One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, “Is that Scaachi?” and I’d say, “YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH” and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth.

Even though he was born in the 1950s, I think he was doing his best and most convincing impression of a passive feminist. And yet, it’s likely easier for men in India to not get too tied up with these little inequities. I hate the narrative that Indian people are backwards, that they are more barbarian, more animalistic. That’s not what it is, but some of them do have priorities that do not include who gets to eat at the fish-fry.

would have stayed off the internet for the rest of my life. I would be one of those people who eats lunch alone in a crowded restaurant without even bringing my phone. I would go on vacation with every intention of leaving my hotel room to learn some of the local language rather than staying inside to watch poorly translated reality television. I would make eye contact and I would bake nut loaf and I would read books, like you are, like some adorable idiot.

But no one on the internet is actually a person; they’re just an amalgamation of human parts, like a robot made from all the components of a person but missing the essentials, like a brain or a lymphatic system. It sounds like a person and, sometimes, looks like one, but it’s not. It’s an idea.

This is it