Square Peg, Round Hole, Bad Weather
AI: Artificial Intelligence, computer systems trained to perform tasks that appear to require human intelligence, such as writing, image generation, prediction, translation, or classification.
EMI: Equated Monthly Installment, the fixed monthly payment people make toward a loan, often the quiet drumbeat behind middle-class anxiety.
Some mornings do not begin. They merely arrive, like an electricity bill slipped under the door.
At the moment my life is not exactly bursting with sunlight, purpose, income, romance, discipline, social charm, or any of those other fine ingredients from which respectable people prepare a human existence. My life is more like yesterday’s muri left open in the damp Kolkata air. Not ruined enough to throw away with ceremony. Not fresh enough to serve guests. Just sitting there, softening.
Depression has become worse. Anxiety has become worse. Loneliness has become worse. They are not separate visitors anymore. They have started arriving together, like three local party workers on one motorbike, each shouting different instructions, none of them useful.
So I have shut myself in a room.
Not dramatically. No candle, no violin, no long black coat, no camera moving slowly toward my tragic profile. Just an ordinary room in the shabby outskirts of Calcutta, with the fan making its thin, accusatory sound, the walls holding the day’s heat like a grudge, and my mind behaving like a cheap plastic chair with one leg shorter than the other.
You sit on it carefully.
Still it wobbles.
People say go out. People say meet someone. People say do something. These are excellent suggestions in the way “become Switzerland” is an excellent suggestion for a man currently fighting with the mosquito coil. Going out is not merely going out when the mind is like this. Going out becomes an expedition. You must cross the room, find the shirt, tolerate your own face in the mirror, deal with the lane, the tea stall, the fish seller, the neighbor who asks too many questions, the app notification, the traffic, the sun, the whole large circus of existence behaving as if your nervous system has approved the program.
It has not.
My mind and I are not on stable diplomatic terms. Some days we exchange documents. Some days we fire across the border.
And money, of course, sits in the corner like a fat inspector with a notebook.
Limited income is not a small practical inconvenience. It is a weather system. It enters your sleep. It enters your tea. It enters the way you answer the phone. It enters the way you look at a broken switch, an empty gas cylinder, a doctor’s fee, a torn sandal, a bank message, an EMI, a cousin’s success, a friend’s polite silence. Money may not buy happiness, but lack of money buys a whole wholesale market of fear, open from dawn till late night, no weekly holiday.
The world outside, meanwhile, is not exactly making a persuasive case for cheerful participation.
Everything is speeding up. Jobs are becoming strange. Machines are writing, drawing, summarizing, diagnosing, recommending, replacing, assisting, confusing, and politely smiling while doing it. People who were already properly shaped for society are also looking dented now. The round pegs themselves are having trouble fitting into the round holes. The holes have changed size. Some have become subscription-based. Some require networking. Some require moral flexibility. Some require the sort of smile that looks like it was manufactured in a basement by a committee.
And here I am.
A square peg.
Not a heroic square peg. Let us not decorate the corpse before checking the pulse. I am not a misunderstood genius standing on a hill while thunder applauds. I am a tired, middle-aged Bengali man with education, experience, rage, shame, fear, and a bank balance that does not encourage poetry. I have worked. I have studied. I have lived in America. I have seen clean hospital corridors, giant parking lots, databases, meetings, airports, health systems, the whole polished machinery of a rich country. Then I returned to this beloved, impossible, sweating, argumentative city where a man can discuss world civilization while bargaining over coriander.
That should have made me worldly.
Mostly it made me tired in two time zones.
There is a special punishment reserved for the person who cannot lie well. Not the grand courtroom lie. The daily little oily ones. The smiling lie. The networking lie. The “wonderful to connect” lie. The “let us explore synergies” lie. The lie that turns the spine into wet rope and calls it professional maturity.
I cannot do it convincingly.
I cannot flatter powerful fools for sport. I cannot step on another man’s neck and later describe the climb as resilience. I cannot turn betrayal into strategy and strategy into a podcast. Again, this does not make me a saint. Saints are usually better funded in paintings. It may only make me badly adapted, like a ceiling fan in Antarctica.
But bad adaptation is still a real condition.
Some people move through society like fish in water. I move through it like a fish asked to submit an updated profile, attend two webinars, maintain personal branding, and demonstrate measurable enthusiasm for the bucket.
So yes, I am frittering away my life.
The word is ugly. Good. It should be.
Frittering is not failing grandly. Frittering is smaller and more humiliating. It is the day leaking through the fingers. It is opening the laptop and closing it. It is making tea and forgetting to drink it. It is reading the news and wishing the planet would lower its volume. It is having talent somewhere inside you, like an old harmonium in a storeroom, but no strength to pull it out, dust it, repair the bellows, and perform for people who are already scrolling away.
People prefer the other verbs. Rise. Build. Reinvent. Conquer. Heal. Transform.
Lovely verbs. Freshly ironed verbs. Verbs with gym memberships.
But sometimes the only verb left is endure, and even endure arrives late, barefoot, without breakfast.
There is also a terrible snobbery around survival. If you survive with a neat desk, a morning routine, a stainless-steel water bottle, and a profitable newsletter, society claps. If you survive with dirty cups, unpaid bills, irregular sleep, anger, shame, and the posture of a man who has been negotiating with invisible wolves since morning, society looks away.
But both are survival.
One merely photographs better.
This is where depression becomes difficult to explain to people who have never had their inner weather turn against them. They think depression is sadness. Sadness is almost luxurious by comparison. Sadness has shape. Sadness has memory. Sadness can sit by a window during rain and become a song.
Depression is not like that.
Depression is a municipal office where all counters are closed but the queue remains. You stand there with your little file of hopes, and nobody calls your name.
Anxiety is the opposite clerk. It calls your name every three seconds. Then it says you brought the wrong form.
Together they run my day.
And loneliness is the peon who has the keys.
I do not mean the romantic loneliness of films, where a handsome person looks at a river and the background music understands him. I mean the domestic loneliness of no one knowing whether you ate. No one noticing that you have not stepped out. No one seeing that your room has slowly become a small independent republic with bad governance, poor ventilation, and a foreign policy based on avoidance.
A room can become very large when you are trapped inside it.
It can contain your childhood, your failures, America, Kolkata, your father’s voice, your mother’s worries, old salaries, lost chances, foolish pride, unfinished work, bad sleep, half-written drafts, and that one mosquito that has clearly received military training.
Then someone says, “Just go for a walk.”
Yes. And while I am at it, I shall annex Burma.
This is not to mock people who mean well. Many do. But the distance between advice and ability can be enormous. A person standing outside the pit can see the ladder. The person inside may see only mud, shadows, and the faint outline of his own foolishness.
The most frightening part is not that I do not fit into the world. I have known that for years. The frightening part is that the world itself now seems to be wobbling. Politics is louder. Work is harsher. Attention is chopped into chutney. Everyone is selling something, hiding something, branding something, fearing something. Even kindness often arrives with terms and conditions.
In such a world, the misfit does not merely feel misplaced.
He feels obsolete.
That is the word that stings.
Obsolete, like an old phone charger in a drawer. Still real. Still made of material. Still once useful. But now nobody knows what it connects to.
I am not writing this to become inspirational. I am suspicious of inspiration. It often arrives wearing perfume and carrying a knife. I am not here to say everything happens for a reason. Many things happen because systems are cruel, people are selfish, luck is uneven, bodies fail, minds misfire, markets change, and some of us were born with corners too sharp for polite furniture.
Nor am I saying I am blameless. That would be too easy and too false. I have wasted time. I have hidden. I have been angry. I have avoided work. I have disappointed myself. I have fed my despair like a stray dog and then complained when it followed me home.
But blame is a dull tool. It explains little. It repairs less.
A man can be responsible for parts of his life and still be crushed by parts he did not design. This should not be a revolutionary idea, but apparently it is. The modern world prefers two stories. Either you are a winner because you worked hard, or you are a loser because you did not. This is tidy, false, and useful mainly to people selling courses.
Life is not so obedient.
Sometimes you work hard and fall. Sometimes you are talented and invisible. Sometimes you are honest and poor. Sometimes you are intelligent and frozen. Sometimes the mind, that proud little lantern, smokes and sputters and refuses to light the room.
And sometimes you are simply a square peg.
What then?
I do not know.
That is the honest answer, and it will not trend.
What I know is smaller. I know that this room is real. This fear is real. This loneliness is real. The world’s madness is real. The need for money is real. The disgust at performance is real. The exhaustion of pretending is real. The tiny remaining wish not to become entirely false is also real.
Maybe that is all I have at the moment.
Not hope exactly.
Not despair either.
Something less marketable.
A stubborn little corner.
The square peg remains square. It may be scratched, dusty, badly stored, and of no immediate commercial value. But it has not yet agreed to become soft wax in the hands of every passing fool with a stamp pad.
Some days, in this bad round world, that is not triumph.
It is not even progress.
It is merely the last small proof that I am still here.