litreat xavier's

  Flying into the past   As the cool raindrops mixed with warm sweat trickled down my brow, the shuttle came flying towards me and I missed it again!  The sun had set, the fluorescent bulbs lit the front of the building, and the six of us were playing a lousy yet competitive game of ‘building’ or ‘gully’ badminton. The shuttle swept more than it flew, and on the few rare occasions of a ‘good shot’, the opponent missed it due to the slippery tile floor of the building front, wet from the continuous drizzle. The miss would happen in a rather idiotically epic manner by slipping or twisting and turning themselves at weird angles, which made everybody crack up. Sometimes, one was so lost in the breeze and rain that they would not realise the shuttle was heading towards them until it was too late. The expression of confusion, followed by the urgency to hit the shot, made them look so funny that it set all the spectators into hysterics.  We played more with the roof penetra...

Alone, Together That morning started like any other, but with an extra dose of irritation. I didn't have a holiday on Anant Chaturdashi, which, to me, felt completely unfair. I left home in a bad mood, half-asleep, half-complaining in my head. I expected the streets to be quiet, the trains to be empty, and the whole city to feel paused for the festival. But when I reached the station, it was far from silent. The platform was buzzing with life; vendors calling out, trains screeching in and out, people walking fast, cups of chai being passed around. For a moment, I just stood there, confused. How could so many people be out and about on a day like this? Didn’t anyone else want to stay home? Didn’t they also wish for a break? But then I looked around properly—at students clutching their bags, office-goers with weary eyes, a man selling flowers for the day’s rituals, an old woman quietly eating breakfast on a bench; and it hit me. Everyone was living their own little version of this mo...

The Doors Of Pondicherry  In Pondicherry, the doors and streets are not merely wood and concrete, but stories and poems painted with bright colours and history. The former stand at the corner of almost every street, adorned in vibrant hues of yellow, white, and coral blue, humming their own rhythms and narrating their own stories. I walked through these French streets with my camera dangling from my neck, a map in one hand and a cup of melting gelato in the other, collecting their colours and silences like seashells. Some doors were coral blue, like the waves crashing on the rocks at the beach, while some were yellow like the petals of a sunflower. But every time I tried to click a picture, something inside me hesitated. How could I capture something that seemed to mirror me? The doors of Pondicherry do that sometimes - they stare back at you, unblinking, as if they know all the stories you’ve brought along with you; all the weight you’ve carried on your shoulders, and the amount o...

  2025 ‘Wrapped’ Put a pretty bow, a couple of party-popping animations and a glowing number on the landing page of an app, and you’ve got the recipe for quantifying and gamifying digital consumption. We, as a generation, are sticking a number on all the wrong things, just for a hit of success. Apps we use congratulate us on how much we use them, and we, faithful servants as always, fall right into the rat’s trap.  These numbers, when shared (for example, Spotify stats) then stand to pit users against each other. Some listeners even try year-round to ensure that their end-of-the-year Spotify stats reflect a niche, unique taste. The more the hours-listened, the more superior you get as a consumer. All this while, companies and creators sit back and watch, probably laughing at us. From Spotify (where it all began) to Linkedin to even Uber, almost every app we use has now begun to show its users their yearly stats, congratulating them on the amount of times they used its services...

  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...