Mihika arrives with guavas and spends an evening talking about work, adulthood, and the shame she feels around becoming ordinary. What begins as casual conversation slowly reveals her fear that stability has replaced significance. She does not want fame or spectacle. She only wants proof that her life will leave some visible shape behind when people remember it later. ------ Mihika brought guavas. Not in a basket or paper bag. Just four of them in the transparent produce packet from a supermarket downstairs somewhere, the sticker still attached. She placed them beside the stove while I boiled water for tea and said they were softer than they looked. I washed two and left the others near the sink. She had already started talking by then. Not about herself yet. About a café near her office that had replaced all its chairs with stools because people were “lingering too long.” She said this while opening the steel container of mathri I kept on the counter. “You can’t sit properly on stools...
Is Happiness a Trap? A Review of Brave New World That Feels too real in 2026 Aldous Huxley imagined a future where people are controlled not through fear but through pleasure, conditioning, and distraction. What you get is a strangely accurate reflection of a world where comfort replaces truth. This long-form review explores Huxley’s dystopia, its themes, flawed characters, and unsettling relevance in 2026, asking whether we are willingly becoming the “happy slaves” he warned us about. Why does happiness today sometimes feel… suspicious? You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That odd, quiet discomfort when everything is technically fine . You have entertainment on demand. Food arrives at your door. Conversations are reduced to notifications. Loneliness hides behind memes. Stress gets numbed, not solved. And whenever something feels too heavy, there’s always something to distract you. A reel. A drink. A vape. A scroll. If you never feel deeply sad, do you still feel deeply alive? That’s exa...