Hey, What's Up?
It had been one of those nights.
Not the dramatic kind. Just the long, quiet grind of it, late hours at work bleeding into the nightly routine that my life runs on. Physio done. Passive exercises, leg stretches, the whole sequence that my body needs and my mind has long stopped arguing with. Dinner sorted. The kind of exhaustion that doesn't announce itself loudly, it just settles into you like sediment, until the line between awake and asleep becomes more of a suggestion than a fact.
I should have just closed my eyes.
But here's the thing nobody talks about. After the chores, after the routine, after the day has been packed up and put away, there is this particular feeling that creeps in if you just lie there in the silence. A restlessness. A quiet, low-grade sense of deprivation, like the day ended without you really living it. Like you got through it rather than inhabited it.
So the phone comes out. Music on, Insta open, blanket pulled up. And for a while, cocooned in that warm little bubble, I can almost convince myself that I am not missing out on anything. That this counts. That this is what me time looks like. The algorithm does its best impression of a social life and I let it, gratefully, because the alternative is lying in the quiet and admitting that I am a little lonely tonight.
It is a comforting lie. And I tell it to myself most nights.
I slipped into the familiar trance of the doom scroll. Dog videos first, obviously, because some things about me are entirely predictable. Then, because this is India and the internet never sleeps, something that quietly raised my blood pressure. A judge, educated and robed and carrying the full architecture of institutional authority, behaving in a way that made you wonder whether we have confused education with character. Whether clearing exam after exam and collecting degrees like trophies actually produces better human beings, or just better-credentialed ones.
My honest belief? The values your parents pass on to you will always outrun the education you acquire on your own. One shapes who you are. The other shapes what you know. They are not the same thing, and we keep pretending they are.
But that is a conversation for another day.
Because somewhere between the outrage and the dog videos, the algorithm served me something else entirely. A Simon Sinek reel. And if you know me at all, you know that man has a particular ability to reach through a screen and make you sit up straighter than you intended to.
He was talking about a friend of his. A friend who had been at her lowest, properly, quietly, dangerously low, and whose cry for help never reached him. When he found out, he went to her and asked the question anyone would ask, gently, carefully.
"Why didn't you reach out?"
And she said: "I did."
He checked his phone. She had. The message was right there, sitting in the thread like it had always been. It read:
"Hey, what's up? Wanna come over?"
He had missed it. Or seen it and told himself he'd reply later. Or let it slide into the noise of a full day and never came back to it. The way we all do. The way we all do, constantly, without ever pausing to consider what might be sitting inside a casual message from someone who didn't know how to say what they actually needed to say.
He also mentioned something a friend had shared with him, a documentary, a study, something along those lines, that spending just eight minutes with someone when they genuinely need you can make a world of difference. Not hours. Not a grand gesture. Eight minutes of actual presence. That is the unit of measurement for saving someone's evening, maybe more.
I lay there, phone in hand, the night doing its quiet thing around me.
And I thought about my friends.
The ones from school. From engineering. From B-school. The ones who carry the versions of me that exist nowhere else anymore. I have always been that person, the one who shows up, who means it when he says I'm there, who would walk the talk without needing to be asked twice.
But when was the last time I actually reached out?
Not reacted to a story. Not sent a meme. Reached out. Opened a conversation from scratch, just to say, hey, how are you actually doing.
The question sat there in the dark, more uncomfortable than I expected.
I have so many friends. And I am not in touch with a single one of them. Why?
The People I Mean
I have never been someone who had one group of friends.
I had several, across every chapter of life. Engineering gave me one constellation of them. MBA gave me another, equally vivid, equally irreplaceable, with its own cast of people I will do full justice to another day. Each world had its own frequency, its own particular version of me that existed nowhere else. And if you are reading this and you know me, really know me, you belong to one of those chapters. All of you.
Let me tell you about the engineering ones first.
There were the branch folks. Same department, same trenches, thrown together by the university's indifferent hand and somehow becoming something real. I was always the odd one out in that group, for the simple reason that everyone else was genuinely sharp and I was, by comparison, spectacularly not. What I lacked in academic horsepower I made up for in banter, and thankfully they kept me around for it. Our finest hours were never the quiet productive ones. They were exam seasons. The most stressful stretches of the calendar, when reasonable people went silent and focused, were somehow when we were most alive. Holding the whole thing together, as he always did, was Chikoti Baba. The life of that group. The thread that kept us woven into something that made sense.
Then there were the Delhi homies. This was the cool gang, and I say that without irony. They genuinely were. At the centre of it was Shrek, and if you know Shrek, you are already smiling. The man turns heads wherever he goes, and that has always been entirely gender agnostic. Suave doesn't quite cover it. He has taste in everything, music, fragrance, the way a room should feel, and being around him meant your own standards quietly upgraded without you noticing. He introduced me to Issey Miyake, which has been my perfume ever since. His room had a 4.1 creative speaker setup with a proper sound card, and when that system woke up the windows would rattle. The pink neon lights were the calling card. People would hear it and simply migrate there, the way you move toward warmth without making a decision about it. That room was home. That gang was the reason I somehow, against reasonable odds, made it out the other side as an engineer. We had each other's backs in ways that went well beyond academics. I'll write about Shrek and that whole chapter properly one day. It deserves more than a paragraph.
Then there was the music crew. This one pulled people from the other groups, like a Venn diagram that refused to stay tidy. What held it together wasn't a place or a history. It was a language. The shared, slightly evangelical conviction that certain songs matter in ways that are difficult to explain to people who don't already know. The Architect was the one we all looked up to, for the simple reason that while the rest of us loved music, he could actually make it. I can still hear those licks on drop D tuning, the particular warmth of it, the way a well-played chord on a dropped string sits differently in your chest. Those of us in that group spoke the same language, and finding people who do is rarer than it sounds.
And then, arriving later than the others but no less deeply, the Gulf Boys. A group that came together over FIFA sessions, music, and a shared devotion to the flavours of South India. They were a late addition to my life, but bonds that form late sometimes form fast, and this one did. Duda was at the heart of it, one of those people who makes a group feel like a group rather than just a collection of individuals in the same place.
Amongst all of those groups, there were four of us who kept showing up everywhere. Different gangs, different rooms, different occasions, but the same four faces, accumulating what I can only describe as a collective wisdom in the field of bhasad. Every front of life, emotional, existential, romantic, and yes, academic, we had somehow managed to generate significant data points across all of them. The academic front deserves a special mention. By the virtue of sharing a remarkable talent for flunking the same subjects, we found ourselves prepping for the same exams across three different batch years. I hold the honour of having done this the most number of times, which I choose to interpret not as a failure of effort but as a commitment to thoroughness.
And so, inevitably, we would end up together. My room or Turnip's, late at night, when the performances were done and the real version of the evening could finally begin.
There was AJ, a year junior to me, and quite possibly the most emotionally generous human being I have ever known. AJ and I were the certified gods of sentaap, a word we coined ourselves, because no existing vocabulary adequately captured the particular art of being foolishly, magnificently, unapologetically sentimental. AJ wore his heart so far outside his sleeve it was practically a flag. One smile from the right person and he would already be quietly sketching out a future together, going all in before the ink was dry on the opening chapter. He was there for anyone and everyone who needed him, unconditionally, without keeping score. An amped-up version of me, if I am being honest. He won on both counts, more episodes to talk about, and more times of being let down despite deserving the opposite. Women, I believe, may have coined the term friendzone partly in response to people exactly like AJ. He was that guy. The best kind of that guy.
Then there was Bengali Baba, a year junior to AJ and Turnip, which made him the youngest of the four, though you would never know it from the way he carried himself. Absolute class, packed, and I say this with nothing but love, into a compact and formidable package. He was known, somewhat unfairly, as Mister Misinterpreted. The thing about Bengali Baba was that he was beautifully, almost surgically direct, with a masterclass-level command of satire and the perfectly timed sardonic kick below the belt. People who didn't know him well often got it wrong, took the fluffy exterior for the contents. But those of us who did knew exactly what was inside. One of us, completely. Underneath it, the same values, the same loyalty, the same embarrassing depth of feeling that the rest of us were equally guilty of.
And there was a fourth one.
Turnip.
Sir.
Sir.
Sir!!
My phone lit up one ordinary morning with those three words, and just like that, fifteen years collapsed into a single notification.
Turnip was in Bangalore.
Now, Turnip was the most sorted of the four, which made him our unlikely anchor. Same batch as AJ, a year junior to me, he lived by the clock and kept his emotional shields up with the quiet discipline of someone who had decided early that composure was non-negotiable. You would not crack him easily.
But he had a thing for good music.
And I had my way with booze.
Between the two, Floyd on the speakers, a glass in hand, the night doing its slow work, the shields would come down. And what you found underneath was not what the daytime version of Turnip let you see. Something more open, more unguarded, more fully himself. The vulnerabilities out there for grabs, as he might put it if he were the kind of person to admit such things, which he was not, except on those nights.
Those nights, man.
I still think about one in particular. The night he decided to ask out a girl from the same college, same batch, the whole impossible proximity of it. He was walking circles around the roundabout between the inner hostels. Literally circles. For hours. From late in the night into the early hours of the morning, working up to something that from the outside looked like a man preparing to defuse a bomb.
AJ and I were beside ourselves.
We tripped on him through the entire night. Well, I say we. AJ was the enthusiastic accomplice. But I was the architect of the operation, deploying every ounce of emotional leverage and persuasive nonsense I had in my arsenal, the way I was somewhat notorious for doing. No space given, no mercy shown, no exit offered.
Just go. Just say it. What's the worst that can happen. Go.
What neither of us had accounted for was that the thing we were treating as a monumental, potentially life-altering act of courage was, for Turnip, when he finally did it, essentially a walk in the park. He came back with the composure of a man who had just ordered a coffee.
We stared at him.
He became our guru of sorts after that. Which felt entirely right.
So when those three words arrived that morning, I replied around 10:30, just before reaching office. We fell back into it immediately, the way you do with certain people, no warm-up required, no awkward recalibration. Plans were made. He'd come to Bellandur the next day, swing by the office, we'd step out for a bite and drinks. Simple. Easy. Long overdue.
Sitting in that exchange, I found myself trying to remember the last time we had actually done this. The last time we'd sat across from each other with something good between us, Floyd in the background, nowhere in particular to be.
I couldn't place it.
Which should have told me something.
The Day That Didn't Happen
The next day arrived the way days do when you have something good waiting in them. With the quiet promise of it sitting at the back of your mind while the morning does its thing.
And then work happened.
Not dramatically. Not a crisis with sirens and flashing lights. Just the ordinary, relentless kind of busy that fills every available gap in a day until there are no gaps left. One burning issue leading to the next, each one reasonable on its own, all of them adding up to a day that consumed itself entirely before I had noticed it going.
I remembered the next morning.
Not in time. Just in the way you remember something after the window has already closed, that particular sinking feeling of a thought arriving to find the flight had already left. He was flying out that morning. The bite and drinks and the catch-up in Bellandur, the plan we had made so easily, so happily, had simply not happened. Swallowed whole by a Tuesday.
I picked up my phone.
And then I put it down.
I did not have the stomach for it. He had come all the way from the US. Not to meet me specifically, I knew that, he was here for his cousins. But he had remembered me. In the middle of a visit to another city, in the middle of his own life, he had sent three words and lit up my entire morning. And I had let the day eat the plan whole without even a message to say, hey, I am sorry, today got away from me.
What do you even say after that.
The honest answer is that I still don't know. Because I haven't said it yet.
He flew out. I said nothing. The chat sits there, the plan still technically the last thing we discussed, as if time stopped at "come to Bellandur" and neither of us has acknowledged that it didn't happen.
Here is the thing though. And this is the part I have sat with uncomfortably since.
He didn't ping either.
No follow-up in the morning. No hey, still on? No I'm heading out, catch you next time. Nothing. Which means we were both okay enough to let it go without a word. Two people who genuinely wanted to meet, who were happy to hear from each other, who made a plan with real intention behind it, and then both quietly let life make the decision for them.
The thing about friendships like this is that they don't need maintenance to survive. You can pick up the phone after two years of silence and within thirty seconds you are back in someone's room at two in the morning, mid-conversation, like time did not have the nerve to interrupt. The warmth doesn't require feeding. The history doesn't expire.
But that is also exactly the trap.
"We will always pick up where we left off" is a beautiful truth that quietly becomes an excuse to never pick up at all.
I Think I Changed
Here is the question I could not stop turning over after that morning.
I have always been the one who reached out. The one who showed up. The one who, without being asked, picked up the phone, made the plan, pushed through the awkwardness of re-initiating when too much time had passed. That was not something I did consciously. It was just who I was. As natural as breathing, as automatic as reaching for my phone at the end of a long night.
So what happened.
The honest answer is that it was gradual. Not a single moment, not a decision I made, just a slow drift that I did not notice until I was already far from the shore.
Life on a wheelchair comes with its own share of maintenance. Not just the physical kind, though that is real and constant and non-negotiable. But the mental load of it. The energy that goes into navigating a world that was not built with you in mind. The recalibrations, small and large, that become so routine you stop registering them as effort. And layered on top of that, the particular madness of wanting to prove something. To make it big. To push your body and your mind to the point where you are not just keeping up but pulling ahead.
I went hard at that. Harder than I probably needed to.
And somewhere in all that pushing, I stopped pausing. Stopped reflecting. The things that were once intrinsic to me, the reaching out, the checking in, the being present in the lives of people I loved, quietly got deprioritised. Not because I stopped caring. But because the bandwidth ran out and I did not notice until the habit was already gone.
I am still me. But for a long time I had to say it out loud to make it true, because it was not being felt implicitly by my actions anymore.
And that is a strange and uncomfortable place to be. To know who you are on the inside while your outside tells a different story.
This is not a crisis. It is a correction.
And the correction, in my case, is going to involve a spreadsheet.
I know. I know. But hear me out, because this is entirely on brand and I have made my peace with it. I am going to build a proper one. Names of every friend I have, across every chapter, every group, every gang. Filters for birthdays and anniversaries. A column for whether they have kids, because I am apparently trailing behind on that particular front and it feels important to know. A column for where they are in the world right now. A place to log the last time we actually spoke, not reacted to a story, not sent a meme, actually spoke.
A live, readily available, slightly over-engineered record of the people who matter.
And then, when I do speak to them, I want to capture something from that conversation. A small note. Where they are in life right now, what they are dealing with, what they are building. There are AI tools now that sit in on calls and capture notes and summaries, the kind we use at work for professional conversations. And the idea of having something like that for the conversations that actually matter to me, not the quarterly reviews but the ones with the people I grew up with, feels both slightly absurd and completely right.
The goal is simple. To stop assuming that "we will always pick up where we left off" is a substitute for actually picking up.
It is not a grand gesture. It is not a dramatic reinvention. It is just a conscious decision to treat the most important relationships in my life with at least a fraction of the intentionality I bring to everything else.
Starting, if I am being honest, with one specific phone call I have been putting off for too long.
Turnip, if you are reading this, and I rather think you are, this is me doing the groundwork.
Eight Minutes
Remember what Simon Sinek said.
Eight minutes. That is all it takes. Not a grand plan, not a perfectly worded message, not waiting until life settles down enough to do it properly. Just eight minutes of showing up for someone who needs you, or someone you need, or someone you have simply not spoken to in longer than you care to admit.
The message doesn't have to be eloquent. It doesn't have to explain the silence or justify the gap. It can be as simple as three words.
Sir. Sir. Sir.
We spend so much of our lives optimising the wrong things. The inbox, the deliverables, the carefully curated feed that makes us feel connected while we drift from the people who actually know us. The ones who were there in the room at two in the morning. The ones who walked circles around a roundabout with us. The ones who would pick up on the first ring if we called right now, after all this time, without a single question asked.
They are still there.
Being there for someone in your heart is not the same as being there in their life. And the people who matter deserve more than good intentions.
So here is what I want to leave you with.
Open your contacts. Scroll past the work numbers and the food delivery apps and the acquaintances you keep meaning to catch up with. Go to the name that makes you smile before you have even tapped it. The one you have been meaning to call since things settled down.
Things have settled down.
Call them.
Find your Turnip. And reach out before it gets too late.
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