What Are You Snacking On?
Six years on, a letter to appa:about Bingo chips, voice memos that’ll be a forever ‘wish I had’, , and the seventieth coming up
I know I haven’t written to you in a while. Last year, when you turned five from the other side, I was looking to take a dig at five-year plans of all kinds. However, 2025 was just a damn blur. It just felt like a Ferris wheel of emotions and curveballs from all sides. Still, not an excuse for not writing to you. I just went back to the pieces from the earlier years—being Lost for a Title from year one, wallowing in grief from year three, and on sprints and marathons from year four.
Here we are, in year six, on this Sunday of June 2026, which coincidentally the world is celebrating as ‘Father’s Day’. I didn’t plan it this way. In fact, I would hate to share our chat with the noisy worldly conversations happening today in the glow of cultural pretence. It just happened to be the day when the thoughts, time, and memories took off on the same orbit.
So, Where Were We?
A few days ago, I was thinking of my twelfth-grade final examinations. Not for the late nights, and poring over of pages, but for the wide range of Bingo chips that you brought home during that time. It was around the launch, and we just chipped away on the samples as substitutes for lunches and dinners. ‘Stress-eating’ wasn’t a fashionable term at that time, nor was ‘saturated fats’. For the past few months, I’m trying to stay off chips, convincing myself that I’m doing something tangible to keep our good friends cholesterol, triglycerides, and fatty liver at bay. Somehow, they think they have an open invitation to come in anytime they want, and never leave—I’m figuring a way to tell them I’m not ‘Hotel California’.
Maybe, I put 2025 into a darker cloud cover than it was in reality. I ended up joining a gym in October 2025, and you could say Diwali got a little upgrade last year. It’s been a good run so far, and I wrote about it a few weeks ago. Talking about writing, I built a little digital corner for myself to dish out mindful observations, and mindless snarls. You can subscribe to it if you’d like, and never miss a word. I also started a newsletter on LinkedIn, which started off as a promising weekly, but now I’m hoping to round off its fiftieth edition before your seventieth birthday. I find it odd to switch a ‘day’ into ‘anniversary’ on the basis of one’s mortal transition—well, that’s the least of my mind space.
Moving On
Staying with transition, I switched jobs in 2025, and got into an organization that’s in a different growth trajectory and pace of working. I completed six months a couple of weeks ago, and it’s begun to stretch my hours, and shrink my days, but it’s been a good run so far. I’ll drop you a voice mail for guidance if I’m getting stuck somewhere. You can call me back anytime; my thumb never calls it a day on the answer button. But yes, I still get calls for buying an insurance product, or a house, or a pest control service—not necessarily in that order. My phone network is trying hard to label them as spam, but I’m sure you’ll somehow cut through their filters to get through to me.
For a few days now, I’ve been thinking a lot about your voice. I’m trying to construct it in my head. I wish I had your voice recorded for these times, when the heart yearns for it, and silence rings hollow. I could have layered your voice samples on certain texts and had you read out stuff to me. Today, there’s a lot that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is up to, and this text-to-speech is probably its lowest hanging fruit. Talking about AI, it holds the potential to mimic my writing style, and it’s trying to get close to how I think. We’re trading in some good punches, and there are areas, outside writing, where I’m getting better because of it.
Outside the window though, the city doesn’t seem to be doing too well. The summer of 2026 was severe. Rains seem to have misplaced their visa and passport. As humans, we continue to forget ‘trees’ are their visa, and the source of pure human breaths. There are newer flyovers that don’t seem to last. There are newer buildings that are coming up too fast. There are pavements that are unrecognizable. There are by-lanes that offer no steady paths.
We’re trudging along—one day at a time, from one moment to the next. Keeping it slow, remembering your principles, walking your path. I have to say, when we went to perform the rituals this year, the priest did a fantastic job draping my veshti—the best to date by a mile. We’re working through 2026, and I’m looking forward to your seventieth this August.
Till then, keep snacking, and watch over us, my dearest appa!
Listen Up
Ek Chatur Naar Badi Hoshiyar, from the 1968 Hindi movie, Padosan, voiced by Kishore Kumar and Manna Dey. Appa loved this number—maybe for the mischief throughout the song.