Men with big desires

I get off my bed and put my less sophisticated glasses on. These are the frames I wear when I want to feel deliberately unpolished. There’s something about looking messy on a Friday afternoon that feels like quiet rebellion against the week’s accumulated respectability. I pick up Fountainhead from my desk. This is the only tome that extends beyond 300 pages that hasn’t been abandoned to dust.

I walk out onto 1st Main Road, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus weighing down my right hand, AirPods nestled in my left. If anyone has been trying to practice Ramdass’s “be here now” or Mooji’s perpetual presence, I highly recommend walking Bangalore’s streets—a forced mindfulness exercise where death hovers at each crossing. A water tanker performs a U-turn on the 40ft road, its mass rotating with geological slowness. Behind him, a Swift Dzire driver radiates the specific impatience of a man who’s received intel that his wife is engaged in infidelity—rushing toward this domestic catastrophe only to be blocked by the mammoth balls of the tanker driver.

Men caught in small tragedies—like infidelity—cannot tolerate those with grander visions, it seems. So he honks. Keeps honking. The sound punctures the afternoon like machine-gun fire. But men with visions beyond the domestic are hardly bothered by such trivialities. The tanker driver continues his cosmic rotation with the serene indifference of planets.

Vishnu Grand appears on my left. Two idli, a coffee. ₹50. I slide into a seat, momentarily abandoning Roark’s ideological purity for South Indian pragmatism. I have this peculiar habit of peeping into strangers’ phones—it’s me versus the privacy glasses of the world. A mid-50s uncle, freshly dyed hair brazenly watches soft porn on Facebook, right here in public view.

Truly, men with grand visions—or grand appetites—are hardly bothered by the judgment of passersby.