Suresh Patel Blog

Most conversations disappear almost as soon as they end. We talk to someone in the morning and cannot remember the exact conversation by evening. We exchange hundreds of messages during a week, yet only a handful remain in our memory. And then there are those strange conversations we remember for decades. Sometimes it is something profound that someone told us. Sometimes it is a sentence that changed the way we looked at a problem. And sometimes it is something completely ordinary. A conversation at a railway station. A few words exchanged with a stranger. Something a teacher said in college. A remark made by a colleague many years ago. We may forget the person’s clothes, the surroundings and even the circumstances. But somehow, we remember the words. Memory Does Not Keep Everything The human brain is not designed to preserve every experience with equal importance. If it did, our memories would become an enormous and unusable archive. Instead, our brains constantly sele...

Bangalore on a September Wednesday has a particular quiet. The monsoon has loosened its grip. The traffic is still there, of course it is, but the light is softer. Offices have already decided what this week will be. The weekend is close enough to feel, not close enough to steal the afternoon. I used to treat midweek as something to get through. Court dates, client calls, the next filing, the next book listing, the next post. A life measured in what still needed doing by Friday. That is a useful way to live when you are building. It is a poor way to live when you have already built enough to know what the building cost. At sixty, the most valuable thing I have learned is not another productivity trick. It is this: some days are not for finishing. They are for noticing. This morning I sat with tea longer than the kettle required. No phone for the first twenty minutes. The same Yoga Nidra I have used for more than a decade—not as a performance of wellness, but as a way to let the ne...

There is a particular kind of laziness that only a Bangalore Sunday afternoon can produce. The kind where the ceiling fan is on, a half-read newspaper lies folded on the sofa arm, and somewhere outside a pressure cooker whistles three times before going quiet. Nobody is in a hurry. Nobody wants to be. We live in a culture that treats rest as something to be earned. You finish your work, you tick off your to-do list, and only then are you allowed to sit still. But anyone who has grown up in a middle-class Indian household knows there was always a version of doing nothing that felt entirely legitimate. The Sunday afternoon nap after a heavy lunch. The uncle dozing in a cane chair with the TV remote balanced on his stomach. The grandmother sorting rice, not because it needed sorting urgently, but because her hands liked having something to do while her mind wandered. That is not laziness. That is a kind of rest with its own dignity. Somewhere between smartphones and self-improvement cultu...

There is a particular kind of afternoon in Bangalore, somewhere between the second cup of filter coffee and the evening traffic building up on the main road, when time seems to stop asking anything of you. The ceiling fan turns at its usual unhurried pace. Somewhere outside, a vendor calls out, selling something you cannot quite make out from indoors. And you sit there, doing nothing in particular, and for once you do not feel the need to apologize for it. I have spent a good part of my life being suspicious of such afternoons. Law trains you that way. Every hour has a client attached to it, every minute a fee, every pause a cost you will answer for later. Idleness, in that world, was not just unproductive. It was almost immoral, a small betrayal of the people counting on you. I carried that feeling long after I stopped needing to. But somewhere in the last few years, I have started to make peace with idling, and I want to write about why, because I suspect a fair number of us are stil...

There's a particular kind of guilt that comes from walking past your own bookshelf. You know the one. Half- read novels with bookmarks frozen somewhere around page seventy, spines that have started to gather a thin film of dust, and that one book everyone told you would change your life, still sitting there, judging you quietly every time you pass. I used to think this was a discipline problem. Buy the book, read the book, simple. But after years of watching my own reading habits rise and fall, and talking to readers who write to me after finishing one of my novels, I've come to believe it's something else entirely. We haven't lost the will to read. We've lost the conditions that make reading possible. The Myth of "No Time" Everyone says they don't have time to read anymore. I don't fully believe that. Most of us still have time to scroll through our phones for forty minutes before falling asleep, time to rewatch a show we've already seen twice...