Suresh Patel Blog

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...

Bangalore, Bengaluru, City Life, Monsoon, Everyday India, Memory I have lived in Bangalore long enough to stop explaining it. Visitors want a sentence. Pleasant weather. Garden city. Silicon Valley of India. Traffic. All of those sentences are true on some days and useless on most. A city is not a sentence. It is the way the light falls on a wet road at four in the afternoon, and the way people wait under a shop awning without looking at one another. I came here from a smaller place. Raichur had a courtyard, a tulsi plant, and rain that arrived like news. Bangalore had scale. It had ambition. It had the feeling that if you stood still, the city would go around you and not come back for you. For years I treated the city as a route. Home to work. Work to home. The rest was noise I learned to ignore. That is a mistake many of us make here. The city that works, and the city that waits There is a Bangalore that begins before dawn milk, newspapers, the first buses, the men who open s...

Bangalore, Bengaluru, City Life, Memoir, Indian Cities, Church Street, Jayanagar, Cubbon Park, Blossoms, Writing Life I have lived in Bangalore long enough to watch it argue with itself. One side of the argument is glass, traffic, and the word opportunity . The other side is a narrow street after rain, a bookshop that still smells of old paper, a house in Jayanagar where the rooms feel larger than they should because the children have left. I was not born here. Raichur came first courtyard, tulsi, the particular smell of wet earth when the monsoon finally arrived in North Karnataka. Bangalore was the city I grew into. Law school. Courts. Firms. The long years when the city was becoming “the Silicon City” and we were all supposed to keep pace. I did not keep pace with everything. That turned out to be useful. The Bangalore I walk, not the Bangalore I read about People write about Bangalore as if it were a product launch. Startups. Weather that used to be famous. Traffic that is n...

 One word review of the movie Terrific!

 At home just finished lunch and settling down for my afternoon power nap and some music on my AirPods