Thank you @usawamag for this. And thank you @neeta.gupta for this shandaar photo. Link to the full interview is in bio (which I know is a pain to click on and read so I have put together some excerpts here)
From sharing ob-gyn stories to Twitter conversations to being school gate mommy buddies (and always enthu cutlets at school events) to wondering why we didn’t take the easy way out with our kids to being part of each other’s book launches to her scolding me for not following her ‘exact recipe’ for dough balls and ending up with rocks to plotting why we can’t have happy wall paper on our ceilings to exchanging happy kitchen decor ideas to then wondering what happened to these kids who worshipped the ground we walked on and why so many eye rolls to making peace with ‘it’s okay, it’s about us now’ to still reading each other’s work and feeling - yes I’ve got your back , @mariagorettiz and I have come full circle. And graceful or not, we’ve got this!
In the 48 hours between my mother’s death and her funeral, I had trouble realising who they were talking about when they said “body”.
The thing with being in the medical system is that you are either a “patient” or a “body”. My mother had a heart condition and other comorbidities and was a textbook patient for over 30 years - compliant, disciplined, a good girl. In the last few decades , after doctors and surgeons had managed the wins (two valve replacements, several ICU visits), to buy her more years, it was now about management and monitoring. For Amma, every new symptom meant another pill. Like her brilliance, my mother wore her illness lightly and towards the end was underplaying her symptoms because she was “fed up” of medication. Could she have had a better last few years had I known that palliative care was not just for the terminally ill? I am sure. She couldn’t eat in her last week and her cardiologist said “but her heart is fine” and I asked him what’s the point of the heart if the tummy is not happy? He was not amused.
My father’s first visit to a hospital as a patient was in 2025 at the age of 88 (with stage 3 oesophagal cancer, no less) and Jerry said the magic words and the team at @palcareindia was home and the rest was a miracle (with a little help from chemo).
I’m at an age where most of my conversations with friends veer towards parental health and caregiving (and I’m not done with the child yet) and we end up talking about wellbeing and logistics and hospitals and doctors and frustration.
A Good Life by Jerry Pinto is full of such thoughts you often thought but never said aloud. In the beginning, I madly dogeared pages with an urgency and later got decent. The book makes you think about the limbo of caregiving - the anticipation, the resentment, the bureaucracy, the tenderness, the waiting , the guilt, the life suspended all at once.
We are all trying to remain functional enough for our parents or children while dealing with rabid work people, bills and emails. We want death to be elegant even if our life cannot. We wish we had loved more instead of just supervising our loved ones. We wish someone had showed us how. This book does.
A book’s life is frighteningly short. Publishers give it a few weeks of attention after its release and then they move on to the next list, the next shiny new things.
In these few weeks, complimentary copies are sent out to media and influencers, and if you are lucky, you may get a few reviews and mentions. And then. Silence.
Yes, sometimes in the heat of the moment, a reader may buy the book. But a book does not survive because it was bought. It survives because it was spoken about. Passed around. Underlined. Gifted. Quoted. Argued over. Posted about. Recommended to a friend who was going through something . But not many people talk about books. And don’t even get me started on the hundreds of bookstagrammers sliding into your DMs offering paid reviews. God no! That doesn’t look like acchhe din.
So if a book moves you, leave a review, put up a story, let someone know it existed. Tell someone why it mattered.
Because publishing moves brutally fast. If numbers don’t come in early enough, books disappear quietly. Sometimes the author doesn’t even know and they are pulped even before they have had the chance to find the readers who may have loved them most. (This has happened to me).
Every post, every conversation, every « you should read this » keeps a book breathing a little longer.
Because, it’s not fun to keep talking about your own work, even though authors are supposed to be marketing their own books. And it’s not a skill we trained for.
Books need conversation. That is their oxygen, their life support. That’s what will give them at least one real life. Nine is a lot.
#books #publishing #authorlife
These days I pay a lot of attention to flowers in my garden and ask myself: which ones would Amma like? And which ones would she find too perfect for her, too good to be disturbed from their habitat?
In her time as a primary teacher, she had many students bringing her flowers from their garden or pots - and although she accepted them with grace, she would always feel she didn’t deserve them and say “Oh you shouldn’t have”.
But no matter where we lived, she always managed to find flowers for her gods and goddesses and actually assigned them - this is for my Vinayagar, this is for Krishna and this for Lakshmi.
In the last few months of her life, she didn’t do much going out and we would joke that the flowers were safe - but she would gaze at them from balcony and somehow they always made their way to her.
For her grand farewell, there were flowers of every kind and I’m sure even as she left her body, she would have said , oh, you shouldn’t have.
I’m trying hard not to text her.
I have to resist the urge to call her whenever something good or bad happens. Or when I need someone to tell me how to make a wick last and not burn in a crazy way (she would add a drop of milk to its tip, that way it will burn like a pearl she would say) . Or when I want to know how to make perfectly sliceable curd. Or simply when I spot a bison in my garden. I am glad she did too, when she visited two years ago. And I remember her saying - babies are always babies even if they are bison kutties.
I’m trying new ways to say she is gone but nothing seems to work. It’s been almost a month.
Because how can Amma be ‘was’? She is always ‘is’.
So I just found this thing called Instagram, Appa said to Re. Very useful! So informative!
And there goes my son-of-the-soil father down the rabbit hole.
He only started at 89 so has a lot to catch up on.
In 2008, Big Bazaar released a cultural campaign themed Make India Beautiful. One of its ad films on Ramzan, which has once again been doing the rounds on social media, featured a Muslim surgeon who saves a Hindu patient and is embraced by the grateful family who awkwardly serves up an iftar for her. The sign off was “Neki Mubarak”. The ad did not announce itself as a secular statement, but coexistence was woven in the most ordinary, yet serendipitous way. That ordinariness, however, has become complicated in the divided India of 2026.
When the Surf Excel Holi campaign (2018) showed a Hindu girl deliberately getting drenched in colour so her Muslim friend could reach the mosque clean, it was conceived as a story about childhood empathy. Instead, it became a lightning rod and faced major pushback and Arun Iyer, who helmed the campaign, was at the receiving end of many threats across platforms. “It was scary, to say the least. The ad was just an extension of the feel-good factor of the brand, which embodied “daag achhe hain” (stains are fine) as its core proposition since 2005”, says Iyer, Founder and Creative Partner, Spring Capital.
Pluralism is not new to advertising. What is new is the scrutiny. There was a period when purpose-led branding was not just fashionable but institutionally encouraged.
Lalita Iyer writes. She is an Associate Editor at Outlook and the author of Aging (Un)Gracefully, The Whole Shebang, Raising Mamma and other books.
@iyerground@nirvana.films
Read the full story 🔗 in bio.
#Advertising #Politics
One of my favorite qualities of Amma is her inherent playfulness, her ability to laugh at herself and her curiosity about the world - things I find lacking in most adults and even children. I find myself drawn to people who are able to not take themselves seriously, who can laugh at stuff, or laugh with their eyes and hearts, who can be truly naughty without resorting to memes. I find this rarer and rarer these days; the world has gotten too adult-y.
Amma calls her idlis Hardy Boys when they are not “upto the mark” - need to give them a bath and steam them again, she says.
Sometimes she makes a dig at Appa - AaLa kanda samudram - she will say of him, which means- give him an audience and watch him in his element.
Most of her jokes are directed at herself- I’m so loda loda (loose loose) she says, when I make fun of her blouses which are now falling off her shoulders because she has lost considerable weight in this past one year. Forget the blouse, everything is loda loda she says.
This picture is from when she visited me in my Goa home four years ago and we went to sit by the Torda river and as usual my father was talking about how Goa has all this land and lazy people and how he can do wonders and she immediately cut him to say if you do any more wonders we will be in Wonderland soon. And I made a photo. When I showed it to her she said oh no, why is my mouth like that - I look so ugly and I said no you look beautiful and she said “kakaiki tann kunju ponn kunju” - for a crow, her own is gold. And I said but I’m the little one (kunju) here - and she said same only.
I don’t know what made me write this post today - May be it’s the gratitude of knowing that no matter how loda loda she is, her mind is still razor sharp as his her humor. And that is something I would like to aspire for.
“Women should be able to do everything that men do” is Anandhi’s life mantra. She works in my home and two others in the mornings , after dropping her daughter to school. She goes to college in the afternoons, and is in her second year BCom and is also learning Tamil typing (it’s good for government jobs she says) as well as putting herself through a computer course (good for office jobs). In the evenings, she works on the counter at a local bakery cafe and gets done by 9 pm and rides back home on her scooty. She learnt to ride a bike from her son (who is technically too young to do it legally) because she realised she can do more if she has wheels. When neighbors ask her how can she come home so late being a woman, she says, would you ask the same thing to my husband? She has also put herself through a tailoring course and does odd jobs like uniforms, alterations etc at home (don’t ask me when she finds the time ). She was proactive enough to move her son after his boards to another private school which is further away because she wanted him to be in better company than the local boys who just want to be Vijay or get drunk she says. He’s really good with fixing things and he has often repaired torches and other things for me. He will get by, she says. She has trained him to manage the house while she is not around - cooking , cleaning etc.
But Anandhi has dreams for her daughter , who is just 11, and a part of the Junior Naturalist action network, a local outreach program which is seeking to build empowered youth. We must start planning now only Amma for our girls; she has already started attending career counseling programs. I need to know what all is possible for her to do, where are the scholarships , how to apply, how to get loans etc. she says. Paperwork has never intimidated Anandhi , neither has finance and when I think of how many women I still know in my world who say things like “I don’t understand money, my husband looks after everything” , I feel like saying - you need an Anandhi course- she can teach you a thing or two about what empowerment actually is. I am in awe of her! This is A on Pongal, stopping by to show me her license.
The recent New York Times piece on “mankeeping” finally put language to a form of labour women have long been performing without recognition. Not caregiving or homemaking but the invisible, ongoing work of managing men’s emotional lives—holding their moods, anticipating their loneliness, softening their failures, absorbing their silences. The word resonated because it articulated something many women already knew but were never encouraged to name as work.
But something good also came out of this kind of cumulative exhaustion: the rise of the so-called self-absorbed woman in popular culture. From Girls to Fleabag to Emily in Paris and Envious, these women are often read as narcissistic or morally suspect. But seen through the lens of mankeeping, their self-centering looks less like indulgence and more like refusal. They opt out of emotional caretaking. They choose themselves without apology or narrative redemption. What culture once punished as selfishness is now tentatively being reframed as agency - not because these women are admirable, but because the labour they refuse has finally been named.
Lalita Iyer writes. She is an Associate Editor at Outlook and the author of Aging (Un)Gracefully, The Whole Shebang, Raising Mamma and other books.
Photo Illustration: Vikas Thakur
Read the full story 🔗 in bio.
@iyerground@meltgrass
#Relationships #Women #EmotionalLabour #ModernDating #ValentinesDay
Lovely things happen when people gather for books. At a Bangalore event for my book Aging (Un)Gracefully, hosted by @attagalatta , friends - old and new, friends of friends, social media friends and even moms of friends held me in a collective hug, sharing their stories with a rare kind of vulnerability and grace that only books can make happen. A friend’s mom spoke about how she felt liberated after her husband of 47 years died and she was finally able to live and do the things she always wanted, breaking free of the shackles of patriarchy that she subjected herself to (including changing her name); she had joined a dance class and hoop class and whatnot and basked in the euphoria of meeting herself again after decades. She had a rare effervescence.
Another lady revealed that it was the first time she had stepped out to have an evening to herself - having been a sole caregiver to her mother who passed away recently at 95.
An Instagram friend who had chosen a child-free life shared how that came under scrutiny every time , and how physical spaces for women to talk about stuff are also a need in the Public Health domain. Her colleague and friend shared how the dichotomy of being a parent kept her torn and full of ambivalence and self-doubt even when the going was good. There were three men in attendance - one, the son of a lady who listened intently and nodded so much, I could hear her words, another man wrote down copious notes and promised me he would email me later as he had so much to say.
It was moving, energising and cathartic at the same time - this coalescence of thoughts around women and the lives they lead - how much they brave, how little they are allowed to bare , despite all we hear about empowerment.
