e Magus

These days, many serious thoughts begin not with books or conversations, but with a social media post glimpsed in passing. A Facebook post by someone in my network asked: Is 18 the right age for adulthood? No preachy stuff, no numbers or data sources, no opinionated copy to go along with it. Just the question. I might have moved on, except for one small detail. My own child will be approaching that milestone in a few years. Suddenly, this was no longer another ‘interesting’ post; this felt closer, personal and slightly unsettling. Eighteen has always been a curious number to carry so much weight. Nothing changes at midnight. I did not wake up wiser the next morning, when I turned Eighteen. And yet, by law and logic, you are expected to be an adult — capable of decisions with long shadows. Adulthood, never really arrives on birthdays. It creeps in through responsibility, through small moments when help don’t arrive on time. You don’t become an adult so much as realise, one day, that n...

Every week, my phone reminds me of my new relationship with the world. An SMS or a WhatsApp notification for something I have, but never actually own. Access to Amazon Prime, Spotify, Kindle, Dropbox that stores the fragments of my life, books and files I might never read, in places I will never visit. There was a time not very long ago when the things we ‘wanted’ were the things we owned. Music came on tapes and CDs whose covers we gently straightened after use. Encyclopaedias lined shelves, heavy with authority. Books carried the thumbprints of those who read them before us. These objects announced themselves by occupying space. Today, so much of what we “have” never actually comes home. Music floats in the cyber space, movies wait in the cloud in queue, a verse of poetry arrives through a clean, content-approved notification. Even memories — once tucked into boxes or photo albums — now live on remote servers, rented back to us through storage plans. The world has shifted from posses...