Rishita Chaudhary

Spending most of his time alone, Soares sits thinking, celebrating the “sombre majesty of splendours no one knows”. He advocates buying books never to read them. He fondly remembers an office boy who collected travel brochures, but never travelled. He looks forward to recognition after death not because he expects to achieve something, but as a... See more

And so, when the comet leaves again to complete its next orbit, the star is no longer lonely — there is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any... See more

“U NLIKE WRITING, WHICH is a vocation mired with maybes, the camera, for all of its complex mechanisms, can only say yes. Photography is, for me, a medium of unanimous affirmation, the shutter creating a yes so total, so entire, nothing in its frame can be denied presence. Though the impulse to fire the shutter can be entangled with doubt, the act... See more

Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . .... See more

Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills that demand time, patience, and a willingness to look beyond the surface.

To collect well is to resist algorithmic influence. A true collection reflects deeply personal values and a genuine desire to... 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