In Masala Body, Krish Ashok unpacks the science of how our bodies process food, separating nutritional facts from popular myths and showing us how to make sense of the countless claims we encounter about what we eat.

***

You’re about to take the first bite of perfectly layered biryani. Channelling my inner five-star menu writer: each grain of basmati rice glistening with ghee, tender pieces of chicken nestled between aromatic layers, the complex perfume of saffron, cardamom, cinnamon and star anise rising with the steam. You’ve been looking forward to this moment all day.

Over the next twenty seconds, receptors will sample it, teeth will grind it, saliva will begin digesting the rice, and more than twenty muscles will route it past your airway to prevent choking. You will notice mainly whether the cook got the salt right.

Your mouth isn’t just where eating begins; it is where your food starts becoming you.

1.1: The Security Checkpoint

That first mouthful hits your tongue and, within a fraction of a second, taste receptors begin sending information to your brain. The report is crude but fast: Salt? Present. Sourness? Mild. Sweetness? Some. Umami? Plenty. Bitterness? Familiar. Nothing immediately alarming. Proceed with consumption. Your tongue cannot tell whether the meal contains enough protein or is free of toxins, but it can detect a small set of chemical cues that helped your hunter-gatherer ancestors decide whether something was worth swallowing. Being too picky tended to make you unpopular with your mates.

Taste buds didn’t evolve for your enjoyment—enjoyment is the UI your brain built on top of a much older system for finding energy, sodium and amino acids, and for avoiding a few things that would have killed you. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami are five broad chemical signals, not a comprehensive laboratory report on whether your lunch is good for you.

Sweet receptors respond to sugars, one of your body’s most readily available sources of energy. Most of the carbohydrate in basmati rice is starch, which does not taste especially sweet until salivary amylase begins cutting it into smaller molecules. Sour receptors detect acidity. Acidity can signal unripe fruit, fermentation or spoilage, but while your tongue alone cannot identify which, a combination of smell, memory and context do the interpretation.

Salt receptors respond mainly to the presence of sodium in food with impressive sensitivity. Your body needs sodium to maintain blood pressure and enable nerve transmission, but too much will kill you as will too little. The perfectly seasoned dish triggers just enough salt receptor activation to signal ‘useful mineral, pleasant concentration, keep eating’. Umami is the real surprise. This fifth taste, discovered barely over a century ago, detects breakdown products that provide a quick signal of protein availability.

Umami responds chiefly to free glutamate, often amplified by nucleotides (the same family of molecules your cells use to carry energy and to build RNA) released as animal and plant cells break down. These compounds frequently accompany protein-rich or fermented foods, making umami a useful hint of what may be in the meal. It acquired a scientific name because the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda noticed that kombu dashi (soup made from seaweed) had a savouriness the four textbook tastes could not explain. In 1908, he isolated glutamate from the seaweed and founded a company to sell its sodium salt with a name that translates to ‘Essence of Taste’ (Aji no moto). When your tongue encounters the rich, savoury depth of well-cooked chicken and caramelized onions, umami receptors are providing early indication of the presence of protein in food. It’s no coincidence that umami-rich foods like aged cheeses, mushrooms and long-cooked meats like nihari taste deeply satisfying. That’s because your brain has evolved to get excited about potential protein in the meal.

The sodium salt Ikeda sold is monosodium glutamate, which makes the restaurant sign reading ‘No MSG’ one of the stranger promises in the food business. It is the same molecule already sitting free in tomatoes, soy sauce, dried prawns and nearly everything fermented or slow-cooked that an Indian kitchen produces—it is the reason a tomato and onion masala cooked down for forty minutes tastes like considerably more than tomatoes and onions. Your umami receptors have no mechanism for asking where a glutamate ion came from. The original fear of MSG can be traced back to a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine that connected the additive to a post-meal headache after a Chinese dinner. Was there any evidence? No. Racism? Yes. A kitchen advertising no MSG while ladling tomato purée over grilled paneer is offering a claim its own food cannot support.

Bitter receptors? They are less like a poison laboratory and more like a smoke alarm: fast, useful and prone to crying wolf. Some poisons are bitter. Some are not. Coffee, methi and dark chocolate set off the alarm without requiring evacuation. This is why acquired tastes exist, and why it’s hard to get kids to eat healthy but bitter things. Your brain can learn that mild bitterness from turmeric or black pepper correlates with familiarity and safety, not danger. Although I personally draw the line at bitter gourd, a beastly pockmarked package of galaxy-scale bitterness that I can tolerate only in the Bengali dish, shukto.

Your tongue contains several thousand taste buds, each one a microscopic cluster of 50–100 specialized receptor cells distributed across the tongue and parts of the palate and throat. Despite what you might have learned in school about ‘taste maps’, every region of your tongue can detect every basic taste, though sensitivity varies slightly across areas. Remember that old diagram showing sweet receptors only on the tip of your tongue? It’s based on an overinterpretation of early-twentieth century German research that has since been thoroughly debunked. In 1901, the German scientist David Hänig reported small differences in sensitivity across the tongue. Four decades later, the psychologist Edwin Boring replotted the data, and generations of textbooks somehow converted gentle gradients into sovereign territories with lines of control: Sweetland at the tip, Bitterstan at the back and Sour Pradesh on the sides.

These taste receptor cells replace themselves every seven to ten days, which explains why you can recover your sense of taste after burning your tongue with hot chai or damaging it during illness. Unlike many other sensory systems that deteriorate with age, taste can remain remarkably resilient throughout life, assuming the cellular replacement machinery stays healthy.

***

Is India Ready for the Next Crisis? by Air Marshal Sanjeev Kapoor (Retd) and Lt Gen KJS ‘Tiny’ Dhillon examines how decades of geopolitical rivalries, regional conflicts and nuclear proliferation have shaped a world where crises far beyond India’s borders can have consequences at home.

***

The Cold War Era: The Reagan Doctrine and Era of Dual Containment

During the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan adopted a ‘containment’ approach, primarily focused on neutralizing Soviet influence globally while managing the Iran–Iraq war. This Reagan Doctrine entailed a massive military build-up to aid the anti-communist insurgents and the adoption of a strategic ‘tilt’ towards Iraq to prevent an overwhelming Iranian victory. In the 1990s, on the other hand, the Clinton administration officially coined the term ‘Dual Containment’ to describe the concurrent and comprehensive isolation of both Iraq and Iran. The focus in the 1980s was less on isolating both Iran and Iraq equally and more about leveraging Iraq against Iran by enforcing a general embargo on Iran. The key aspects of the Reagan-era dual containment policy were as follows:

• Focus on the Soviet Union: President Reagan intensified the Cold War competition, moving from détente to a policy of reversing Soviet gains by attempting to reduce the access to Soviet technology, depressing commodity prices and launching aggressive ideological battles, with the aim of achieving a victory rather than simply containing the perceived enemy.

• The Reagan Doctrine: In order to combat the spread of Soviet influence in the Third World, the US provided aid and training to anti-communist regimes and guerrilla movements like the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

• Tilt Towards Iraq: The US pursued a policy of tilting towards Iraq (1982) during the Iran–Iraq war in 1982 after Iranians had started making gains on the battlefront, by providing intelligence and economic support to Iraq, while simultaneously selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

• The Iran–Contra Scandal: In an underhand counter to the policy of managing Iran, the US administration secretly sold arms to Iran to divert profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, thereby violating the US Congress Boland Amendment (of 1982–84), which had banned the supply of US military aid to the Contras.

Regional Cold War Amidst the Sub-Surface Simmering Heat

At the peak of the Cold War between the USSR and the US, the two superpowers brazenly exploited West Asia to reap the benefits of its geostrategic location and newly-found oil reserves. Thus, the West Asian region became a key inflammable battleground with both the Soviet Union and the US exerting their respective spheres of influence by backing the rival regimes in the region and fuelling regional conflicts, including the Arab–Israeli and Iran–Iraq wars. Both countries were working towards the aim of securing their energy interests and quelling the rise of their opponents’ ideologies. Following is a delineation of the major dynamics and alliances that characterized the political landscape of that era:

The Ideological Divide: The regimes ruling various West Asian nations during the post-Second World War era were mostly monarchies that were split apart not by their individual historic or cultural beliefs and dogmas but by the ideologies that their monarchs or leaders supported or aligned with. While the Americans backed anti-communist, conservative regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran under the Shah to arrest possible Soviet expansion in the region, the Soviets, on the other hand, backed Arab socialist governments like those in Syria and of Nasser in Egypt to expand their sphere of influence.

Energy Security and Military Interventions: As explained earlier, the US prioritized the securing of oil resources by forming critical partnerships in the Gulf region, while both the US and the USSR flooded the region with the legal and illegal export of arms, in the process accelerating both the regional arms race as well as the proxy wars. Some of the major regional events occurring around this time, such as the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, highlighted the shift from the supremacy of the pre-World War II powers such as Britain and France to the ascendancy of superpowers. The region again became a flashpoint during the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1967 and 1973, wherein the US provided economic and military support to Israel, while the USSR supported the Arab states. Thereafter, developments in the region such as Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran in 1979 and the Iran–Iraq War, which raged for eight years from 1980 to 1988, were heavily influenced by the Cold War alignments, with the superpowers and their allies supporting the opposing sides.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM): During the heightening of political tensions perpetrated by the Cold War, every country started aligning itself with either of the two blocs, with such alignments being manifested in the formation of powerful military alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) comprising the nations supporting the US, on the one hand, and the Warsaw Pact, which brought together nations supporting the USSR, on the other. In this environment of dominance of the international political milieu by two powers emerged a policy of non-alignment aimed at the pursuit of diplomatic relations with both sides while steering clear of aligning with either of them. Hence, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed in 1955 under the leadership of Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia. This movement aimed to promote Afro–Asian solidarity as a means to counter Western and Soviet interference in their sovereignty.

End of the Cold War: With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US emerged as the only superpower in the world, which shifted the geopolitical balance dramatically. This period also saw a shift from ideology-driven politics to the protection of pragmatic national interests, including enhanced security cooperation and energy trade. However, despite the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the sub-surface simmering heat of conflicts and exploitation continued in West Asia, accompanied by the rapid rise of Israel–Iran animosity.

Regional Nuclear Proliferation—The AQ Khan Network: Meanwhile, things were heating up in the Indian subcontinent too. On 11 and 13 May 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests under the code name ‘Operation Shakti’. This was followed, just a couple of weeks later, by the Pakistani response in the form of six nuclear tests on 28 and 30 May 1998, under the collective nomenclature of ‘Chagai-I’. These nuclear tests marked the overt entry of the two regional nations into the elite nuclear club, shaking the foundations of global nuclear non-proliferation efforts and setting in motion a nuclear race in the region, with Iran also nurturing the dream of acquiring a nuclear weapon.

***

Not every season of life asks us to find a new path; sometimes, it asks us to tend to the one we’ve already chosen. At the Speed of Flowers by Deepak Ramola explores this quiet distinction between seeking and preserving, offering a thoughtful reflection on purpose, growth and learning to bloom in your own time.

***

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who need help finding their light and those who need help preserving their light.

I think of Melissa, who I met at a conference three years ago where I was speaking. She had just joined the board of a not-for-profit working on food hunger after nearly two decades as a consultant at one of the world’s top management firms. She had just returned from a five-month sabbatical volunteering in Guatemala and was considering applying to a yoga certification course in Bali. She came to our meeting with a notebook of possible questions, the way some people carry a list of restaurants they want to try. ‘I just want to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here,’ she said once, meaning her job, meaning the earth, meaning both at once. She was forty-one. The consulting work had been a financial security decision more than a love affair. The not-for-profit was a way to give back. She had read more psychology and self-help books that summer than I had read in two years.

Melissa was a seeker in the season I met her in. Her wonder was wide and unanchored. She was on a quest to understand where she truly belonged. By sampling careers, talking to many people, volunteering and prototyping, she was gathering data before committing to something she could call home.

My friend Aditi Gupta, on the other hand, has been tending the same fire for over a decade. Aditi runs Menstrupedia, an organization she co-founded in 2012 with her husband Tuhin Paul when the two of them were design students at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. What began as her thesis project—a comic book to teach young girls about menstruation in a country where the subject lives in hushed tones—has, in the years since, reached fourteen million girls, and been translated into twenty languages across twenty-three countries. Through their comics and educational programmes, Aditi and her team have fought the taboo around health and well-being one classroom at a time. Aditi knows her passion lies with informing the youth. When she went on Shark Tank India and walked away with funding from the investor Namita Thapar, it was not to find her path; it was to widen one she had already walked for a decade.

Aditi, in this season of life, is preserving her light.

Most of us are a little bit of Melissa and Aditi, depending on the season of our lives. Recognizing which one you are, right now, can be a useful navigational tool.

Both kinds of people need help navigating their journeys but the kind of support they require is arguably different. Seekers need tools to uncover meaning; preservers need spaces to deepen it. Both call for an attentive examination of one’s inner landscape, but their compasses point in different directions. Both need courage. Both need company.

The seekers belong in folders marked Exploring or Figuring it out. They are in search of a spark, a purpose or meaning. The preservers, on the other hand, might file themselves under Sustaining, Building or Tending. Their wonder hasn’t dimmed; it has simply traded away the wandering.

For years, I was a seeker. I asked the world: ‘Was that poem any good?’; ‘Did that story matter?’; ‘Did I teach well enough?’ I held out my work like a child offering a crayon drawing, eager to know if I was any closer to being enough. I gathered yes’s and no’s to understand my potential. Now, I find myself asking different questions: ‘Can I try something new without breaking what I’ve built?’; ‘Is there a way to be both brave and rooted?’

As a result, the people around me changed too. Once, I needed cheerleaders and now, I need collaborators. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m good; I need someone who can hold the net while I attempt the next leap.

Preserving your light isn’t about resisting the world’s distractions. It’s about tuning your instrument, so it doesn’t fall out of harmony with your purpose. It means making time to listen to yourself, to replenish your reserves, to work on things that set your heart aglow. Only when we feel safe in our own light do we feel brave enough to share it with others.

Truth be told, the world is generous with resources for seekers. Everyone wants to hand you a map when you say you’re lost. But very few know how to support you when you’ve already arrived somewhere, and you just want to stay, go deeper, or wander sideways. They mean well, but they offer flashlights to someone who’s already found the sunrise.

***

***

There’s a school of thought that says frameworks kill creativity. That real storytelling can’t be stuffed into boxes.

I understand the concern. And honestly, some of the most brilliant storytellers I’ve encountered would never use a framework consciously. Instead, they use instinct born of years of experience to perform something akin to magic.

But study their work closely, and you’ll notice that they’re using patterns. They’ve just absorbed them so completely that they don’t recognize them as patterns anymore.

There’s a story about Johann Sebastian Bach that I think about often. In 1747, Bach visited the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia. He was sixty-two years old and somewhat out of fashion in that age of music. The king, who was a musician trained in the modern style, handed Bach a melody and asked him to improvise a fugue on the spot. The theme was long, intensely chromatic and rhythmically awkward. Some commentators have speculated that Frederick conspired with Bach’s own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who worked at the court, to design a melody that would be nearly impossible to work with. It was, by most accounts, a trap. But Bach improvised the fugue flawlessly.

Frederick then raised the stakes: create a sixvoice fugue on the same impossible theme. Even Bach couldn’t do that on the spot. He promised to send something later.

Two months later, Frederick received ‘The Musical Offering’. It contained the six-voice fugue he’d demanded. But also, a three-voice fugue, ten canons of increasing complexity and a full trio sonata, all built on the same ‘impossible’ theme Frederick had used to try to embarrass him.

The constraint revealed Bach’s art instead of limiting it.

That’s what I want for you from this book.

This book is a system of patterns that helps you find the story already inside the situation you’re facing. This is not a formula that makes all your stories sound the same, or a template that strips the life out of anything you want to say.

The Story Map: Soul, Body, Spirit

So, what did Pasteur have that Semmelweis didn’t?

It wasn’t intelligence. Semmelweis was brilliant. It wasn’t evidence. Semmelweis had more data than Pasteur did when he started. It wasn’t even courage. Semmelweis risked his entire career to tell the truth.

What Pasteur had was a complete story. And every complete story, I’ve come to believe, rests on three pillars. Miss any one, and the story fails.

I call these pillars Soul, Body and Spirit.

Soul is the meaning of your story. It’s what makes people care even before you’ve told them anything useful.

Soul answers three questions:

Who is this story about? That’s your Character. It might be you, your customer, your company, your team or somebody else. But someone has to be at the centre of the story, facing something.

What do they want? That’s your Goal. Every Character worth caring about wants something. To solve a problem, to achieve a milestone or perhaps to undergo transformation.

What’s standing in their way? That’s your Challenge. Without an obstacle, there’s no tension. Without tension, there’s no story—you just have a sequence of events.

Character. Goal. Challenge. These three levers move the Soul of every story worth telling.

Body is the structure of your story. It’s how you organize and deliver the meaning you’ve established.

Body also answers three questions:

What shape will this story take? That’s your Structure. There are nine master structures that cover most situations you’ll encounter, from the Hero’s Journey to the Inverted Pyramid to the simple Problem Solution. Each has a different purpose and a different effect on the listener.

How do you create tension? That’s where Tension Tactics come in. Starting in the middle of the action. Introducing a ticking clock. Setting up a David-versus Goliath dynamic. These are the moves that grab attention and hold it.

How do you build connection? That’s where Connection Tactics come in handy. A well-placed anecdote. A vulnerable confession. A visual metaphor that explains an abstract concept. These are the parts that build trust and make your audience feel like you understand them.

Soul gives your story meaning. Body gives it shape.

Spirit is what makes your story land with your audience, in a moment, in a particular context.

You can have a perfect Soul and Body and still fail, because you didn’t adapt to the room you were actually in.

Spirit answers three final questions:

Who are you talking to? That’s your Audience. A story that works for investors might bore your team. A story that energizes a conference crowd might feel over the top in a one-on-one conversation. You need to know who’s actually listening.

What should they feel? That’s the Emotion you’re designing for. Urgency. Trust. Pride. Belonging. Hope. Different emotions drive different actions. Pick the wrong one and your story might be admired but not acted upon.

Where and how are you telling it? That’s your Context. A boardroom presentation is different from an email is different from a toast at a sangeet is different from a difficult conversation with a direct report. The medium shapes what’s possible.

Spirit is the final gate. It’s what separates a good story from the right story for this specific moment. This is where Semmelweis failed most completely. His Audience was physicians who valued professional status above almost everything else. The Emotion he triggered was shame and defensiveness—the exact opposite of what he needed. And his Context kept shifting from medical journals to public accusations to, eventually, screaming at colleagues that they were murderers.

Pasteur read the room. He gave doctors a story that made them heroes, not villains. He let them feel like they were defeating an enemy rather than admitting a mistake.

***

What begins as one young researcher’s determination to find a snow leopard becomes a decades-long journey through the Himalayas, wildlife research and conservation. The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi takes readers into the wild, unpredictable world of one of the planet’s most elusive big cats—and the people working to protect it.

***

‘You will never see a snow leopard,’ said a professor when I sought advice on my master’s research project. ‘And you won’t get enough data to write your thesis.’

As a Wildlife Biology and Conservation student at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, the thesis I was due to present in 2008 was to be my gateway to a career in wildlife research. Modelled on American Ivy League universities, with acres of green lawns, air- conditioned research laboratories and cafeterias that serve cappuccino, the NCBS is one of India’s leading institutes in biological systems research, studying everything from molecules to entire ecosystems. I had found my way into this elite scientific institution through hard work and a talent for wandering the wilderness, but now I was struggling to journey through the door I wanted to open – the one labelled ‘snow leopard’.

‘Your idea of studying predator–prey relationships between snow leopards and blue sheep in the Himalaya is very good,’ said another faculty member, ‘but you should do this research with the tiger and the deer instead, and work here in South India. Besides, it will be 40 degrees below zero during the winter and you are from one of the hottest parts of India, so how will you handle the Himalayan winter?’

Some of this was true. Only a handful of researchers – mainly from Western countries – had ever studied snow leopards in the wild, and they often struggled to back up their research claims with adequate data from the field.

It was also true that I had grown up in the heat, in a village in the central Indian state of Maharashtra, near the famous UNESCO heritage site of the twenty- nine Buddhist caves cut into the cliffs at Ajanta between the second and fourth centuries BC. My village often gets to over 40º C, and the hot summers of my childhood were spent eating mangoes and swimming in wells. I had grown up listening to my grandmother tell the story of the Last Tiger of Ajanta. This tiger had killed a cow on the outskirts of my village, and my grandmother recounted in great detail how my grandfather stayed up in a cowshed near the carcass and shot the tiger on a full-moon night. My father was a little boy then and remembers sitting next to the dead tiger, measuring his height against the length of the ferocious animal. My grandmother would end the story on a sad note, saying that was the last time any­ one saw a tiger near our village. I grew up regretful of the outcome but tried to maintain a proud feeling that my grandfather had helped the village. The suggestion that I should study the tiger had resonance.

But I felt a calling to the Himalaya. I had been obsessively drawn to vertical surfaces since I was 15. Be they boulders, hillsides or buildings, I had to find a route to climb them. As a teenager I spent every waking moment thinking about how I could find my way to the Himalaya and be among the ‘real mountains’. Living in the mountains, hiking without a destination and climbing was the dream – not to set records but simply to be with myself exploring my great passion. Doing my master’s thesis in the Himalaya could locate me in the mountains for good. I knew I could handle the Himalayan winters. At 19, I had trained at one of the best mountaineering schools in Asia, and I could hold my own on icy slopes. During the NCBS’s summer break, after the second semester of my current course, I had also interned with an organization working on snow leopard research and conservation, and I was confident I would gather enough data to complete my thesis. What I lacked, given an upbringing which emphasized an unquestioning respect for my elders, was the courage to say this to my professors.

The final decision would be made at the proposal defence seminar, a gruelling annual ritual at the end of the third semester at which students presented their research plans to an audience composed of professors and practising conservationists. If a student’s idea was accepted, they would get the funding and permission to research at the proposed field site for six months. I had decided to propose researching the snow leopard’s prey species, rather than the cat itself, in the hope that this would sound more achievable. I included a photograph of myself climbing an icy Himalayan peak to convince them that I could handle the winter cold. When I walked up to the lectern and the lights in the seminar hall dimmed, with faculty members and students leaning back in their seats to listen to my proposal, the voice ringing in my ears was that of a friend. She had told me that some people in the audience would support my plan simply for its audaciousness.

***

Parenting often asks us to correct what we can see, but what if the real answer lies beneath the behaviour? Connection Before Correction by Schweta Merchant Gandhi explores how understanding a child’s developing brain can help parents respond to tantrums, big emotions and difficult moments with greater empathy, connection and calm.

***

That night, the house was silent.

Agastya had finally fallen asleep, his breath soft, his face impossibly peaceful, as if the hurricane at Hamleys had never happened.

I sat beside his bed in the dark. Watching him breathe. My own chest was still tight. My hands were still trembling slightly. The guilt was a physical thing, heavy, pressing against my ribs, making it hard to take a full breath.

I kept replaying the scene.

The wailing. His small body crumpled on the floor of that store. The eyes of strangers. My own voice, that voice I didn’t recognize, ricocheting off the walls of our home.

His face when I screamed. The way his whole body crumpled. The sob that came from somewhere so deep it shook us both.

How did we get here?

How could a loving, educated mother lose herself just as fast? How could logic, love and all my training evaporate the moment emotions rose?

I had read the parenting books. I studied child psychology. Built a career around understanding little minds. Worked with thousands of kids and millions of parents.

And yet, here I was. Broken on the floor of my own home. Watching my son wonder if it was safe to feel happy again.

In the silence, something whispered, a truth I’d been avoiding: There has to be a reason.

Not an excuse.

A reason.

The Realization

For the first time, I saw it clearly: I had spent years looking at my child. His tantrums. His reactions. His ‘difficult’ moments. His behaviours that needed ‘fixing’.

But I had never truly looked into him. Into the invisible universe firing beneath his skull. Into the why behind every meltdown, every explosion, every moment that left us both in tears.

Beneath every word he spoke and every tear he shed, something far more powerful was shaping him, a ‘universe of tiny circuits’ firing faster than thought, deciding in a split second whether to connect or protect.

That night, I made a promise: Before I teach, correct or guide, I will first understand the brain behind the behaviour. Because that’s where the real story of parenting begins. Not in what our children do, but in what’s happening inside them while they do it.

Inside that small but mighty organ that holds our children’s feelings, fears and future.

Let’s open the door and walk inside your child’s brain, a little two-storey house where storms rise, calm returns and connection is built brick by brick.

The Two-Storey House

When you imagine a child’s brain, don’t picture a dull diagram or a medical sketch.

Picture a home, warm, buzzing, alive.

Where some rooms are loud and impulsive, while others are wise and calm.

Where some spaces are fully furnished and others are still being built.

Dr Daniel Siegel, one of the world’s leading child psychiatrists, explains it beautifully using a ‘two-storey house’ model:

1. Downstairs Brain (Survival + Emotion)

2. Upstairs Brain (Thinking + Reflection)

3. The Staircase that connects both the brains

***

Sometimes, you travel to escape your life, only to find yourself sitting in a strange city, confronting everything you were trying to leave behind. Manav Kaul’s A Mountain, A Lake and a Song captures this beautiful contradiction of travel—the way new places, fleeting encounters and unfamiliar rhythms can bring us face to face with ourselves.

 

***

The next day the weather in London changed suddenly. Golden sunlight covered everything. I was sitting outside Paul Cafe at Gloucester Road, trying to put the darkness of the past into words. To sit in this beautiful sunlight and write about the darkness of the last few days was making the sunlight that much more beautiful. But after I had written it all down and read it in the sunlight, it all rang hollow. Again and again, I’d type, read and delete the same sentences. My life lay in front of me like a tangled mess of wet thread and I was trying to find one of the ends—then there’d at least be an opportunity to untangle it all.

My coffee had gone cold. I was just thinking about ordering another when the waitress came by to take the cup away. I asked her for another. She acknowledged the request and was picking up the cold cup when she saw the laptop screen. ‘What the hell is this?’ she blurted out. I couldn’t help but laugh at her surprise. I told her that it’s Hindi, and that I’m a Hindi writer. She sat down next to me, staring at the words on the screen. She then asked me to type something. I asked her name. Katherine, I typed it out.

कैैथरिन

She looked at it and laughed. She pulled out her phone, took a photo of my screen and said, ‘Your next coffee’s on me.’ I thanked her and she went back inside. I kept staring at her name for a long time, कैैथरिन, her laughter now embedded in it.

I started writing a story. I once knew a girl called Katherine . . . The minute I typed it, I was ashamed of my own superficiality. For a long time now I’ve been struggling with the question as to which parts of my life are real and which are the stories I make up? I mean, there has to be a difference between my real life and the stories I create; else I’ll never be able to experience anything real. The minute anything beautiful happens around me, I start looking at it as a potential story. But how do I remain in the present? Like, where am I right now? What am I doing here in London? Why do I want to run from my lonely life towards more loneliness? I hate my writing when such questions surround me. I instantly deleted the name and closed my laptop.

Katherine was back with my coffee. She put the cup down and asked, ‘Are you okay?’ An anxious person looks the same in all the languages of the world. I just smiled, which meant both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I’m not in my country, or I would’ve instantly said, I’m alright. You have to hide everything there. You have to constantly toil to hide the weakness that comes with not being okay. But here, here I felt I should live my reality how it was. Katherine was gone. Soon I was irritated at myself for smiling. I should’ve just said I’m fine.

It had been a long time since I had quit smoking. But the last two days had been so stark that I had bought a packet. I know I’m weak. After just two sips of coffee, my hands were on the packet. I pulled one out and put it on the table. I had to scramble a bit in my bag before I could find the lighter. I sniffed the cigarette for a bit before putting it between my lips. I kept waiting for something to stop me, a thought, a call or a message but nothing did. After some time, I lit the cigarette. With the first drag, the tension in my body started to loosen up. But soon I felt dizzy and couldn’t smoke the entire cigarette.

Katherine brought a chocolate cake and put it on my table. ‘This is from my boyfriend. He asked me to give it to you,’ she said and smiled. I thanked her but refused to accept the cake, to which she replied that her boyfriend will feel bad. After some back and forth, I accepted the cake. I was hungry. The only thing I had consumed since morning was coffee. Soon, I had demolished the entire thing. I thought Katherine had gone back in, but she was just standing there at the door, watching me eat. She had golden hair, like the sun’s sheen on London’s buildings. She was tall and well-built like an athlete. Her genial smile seemed like an anomaly. I had to leave. I pulled some money out of my wallet and gestured at her to accept it. But she kept looking at me, she didn’t accept the money or deny it, she just smiled at me. I was getting uncomfortable. She was still smiling when she went back inside but there was something different to this smile. It felt as though she was saying, ‘I see you, I know you.’

I left the money for the two coffees and the cake on the table and got out of there like a thief.

***