I’d probably reach for something that exists in two very different emotional universes at once.
In San Francisco, a “snack” meant artisanal. Almond-flour crackers, hummus with a backstory, kale chips that cost more than an actual meal and left you wondering if hunger was a personality flaw. Snacks were measured, optimized, eaten while standing at a kitchen counter, usually between Zoom calls.
In Mumbai, a snack is a full-bodied experience.
It crackles, drips, stains your fingers, and unapologetically demands your attention.
Right now, I’d choose a vada pav.
Not the Instagram kind. The real one. Wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, green chutney leaking through the paper like a secret, garlic in the air, traffic honking in the background. A snack that doesn’t ask who you are or what you do—only whether you’re hungry.
Food, I’ve learned, mirrors the lives we’re living.
San Francisco taught me restraint. Efficiency. Eating for fuel.
Mumbai taught me comfort. Chaos. Eating for survival and joy.
Somewhere between protein bars and pavs, I realized snacks are never just snacks. They’re tiny reflections of where we belong—or where we’re trying to belong.
That tension—between worlds, tastes, choices, and identities—runs through About Life Choices & Potholes. It’s not about food, really. It’s about what we reach for when we’re tired, unsure, or standing at a crossroads.
Right now, I’d eat the vada pav.
Because some days, you don’t need something clean or curated.
There was a time when nourishment felt transactional.
Food, care, attention—each arrived with an unspoken ledger. Nothing was allowed to remain unaccounted for. To receive was to incur obligation. To accept warmth without explanation felt irresponsible, even dangerous. Independence was not just a value; it was armor.
Beautiful Men: The Chef was written during the slow, often uncomfortable unlearning of that belief.
This book uses food as a language for intimacy—not desire, but care. Not pursuit, but presence. The kitchen becomes a site of quiet exchange, where nourishment is offered without spectacle and received without negotiation. In these moments, romance is stripped of its usual performances and redefined as attentiveness.
Here, romance is not about being chosen. It is about being tended to.
The figure of the chef is not heroic or idealized. He does not rescue or transform. He notices. He prepares. He offers sustenance without demanding recognition. And in doing so, he exposes a deeply ingrained discomfort: how difficult it can be to receive without immediately reaching for repayment.
This book asks an uncomfortable question: what if receiving is not weakness, but wisdom?
Self-sufficiency is often framed as moral virtue. We admire those who need little, who ask for nothing, who carry themselves without visible reliance. But Beautiful Men: The Chef interrogates this ideal, suggesting that it may be less about strength and more about fear—fear of dependency, of disappointment, of vulnerability disguised as autonomy.
Receiving requires a different kind of courage. It asks us to trust without control, to accept care without managing its consequences in advance. It demands a softness that cannot be optimized or defended.
My mission in this work is to challenge the mythology of self-sufficiency without romanticizing dependence. The book does not argue for passivity or entitlement. It argues for permission—for the ability to allow nourishment to arrive without guilt, justification, or self-correction.
Healing, as explored here, is not an achievement. It is not the result of discipline or effort. It is a shift in posture. A willingness to be affected.
Beautiful Men: The Chef is written for readers who have learned how to provide but forgotten how to receive. For those who equate independence with safety, and control with care.
If you’ve ever struggled to accept what is freely offered, this book is not asking you to change.
It happened on an ordinary street, at an ordinary hour.
Nothing about the setting suggested significance. There was no urgency, no promise, no narrative momentum. Just a pause. A glance. A moment of softness that didn’t ask to be continued. And then it was gone.
At first, it registered as nothing more than an observation. But like most things that matter, it lingered. Not because it demanded interpretation, but because it resisted dismissal.
Beautiful Men: The Dog Walker began there—at the edge of something small and easily overlooked—and slowly became a meditation on fleeting connection. On gentleness without agenda. On the quiet, almost imperceptible ways life reassures us when we are paying attention.
This book is not about romance as possession. It is about presence. About the subtle flirtation between the self and the world—a dynamic that does not seek escalation or resolution. These moments do not ask to be named or secured. They ask only to be noticed.
There is a cultural bias toward continuity. We are trained to measure meaning by duration, to assume that what matters must lead somewhere. Encounters that do not develop into stories are treated as inconsequential, their value dismissed because they do not accumulate.
This book resists that logic.
It suggests that some encounters are complete precisely because they do not extend themselves. That their power lies in their brevity. That they exist to remind us of our own receptivity, not to promise connection beyond the moment.
In this sense, the dog walker is not a character so much as a figure of attention—a stand-in for the everyday miracle of noticing another human without attempting to possess the experience. The exchange is light, mutual, unburdened by expectation. It leaves no trace except a subtle recalibration of the senses.
My mission here is not to romanticize strangers or elevate fleeting attraction into myth. It is to reclaim attentiveness as a form of intimacy. To suggest that meaning does not always announce itself with permanence, and that some forms of connection are valuable precisely because they remain unkept.
There is a discipline to unkeeping.
To notice without grasping.
To receive without claiming.
To allow something to be meaningful without insisting it become more.
Beautiful Men: The Dog Walker is written for readers who sense that life is constantly offering small confirmations of aliveness—if only we are willing to slow down enough to perceive them.
This book was written during a period when sleep stopped behaving.
Nights lost their edges. Mornings arrived without permission. Time collapsed into something viscous and unreliable. Thoughts no longer lined up in sentences; they arrived in fragments, sensations, impressions. Logic—once dependable—loosened its grip. And in that unraveling, something unexpected surfaced: a form of clarity that did not announce itself with arguments, only with felt truth.
Fever Dreams was born in those liminal hours—when exhaustion stripped away performance and left only what could not be faked. When the mind, too tired to maintain coherence, finally stopped interfering. I did not understand more in those moments. I noticed more.
This book is not about healing as progress. It resists the familiar arc of breakdown followed by breakthrough. Instead, it examines altered states as teachers in their own right. States often dismissed as dysfunction—burnout, dissociation, sleeplessness—are treated here as thresholds rather than failures.
There is an intelligence in the body that does not rely on explanation. When the mind exhausts its narratives, the body begins to speak more clearly. Through sensation. Through timing. Through an unedited knowing that bypasses language entirely.
Mysticism, in this context, is not decorative. It is functional.
Fever Dreams does not treat intuition as an aesthetic preference or spiritual affectation. It approaches it as a legitimate epistemology—a way of knowing that operates beneath cognition, beyond linear thought. One that cannot always be translated, but can often be trusted.
The book pays attention to what surfaces when we are too tired to curate ourselves. When ambition softens. When coherence collapses. When the question is no longer What does this mean? but What is happening in my body right now?
My mission with this work is simple but radical: to legitimize experiences that are routinely pathologized or dismissed because they resist neat explanation. To suggest that not all clarity arrives through control, and not all understanding is verbal.
This is not a romanticization of suffering. Collapse is not framed as desirable. But it is treated as informative. As an altered state that reveals what remains when the usual scaffolding falls away.
Fever Dreams is written for readers who suspect that their most lucid moments did not arrive during periods of composure, but during moments of unraveling. For those who have felt more awake while falling apart than while holding everything together.
If you recognize that kind of clarity—arriving sideways, unannounced—this book is not here to explain it to you.
I didn’t know I was looking for myself when I first mistook it for love.
The moment itself was unremarkable. A conversation that lingered longer than it should have. Not because of anything extraordinary that was said, but because of what surfaced in the pause between sentences. A sense of familiarity without history. Recognition without proof. The kind of encounter that leaves no evidence, only residue.
It wasn’t comforting. It was clarifying.
For a long time, I believed connection was something to be secured—defined by continuity, reciprocation, and effort. I measured its legitimacy by outcomes: longevity, commitment, return. Love, I thought, was something you earned by staying, choosing correctly, wanting carefully enough.
Finding Noir emerged when that framework began to collapse.
I began to notice a different category of connection—one that didn’t orient itself toward resolution at all. These encounters didn’t soothe or stabilize; they destabilized. They rearranged the internal furniture. They made familiar beliefs suddenly feel provisional. They asked questions instead of offering futures.
This book is not interested in romance as resolution. It treats love as a mirror rather than a promise. A reflective surface that shows you not who the other person is, but who you become in their presence. What they activate. What they expose. What you mistake for destiny when it is, in fact, revelation.
Noir is not a person in the traditional sense. Noir is a catalyst. A placeholder for the kind of connection that arrives without invitation and leaves without explanation. The kind that intensifies quickly, not because it is meant to endure, but because it is meant to reveal.
There is a particular danger in these connections. Intensity can masquerade as alignment. Recognition can feel indistinguishable from belonging. The nervous system confuses activation with intimacy. Projection fills in the gaps that reality does not yet occupy.
Finding Noir does not romanticize this confusion. It sits inside it.
The book asks difficult, often uncomfortable questions:
What are we really responding to when someone feels familiar?
What parts of ourselves are we trying to reclaim through another?
At what point does longing become a refusal to see clearly?
Rather than offering answers, the book traces patterns—emotional, psychological, somatic. It examines how unhealed hunger can dress itself up as fate. How longing can borrow the language of spirituality. How the desire to be seen can override the willingness to see.
And yet, this is not a book that dismisses these connections as mistakes.
Some encounters are not meant to last because their purpose is not companionship, but consciousness. They arrive to interrupt, not to accompany. To destabilize the architecture of who you think you are, so something truer has a chance to emerge.
My mission in writing Finding Noir is not to instruct readers on what love should look like. It is to sit with them in the discomfort of asking what love is doing to them. To invite a more rigorous, compassionate form of inquiry—one that does not rush toward narrative closure.
This is a book for readers who are willing to look at their own projections without flinching. For those who suspect that the most powerful connections are not always the healthiest, but are often the most revealing. For those who are less interested in happy endings than in honest ones.
If this story leaves you unsettled, that may be the point.
Some books don’t want to be finished.
They don’t want to be consumed, resolved, or put away.
The phrase comes from a folk song I grew up hearing without ever stopping to translate. Doorun dongar saajre. From a distance, the mountains look beautiful.
I didn’t know then that it was a warning disguised as poetry.
We met the way modern connections often do—through words first. Messages that arrived with intention. Conversations that stretched longer than planned. A sense of recognition that felt less like discovery and more like inevitability. It wasn’t romance in the traditional sense; it was something more flattering to the intellect. A meeting of minds, or so it seemed. He saw my work. I saw his hunger. We spoke the same language of pattern, meaning, depth.
Distance helped. Distance always helps at the beginning.
From far away, everything aligns. The rough edges blur. Silence reads as mystery. Intensity passes for intimacy. I could step into the connection without the burden of the body—without having to negotiate pace, presence, or consequence. From that vantage point, the mountain looked exquisite.
Saajre.
What drew me in was not charm so much as vulnerability. He spoke from a place of longing that felt raw, unedited. There was an ache beneath his words, a sense of having been misunderstood by the world and—perhaps for the first time—seen. I know now how dangerous that feeling can be: to be cast as the witness to someone else’s becoming.
At first, I mistook that role for closeness.
The trouble with being deeply empathic is that it doesn’t announce itself as risk. It arrives as responsibility. I could feel his emotional weather before he named it. His agitation registered in my chest. His anticipation showed up as restlessness in my body. I began to calibrate myself around him—slowing here, softening there—without quite realizing I was doing it.
Still, from a distance, it worked.
The mountain remained beautiful as long as I didn’t try to climb it.
The shift came when abstraction gave way to reality. When the possibility of proximity entered the frame. Plans, however tentative, have a way of revealing fault lines. The ground beneath the poetry began to tremble. What I experienced as saturation, he experienced as withdrawal. What I felt as the need for space, he felt as threat.
That is often how scripts flip.
I became quieter. He became louder. My pauses grew careful; his words grew urgent. I found myself explaining feelings I hadn’t yet finished having. The connection, once expansive, began to narrow. I was no longer meeting him; I was managing him.
From up close, the mountain was no longer ornamental. It was unstable.
There is a particular confusion that sets in when you are told—repeatedly—that your gentleness is cruelty. That your boundary is abandonment. That your attempt to leave without harm is, in fact, harm itself. You begin to doubt your internal compass. You replay conversations looking for evidence of malice you don’t remember feeling.
I stayed longer than I should have, not out of love exactly, but out of a familiar sense of duty. The idea that if I could just explain myself clearly enough, softly enough, the landscape would settle.
It didn’t.
Distance, once protective, had become impossible.
The end did not arrive as a clean break. It came as an unraveling. Words sharpened. Meaning distorted. What had once been admiration curdled into accusation. The same intensity that once felt intoxicating now felt volatile. I watched, almost clinically, as the mountain revealed its true terrain: steep, unforgiving, prone to collapse.
When it finally ended, it did so without poetry.
Just silence. And the dull thud of something idealized coming apart.
It took time for the grief to register—not for the relationship itself, but for the fantasy it had supported. I had believed, perhaps naively, that depth alone could sustain connection. That mutual insight was enough. That distance was a neutral condition rather than an amplifier.
The phrase returned to me then, not as lyric but as diagnosis.
Doorun dongar saajre.
Beauty at a distance is not deception. It’s perspective. But perspective has limits. What enchants from afar can overwhelm up close. What feels like destiny when untested can become danger when embodied.
I think often now about how many connections are born and sustained in abstraction. How easy it is to confuse intensity for intimacy when the body is not yet involved. How many of us fall in love not with a person, but with the version of ourselves we get to be in their gaze.
Distance gives us that gift. It also withholds the truth.
The mountains are still beautiful. I don’t deny that. But I have learned to ask a different question before moving closer.
Not Is it stunning from here?
But:
What will it cost me to stand at its base?
The answer, I’ve learned, is what decides everything.
I remember the moment I realized nothing was going to happen.
Not the dramatic kind of nothing.
No explosion. No goodbye.
Just the quiet violence of unanswered messages and a body that knew before the mind admitted it: this is it.
I replayed every sentence. Every pause. Every almost.
I told myself I could have spoken differently. Softer. Braver. Less available. Less intense. More mysterious. More patient. Less honest. Less me.
That’s when the question appeared—not as self-help, not as advice, but as an ache:
What could I have done differently?
It’s a seductive question. It implies control. It suggests that love is a chessboard, not a collision. That if we just move the right piece, the ending changes.
But here’s the truth most people don’t want to hear:
Sometimes the only thing you could have done differently
was leave the story earlier—
before it taught you everything it came to teach.
Finding Noir is not a book about how to get it right next time.
It’s a book about what happens when you stop editing yourself for an outcome that was never available.
It traces a connection that lived vividly in the interior world and failed spectacularly in the physical one. It explores twin flames, projection, longing, somatic memory, and the way absence can feel more intimate than presence. It refuses to tell you whether the connection was real, spiritual, imagined, karmic, or psychological—because the body doesn’t care what we name the wound.
This book doesn’t offer closure.
It offers recognition.
For anyone who has loved someone who never fully arrived.
For anyone who felt chosen in private and abandoned in reality.
For anyone who wonders whether depth itself is a liability in modern intimacy.
Finding Noir asks a quieter, more dangerous question:
What if you didn’t do anything wrong—
what if you were simply brave enough to feel everything?
And if that question unsettles you,
you might already be standing at the edge of this book.
(A reflection inspired by my book About Life, Choices, and Potholes)
If I had to describe my father, I wouldn’t start with his profession or his habits — though I could. He was an engineer by training, a man of tools and precision, but his real craft was patience. The kind that doesn’t make noise, doesn’t demand recognition, but stays steady like the background hum of a ceiling fan on a humid night — always there, always working.
Growing up, I used to think he was too quiet. He didn’t express affection in words; he showed it in ways you’d miss unless you were really paying attention — an extra roti on my plate before I sat down, the car tank always full, the lights left on when I returned late. His love language was logistics.
When I moved to the US, I thought I was leaving that world behind — the world of early mornings, the smell of oil and diesel from his workshop, the steady rhythm of his tools. I was chasing independence, identity, a new story. But years later, when life hit a wall — job loss, immigration uncertainty, heartbreak — it was his voice, calm and undramatic, that steadied me again.
In About Life, Choices, and Potholes, I write about that moment — when he cleaned up after my mess despite just recovering from spine surgery, even as eviction threats and house-hunting chaos unfolded around us. He didn’t complain. Didn’t remind me of sacrifices. Just did what needed to be done.
It took me years to understand that kind of strength — the quiet resilience of doing what life demands, not because it’s fair or easy, but because someone has to.
He’s the kind of man who believes in roads — in building them, fixing them, walking them. And maybe that’s why the book carries the word potholes in its title. Because life, as he taught me, is just that — a long, uneven road you keep driving on, knowing you’ll hit bumps, but trusting you’ll reach home.
If there’s one thing my father has taught me, it’s this:
Love doesn’t always arrive wrapped in words.
Sometimes, it’s in the quiet act of showing up — again and again — even when no one’s watching.
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
(Inspired by my book About Life, Choices, and Potholes)
If someone had told me a decade ago that my “career” would one day include storytelling, healing, and writing about life’s unpredictable messes, I would’ve laughed. I was trained to think in straight lines — college, career, promotions, retirement. Life, however, had other plans.
Like many of us, I once believed that fulfillment came from achievement — that your title, paycheck, and business card somehow proved your worth. And for a while, I played that game well. Until one day, the system I had built my life around — job, visa, stability — suddenly reminded me that I didn’t truly belong there.
That moment cracked something open.
I began asking questions I had avoided for years: If not this, then what?
That’s how About Life, Choices, and Potholes was born — not from certainty, but from chaos. From nights of wondering what comes next when the path you’ve been walking dissolves beneath your feet.
Since then, I’ve flirted with many alternative paths — each one whispering a different truth about who I am. Writing became my therapy. Teaching and mentoring opened my heart. Holistic healing, with its roots in energy and intention, taught me that success is not always visible — sometimes it’s felt.
The world glorifies specialization. But what if we’re meant to evolve — to live many lives within one lifetime? To be the analyst and the artist, the strategist and the storyteller?
I no longer chase one perfect label. I’m learning to honor the mosaic of it all — the detours, the dead ends, and the potholes that shaped me into something far richer than a résumé ever could capture.
In About Life, Choices, and Potholes, I invite you to reflect on that too — the alternate versions of you that are waiting patiently to be lived. Because maybe the truest career path isn’t a ladder at all. Maybe it’s a spiral — one that leads you back to yourself.
If you asked me this question a few years ago, I might’ve shrugged and said something safe—pasta, maybe. Or a salad that looks healthy but tastes like regret. But now, after writing Beautiful Men: The Chef, I’ve come to see food not as a skill, but as a language of the soul.
When I think of a “specialty,” I no longer think of what I’m good at cooking. I think of what I’m good at feeling through.
In the book, Kevin—the chef at the heart of the story—doesn’t just cook to feed others; he cooks to understand himself. Every dish he creates is a confession. The way he slices onions, slow and deliberate, feels like the way one learns to forgive. The way he folds butter into dough, patient and rhythmic, mirrors the way love asks to be tended—over time, with care, and without rushing the rise.
And Tammy, the woman who walks into his life from the other side of the screen, isn’t impressed by the precision of his plating. She’s drawn to the quiet ache behind his meals—the kind that says, I’ve been lonely too.
Writing their story changed how I see my own kitchen.
Now, when I cook, I pay attention to what my body is trying to say. If I’m restless, I make something that simmers—a stew, a curry—something that teaches me to wait. If I’m tender, I bake, because baking is faith in action. You measure, you mix, and then you let go. The oven does its part when you stop interfering.
That, I think, is my specialty now: listening.
Listening to what my body craves, to what my heart fears, to what the silence in the kitchen is whispering back. Because food isn’t just about taste—it’s about presence.
The act of cooking for someone you love, or even for yourself, is deeply spiritual. It’s the most intimate form of saying, I see you. You deserve warmth. You deserve nourishment.
When Kevin says in The Chef,
“Cooking was never about impressing anyone—it was about remembering I was still alive,”
he captures what I think every artist, every lover, every human eventually learns: that love, in all its forms, is an act of remembering.
So, what food would I say is my specialty?
Something simple. Something soulful. Something that reminds me of connection—like Kevin’s basil risotto, stirred slowly until creamy and forgiving, or Tammy’s favorite lemon tart, a little tart at first bite but soft at heart.
Because in the end, the food doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest.
And maybe that’s what Beautiful Men: The Chef is really about—learning that the recipe for love, healing, and fulfillment isn’t complicated. It’s about showing up as you are, stirring what you have, and trusting that it’s enough.
🥄 Experience the story. Taste the emotions.
Read Beautiful Men: The Chef — available now on Amazon.
