Chaos and Connection

You can’t see the world through the eyes of another.

Not even your son’s.

Yesterday, I walked the kilometer from the Sacred Heart Cathedral to the Metropolitan Hotel in the heart of Delhi, through the crowded gates of St. Columba’s, my old school, past a group of homeless men, still draped in the ragged blankets in which they had slept. A spliff had just been rolled, and my eyes met the man who was lighting it.

“Bam Bam Bhole!” I greeted him. He took a deep drag and raised his hand with the gentlest of smiles. I waved back, dodging splayed paving tiles, the gnarled roots of a giant ficus tree, the rigging cables of an electric sub-station. Turned left opposite Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. Almost six decades ago, my mother would bring us here on the first day of our final exams to touch our foreheads - mattha teko - before the Guru Granth Sahib. Past the roadside Kali Bari temple, a knot of supplicants and mendicants, of carelessly parked cars and cripples in tricycles waiting for alms from the faithful; a mess of plastic wrappers slush and banana peels underfoot, a bahurupiya with eyes dramatically underlined in kohl.

This is chaos, right? I asked myself. I wonder how my son sees this now, after nine years in the leafy suburbs and ordered streets of Chicago. And his girlfriend? Who just landed in India for the first time.

I passed into the sanitised forecourt of the hotel, where the parking valet recognised me from an hour ago, and asked with his eyes whether I wanted my car now. Later! I waved at him, and he smiled, as I walked to lunch in the ‘Garden of Joy’. Dining tables were decked out in white and salmon, awaiting the wedding party who trickled in from the cathedral, the bridesmaids in peach gowns, the groomsmen with little boutonnieres in their dark lapels. The bar was opened, the wine uncorked, the DJ unleashed, and we eased into the privileges of the moneyed, the waiters attentive, the bartenders practiced, the Emcee self-assured.

Eased, too, into conversation with familiar faces - about the Garhwal peaks, with Sudhir Sahi, veteran of a hundred expeditions, about Gurgaon real estate with David Rebello, about last Sunday’s blues concert with Olympie…

Ease is easy for the moneyed, I reflected as I slid into my car. We walk the streets of chaos knowing we can retreat into our ordered and feathered nests. In Pallavi Aiyar’s substack*, her friend Priya Malhotra wrote of my Delhi:

the streets hum with chaos, the air is thick with dust and petrol, and the disparities between wealth and poverty gape wide. And yet, amidst this, I see people who seem—dare I say it?—happier. Their circumstances, when measured against any global standard of ‘quality of life,’ are objectively harsher than those of the stressed and striving New Yorkers I left behind. But their faces, their words, their mannerisms suggest something else entirely.

The valet had driven up to me with a sense of triumph, his face alight with a smile when we exchanged places. And this, well before I handed him a new blue note. There had been smiles in abundance in the wee hours, too, when the family chauffeur had hugged Kedar at the airport, and said - “So many years a man, and you’re still so skinny!”

Through the day, we share our spaces with the people who cook and clean for us, who man our gates, and drive our cars. Too often, we take them for granted, but every so often you stop and ask - How do they accept these disparities, not erupt in resentment?

Here’s Priya Malhotra again:

A friend once told me, “Happiness is a function of expectations.” It’s a deceptively simple idea, but the more I sit with it, the more truth I find in it. Americans are taught to expect so much—to dream big, to reach for the stars, to believe that success is not just possible but inevitable with enough hard work. The downside? When reality falls short of these grand expectations, dissatisfaction is almost guaranteed.

In contrast, Indians often approach life with a different set of expectations. Stability, family, and community are valued as much as individual achievement. Life isn’t framed as a personal project to perfect, but as an experience to be navigated. Disappointments are absorbed into the ebb and flow of daily life, rather than magnified into existential crises.

I’m tempted to examine whether this is good for India, or bad. Will ambition make for a better India?

As a student of economics and entrepreneurship, I’m programmed to say - It will.

But India is a land that crushes ambition. For every Narayana Murthy or Nithin Kamath, there are hundreds of thousands who didn’t clear their JEEs, or the physical tests for army recruitment; there are farmers with failed crops, and vendors ejected from city sidewalks. Lowered expectations are, perhaps, a civilisational response to generations of deprivation and repression, a coping mechanism.

I don’t know whether it was civilisational, or genetic, but I was born with low levels of personal ambition, which faded further with every decade. I swim the lakes of aesthetic and intellectual delight, and take as much pleasure in the turn of a phrase as in a trade that turns good.

I know this comes from a place of acute privilege, but the muse that got this piece going was the visit of my son, and his privilege is even more acute than mine. He will discover the shape of his ambition over time, as did I. As for the chaos, I hope he will combat it, whenever he can, wherever he chooses to make his home.

But above all, I hope he will ever be able to reach out over the chaos, into the golden current of human connect, and smile with that stoned Baba.

• Pallavi Aiyar:

The Paradox of Happiness