Dear Ms. Goswami,

You have been a “writer” for Brunch magazine for a number of years now – hundreds of columns, I guess (and I can just imagine you hoping for a book deal like Carrie Bradshaw at this point)—and I must have read at least half of them. So you know this is coming from an informed and loyal (if unwillingly so) reader.

I will probably take longer to write this email than you ever gave to a column, beginning to end. So I hope you take some of that free time to read the rest of this missive.

My sister and I have a little practice that's become ritual over the past year. At night, after our parents go to bed, we hang out in our restroom—it’s quite big, you know—and smoke and talk. On Sundays, we sometimes (if Brunch is lying around by the pot) read your column out loud to each other.

And we shake our heads.

Here is our perception of you: You are a lazy writer. And a lazy columnist. You do not respect your readers enough to try making sense; resorting to cliches of the worst kind, all the time. You compensate for your poor standards by talking down to your readers—you do this most often by talking about US trends in general and Hollywood in particular, and positing yourself as some kind of insider and perceptive “spectator”. But you see nothing except what your own media feeds the masses. You augur a terrible age, in which people who are raised on meaningless mediated values, grow up to spout those same values, louder and lower, in that very media.

In short, you are a writer of no substance. Most of your readers know a great deal more than you. 

This is not a new discovery for us, or a new anger at the sudden realization that trees are cut to distribute your column. This is the summation of a strong opinion formed over the course of years. Yes, your column on Google recently bothered us a great deal. It. Made. No. Sense. Sounded like you had heard a bunch of disconnected things (privacy, googling yourself, jobs, what not) with the word Google appearing in them, and decided to drop them on the page and call it a Spectator column. 

Or perhaps Spectator itself signals that you have experienced nothing yourself, and are only regurgitating the images that you are bombarded with daily.

Anyway, even after the Google column, we didn’t write to you. But today, we are. Suddenly, but earnestly, we are writing to you, after reading your column “Neighbour’s Envy”.

This column is truly terrible (although I still would not call it your worst column). You continue your Tendulkar-level winning streak of making no sense, using the basest cliches and unsophisticated “analysis” to describe a universal phenomenon: the mid-life crisis. The two things about this article that resonate with your entire body of work are: 1) it makes no sense, and 2) the points you even try to make are stupid.

Offensively stupid.

There are three main issues, specific to this article, that I would like to bring your attention to at this point:

This is not the US of A. Perhaps you think that’s a terrible thing, but trust me, you would not have a job as a columnist in the US. This from someone who has studied and worked as a writer there. Trust me. 

The important and meaningful things in this world do not all occur in Hollywood and cannot all be dismissed with poor Western punchlines like Scientology. You and your readership live here, in this bounded and complicated plot of land called India. This is where our experience happens. This is what we use to make sense of and navigate the world.

Your excessive namedroppings and brand obsessions (whether they are designer labels, celebrities or values) have very little organic meaning in this country. Such fixations keep you from making sense—not just because we as a readership don’t know what you are talking about, but also because clearly you yourself do not understand or know much about the rich context in which those symbols (Brangelina, Tom Cruise, Sex and the City) emerge, nor understand the morality that they embody. 

Your classmates are coming to reunions in Jaguars? Really? You had an adolescent crush on George Clooney? (He’d have to be a lot older for that.) You dreamt about being interviewed by Leno and Letterman?

Gosh. Do you realize how far away you push your audience with such disconnecting, condescending junk? You do not even do us the essential writerly courtesy of referencing to our imagination to enable us to connect with your words.

Mid life crisis is not about envy.  Please do not open your columns with phrases like “I have a theory...” unless you are prepared to make a coherent argument. Even though your poor excuses for anecdotal evidence prove nothing except that you watch too much television, I would like to register my disagreement with your thesis, and perhaps try to demonstrate how an argument is made.

I posit that a mid-life crisis is not about envying others and what they have achieved in comparison to us. It is the psychic hangover of our brutal and inevitable confrontation with the essential meaningless of life, and the gathering certainty of our own demise.

That, I would humbly suggest, is a much more sobering experience than watching your friend drive up in a Benz or imagining Brad Pitt’s sex life. 

Mid-life crises occur at a period when the structure of our lives begins to wind down: when the controlled and potential-filled occupations of school, college, career establishment and finally child-rearing end, and we are faced with the uncertain and too-short prospect of the rest of our functioning lives. Our children are growing up, in most cases without much thought for us, the parents; attacking their lives and careers with the same zeal that we once did, driven by the same unquestioned and vague notions that motivated us. Plus, all their jargon and savviness can make anyone feel obsolete.

The feeling of crisis is that it’s the beginning of the end. And that even what has happened yet doesn’t add up easily or to much. By the middle of our lives, our convictions and sense of justice and meaning have in all cases taken a sound beating. All threads are fraying, all girders are rotting. To address your specific “theory”: It is not about the fact that society may have “rewarded” some (a very few) people with more money, fame or sex partners than you—but the fact that such rewards are not based on any value system that makes sense or is fair; and that those rewards are meaningless too.

It’s not about the fact that most of us can only afford off-season vacations, but the fact that more expensive vacations aren’t any better (the idea of vacation itself is kind of depressing, don’t you find?) and may in fact be worse. (We certainly think so.)

The culture of celebrity has made suckers out of people like you (and I do mean you, Ms. Goswami). The fact that people like you love to read tabloids about “fucked up” celebrities and are still the most ardent believers (and enviers) of some special celebrity happiness is neither coincidence nor irony. You are simply a sucker for borrowed values, because you refuse to do your own thinking. 

Only for someone who doesn’t think at all about life can a mid-life crisis be explained by envy and shallowness. But the buck stops here. Yes, I am not at mid life yet, but I am a spectator, just as you claim to be. My parents are in crisis, as are many other middle aged people I know, and it has nothing to do with what you write. And by the way, you don’t have to be at mid life to have this crisis. It’s just that most of us can put it off until then.

We are the “you” that you address in your column. Don’t presume to speak for us just because you do not know how to speak to us.

You know nothing about Vinod Kambli, and have no right to make flagrantly unfounded claims about a person. Like I said, you are a sucker for borrowed values. And of course, your “ideas” and opinions are borrowed too. Fair enough. But please do not try to turn Brunch into a tabloid (don’t you know that it’s a weekly advertisement for the Good Life?) and make claims about real people and their experiences. Just because you saw him on TV and you are part of the media, you don’t get the right to talk about him or his “crisis” like you know what you are talking about. You don’t. Deal with it. Stop borrowing your idea of bitchiness from Sex and the City (emulate Maureen Dowd for bitchiness, at least, if you must).

Ms. Goswami, it is clear that you are going through a mid-life crisis yourself. “Stuck in a dead end job that doesn’t give you enough satisfaction, money or free time...your kids treat you as some kind of bad joke,” as you said. 

It’s probably clear that the book deal isn’t coming either. All right.

At some level, I empathize. That must suck. But take heart in the fact that none of it makes much sense and that it sucks for everyone. Your children will be treated as jokes by their children too. Angelina Jolie probably wasn’t that job-satisfied with Hell’s Kitchen. In any case, she too will get old some day, and all of us will die soon enough. 

So chill out, and stop using your column to vent your vague rage at the unfairness of life, and in doing so, make the state of journalism worse. If you want to write about your own issues, at least learn more about yourself, and try to think a little harder. Stop living and dying by borrowed dimes. 

Learn to use your own experience of the world to formulate and defend your theories. If you must be a product of the media, then absorb better media (yes, most of it is American, but you’re good at that). Learn to appreciate the fact that real people with full-grown minds read your weekly column, and that that power can be used in far more interesting and rewarding ways.

This is the digital age, Ms. Goswami, and it is already hacking away at the antiquated foundations of print journalism. Don’t bury your head in the sand. We don’t put up with one-way conversations and sorry excuses for advertising any more--we get better than that for free. Can you face your readership? Do you have the cajones to hear what we’re saying about you? Do you have a readership besides disgrunted youngsters like us who read your column more out of a sense of morbid curiosity than anything else?

Start a blog, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. 

The very fact that we are writing this letter should signal the fact that our patience is running out on people like you, who have taken the worst of the babu mentality and switched to corporations, squeaking in the deafening racket of their petty ideology. I don’t have much hope that you will understand, let alone regard, anything in this letter. I also doubt that we will have the patience to read another column by you—and the only way to avoid it would be to discontinue HT, so two birds with one stone, I guess. Convey our goodbyes to Vir Sanghvi, if you get any face time with him and can stop envying him long enough to tell him anything real.

This is probably the longest letter you’ll ever receive. Do you know how to respond?

Yours sincerely,
Nilanjana Behl.