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The lamp stopped smoking and this guy just emerged out of thin air, like he’d been cramped in there and was working out a kink in his back.

“Three wishes,” he said. “Usual rules. Can’t wish for more wishes, can’t bring anyone back, and honestly, skip the love stuff…. I’ve seen how that goes.”

I didn’t need three, though.

“I wish everyone, everywhere, could actually feel at peace. Genuinely happy. Not fake-happy, the real thing, and it has to last.”

He went quiet for a second, then let out this short laugh…not mean, just tired. “You’d be surprised how many people ask me this. And how fast they change their mind once they understand what it actually means.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. You’re just picturing it wrong. You’re seeing wars ending, borders melting away, kids running around in some field somewhere. That’s not what peace is, though. Peace is a million tiny decisions happening every day … some guy choosing not to slam the door on his way out, two politicians deciding to sit in the room one more hour instead of walking, someone at 3 a.m. picking up the phone instead of pouring another drink. I can’t make those choices for people. And if I take the choosing away, I take away the thing that makes it real. You’d get quiet. Not happiness. Happiness has to be earned, or it doesn’t stick.”

I didn’t really have a comeback for that.

“So it’s impossible.”

“Didn’t say that.” He crouched down so we were at eye level, like he was about to let me in on something. “Can’t just hand it out to eight billion people, no. But I can do something else, if you let me tweak the wish a little.”

“Tweak it how.”

“Everyone gets thirty seconds. Once. Where they actually ‘feel’ what the person they hate most is carrying around … their fear, their grief, whatever they’re chewing on at 3 a.m. Not told about it. Felt. What they do after, that’s still on them.”

I thought about my neighbor and that stupid fence we still haven’t spoken about. I thought about a couple of countries, too. And honestly, myself.

“Do it,” I said.

No smoke this time. He just smiled and said, “You already had this wish, by the way. You just needed someone to point out it was in your hands the whole time. Thirty seconds at a time.”

Then the lamp was just a lamp again, still warm in my hands. And somewhere out there, the world got a tiny bit quieter. Not silent, though. More like it was listening.

When I woke up, I was saddened that it had only been a vivid dream. No genie, no lamp, no quiet, listening world. Just my ordinary ceiling fan rotating at full speed…the faint disappointment of having almost held something enormous.

But the more I sat with it, the less that disappointment made sense. Because the genie’s whole point was that peace was never something that gets handed over. It isn’t a gift you unwrap and keep. It’s built, one small and unglamorous choice at a time … the door not slammed, the extra hour in the room, the call made instead of the drink poured. If that’s true, then a dream reminding me of it isn’t really a loss. It’s the only kind of magic that was ever going to work in the first place: not a genie doing the choosing for me, but me waking up and still remembering that I have one to make.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

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There is a quiet kind of courage in simply being who you are , the steady kind that shows up in small daily choices – what you say, what you tolerate, what you walk away from. We spend years building a version of ourselves shaped by other people’s expectations, and then wonder why it feels like wearing someone else’s coat. Being yourself isn’t a slogan. It’s a discipline.

It helps to separate two things that get treated as identical – rules and norms. Rules are the structures that make a shared life possible – laws, agreements, basic decency, the terms you signed up for. Breaking them usually costs someone else something. Norms are different. They are the unwritten scripts about how to dress, speak, celebrate, grieve, succeed, or fail “properly.” They are enforced not by courts but by raised eyebrows.

Rules deserve respect because they protect people. Norms deserve scrutiny because they often protect nothing but comfort, usually someone else’s comfort with your difference. A person can follow every rule that matters and still refuse the norm that says ambition should look a certain way, or family should look a certain way, or grief should be tidy and quick. Conflating the two is how people end up trapped, obeying customs they never agreed to as if they were laws they can’t break.

Not every mismatch needs to be fought. Sometimes the wisest response to a room, a job, a relationship, or a community whose values run against your own is simply to leave, and to leave without dragging it out. Lingering in a place that asks you to betray what you believe rarely produces a compromise. It produces erosion. A little bit of you goes missing every week you stay past the point of knowing it’s wrong.

Leaving quickly isn’t cowardice. It’s respect for your own time, and for the fact that the place doesn’t have to change and you don’t have to force it to. Some doors are worth closing gently and immediately, before resentment turns you into someone smaller than you were.

There’s a particular exhaustion that comes from trying to reshape people who never asked to be reshaped. It rarely works, and even when it seems to, what changes is usually behavior on the surface, not conviction underneath. People change because something in their own life made the old way unworkable, not because someone else pushed hard enough.

This isn’t an argument for indifference. You can disagree, state your case once clearly, and mean it. But there’s a difference between offering a view and campaigning for someone else’s soul. The energy spent trying to convert other people is energy stolen from the only project that’s actually yours to run: your own life.

The flip side of leaving others alone is turning that same energy inward. Self-change is legitimate work, maybe the most legitimate work there is. But it has one condition worth holding onto – change for yourself, not for an audience. Losing a habit because it was quietly hurting you is different from losing it because someone else disapproved. Softening a hard edge because it kept costing you relationships you wanted is different from softening it to be more palatable to people you don’t respect.

The test is simple, if not always easy to apply honestly. Would you still want this change if no one were watching, if no one would ever know? If yes, it’s growth. If no, it’s performance, and performance has a way of collapsing the moment the audience leaves.

Put together, these aren’t separate ideas so much as one attitude seen from different angles: hold the line on what genuinely matters (the rules), let go of what’s merely expected (the norms), don’t waste your one life waiting for a bad fit to become a good one, don’t spend it trying to author someone else’s character, and keep improving the only person you actually have jurisdiction over. It’s a quieter way to live than constantly negotiating with everyone else’s opinion of you. But it tends to produce something rare – a person who is recognizably, consistently, unapologetically themselves.

Be Yourself….

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

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I almost missed it. It was just a smudge of pink caught in the wiper blade when I got back to the car. A leaf-shaped piece of pink paper, the kind that peels off a sticker sheet, scribbled over in blue crayon by a hand still learning its letters.

I love my life, written on it.

I smiled. It made my day.

The heart was pressed so hard the crayon had gone waxy and shiny in the middle, like whoever drew it wanted to make sure it would stay. The letters wandered a little. The ‘y’ leaned like it was in a hurry, the ‘f’ curled at the bottom like it wasn’t quite sure how to stop.

I have no idea who left it. Perhaps some kid, walking home from school, hands full of nothing better to do than press love onto a stranger’s windshield. They didn’t know whose car it was. They didn’t need to. They just had something good in them that day and decided the world should have a little of it too.

I’ve picked up plenty of things off the street over the years – a few coins, once a twenty-dollar bill that I felt guilty keeping, so gave it to someone in need. But nothing that cost less and was worth more than this. A kid, somewhere out there, loves their life. And now, a little bit, so do I.

I peeled it off carefully and saved it. It’s still there somewhere in my box of old things.

Daily writing prompt

Share a hobby you’ve picked up recently — what got you into it?

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I never planned to become a cyclist. Five years ago, as the pandemic loosened its grip on the world and I closed the door on a long career, I found myself standing at the edge of an unfamiliar kind of freedom — the kind nobody warns you about. Retirement doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with time, and time, I quickly learned, can feel like both a gift and a void.I bought a bicycle almost on a whim. I told myself it was for exercise, something to keep the body from stiffening into old age. I had no idea it would become the axis around which an entirely new chapter of my life would turn.

My first real tour was along the coast — salty air, long empty stretches of road lined by coconut palms, the rhythmic hum of tyres on tarmac. There is something about cycling that other forms of travel simply cannot replicate. A car moves too fast to notice the way morning light changes the colour of the sea. Walking is too slow to cover real distance. But a bicycle moves at exactly the speed of attention — fast enough to carry you somewhere new, slow enough to actually see it.

I began pedalling along India’s coastline in short stretches at first, then longer ones, then entire seasons planned around it. Over five years, the coast became less of a route and more of a companion — familiar in its unpredictability, generous in what it revealed. Fishing villages waking before dawn. Temples, churches, and mosques worn smooth by centuries of monsoons. Strangers who fed me, sheltered me from sudden rain, and asked nothing in return except a story or two in exchange.

What surprised me most wasn’t the cycling itself . It was everything cycling opened the door to.

The long, meditative hours on the road did something unexpected to my mind. Thoughts I had buried under decades of deadlines and responsibilities began to surface. I started writing about the rides, first just as notes to remember a particular sunrise or a conversation with a roadside chai vendor. Those notes became blog posts. The blog posts became the scaffolding for something bigger — my first travel memoir, which I’ve now published (The Roads Along the Sea: The Malabar and Coromandel Coasts eBook : Nair, Ayyappan: Amazon.in: Kindle Store https://share.google/mxGgEo3CdZfge7Ttw) or (https://a.co/d/03gDO9uB)

Cycling also reignited an old, dormant curiosity for history. Every coastal town had a past — a fort, an ancient port, a colonial ruin, a fisherfolk legend — and I found myself reading deep into regional histories just to understand the ground I was rolling over. What began as casual curiosity became genuine study.

And there was photography — a passion I’d carried quietly for years but rarely had the time or stillness to pursue properly. On a bicycle, you’re forced to slow down and notice: a heron standing motionless in a backwater, light breaking through casuarina trees, the exact blue-grey of the sea before a storm. Nature photography became a natural extension of the ride itself, each day’s journey yielding its own small gallery.

Strangely enough, the miles also gave birth to fiction. Something about the solitude of long-distance cycling — the rhythm, the isolation, the sheer amount of unstructured thinking time — nudged me toward writing science fiction, of all things. I’m now preparing that manuscript to send out to literary agents and publishers.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe how much unfolded from a single decision to get on a bicycle. What began as an outward journey along a coastline gradually became an inward one — a slow, unhurried transformation that, five years on, feels almost like a dream I’m still living inside.

Cycle touring gave my body movement again, but it gave my mind and soul something far more valuable: room to wander, to notice, to create. It let me see humanity through a different lens — unhurried, close to the ground, dependent on the kindness of strangers, attentive to small things that a faster life would have blurred past.If retirement is meant to be an ending, mine turned out to be something else entirely — a beginning disguised as one. And it all started with two wheels and a coastline.