Essays

“My helplessly feverish views on the state of our species and world…short, semi-sweet and to the point…on life, death, international affairs, society, philosophy, human nature and social sports … funny, satirical, hard-hitting, sentimental, uplifting and self-deprecating … in short, a little bit of everything but boring.

Welcome to the abbreviated, but unfiltered musings of Diya Sethi on DiyaSethi.com.”

In sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher” – Socrates …

Of  Friends & ‘Other Animals’

Hashtag #‘Friends like Family’; a perfect oxymoron …

… not to mention a dangerously overlooked one, of which I feel compelled to write in the first person, my thoughts & sentiments on this matter far more feverish and eminently less distant than usual …

“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered” ~ Oscar Wilde

Whatever happened to the rigorous criteria of fashion and hard-earned credentials of its designers?

Or for that matter artists, writers, chefs, political commentators, spiritual guides and so on and so forth …

The Truth; an elusive commodity in the 21st century

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” …

… A citation that needs no introduction, and even while William Shakespeare was making metaphorical reference to the transient nature of life, she couldn’t help but find in those words, a striking appositeness to the artificiality …

Cry freedom … ‘be careful what you wish for’

“No one has the right to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies,” her friends bellowed in near perfect unison, the moment she voiced her ambivalence toward the possibility of the illegalization of abortion in the United States, yet another expression of a fast-growing trend of draconian measures being imposed on people by democratically elected governments and supreme courts …

Sentio Ergo Sum

(“I feel, therefore I am”)

“Me, Me, Me, I, I, I”;
the biggest ever obstacle to a happy life … Not to mention a respectable one, she thought out loud, reflecting upon the various people she knew, herself included, who periodically availed of the services of one or another new age self-help or spiritual ‘guru’ …

“To err is human, to forgive divine”

“Relax, it’s ok to want to kill most people; it’s just not ok to actually do it”… famous last words, spoken in a semi sober condition at one of the many evenings of forced merriment …

Of Self-Sabotage

Whatever happened to those little girls Maurice Chevalier sang of in Gigi, who “grew up in the most delightful way”?

The Frightful Duplicity of Language

‘Simplicity is the ultimate (form of) sophistication’ … famously said by 16th century painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect, Leonardo da Vinci, for whom one might reasonably assume that simplicity was an elusive quality …