Here is something I noticed while thinking about the best and worst airports I have passed through in India. Hyderabad is clearly the better one, and yet I can barely describe it. Thiruvananthapuram was the harder passage, and I can still recall the queue, the heat, the whole afternoon. Good infrastructure works by disappearing, which means it leaves us nothing to hold. Bad infrastructure interrupts us, and interruption is how memory records anything at all. I wrote about that gap, and about why the story we tell is almost never the same as the ranking we should trust.
The Airport I Rank Worst Is the One I Can Still Describe
Ask me for the best airport I have passed through in India and I will say Hyderabad without hesitating. Ask me what it looked like and I will struggle. I remember an impression of width and quiet, of moving forward without being stopped, of arriving at the gate earlier than I expected to. That is nearly all. Ask me about Thiruvananthapuram and I could give you the queue, the heat of the hall, the particular exhaustion of standing in a building that was designed for a smaller century.
This is the strange arithmetic of travel, and I think it holds beyond airports.
One. Excellence is built to disappear. A well-run terminal succeeds by removing every point at which you would have had to think. Signage answers the question before you form it. The line moves before you resent it. The result is that a good airport gives you nothing to hold. You cannot describe a smooth passage because smoothness has no edges. Hyderabad earned my highest rating by making itself unmemorable, which is the closest thing to a compliment infrastructure can receive and the worst possible outcome for anyone hoping to write about it later.
Two. Friction is the only thing that records itself. Memory does not archive comfort. It archives interruption. Every detail I can still recall from Thiruvananthapuram exists because something in that building resisted me, and resistance is a form of attention. The place made me notice it. Buildings that work do not require to be noticed, and so they are not.
Three. A bad airport asks something of you, and asking is a kind of intimacy. The efficient terminal treats you as a unit to be processed and does it so well that you never meet it. The struggling one draws you into a relationship. You have to negotiate with it. You find yourself watching the staff, judging the crowd, calculating your own chances. You become, briefly, a participant rather than a passenger. Nobody enjoys this. Everybody remembers it.
Four. Comfort produces no witnesses. Consider what actually gets said about travel. Nobody has ever held the attention of a room by describing an unremarkable connection. The stories that survive are delays, missed flights, an official who would not bend, a stranger who did. The airport I would recommend to you is not the airport I would tell you about, and we should be honest that these are two different rankings, using two different currencies.
Five. By the currency writing uses, the ranking inverts entirely. If the measure is what a place gave me to keep, then Thiruvananthapuram was the more generous of the two. It handed me something to carry. Hyderabad, doing everything right, sent me away empty. The best airport I have been to gave me a good day and no material. The worst gave me a bad day and a page.
I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this argument that romanticises dysfunction, and it deserves resisting.
The value of the difficult passage is retroactive, and it is unearned. It arrives only after you are safely through, only if you were never really at risk, and only if the cost of the delay was measured in irritation rather than in something serious. I could afford to find that terminal memorable. Somebody in the same queue could not. For the traveller who is ill, or old, or carrying a child, or migrating for work with papers that invite a second look, that friction is not texture. It is the thing itself. My essay is their ordeal. It would be indecent to convert their afternoon into my anecdote and then call the exchange fair.
So the honest conclusion is not that bad airports are secretly good. It is that we have been using one word for two entirely different judgements and pretending they belong on the same scale.
Judged as infrastructure, Hyderabad is better and it is not close. That is the ranking that matters, because it is the one that determines how a hundred thousand people are treated on a given Tuesday. An airport’s job is to be forgotten, and forgetting is a public good.
Judged as experience, the failure wins, but only because experience is a scavenger. It feeds on whatever goes wrong. It has no interest in the days that were merely fine, which is why the best-organised parts of our lives leave the thinnest record behind.
The prompt asked me to name a best and a worst. I have. But the ranking I actually trust is the first one, and the story I actually have is the second, and I no longer think that gap can be closed. Some of the finest things we pass through are designed to leave no trace. We should be glad of them, and we should accept that we will not be able to say why.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 07 September 2026
I have been thinking about why certain storytelling habits irritate me and others do not. It is not repetition. The disguised stranger and the letter that arrives too late have been in use since the epics, and a good writer can still make them feel new.
What bothers me are the tropes that misdescribe experience. Screen grief lasts a single rainy scene. Redemption arrives at the graveside. A montage turns a novice into a master. Reconciliation happens in one conversation instead of the several awkward attempts real life requires.
I have written up six of them, along with a simple test I now apply to any story: does it know what it has left out? Would love to hear which one annoys you most.
Six storytelling habits that quietly misdescribe how people actually change
Not every worn device in storytelling is a fault. Repetition is how narrative works. The disguised stranger, the journey that changes the traveller, the letter that arrives too late — these have been in use since the epics, and a good writer can still make any of them feel like the first time. Familiarity alone is no crime.
The tropes worth being irritated by are a narrower set. They are the ones that misdescribe experience: that teach an audience to expect something of themselves, and of the people they love, which life will not supply. Here is the case, in six parts.
1. Grief that finishes
There is the funeral, the rain, the long look at the horizon, and by the next act the character is functioning normally. But grief is not a scene; it is a climate. Traditions that took mourning seriously built duration into the form itself — the seven days of shiva, the thirteen days of Hindu ritual observance, the Greek chorus still lamenting long after the body has been carried off. Modern screen sorrow has no duration. It has a montage. Audiences who absorb this learn to feel defective when their own grief is still there in month eleven.
2. Redemption that arrives in the last five minutes
The cruel father softens at the graveside. The tyrant weeps and is forgiven. Real change is possible — but it is slow, unglamorous and mostly invisible, made of small revised habits over years. Classical drama knew this. Greek recognition scenes usually come too late to save anybody, and the lateness is the whole point. A story that hands out transformation as a curtain gift trains us to wait for a moment that will not come, instead of beginning the work that would.
3. The person who exists in order to be lost
The wife with no interior life who dies so the hero can acquire a motive. The mentor who has no ambitions of his own and is killed at the midpoint. The lie here is not that people die. It is the suggestion that a human being can be a device — that some lives are load-bearing and others are scaffolding.
4. The single conversation that repairs everything
Two people finally say the true thing and the wound closes. Anyone who has attempted a real reconciliation knows the true thing usually has to be said several times, on different days, in worse words, with long silences in between, and that the first attempt often makes matters worse. Reconciliation is a practice, not a speech.
5. Evil that announces itself
The villain who explains his plan, wears the colour of menace, and is unmistakable from his first appearance. Actual harm is rarely so obliging. It usually arrives plausible, well-mannered, procedurally correct and entirely convinced of its own decency. Fiction that makes wrongdoing legible flatters us: it implies we would have recognised it. Most people who were there did not.
6. Mastery without labour
Three minutes of training set to music, and the novice is formidable. This may be the most quietly damaging of all, because the young absorb it first. It edits out the only part that actually matters — the long, dull, unwitnessed middle, where nobody is watching and nothing yet looks like progress.
The common thread is compression. Storytelling must compress; that is its nature and its gift. The failure is not compression itself but compression that forgets it is compressing — that presents the shortened version as the true shape of the thing.
So the test I would apply is a modest one. Does the story know what it has left out? The best writers signal the omission somehow: a line, a look, a scene years later that shows the wound is still there. That single gesture is the difference between a convention handled with care and a convention that lies.
Which of these has annoyed you longest — and which one, handled by the right writer, has actually moved you?
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 06 September 2026
If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
Five traditions examine a single wish: to relive the year when the family was together and life felt simpler. Greek nostos says the place has moved. Japanese mono no aware says the value would evaporate on arrival. Portuguese saudade says you never fully left. Hebrew zakhar says the past is an instruction, not a destination. Modern memory research says the film may be flattering the footage. What survives the cross-examination is not a longing for the past but a demand on the present.
A short comparative essay on attention, memory and the ordinary evening you are currently not noticing.
WordPress Daily Writing Prompt · 5 September 2026
Five Languages Cross-Examine a Single Wish
If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
The wish is simple. I would relive the year when the family was together and life felt simpler. I would change nothing. I would only like to stand inside those ordinary hours again, now that I know what they were worth.
It is such a common wish that it has been named independently in at least five languages, by people who never met, in centuries that never overlapped. Each names a different part of it. Set side by side, they stop sounding like sympathy and begin sounding like cross-examination.
One. Greek: nostos.
The ache is not for a time but for a return. The Greeks paired nostos with algos, pain, and gave us nostalgia, literally the pain of homecoming. Their epics make the point without mercy. Odysseus reaches Ithaca at last and finds it altered, smaller, occupied, requiring a fight. The verdict: the door you are asking to walk back through has since been repainted. What you want is not the house. It is the version of yourself who lived in it without noticing.
Two. Japanese: mono no aware.
The tenderness we feel toward things precisely because they are passing. The cherry blossom is not prized despite falling. It is prized because it falls. Applied to my year, this is an unwelcome finding. The ordinariness I mourn was not valuable and then lost. It became valuable by being lost. Restore it and it turns ordinary again within a week.
Three. Portuguese: saudade.
The presence of an absence. A fullness, not a void. Saudade concedes something the other traditions withhold, that longing is itself a form of possession, and that the year is not gone but held in a different shape. The verdict here is gentler. I am not separated from that year. I am carrying it in the only form it can now take.
Four. Hebrew: zakhar.
To remember, but never passively. In that tradition remembrance is an act with obligations attached. You recall in order to do something. This lens refuses my petition outright. It does not ask what I want returned. It asks what the memory now requires of me. Which call I make this week. Which chair I sit in while someone is still occupying the one beside it.
Five. Modern psychology: the reminiscence bump.
Autobiographical memory clusters disproportionately around a handful of years, and those years are not selected for happiness. They are selected for novelty and for the formation of the self. The finding is deflating and useful in equal measure. The year I want back may simply be the year my memory recorded at the highest resolution. Its perfection could be an artefact of storage.
The composite verdict.
Not one of these traditions grants the return. Greek says the place has moved. Japanese says the value would evaporate on arrival. Portuguese says you never fully left. Hebrew says the past is not a destination but an instruction. Psychology says the film may be flattering the footage.
And yet all five agree on the finding underneath. What I am actually asking for is attention. The capacity to register an ordinary evening while it is happening rather than forty years afterwards. No tradition offers that retroactively. Every one of them offers it now.
Which is the quiet cruelty of the question, and also its use. Somewhere this week there is an unremarkable evening that will one day be the year I would petition for. It is available at full resolution. It asks nothing of me except that I look up.
Background for readers who wish to verify or extend the five lenses used in the essay.
1. Nostos and nostalgia
Nostos is the Homeric term for the homecoming of a hero, and gives its name to an entire genre of returns, of which the Odyssey is the surviving masterwork. Algos denotes pain or grief. The compound nostalgia was not Greek but was coined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, in a medical dissertation describing acute homesickness among Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. It was, for nearly two centuries afterwards, classified as a disease. Its migration from pathology to sentiment is itself a small history of how the modern self came to be understood.
2. Mono no aware
Usually rendered as the pathos of things, or a sensitivity to ephemera. The phrase was given critical weight by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga in his readings of The Tale of Genji, where he identified it as the governing emotional principle of Japanese literature. It differs from Western melancholy in an important respect. It does not protest transience. It accepts transience as the source of beauty rather than the enemy of it.
3. Saudade
Portuguese and Galician, with no exact equivalent in English. Commonly glossed as the presence of an absence. It carries an affectionate rather than a bitter charge, and it has a distinct cultural home in fado, the Lisbon song tradition, and in the literature of Portuguese maritime departure. Note the structural difference from nostalgia. Nostalgia grieves a lost time. Saudade holds a person or place continuously present in their absence.
4. Zakhar
The Hebrew verb for remembrance, appearing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures in a form that is consistently active rather than contemplative. To remember, in this usage, is to act upon what is remembered. Remembrance is covenantal and ethical, not merely wistful. This is the tradition that converts memory from a private comfort into a public duty, and it is the reason the essay treats the fourth lens as the one that refuses the request.
5. The reminiscence bump
A well-replicated finding in autobiographical memory research, first described in the psychological literature of the 1980s and studied extensively since. Adults asked to recall life events produce a disproportionate concentration from roughly ages fifteen to thirty. The leading explanations are the novelty of first experiences, the encoding advantage of self-defining events, and the availability of a stable narrative script for that period. The finding does not say those years were better. It says they were recorded more densely.
A note on method
The essay deliberately places four humanistic traditions and one empirical finding on the same bench. This is not to rank them but to test whether a wish that feels intensely personal survives examination from five directions at once. It does, but not in the form in which it was made.
The practical residue of the essay, for readers who prefer their conclusions unornamented.
The question posed by the prompt is retrospective. The answer it produces is not. That inversion is the whole point, and it is worth stating plainly.
First
The year you would choose is rarely the year of your achievements. Ask ten people and most will name a period of unremarkable stability rather than a period of success. This is information about what we actually value, and it usually contradicts what we spend our years pursuing.
Second
The standard of proof for a good year is lower than we think while living it. Presence of people. Absence of dread. Ordinary food, ordinary evenings, ordinary argument. These conditions are frequently met and rarely noticed.
Third
The failure being mourned is not a failure of circumstance. It is a failure of attention. That distinction matters because circumstance cannot be recovered and attention can be practised immediately.
Fourth
There is a test available. Name the year you would relive. Then list what specifically you would want returned. If the list contains events, the longing is for the past. If the list contains people in adjoining rooms, the longing is for presence, and presence has a current address.
Fifth
Somebody in your life is currently living inside the year you will later petition for. They do not know it. Neither do you. That is the only reason to look up from the screen this evening.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 05 September 2026
What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done when no one was watching?
Bravery with an audience is partly a performance. Bravery without one is simply what you are. The bravest thing I ever did was tell one person a truth they did not want to hear, with nothing in it for me. New post on courage nobody sees.
I told a human being an uncomfortable truth to their face, with no third person in the room.
That is the whole answer. What follows is why I think it qualifies.
I. The Qualifier Is Doing All the Work
1. The question does not ask what was hardest. It asks what was brave without an audience.
2. Courage performed before witnesses carries a return — admiration, reputation, the record of having done it.
3. Remove the witnesses and you remove the return. What is left is the act itself.
4. Plato put the same test as a thought experiment: give a man a ring that makes him invisible and see what he does. The ring is only a device for asking what a person is when nothing is owed to appearances.
II. Why Private Truth-Telling Counts
1. It was not unwitnessed in the ordinary sense. One person saw it — precisely the person who did not want to hear it.
2. What was absent was the third party, the audience that rewards. No applause, no vindication, no record.
3. The likely outcomes were all costly: anger, denial, withdrawal, the end of the friendship.
4. The person I was trying to help was the same person I was about to hurt. There is no way to separate the two.
5. Gratitude, when it comes at all, arrives years later and often unspoken. You act without expecting to be told you were right.
6. Physical courage is usually brief. This kind has a long afterlife — the silence that follows, the changed footing, the wondering whether you were wrong.
Bravery with an audience is partly a performance. Bravery without one is simply what you are.
III. Two Kinds of Uncomfortable Truth
1. Truths about a situation: the arithmetic does not work; he is not going to leave her; the illness will not wait.
2. Truths about a person: you are unkind to those who cannot answer back; you have apologised many times and changed nothing; you are lonely because of how you treat people, not despite it.
3. The first kind wounds hope. The second wounds identity.
4. Almost all the courage is required for the second — and almost all the good, when it comes, comes from the second.
IV. The Traditions Do Not Agree
1. Confucian ethics names the private test directly: shen du, watchfulness in solitude. Character is what holds when observation stops.
2. The Greeks called candid speech parrhesia and treated it as the mark that separates a friend from a flatterer. Aristotle held that flattery is the corruption of friendship, not its excess.
3. The Stoics divided the act: the speaking is yours, the receiving is theirs. You are answerable for the first and not the second.
4. The Hebrew tradition made rebuke a duty owed to a neighbour, and treated silent resentment as the graver failure.
5. Buddhist teaching on right speech applies three filters — is it true, is it useful, is it timely — and refuses to let truth alone settle the question.
6. The Indian dharmasastra takes the sharpest counter-position: speak the truth, speak it agreeably, and do not speak a disagreeable truth. Read carelessly, this is a licence for cowardice. Read carefully, it is a warning that a truth delivered for the speaker’s satisfaction is not virtue at all.
7. The disagreement is real and worth keeping. Candour is not automatically good. It becomes good only under conditions.
V. The Conditions I Have Learned to Apply
1. Am I speaking for their benefit, or for the relief of no longer carrying it? If the second, wait.
2. Have I earned the right? Truth from someone who has stayed lands differently from truth delivered in passing.
3. Is it about something they can still do anything about? Otherwise it is a verdict, not counsel.
4. Is it in private? A truth spoken before others is an accusation, whatever the intention.
5. Am I prepared to be there afterwards? Saying it and disappearing is an act of aggression dressed as honesty.
6. Say it once, plainly, and then stop. Repetition converts honesty into pressure.
VI. The Cowardice That Passes for Kindness
1. Most silence in the face of a needed truth is not gentleness. It is self-protection with better manners.
2. “I did not want to hurt them” usually means “I did not want the hour that would follow.”
3. Hinting is worse than silence: it discharges the duty in your own mind while leaving the other person uninformed.
4. The clearest sign is this — the silence cost me nothing and cost them a great deal.
VII. Why the Question Is Well Made
1. It quietly separates courage as character from courage as reputation.
2. It refuses the dramatic answer. Most real bravery is undramatic, brief, and unrecorded.
3. It carries a paradox: to answer it publicly is to end the privacy that made the act what it was.
4. The paradox resolves only if the point is not the deed but the definition. I am not reporting a moment. I am proposing a standard.
When no one is watching, there is no one to confirm that you did the right thing. That is not a defect of the situation. That is the situation.
What is the truth you are carrying at this moment that someone deserves to hear from you, in private, with nothing in it for you?
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 04 September 2026
We are all shaped by the way we were raised. Our families teach us how to work, how to handle difficulty, and how to treat the people around us. Some of those lessons stay for life. Others change quietly as we grow older — and sometimes we find, without ever having decided to, that we are doing something in the exact opposite way we were taught.
That is not always a rejection of our upbringing. Very often it is simply growth. But the prompt asks for something more specific than a general reflection on change, so let me be specific.
The One Thing I Do Differently
I was raised in a house where decisions were announced, not explained. The elder decided; the young complied. A reason, if it ever came, arrived years later and usually by accident. To ask why was not forbidden — it was simply not done, in the way one does not ask the sea to justify the tide.
I explain. Persistently, and sometimes past the point of usefulness. Every decision I have taken — in a family, in an office, at a committee table, in a draft laid before Government — has gone out with its reasons attached.
The difference is not that I decide less firmly than my elders did. It is that I will not let a decision travel alone. A decision without its reason is an instruction. A decision with its reason is an invitation — the other person may now examine it, and may find the flaw I missed.
The Silence Was Not Cruelty
It would be easy to write this as an indictment, and the indictment would be unjust. My elders were not withholding reasons out of contempt. That was what authority looked like in every house on the street. Confucian ethics placed filial devotion near the centre of the moral order; the Tamil vocabulary I grew up inside turned on kadamai and ozhukkam, duty and ordered conduct, on the assumption that the young learn the reason by living it rather than by hearing it. The household was a small polity, and sovereigns, in the older understanding, did not give reasons. Explaining oneself was what a servant did when called to account.
And yet each of those traditions preserved the seed of its own correction. Athens asked the free man to render his account. The rabbis kept the defeated argument on the page beside the winning one. Indian and Islamic jurisprudence both insisted that a ruling state the reason beneath it. I did not import a foreign value. I recovered a suppressed one.
Keeping the Values, Changing the Method
Changing the way we were raised does not mean rejecting everything from it. There are values worth preserving — integrity, responsibility, perseverance, consideration for others. What changes is how we express them.
Discipline does not have to mean harshness.
Respect does not have to mean fear.
Responsibility does not have to mean carrying every burden alone.
My father believed that an elder is answerable for the young — answerable to God, to the family name, to the bare arithmetic of survival. I believe exactly the same thing. I have only changed the creditor: I hold myself answerable to the person standing in front of me, which is why I owe her the reason. I did not replace his ethic. I re-routed it.
Perhaps maturity is learning to separate the value from the habit, and the lesson from the method.
Different Does Not Mean Better
One caution belongs here. Doing something differently does not automatically mean doing it better. There is a kind of explanation that is not respect but self-defence — reasons piled so densely, and delivered so fluently, that no one can find the seam to object at. I have done this. A trained drafter can build an argument the way a mason builds a wall and call it transparency.
My elders’ silence was at least honest about its power. It said plainly: this is my decision, and you are young. My explanations occasionally disguise the same thing under better manners. Every generation has its blind spots, and the useful question is never which was right, but what each can still teach the other.
We Are Writing Our Own Chapter
Our upbringing is the first draft of our story. It shapes us, but it is not the final version. As adults we are given the chance to revise — to keep what made us stronger, and to learn from our parents without copying everything they did.
The striking-out is easy to narrate. It makes a good story and it flatters the teller. The quiet retention is harder to find, and it is usually the more important half of the inheritance.
So the question I would leave you with is not the one the prompt asked. It is the one underneath it: what did you change in form while keeping entirely intact in substance — and have you ever thanked anyone for it?
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 3 September 2026
The prompt asked for my five favourite apps. I struck out favourite and wrote most used.
It is not pedantry. It rests on a rule simple enough to teach in an afternoon:
Do not enact a word you cannot prove.
“Favourite” is a claim about affection, and affection will not stand cross-examination. Ask me on a good morning and I will name the app that lets me publish. Ask me at eleven at night, after a day that has gone sideways, and I will name something else.
An answer that moves with the mood is not a fact. It is a feeling in a fact’s clothes.
“Most used” does not move. There is a register, kept without my permission and without my flattery. The screen-time report is the one witness in my life that has never tried to make me look good.
So, from the record rather than from sentiment:
Jetpack · Notes · WhatsApp · Gmail · Photos
But an app need not be a favourite to become part of a life. And that leads to a harder question, which the prompt does not ask:
Which of these could I least afford to lose?
Frequency and consequence are different measurements.
The Subtraction Test
Delete each one in turn. Ask what collapses. Whatever survives deletion was never load-bearing.
WhatsApp
Delete WhatsApp, and the failure is immediate. Committee coordination, family conversations, the Association and its inexhaustible small crises, and the group where a verse arrives each morning — all of it disappears from my screen at once.
Yet most of it would reroute within days. What I would miss is not the messages themselves but the warmth they carry: a good morning, a word of encouragement, a simple how are you.
Technology can make communication feel impersonal, but behind every message there is a person.
Painful, loud, and largely recoverable.
Gmail
Delete Gmail, and institutional life becomes noisy. Minutes stop moving. Drafts stop circulating. Three institutions notice within a day.
But email is a channel, not a possession. The correspondence remains somewhere beyond the app. Find another door and the house is still standing.
I have lost the key, not the house.
Notes
Delete Notes, and almost nothing collapses that anyone else can see. Nobody asks what happened.
But an idea that arrives while reading, travelling, or simply watching something ordinary can disappear within the hour if I do not write it down. Some notes become nothing. Others slowly become an entire reflection.
The loss is invisible from outside and complete from inside:
A thought you failed to record is not misplaced. It never existed.
Jetpack
Delete Jetpack, and the publishing stops. The writing does not. I can write on any surface that will take ink. What disappears is the publishing channel, and that small daily confirmation that someone, somewhere, opened the page.
The streak ends too — and a number of that size acquires a gravity it has not honestly earned.
Jetpack matters to Rise & Inspire. But Jetpack is the door, not the room.
I would miss the door. The room remains.
Photos
Then comes Photos. I use it for almost every post, searching for the image that gives a reflection its visual entry point. Words carry the message; a picture often helps the message find its way.
But that is not why losing Photos would hurt most.
Delete it, and I do not merely lose a tool for selecting images. I lose what the tool has been carrying. I open Photos looking for a header image and find myself standing, without having meant to, before years of people, places and moments I have kept.
The blog would recover. Some of the rest would not.
The tool was never the point. I had simply not noticed what the tool was carrying.
By consequence of loss: Photos → Notes → Jetpack → Gmail → WhatsApp
The order reverses almost exactly.
Jetpack is what I create. Notes is what I think. WhatsApp is whom I am connected to. Gmail is what I manage. Photos is what I remember.
And memory is different from everything else. A message can be resent. A draft can be rewritten, and is often improved by the second attempt. An email can be recovered through another channel.
But nobody can go back and re-photograph 2011.
What the Test Is Really For
The prompt wanted a list. What it produced was a small audit. And the audit returned an uncomfortable finding:
My attention is allocated almost exactly inversely to what I claim to value.
Attention follows urgency. Urgency is loud. And the loud things are the ones wearing notification badges. Photos has never once demanded anything of me. That is precisely why it will outlast the rest.
So run the subtraction test on your own five most-used apps. Do not ask only what they do; that is the easy question, and the prompt has already answered it. Ask instead:
What would fall if each one disappeared?
And then ask which absence would be the quietest.
In my experience, the quiet one is the answer.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 2 September 2026
What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?
R I S E & I N S P I R E
riseandinspire.co.in
The Best Thing I Ever Found on the Street Was a Street
WordPress Daily Writing Prompt | 1 September 2026
What is the best thing you have ever found randomly on the street?
John Britto Kurusumuthu
It is a quarter past nine, and the road is closed.
Not officially. There is no barricade, notification, or diversion board. Just a trench the colour of brick dust running across the carriageway, a heap of red earth, four lengths of pipe stacked like sleeping animals, and a man in a green shirt holding a torn red flag as though he is not entirely convinced of his own authority. Behind him, traffic has folded in on itself. An autorickshaw sits sideways, unable to turn back, while someone leans relentlessly on a horn.
I have files under my arm and a meeting at half past nine.
The pavement has disappeared into the same trench. Going around by the main junction would take at least nine minutes on foot, perhaps more with the crowd at the crossing. I do the arithmetic that everyone does at such moments and arrive at the same unhappy figure. Twelve minutes late, in front of people who will not say anything about it and will not forget it either.
Then I notice a gap between two compound walls.
It is wide enough for a car, though there is no car there. I have passed it for months without noticing it. A lamp post stands at the entrance, wrapped with old wire. Beyond it, the tar gives way to an older, browner path, worn smooth where wheels have travelled.
I turn in.
The noise stops almost at once. Two steps in, and the horns become a distant complaint. Instead, I hear a tailor’s sewing machine: stop and start, stop and start. He does not look up. A faded film poster curls on the wall beside him.
The lane smells of wet earth and coconut husk. It rained during the night.
A dog lifts its head from a doorstep, looks at me, and settles down again. A woman throws water across her front step and sweeps it flat with a coconut-rib broom, and the water runs to the edge and finds the drain without being told. She moves aside to let me pass.
Neither of us speaks.
A drumstick tree leans over a wall. Jasmine grows along a wire, and its fragrance reaches me before I see it.
The lane bends.
Somewhere nearby, a radio announces the nine-thirty news. A hen crosses with four chicks hurrying behind her. A boy pushes a bicycle far too large for him, steering around me with the effortless confidence of someone who knows every inch of the lane.
Then the lane bends again and appears to end at a gate.
For a moment, I can feel twelve minutes becoming eighteen.
The gate is rusted and padlocked. I am already composing the explanation I will give at the meeting when I notice that the lane does not end. It turns right, narrowing between a plantain patch and a culvert with a concrete slab across it. The slab has a crack in it shaped like the letter Y.
I cross the slab.
Forty feet. Fifty.
A wall on my left looks unfamiliar. Then I recognise the next one. I have seen it every working day, from the other side.
I emerge beside the junction, ahead of the traffic still trapped behind the trench. There is a tea shop at the corner with a bench in front of it, and two men on the bench who have watched me arrive from a direction nobody arrives from.
I look at my watch.
I am four minutes early.
That was twenty-three years ago.
I walked that lane perhaps four thousand times afterwards. The main road was widened, made one-way, dug up, and repaired again. The lane was never touched.
The tailor’s room became a photocopy shop and eventually a permanently shuttered room. The dog died, and another dog took its place, and it too, in time, stopped lifting its head at me. The boy with the oversized bicycle must be past forty now.
The crack in the culvert slab is still shaped like the letter Y.
I showed the lane to three colleagues over the years and to nobody else. Each of them, within a week, began speaking of it as though they had discovered it themselves, which is the correct way to hold such a thing.
Everything else I have ever found on a street I eventually spent, returned, or lost. A coin goes. A note goes faster. A wallet is handed back. A key sits in a drawer until it is forgotten. A photograph may be looked at once and never again.
But the lane remains.
The best thing I ever found on the street was a street.
And the only reason I found it was that the way I meant to go was closed.
Rise & Inspire — riseandinspire.co.in
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for September 1 2026.
What is the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?
31 August 2026 | John Britto Kurusumuthu
The prompt expects a story with a verb in it. But the kindest thing anyone ever did for me is not well described by what was done. It is described by what was left out. So let me record it the only way it can honestly be recorded — as a list of absences.
We are trained to describe kindness additively. Someone gave. Someone stayed. Someone paid. The grammar of gratitude runs on transitive verbs, and the accounting is simple: the more that was added, the greater the kindness.
That accounting fails on the act I have in mind. Measured by what it contained, it was modest — a difficulty removed at a moment when I could not have removed it myself. Measured by what it deliberately excluded, it was the most carefully constructed thing anyone has ever done on my behalf. Every element that would ordinarily attend such an act had been identified in advance and taken out.
Six omissions, in the order I noticed them — which was not the order in which they were made.
I. There was no asking
The need was met before I had to name it. Anyone who has ever had to ask knows the quiet levy that asking imposes: you must first construct an account of your own insufficiency, then present it to someone who is at liberty to decline it. The help, when it comes, arrives already tinged with that transaction.
Maimonides ranked the degrees of charitable giving into eight ascending grades, and he placed giving before one is asked above giving after. He was not making a sentimental point. He was making an administrative one: the asking is itself an injury, and a well-designed act of giving eliminates it at source.
II. There was no audience
No one saw it. There was no room in which it was announced, no gathering at which it was acknowledged, no third party who could later refer to it in my presence.
Islamic tradition names this precisely — sadaqa al-sirr, the charity of secrecy — and a well-known hadith numbers among those granted shade on the Day of Judgment the one who gives so privately that his own left hand does not know what his right hand has done. The Gospel of Matthew reaches for the identical image of the two hands. Two traditions, working independently, arriving at the same anatomical metaphor for the same insight: a witness converts a gift into a performance, and the receiver becomes the audience’s object rather than the giver’s equal.
III. There was no receipt
Nothing was recorded. No note, no message, no entry in any ledger I have ever been shown.
Seneca devoted an entire treatise to the subject and reached a conclusion that reads almost as a rule of drafting: the one who receives should never forget; the one who gives should never remember. A remembered gift is a live instrument. It can be produced later, and the mere possibility that it might be produced is enough to alter the standing between two people. To give without record is to destroy the instrument at the moment of execution.
A witness converts a gift into a performance. A record converts it into an instrument. Both leave the receiver smaller than they found him.
IV. There was no mention afterwards
In the years since, it has never been raised. Not in anger, not in affection, not in the oblique way people have of reminding you of a thing by conspicuously declining to remind you of it.
The Bhagavad Gita sorts giving into three kinds, and reserves its highest classification for the gift offered to a fitting person, at a fitting moment, with no expectation of anything returning. The gift given with an eye on the return is placed lower — not because the recipient is worse off, but because the act has been quietly converted into an investment. What distinguishes the two is almost entirely a matter of what happens afterwards.
V. There was no debt created
This is the omission I understood last and admire most. The thing was arranged in such a way that accepting it required nothing of me — no gratitude I would have to keep paying, no obligation held open. It was framed, with some care, as a convenience to the giver.
Confucian ethics has a vocabulary for this. Propriety — li — is not decorum for its own sake; it is the set of forms by which one person protects another’s standing in an exchange. The Analects records the principle plainly: help the one in need, do not add to the one who already has. The instruction is about direction, but the surrounding practice is about manner — how to give in a way that does not make the receiving conspicuous.
Valluvar puts the same duty on the giver with characteristic bluntness. In the Tirukkural’s chapter on giving, the discomfort of the encounter belongs squarely to the one with something to give; it is his business to feel it, and not to let the other person carry it. That is an unusual allocation of burden, and a precise one.
VI. There was no name attached
I learned who it was long afterwards, and by accident — from someone who assumed I already knew and mentioned it in passing. The person who did it had not intended me to find out, and has never been told that I did.
Buddhist teaching treats generosity as the first of the perfections and holds that the purest form is emptied of the giver — no donor standing behind the gift expecting to be seen there. That is easy to state and nearly impossible to execute, because the desire to be known as the source of a good thing is not a vice one grows out of. It is a permanent condition, managed at best.
And one omission of my own
This post does not name the person either. That was the last thing I had to work out about it: what the correct response is to a kindness engineered so thoroughly to leave no trace.
Gratitude wants to publish. It wants to say the name, list the particulars, and settle the account in public. But every one of those instincts would undo the specific thing that was done for me. The act was designed to leave me standing at full height, unindebted and unobserved. To narrate it properly would be to reverse the design.
So the sixth omission is theirs and the seventh is mine. The only faithful way to record an act of concealment is to continue it.
What the omissions leave
We tend to think of generosity as an additive art — more given, more good. But the highest kindness I have received was subtractive, and its whole difficulty lay in the removals. Anyone with means can add. What is rare is the discipline to identify, in advance, every element that would have diminished the other person, and to take each one out: the asking, the audience, the record, the reminder, the debt, the name.
Six traditions, none of them talking to the others, all arrived at some version of this. Maimonides ranked it. The hadith shaded it. Seneca legislated it. The Gita classified it. Confucius formalised it. Valluvar assigned its burden. That degree of convergence across languages and centuries suggests we are not dealing with a cultural preference but with something closer to a structural truth about what people are: that a person can be helped and lowered in the same motion, and that the whole art lies in preventing the second thing while accomplishing the first.
What is left, when the removals are done, is not a story with a hero in it. It is just a person still standing where they were, no shorter than before, unaware for years that anything had happened at all.
That is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. I am not able to tell you what it was.
Rise & Inspire — riseandinspire.co.in
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 31 August 2026.
Today’s writing prompt asked a simple question: if the salary were the same, what job would you be doing right now?
I answered it as a vacancy notice — post, scale of pay, essential qualifications, hours of work, leave, probation. Then I withdrew the notice, because the post is not vacant.
The interesting version of this question is not additive but subtractive. Not what you would take up if you were free, but what would still be standing if the money were removed from the description. Some of what we do will not survive that removal, and there is no shame in it. But something usually does. It is generally smaller than we expected and older than we remembered.
Notification of Vacancy
John Britto Kurusumuthu
WordPress Daily Prompt · 30 August 2026
Prompt: If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?
GOVERNMENT OF ONE’S OWN LIFE
DEPARTMENT OF UNFINISHED INTENTIONS
No. DUI/Vac/2026/01 Dated, the 30th August, 2026.
NOTIFICATION
Applications are invited from eligible candidates for appointment to the post specified below, on the terms and conditions hereinafter set out.
1. Name of post. — Writer.
2. Number of vacancies. — One. The post is not transferable, cannot be filled by deputation, and no waiting list shall be maintained.
3. Scale of pay. — Identical to that presently drawn by the candidate, whatever it may be. It is clarified that the parity of pay is a condition of this advertisement and not an inducement under it. Candidates who require the salary to be different are advised not to apply, as they have not understood the question.
4. Age. — No upper limit. The lower limit is the age at which a person first suspects that the work he does and the work he is for may be two different things. This age varies. In some it arrives at twenty-three; in others it waits until the farewell function.
5. Essential qualifications. —
(a) Ability to sit alone in a room at an hour when nobody is watching, and to produce something that nobody has commissioned.
(b) Sustained evidence of having done the work already, without appointment, without sanction, and without a file number.
(c) Willingness to be judged by the reader and not by the reporting officer.
6. Desirable qualifications. — Familiarity with any of the following, the traditions being listed in no order of precedence:
(a) The counsel of the Bhagavad Gita (III.35) that one’s own duty, imperfectly discharged, is better than another’s duty performed well — the doctrine of svadharma, which locates excellence not in the grandeur of the task but in its fitness to the person.
(b) Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics (I.7) that the good of any thing lies in its characteristic function, its ergon — the flautist’s good being flute-playing, and the human being’s good being the exercise of what is distinctively his.
(c) The Confucian insistence, in Analects XIII.3, upon the rectification of names — that when names are not correct, speech does not accord with things, and affairs are not carried to completion. A person miscalled is a person misemployed.
(d) The German word Beruf, which carries at once the sense of occupation and of calling, and which the Reformation pressed into service to dignify ordinary labour — the cobbler serving as truly at his last as the cleric at his altar.
(e) The Japanese ikigai, understood in its native and humbler sense as that which makes the morning worth rising into. (Candidates are cautioned that the four-circle diagram now circulated under this name is a later Western construction and forms no part of the original idea.)
7. Nature of duties. —
(i) To notice.
(ii) To find the word that fits, and to reject the three that nearly fit.
(iii) To publish daily, whether or not the day has been kind.
(iv) To be read by strangers in countries the incumbent will never visit.
(v) Such other duties as the sentence may require.
8. Hours of work. — Chiefly before dawn. The post carries no fixed hours, which in practice means all of them; a paragraph left unfinished at nine in the morning will follow the incumbent into the afternoon and sit down with him at dinner.
9. Leave. — Nil. Casual leave is theoretically admissible but has never been availed. Applications for leave will be sanctioned and then quietly ignored by the applicant.
10. Probation. — Lifelong. Confirmation is not contemplated.
11. Method of application. — Candidates need not apply. They need only begin.
12. Note. — Attention is invited to the fact that the salary attached to this post is nil, and that clause 3 above is therefore satisfied automatically, whatever the candidate presently earns. This is not a drafting error.
A Corrigendum, Immediately Issued
The above notification is withdrawn. The post is not vacant.
It was filled some years ago by a man who never saw the advertisement, submitted no application, and received no order of appointment. He simply started, on an ordinary morning, and then did it again the next day, and has not yet found a reason to stop. There are now more than eleven hundred consecutive mornings on the record, and not one of them was paid for.
That is my answer to today’s prompt, and I concede at once that it is a cheat. The question assumes that the salary is what holds us in place, and invites us to imagine the door swinging open. Remove the money, it says, and where would you go? It is a good question and a generous one. But I find, on trying to answer it honestly, that I have already gone. The desk I would walk to is the desk I am sitting at.
I do not offer this as an accomplishment. It is closer to a diagnosis. Forty years of drafting law taught me a habit I could not put down at retirement: the search for the exact word, the suspicion of the approximate one, the conviction that a badly built sentence will eventually injure somebody. That habit was once a duty attached to a designation and a pay scale. It is now simply how I spend my mornings. The designation fell away and the work did not.
Which is, I suspect, the real test the prompt is proposing. Not what job would you do — that is easy to answer expansively, and most of us answer it with something we have never tried and are unlikely to try. The harder test is subtractive. Take the salary out of the question and see what is still standing. Some of what we do will not survive the removal, and there is no shame in that; a great deal of honourable work is done for money and is none the worse for it, and the man who says otherwise usually has money. But something usually does survive. It is generally smaller than we expected and older than we remembered.
The traditions listed at clause 6 disagree about almost everything, and it is worth saying plainly that they cannot all be right. Aristotle is arguing about human nature in general; the Gita is speaking to a particular man in a particular caste on a particular battlefield; Confucius is chiefly concerned with the ordering of a state; the Reformers were making a theological point about the dignity of the laity. They are not four ways of saying the same thing, and I distrust the anthologies that flatten them into one.
But they converge on a single practical suspicion, and it is the one the prompt is circling: that a person can be fully employed and still not be at work. That there is a difference between the post one holds and the function one performs. That the name on the door and the thing being done inside can drift apart for years without anyone raising it in a meeting.
If the salary were the same, I would be doing this. I know that with the particular certainty available to a man who is already doing it for nothing.
The vacancy, in the end, was never the job’s. It was mine — and it took a long time to fill.
What survives the subtraction, in your case? Tell me in the comments.
Source notes to “Notification of Vacancy”
Purpose. Clause 6 of the notification lists five traditions in a single breath. The compression is a device of the essay and is not a scholarly claim. This companion sets out what each source actually says, in what context it says it, and where the popular modern use of it departs from the original. Points at which the essay simplifies are flagged expressly rather than quietly repaired.
I. Svadharma — Bhagavad Gita III.35
Text. The verse holds that one’s own dharma, though defectively performed, is better than the dharmaof another performed well; and that it is better to die in one’s own than to take up another’s, which is attended by fear. The opening line recurs almost verbatim at XVIII.47, though the second line of that verse turns instead on action determined by one’s own nature (svabhava), and holds that one who so acts incurs no fault.
Context. The counsel is addressed to Arjuna at the point of refusing battle. It is not general career advice; it is an argument against abandoning a duty that has become distasteful.
Caution. In the received text svadharma is bound to varna — duty as fixed by station of birth. The modern reading that treats it as a summons to discover one’s individual vocation detaches the term from that setting. The detachment is defensible and has a long lineage, but it is an interpretation and should be named as one. Gandhi read the battlefield allegorically; Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, by contrast, read the doctrine as a defence of the varna order and criticised it accordingly. The essay uses the softened modern sense without argument, and the reader should know that.
II. Ergon — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7
Text. Aristotle reasons that for a flute-player, a sculptor or any craftsman, the good lies in the characteristic work — the ergon — and asks whether a human being as such likewise has one. He concludes that the human ergon is activity of the soul in accordance with reason, and, where there are several excellences, in accordance with the best and most complete of them. (Bekker 1097b22—1098a20.)
Caution. This is the passage most often misapplied. Aristotle’s ergon is a claim about the species, not about the individual: he is identifying what human beings are for, not what any particular person is for. He does not hold that each of us has a private function awaiting discovery. The essay borrows the flautist illustration for a purpose Aristotle does not sanction, and the borrowing is deliberate rather than inadvertent.
III. Zhengming — Analects XIII.3
Text. Asked by Zilu what he would attend to first if entrusted with the government of a state, Confucius answers: the rectification of names. If names are not correct, speech does not accord with things; affairs are not brought to completion; rites and music do not flourish; punishments are not properly awarded; and the people do not know where to put hand or foot.
Caution (i). The concern is administrative and political — that titles of office and relation should correspond to conduct — not psychological. It is nearer to a doctrine of accurate designation in government than to any notion of personal authenticity.
Caution (ii). The authenticity of this particular passage has been questioned. Arthur Waley, among others, regarded it as a later accretion, partly because the vocabulary of zhengming belongs more comfortably to the philosophical disputes of a subsequent period. The point is contested and not settled; it is recorded here so that the citation is not made to carry more weight than it can bear.
IV. Beruf — Luther and Weber
Text. The German Beruf holds together the sense of an occupation and the sense of a summons. Max Weber, in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05), argued that the word acquired its distinctively modern colouring largely through Luther’s Bible translation, and that the effect was to invest ordinary worldly labour with a religious dignity previously reserved to the monastic and clerical life.
Caution (i). The figure of the cobbler serving God at his last is a paraphrase of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation as it is commonly summarised, and is not offered as a quotation from Luther. Formulations of this kind circulate widely in a quotational form; the underlying doctrine is genuinely his, the sentence is not.
Caution (ii). Weber’s larger thesis has been contested for a century — by R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and by many since, on both historical and causal grounds. The narrower philological observation about Beruf has worn better than the causal argument built upon it, and it is only the narrower observation that clause 6(d) relies on.
V. Ikigai
Text. The Japanese ikigai denotes, in ordinary use, that which makes life feel worth living — characteristically something modest and daily rather than grand and singular. Mieko Kamiya’s study Ikigai ni tsuite (1966) is the standard treatment; Ken Mogi’s later popular account likewise emphasises small satisfactions rather than a life’s overarching mission.
Caution. The four-circle diagram — what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for — is not Japanese in origin and is not what ikigai means. It is commonly traced to a diagram of propósito (purpose) published by Andrés Zuzunaga in 2011, subsequently relabelled ikigaiin an English-language blog post around 2014. That chain of attribution is widely repeated and appears sound, but it rests substantially on the later writer’s own account of what he did, and is reported here with that qualification. What is not in doubt is that the diagram post-dates and misdescribes the Japanese term — not least because it makes payment one of the four conditions, which the native sense does not.
Note. This last point is the one that matters for the essay. A prompt that asks what we would do if the salary were held constant is asking a question the Venn diagram cannot frame, because the diagram builds remuneration into the definition of a life worth living. The older sense does not.
VI. What the Five Do Not Share
It is worth stating plainly that these five cannot be harmonised. Aristotle is making a claim about human nature as such; the Gita is addressing a particular man in a particular station at a particular moment; Confucius is prescribing for the government of a state; the Reformation doctrine is theological, concerned with the standing of lay labour before God; ikigai is descriptive and domestic, and makes no metaphysical claim at all. Anthologies that place them side by side as five expressions of one insight are performing a conjuring trick.
What can honestly be said is narrower. Each tradition, from its own direction, takes seriously the possibility that a person’s designation and a person’s actual function may come apart — and each treats that gap as a matter of consequence rather than a private inconvenience. Confucius thinks it disorders the state. Aristotle thinks it forfeits the good life. The Gita thinks it invites fear. The Reformers thought it misdescribed where holiness was to be found. Kamiya thought it drained the morning of its reason. That is a convergence of concern, not of doctrine, and the essay claims no more.
Select References
— Bhagavad Gita, III.35 and XVIII.47. (Consult a translation that prints the Sanskrit; the two verses should be read together.)
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, ch. 7, Bekker 1097b22—1098a20.
— Confucius, Analects, XIII.3. See also Arthur Waley’s introduction and notes for the doubts as to the passage.
— Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05); English translation by Talcott Parsons (1930), particularly the discussion of Beruf.
— R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).
— Mieko Kamiya, Ikigai ni tsuite (1966).
— Ken Mogi, The Little Book of Ikigai (2017).
— B. R. Ambedkar, writings on the Bhagavad Gita and varna, for the contrary reading noted at Part I.
Standing note on attribution: where a source is paraphrased rather than quoted, or where an attribution is widely repeated but imperfectly evidenced, the fact is flagged in this companion rather than smoothed over in the essay. Readers who find an error are asked to write; corrections are published, not absorbed.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 30 August 2026.
Explore more at the Rise & Inspire archive | Daily Prompts
My Hobby Is Artificial Intelligence. It Has Made Me Steadily Less Modern.
You expect a post about the future. This is a report from the opposite direction.
Tell someone your hobby is exploring artificial intelligence and you can watch them assemble the rest of the sentence for you.
They assume you are one of two people. Either you are an enthusiast, breathless about the future, forwarding threads about how everything is about to change. Or you are the other sort, secretly hoping the whole thing collapses so you can be right about something. Nobody’s third guess is that you might be a person who, after months of doing this nearly every day, has become quietly and steadily more old-fashioned.
But that is the honest report, so it is the one I am filing.
It began the way these things do. Curiosity about a new technology, entirely ordinary. Then experimenting. Then, somewhere in the accumulation of unremarkable evenings, a habit — learning something, trying something, turning up some little possibility I had not considered. It has never stopped being interesting.
What I did not anticipate was the direction it would push me.
The contrast dye
There is a technique in medical imaging where a substance is introduced into the body not because anyone is interested in the substance, but because it makes the surrounding structures visible. On its own, the tissue is a grey blur. Against the dye, the shape appears.
That is what this hobby has turned out to be. I went in to study the machine. What I have actually been studying, for months now, is everything the machine throws into relief.
You do not learn what a thing is by looking at it directly. You learn it by encountering a very good imitation and noticing precisely where the imitation runs out.
And so, evening after evening, I have been finding out what was load-bearing all along — not in technology, but in reading, in writing, in thinking, in the company of other people.
What turned out to be load-bearing
Slowness, which I had always treated as a defect. When competent prose becomes abundant and instantaneous, the scarce commodity is no longer the prose. It is the hours of consideration behind it. I have started deliberately doing certain things more slowly, not out of nostalgia, but because slowness has quietly become the rarer input.
Provenance, which nobody used to ask about. For the whole of my life until recently, a sentence carried an implicit guarantee: someone sat down and chose it. That guarantee is now optional, and I have found myself caring intensely about a question I never previously had to ask — who made this, and what did it cost them. It is a startlingly old-fashioned question. It is also, suddenly, the interesting one.
Books written by people who could not have looked it up. I have drifted towards older writing, and I have thought about why. I think it is because an author working from a lifetime of accumulated attention writes differently from one assembling from what is available. The difference is not accuracy. It is a certain weight-bearing quality in the sentences, the sense that they cost something.
Idiosyncrasy. The machine has no accent. It has no regional habits, no crotchets, no wrong-but-alive turn of phrase that could only have come from one person who thinks in one particular way. After enough hours of unfailingly smooth competence, I have developed something close to hunger for a human being’s peculiarities — including the irritating ones.
Disagreement with actual people. The machine is agreeable. It will argue if instructed, and it will do so without any stake in the outcome. A friend who thinks you are wrong has something to lose by saying so, and that risk is precisely what makes the conversation worth having. I value it more now than I did a year ago, and I value it more because of a technology that cannot supply it.
The unexpected shape of it
None of this makes me a sceptic. I am not filing a complaint. The habit continues, most evenings, and I expect it to continue for years.
But if you asked what I have actually acquired from taking up the newest thing on earth, the answer is not a set of predictions about where it is going. The answer is a much clearer sense of what was quietly holding everything up before it arrived — the slowness, the cost, the peculiarity, the friction, the fact that a person chose the words and can be asked why.
I took up the future as a pastime.
It made an antiquarian of me, and I did not see that coming at all.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 29 August 2026.
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What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?
Everyone has a coincidence story. I checked, carefully, and I do not have one. That absence turned out to be far more interesting than any story I could have told.
The Coincidence I Never Had
Today’s prompt asks for the weirdest coincidence I have ever experienced. I sat with it for a while, walked back through the years, and came up with nothing.
Not a modest nothing. No lost heirloom returned by a stranger. No chance meeting with someone from my own street. No phone call from the friend I had just been thinking about. If the universe has been sending me signals, it has been doing so on a frequency I do not receive.
For a while, I blamed my memory. Now I suspect it is something else: a failure to notice.
What I Was Trained to Do with a Coincidence
I work with evidence. That changes how you hear the word coincidence.
Outside the courtroom, coincidence is a charming story. Inside it, coincidence is a claim—usually a contested one. One side says, “Look how unlikely this is.” The other says, “Unlikely things happen all the time, and noticing this one tells us something about you, not necessarily about the event.”
The law recognizes that repeated occurrences can become relevant when deciding whether something was accidental or intentional. Once may be chance. Twice invites a question. Eventually, a jury may stop believing in luck. But the law cannot tell us exactly where that point lies.
The Most Expensive Coincidence
Sally Clark’s two infant sons died thirteen months apart. She was convicted of their murder after a paediatrician testified that the odds of two such deaths in one family were one in seventy-three million.
That figure was based on squaring the estimated probability of a single death—an assumption that required the two deaths to be independent. That had not been established. The Royal Statistical Society later stated that there was no statistical basis for the figure, and Clark’s conviction was eventually quashed.
The error became known as the prosecutor’s fallacy: confusing the probability of the evidence if someone is innocent with the probability that the person is innocent given the evidence. They are not the same.
So no, I do not collect coincidences. I was taught to interrogate them, and the lesson stayed with me.
What I May Have Trained Away
And yet.
J. E. Littlewood offered a useful corrective. If we experience roughly a million events a month, even a one-in-a-million occurrence should happen to us about once a month.
The improbable, in other words, is not necessarily extraordinary.
But statistics explain why an unlikely event occurs. They do not explain why that particular event catches our attention.
Jung saw synchronicity as meaningful connection beyond ordinary causality. The Stoics imagined an interconnected cosmos. Buddhism’s dependent origination likewise sees events as conditioned and interconnected, while the empiricist offers the simplest explanation: the pattern may be real, but its significance lies in the observer rather than the world.
I can keep my scepticism. But one possibility costs me something.
If coincidence reveals what the observer is already carrying—an unanswered question, a forgotten name, a decision postponed—then someone who notices no coincidences is not necessarily seeing the world more accurately.
He may simply be refusing to say what he carries.
Perhaps he has stopped knowing.
That, I suspect, is my honest answer to today’s prompt.
I have no weird coincidence to offer. What I have is the suspicion that they have been arriving on schedule all along—and that I have filed every one of them under ordinary before it could ask me anything.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 28 August 2026.
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What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
Most people who abandon a book can tell you the page. I cannot, and that turned out to be the real confession.
No Admittance Except on Business
Most confessions of this kind come with a page number. People remember where they stopped — the paragraph, the airport, the winter. The abandonment has a scene, and the scene does most of the work of the essay.
Mine doesn’t. That is the part I find harder to admit than the abandonment itself.
The book is Marx’s Capital, Volume One. It is still on my shelf. I read most of it. I could not tell you, under oath, where I stopped.
Marx warned me, and warned me kindly. In the preface to the first German edition he grants that “every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences,” and then, with a candour I still think is the most attractive thing about him, tells his reader outright that “to understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty.” He was right. The opening is where most readers are lost — the value-form, abstract labour, the commodity that appears at first sight a trivial thing and turns out to abound in metaphysical subtleties. Later, to his French publisher, he put it less gently: “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
I climbed it. Slowly, twice over in places, with the particular humility of a man who reads a sentence, understands it, and finds by the next morning that the understanding has drained out of him.
And then the book opens out, the way a mountain path does. Whatever else Marx is, he is a tremendous writer, and once the categories are laid down he turns them on the factory inspectors’ reports, and the argument becomes unbearable in the good sense — the hours, the children, the lungs, the working day. I read that. I read a great deal further. Somewhere past all of it, without a decision and without a page, I stopped.
This is where I am supposed to produce a reason. Work, perhaps; a season that ran long. But I have finished other long books in similar seasons, and I distrust the alibi. The truer account is duller and less flattering. Understanding the principle behind a passage was, for me, sometimes not easy — and more often it was easy in the moment and impossible to keep. I could follow. I could not carry. Somewhere in there I began to read the way one reads a long document one has already decided about, which is not reading at all.
I teach, among other things, and teaching has given me an unforgiving test for whether I have understood something: can I set it in front of another person without hiding behind the author’s sentences? For long stretches of Capital I could not. I could summarise. Summary is what understanding looks like from the outside.
But there is a second thing, and it is the reason I still think about the book rather than merely regretting it.
Near the end of Part Two, Marx does something I have never quite got out from under. He announces that we are leaving the marketplace — “this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men” — and following the buyer and the seller of labour-power into “the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business.'” The sphere we are quitting, he says, is “a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”
Freedom, Equality, Property.
I earn my living in that Eden. Those are not slogans in my working life; they are the load-bearing assumptions of an instrument. Willing parties. Consideration. A meeting of minds. An agreement that is valid precisely because nobody was compelled. And Marx does not say the words are lies — that would be easy to argue with, and I would enjoy arguing with it. He says something more disquieting. He says they are entirely true at the level where I am standing, and that the level where I am standing is the surface.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a conversion narrative. I did not put the book down because it had convinced me, and I have not spent the years since as a Marxist. A good deal of the machinery he builds in that volume is contested, for reasons I think are serious ones. The form he calls a surface has also, in my experience, sheltered people who had nothing else standing between them and someone stronger; freedom of contract is not only an illusion sold to the weak, and a person who has ever been protected by a signature knows it.
And yet.
What haunts you is never the part of a book you failed to understand. It is the part you understood. I already knew how to read an agreement for what it does not say — that is most of the job. He made me wonder what an entire vocabulary might not be saying. Mine included. And then, somewhere in the later pages, I closed the book and did not open it again, and I have never been able to satisfy myself that the two facts are unrelated.
So I have no scene to offer you. No bookmark at page 612, no slammed cover, no moment. Only a volume on a shelf that I have read most of, and a threshold I keep finding myself back at, standing on the wrong side of it with a book I never finished — which is, I suppose, business enough.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 27 August 2026.
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Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?
You Would Hate It There
Daily Prompt, 26 August 2026: Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?
The question carries a hidden assumption — that the worlds we love would be pleasant to occupy.
Almost none of them would.
Loving a world is a reader’s relationship with it: total immersion, total safety, and an exit available on every page. Visiting is a consumer’s relationship, and consumers ask duller questions.
I ask the duller questions for a living, which has spoiled me as a reader. I can no longer enter a fictional world without wondering what my standing in it would be.
So: five unromantic questions. What is the water like? Who treats you when you fall ill? What is your legal position as a foreigner? Is there anyone to complain to? And can you leave on the day you meant to?
Hogwarts is a school with a serious record of injury and death, and a single matron holding the line against children who fly, duel, and occasionally meet Dark wizards in corridors. In fairness, wizarding medicine outperforms ours: bones regrown overnight, injuries our hospitals would call permanent treated before dinner. None of which is available to you. You would arrive without a wand, which in that society is not an inconvenience but a social disadvantage. And if you are a Muggle, you will not find the castle at all — it presents itself to outsiders as a ruin with a sign advising them to keep out.
Middle-earth means weeks on foot between anywhere and anywhere else. Its medicine is better than the joke allows: Gondor keeps the Houses of Healing, with trained healers and genuine herb-lore, and the returning king’s hands are said to heal what they cannot. But the Houses are a war hospital in a besieged city, and their best healer is otherwise engaged becoming king. You would arrive in Gondor as an undocumented foreigner during a siege, which is the worst possible arrangement of nouns.
Wonderland runs the most efficient legal system in fiction: sentence first, verdict afterwards. Delightful to read. Ask yourself how it reads as a party to the proceedings.
Westeros everyone already concedes is spectatorial. Nobody who claims they would visit means they would like to attend a wedding.
A galaxy far, far away offers unregulated transport, no consular service worth the name, and slavery practised openly on the stops your itinerary will actually cross. The Republic outlawed it; Hutt space never noticed. There are pleasant planets, presumably. The itinerary has a habit of ending somewhere dusty.
The pattern is not accidental. We love the worlds with the most jeopardy, because jeopardy is what makes a story worth telling — and jeopardy is exactly what you pay a travel agent to remove.
The better a world is to read about, the worse it is to be in.
Fandom has this backwards, and cheerfully so.
The honest answer to this prompt, then, is somewhere nobody would put on a poster.
I would defend the dullest place in English literature.
In defence of the Hundred Acre Wood
No currency. No exchange rate, no tipping, no taxi from the airport, nobody to overcharge you.
No courts, no bureaucracy, and very little crime. Rabbit once organised a kidnapping and the matter was settled by lunchtime.
No enduring antagonist. Not a defeated one, not a dormant one, not one who returns in the third act. The local monsters — heffalumps, woozles, the Backson — exist mainly in the Wood’s imagination, and the imagining is done by the residents themselves.
The worst incident on record is a flood. The second worst is a misunderstanding about a jar.
Adventure is correctly scaled. The local expedition — an expotition — is an afternoon walk with a stated purpose that nobody minds failing to achieve. This is precisely the amount of jeopardy a holiday can absorb.
And the melancholic donkey is not fixed. Not converted, not given an arc, not told to try harder. His house falls down and his friends rebuild it — in the original account, out of the very sticks they had unwittingly taken from it — and not one of them suggests the falling down is his fault.
Yes, it is boring.
That is the argument, not a concession to it.
Everyone wants a story to tell; almost nobody wants to be inside one while it is happening.
A story, experienced from the inside, is simply a stretch of time in which you cannot rest and events are outside your control. We call that a crisis when it happens to us and a plot when it happens to someone we are reading about.
A holiday is the deliberate purchase of a few days with no plot in them at all.
The test of a destination is not what could happen there. It is what could go wrong, how far wrong, and whether anyone would help.
Measured that way, a wood of a hundred acres, a small and settled population, a reliable honey supply and no history to speak of beats every world that arrives with a map in the front of the book.
Your turn — and not which world you love. Which one would you last a fortnight in, and come home glad?
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 26 August 2026.
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If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?
The Water Clock
If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?
It is a spring morning in Athens and the court has no roof. Five hundred men sit on wooden benches in the open air, chosen at dawn by lot — potters, farmers, a shipwright with salt still in the creases of his hands. Some of them will sleep.
At the front a bronze vessel drips water into a second below: a man’s allotted time, measured not in minutes but in water. When the upper jar runs dry you stop speaking, mid-sentence if need be.
The charges: that the accused does not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges, that he introduces new divinities, that he corrupts the young.
Then the old man stands. Seventy, barefoot, famously ugly, and he does not do what the court expects. He does not weep, has not brought his sons out to soften them, and says so, and says why — and the benches make a low sound. Thorubos, the Athenians called it: the murmur of a crowd deciding something. That is the sound I want. Anger? Delight? Or the noise a room makes when it understands that something has gone too far to be stopped?
Athens, 399 BCE. That is my answer, and here is the unromantic reason for it.
I would go as a witness in the narrow, legal sense — not to feel the day, but to fix the record. Because the record is terrible.
Almost everything we know of that trial comes from two men who loved him. Plato wrote years afterwards, a work of art rather than a transcript. Xenophon wrote another and was not even in Athens; he had it secondhand. Both are titled Apology — not apology, but defence speech, a literary genre with its own conventions and its own permissions. Neither is a stenographer’s page; there were no stenographers. Even the count, some two hundred and eighty against to two hundred and twenty for, reaches us through a compiler working six centuries later.
The most famous trial in Western memory survives as a partisan reconstruction, a genre exercise by an absent friend, and a late piece of arithmetic. In any court I would trust, that is not a record — it is hearsay with excellent prose style.
Take the seat and you could settle it: what was charged, in what words; whether he really proposed, as his own penalty, that the city feed him at public expense for life — an answer so precisely calculated to lose that I have never decided whether it is true or merely improved.
Then the honest limit, which the fantasy always skips.
A witness establishes what was said, never why. I could give you the words and the tally, not what moved two hundred and eighty men to raise a hand — piety, the long memory of the Thirty and the well-born young men he had taught, fatigue, the opinion of the man three benches down. Motive never enters the record. It stays in the room and leaves with the people.
Worse: I would come back carrying a memory, and memory is the instrument on trial here. Witnesses compress, smooth, acquire certainty about details they never saw, and do it in perfect good faith. I would return no more reliable than Plato — only more confident.
So the real reason is smaller, and harder to admit. I would want to know what it looked like from the benches: whether five hundred ordinary men, walking home to their suppers, understood that they had just made it a capital matter to ask the wrong questions in public — or whether it felt like an unremarkable Tuesday, a bit long, hot, and probably correct.
I suspect the second. That is the finding worth travelling for: not that injustice is loud, but that it is procedural, well attended, and adjourns on time.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 25 August 2026.
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If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?
A tattoo artist asks three questions: what, where, and how large. They are the questions of a trade. There is a fourth he never asks, and it is the only one that matters.
This reflection takes an ordinary writing prompt and follows it into the comparative ground where four great traditions have thought carefully about the marked body. Their disagreement is about ink. Their agreement is about motive — and about the danger of allowing a sign to substitute for the thing it signifies.
Written from the perspective of someone who has spent a lifetime shaping words meant to endure, only to witness how few of them do.
Three Questions at the Counter
What one word would you carry on your skin — and what would that choice reveal?
WordPress Daily Writing Prompt | 24 August 2026
Prompt: If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?
I have never set foot in a tattoo studio. But suppose I did — this morning, at my age, with four decades of ink of a very different kind behind me.
The artist would not be startled. He has seen older men than me come through that door, usually after a funeral or a diagnosis. He would put down his coffee, open a folder, and ask the three questions he asks everyone.
“What do you want?”
Not a design, I would tell him. A word.
He would wait, pen ready, expecting a name. A date. Somebody’s initials inside a heart.
Nevertheless.
Four syllables. Twelve letters. It is the least decorative word in the language, and I have loved it for most of my working life. In the statutes I drafted, words like that one did the heavy lifting — the small hinges on which large consequences turned. Everything before the conjunction is the situation as it stands. Everything after it is what shall now be done regardless.
It is also, if you look, the word most traditions have been trying to write on the body all along. Not the fact, but the defiance of it. The Baiga women of central India believed the godna on their skin was the one possession that would travel with them past death — everything else surrendered, this alone carried through. That is a nevertheless in ink.
“Where do you want it?”
On the palm, I would say.
He would shake his head. Palms are the one place ink will not hold. The skin there renews itself too quickly, the hand is used too hard, the lines are too deep. Whatever you put on a palm fades within the year. Choose the wrist. Choose the forearm. Anywhere but there.
And I would sit with that, because it is one of the more interesting facts I know.
Notice how much of the world’s marking gathers at the hand anyway, knowing it will not last. Henna on a bride’s palms in Kerala and in Cairo, elaborate beyond reason, gone in a fortnight. The tilaka pressed on the forehead at dawn and wiped away by evening. Pilgrims to Jerusalem taking the same cross from the same family of tattooists for seven hundred years, on the arm, where it will hold — but the ordinary devotion of ordinary days goes on the palm, where it will not.
There is a shrewdness in that. The deepest things are marked in the places that cannot keep a mark. What has to be reapplied daily is what has to be chosen daily.
“How large?”
Small, I would say. Very small.
He would push back, gently, the way a good craftsman does. At that size the letters crowd. Nobody will read it. What is the use of a word nobody can read?
But that is the point. The great truths have never needed large letters. A vow is eight words. A verdict is one. The most consequential sentence ever spoken over a human being takes up less space than a shopping list. It is the trivial that has to shout; what is true can afford to whisper.
Small enough to be private, I would tell him. Large enough that when somebody takes my hand at a hospital bedside and their own hand is shaking, they can read it at that distance. Twelve letters. Nevertheless.
Then he would set down his pen, because his three questions are done. What, where, how large. Those are the questions of a trade. He has no fourth.
But there is a fourth, and it is the only one that matters.
“Why?”
Here the traditions, which disagree about nearly everything else, turn out to agree with one another almost completely.
They disagree about the ink. Islamic jurisprudence, in the main, holds permanent tattooing forbidden — an alteration of fitra, the created nature a person is given rather than authors. Hindu thought carries two impulses at once: the body as an instrument to be consecrated, and the Vedantic warning that to identify with the perishable is to mistake the vehicle for the traveller. The Levitical prohibition, shared by Jews and Christians, was aimed narrowly at cultic self-marking for the dead, and has been read broadly ever since.
But on motive they converge, and they converge hard. Marking as identity, protection or consecration is tolerated nearly everywhere. Marking as self-display is commended nowhere. Not in any of them.
And there is a third thing none of them permits: letting the visible sign stand in for the invisible thing it was supposed to point to. The mark on the skin is easy. The inscription on the character is the labour of a lifetime. Where the first is offered as evidence of the second, something has quietly gone wrong.
So I would stand up at that point, and thank the man, and walk out without it.
Not because the word was wrong. Because the word is not meant for the skin, and putting it there would have been the cheaper way of keeping it.
That is the harder art, and no studio in the world can do it for you.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Founder and Principal Author, Rise & Inspire
What word would you carry — and would you put it on your skin, or somewhere it costs you more to keep?
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 24 August 2026.
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