I saw small black lines on the floor while peeing in Surya’s bathroom. They were… wriggling. I ran out in disgust. “Poor things”, Sunny Uncle said with empathy I do not possess.

They were earthworms that had found their way into the bathroom from the garden, in search of moisture. Surya carried them back out into the garden on a folded newspaper.

It’s been the hottest summer.

In this heat, we cast our votes for our next government. It’s been three years since my family moved from the house from which you could see the old airport runway, but the address on our voter’s cards haven’t moved. The neighbourhood feels like a different world from the one we knew, and so does the country.

I wonder if every generation feels the world changing right before their eyes.

On a weekend trip to Ooty, I asked Anne, who grew up there in the ‘70s, if she has felt it get warmer. She said, “Nobody even knows what chillblains are anymore. When I was in school, all the children always had them”. We walked for a moment in silence.

“What are chilblains?”, I finally found the courage to ask.

Rejection Rituals

Much of my life is an exercise in waiting for confirmation of my worst fears about myself, all of which can be distilled into two categories: that I am a loser and/or that I am cosmically bad. In the case of creative rejection there can be dribs of the latter, but the underlying fear is the former.

Melissa Broder via The Creative Independent

If you are in the business of receiving rejection often, you may find it helpful to have a Rejection Ritual. Here’s mine:

1. Collect the rejection

I’ve been told that this is a psychotic thing to do, but I to me, it feels like evidence that I tried. The number of rejections feels like a rank I can pin to my sleeve - as if to say, “that’s how much I tried!” And hopefully, the more you try, the more you get.

2. Allow yourself a strictly-timed pity party

Rather than brushing the hurt under the carpet (a personal favourite!), it’s more productive to wallow for a while. I came across this Rumi poem from someone’s rejection ritual.

3. Snap out of it

And then remind yourself at the end of it that it’s not a reflection of you as a person. You just didn’t fit into this particular peg. Go for a snap-out-of-it walk.

4. A treat

This is very very important. For me, it’s eating steamed momos and drinking ginger ale.

5. A promise to not stop trying

Corny, but important. Remember the ratio of rejection to acceptance is high. That’s just how it goes.

You could also add some other sensory activities like lighting incense or chanting mantras or affirmations or a cold water shower, to make it feel more like a ritual.

Rejection is a terrible feeling which I would really like to avoid. Unfortunately, you have to face it on the road to getting where you want. Having a ritual is a standard operating procedure which (I hope) neurally trains me to not function out of a fear of rejection.

This guy wanted to conquer his fear of rejection. He gamified it by deciding to get rejected every single day. Rejection Therapy eventually came to be a card game. Among its many users was a widowed Russian grandmother: “This 80-year-old babushka plays Rejection Therapy to pick up men”.

Just get out there and get rejected, and sometimes it's going to get dirty. But that's OK, 'cause you're going to feel great after, you're going to feel like, 'Wow. I disobeyed fear.'

Jason Comely

I like what Oliver Burkeman says about “gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at a gym…. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway”.

A bit on the nose, but this pops up when I open the Burkeman article:

My rejection ritual is a work-in-progress. Do you have one? Leave a comment, or hit reply.

The Nothing and Everything Segment

🐸Yes, it is getting hotter with every passing year, and the world feels like a bleak place a lot of the time, but also - earlier this year, a new frog species was discovered in Bangalore.

🥄I was complaining about the over-sweetness of chai in Gujarat to a friend’s father. He told me about khadi chamach chai they used to drink in highway dhaabas when traveling by road across North India, when he was a kid. It’s chai that has so much sugar in it that a spoon can stand in it. The excessive sugar would help keep the truck drivers awake in their long-distance drives.

📱A recent shower thought was: how many QR codes can exist? While looking for the answer (long story short - it’s a large number), I came across the work of artist Tony Taj, who painted QR codes into his artwork, back in 2012. I’ve been finding how we interact with physical objects through technology quite interesting. I wonder what became of his project, which looks like it didn’t get funding.

⏳“On trains, I am held hostage, disconnected, suspended in time. It forces me to slow down. This is what I crave: Give me a long, slow ride and I am happy.” Gulnaz Khan writes about the longest train ride in India:

Scientists agree that industrialized societies are experiencing a paradoxical “time famine”—the persistent feeling that we have too much to do, and not enough time to accomplish it—and that this interferes with our ability to savor immaterial experiences. We’re doing everything faster, but we don’t feel like we have more free time.

🫵Every now and then, this thought visits me in different shapes and forms and from different sources- What you’re looking for… was right there, all along. Most recently, it was over video call, when Richa told me, “Bagal mein chchora, sher mein dindhora”.

I nodded.

A beat.

“Means?”

Richa roughly translates: “They’re making a big noise, looking all over the town for a man for you to marry, but the man is your neighbour”. A metaphor, of course.

In the course of writing this edition, the weather changed. It began raining, which was a relief. It’s now not just mango season; it’s mango AND lychee season. The months chase each other down faster as the year progresses, and how time works never fails to surprise me.

I was told that the previous edition was very long. With most things, it’s better to be left longing rather than shorting. “Longing, because desire is full of endless distances”.

Wishing you the strength to chase down a lifetime of rejections,

Nitya