yourfavanxioussunshine

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

you cut off women from dancing, because girls of good characters do not indulge in such lewd activities. if they become one with their swaying hips, how will you hold down their bodies and spirits?

you cut off women from reading, because books have so many vile ideas about freedom and humanity. hence, they may begin to spin ideas from the yarn of knowledge, jeopardising the conditional safety of your cage.

you cut off women from adorning themselves lovingly, because lest they begin to like the shape of their noses or the curves of their waist; they will stop caring about other people and conforming to your standards of beauty.

you cut off women from expressing because girls from good families do not raise their voices. you say the devil resides in their voice boxes and if they don’t watch their tongues, they may taint the name of their families.

you cut off women from being, so the only thing they’re left with is fear and misery. grinding that terror on the stone of fate like grains, they toil away their lives.

then you call them many many rotten things if any of them refuses to believe this. still, if they don’t comply, force is applied repeatedly.

they become a skeleton of their potential self, grieving in secrecy; because privacy is a luxury. what if in the empty silence they finally start thinking & questioning?

yet, you wonder why they’re exhausted and angry, fighting silent wars within and outside.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

respectful and polite men are the hottest. men who can hold an argument without shouting are the hottest. men who are not insecure of their masculinity are the hottest. nice men are the hottest.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

i met this hippie-ish boy with sun-drenched hair and dirt under his fingernails on a mountaintop like the universe plucked him out of a barefoot dream and dropped him into my vacation. we locked eyes over a pack of instant noodles at a hillside shack and then BAM three days vanished in a dizzy blur of rock climbs and waterfalls and unwashed hair and us harmonizing terribly off-key under bonfire stars like woodland spirits who flunked music school.

he called me a forest witch. i called him a misguided druid. we climbed rocks barefoot, swam in waterfalls that nearly swallowed us, told wildly fake stories to unsuspecting tourists about ancient curses and goat gods and laughed till our stomachs hurt, made up songs about fairies, shared one (1) toothbrush because someone forgot theirs (not me). He sang off-key, I joined in worse. We roasted marshmallows we didn’t have and used firewood that never fully caught fire. Time slipped. Nothing was real. Everything was perfect.

time? irrelevant. society? overrated. cell reception? zero. we didn’t talk about the future. we didn’t talk about the past. we existed.

On the day he left, he showed up at my door with a massive, ridiculous bouquet of wildflowers, too big to carry, somehow exactly right. A folded note: "Thanks for making the world feel like a fairytale. Can I have your number, just in case the story’s not over?"

i smiled so wide it hurt and my chest did that weird ache-lurch-swell thing and then i didn’t give him my number. not because i didnt want to but because sometimes, the most magical things are meant to live only in memory, like pressed flowers or phantom dreams.......and also because i am dramatic and deranged and believe in the art of the almost.

i’ve been thinking about him since. his laugh, the way he looked at the sky like it was telling him secrets....... how easy it all felt, wild, free, tender in a way most things aren’t.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

The Forest is Not a Punishment. It is Freedom.

The Liberation of Sita and the Mythic Violence of Walking Away

There are books you read. There are books you admire. And then there are books that walk up to the altar of your moral universe, flip the sacred thali, and disappear into the forest without offering you an apology. The Liberation of Sita by Volga is that book.

It doesn’t just retell the Ramayana. It stands at the edge of Valmiki’s carefully constructed epic, stares it dead in the eyes, and then walks — barefoot, furious, weeping and unashamed — into the forest, leaving the storyline behind. Literally.

This book. This BOOK. It broke me open like a tender fruit and offered me liberation disguised as short stories.

I don’t know what I expected when I picked up The Liberation of Sita. Maybe some gentle, empowering reimaginings of mythological women. Maybe Sita getting a little more screen time. Maybe some closure.

What I got was a book that gutted me.

It’s been days, and I still don’t quite know how to talk about it except in the voice of someone who’s watched every good girl in every story finally say:

“No more.” And mean it.

Myth as Machinery, Woman as Wreckage

There’s this thing we do with myths, especially in South Asian traditions, where we preserve the story, even when it cuts us. We polish it. We recite it at festivals. We name our children after their heroes. We pretend the violence is metaphorical, or necessary, or divine.

Volga doesn’t pretend. She doesn’t even look away.

She writes as if she’s stitching back together the pieces of every woman the epic tried to break open. Ahalya, Surpanakha, Renuka, Urmila, and Sita — they aren’t retold here as footnotes to the great male journey. They’re not waiting to be redeemed. They are already past redemption. And that’s the point.

What hit me the hardest was how quiet these stories are. There’s no grand speech, no revenge plot. Just… conversations. Long walks. Reflections. But it’s in these silences that the real violence sits. The kind you survive quietly. The kind people don’t write ballads about.

Each woman Sita meets has been exiled in her own way — from love, from memory, from story. And yet, none of them are bitter in the way we’re taught to fear. They’re just… free. In a quiet, aching way.

And Sita, who begins the book full of heartbreak and confusion, listens. Slowly, she starts to see her suffering not as fate or duty or divine test — but as something she can choose to step away from. Not erase, not avenge, just… release.

I want to scream this book into every temple.

I want to tattoo “YOUR PURITY TESTS MEAN NOTHING” across the sky. I want to leave copies on the seats of every wedding mandap and whisper “good luck.”

This isn’t feminist literature. It’s mythic vengeance. It’s divine rage in a cotton saree. It’s the sound of shackles being broken one quiet, deliberate story at a time.

In Praise of Refusal

Volga gives Sita something I didn’t know I needed until I saw it happen: The right to leave. Not out of rage. Not even grief. But out of peace. Out of enoughness.

I think a lot of us, especially women, especially those raised around stories of sacrifice and duty, are still learning how radical that is. To not fight for the throne. To not win the argument. To not become a better version of the thing that hurt you.

Just… to leave. And know that you are still whole.

The Liberation of Sita isn’t a retelling. It’s a refusal. A refusal to be polite about pain. A refusal to give men more chances than they gave you. A refusal to keep proving your worth to a story that was never written for you.

And in that refusal, there is so much quiet, stunning power.

I thought this book would make me angry. And it did. But more than that, it made me tired. In that way grief does, when you realize you’ve been carrying something heavy for too long.

Volga doesn’t tell you to burn it all down. She just hands you the weight, shows you the forest, and says:

“You can put it down now.”

And for the first time, maybe ever — Sita does.

So do I.

INCOHERENT FINAL MONOLOUGE

I finished The Liberation of Sita and sat in stunned, white-hot silence. Not because I was angry. But because I had, without realizing, been waiting years for someone to say this:

“You don’t have to stay.” “You don’t have to forgive.” “You don’t have to be good.” “You can leave the story.”

This book is a ritual. A reckoning. A quiet spell of unlearning. It does not ask for your analysis — it demands your grief.

If you have ever felt erased by tradition, imprisoned by reverence, or hollowed out by expectations carved into scripture, this book is your forest. Step into it. You will not come back the same.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

I met a girl on the metro today because of course I did — of course the one day I drag my emotionally sunburnt corpse onto public transport with cucumbers in my tiffin and no will to live is the day some chaos lesbian with smudged eyeliner and a brain full of historical violence decides to talk to me about mythology.

My brain was doing that post-shame shutdown thing. You know — the kind where you’re too tired to perform your own personality, so you sit on the metro hoping no one makes eye contact and you can just dissociate through three interchange stations and die quietly in air-conditioning.

But then she said something. I don’t even remember what. Something sharp. Something weirdly academic. Maybe something about the Mahabharata being peak intergenerational trauma and I — like a fool, like a moth to a bisexual flame — said “sounds like my family WhatsApp group.” Not because I wanted to — but because the thing in me that won’t shut up about ancient gods and failed empires just had to.

And just like that, we were in it. Trading theories on divine justice and the weaponization of beauty in ancient warfare like we were prepping for a niche panel at Comic Con.

I offered her cucumbers. She countered with ORS from a bottle that looked like it had lived through a small apocalypse. We made eye contact and did that silent, suspicious nod women do. We talked about mythology, about girl rage, about the way textbooks lie and temples remember. It got loud. People stared. We didn’t care.

She told me she liked my kurti and I, being a menace, said “Thanks, it’s backless.” She looked me dead in the eye like she was trying to calculate my threat level and said, “As it should be.” Then she braided my hair. Just. Grabbed it. No warning. No question. Like she’d earned the right in a past life. Her nails were painted and chipped and her hands smelled like some suspiciously fancy hair oil and I let her do it like I owed her something. Maybe I did. I told her she had war-princess energy.

“You look like desi Ariel,” she said. “The feral and anxious version.”

I almost barked. The chaos in me recognized the chaos in her and said “sup.”

We exchanged numbers like we were making a blood pact. She typed her name into my phone with three emojis, none of which made sense. We’re meeting at a museum next week. I don’t know what’s going to happen there. We might get kicked out. I might let her convince me Nehru was a hot girl. Honestly, I’m open to anything.

She’s queer. Obviously. No one has that much chaos in their bloodstream and walks the straight line of heterosexuality.

I think this is what happens when two girls carry too much hunger in their chests and find someone who speaks fluent unraveling. I think this is the kind of friendship that shows up like a flood, not a hug. I think I needed her more than I realized.

And I think if the train hadn’t stopped, we might’ve started a revolution.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

11:11

Andha Dhan Daulat Jameen Jaydaad Paisa Mera apna mehel jaisa ghar heere moti jawaharaat beintehaa gyaan aur bala ki khubsurti saccha beintehaa pyaar sab Mera Mera Mera Mera Mera ✨

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

Did I ask too much when I said a nerdy boyfriend with specs and smirk who flirts while teaching me?

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

if you see me listening to a tall guy whos wearing a black shirt, analog watch yapping about his interests dont save me im exactly where I belong

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

that moment when your hair is so soft and silky that the hair stick just gives up and falls out… and suddenly it’s like a red waterfall cascading down your shoulders??? hello??? main character energy??? absolute peak. i feel like a fairy in a shampoo commercial. like everything’s in slow motion, and i'm just vibing and living my best life. like a soft, feminine princess, wrapped in a gentle glow, just existing in the most magical way.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

I hope when death finds me it feels like my father carrying me to bed from the car while I'm asleep.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

THE GOD OF SINS, AND THE WOMEN WHO BLED FOR HIM

A feminist gut-punch of a review of Gunahon Ka Devta by someone who’s had enough.

I’ve had a lot of books make me feel angry. Like, that low, simmering fury that builds up until you're practically shaking. But Gunahon Ka Devta? This book shattered something inside me. It didn't just make me mad—it made me so freaking furious I could barely even focus on the words, because every page felt like another slap in the face for every woman who's ever been told her silence is her virtue.

Let’s start with Sudha. Because Sudha—oh, Sudha—she’s the textbook "ideal woman," isn't she? Pure, self-sacrificial, and so endlessly patient that it's painful to read about her. This woman spends every waking moment swallowing her pain, her dreams, her desires, all in the name of “love.” But it’s not real love. It’s a love built on silence, suffering, and unquestioned devotion. And here’s the kicker: the book loves her for it. It paints her as some kind of angel because she doesn’t fight back. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t even want anything—because heaven forbid a woman have desires beyond her role as a man’s emotional support. And it’s this constant glorification of her self-erasure that made my blood boil.

I can’t stand it. I just can’t. Sudha deserves so much more than this passive, saintly suffering. She deserves a voice. She deserves a life that isn’t defined by the men who walk in and out of it. But instead, she’s written as some sort of martyr. And that? It’s not romantic. It’s not beautiful. It’s a cage.

Now, let’s talk about Chander, the so-called “Devta.” This man, this walking moral crisis, spends the entire book destroying women in his path, and he gets a free pass for it because, you know, he’s so tragically conflicted about his feelings. He can’t decide between Sudha and Biniti, and because of that, every woman around him gets emotionally obliterated. And what does he do? He sits around, weeping, agonizing over his choices, like that somehow makes him a better person. He gets redemption. He gets to be understood, forgiven, while the women around him are just expected to swallow their pain and keep going. But you know what? I’m not buying it. This isn’t some tortured soul. This is a man who gets to ruin lives without consequence, while everyone else suffers in silence. The fact that the book romanticizes this as some deep moral struggle is insulting.

And then there’s Gesu. Oh my God, Gesu. She’s a tragic heroine—but not the kind we should be admiring. The man she loved, the one she was about to marry, leaves her at the altar for her younger sister. Let that sink in. And what does she do? She quietly retreats. She doesn’t fight. She doesn’t go on a revenge quest. She doesn’t even dare to scream. She just quietly, sorrowfully fades into the background of the story, where her pain is immortalized as this pure, saintly suffering. And it’s heartbreaking. Because she deserved better. She deserved to be angry. She deserved to break things, to burn down that damn altar. Instead, she gets to be the martyr for everyone else’s emotional growth, and I’m so tired of women being written as symbols of quiet, unquestioning sacrifice. Women don’t exist to be angelic figures of pain. We deserve to scream. We deserve to burn things down.

Pammi and Biniti? Oh, don’t even get me started. These women are everything Sudha isn’t. They have agency. They have desire. They’re messy. They’re human. And for that? They’re vilified. Pammi likes to wear makeup? A sin. Biniti speaks her mind? She’s a “fallen woman.” The book punishes them for owning their sexuality, their voice, their very right to exist outside a man’s approval. It teaches us that women who desire anything for themselves are somehow less pure, less worthy. And that? That is the real villainy of this book.

So yes, I’m angry. I’m not just angry about the portrayal of women in this book, I’m furious about how normalized it is to treat a woman’s silence as her virtue. I’m furious that we’re still romanticizing this passive suffering as some divine state of being. These women are not goddesses of pain. They are victims of a world that refuses to give them the agency to be real. To be messy. To be human.

And you know what? We deserve more. We deserve stories where women get to be loud, messy, complex, and real. We deserve stories where women are not punished for speaking out, for wanting more, for living for themselves. Not for someone else’s redemption arc.

This book made me feel like I was trapped in some twisted morality play, where women are forced into silence just to prove their worth. And no. We don’t need to worship women who suffer in silence. We need to give them the space to rage, to hurt, to be whole.

Gunahon Ka Devta forgets that women are people, not symbols. It forgets that we deserve to be whole, not just holy. We deserve to be loud, not just quiet, saints of suffering. I don’t care how beautiful the prose is. I don’t care how many poetic metaphors you’ve woven into a woman's pain. I will not call this literature. I will not call it love. It is a disaster. And I hated every second of it.

Sudha deserved to scream. Gesu deserved to burn down the whole damn town. Pammi and Biniti deserved to be loud and free. Pammi and Biniti deserved to live on their own terms, without being punished for wanting.

And I deserve to read a book where women don’t have to suffer silently to earn their place in a narrative.

So no, I’m not romanticizing this. I’m calling it out for what it is. A deeply toxic, deeply misogynistic story disguised as something beautiful. And I’m done with it.

Burn this book. Write something real.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

Public International Law: A Love Letter, a Breakup Text, and a Crime Scene Report

i don’t even know how to describe what studying for my public international law exam feels like anymore. it's like being stuck in a long-distance situationship with a textbook—complicated, theoretical, no emotional payoff. we've been circling around the same ideas since i was in fifth grade: the UN, peace, sovereignty, treaties. nothing has changed. just more jargon, more footnotes, more reasons to question why i thought this degree was a good idea.

i did great in environmental law, by the way. the questions were laughably easy—like, “draw a tree and name it” easy. i wrote six answers instead of five because i had time, energy, and a deep-seated fear of underperforming. public international law, though? it’s just sitting on my desk like a cryptic ex, making me read the same paragraph five times until i start dissociating halfway through the word customary.

and yes, i'm tired. of the vague definitions. of the endless distinctions between binding and non-binding. of the way this subject floats above real life like a balloon someone forgot to tie down.

meanwhile, the guy i’m talking to called me while i was revising jurisdiction clauses. i ignored it because priorities. he responded with a “good night” text so drenched in passive aggression it might as well have come with a disclaimer. also, he deleted a bunch of messages before i could read them, which is exactly the kind of energy i don't need when i'm already on the verge of crying over the VCLT. i’m not saying i want to yeet him into the void but… no, actually, i am saying that.

anyway. back to pretending i understand how the ICJ enforces anything.

[yourfavanxioussunshine]

To everyone who's living in war prone areas (I.e., Amritsar, Ludhiana), keep few emergency things close to yourselves.

1. Torch

2. Phone powerbank (if possible)

3. All necessity food items (Rice, Wheat, lentils, eggs)

4. Knives, scissors, sharp items (trust me they are helpful)

5. Medicines (Paracetamol, digestion related medicines, med to control vomiting and nausea) and the necessity medicines (for diabetes, blood pressure and other chronic illness' ones) and bandages and antiseptic.

6. Water (a lot and lot of it, even tap water, boil it if possible and store in small cans and bottles)

9. Keep few cash in hand as ATMs or net banking might not work

10. Sanitary products (pads, tampons, paper soaps, toothpaste)

11. Dry fruits (if there's a horrible situation and no food is available)

12. Whistle

Edit*

13. Identity cards (Aadhar card, Pan card, Pass port, any other identity card)

14. DO NOT VIDEOGRAPH OR TURN ON FLASHLIGHTS. Blackout is done so that it would become difficult for the enemies to find out the civilian areas or civilians themselves. Turning on flashlights at them, video graphing, or yelling too much will indicate your presence there.

15. Canned or instant food which doesn't need cooking.

16. Electrolytes

These are all the things I can remember. I'll add more later. Even though the attacks are upto the Punjab and Kashmir region, there's chances of the fight to flow throughout the country, especially the rest of the north, northeastern, northwestern and western states. Keeping few of these things close to you will help in emergency situation.

Stay safe. Take care of yourself and stay alert.