I Do Not Hate the World. I Am Tired.

I do not hate the world. I should say this early, before someone reads two angry paragraphs and diagnoses me as a professional misanthrope, sitting in a rented Calcutta room like a retired crocodile, snapping at humanity for sport.

No.

I do not hate people. I am tired of people. There is a difference, though in public the two can look annoyingly similar. A man who is tired may speak sharply. A man who is tired may stop attending functions, stop answering calls, stop smiling at jokes that arrive already dead. A man who is tired may look at the world with suspicion, not because he wants to burn it down, but because the world has been nibbling him for years like a determined rat under a wooden door.

One bite is nothing. Two bites are comedy. Ten years of small bites become philosophy.

That is where I am.

Not above men. Not outside the mess. Not standing on some marble balcony with a moral telescope. I am in the drain with everybody else, only slightly more verbal about the smell.

My quarrel with men is not that I am better than them. That would be such a comfortable lie, the sort of lie a man tells himself while adjusting his collar over the place where a spine was supposed to be fitted, perhaps during childhood, between handwriting and multiplication tables. My quarrel is that I have watched us shrink. I have watched myself shrink too. Big talk, small courage. Large opinions, tiny rooms. Men with magnificent theories and the emotional reliability of a cheap umbrella in a nor’wester.

Some men hunt. Some men are hunted. Some sell knives to both sides and later explain over tea that this is how life works. Then there is the most common type: the pavement philosopher. He stands near the paan shop, holding a plastic cup of tea, helping no one, risking nothing, and announces with great sorrow that life is complicated.

Yes, life is complicated.

So is a drain in July.

But even this is not hatred. Hatred has energy. Hatred wakes up early, irons its shirt, makes lists, buys fuel. I do not have that kind of executive function. What I have is exhaustion wearing a theatrical moustache. What I have is bipolar depression with anxiety, which is not a poetic mood, not a black kurta, not a tragic Instagram filter, but a small private weather department inside the skull issuing cyclonic warnings over ordinary activities like bathing, replying to emails, or deciding whether the rice has gone bad.

Some mornings I wake up already defeated by the ceiling fan.

The fan rotates. The room stares back. Somewhere outside, a pressure cooker whistles with more ambition than I currently possess. A motorcycle coughs. A neighbour drags a bucket as if moving artillery. Some phone somewhere plays music loudly enough to wake the dead, who, being sensible, probably pretend not to hear.

This is not the grand loneliness of mountains and Russian novels. This is the lower-middle-class Calcutta variety. Plastic chair. Damp wall. Medicine strip. Old book. Unpaid invoice. One towel that should have been washed yesterday, which in the moral calendar of depression means sometime before the Gupta Empire.

Inside this room sits my head.

My head is a government office after a flood. Files floating. Clerks missing. One ceiling fan turning above the mildew of old ambition. Somewhere a peon is sleeping on a bench with the key to the records room. Somewhere a committee has been formed to investigate the earlier committee. Somewhere, naturally, tea is being prepared.

I have degrees. I have memories. I have lived in America. I have worked in serious places where the carpets looked insured and the chairs did not wobble. I have seen systems, hospitals, data, deadlines, meetings, and the strange American belief that if you put enough people in a room with a projector, reality may eventually improve.

Now I sit in Calcutta and negotiate with mosquitoes.

This is not self-pity. Or not only self-pity. Let us be honest. Self-pity does visit. It comes in the afternoon, usually after lunch, removes its slippers, and sits too long. But beneath it is something more ordinary and less fashionable: weariness.

The world mistakes weariness for hatred because weariness has stopped performing friendliness.

A tired man no longer has the strength to decorate every sentence with hope. He cannot say “All good” with the necessary showroom brightness. He cannot pretend that every betrayal was a lesson, every unpaid bill a spiritual seminar, every failed project a stepping stone, every illness an invitation to grow. At some point growth itself begins to sound like a gym membership sold by a man with suspicious teeth.

No, I am not against humanity.

I am against being asked to admire the boot while it is still on my neck.

Respectability makes this worse. Respectability is cowardice after ironing. A respectable man can do almost anything if his shirt is tucked in. He can abandon, betray, flatter, cheat, ignore, exploit, and still be invited to sit in the front row because his shoes are polished and he knows when to say “actually.” He has discovered the great social trick: if you speak calmly while doing harm, many people will call it maturity.

This is where my anger begins.

Not from superiority.

From recognition.

I know cowardice. I know hunger. I know fear. I know what happens when options vanish one by one, not dramatically, not with thunder, but like utensils disappearing from a shared kitchen. First the spoon is gone. Then the lid. Then the good knife. Then someone explains that you are being negative for noticing.

That is how fate works most days. Not as a tiger. As a mouse.

Nibble. Nibble. Nibble.

One job goes. One friendship cools. One relative performs affection like a badly rehearsed school play. One invoice remains unpaid. One health problem joins another like passengers boarding an already crowded local train. One morning you realize your younger self has become a photograph from a country that no longer issues visas.

Then people ask why your tone has changed.

My tone has changed because the instrument has been dropped many times.

Still, I do not hate the music.

That is the important part.

I still like intelligence. I still like jokes. I still like books, though sometimes I read the same paragraph five times because my mind has gone out for tea. I still like a good sentence, a sharp observation, a small kindness, a street dog sleeping with the democratic confidence of a cabinet minister, a tea stall owner who remembers how much sugar you take, a child asking a question no adult in the room can answer without lying.

I still like the world in pieces.

I only cannot digest the whole thing at once.

The whole thing is too much. The whole thing has relatives, landlords, parties, banks, illnesses, algorithms, motivational frauds, spiritual salesmen, family politics, polite cruelty, public noise, private dread, and people who say “stay positive” with the tenderness of a stapler.

A man can love the world in fragments and still refuse the full buffet.

Especially when the buffet has been kept uncovered since 1998.

My anger also comes from the old middle-class promise, that famous ladder sold to boys with good marks and bad furniture. Read. Work. Behave. Speak English. Do not make trouble. Do not ask too many questions in front of relatives. Get degrees. Cross the sea if possible. Return with experience. Build something. Become useful.

Lovely story.

Then you discover the ladder is owned by someone’s uncle, guarded by someone’s cousin, rented to someone’s party worker, and finally sold for scrap by a man giving a speech on values.

After that, if your language becomes a little sour, please do not act surprised.

And family?

Ah, family. That polished brass word kept in the drawing room for guests.

Blood is not loyalty. Blood is biology with a surname. Family can backstab with the confidence of priests. Friends can vanish with the elegance of cockroaches when the light comes on. Society loves a successful man because success disinfects him. Society dislikes the fallen man because failure smells contagious.

Yet even here, even here, I do not hate them all. That would be too easy and also inaccurate. There are good people. There are decent people. There are tired people carrying invisible loads with more grace than I can manage. There are people who send a message at the right time. People who remember. People who do not convert your suffering into advice within six seconds. People who sit beside you without trying to repair you like a fan regulator.

I know this.

That is why the bitterness hurts.

If the world were entirely rotten, one could become a clean cynic and retire from emotional commerce. But the world is not entirely rotten. It is worse. It is mixed. A rotten mango would be simple. This world gives you one sweet slice, then a worm, then another sweet slice, then a bill.

What does one do with that?

Some days I feel worms crawling over my skin. Maybe there are no worms. Maybe it is anxiety. Maybe nerves. Maybe the brain, short of decent programming, has started screening cheap horror films against the wall of the skull. The projector is damaged. The operator has gone out for tea. The audience is one exhausted Bengali man in a vest, sitting under a fan that sounds like it has secrets.

But the sensation is real enough.

That is what people miss about the mind. It does not need accuracy to torture you. It only needs authority.

A false alarm can still wake the building. A rumour can still start a riot. A shadow can still stop your breath. The brain is not always a calm professor with spectacles. Sometimes it is a police loudspeaker at midnight, shouting instructions no one understands.

So when I sound harsh, it is not always judgment.

Sometimes it is pain looking for an exit.

Sometimes profanity is not a weapon but steam from a cracked kettle. Sometimes anger is the last working generator in a neighbourhood where every other line has failed. Hope trips the fuse. Love flickers. Ambition was stolen for copper wire. Faith never had a connection in my house. But anger, that old machine, still coughs, rattles, and lights one bare bulb over the staircase.

Not enough to live by.

Enough not to disappear.

This is why I refuse one insult.

I refuse to let anyone call this stupidity.

This rant, this dirt, this pressure escaping through ugly little valves, is not stupidity. It is damaged intelligence refusing to become silent. It is not hatred of mankind. It is fatigue after too many small collisions. It is a man turning garbage into grammar because otherwise the garbage wins. It is not noble. It is not healthy. It is not marketable. It will not fit nicely into a wellness brochure with a smiling plant on the cover.

But it is mine.

And maybe that is all I am trying to say.

I do not hate the world.

I am just tired from being bitten by it.