litreat xavier's

  There are More Christmases in Bombay Besides the Bandra Christmas! I know we’re all going to throw hands if we come across one more “Hidden Gem in Bandra” reel. But all things considered, the charm of a ‘Bandra Christmas’ is undeniable. The maximalist wonderland of Candies, the cosy winding streets of Ranwar, the glistening archways of Reclamation. However, it’s all fun and games till you’re photo-bombing a stranger with every step you take, or till you’re inches away from a car running over your foot. So, even as I have enjoyed the holiday spirit in Bandra (pro tip: go before Christmas day and in the afternoon), I must talk about why it is overrated.  Everything is a spectacle today, or has to be one to garner any attention in the throes of content on social media. We rarely go to places without the Internet recommending them, and this fosters a need to beat the FOMO by getting to these ‘Instagrammable’ spots (the fact that the word is a known adjective is concerning in its...

  The Girl He Thought He Killed Every truth is tainted with a spot of lie. I told them I didn't do it. That was true—I didn't. But did I want to? Yes. I wanted to watch every ounce of life seep from his eyes. I wanted him to know, with every fibre of his being, that his time was over.  Did I want to hear his cries for mercy? Yes. Did I want to watch him turn into nothing? Yes. I wanted him to plead for his life the way I had—to feel the white-hot pain I felt when he left me broken, wounded, lying on the cold ground to die. I wanted every nerve in his body to ignite with suffering, just like mine did when his sharp knife cut through my stomach.  He thought I was dead. That I would be an incident he could tuck away. But little did he know that the shattered girl he left that day had learned how to put her pieces back together.  He didn’t know the voice he thought he’d buried would echo in his last moments. However, vengeance isn't me, I tell myself—justice is.  Ye...

  We Need to Retire the Phrase ‘The Man of the Relationship’ How the Internet is forcing heterosexual relationships into inflexible gendered binaries You’d expect, or at least hope, that love would be the last thing the Internet hijacks, but it is in fact doing so quite successfully. In its effort to produce homogenous individuals and relationships devoid of nuance, social media is not just trying to control how we (show) love, but also who we are in love, as individual men and women.  It’s an ancient habit, sorting ourselves into binaries when we speak of relationships. We have an inexplicable urge to go back to default settings to be able to effectively explain and define ourselves. And sadly, it’s not that we think a woman can’t be masculine, or a man can’t be feminine - it’s that we think they shouldn’t.  The ‘princess treatment or bare minimum’ trend, for example, encapsulates the essence of what a relationship means to social media: both grand and little gesture...