This morning, a Bing wallpaper stopped me – an image of Madeira’s forest, shrouded in mist and mystery. I stared longer than I intended. Something in the way the trees stood, ancient and unhurried, pulled me in. They felt almost sentient.
I have never walked among them. I have never brushed my hand against the bark of those Methuselah-like wonders, nor stood beneath their canopy as the Atlantic wind whispered through their limbs. And yet, I feel I know them.
In my mind, they are like octogenarian patriarchs at a family gathering – silent, commanding, all-seeing. Their gaze is not judgmental, but penetrating; Odin-like, yet loving. They do not speak because they do not need to. Their presence is their language.
There is something about old trees that commands reverence, even the imagined ones. They remind us that time is not a straight line but a deepening spiral, and that the greatest wisdom often resides in absolute stillness. I see them as sentinels of memory, holding stories not in words, but in rings – each one a year, each scar a tale.
And perhaps that is the point. We don’t need to visit every sacred place to be changed by it. Sometimes, the idea of a place is enough. Madeira, for me, is not a destination. It is a metaphor: for rootedness, for a strength that does not need to shout, for a history that hums just beneath the surface.
In a world obsessed with speed and novelty, I find myself drawn to the imagined wisdom of trees I will never meet. They are a call to pause. To listen. To respect the slow, necessary unfolding of things.
There is a virtue in patience that the ego’s frantic noise can never comprehend. Silence, like wisdom, is often only understood in hindsight – a truth that is tough to grasp and even tougher to release.
The imagined trees of Madeira stand as a testament to this. They do not rush. They do not explain. They simply are. And in their profound stillness, they offer a truth that words can only point to, but never fully contain.
Perhaps what we need most is to learn from their example: to listen more and assert less; to seek rootedness over reaction; to hold reverence for the quiet mysteries we have yet to understand.
This psalm was not written as prayer, but as remembrance. It belongs to no creed, and owes allegiance to no god. It is a meditation for an age that has outgrown the need for confession, yet still feels the ache of reconciliation.
Ours is a civilisation that speaks often of progress but seldom of return – of innovation, but rarely of renewal. And yet, beneath the rhetoric of freedom and the hum of machines, the same ancient human need persists: to stand before the truth of oneself and not turn away.
This piece is a gesture toward that standing – a quiet re-enactment of the sacred in human terms. It seeks not forgiveness, but clarity; not purity, but wholeness.
It may be read aloud, or held in silence like a stone in the hand. Each reader will find within it a mirror of their own making. And if it does its work, it will not comfort, but cleanse.
– J
Invocation – Before the Word
In the beginning there was no guilt, only the tremor of becoming. The sea drew breath, the stars unfolded, and consciousness looked upon itself for the first time. From that astonishment was born the need to name, and from naming came distance.
So the first prayer was not to a god, but to the memory of wholeness. It whispered: let me not forget what I am made of.
Across millennia, we have traded mystery for meaning, and meaning for rule. We built altars to our own reflection and called the distance between us and light “sin.” Yet even here, among the ruins of our certainties, a voice remains – older than creed, tender as breath after weeping.
It calls not for worship, but for remembering. It asks of us only this: that we turn inward with the reverence once reserved for heaven, and listen until silence answers.
Let this be that listening. Let this be the temple built without walls. Let this be the beginning of renewal.
Confession – The Naming of Shadows
I speak now into the stillness, not to justify, but to remember. The world I built with my hands trembles with omissions: the kindness delayed, the truth withheld, the gaze turned aside from another’s pain.
I summon them, these small betrayals, not as prosecutors but as teachers. Each carries a lesson written in bruise and silence. Let them gather at the edge of my mind like witnesses of forgotten wars. I will not send them away. To confess is not to beg pardon – it is to bring all voices home.
So let the first act be honesty. Let it be said: this is who I have been. This is what I have done in ignorance of myself. And let that saying open the wound wide enough for light.
Witness – The Still Eye
Now I step aside, and let the watcher take my place. No hand raised in accusation, no scale of worth or guilt – only the gaze that sees without dividing.
This is the true priest: awareness itself. It neither forgives nor condemns. It waits.
In that waiting, the storm subsides. The shadows, once cornered, begin to soften, finding edges, names, and faces I had refused them. I see that every cruelty was a plea for warmth, every lie a fear of vanishing, every mask a fragile prayer for belonging.
To witness without recoil is to allow creation again. In the silence that follows, I meet the part I once called unholy and realise it has been waiting, all along, to be seen.
Integration – The Act of Returning
Now the exiles approach the hearth. I offer them no penance, only a seat at the fire. The body remembers: how long it has carried the tension of self-rejection, how weary it is of playing both judge and accused.
I gather each fragment, each tremor, each unspoken grief, and set them among the living. Nothing is cast out. The heart expands to contain its own opposites – the rage and tenderness, the ignorance and insight, the one who wounded and the one who healed.
This is atonement, stripped of ceremony: a returning to wholeness, a reconciliation without witness or applause. In this act, sin dissolves, not through mercy, but through understanding.
Silence – The Absolution
Now all words have served their purpose. The air grows still, and meaning folds back into being. No prayer rises, for nothing stands apart to receive it. The mind, once restless for verdict, rests in recognition.
What remains is breath – steady, ancient, sufficient. It fills the space where guilt once lived. It moves through me as the tide through shore, erasing the line between penitent and forgiven.
I am not cleansed; I am complete. I am not redeemed; I am real. And the silence that follows is not emptiness, but peace reclaimed from noise.
Epilogue – After the Silence
And when the silence has spoken, walk out into the ordinary world. Do not seek angels; seek the turning of leaves, the faces of those who labour and forget, the kindness offered and declined.
The sacred hides there, in the small reconciliations that no scripture records.
There is no longer a story of fall or salvation, only the long rhythm of remembering and forgetting. You will forget again – that is the nature of time. But you will also remember again – that is the mercy of awareness.
Carry neither creed nor shame; carry attention. Let it be your prayer, your penance, your peace. And if ever you falter, return to the silence that began this work.
It will still be waiting – not to forgive, but to recognise you.
In a world addicted to noise, silence has become the last act of faith.
There was a time when silence meant presence. Now it feels like absence. We fill every crevice of consciousness with commentary, fearing what the quiet might reveal. Yet beneath the noise, small rituals still survive – gestures that whisper rather than shout, full of love, hope, and protection.
This essay continues the “Modern Rituals” series – reflections on how the sacred survives in the gestures of everyday life.
The Rituals of Noise
We have mistaken volume for vitality. Every day begins with a buzz, ends with a scroll, and in between, we drown in the sound of our own broadcasting. We talk about “connection”, but what we crave is confirmation – that we still exist, that we still matter, that the world hasn’t forgotten our name in the feed.
Noise has become our modern incense. We burn it constantly, afraid of what might appear in the silence that follows. Our need to comment, reply, and react has become a liturgy without faith – movement without meaning.
In The Guardian, Shadi Khan Saif writes: “People survive not just through faith but through the small things they do when no one’s watching; the quiet rituals and little beliefs that live in everyday life.” It’s a gentle reminder that not all worship happens in temples or timelines. The true gestures of the soul are small, unpublicised, and wordless.
Our modern rituals, by contrast, are noisy because they are insecure. The louder we shout, the less we seem to believe in what we’re saying. We’ve built an economy of attention where silence is treated as a fault in the system. Algorithms panic when you pause. Apps prod you back to speech. Even grief now comes with a “share” button.
The tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost the divine. It’s that we’ve lost the quiet in which the divine could once be heard.
The Return to the Whisper
And yet – not all is lost. Saif’s piece reminds us: “They’re not loud, not official. But they’re full of love and hope.” Somewhere beneath the static, small acts of reverence still survive – lighting a diya at dusk, a hand over the heart before a flight, a whispered “thank you” to no one in particular. These are our unnoticed prayers, carried out in the hush between larger noises.
In the old texts, silence was a sign of listening; in our time, it has become an act of rebellion. To sit still for ten minutes without touching a device is now radical. To walk without earbuds is a pilgrimage. To look at the sky without photographing it is prayer.
“These seemingly small gestures,” Saif observes, “hold more than superstition. They carry virtues: grounding, comfort and a deep sense of protection.” That, perhaps, is what the whisper really is – a reminder that truth doesn’t compete for your attention. It waits.
Maybe silence was never meant to be an escape, but a return – the slow homecoming of awareness to itself. The whisper, whether it comes from a prophet, a verse, or the soft interior of your own breath, is the same voice that has always spoken beneath the noise. We just need to stop long enough to hear it.
Epilogue: The Sound of Returning
Silence was once a homeland. Every word began from it, every prayer returned to it. We have wandered far, building temples of noise, mistaking echoes for answers. But perhaps the sacred was never lost – only muffled beneath our constant need to speak.
In the beginning, there was no command, no thunder, no proclamation. There was only breath – the same breath that stirs the reed, the same that carries a whisper across a room. Maybe God still speaks that way. Maybe the divine frequency has not changed – only our bandwidth has.
When the noise fades, what remains is not emptiness, but presence. It is in that quiet that the world becomes audible again – the heartbeat of things, the rustle of what endures.
So, close the tab. Let the room go still. And listen – not for what’s next, but for what has always been speaking softly beneath it all.
“People survive not just through faith but through the small things they do when no one’s watching; the quiet rituals and little beliefs that live in everyday life. They’re not loud, not official. But they’re full of love and hope. These seemingly small gestures … hold more than superstition. They carry virtues: grounding, comfort and a deep sense of protection.” – Shadi Khan Saif, “Spirituality isn’t rigid dogma. It’s a living, breathing practice that helps make sense of an incomprehensible world,” The Guardian, 20 October 2025. Read full article →
I came across yet another tourist review recently – the kind that raves about Indian hospitality. How complete strangers opened their homes, shared their food, offered lifts, and insisted on paying bills. It made me proud for a moment. But then, as always, the patterns were predictable. The reviewer was white.
Scratch the surface and the same story repeats itself across travel blogs and vlogs: white tourists treated like minor gods, their every move accompanied by smiles, selfies, and unsolicited generosity. The same crowd that will barely glance at a tourist of colour suddenly turns devotional before pale skin and blue eyes. What these visitors take as exotic warmth is, in truth, something far more complex – the echo of an old servitude dressed up as kindness.
It is a strange thing, to witness a civilisation so ancient and self-sufficient still bowing to the ghost of its coloniser. You can see it everywhere, if you care to look – in the way people fawn over a fair-skinned foreigner, in the hush that falls when someone speaks English with a Western lilt, even in the way advertisements bleach faces and consciences alike. The empire may have left, but it left its mirror behind. And we, faithfully, never stopped gazing.
Years ago, I was reminded that this deference to whiteness isn’t reserved for foreigners alone. Growing up in semi-urban Kochi, we had a neighbour from the northeast – a young woman whose skin was far lighter than ours. With a touch of make-up, she could have passed for foreign, and that, it seemed, was enough to rearrange the laws of attention.
Whenever she walked down the street, people of all ages and genders would slow their steps. Shopkeepers would lean a little closer. Auto drivers, usually brusque, suddenly became courtly. What should have been ordinary movement – a woman simply walking home – turned into quiet theatre. The attention she drew was confusing to witness, partly because it was so disproportionate, partly because it felt so involuntary.
It wasn’t desire in any straightforward sense; it was awe. The same mixture of reverence and curiosity one sees around white tourists in Indian towns – a need to look, to linger, to touch the idea of something higher. The same script, only cast with a local actor.
At the time, I couldn’t name what I was seeing. It was only years later that I recognised it as a small expression of a much larger truth: that India’s fascination with fairness is not aesthetic at all – it’s devotional. A hangover from centuries of being told that light is civilisation and darkness is its absence. It is no coincidence that the gods we imported wore pale skins, spoke foreign tongues, and offered salvation in exchange for submission.
So when a white traveller walks through an Indian market, or a fair-skinned neighbour crosses a street, what one witnesses is not spontaneous warmth. It is the echo of empire – a reflex trained into generations who learned, however unconsciously, to equate fairness with worth.
The empire may have ended, but its afterglow was too profitable to waste. In the decades that followed, the notion of fairness – once a colonial hierarchy – was quietly repackaged as aspiration. The missionary’s gospel became the advertiser’s jingle.
By the 1970s and ’80s, India’s obsession with lighter skin had already found its most marketable form: the fairness cream. Fair & Lovely, that curiously earnest name, promised deliverance in a tube. Its advertisements were parables of modern salvation – the dark-skinned girl rejected at a job interview, her fairer self later rewarded with success and admiration. The transformation was not moral or intellectual; it was epidermal. Fairness became the new enlightenment.
What is astonishing is how unchallenged this narrative remained for decades. It passed through living rooms, bridal columns, and cinema screens without embarrassment, endorsed by film stars who owed their fame to the very gaze that had once worshipped the coloniser. The colonial gaze had become domestic, internal – Indians selling to Indians the same fantasy once sold to them.
When the world began to speak of racial consciousness and colourism, the industry responded with cosmetic diplomacy. Fair & Lovely became Glow & Lovely; “whitening” turned to “brightening”. The names changed, but the grammar of shame remained. The product was no longer fairness; it was validation. And the market – worth billions – proved how deeply the need ran.
It is tempting to see all this as mere vanity, but it isn’t. It is theology – a commercial catechism preaching that purity lies in paleness. The British may have left, but the idea that beauty, power, and goodness come in lighter shades continues to govern the Indian imagination. One might even say that the country which once resisted empire now applies it every morning, one layer at a time.
Today, the old advertisements have vanished from television screens. There was no great cultural reckoning, no mass protest – only a quiet retreat into rebranding. But absence can be eloquent too. When a message that once roared across every medium suddenly falls silent, it means the nation has begun to feel embarrassed by its reflection. The whitening has merely moved underground – into softer words like radiance, glow, and tone correction. The empire’s gospel now speaks in whispers, not sermons.
This pattern – of domination repackaged as virtue – is hardly new. It was the essence of colonial philosophy itself. The white man’s burden, Kipling called it – that grotesque conceit that conquest was charity, that subjugation was civilisation’s gift to the savage. It was a moral mask for empire, and Europe wore it well.
Joseph Conrad, writing at the same time, stripped away that mask. In Heart of Darkness, his seafarers bring not light but shadow, not progress but decay. The real burden is not the native; it is the rot within the so-called civiliser. The darkness lies not in Africa or Asia, but in the European soul that cannot see itself.
A half-century later, William Golding would turn that insight inward in Lord of the Flies. His marooned English schoolboys, heirs to empire and hymn, become their own savages. The “beast” they fear is no creature of the forest – it is their reflection in the firelight. If Conrad revealed that civilisation corrupts, Golding showed that civilisation conceals.
And that, perhaps, is where India still stands: suspended between mimicry and awakening, between awe and embarrassment. The empire’s myth continues to breathe quietly through us – in our mirrors, our advertisements, our accents, and our weddings. We have learnt to condemn the coloniser, but not to unlearn his hierarchy.
Yet, there is hope. The new world order – whatever its shape – has drawn its own boundaries. Global mobility has blurred hierarchies once thought immutable. India now hosts as many foreign professionals as it sends abroad. Electronic media, for all its noise, has demystified white skin to a great extent. My son’s generation has seen enough of the world – on screens and in streets – to know that pale skin neither sanctifies nor intimidates.
And still, there is something unmistakably human in the thrill of proximity to difference. Nothing quite compares to seeing the exotic animal in the flesh. The instinct lingers, though it no longer defines. The white sahib and the mem sahib are fast losing their pedestal – becoming, at last, ordinary travellers among us.
Perhaps that is the quiet victory of this century: that wonder remains, but worship fades.
Light does not chase away the dark – it reveals what endures through it.
Wishing everyone a Deepavali of quiet radiance – where the lamps we light are not merely to dazzle the night, but to remind us of the steady flame within.
There’s a curious tension that underlies every act of writing online. A blog, especially when treated as a journal, is not intended as a performance but a confession made audible. It is a private space left intentionally unlocked — a threshold where one speaks to oneself but in a voice pitched just loud enough for another to overhear.
When I write, I do not always imagine an audience. I am often simply tracing the contour of a thought, the residue of a feeling, or the slow unfolding of an idea that insists on finding expression. Yet the very act of placing these reflections in a public domain changes their nature. The words, even when deeply personal, carry an awareness of being witnessed. That awareness does not dilute their honesty; it deepens their responsibility. One writes, knowing that silence too has ears.
I’ve often wondered whether writing remains incomplete without readers, without interaction or dialogue. But for those of us who use the blog as a form of journaling, completion is not measured by engagement metrics. A post feels complete not when it is read, but when it ceases to trouble the mind — when the thought finally settles into coherence. The page becomes a mirror, not a stage.
And yet, interaction — especially with fellow writers — can be quietly transformative. Not for validation, but for resonance. When another writer responds, even wordlessly, there’s a kind of recognition that occurs beneath language. Two solitudes acknowledge each other. It’s not conversation in the conventional sense, but communion — an invisible fraternity of those who also listen for meaning in the dark.
To write a public journal, then, is to inhabit a paradox: solitude made porous. One is alone, but not isolated. The act of publishing is not an invitation to consume but to witness. Readers may pass by, pause briefly, or stay — but their presence is incidental to the inner necessity of the writing. The words are their own reward.
Perhaps that’s the quiet truth of blogging in this way: it’s less about being heard, more about learning how to listen to oneself in the presence of the world.
There is a stillness that comes when we stop trying to prove our place in the world. The pulse slows. The mind, that tireless architect of justifications, falls silent. What remains is simple presence – the sheer fact of being here, breathing, surrounded by a universe that neither notices nor needs us.
For most of creation, that is enough. The trees, the waves, the sparrows, even the mountains – they live. They move through cycles of light and shadow, growth and decay, without ever asking why. They are perfect in their obedience to pattern. They live because the rhythm continues.
We, however, were not content to live. We began to exist.
To exist is to know that one lives – and to know that life will end. It is the crack that opens between heartbeat and awareness, between sunlight and self. In that opening, meaning is born: fragile, provisional, luminous.
Plants live in a system that exists in a galaxy. But we – these brief sparks of consciousness – exist within our own living. We watch ourselves feel, we weigh our joys, we question our griefs. We build language, ritual, memory. We carry the ache of knowing that the stars we admire would burn on without us.
That knowledge is both curse and grace. It grants us the terrible freedom to make meaning in a cosmos that offers none.
So we tell stories. We invent gods, and then question them. We build cities, and then lament their loneliness. We love fiercely, knowing it will break us – because even heartbreak feels more alive than indifference.
The mayfly lives a day; it fulfils the command of existence. We may live eighty years, and still not learn to exist.
For living is continuity, but existing is consciousness. One sustains the world; the other gives it witness.
Meaning is what we create within that witness. Significance is what holds us, whether we know it or not.
And perhaps – if the two can meet for even a moment – the universe becomes aware of itself through us. The star sees its own light in our eyes. The soil tastes its own life in our breath. The infinite touches its reflection in our small defiance.
That may be enough. Not eternity, not certainty – just the quiet dignity of knowing that we both live and exist. And in that knowing, something vast and wordless learns to feel.
Every so often, something passes through us that thinking can’t quite reach. It might be a piece of music, a line of writing, or the light in an old cathedral. The response isn’t intellectual; it’s physical. A quiet shiver, a sudden welling of tears, a sense that you’ve brushed against something older than words.
From The Sandman to Ed Gein. This series of connected reflections began after moving from the mythic architectures of The Sandman to the stark realism of Ed Gein. It is less about true crime and more about the stories we tell of monsters, and the human needs they mirror. The gaze here is that of a lifelong student of literature, tracing the old, familiar patterns in new and terrifying forms. It’s about recognition – the body’s quiet way of saying, “This matters.”
You’ll find the essay in six parts:
The Echo of Unendurable Solitude (The Analysis)
The Maternal Labyrinth (The Architecture)
The Observer’s Gaze (The Internal Pivot)
A Distant Kinship (The Personal Recognition)
The Artist’s Vocation (The Creative Declaration)
The Standing Ovation Within (The Embodied Experience)
Some stories are not merely told but built, like cathedrals of thought and dream. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is such an edifice, and at its heart beat two rhythms that seem opposed but are, in truth, complementary: the tender servitude of Death and the glorious dissent of Lucifer. Across its dreamscapes, one senses a writer less interested in divine order than in moral tension: the fragile equilibrium between purpose and freedom, duty and desire.
The Endless, those beings who stand outside the ordinary rhythms of time, are not gods but functions – the metaphysical grammar of existence given voice and shape. Yet Gaiman, with the empathy of a poet, allows even these cosmic constants to ache. They feel, they doubt, they stumble in the performance of what they are. It is, perhaps, the highest form of moral art: to give doubt to what should be certain, to allow divinity to tremble.
Among them, Death and Lucifer linger longest in my mind. They are the twin edges of Gaiman’s moral blade.
Death in Gaiman’s hands is not the hunter we fear. She is the quiet visitor who removes her shoes before entering the room. I’ve always found her tenderness unnerving – that she can cradle a life at the moment of its unmaking and yet smile, not cruelly, but with that soft knowing that life and ending are the same gesture seen from opposite sides of time.
She does not take souls; she accompanies them. There is a profound dignity in that distinction. She is the servant who steadies the axis. Her role is custodial, not coercive. She embodies what the Gita might have called nishkama karma – duty without desire, function without possession. There is no triumph in her harvest, only completion.
She evokes Yama, the still one who judges not, only remembers; more profoundly, she embodies Shiva’s dissolution – the destruction that is not annihilation but release. Death, like Shiva, is the only one who never pretends to rule; she serves. Her servitude is not subordination but surrender – a willing consent to the inevitability of endings. And in that surrender lies her power.
Lucifer, on the other hand, burns.
If Death steadies the axis, Lucifer tests its strength. He is the radiant exile, the one who refuses to participate in a design he did not choose. When he abandons Hell, it is not repentance but reclamation – an act of terrifying autonomy. I have always found that moment unbearably noble: when he hands Dream the keys to Hell and walks away, not towards Heaven, but into the vacancy of his own will.
Lucifer’s grandeur lies in his refusal to be written. He will not be a chapter in someone else’s book – not even God’s. His rebellion is not against good, but against authorship. He refuses to exist as a metaphor. And that, perhaps, is why his rebellion feels closer to art than sin.
In his proud solitude, he is a celestial Karna – fighting not for victory, but for the right to refuse a script written for him by another. The curse of the noble outsider: condemned to be right too soon and therefore always wrong in the eyes of history.
Lucifer’s tragedy is not his fall; it is his loneliness. Death’s mercy surrounds her; Lucifer’s glory isolates him.
There is a scene I often return to – a conversation where Death chastises Dream for brooding. “You are the Dream of the Endless,” she says, “you are what you are.” It is said without grandeur. It is simply true. Death’s wisdom lies in that quiet exactness. She knows that identity is not an achievement but a function. To be what one is – that is her faith.
Lucifer, in contrast, refuses that faith. He demands to be more than what he is. He would rather lose everything than be a symbol of anything. There is a strange sanctity in that defiance – as if his pride is the last bastion of freedom left to consciousness.
And here, between Death’s surrender and Lucifer’s revolt, we find it: the fragile equilibrium of the universe. A cosmos that only obeys becomes stagnant, and one that only rebels burns itself to ash. Together, they form the unspoken rhythm of existence – acceptance and dissent, each sanctifying the other.
Sometimes, I wonder if Gaiman was hinting that even God, in his mythos, needs both. The world endures not because everyone follows the rules, but because someone must test them. The dance of balance depends on both rhythm and disruption.
In Indian thought, this duality is not unfamiliar. The devas and asuras, after all, churn the ocean together. Without the opposition, there is no elixir. Without resistance, no creation worth preserving. Perhaps Gaiman’s genius lies in rediscovering this ancient symmetry – not through theology, but through story. He humanises the cosmic by letting it ache.
And what are we, if not the children of both? Part Death, part Lucifer – torn between our longing to belong and our hunger to be free. One part wants to surrender, to rest in the pattern; another part wants to break it, to speak a new word into the silence. We live in that tension – that exquisite discomfort between love and liberty.
I think that’s why The Sandman lingers. It isn’t the fantasy or the myth that captivates; it’s the recognition. We recognise in Death our yearning for peace, and in Lucifer our refusal to die unexpressed. They are not opposites, but mirrors. She teaches us how to end; he teaches us why we resist. Both are merciful in their own ways – one through grace, the other through will.
Sometimes I imagine them meeting, not as adversaries but as kin. She would smile, perhaps a little sadly, and say, “You never change.” He would shrug, half amused, half tired, and reply, “And you never stop.” And the universe, hearing them, would continue to turn – not because it must, but because it is held in place by the conversation between those two silences: one tender, one proud.
In the end, I suppose what moves me most about Gaiman’s creation is its moral humility. There are no villains here, only functions of truth. Death, who obeys without pride. Lucifer, who defies without malice. Between them lies the secret of endurance.
Perhaps this is what the old mystics meant when they spoke of dharma – not righteousness as law, but rightness as balance. To obey when it is time to obey, and to rebel when obedience becomes decay. To know which moment demands surrender, and which demands fire. Death and Lucifer are the two gestures of that wisdom. One opens the hand; the other clenches the fist. Together, they keep the heavens from falling.
And maybe – just maybe – that is the secret heartbeat of Gaiman’s universe: that the cosmos is not sustained by perfection, but by conversation. By the dialogue between tenderness and pride, silence and song, servitude and dissent.
In the end, Death remains, doing her work with compassion. Lucifer walks away, proud and unrepentant. And I, somewhere between them, keep reading – wondering which of the two will greet me first.
As Diwali arrives, homes across north India are being scrubbed and polished to welcome the goddess Lakshmi – and perhaps, the first touch of winter. Once upon a time, this was a family ritual: everyone joined in the cleaning, sometimes helped by the neighbourhood bai or a friendly freelancer with a broom and a transistor radio.
Today, the festival season has a new ally.
We reach not for the broom, but for our phones – UrbanClap (now Urban Company); or, if it’s a feast we have in mind, Swiggy, Zomato, or another from their tribe – all promising spotless homes, sumptuous meals, safe transactions, and service “guaranteed.”
But this simple act of outsourcing our Diwali cleaning, or feasting, tells a deeper story about India’s economy and culture. In a nation overflowing with cheap labour, our faith in proof has quietly shifted – from certificates on the wall to stars on a screen substituting for experience (or a semblance of them), vouched for by the platform itself.
The Low-Skill, Low-Wage Equilibrium For decades, India has been stuck in what development economists call a low-skill–low-wage equilibrium. Over 90 per cent of our workforce operates in the informal sector, where productivity and wages remain low. Here, formal qualifications rarely matter. Employers – whether in construction, manufacturing, or domestic work – care more about cost and compliance than about training certificates.
For a worker, investing time and money in a government-approved course rarely pays off. The return on certification is too small to matter. In this ecosystem, both sides quietly agree to stay informal.
Government skilling missions, however ambitious, have barely scratched the surface – with only 4–5 per cent of workers formally trained. The problem isn’t supply. It’s that the demand signal itself is broken. Pushing for certification in such a landscape is less a reform than a ritual – a gesture of faith in a market that isn’t listening.
The Platform Pivot: Trust-as-a-Service And yet, millions of Indians – you and I included – happily pay a premium for services through apps like Urban Company without ever checking whether the person who shows up is certified.
Why? Because we’re not paying for labour. We’re paying for trust.
Urban Company and its cousins have solved a problem that the government couldn’t: the trust deficit that defines India’s informal economy.
They’ve replaced static paper credentials with a living, algorithmic reputation system:
Accountability – If something goes wrong, the platform steps in.
Predictability – Fixed pricing and defined service categories remove guesswork.
Vetting – Basic background checks and in-house training build a layer of institutional trust.
The five-star rating has become a more powerful credential than any laminated certificate. We no longer verify people; we verify platforms.
The State’s Catch-Up Game The government, of course, has taken notice. Initiatives like the Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), ASEEM, and e-Shram aim to digitise India’s labour landscape – creating national databases of workers and job opportunities. But these platforms are still digital directories, not full-service ecosystems. They list skills; they don’t manage relationships. They connect supply and demand but don’t guarantee experience.
To work, such systems must evolve from being registries of labour to curators of trust – handling payments, quality, feedback, and grievance resolution with the same seamlessness that private platforms have mastered.
The Vendor Trap: Vision Outsourced Execution, however, remains India’s weak spot. Most government tech projects are outsourced to IT giants like TCS. While that ensures reliability, it often results in vendor-driven design – portals that look efficient on paper but feel clunky in practice.
The process inevitably spawns a flood of acronyms, often prefixed with “PM,” creating a crowded landscape of schemes where consulting firms thrive but users remain lost.
Vision gets subcontracted; impact gets delayed.
Beyond Certification: The Reputation Economy If there’s one lesson in all this, it’s that India’s future of work won’t be built on certificates, but on reputation. For skilling initiatives to matter, they must treat reputation as a dynamic credential – continuously updated through work performance, ratings, and verified transactions.
That means: Integrating feedback and ratings as part of credentialing. Covering the full service journey – from hiring to payment to redressal. Making reputation portable, so a worker’s track record travels across employers and platforms.
Today’s successful chai-wala doesn’t hold a certificate in hospitality. He holds a UPI QR code, a Google Maps listing, and a string of five-star reviews.
The Deeper Reflection It’s poetic that during Diwali – when we symbolically invite prosperity into our homes – it’s gig workers who make that welcome possible.
We still pray to Lakshmi, but it’s an algorithm that brings her through the door.
Perhaps that’s the quiet transformation of modern India: We no longer trust people because we have learned to trust systems that promise to manage people. The question is not whether this is progress, but whether we can make it humane.
Your Turn Now Have you hired through UrbanClap or another platform this season? Was your confidence in the worker – or in the app? Share your thoughts in the comments.
