Rishita Chaudhary

Travel in both its literal and symbolic avatars is the process of acquiring cognitive empathy. When you visit somewhere with different norms to those that you have known so far, the realization dawns that those norms are not “normal.” Every person’s experience of the world is particular, but this specificity only becomes obvious when another way of... See more

7. Stories trump information

Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better ,... See more

What is something new you’ve done recently?

I have taken up flying trapeze – an aria of joy with existential undertones. Up there, you can’t be a Cartesian divide, a mind commanding a body – you are thrust into total integration, working with the most fundamental elements: gravity, consciousness, and time. You learn to balance strength and trust,... See more

There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better an women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married... See more

“I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick... See more