of what had happened, was difficult to witness. I found myself quietly checking my own belongings, making sure everything I had brought was still where I had left it. No police official came to the compartment, not once, in the hours that followed. The entire episode ended exactly where these things usually end in this country, a complaint lodged over the telephone, filed into a system that, by every indication, would take it nowhere.

After roughly thirty six hours from departure to arrival, a journey that should have taken a fraction of that time, I reached Kakinada. The compartment, by then, was almost entirely empty.

I have read, like most Indians have, a great deal about the transformation supposedly underway in Indian Railways, the new trains, the modernised stations, the promise of a railway system finally catching up to the country it serves. I am not asking for that transformation to happen overnight. No reasonable person expects an institution this large to change in a season. But there is a difference between not yet having achieved excellence and failing, repeatedly, at the most basic things a paying passenger is owed. A clean coach without insects and rodents is not an aspiration. It is a baseline. What I experienced falls well short of even that baseline, in a class of travel positioned as one of the more comfortable options available.

Consider, then, what the general compartments carry, the ones I did not travel in but could only imagine after seeing my own. Passengers packed in with barely room to breathe, let alone sit comfortably for a journey of any real length. Toilets in those compartments that, by every account I have heard from others who have endured them, are conditions that would turn most stomachs on sight. If this is what a Second AC passenger is handed, I do not need much imagination to guess at what a general compartment traveller, who is very often the passenger with the least means to absorb such treatment, is left to endure.

And then there is security, or rather, its complete absence. A man loses his laptop, his cards, the very keys to his home, on a moving train he paid to travel on safely, and not a single official appears to even acknowledge it in person. The response is a phone number and a complaint that vanishes into a system with no accountability attached to it. Forget the bag. If a passenger loses something far more serious than belongings on that train, the response, I suspect, would look identical, a complaint registered, and nothing that follows it.

We have all heard the railway’s standard line by now, the inconvenience is regretted. I would like to ask, plainly, who is regretting what, exactly. Who compensates me for the taxi rides back and forth to a station that kept moving its own departure time by the hour. Who accounts for the time lost, an entire extra day and more of a finite life that no government, however efficient it eventually becomes, can ever hand back to a person once it is spent. I paid a real fare for this journey, priced as a premium class of travel. What, precisely, did that fare purchase. If it was not comfort, not safety, not punctuality, and not even basic cleanliness, I am left asking a simple question the railway owes every passenger an honest answer to: was this a fare, or simply a donation, handed over in exchange for nothing resembling the service it was meant to buy.

I stepped off the train at Kakinada in the early hours of the morning, the platform still half asleep, the air carrying that particular stillness only a very early morning arrival has. Thirty six hours after I had first reached the station in Mysore, filled with the excitement of a journey home, I was finally standing in the state where my life had begun, tired in a way that had very little to do with the actual distance travelled, and everything to do with everything that stood between the two points on the map.

In short: A long-awaited train journey from Mysore to Kakinada, meant to revive the nostalgia of travel by rail, turned into a 36-hour ordeal. A nine-hour delay, a filthy Second AC coach with cockroaches and a mouse, near-absent food service, and a fellow passenger whose laptop and house keys were stolen with no police response at all, only a phone complaint that led nowhere. The piece argues that despite years of railway PR about modernisation, the most basic passenger expectations, cleanliness, security, and punctuality, remain unmet, and asks plainly what a premium fare is actually paying for if not these.

Thirty-Six Hours to Kakinada: What Indian Railways Still Owes Its Passengers Read More »

A Journey to Hometown: When Your Phone Knows You Before You Know Yourself

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

“Best route from Mysore to Kanhangad by road.”

That was all I typed into the search bar, sitting at my desk a few days before my father’s death anniversary, planning to make the journey alone this year, on my Royal Enfield Classic, along the hilly stretches of the highway. My children could not join me this time, examinations had claimed their attention instead, and some part of me had already made peace with performing this year’s rituals by myself.

The search results came back the way they always do, distances, road conditions, a landslide advisory near one ghat section. I was about to close the tab when I kept reading.

“Travelling on your RE Classic would suit this route well. Before you set out, make sure you renew your insurance policy, which is due to expire on the fifth of September. Also ensure you’re using a reliable helmet.”

I sat back from the screen for a moment. I had never mentioned which vehicle I owned in that search, or in any search that day. I had, months earlier, sent a complaint email to a customer care department about a fault in my helmet. And yes, my insurance was, in fact, due to lapse on exactly that date.

I had not asked it any of this. It had simply already known.

I have been fortunate, if that is the right word, to live through several distinct eras of human life. An era before telephones or computers existed in any home I knew. An era of ordinary mobile phones, simple, functional, entirely under my own control. And now, this era, one in which artificial intelligence appears to be quietly absorbing everything around it, including details about my own life I do not remember ever having handed over so plainly.

That moment on the road to Kanhangad stayed with me, and it made me think seriously, not with fear exactly, but with real curiosity, about where this is actually heading. If a search engine can already know which motorcycle I ride and when my insurance expires, what does a phone even remain, five or ten years from now. I do not think the answer is more apps, or faster processors, or sharper cameras. I think the phone, as an object we hold and unlock and scroll through, is quietly approaching the end of its own relevance, and something else entirely is taking its place.

Consider what is already technically possible today, even if not yet fully assembled into one seamless experience. A system that knows your calendar, your location, your vehicle, your health records, your spending habits, your relationships, and your habitual patterns of behaviour, closely enough to anticipate a need before you have consciously formed the question yourself. We are, I think, moving toward a world where the phone stops being a device you actively use and becomes something closer to a standing presence in your life, an assistant that has already read the room before you walk into it.

Picture something more concrete. You wake up, and before you have reached for anything, a voice in your ear or a projection on a lens has already noted that your father’s death anniversary falls in ten days, that the route you took last year had a landslide warning near a particular ghat section, that your bike is due for a service, and that your insurance, this time, has already been renewed automatically because you gave it permission to do so six months ago. It does not wait for you to ask a question. It has already anticipated the journey, the ritual, the logistics beneath it, and quietly cleared every obstacle before you have finished your morning tea.

This is not simply a smarter phone in your pocket. It is closer to a continuous companion, one that may not even require a screen at some point, delivered instead through an earpiece, a pair of glasses, or eventually something closer to a subtle interface with the body itself. The phone as a rectangle of glass we tap and swipe may come to look, to future generations, the way a rotary telephone looks to a child today, a quaint, clumsy ancestor of something that eventually became invisible, folded so completely into daily life that it stopped needing to be held at all.

Extend that thought further, into the parts of life we currently manage through a dozen separate apps and a great deal of quiet anxiety. Health, for instance. A future assistant would not wait for you to notice a symptom and search for it in a panic at midnight. It would already know, from years of accumulated data, your sleeping pattern, your heart rate on ordinary days versus stressful ones, the subtle change in your gait as you crossed a room, that something had shifted before you yourself had consciously registered it. It might simply say, one morning, that your recovery metrics over the past week suggest you should see a doctor about your blood pressure, not because you asked, but because it had been watching the pattern build for months and finally crossed a threshold worth mentioning.

Or consider money, an area where most of us make our worst decisions while our judgement is at its weakest, tired, emotional, or simply distracted. An assistant woven this deeply into daily life would not just track your spending after the fact. It would negotiate on your behalf, quietly comparing insurance renewals across providers before your policy lapses, flagging a subscription you forgot you were paying for, or gently declining an impulsive late night purchase by asking, plainly, whether you still wanted to proceed given what it already knew about your monthly commitments. Some of this exists in fragments today. What is coming is the version where none of it feels like a separate tool at all, simply one continuous, watchful presence.

Work, too, would change shape. Rather than opening five applications to prepare for a single meeting, you would simply be handed, unprompted, a short briefing the moment you sat down, drawn from every relevant email, document, and prior conversation, without you having to ask a single question to assemble it. Even grief and memory, the very thing that took me to Kanhangad in the first place, might be quietly assisted in ways that feel almost tender. An assistant that remembers, without being told twice, the date of your father’s passing, the specific rituals your family follows, the names of relatives you only see once a year at this gathering, and gently prepares you for all of it in advance, the way a thoughtful relative might, if that relative also happened to know everything about you that a phone now does.

There is a genuine convenience in this future, one I would be dishonest to deny. A world where I never again have to remember an insurance renewal date, where a journey like mine to Kanhangad is supported at every turn by something that already knows the roads, the risks, and the rituals waiting at the end of it, is in many ways a kinder world to grow old in. For someone travelling alone, as I was, to perform something as significant as a father’s death anniversary, having a system that gently ensures nothing practical goes wrong is not a small comfort.

But the same moment that unsettled me on that road is the moment that deserves the most honest scrutiny as this future arrives. Knowing my vehicle, my insurance date, and my old complaint about a helmet is not, on its own, a small parlour trick. It means a system somewhere has assembled a working model of my life that I did not explicitly consent to in any conscious sense, stitched together from fragments I gave away in a hundred separate, forgettable moments. As phones evolve into something closer to full personal assistants, the real question stops being what they can do for us, and becomes how much of ourselves we are willing to have known, catalogued, and predicted by something we did not build and cannot fully see inside of.

I suspect the honest answer is that most of us will trade a great deal of that privacy for the convenience, the way most of us already have, one small permission at a time, without ever making a single dramatic decision to do so. The phone that becomes a true personal assistant will not arrive with an announcement. It will arrive exactly the way it did for me on that ride to Kanhangad, quietly, inside an answer I had not fully asked for, about a life it already seemed to know better than I expected it to.

I still made that journey on my own motorcycle, along those hilly highway stretches, to perform rituals that have not changed in generations, for a father who lived in none of these eras at all. Perhaps that is the real balance worth striving for as this future arrives. Let the machine anticipate the insurance dates and the helmet reminders. Some things, the weight of a ritual performed alone on that winding road, the memory of a father, the particular silence of that kind of grief, are still worth carrying ourselves, un-assisted, exactly as they have always been carried.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

In short: A routine search for directions from Mysore to Kanhangad returned something unsettling, details about the author’s motorcycle, insurance expiry date, and a past helmet complaint, none of which had ever been typed into the search. That moment becomes the starting point for a broader look at where phones are actually headed: not smarter apps, but an ambient, continuous personal assistant woven into health, finance, work, and even grief and memory. The piece weighs the genuine convenience of this future against the real cost, a system that knows us more intimately than we consented to, and closes by asking how much of ourselves we’re willing to have known, catalogued, and predicted by something we didn’t build.

A Journey to Hometown: When Your Phone Knows You Before You Know Yourself Read More »

Should Teachers Still Prioritise Handwriting Over Typing Skills?

Should We Still Be Proud of Good Handwriting?

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

“Tara has a very good handwriting,” her teacher told me, as I left my daughter at the school gate.

I have not actually seen Tara’s handwriting. What I have noticed is her interest in the English language and in expressions. On our short journeys together, I often hear her trying out some difficult word she has been reading, sounding it out, then asking me if she got it right. A great deal of that credit belongs to Ms Karen, a good friend of mine, an Anglo-Indian and the principal of the school where Tara studies, whose own ease with the language has clearly found its way into how Tara has come to hold it. But the compliment somehow did not make me smile.

It should have. A parent is supposed to smile at that sentence. Instead I found myself asking a question the teacher had not asked and probably had no reason to: good handwriting, measured against what, useful for what. Tara is not failing at anything. But I am no longer certain that handwriting is the thing worth measuring, at least not the way we still measure it.

What the Research Actually Shows

I want to be careful here, because the stronger version of this argument is wrong. Handwriting in the first year or two of school does something typing does not. A child who traces the shape of a letter with her own hand builds a memory of that letter that a child tapping a key does not build in the same way. Several studies on early literacy support this, and children taught to write by hand in their earliest years tend to recognise letters and begin reading sooner than children taught primarily on a keyboard.

There is also the often-cited research on note-taking, which found that university students who wrote lecture notes by hand remembered the material better than students who typed the same notes. I know this research well, and I do not think it settles the question the way it is usually made to settle it. Later attempts to repeat those note-taking findings have produced mixed results, and a study about university students taking lecture notes tells us very little about what a ten-year-old gains from another year of cursive drills in the fourth or fifth grade. Even so, the early literacy findings deserve to be taken seriously, and I have no interest in arguing them away to make a tidier case.

What concerns me is everything after those first two years. Cursive continues to be drilled, penmanship continues to be graded, and handwriting continues to be treated as a skill worth refining well past the point where its early benefits have already been collected. This is the stretch I keep returning to when I speak with teachers, and I have said the same thing to rooms of them that I am saying here: the hours spent perfecting a cursive loop in the fourth grade are hours not spent on the skill that child will actually use for the rest of her life, which is typing.

What Is Already Changing Elsewhere

Some school systems have already started to act on this, in their own way. A number of American states quietly dropped their cursive requirements over the last decade, only to have some of them reinstated after parents and legislators pushed back, less on the evidence than on a feeling that something was being lost. Finland, which is looked to often enough in these conversations, moved years ago toward teaching keyboarding earlier and treating cursive as optional rather than compulsory.

None of these decisions were made lightly, and none of them were made without argument on both sides. But they suggest that the question I am asking here is not a private worry of mine, and not particular to one country’s classrooms either. It is being asked, unevenly and with different answers, in school systems far from Tara’s, by people who have looked at the same evidence and reached different conclusions about how much of it to act on and how quickly.

What Children Are Actually Being Prepared For

Think about what Tara, and every child like her, is being prepared for. She will sit exams on a computer before she finishes school, in most systems already moving that way. She will apply for everything she wants, college seats, scholarships, her first job, through forms that reward speed and accuracy at a keyboard. She will write, correspond, and think through a keyboard for almost all of her working life, and the fluency she builds in that skill compounds every year she has it, the way any skill practiced early becomes effortless later, requiring no conscious attention at all.

Her cursive, by comparison, will be tested by almost nothing beyond a signature, and even that is disappearing from more transactions every year as digital verification replaces it. Continuing to grade penmanship well into adolescence is not really about tradition, or at least not only about tradition. It is inertia, a curriculum built for a world that has already changed shape while the timetable stayed the same, and inertia on its own has never been a good enough reason to keep doing anything.

What I Tell Teachers Instead

What I tell teachers instead is straightforward, even if school systems built around old habits find it hard to act on. Start keyboarding earlier, and treat it as a measured skill the way reading fluency is measured, not as a once-a-week visit to a computer lab that exists apart from the rest of the school day. Let typing speed and accuracy matter the way spelling already matters, tracked the same way, supported the same way when a child falls behind.

Bring digital tools into ordinary classwork across every subject, geography, mathematics, language, instead of keeping them cordoned off in a separate period called computer class, as though technology were something a child visits rather than something she already lives inside every hour she is not in school. None of this means dropping handwriting instruction in the early years, where it earns its place and where I would defend it against anyone who tried to remove it. It means letting go of the idea that more handwriting practice, indefinitely extended, keeps paying the same returns it paid when a child was six.

I think of the teachers I have spoken to in these sessions, many of whom agree in the room and then go back to classrooms where the timetable, the exam board, and the parents expect cursive worksheets regardless of what anyone in the room believes about typing. Changing a curriculum is slower than changing a mind, and I do not underestimate how much slower. Textbooks have already been printed, exam formats have already been fixed years in advance, and a teacher who wants to spend an extra hour a week on keyboarding is often the same teacher being asked to cover a syllabus that has not made room for it. But somebody has to keep asking the question out loud, in rooms full of the people who set the timetable, or the timetable simply repeats itself for another generation because nobody interrupted it.

I still do not know what I will do with the compliment the teacher gave me at the gate. I will probably let Tara keep it, since the hours she has put into her handwriting are real, whatever else is true about the world she is growing into, and a child’s effort deserves to be named even when a parent is quietly asking himself harder questions about what that effort was for.

But I noticed, walking away from that gate, that I was more interested in what she was reading aloud on our last walk home, the words she was still learning to trust herself with, than in how neatly she had written any of it down. If I had to choose, today, which of the two to spend more of her school hours on, I already know which one I would choose. I am simply not sure the timetable has caught up with me yet.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

In Short: A conversation with his daughter’s teacher about her excellent handwriting leads the author to question whether schools still emphasise penmanship well past the age where it serves any developmental purpose, at the expense of typing and digital fluency children will actually need for the rest of their lives.

Should We Still Be Proud of Good Handwriting? Read More »

Hymns of an Unfinished Poem

Leave a Comment / Poetry / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

Now tell me, where should I go?
It is evening; travelling the country roads,
I am lost in the woods where it is already dark.
All I can see is just a few yards beyond my sight,
And then it disappears into the dark.

The soles of my feet are still burning,
My tendons torn and weary.
Walking all the way through the summer day,
I stumble and wish to rest beneath a tree
That bears nothing but naked branches.

The hands I held have disappeared;
Promises remain futile and unfulfilled.
Parting for separate paths, I am left with the void.
A long way I have walked, humming the songs
That speak of the eternal truths.

The noises from the dark frighten me
I wish I could close my eyes for a while
And stretch my feet across the fallen leaves,
But what if a wild creature hidden in the woods
Should leap upon me and feed its hunger?

The sweet voices of the morn have gone;
The whistling of the eagles has disappeared.
Upon the skies, the colours have faded,
And dense darkness spreads across the horizon.
Alas, the night is not far away.

There is still a long way before it is time to sleep.
Perhaps I can walk as far as these worn feet will bear,
And then sleep until another morn, when I awake
To a world illumined by His majestic rays,
Remembering nothing of the journey gone by.

I could make my tomb beneath these trees,
And decorate it with the yellow leaves,
Covered by the wet soil, breathing in the earth,
Then fall into a deep and endless slumber
From which I would never wake again.

O travellers journeying towards the dusk,
Stop by the wayside, if you can; deep beneath the soil
Rests a man who left unfinished the journey he yearned for.
Listen, the newborn leaves of the age-old tree
Still tremble with the hymns of an unfinished poem.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

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Why Marriage Is Not the Enemy but a Reality to Be Lived

1 Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

This article was never meant to be written. The two pieces before it said everything I had originally set out to say. But the response to those pieces, from readers who took away the idea that marriage itself should perhaps be avoided altogether, told me something important had gone unsaid. That was never my intention, and it is worth correcting directly rather than leaving it to sit there, misread.

There is a curious contradiction running through almost every corner of life. A person who has become famous spends the rest of their years chasing privacy, while someone unknown spends theirs chasing exactly the fame the famous one is trying to escape. A person with a stable job dreams of a long vacation away from it, while someone without work would give almost anything just to have that job to escape from. The wealthy quietly search for peace, and the people who have finally found peace often start searching for wealth. It should not surprise anyone, then, that the same contradiction plays out in marriage. The unmarried yearn for it, certain it holds something missing from their life, while a great many of the married spend real energy looking for a way out of the very thing they once yearned for.

I came across someone recently who had spent several years being told by almost everyone around her that she should never get married. She was not against the idea herself, not originally. But every married person she encountered seemed to arrive with the same complaint, the same warning, the same tired advice to stay away from it if she valued her peace. One of the loudest voices pushing this advice on her, tellingly, was a man who had married twice and was, by every visible account, living a genuinely happy life with his current wife and their children. He gave the advice freely, perhaps without even noticing the contradiction in his own life while he gave it. Over time, hearing this kind of warning again and again, often from people whose own lives quietly disproved it, left a mark on her that no argument could easily undo. I do not think she is unusual. I believe there are a great many people shaped this way, not by their own experience of marriage, but by absorbing everyone else’s disappointment with it, secondhand, year after year, until the idea of marriage itself began to feel like a warning rather than a possibility.

I wrote, in the pieces before this one, that love and marriage draw on different parts of us entirely. Falling in love calls on the right side of the brain, the emotional, intuitive, imaginative part of us that does not ask for evidence before it commits. Marriage, once the early intensity settles, calls instead on the left side, the logical, practical, sequencing part of us that has to actually plan a shared life, manage money, raise children, negotiate in laws, and keep a household running through the ordinary, unglamorous stretches most love songs never mention. A great deal of the suffering I described earlier comes from expecting the right side of the brain to keep doing a job that, at some point, only the left side is actually equipped to carry.

This is where I think practicality earns its place, not as the enemy of love, but as its necessary partner. A marriage that continues to run purely on feeling, long after the feeling that started it has naturally settled into something quieter, will struggle every single time reality asks something of it that emotion alone cannot supply. Budgets have to be planned. Disagreements have to be negotiated rather than simply felt through. Time has to be divided fairly between a spouse, children, parents, and one’s own sense of self, and no amount of love, on its own, tells you how to do that division well. Couples who bring genuine practicality into a marriage, who talk plainly about money, about boundaries with extended family, about how disagreements will actually be resolved rather than assuming love will somehow resolve them automatically, tend to build something sturdier than couples who rely on feeling alone to carry them through decades. Practicality is not the opposite of love inside a marriage. It is what allows love to survive long enough to become something deeper than the feeling it started as.

There is a particular kind of maturity that life only releases to us once we have actually lived through certain stages of it, not simply read about them or observed them in others. The maturity of a father or a mother cannot be reached by any number of years lived outside that role. The maturity that arrives with becoming a grandparent belongs only to those who have crossed into it. In the same way, I believe there is a maturity that marriage itself makes available, one that no amount of careful avoidance can substitute for. We are, I think, meant to move through each of life’s stages and meet it honestly, rather than skip past the ones that frighten us.

Even Adi Shankara, by most accounts the sharpest philosophical mind this land has produced, was not exempted from this. As the story is told in his traditional biographies, when he arrived at the Sarvajna Peetha, the seat reserved for those recognised as complete in all knowledge, he was challenged by Ubhaya Bharati, the scholar wife of the sage Mandana Mishra, whom he had just defeated in philosophical debate. She pointed out that Shankara, a renunciate who had left the world as a boy, could speak with total authority on the nature of the self and the illusion of the material world, but had no lived understanding whatsoever of grihastha life, of marriage, of the householder’s world he was being asked to be recognised as complete in. He could not answer her questions on that subject, not because his intellect had any limit, but because he had never actually lived it. Rather than dismiss the challenge, he asked for time, and by tradition, left his own body in a cave to inhabit the recently deceased body of a king, living for a period as a householder among his queens before returning to complete the debate and finally ascend the Sarvajna Peetha. Whatever one makes of the literal details of that story, its point has stayed with me. Even a mind capable of grasping the ultimate nature of reality was not considered complete until it had also lived, if only once, inside the ordinary, entangled, demanding experience of a shared domestic life.

I want to be clear about something, especially after two pieces that have looked honestly, and at times painfully, at where Indian marriages go wrong. Marriage itself is not bad. It is not a trap, and it is not, by nature, a battlefield. What I have described in the pieces before this one are the failures of preparation, of communication, of practicality, and of a culture and an education system that never taught us how to carry this particular kind of relationship well. None of that is an indictment of marriage as an institution. It is an indictment of how unprepared we so often are for it, which is a very different thing, and one that can actually be fixed. Avoiding marriage for fear of the suffering it might bring is no different from refusing to be born because the world contains suffering.

I think of Shiva and Shakti here, not as deities to be worshipped, but as two of the oldest philosophical principles this land ever produced, ideas that have outlasted every temple built around them. Shiva, in this reading, represents pure consciousness, stillness, the unmoving awareness beneath everything. Shakti represents pure energy, movement, the dynamic force that gives form and life to that stillness. As principles, neither is complete without the other. Consciousness without energy is inert, awareness with nothing to animate it. Energy without consciousness is directionless force, movement with nothing to give it shape or meaning. Together, as concepts, they are said to complete the whole of existence, much the way the Taoist idea of yin and yang describes two forces that only make sense, that only become whole, in relation to each other. Marriage, at its best, works on something close to this same principle. Not two people erasing themselves into one, but two distinct forces, each already whole on its own, choosing to move through life joined together, each making the other more complete than either was alone.

Perhaps that is the real correction needed, not a rejection of marriage, and not a naive return to marrying without preparation either, but a marriage built the way Shiva and Shakti are described together, consciousness and energy, stillness and movement, emotion and practicality, each given its rightful place rather than one being asked to do the work of both. Marriage was never the enemy. Our lack of preparation for it was. Live it, then, fully, and give it everything you honestly have to give. But there may come a point, after every real effort has been made, when you know with a clarity that no longer argues with itself that this particular joining of two forces was not meant to hold. When that moment arrives, speak it plainly to the one beside you, rather than letting it decay quietly into years of silence.

To part ways with honesty, after having truly lived it, is not a failure of the philosophy above. It is, in its own way, a final act of respect, for the marriage, for the person, and for the truth neither of you can keep unspoken forever.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

This piece reflects patterns observed specifically within Indian marriages and Indian family structures, and is written from that context. It is the third in a series.

In short: Written in response to readers who took the previous two articles as an argument against marriage, this piece makes the opposite case. Drawing on the contradiction of always wanting what we don’t have, the story of a woman warned against marriage by a happily remarried man, and the legend of Adi Shankara being made to live a householder’s life before he could be called complete, the piece argues that marriage offers a kind of maturity no amount of avoidance can substitute for. It closes with Shiva and Shakti, held here as philosophical principles rather than deities, as a model for what a complete partnership actually looks like. This is the third in a series.

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The Chains No One Sees, and How to Break Them

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

In the piece before this one, I wrote about how Indian marriages are chosen, and why the mismatch between arranged practicality and love marriage emotion creates trouble before a couple even reaches the wedding day. This piece is about what happens after, because in my observation, and in the experience of a great many people I have come to know over the years, the real difficulty in Indian marriages often begins not at the wedding but well after it, frequently around the arrival of the first child.

In a great many Indian households, marriage does not simply join two people. It places a man between two women, his wife and his mother, and asks him to navigate a loyalty that was never meant to be divided so sharply. A mother, though she will rarely say this openly, often feels a real sense of loss when her son’s attention shifts toward his new wife. Psychologists who study attachment describe this as a natural, if painful, response to a bond changing shape rather than ending, a mother watching the centre of her son’s daily life move elsewhere. At the very same time, a wife who watches her husband remain deeply attached to his mother can feel that she herself is not being fully cared for, that some part of her husband still belongs somewhere she cannot reach. The man in the middle of this is rarely the villain in either story. He is simply caught between two people he loves, each of whom is responding, in her own way, to a very human fear of being displaced.

This dynamic becomes sharpest inside joint families, where physical closeness leaves little room for the new couple to build their own rhythms without another set of eyes and expectations always present. I have come to believe, even knowing this will sound blunt to some readers, that one of the most protective things a newly married couple in India can do is move into their own home, separate from the extended family, as early as circumstances allow. This is not a rejection of parents, and it does not have to be framed as one. It is simply the creation of space in which a marriage can find its own footing before it is asked to survive the added weight of competing loyalties under one roof.

A second, quieter shift tends to follow the birth of a child. A father’s attention, understandably, moves toward the new baby, often without him fully realising how much of his time and emotional energy this now consumes. This shift is rarely acknowledged as a source of strain, because on the surface it looks like nothing but good parenting. But a wife who has just gone through childbirth, who is often exhausted and adjusting to an entirely new identity herself, can experience this redirected attention as a second instance of feeling less prioritised, coming not long after the strain she may already have felt around her husband’s bond with his mother. Psychologists have written about this postpartum period as one of the most vulnerable windows in any marriage, precisely because both partners are stretched thin at the same time, often without the vocabulary to say so to each other.

There is also a physical dimension to this period that deserves to be said plainly, because it rarely is. Childbirth brings a dramatic drop in oestrogen and progesterone within days, and that hormonal shift affects a new mother’s body and mind in ways that have nothing to do with her character or her commitment to her marriage. Most women experience some version of this as the so called baby blues, a passing stretch of tearfulness, irritability, and exhaustion that eases within a couple of weeks. For a meaningful number of women, roughly one in seven by most clinical estimates, it does not ease, and becomes something doctors recognise as postpartum depression, a genuine clinical condition, not simply tiredness or moodiness, and one that only gets that diagnosis once the symptoms are severe and persistent enough to interfere with daily life. A husband who does not understand this distinction can easily misread his wife’s withdrawal or flatness as a loss of feeling for him, rather than what it usually is, a body and a mind moving through a genuine physiological upheaval at the exact moment his own attention has shifted toward the new child. Layered on top of the mother in law tension and the redirected attention of a new father, this hormonal reality may well be a third, largely unspoken factor in why so many Indian marriages begin to crack in precisely this window.

It is around this same period, in many of the cases I have observed, that a certain restlessness begins to surface, in men more visibly, though not exclusively. Some psychologists and evolutionary theorists have pointed to an innate pull toward novelty that both men and women can feel over the course of a long relationship, a pull that has nothing to do with love having failed and everything to do with how human attraction is wired. I want to be careful here, because this is a genuinely contested area of psychology, and it is not destiny. Whether that restlessness turns into something that damages a marriage depends far less on instinct itself than on the values, communication, and commitment a person chooses to bring to the relationship despite it. But when a marriage is already strained by unresolved tension between a wife and a mother in law, or by the quiet neglect that follows a child’s birth, that restlessness finds far more room to grow into something a marriage cannot survive. I have seen it end marriages. I have, more than once, seen it end lives.

I have no hesitation in admitting that I have gone through experiences that turned my own life upside down. I was shattered, wounded, and there were several moments when I seriously considered ending my own life. What eventually pulled me back was strange in its own way. The same pain pushed me toward something productive, in my case, writing, and toward work that could bring some genuine positive change to society. Slowly, I stepped back from the entire logic I had been living inside. I chose to live separately, quietly continuing to fulfill my duties as a father, and built a life centered on my actual purpose rather than on the partnership I had once assumed defined me. Once I did that, things became clearer than they had been in years.

I do not believe any of this is spoken about honestly enough in Indian society, and I think our educational system carries real responsibility for that silence. We teach children mathematics, history, and science with great seriousness, yet we send them into adulthood with almost no structured understanding of what a long term relationship actually requires psychologically, how attachment works, how conflict escalates, what a healthy boundary between a spouse and a parent looks like, or how ordinary and survivable certain phases of restlessness or disconnection can be if a couple has the tools to recognise and name them. We treat this entire domain of human experience as something people are simply expected to figure out on their own, usually after the damage has already been done.

Part of the reluctance, I suspect, comes from how closely this subject brushes up against religious and cultural sensitivities. A serious, honest conversation about the psychological demands of monogamy, or about why certain family structures create predictable strain, inevitably raises questions that sit close to religious teaching on marriage, and few governments, in India or elsewhere, seem willing to wade into that territory directly. But the cost of that avoidance is not abstract. It is paid, quietly, inside individual households, by men and women who reach crisis points they were never given the language or the preparation to recognise, let alone navigate.

I believe this needs to change, beginning in our schools. Not as a single lecture bolted onto a health class, but as a genuine, ongoing part of how we prepare young people for adult life, covering the psychology of attachment, the realistic pressures that joint families and new parenthood place on a marriage, and honest, non-judgemental education about why relationships strain in the ways they predictably do. This is not an attack on marriage, or on the family structures Indian society has built over generations. It is an argument that those structures deserve to be protected with real understanding, rather than left to survive on tradition and silence alone. A society that teaches its young people how relationships actually work, psychologically and practically, before they enter one, is a society far more likely to end up with marriages that last, and with people inside those marriages who are not simply surviving them, but genuinely well.

But there is a deeper truth underneath all of this, one I had to learn for myself the hard way. Marriage is not your whole life. It never was. Somewhere along the way, many of us hand over our entire sense of purpose to a marriage that was only ever meant to be a part of a much larger life. The chains that keep people trapped are rarely the marriage itself. They are invisible: guilt, fear of judgement, the belief that you are only worth as much as someone else’s approval of you. Detach from those chains. Not from your responsibilities, not necessarily from the relationship itself, but from the fear that has quietly been running your life. Once you do that, you stop merely surviving your circumstances and start building the life you were actually meant to live.

A partner is needed. Someone to hold you when a day has gone wrong in ways you cannot explain to anyone else. Someone to lie beside you at night after the world has taken what it wanted from you. Someone who meets your need for closeness, for touch, for simply being wanted, the same needs every human body carries. If you have found someone who gives you even this, honestly, then you are blessed, whatever name you give to what the two of you are.

This piece reflects patterns observed specifically within Indian marriages and Indian family structures, and is written from that context.

If anything in this piece has touched on something you are personally struggling with, please know that support is available. Tele-MANAS: 14416 (24/7, free) | KIRAN: 1800-599-0019 (24/7, free)

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In short: This piece continues the earlier argument that Indian marriages often unravel not at the wedding but afterward, in the quiet triangle between a man, his wife, and his mother, and in the strain that follows a child’s birth, compounded by real hormonal shifts like postpartum depression that go widely misunderstood. Drawing on a deeply personal account of nearly losing everything before finding clarity, the piece argues that Indian schools have failed to teach the psychology of relationships, and calls for real education on this front. It closes with a direct message: marriage was never meant to be a person’s entire purpose, and real freedom comes from detaching from the invisible chains, guilt, fear, and the need for approval, rather than from the relationship itself.

The Chains No One Sees, and How to Break Them Read More »

When Marriages Become a Battlefield We Never Trained For

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

His fingers were trembling, his words breaking into fragments. From the eyes he was trying so hard to hide, I saw a few drops fall onto the table between us.

“Come on. Let’s get it fixed, dear. After all, we are men, and we have an innate ability to break anything, even if it is a huge rock.”

Holding his hands, I said this to reassure him, though it was not really a reassurance at all, but a promise to a dear friend.

This was not the first time something like this had happened to me. Perhaps because of the depth of certain connections in my life, or perhaps because people see a good listener in me, a number of people over the years have chosen to share their most difficult moments with me. Letting the mind empty itself is, in some ways, its own kind of solution. But I have also come to believe that my own life experiences have given me a certain authority to offer suggestions, ones that I believe have genuinely helped some of the people who have sat across from me. Most of these conversations, over the years, have circled back to the same subject, marital difficulty. And the friend in front of me that evening was, by his own admission, on the verge of ending his life because of a series of things that had happened to him in his marriage.

I have thought about that evening often since. His situation was not unusual. I have heard some version of it from enough people, in enough different households, to know it points to something structural, not personal, something about how we approach marriage in this country that leaves good, well meaning people quietly worn down by it, some of them to the very edge.

I want to begin with a claim that will sound strange to most readers, and perhaps uncomfortable to some. Marriage, in the way we practice and defend it today, is not a natural institution. Nature’s interest in a man and a woman is limited and specific. It wants reproduction, and beyond that, it is largely indifferent to what happens between two people. Lifelong monogamy, fidelity, the promise to build an entire existence around one other person until death, none of this comes from biology in any straightforward way. It comes from us, from the systems we built on top of biology once we realised that raising children and organising a society required more structure than instinct alone could provide.

Religions across the world stepped into that gap and gave marriage its rules. Fidelity, permanence, the specific roles assigned to husband and wife, all of these were introduced with real intentions behind them, the stability of families, the protection of children, and, not incidentally, the survival and continuity of the religion itself. These rules asked something difficult of human beings, that they commit their entire romantic and physical life to one person, in a way that does not come naturally or easily to most of us. This is rarely discussed openly, but the tension it creates is real, and I think it explains a great deal of the quiet suffering inside marriages that otherwise look stable from the outside.

In much of the Western world, the practice of marriage has moved, gradually and unevenly, toward something more rational. People increasingly live together before marrying, date for years, test compatibility in practical, everyday ways before making a lifelong commitment. In India, we have largely not followed that shift, even as much of our economic and social life has modernised around it. We still hold, for the most part, to older frameworks that were designed for a different kind of society, and I think this mismatch between an old system and a changed world is where a great deal of Indian marital distress actually begins.

Consider the two paths available to most people in India. In an arranged marriage, two individuals who are often near strangers to each other are brought together, largely through family will, into a lifelong partnership. This path is not without its strengths. It comes with structure, with families invested in the marriage’s success, and with an in-built support system that steps in when conflict arises, because the marriage was never just between two people, it was between two families who have every reason to want it to work. In a love marriage, the path is almost the reverse. Two people come together purely through emotional attraction, often without family involvement in the decision, and sometimes against the family’s explicit wishes. When trouble comes later, that same family, having been excluded from the choice, is often reluctant to step in, telling themselves and each other that it was the children’s decision to make and now theirs alone to bear.

I have watched this second path lead to real devastation, more often than most people are willing to admit publicly. Marriages built purely on emotion, without the practical scaffolding that arranged marriages often carry, can collapse with startling speed once the initial intensity fades. In the saddest cases I have come across, the collapse has been complete enough to end not just a marriage, but a life. This is not a small or occasional pattern. It is common enough that it deserves to be spoken about honestly, not hidden behind embarrassment or the assumption that love alone should have been sufficient protection.

Part of the problem, I think, lies in how courtship itself works. During the period when two people are falling in love, each is, consciously or not, presenting a curated version of themselves, competing to appear more patient, more understanding, more suited to the other than they may actually be in ordinary daily life. This is not usually dishonesty in any deliberate sense. It is simply what courtship does to people. But it means that by the time a couple marries, especially in a love marriage that has bypassed the practical vetting a family might otherwise provide, neither person has necessarily seen the other in the full, unglamorous texture of daily life, the tiredness, the financial stress, the small irritations that never show up during a romance but define an actual marriage.

An arranged marriage, for all its own real problems, is built on a kind of practicality from the outset, however imperfect. A love marriage is built on emotion, often without much practicality at all. Neither extreme, in my view, serves people particularly well on its own. What seems to actually work, where I have seen it work, is balance, arrangements that allow genuine time and honest interaction before a lifelong commitment is made, rather than either a stranger’s contract or an infatuation’s promise. Indian parents, I believe, need to begin treating a period of living together, or at minimum an extended and honest courtship, as a normal and practical part of marriage rather than something scandalous to be whispered about. If that full step feels too large a departure from tradition for many families, then at the very least, couples need to be given real time, protected from social pressure to rush, to understand each other practically rather than only emotionally, before they are asked to build an entire life together.

As is so often the case, the rise in failed marriages, and in the more traumatic incidents that sometimes follow them, comes back to the failure of an educational system, whether that is the education delivered through our academic institutions or the education quietly passed down through culture itself. When a culture or an educational system keeps producing the same painful outcomes, generation after generation, that repetition is not simply misfortune. It is a signal, one worth taking seriously, that the approach itself needs to be revisited. The government should seriously consider introducing this into our school curriculum, and educationists themselves need to press for it, rather than waiting for policy to catch up with a need that has already been visible for far too long.

This piece has focused on what happens before marriage, the mismatch between how we choose partners and what marriage actually asks of us afterward. What happens after the wedding, particularly after a child enters the picture, carries its own distinct set of pressures, ones I believe deserve their own space to be discussed properly. I will turn to that, and to what real change might look like, in the article that follows.

This is the first in a two part series. The second article continues this discussion, covering what happens after marriage and what a genuine solution could look like.

Please note: This piece reflects patterns observed specifically within Indian marriages and Indian family structures, and is written from that context.

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In short: A friend’s breakdown over his marriage becomes the starting point for a hard question: was marriage ever a natural human institution, or something built entirely by religion and society to hold families together? This piece traces how that gap between biology and tradition plays out differently in Indian arranged marriages, built on family practicality, and love marriages, built on emotion with little practical grounding, and argues both extremes leave people unprepared for what marriage actually demands. It closes with a call for India’s educational system, and its government, to start teaching the psychology of relationships before couples ever reach the altar. This is the first of a two part series.

When Marriages Become a Battlefield We Never Trained For Read More »

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

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