• For how suddenly winter set in in Delhi. The smog, the chills, the fans being switched off. 
• For the awkward coexistence of high-pitched excitement about Iran and the sense that it's still distant (although it's not!)
• For being 30 for a month (and it doesn't feel any different) 
• For discovering that the Mt. Fuji puzzle that I'd thought had gone for recycling with newspapers was, in fact, safe at home - enough to make me jump with joy 
• For some promises that I will get to do something new that I'd been waiting for, at work  

It’s nearly 10 am and there isn’t even a hint of sunshine. I look out the glass wall of my living room and all I see is grey – a cover of mist on the trees on the ground right outside my building, trees in mourning without a speck of brightness about them and brown earth that hardly seems brown. The scene looks like a picture that someone was editing; halfway across changing a beautiful colour picture to black and white, they gave up and left the greens, browns and blues looking almost like grey but didn’t quite get there.

I loathe winters. There are no two ways about it. I don’t like the cold, the multiple layers of clothing required, the decision on what to wear, the idea that at 8 in the morning my bedroom could look like it’s 4am, completely eliminating my desire to be up and about.

I don’t care that vegetables taste better and are cheaper in winter, that you don’t sweat or feel all icky, and I couldn’t bother about the pleasure of sitting in bleak sunshine. I don’t know how to wear a woolly hat properly, when to take a scarf or what to do when I alternatively feel warm and cold in that thick jacket. I hate that simple tasks such as brushing your teeth or sitting on a toilet pot become tests of willpower. It’s annoying that the quilt I get under first makes me go stiff with cold, then the gets cosy warm with my body heat and then ends up making me sweat in the night, so much so that I wake up with a jolt, gasping and throw the quilt off my body.

As a chai person, the only pleasure I allow myself during winters is that of holding a hot cup of tea to my freezing winters. Ironically, even then, I can’t handle the scalding hot tea; I wait a minute or two for the tea to cool down.

Add to this despondency my confused feelings about my voluntary unemployment. I swing between feelings of joy at a whole day of possibilities to use my pent-up words and feelings of utter uselessness and pure terror when thinking about my career and the future. Given my ideas to work full time in the gender activism space, I wonder what I know and what I can do with that limited knowledge. It’s a phase that questions your self-confidence, your daring ideas and idealism. When you see the bank balance that’s rapidly going down without any inflow, you wonder if you made the right decision.  

Thanks to a supportive partner gently guiding me through my mood swings, I come to terms with what it means to take a break to figure out the what-next in life. That involves accepting the dark days, making to-do lists, reading more and pushing hard to create a routine, for full-time work instills ideas of productivity purely because there’s something to do everyday: calls to take, emails to check, meetings to attend. The break also involves making those tough decisions about spending your money – knowing that with those limited funds (and for now, no inflow) lifestyle changes of taxi vs. metro, eating out, alcohol, etc. are to be made. It’s about full cognizance of the fact that most of my basic needs, urgent expenses and even my lifestyle expenses can be met, thanks to supportive and non-judgmental family.

Winter and unemployment tell you loads about the privileges that you were born with and continue to have. I chide myself for cribbing about the cold when I sit within the confines of home, with a room heater and instant hot water, and a range of thick jackets. I scribble furiously in my diary about the need to quickly get over the panic that washes over me oh-so-frequently. I try to use the time to wander about the city, to incorporate new habits like journaling everyday, and learn to take disappointment, frustration and unhappiness in my stride. Thanks to yoga lessons, I try to breathe deeply and dismiss stress and tension over things I don’t control.

It’s 10.30 and the morning continues to be bleak. A crow swings on a cable outside the room, making me laugh. An eagle swoops by too close for comfort, until I realize there’s a strong glass wall keeping me safe.

Another winter day begins, another day full of possibilities for me to feel happy through words, music and aimless walks. I wonder how I'll fare today! 

I realise there’s much that Delhiites (or anyone, for that matter) could find to disagree with in this post. Therefore, I qualify this by stating that this is purely based on what I’ve seen so far in the few parts of the city I’ve had a chance to be around, and the few people I’ve had a chance to observe – which I’ll admit is really not much at all. So excuse the seeming generalisations, because I’m telling myself there’s a lot more to Delhi that I have yet to see, know and understand. But then again, can you truly understand any city, can you truly shed the circumstances you were born in and are in?

Anyway, the one thing that perturbs me most is how there is a clear line of hierarchy for nearly everything. I will qualify this again by saying that this is true of the rest of the country too – and perhaps the rest of the world as well. But nowhere in my few travels and the three cities I’ve lived in have I seen it play out as obviously as it is done in Delhi. Every interaction seems tinged with a sense of ‘you better know who you’re dealing with…’ - and I'm not even talking about workplace hierarchical levels. One friend said that Delhi has a strong ‘naukar chakkar,’ and I can’t help but agree. Coming from a middle-class family from Chennai, I’m unable to comprehend the extent to which people rely on – what do I call them, servants? – their maids, cooks, drivers and other kinds of helpers for so many things. I see the idea that because we pay them, we are entitled to much. Help we demand – we hardly request – ranges from bringing up our bags from the car, to bringing a spoon from the kitchen, to clearing our hair off the bathroom floor, to cutting our apple, to plugging our laptop charger in the socket a tad unreachable, under the table. I see that we are annoyed when someone refuses to do anything we ask, because, heck, we deserve it because we pay them so much. I see that we are always suspicious about the very people who help us get by everyday, because if you’re too nice you’re going to be ripped off someday or you’ll be taken advantage of.

I see this attitude translating into how we talk to them – there’s a customary bhaiyya or didi attached to every sentence, but it doesn’t mask the tone of you-better-do-what-I-say. Someone living in my house compound had the audacity to tell construction workers who live in the half-built apartment they are constructing behind my place, and cooking on random fuel they’ve collected, that they don’t cook meat there because the badboo is coming into his house courtyard. The security guard of the hotel nearby proudly yells at the rickshaw-drivers to get out of the entrance to the hotel. The big car honks the brains out of the smaller car and forget how everyone treats pedestrians.

I’m deeply annoyed myself that I’ve employed a cook, and even as I try to justify it by saying that the kinds of conveniences available to me in Singapore – of readily-available, inexpensive food steps outside my office and in umpteen malls and food courts paces outside my home – I feel angry that I’ve also become reliant on someone for a basic need. I’ve been told that I should yell at her when required, for she won’t take me seriously otherwise.

It’s seriously disturbing. I know I’ve not had a chance to see much of Chennai because I never went to college or worked there, but I honestly doubt that most people from a background similar to mine from Chennai would be able to relate to this. Of course, all of our houses employ women who come to clean the house and do the dishes, and I’m sure there are people who behave in different ways with their helpers, but somehow, this attitude is scary. Singapore is also full of domestic maids who immigrate from other southeast Asian nations, and I have heard horror stories of how some of them are treated – as many as I’ve heard of maids who have truly become family. I haven’t, however, seen this overt class distinction play out there at least among the Singaporeans. The average Singaporean, to my knowledge, is respectful – or at least tolerant – of the people who clean her toilets, cook her food, and sweep the roads. The city taught me to be self-reliant, clean bathrooms, pick hair off the drain, and do my dishes on my own – so much so that my mother, who has often ranted about the hair I leave behind whenever I wash it, was surprised that I started clearing it once I moved to my own house in Singapore. Of course, I acknowledge the massive difference in backgrounds, situations and cultures here, and realise that most people I'm talking about, in Delhi, in India, have never had to be in a situation where hiring domestic help is a costly affair.

I’m not judging people for behaving in a particular manner, trying to portray that we treat people better in the South or pretending to be a superior person, etc. – I will not fall into that simplistic trap of painting people with the same brush, or of assuming false morality in my behaviour. I’m simply registering something that surprises me. This is something that I’m taking time to get used to, and maybe months down the line it won’t bother me at all. And, how do I put this without making it sound like I’m judging? I hope that come what may, I don’t change how I behave with people.