New York City's Parks Ranked: Worst to Best

You have to find your green space in New York, otherwise the rivers of concrete can get to you. The paucity of parks scares many would-be residents away altogether. Because we have such little grassy sprawl, so few tree-lined heaths, we are forced to share our little parks with our fellow New Yorkers. And in that necessary communion, we find a little leafy magic amid all the glass and steel.

5. McCarren 

McCarren Park is where I feel most insecure. 

Every perfect, toned body on display there reminds me of my own shortcomings, my unending failure to master my muscles. I call it “Influencer Park” because it's in trendy Williamsburg and I’ve never seen so many stunningly beautiful people writhing around on yoga mats atop the afternoon’s sunlit AstroTurf. There is a large AstroTurf sports field, enclosed by a running track. Across the street is a large grassy field, where last summer there were daily gatherings for the Black Lives Matter movement. The racial inequities their vigils highlighted are a reminder of things we should never forget.

A billboard near McCarren Park, Williamsburg

McCarren is usually packed, with multiple soccer games happening on the AstroTurf field, dozens of women doing yoga around it, and handfuls of private training classes — from boxing to breakdance. It is Williamsburg’s only real "green" space, it’s like in those African savannah nature documentaries when all the animals have to drink at the same tiny watering hole in the dry season. 

Even though I lived in Williamsburg, I never felt like I belonged in Williamsburg. I was not one of the beautiful young Instagram models who had moved in with a ridiculous whimpering Poodle-like dog. I was not one of the quiet, smouldering Black residents, who knelt with protesting fists aloft and sang and cried with the most profound pain last summer. I was just some guy passing through. It was one of the few places in my beloved New York City where I felt like a stranger. Not unwelcome, just unnecessary. I would play tennis alone — hitting against a wall to myself — before scurrying away on my bike. Maybe some I’ll be comfortable enough in my skin to come back and claim my piece of that fashionable AstroTurf.

4. Central Park

I’ve never lived in Manhattan, so Central Park has always felt performative. It’s beautiful, it’s big, it’s the stuff of films and dreams. You seen it. You probably have your own impression of it. It’s for tourists and New York’s wealthy (ie. Columbia/NYU students). It’s for being seen. It’s for going on dates. I think it’s the kind of park you go to with intention; it’s a destination rather than a state of mind. I don’t think you can just turn up at Central Park. It’s not like your grandma’s kitchen or your best friend’s TV room. It’s a place to get dressed up to go to. It’s the best seat from which to view the symphony of Manhattan’s surrounding skyscrapers. My memories of Central Park are of friends’ lavish picnic brunches and meeting distinguished old professors for dignified walks.

It’s always been an hour away by train — a world away in my imagination. My physical distance from Central Park has probably informed my emotional distance from Central Park. 

3. Sternberg

Sternberg Park is a curious creature. You wouldn’t have heard of it unless you lived right by it. It’s an AstroTurf field (with a baseball diamond at either corner), flanked by a playground, a small dog park, and basketball courts. It’s your typical Brooklyn public “park”, with a smattering of trees, a sprinkling of artificial grass, and spadefuls of concrete. I used to live across the street from Steinberg Park and I grew to love it. 

In the early mornings, you see old Chinese men and women doing Tai-Chi on the concrete basketball courts. They are smiling and laughing - as relaxed as I’ve ever seen them. Their numbers would serve as a proxy indication of Covid’s terrible hold on the city; as soon as cases go down they are out in force, caressing the cool morning air with pleasant sweeping strokes of wrinkled hands.

On a weeknight, Sternberg plays host of a mix of different residents. Young men playing soccer, young couples on their evening stroll, and even 30-year old Indian fellows teaching themselves how to ride a bike. Like New York taught me how to be a grown up, Sternberg park is where I taught myself to ride an old hand-me-down cycle that my Uncle had gifted me in summer 2020. Being able to glide through New York atop my trusty bike - especially during the 1st Covid wave when we were scared of taking the subway - was a profound gift. It took me 2 sessions of nervously lumbering around Sternberg park on my bike to get the hang of things. Some kids looked at me in bewilderment, some older Latino men laughed. They were well within their rights, because I looked ridiculous. But I taught myself, I learned. Thank you, Steinberg Park.

A summer Saturday at Sternberg Park is a thing to behold. South Williamsburg has a big Puerto Rican community, and the whole neighbourhood comes out to play softball. While young men play on the AstroTurf, older men and women pull up all kinds of lawn furniture on the other side of the wire fence. They pour themselves drinks and put on Latin music. Cold beers cut through the warm air. There is dancing. There is joy. This is their neighbourhood and they let themselves feel the collective freedom only a lazy Saturday can invoke.

And Sunday! Sunday is for Football. American Football. On Sunday morning, dozens of big cars pull up to Steinberg Park. A grill is fired up outside that same wire fence where people Salsa’d yesterday evening. Now the African American residents are out in force. Men are hurling themselves over and across and around and above and along the AstroTurf field as they run to catch and tackle and share the elusive oblong football. There are snarls of conflict, which referees’ whistles quickly quieten. There are people cheering from the sidelines and hip hop blaring from the parked cars. So much human energy.

And yet all that human energy, that resilient spirit that stood up to Covid, was squandered and doused for 18 months as the local city council closed down Steinberg park for renovations starting in Fall 2020. 

It was the time we needed Steinberg park the most — this wonderful open public space that delivered us from the monotony of lockdown. All they were doing, the city said, was replacing the AstroTurf but they closed the park down for almost 2 years. For the first year, all they did was tear away the existing AstroTurf as a van would sit idle on the exposed concrete. No work. No men on site. Just the soul ripped out of a desperate community, by some disinterested city planners somewhere. I looked into it and the simple re-laying of AstroTurf (something that should have taken 2 weeks), took almost 4 years and $3 million from planning to execution. I moved out of my Sternberg-facing apartment before the “renovation” was complete. I went back to see it recently, but it’s someone else’s park now. I wish it well. I was dumped. I bounced. 

2. Transmitter Park

Go to Transmitter Park in Greenpoint on a balmy summer night. Get a delicious pizza from Pauly Gee’s next door, get a couple cold drinks, and sit on the grass to take in one of the best Manhattan skyline views around. That is all you need to be happy.

Transmitter park is small, but there’s always a little space for you. During the day, people do yoga classes right by the water. In the evening, once the skyline is lit up, people just sit on the benches and gaze in wonder at the city’s dazzling beauty. All the lights, all the colours - they light up the night sky and brighten even the most troubled mind, massage the most tired shoulders. Transmitter Park and Pauly Gee’s pizza on a summer night: a NYC must-do.

1. Prospect Park

Prospect Park is Brooklyn. Prospect Park is my home. It is a “living” park, as much a part of my home as my living room. In a city where space and greenery are at such a premium, it is boldly shared, defiantly green and it belongs to all of us.

On a Sunday, the park is packed with families from local communities. Latino folks are having barbecues, Black folks are having birthday parties. It is the only place I’ve seen in New York City where people of all races, genders, ages, and incomes seem to mingle and jingle in carefree harmony. It is a colorful, vibrant, peaceful celebration of Brooklyn: you can see the Manhattan skyscrapers peering at you over the trees in the distance, but they are far away. You feel the distance between you and the glass towers and that distance gives you levity and air and breathing room. You can breathe in prospect park — really breathe. There are always three different jazz quartets and a thirty different reggaetón beats and they never clash. Where one music’s territory ends, another’s begins. A truce through the trees.

I live in the park through all seasons. It is where you can really experience New York’s different seasons. In the winter, we are all huddled up. It gives you the space you need to walk around so you can keep warm. In the spring, it is lush and glistens after the rain and the cycle track - my beloved cycle track - is crisp and enticing. In the Fall, the colors of the trees invoke such emotion, such passion on all of us. So often I see the same blood-red canopy being photographed on one side by a family of Orthodox Jews and on the other by East Asian tourists. 

No matter how many of us squeeze into the park, it seems to expand to fit us all. There is always enough Prospect Park to go around. And this is never more apparent than in summer. Summer in prospect park is a dream that I try to escape to whenever I close my eyes. Long evenings, endless laughter, families and babies and dogs and musicians to keep us all engrossed in our collective joy. 

Summer is when I feel most connected to the trees in Prospect Park. The great big trees are my friends and I love to see them standing healthy and strong and proud under the summer sun. Last summer I would listen to Lord of the Rings on audiobook as I walked around the Park every weeknight at dusk and through the purple twilight I would imagine the trees were Ents. They are so big, so powerful, so green, and their leaves are an oasis of oxygen in an urban cacophony. I love how the orange lamplights somehow make the night’s sky’s purple even more purple. 

You can go to Prospect Park wearing whatever you want. You can do there to cry, to dance, to think things through. Prospect Park is Brooklyn’s back yard. Have a seat.

Biryani and Mischief

You would always hear him before you would see him.

His booming voice, his mischievous laugh, would echo down the stairs of their building and out onto the street to greet you even as you were parking the car. And then we would follow our ears and our noses and we would run up the stairs to their apartment and bound through their always-open door to hugs and love and a big steel drum of spicy, delicious, steaming mutton biryani. And Santosh Dada was always conductor, front and center. Larger than life, at the heart of the action, bringing people together, bursting with expression, full of stories, singing for us all – just like the biryani he served us so merrily.

Santosh Gulwadi – our beloved Santosh Dada – passed away today. July 26^th, 2021. He was one of my favourite people. I want to explain why.

I remember what he and the Gulwadis did for me both as a young boy and as a young man. My family would visit India every year when we were living abroad – usually at Christmas – between 1995 and 2004. Our time in Bombay would be split between my dad’s family in the Bandra suburbs and mum’s side in Town. Bandra was home to my Ajoba and my Dadima and the pace of life was slow, sultry, almost dreamlike. The food was mostly vegetarian. You were lulled into a beautiful trance, an endless loop of afternoon naps and evening chai. The exception to this stupor was our traditional biryani night with the Gulwadis.

We would get into auto-rickshaws and buzz frantically through the streets for 30 mins till we got uptown to Vile Parle. And as we got out of the rickshaws, I would hear that unmistakable voice echoing from the Gulwadis’ 1^st floor apartment. Sometimes he would greet us on the foyer itself, because he would be made to stand outside their house to smoke, which made him seem even more charismatic and made me even more curious. He would smoke outside the door as we’d enter their house and he would pace back and forth, desperately trying to participate in the conversation through the open window.

Santosh Dada was this maverick, this dashing, talented, gregarious rascal. If he was in Star Wars, he would be Han Solo. He would always be joking, serving people food and drinks and repeating the same stories again and again. I liked listening to them anyway, because they seemed to get grander every time. The number of puran polis he and my dad ate as young men would magically increase with each retelling of “the puran poli story”. We indulged him. An evening at the Gulwadis was about indulgence.

I love the Gulwadis so dearly. Theirs is a family with the biggest of hearts. I adored Mhavu, the gentle wisdom amidst all the joyous tumult. I loved Santosh Dada for his swagger and Shital Didi for her tenderness. I loved how they would argue like children about what channel to put on or what speed to run the fan. I idolized their three kids – my impossibly cool cousins. I wanted to grow up to be just like them. Whether I was 5 or 15, I hung on their every word when Shambhavi and I would go to their place for sleepovers. There was just nowhere else like it. If our Bandra home was where we could be children for a week, the Gulwadi home was where we were treated like young adults for a day.

And it was as a young adult that I got closest to Santosh Dada. When I moved back to India from the UK in 2012, age 21, it was a very difficult time in my life. I suddenly found myself in Bombay, without many friends. Those years, between 2012 and 2013 especially, were when Santosh Dada and the Gulwadis – especially Shital Didi and Gopika – would watch over me and guide me. I would take every chance to get in an auto to go to Vile Parle, to have coffee with Santosh Dada and let him tell me about his snooker-playing days or the latest drama at the gymkhana. He would always ask me to do my accents and laugh thunderously every time I’d do a particularly offensive one. He would enter music contests at the gymkhana and we would all go and cheer for him. He had many fans.

I will always be a fan.

I left India for the US in 2015 and so I didn’t spend much time with him towards the end, in these last few years when his illness made things really difficult. I can’t imagine how difficult today must have been for my dear Gulwadis and all of Santosh Dada’s fans. I am still in shock and I dare not face the present. I do not want to be 30 years old, sitting thousands of miles away, saying goodbye to him. I want to be 13, bounding up those stairs to say hello.

Name Tag Mathematics

Are the bland, rehashed, overcooked scrambled eggs they serve at breakfast buffets a metaphor for the monotony of the American corporate conference? I’ll let you decide. 

But the answer is yes.

Do you even remember what conferences were like? Remember collecting your name tag at a rickety reception desk and getting the all-important Wi-Fi password at 8:30 a.m., in a windowless hotel basement? The $325 billion corporate events industry has been hit hard by Covid and 2020 saw essentially all conferences go virtual. Though covering conferences as a reporter was a real chore, month after month of Corona-Zoom drudgery has reminded me that I somehow actually miss them. I miss horsing down those dry scrambled eggs in the mezzanine of some characterless Hilton that looks like a hollowed-out casino, commiserating with Bob from Tallahassee about the pungency of the air at Penn Station on a July afternoon. The bumbling routine of the corporate conference punctuated the urban work-lives we’ve since forfeited – lives we had taken for granted. Let’s remember those mundane constants that Covid stole from us.

 

Up until recently, I covered the energy sector for a financial trade journal in New York City, so I ended up going to an industry event every couple of months. In my first job, as a writer for Forbes Magazine in Mumbai, I’d be invited to one every couple weeks. I went to over 50 conferences in my reporting days and the experiences across the US and India were not so different: there are the bustling subterranean convention centers, the manic event producers scrambling around making sure the seat covers have the right sponsors’ logos, the service staff that usually come from two rungs below the attendees in their respective country’s ethno-racial hierarchy, and of course the ‘Plenary, Panel, Break’ program format. Whether it’s the glitzy Association of Indian Merchant Shippers Annual Summit or the more stoic 7^th North America Power and Gas Infrastructure Finance Forum, the attendees were mostly men knee-deep in their 40s. The women and millennials in the room were mostly either event organizers or reporters like me. For some reason, you’d have to wear a suit, whether it's 38°C outside the Oberoi Hotel in South Bombay or 38°F inside the Crowne Plaza in midtown Manhattan.

I wonder what it would be like to attend as a guest – to actually be excited about going to a conference? I know a lot of business gets done at conferences since they’re the only time everyone in the industry is in one place. My friends in academia, for instance, tell me they quite enjoy traveling to these things. For me, conferences are where I had to be at my sharpest because it’s where I could talk to sources without their PR and/or corporate communications chaperones censoring my questions. They were a chance to meet executives face to face, to show them you’re a real human and that you won’t screw them over by quoting them out of context. Conferences are a gold mine of market-moving information, if you know how to work the room – how to matter-of-factly glide your way over to a Merlot’d CFO before your rival at another publication can get him a refill.

 

My conferences would usually start with collecting my name tag from someone on the conference production team. It was always nice when they would spell my name right and always funny when they would put an extra sticker on my name tag that said “PRESS”, so people knew to steer clear of me. The receptionists would wave me off quickly, eager to welcome the paying attendees who’d flown in from Topeka or Tokyo and to serenade the revered Platinum-level sponsors who had brought along a litter of junior analysts.

The opening remarks of the conference are usually from a head of a trade association saying how great things are for the industry, followed up a “fireside chat” with the highest profile CEO in the room. For events in big cities, it is important that speakers start strong and come out all guns blazing, because they know their audience can get up and leave any time they want. Everyone is listening; many are taking notes. If there’s a particularly good slide, everyone lifts up their phones to take pictures as a sacred mark of respect to the PowerPoint Gods.

10:30 a.m. is the first coffee break and it’s where the great reporters stand out from the rest. It’s that 30-minute slot between sessions where attendees are restless enough to talk to strangers—even the press. Now, I must waltz with them. You’ll never see people do mental math faster than you will at a conference coffee break. There’s a silent dance that everyone does, where they decide who to talk to. Attendees walk slowly through the crowd looking for a conversation and as soon as we make eye contact with each other, we each quickly glance down at each other’s name tags and decide whether to stop in our tracks and reach out for a handshake or keep walking. You have a split second to decide if someone else is worth your time. You have to calculate whether this is someone who can help you or not. It’s primal; it’s instinctive. I can see the decision-making process in their eyes: “Do I really want to talk to a goddamn reporter?” Many attendees look at my name tag and turn away. Sometimes I’d say hello and they’d pretend not to have heard me. The awkward air is so heavy you can drink it through a straw. You see other journalists getting ghosted in real time. It’s theater.

But rejection is a constant for journalists and if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re in the wrong business. By the time I’m five feet from someone, my algorithms are whirring away: Don’t I already have a good source at their company? Avoid. Is this lady simply another reporter? Keeping walking. Oh, this is the guy who never answers my call? Attack mode. I wonder if he’s a vendor or a spender?

You see, there are two types of people at conferences: vendors and spenders. The vendors have paid good money to be here; they want to sell their products to spenders and their brand to reporters. The spenders have paid even better money to be here and they want their logo to be the biggest on the stage and the first in the news report. The spenders hold the upper hand over the vendors in this power dynamic, but there are sales to be made and everyone knows it.

Sometimes, as a journalist, you chance upon a freshly minted Senior Vice President, eager to show off his industry insight. Delicious. But mostly, it’s a media-trained Managing Director, who is counting down the seconds till he can leave the conversation and find someone he can speak with freely. He’s looking at other people as I’m trying desperately to say something interesting. They can sense the power imbalance a mile away and it disgusts them. Once in a while, I’ll strike up a truly equal conversation with someone, who has absolutely nothing to gain from me and vice versa. You just talk because it feels normal. There’s a subtle art to knowing how to exit those conversations with grace and tact, because that’s not who your editor is waiting to hear about. The reluctant time bell rings, signaling the end of networking and the finale of the ballet, where business cards are exchanged or lies are told how about they just gave their last card to someone else. 

The first full panel discussion is next, where each speaker takes four minutes to introduce themselves before using each question as a segue into how their company is the best in the business. Sometimes you get a rogue CEO who actually says what’s on his/her mind and you can feel people’s eyes looking momentarily up from their iPads. Maybe you’re even lucky enough to see panelists disagree. Not all panels are boring, only the overwhelming majority. The volume and quality of the audience Q&A is always a good barometer for how engaged the room is. I wonder if audiences were more ‘present’ before the electronic era?

The lunch buffet line is the conference’s great leveler. Vendors and spenders fly out of the main room and line up for scalloped potatoes like hungry schoolboys. The smell of beef bourguignon quickly masks the hierarchy in the air. As a twentysomething reporter, I was generally near the bottom of the food chain but I could win the heart of a grizzled executive behind me by passing up that last piece of duck. Maybe I could even waltz my way into his lunch table and talk about sports. I think conference buffet lunch food is generally great, by the way—it’s hotels doing what they do best. It’s those giant, circular conference lunch tables I cannot stand.

The event organizers seat you ten to a table, so you can talk comfortably to your immediate neighbors for a few precious minutes before everyone is reaching over everyone else, their ugly ties dipping in each other’s clam chowders as they exchange cards. The conversation is chaos. You can sense a newcomer to the circular table is waiting eagerly to join in and you have to find a way to let them enter the discussion. I find the best strategy is to plonk myself down next to someone senior that I respect and talk about anything other than the topic of the conference. I miss the pageantry of the conference lunch—it’s fashionable to complain about food even though everyone secretly loves it.

The post-lunch panels are the graveyard shift. Reporters with full bellies are busy filing articles for their hungry editors while the real decision-makers at the event have found high tables on the sidelines to quietly hammer out term-sheets. Conference afternoons for a journalist on a deadline are literally a write-off. In the main room, eyes are mostly on phones and laptops now. There are emails to be answered. Desperate panelists do their best to provoke weary listeners. If the speakers are lucky, they’re presenting in break-out sessions in smaller rooms with industrial-sized espresso machines. If everyone in that 300-seater main room could curl up under those tables and take a nap, they’d be asleep before the panelists were mic’d up.

The 3 p.m. networking interval arrives like the Berlin Airlift. The audience surfaces, staggering out of the auditorium, gasping for caffeine. For the journalist, it’s another chance to tango with the reluctant. But if you’ve filed enough good copy for the day, you can skip the schmoozing and head straight for the hors d'oeuvres.

We’re in the home stretch. People will hang around for the final talk of the day because there’s that sweet, spender-sponsored sangria on the other side. It’s when the conference producers can finally sit down and chug a cold one. It’s when jackets and ties come off and XM Satellite Radio jazz comes on. For a reporter looking to get a scoop, it’s the golden hour. It’s when even the media-trained Managing Directors will start bad-mouthing their competitors—all off the record, of course. Sure enough at 5 o’clock, the men leave the conference hall for the day. Some go to the airport, some to their rooms but many stay to chat to the dainty blonde reporter they’ve been stealing glances at all afternoon. The group has made it through the day and there’s a sense of camaraderie. Name tags don’t matter so much. Everyone’s a vendor now.

I hope Coronavirus goes away soon so we can go back to our bland conferences, to petty complaints about delicious food, to stalking new spenders and avoiding old journalists.

Would I Believe Him?

[I wanted to start this blog with something like “The end of a year – and of a decade in your life – is always a good time for reflection on how you’ve grown” and I could not believe how old I sounded. Urgh. But I turned 30 on Monday and have generally been taking stock of where I am in life and I realized that I managed to accomplish some pretty cool things through the belligerent hellfire that was 2020 AD. I’m sure you did too. I’m writing this for myself – each of the things below could/probably should be blogs of their own – and so if you do end up reading, thank you and sorry for being self-indulgent. I will have some real writing for you soon, I promise. But you’re welcome to stick around. It’s a happy piece!]

I remember at the end of 2019 I met my best friend at her office gym to exercise together after work. It was 6pm and the view of the city at dusk from the Blue-chip Tech Company building’s penthouse was stunning. It’s the kind of view people move to New York for. I remember looking at her and the people around us and feeling like they had something I wanted. She seemed so secure in her career, making the money she wanted to be making, living in the apartment she wanted to be living in, satisfied with how she lived her life, happy with how she chose her friends and generally excited for the future. If our mid-20s had been about understanding what we wanted, her late 20s had seen her go and get those things. She had a base from which to grow; she had arrived into adulthood in the most beautiful, convincing way. I said to myself, I would also get to that place in 2020.

And so I did. I actually did it. I feel like I am there now. It is something I am going to give myself credit for. To be sure, I was already in a pretty good place – in an incredibly privileged place – and there is lots I did not do in 2020. I did not finally get a US driver’s license, I did not get speech therapy for my stammer, I did not marry Mary Hatch, I did not solidify my long-term immigration plans – or reconcile my disillusionment with India, for that matter. But here are five things I did do – five things I managed in the midst of a global pandemic. Five things I am happy about and proud of myself for. Five things that make me feel like I’m worthy of my 30s. If 2020 Shravan went back in time to that meet 2019 me at the gym that day and told me where I would be in life, would I believe him? I don’t know. It was possible but not probable. So here are my Christmas presents to myself:

1.     1. I got my dream job

I knew it was time to leave journalism at the end of 2019. I had a great boss and a wonderful team, but I was not growing professionally, learning any new skills or making anything close to what I deserved. Then, when the daily rigors of old job – my last as a reporter – suddenly became too stressful relative to my pay slip, I began a lockdown job hunt amid a crumbling economy. I knew I had to step into my long-term career. I knew I wanted to go from writing about climate issues to actively influencing them. I applied to my current job – leading marketing at a climate finance NGO – in March. After rounds and rounds of Zoom interviews, I accepted a generous offer in May. After months and months of visa application stress, I finally began work in late September.

I can say with my hand on my heart that I love this job. I love this organization – it’s a caring organization, a healing organization. I love my boss, my boss’s boss, my team, the people who work in HR, the people who work in IT… everyone. The work is interesting and challenging and so I learn new things every day and I see a path for me to grow. This is my dream job because I can basically be my authentic self at work and so work doesn’t feel like work. This job change was… huge. I cannot even begin to describe how important it was in my life. It was so difficult but it made me have to strive and be the best version of myself. My relationship with my parents, who helped me in the interview process, reached a new level of closeness and mutual respect. I can’t believe I get paid to do this work. I’m in love.

2.      2. I found an amazing therapist  

‘Therapist dating’ can be harder than actual dating. You have to find someone who accepts your health insurance, who has time slots that match yours and most importantly, who you feel comfortable opening up to. It’s hard to differentiate therapists from their homogenous profiles online. Sometimes you’ll spend a week looking for someone, then you’ll spend your co-pay on an intro meeting and find them awful and then you’ll question if you really need therapy at all and then you’ll stop looking for help for months and months till life stress boils over again. This happened to me a lot. Then a friend shared a therapist hunting technique that I’m going to share with you: set up three appointments with three promising therapists back-to-back or all on the same weekend and just see who you best vibe with. You’ll be able to compare them easily and you can just commit to three sessions with the one you like the most. ‘Therapist speed-dating’, if you will, served me well.

I found my dude in March and went to his office exactly once before Covid lockdown moved us to nine months of Zoom sessions. I had a lot of unspoken, unarticulated feelings and internal conflicts writhing around inside me and Craig helps me untangle them every week by asking me the right questions. He never tells me what to do. He listens – really listens – and takes notes and then helps me find the answers that are inside me by reflecting my statements back to me. He notes down my ramblings every week and so Craig's list has become my Saturday morning ticket to understanding myself. Therapy is by far the best $50 I spend a week. Sometimes I’ll go into a session thinking “I’m happy! Life is good! Do I really need this?” and then within 20 mins I am verbalizing an anxiety or painful memory that I have never uttered aloud or shared with another soul! I stuck at it and now I'm reaping the benefits. For instance, he has helped me identify that I was living a profound mind-body disconnect, where I lived only in my head and saw my body as another person, another being separate from me. And speaking of my body…

3.     3. I lost 15 lbs.

I lost 15 lbs. in two months and now I know how to lose 1 lb. a week in a sustainable, fun way. (I can’t believe I’ve become American enough to use lb. instead of kg but the secret reason is that weight-loss numbers sound more impressive in lbs., so I lose weight in lbs. and gain it in kg.) Since I became conscious that my body was unacceptably imperfect – when I was bullied at age 11 – I’ve seen losing weight as simultaneously essential and impossible. Learning to love, accept and mold my body seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Then, this summer, all that changed when I got a hand-me-down bike from my uncle, primarily to help me get around town sans Ubers and the subway.

I never learned to ride a bike as a kid so I taught myself at age 29 at Sternberg Park in Brooklyn. It was scary but I said to myself “dumber people than you can do this” and in three rides I got the hang of it. Then I wanted to figure out how much exercise a bike ride actually gives you, so I bought myself a Fitbit. Then I said I wanted to measure these results, so I got a weighing scale. I was 189 lbs. and it came as a jarring surprise. I began doing either a 5k run (500 calories) or a 20-mile bike ride (1,200 calories) every day, six days a week, and using Sunday afternoons to meal prep. My daily diet is oats & almond milk for breakfast, a spinach, bean and meat stew for lunch, and pan-seared chicken & baked veggies for dinner – all punctuated by fruit and green/black tea. I allow myself 3 cheat meals a week. This is my life now and it's delicious.

I lost 10 lbs. in the first month and 5 lbs. thereafter and this regimen feels natural and energizing and has even led me to sleep better. Maybe the boys from middle school were right and I’ll never lose my hand-me-down love-handles but when I look in the mirror I like what I see and love how I feel.  

4.     4. I figured out what I want from a relationship

One of the more terrifying moments of 2020 – obviously aside from actual terrifying things like Covid cases in my family and Arsenal paying Willian £220,000/week – was realizing that my whole approach to relationships was wrong. I had only been thinking about what I wanted my partner to be, rather than how I wanted the relationship to feel. This is another revelation that Craig helped me both diagnose and remedy. I used to say – get ready to cringe – that I was looking for someone who was highly educated, “successful”, ambitious, purpose-driven, globally-minded, etc. I thought I knew my “type”. Then, this summer, I dated someone who was absolutely not my type and she made me feel more comfortable, valued and exhilarated than anyone had done in years. We realized I had to do a lot of work on myself so we ended things cordially. And so, I got to work. Big, scary, life work where you have to put yourself under a microscope and come face to face with your flaws and deficiencies.

I realized that my criteria were not wrong per se, but that they were merely proxies for how I wanted to relate to someone, to feel around them. For example, I wanted someone highly educated because I wanted to feel secure: I linked education with intelligence, intelligence with financial stability and financial stability with a comfortable life. I have a better idea now of what I’m looking for in a relationship, including things like being able to be my authentic self by connecting both at an ‘adult’ level (through physical intimacy) and at a ‘child’ level (through humour). I realized I need both. And I’m OK to wait until I find the person that makes me feel the way(s) I want. 

This has lifted the fog of dating desperation that long clouded my judgement. I just can’t wait for Covid to be gone so we can actually storm dancefloors, visit galleries, warm houses, survey museums, catalogue Taco trucks, christen AirBnbs, and perform all the other dating pageantry that helps you learn about a new relationship. Being patient will be hard. But I think it’ll be worth it.

5.     5. I stayed sober

This was my third year of being sober – my third year of being the best version of myself. All the accomplishments above were only possible because I quit drinking in January 2018 and used that year to figure out how to live a full, fun life without alcohol. To be honest, I rarely even think about alcohol any more and certainly never feel any pangs to return to it. Life is good; life has never been better.

With the life I’ve worked to build for myself, every year of sobriety gets easier and more fun. That’s why I need to keep reminding myself that I’ve achieved something worth celebrating – especially in a difficult pandemic year and a time of so much other change in my life. I defeated my demon every single day through 2020. I used to turn to alcohol to escape my reality, to escape difficulty, to escape loss. The gift of sobriety is that every day you do not drink, is something to celebrate. There is nothing to escape. You get addicted to winning. My life now has reached a sweet moment, where every day is a victory.

So there you have it. Maybe next year is a disaster and we look back at this blog and laugh. But for now, I thank you for reading this far. I would love to hear your favourite accomplishments this year, because I know there are many. I hope you take time to reflect on your own strength and success and you find comfort in sharing the happiness in the lives of your favourite people. Merry Christmas!

Disappointing Women of New York: Part 3

(This will be the last post in this series. As you can probably tell, these posts (Part 1 & Part 2) are more a reflection of my own insecurities and immaturities than any commentary on women in general or on dating the ones who live in New York City. I have disappointed my fair share of women - maybe I'll do a blog on that some day. Any flaws I’ve highlighted in these ladies and their actions are dwarfed by my own and by the galaxy of terror that men have wreaked upon the other genders on our planet. I was at fault in some way for everything that I'm going to tell you about. I’m sure "Disappointing Shravans of New York" could be a book unto itself. I wish all these women – all women in general – only success and happiness. On this dreary Saturday though, I just wanted to blog, to vent, to make myself feel better. So, without further ado, let’s finish what we’ve started.)

 

20 five-year-olds

Ever since I moved to America’s liberal Northeast in 2015, a dominant cultural narrative has been repeated to me again and again and ingrained in me: Women are queens. Men are trash. Women = good, men = bad. Men are boorish pigs who sometimes surprise you with tact and charm but overwhelmingly, they are the vicious aggressors in an age-old battle whose tide has only recently begun to turn. All my best friends in America are liberal women and these ideas provide the stars by which we navigate dating, workplace dynamics and other touch-points of gender interaction. Women by default are good and right and men are bad and wrong. This is the prism through which I’ve been taught to view the world – first at graduate school and then while working in New York. And largely, I have come to agree. It is a prism that serves me well because it can help me compensate for my many unconscious gender biases. But if you’ll humour me today, I’d just like to challenge the notion this one time. Just this once, and then I’ll go back to assuming the best in women and the worst in men, I promise. Sometimes – sometimes – women can be really, really mean. And for some reason, the ones who’ve been the worst to me have all been 25. So, I’m going to make a sweeping, silly, anecdotal generalization: Women in their mid-20s are children.

 

Ghosts in the System

We had been dating almost three months when I told her I loved her. She didn’t say it back and that was fine. We had talked about this. I think it’s fine to tell someone you love them just because you want to, rather than because you need to hear it back (for it to be real). We met shortly after I moved to New York and we went from 0-100 at a speed that surprised us both. But we stuck with it because it felt right. We would hang out often and have the most wonderful time together. We had met each other’s moms. We hadn’t made any long-term plans but we were really into it. She made life fun. For once, I stopped planning every waking moment and just lived every day. It was a joy.

When I wake up in the morning and I’m excited about the day just because I get to spend it with my partner, I know I’m in love. So I told her. And it felt great. She never said it back to me but she would send me long, drunk text messages late at night telling me how great I was. I felt fine about our dynamic; there was not an imbalance. They were three of the best months of my life.

Then one day she went to Paris on holiday for two weeks and stopped replying to me. 

I had never been ghosted like this before, especially not by someone I loved. She did not reply to me even on her return. I think it was more than a month of radio silence before she dumped me over text. “What a queen. YAS! Slay!”

Perhaps I had come on too strong. Perhaps our three-year age gap was beginning to tear at the spontaneity of the romance. Perhaps she had just realized she was bored of me. It doesn’t matter. You do not ghost someone who has told you they love you, who you’ve introduce to your family, and then dump them over a text message. You act like a grown-up. But alas, 25-year-olds are not grown-ups. 25-year-olds are children.

 

War Correspondence

It started on Hinge, of course. (I do not know how people meet outside of dating apps.) She was a consultant. She had gone to Yale too. She “checked all the boxes”. We talked for a bit and then she said she was traveling for work and would be back in a couple weeks. And of all places, she was in Bombay! It was her first trip to India and she was traveling alone.

This was a couple months after I’d been dumped by aforementioned Ghost Girl and so I think I had come across as a bit desperate to this new lady. In any case, the power dynamic was definitely in Check Box Chica’s favor. But as soon as I realized she was in my hometown and was working on a project that was close to my heart, I offered to help. I genuinely went into “help your friend visiting Bombay” mode. She gave me her email and we emailed each other every day. Aside from restaurant recommendations and site-seeing tips, I also connected her with my industry contacts and friends who would be best placed to advise her on her project. I remember writing honestly, “even if we never meet, I just hope you have a good experience in India” and she replied saying “Oh we will definitely meet when I’m back! This is amazing! Thank you so much. Etc.”

We never met.

We had exchanged 31 emails before she ignored me. An email a day between two strangers for two weeks; each message reaching across 11 time-zones. It was kind of nice to try online dating via 3 lines on an email every night. It felt like writing letters to a soldier on some front-line. Did my soldier die or defect?

Looking back on my emails, I was definitely too eager to impress and too anxious to show my virtues. But. I don’t think you ignore someone who has gone out of their way to help you when you’re traveling alone for work to their country for the first time. I don’t think this is how “YAS Queen Slay me” queens should act. At least tell them you’re not feeling the chemistry or make something up? I wasn’t ready for this kind of behavior. Weren’t women amazing, emotionally intelligent archangels of kindness and virtue? This is what I had been told. I guess she was not. What she was, of course, is 25.

 

5pm Checkout

I knew it wasn’t really “going anywhere” with this girl. She came into my life a month after “we’ll definitely meet” Check Box Chica. This new woman was fun but we were both very different. We texted a lot but would meet only every couple weeks for a few months. She wasn’t my usual type and I was not hers. She had taught English in Southeast Asia for a while and was now working at an education non-profit, but she was still very much finding her mission in life. Alas, she was beautiful and I was lonely and so I gave it a go. On one occasion, she even took the train out to New Jersey, where I was baby-sitting for some family-friends on the weekend, and we went for a lovely hike in the nearby forest. We kissed for the first time over a waterfall. It was nice! There were no “expectations” or ever any conversations about where this was leading. It was two people showing up for each other in a frigid November when the big, scary city had started to ice shut.

Though we did not see each other over Christmas, we texted and shared photos of our vacations. She sent me a photo of her holding her baby cousin and I sent her one of me in a Christmas sweater. It was nice!

We even met once in January. And I was starting to consider whether we could maybe work after all, if we could meet a little more often and invest emotionally in each other. So, we made a plan to grab dinner on a Wednesday. The night before, I’d suggested a place in East Village and she said she was looking forward to it. 6pm tomorrow, we agreed. I had made a reservation. The Italian joint was known for its lasagna and its cheesecake.

I texted her the next day at 5pm to let her know I was leaving work soon. She texted back... saying that she had been seeing someone else all this time and that she wanted to give it a shot with him. So, she said she would not be able to meet me and that she was sorry. I was “a good guy who deserved someone good, etc.”

Have you ever been dumped by text an hour before you’re supposed to meet for cheesecake? It’s a weird feeling. You kind of step back and ask yourself, “What…. What just happened?” How long had she been sitting on this decision and why did she wait until an hour before, to not only cancel the date but to cancel the dating? I could not imagine leading someone on like that and not being honest with them. But then again, I am not 25.

 

I think people in their mid-20s are inconsiderate because they are still looking to maximize their self-interest at any cost – and at anyone else’s expense. I know I was like that. When you’re in your late 20s, I think you’ve been through enough heartbreak to be gentle to people whom you’re breaking things off with. I think you learn decorum, etiquette, etc. Maybe all these women were ghosted and/or dumped by men in similar or worse ways to the ones above and so they saw nothing wrong with it. I feel sorry for them. It makes me sad that people on dating apps are so unkind to one another. There is never a fun way to end a relationship or let someone down easy, but there is a respectful way – a mature way. I’ve found women in their late 20s are generally kinder when they end things.

I think there’s a lot of room for kindness in dating. Who is going to teach us? The apps are great at matching us up but they are absent when it comes to helping us part ways. I don’t know if apps are going to help us get better at the hard bits, the messy bits. Only life teaches you that. 

 

Xavier's by Proxy

I am writing this from a marble island counter-top, in a sunny kitchen in South Orange, New Jersey. This is a home filled with love and laughter in the face of many difficulties – a home to family-friends that has been a beacon of warmth and care for me since I began visiting New York in 2005. This home has been my happy place – my emotional release valve – since I moved from India to the US in 2015. The man of the house attended St. Xavier’s College in Bombay with my parents in the 80s and they form part of a jolly friend group that has stayed together, multiplied and evolved over the last 40 years. There are five or so other families in this family-friend cluster that I consider to be more family than friends. Recently I thought about what has held their friendship together and why I feel so at peace with myself when I’m around them. I realized that wherever in the world I’ve lived, the aspects of my Indian identity that I feel most connected to are reflected in the values that the Xavier’s gang lives by. The Xavier’s gang of 50-somethings hang out with their Xavier’s friends’ kids – just as their own kids do! Strangely, it is in the company of these middle-aged moms and dads that I can be my authentic self. They make it so easy to be yourself. What on earth did that college teach them?

For the uninitiated, Xavier’s was founded by Jesuit priests in 1869 in South Bombay. I have not spent that much time on campus but I remember the beautiful architecture and the greenery and sense of space that surrounds it – a certain lightness and airiness that I felt so rarely in the rest of the city. I think two things happened that brought this Xavier’s gang together. The first was that the boys all grew up  in relatively educated, suburban middle-class households. They did not grow up poor but they were not South Bombay elite in mindset or pocketbook either. It seems there was a drive among them to learn about and explore the world, rather than simply continue a family business and/or accumulate wealth. So there was a self-selection into Xavier’s even before the Indo-Gothic halls could whisper their magical hymns.

From what I’ve learned about Xavier’s, the ethos of the institution is about critical thinking, social activism, tolerance, diversity and inclusion rather than simply academic or sporting excellence, for example. This is the second part of the Xavier’s experience that I think turned the Xavier’s gang into the progressive, kind, liberal bunch of wise-cracking air-guitarists they are today. In many ways, it seems Xavier’s was ahead of its time since those are the same buzzwords that schools, colleges and workplaces around the world seek to tattoo on their foreheads today.

Perhaps calling Xavier’s a ‘liberal arts school’ is going too far, but from what I have gathered from smitten alumni, it was a university that attracted well-rounded candidates and sought to round and ground them further in its core values. When my parents and the Xavier’s gang recount college stories, they’re always tales of music festivals, sports tournaments, rainy treks… not so much about the classes or their career office. Somehow, while the rest of the city (the country?) was striving for academic perfection, these brave Jesuits were trying to fill young Indians with empathy. My parents talk about the university staff – ‘Father’ this and ‘Brother’ that – more as mentors and confidantes than professors or teachers and have maintained astonishingly close bonds to those kindly old men to this day. I could name on one hand the professors I remember from my undergrad in the UK. And while I’m connected to my high school and undergrad friends, it’s not like we meet every year (or our kids live in each other’s homes) the way the Xavier’s mob operates.

When my sister and I were young and our parents would introduce us to members of The Gang, all they had to say was that these were “Xavier’s friends” and no further explanation was necessary. That name and the friends who carried it hold certain inalienable values that I’ve only recently been able to put my finger on. They exhibit the form of secularism and tolerance that makes me proud to be Indian. They live the Indian values that I most closely identify with.

Look at this extract from the charter of the Xavierites of Bangalore alumni group:

“We cherish values such as pluralism, liberalism, social responsibility and freedom of thought that we have imbibed from St. Xaviers, and which in turn, we wish to propagate. We also desire to champion worthy causes which reflect the values we cherish.

We, the Alumni accept that there are a number of worthy causes which might meet the desired criteria. We accept that the first such initiatives might be modest in scope. We accept that more than the need to achieve width or scale of coverage, is the need to make a beginning.”

I was astonished when I read the charter. It felt like someone had distilled my entire world-view and raison d'être – something I’d been trying to crystallize for years – into a 1-page word document.

It seems I trace a large part of my Indian identity to… my parents’ college? This is weird, right? I’m not saying everyone at Xavier’s is like this, but I do think The Gang is the way they are because of Xavier’s. They have even picked up friends over the years who never went to Xavier’s but in our minds they are all part of the Xavier’s Gang because they share the same values.

Some in the squad are more religious than others and those who practice, do so privately and in a way that even this staunch atheist can accept and cherish. When I heard them talk about social issues as a kid, they were always quick to criticize religious bigotry or gender-based discrimination. (Jokes about their wives do not count.) They hate politicians for being corrupt, not because of what party they were from. They love India enough to call out its flaws; those who live abroad pepper their homes with the country’s essence (plurality, debate, etc… as well as a rogue Ganesh figurine here and there). They love Indian music as well as Western music – they loved music because it was good, not because of who sang it. While all of them have done well for themselves and their families, they never ever ever ever talked about money obnoxiously or flaunted their wealth; conversations around material possessions are always tempered by Bandra-convent-school humility. It is so different to the energy in other well-to-do Indian living rooms where people become experts at talking about themselves, their newly acquired toys or the job their kid got with Goldman Stanley and Googazon or Bainkinsey.

When I look at my closest friends today – people in the late 20s or early 30s just starting to get married and have kids – I wonder if we will make the effort to travel and see each other, to stay as connected, to use our friendship as a foundation to build meaningful lives on. I hope so. Some of my closest friends are moving away from New York because of Covid. I am sad that I won’t get to be in the same city as them when their kids are born. I guess we have to trust that the bedrock of our connection is solid enough that it will endure the stresses of life on this curious planet. What work and sacrifice must have gone into keeping the Xavier’s ties strong? Or was it effortless? I wonder how the internet will impact my generation’s ability to cultivate family-friend groups. My sense is that we’ll remain connected to a lot more people, but not as closely as the Xavier’s mafia has stayed connected to itself.

What a gift their friendship has been to my life. How grateful I am that my parents went to a liberal, open-minded institution and built friendships with humble humans who work across such different professions. How thankful I am that my folks did not go to IIT/IIM – not that there is anything wrong with those great institutions or the sacred friend circles they must have bellowed out over the years. I’m just glad we’re Xavier’s kids who are as happy listening to Lucky Ali with an uncle and aunty in Washington DC as we are listening to Dire Straits with an aunty and uncle in Bangalore. Somewhere along the way the air-guitarists all learned to play off the same hymn sheet.