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.”

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

… and thus, she woke up with a start, the sounds of “jaldi, jaldi, niklo niklo” (‘quickly, quickly, get out, get out’) ringing wildly in her ears, visions of being forcibly ushered out of two of the holiest temples in India dancing before her eyes, and in their wake, bringing forth a deluge of tears of laughter that emptied her of the last vestiges of existential angst, which she had been struggling to evict for many years …

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Silence without Innuendo

She hadn’t realized she was staring, until he looked up and caught her gaze with his own, his eyes deathly pale and still, almost perfectly consonant with the expressionless face onto which they appeared to have been sculpted, yet somehow alive and alight …
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To Be or not To Be

It was at the end of a debut post-pandemic revival of her legendary sit down dinner parties, for which she had earned a peculiarly strapping social identity in the upper echelons of New Delhi society …
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Where no-one knows your name

As 2022 Nobel prize winning French female author Annie Ernaux wrote in her book ‘Les Annees’, i.e. ‘The Years’, prior to the 1960’s, the matter of identity pertained to a simple identification card tucked away inside a wallet. Thereafter, she writes, it became central to the navigation of life, something one had to ‘possess, discover, conquer, affirm and express’ …
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Well I Daresay

She had often heard it said, and even more frequently read it in writing, that India is a land of contradiction, and for a long time felt convinced the appraisal was a fair one, up until the day she began to contemplate the essence of the word contradiction …
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Philosophical Malnourishment

Even the symbolic heart has defected, she thought to herself, its alliance with ‘like’ far more prevalent today, in what is incontestably the age of Instagram, that most disquieting of all social media platforms …
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