It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe River. Nothing dramatic.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, and my hand. And with that my words, and my pen. When I stopped and read, it shook me. I had written something I have felt.

The more I look for what I don’t know I’m looking for, the more likely I am to not find it.

So I am likely to be disappointed. Be disgruntled. What triggered this was my reaction to a new nib grind. It wasn’t really living up to its billing. Not every grind or nib should, as they too are creation of a moment, the artisan finds themselves in. It was not about them. But more about me.

It made me realize, the more new nibs, new grinds I try, I end up not thrilled with the new or appreciative of what I already have.

The universe in its own unique way, was slapping me silly and asking me to stop. And just try and be happy with what I have. Not find happiness with what I can have next. After all, in the end, it is about knowing what I am seeking really.

The pattern repeats. Objects are what change.

Things that somehow add up and pile up. Another new pen. Another new nib, new notebook. It’s all a distraction. Things that seem to bring happiness, but in the end are nothing but distractions from life and the emptiness of it.

The doodling led to self-reflection, and realization, that what I was chasing wasn’t a pen. Or a nib. Instead it was an imagined feeling that something new, something novel would produce. This feeling lives in the future, in the imagined version of the experience. We all feel it, one way or the other. We act on it, one way or the other. Nibs for me. Labubus for someone else.

The actual nib and pen, once inked are nothing like what was imagined. When the nib skips, and catches on paper, the imagination has none of that. That feeling of disappointment. But this is not just about nibs.

It never was. Clothes. Books. Another notebook. Swipe left, swipe right. The rhythm is identical. You’re not looking for a thing. You’re looking for the version of yourself you imagine owning it would produce. You can’t get there. Not because the thing is wrong. Because that self doesn’t exist. Acquisition isn’t the answer of finding self. It is always elimination, stripping down to the essence. And yet the trap of our modern now is that the Lego blocks of consumerism will complete the thing that really it wants to keep incomplete.

Buddhists call this Tanhā. Loosely translated it means craving. Tanhā is the addiction to wanting itself. Not the object. The wanting. What makes it hard to see is that the seeking loop feels like aliveness. The browsing, the imagining, the anticipating. It produces an energy that feels like engagement with life.

These days we call it FOMO, the fear of missing out. It is the algorithmic, bastard child of Tanhā. Social media didn’t invent this. It surely industrialized it. Every pen post, every rotation photo, every “new pen day” thread is engineered to make your current pen feel insufficient. Not because it is. Because the platform needs you to keep scrolling.

The cost of infinite options is that you never fully inhabit any of them. You hold everything lightly because the exit is always visible. Nothing becomes what it could be if you stayed.

It is ironic. Till recently, I had been using a version of the same camera I started taking photos with over a decade ago. My new camera is a more constrained version of the original. I know it intimately. Like the crook of the hand of a beloved with whom you have walked many walks that go nowhere, but end up somewhere. I know the images before they are captured.

I am also the same person who ruthlessly edited his wardrobe down to one hundred pieces, where the new one comes only when something has to go. It is a restricted palette of colors, choices, and clothing that are determined from knowing myself, what I like, and why I like things a certain way. It is unusual to be so precise in one thing and yet wayward in the other.

The person who writes with one pen for ten years knows things about it. I should know. I used the same pen from 1990 through the turn of the century before buying a new one, to celebrate the new century. So, I should know better. Yet, the whole modern social edifice is built on the new, the novel, and the next.

As a lifelong lover of ghazals, and having grown up in northern India, my first understanding of the word Tanha comes from Urdu. It means alone.

Solitary.
Craving.
Loneliness.

Somewhere in the linguistic memory, craving and loneliness were understood as the same condition.

The seeking loop. The new nib, the new ink. The swipe left or right. The next thing. This isn’t just desire. It’s modern society’s reality of finding meaning and company in objects. It makes you wonder if one is not filling space with things, and instead it is about filling an aloneness that things can’t actually reach.

The answer is not in wanting more.

Buddhists call the practice sati, bare attention. To be with what’s in front of you long enough to see it clearly. And so attention, then, isn’t just a practice. It’s learning to be alone without reaching. To sit with the tanhā, the loneliness, the craving, without immediately converting it into a search. Concrete, in my case: I probably don’t know what my best pen can actually do. I’ve never spent enough consecutive hours with it. I switch before I find the edge. It is strange, because I spent hours, days, weeks, and months with my camera. I should have learned.

It is getting late. The notepad is still on the desk. A few more pages have been used. The ink has dried. Somewhere in the middle of doodling and testing nibs I had stopped being a collector and started being a writer again.

I wonder if subconsciously I had come to a point where I now know it is time to start paring back. Finding the joy in the intimacy of knowing something longer. A lot longer. Just as my favorite clothing. My only camera. My favorite watch.

Is this what it feels like when a pen stops being a collector’s object and becomes a writer’s tool?

I don’t know how long this feeling lasts. But something inside me says, this is the point.

As a photographer who is primarily a writer, I like reading about photography so I can learn from those who create. I do that by reading photo magazines and listening to podcasts. One such magazine is Aperture. They take me out of the noise and bring me right into the core of the work. Photographers I don’t follow, or don’t know. Always a pleasant surprise.

In a recent issue they ran an interview with Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran. I have followed Lemaire since his time at Hermès, so I was genuinely excited to read about how he and Tran think about creating. Lemaire is one of the few fashion brands that earns the word “philosophy.” These are people who think in multiple planes: fabric, cinema, sociology, memory.

The initial excitement soon turned into disappointment. Not with the subjects but with the actual interview, and more specifically with the person doing the interview. The interviewer, Alistair O’Neill, an academic from Central Saint Martins, was so much more interested in impressing the subjects that he could never get out of the way.

He finished their thoughts or volunteered his own references. He mentioned mid-interview that he had recently interviewed someone else, for a book chapter he is writing. He was, in the politest possible terms, more interested in being seen conversing with interesting people than in what those people actually had to say.

This is the interaction I see everywhere. The mutual admiration interview is a genre of its own. You see it in podcasts, in magazine profiles, in the long-form Q&As that cultural institutions produce to signal seriousness. The subject is interesting. The interviewer is credentialed. They agree with each other at length. Nothing is at stake. No one is surprised. You finish reading and feel vaguely full but can’t say what you ate. It is worse on technology podcasts. You know people are doing interviews to accumulate symbolic capital, not insight.

Everything gets so diluted that you lose the actual substance. The comfortable questions. Nothing proactive or one that scratches the veneer. The best interviews I read were in Rolling Stone, Creem, and Spin magazines. The interviewer didn’t guarantee to agree. Not hostile, or antagonistic. Not adversarial in the cable news sense. Just genuinely curious enough to risk the awkward follow-up. To leave a silence instead of filling it with your own reference.

Lemaire said something worth sitting with: “Style has a kind of mystery about it. You see someone in the street passing, and you’re like, who is this person?” O’Neill nodded and moved on to Irving Penn.

This was the heart of the conversation. The real reason for the interview. Sitting in that sentence. Pulling on it. Why does mystery matter? What does it mean to make clothes that resist easy categorization in an era when everything is optimized for instant recognition? What does that cost commercially? How do you survive it?

Instead: Penn.

FFS!

Five Things Not To Do

1. Finish their sentences. You are not the subject. They are. So let them lead. Otherwise you get the answer you expected, not the one that was coming.
2. Volunteer your own references. Every time you name-drop, you redirect the conversation back through yourself. The subject stops leading. You get zero revelation.
3. Mention your other work. Nobody you are interviewing cares about your other work. Unless they specifically ask or comment about it, it just gets in the way.
4. Ask only comfortable questions. Agreement is not a conversation. It is applause. The interesting stuff lives precisely where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
5. Fill the silence. Silence is the ultimate pressure. Pressure produces truth. The instinct to rescue the subject from a pause is the interviewer protecting themselves, not the reader.

What Rolling Stone Interviewers Got Right

The Rolling Stone interview has shaped my approach more than any other style. The long, languid, and learned approach is still my cheat sheet. The contrast with today’s technology podcasts could not be starker.

A few things from those interviews that have long since been forgotten, but I often use as part of my interview toolkit:

Take your time. An interview is not a two-hour session. You need to spend time to learn about your subject. When I met Brunello Cucinelli, I had no plans for an interview. It was a 30-minute meeting. It turned into a day with the man. It is still one of my most well-read interviews. And I have been a professional writer for the best part of four decades. If you saw the movie Almost Famous, the main character based on Cameron Crowe didn’t get just one hour in a hotel room. He got days on a tour bus. Proximity produces honesty. The subject stops performing eventually. But of course, you could be Lex Fridman. You could talk, and talk, for hours and numb your subjects, not to mention atrophy the brains of your listeners who actually listen.

Do the research. It is really important to know your subject’s work. And how they think. The Rolling Stone writers were music fans, but they were experts as well. They knew music, they knew the backstory, and they just had knowledge. Not just prepared questions. That knowledge meant subjects couldn’t hide behind vague eloquence. Charlie Rose did good interviews on television. Whatever you thought, or still think, of him, and there is plenty to think about, he arrived at every interview with what felt like a Ph.D. in his subject. Politicians, novelists, scientists, filmmakers: with the help of his team, he knew how to guide the conversation no matter what. His work and Rose the man are two different things. The lesson survives him.

Follow the contradiction. I recently wrote about the ever-changing arguments of Sam Altman around advertising. It is not unfair to ask him directly: what happened? Why did you change your thinking? When a subject says something that doesn’t square with what they’ve done or said before, pull on that thread. Politely. Persistently. It is an opportunity to explain for the subject, and for readers to learn. Your role as an interviewer is to bring an understanding about the subject to the reader. You are only interesting, and what you know or say is interesting, only if you are able to achieve that.

Let them be uncomfortable. You have to read the John Lennon interviews in Rolling Stone. They are hard to read. That’s the point. Nobody rescued him from the difficult moments. The reader deserved that discomfort. So did Lennon. Comfort is the enemy of truth in any conversation worth having.

Be present, not prominent. I go into every interview curious. I want to come out smarter than when I walked in. And the only way to do that is to listen. Really listen. You feel the great interviewers in the room. You never feel them performing for the room. That difference is everything.

A Report Card Of My Own Work

I am not going to say that I am good at following my own rules. I slip up, but with the right intentions. I have linked to three long-form interviews with Brunello Cucinelli, musician Nitin Sawhney, and writer and culture critic Jenna Wortham. In these interviews you will find moments where I insert myself.

I make a verbose speech with Nitin, and with Brunello I talk about myself more than I should. But if you read the interviews, there is a reason for breaking the rules. I am not trying to get off the hook. What I am trying to point out is that whenever I have inserted myself, it is because I am hoping to unlock and provoke a response. I use this technique not to be antagonistic, but to share my own foibles.

To push, to provoke, to offer a thought they can agree or disagree with. The conversation, at least for me, moves forward. When O’Neill inserted himself into the Lemaire interview, the conversation folded back on itself. It became about the interviewer’s taste, not the subject’s thinking.

That is the only test worth applying. Who is this serving? If it is the reader (or listener) then you are on the right track.

For what it is worth, here is how the Rolling Stone tests apply to three of my own interviews:

Take your time. The Brunello interview is all about taking the time. A 30-minute meeting that turned into a day.

Know the work cold. I have listened to Nitin Sawhney for years, so it was easy to follow and talk about the emotional and musical evolution of his work, and elicit responses.

Follow the contradiction. With Jenna Wortham, I push on the gap between internet idealism and structural racism directly and persistently.

Let them be uncomfortable. Jenna yes. Brunello, probably not as much. He is a philosopher-king who never gets rattled.

Be present, not prominent. The Nitin nostalgia speech and the Brunello ending are the two places where I cross the line briefly. I know it. Now you do too.

March 19, 2026.

A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.

I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.

I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe a whole person. It is a strange way to think of yourself. I came up with many descriptors, but they are not the whole thing. I knew that already. Still, I wondered why they were the fragments that I chose to put down on paper.

When I offered my fragments to Claude, it pointed out that the underlying theme to them all, the one that ties it all together, makes me a “seeker.” And almost instantly I realized that’s the word that describes me best, more than anything else.

I have always believed that you need others to see you better than you see yourself. Just as I am able to see, learn, and appreciate others better. In this specific case, Claude found an underlying correlation.

Over the years I have amassed many fragments of self. The phrases I ended up using to describe myself.

Curious. Interesting. Sarcastic. Optimistic. Cool. Forever young. Worry wart. Uptight. Indecisive waffler. Taste maker. Curator. Never finish. Early adopter. Careless.

Curator and Taste are real. But they are outputs. Descriptive of what I produce. Seeker is the reason I am. The AI pointed out that most seekers are better at outward motion than the inward one. Or maybe the AI was just doing what it is trained to do: be a sycophant, aimed to please, saying what you think you need to hear.

But, I do trust my own view of things. And of me. More than AI, or more than any other person. I just lack the vocabulary to describe myself for myself. Words are very important, but when it comes to the self and labeling myself, they have failed me.

Because words are your salvation, your reason to be, as a writer you feel your verbal shortcomings more acutely.

“We know more than we can tell.”

Michael Polanyi.

And while Polanyi was writing about science, it applies here too. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, points out that articulation isn’t just description. It changes how you see what you know. The gap between awareness and articulation is something we don’t think about enough.

But we should.

As I came closer to my own fragments, I realized that the glue that holds them together is a fundamental quality I don’t even think about. Caring.

Curiosity means I care enough to dig deeper. My sarcasm is a mask for caring enough to be disappointed. I worry because I care too much to let go. An indecisive waffler? Maybe I don’t want to get it wrong. You get the point. The fragments point to just one thing. And I didn’t even realize it. It took a long few days of introspection to even come to this realization.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, had it right: language chops up something that was never meant to be fragmented. I suppose that’s where it all started. Where my fragments of self managed to hide the one word that describes it all.

Maybe because you are too close to yourself. Too clouded to see clearly. And that’s why you have to go outside to get a better perspective. Or maybe that’s the journalist in me. A larger perspective, a bigger context, a lens that’s not so close.

Weirdly, this translates in my photography as well. I find beauty in a landscape through its contours and its outlines, not in its details. And even when I get close, I always seek the essential.

So maybe “Seeker” is the best descriptor. What fuels the seeking is that you care. I care about a lot of things. Not sure why. But I do. Maybe I will never know. Maybe that’s the point.

Ancient philosophers across all traditions, Western, Zen, or Vedic, point out that seeking is noble. But the seeker has to make peace with the idea of never arriving.

I think I am okay with that.

March 28, 2026. San Francisco