cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

ironic cringe Joined July 2014

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ak @arjunality

24 hours ago

vishal dadlani wearing the tshirt i made based on the words i tweeted 4 years ago is the funniest thing that has happened in a while

ak @arjunality

4 years ago

real

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Any society that makes people who want kids by 25 feel irresponsible has failed at something basic. I know how this sounds. So, caveats upfront: not everyone wants kids, 25 is not magic, and this is not some return-to-1950s-housewife fantasy. I mean something narrower. If someone wants children young, they should not have to fight the entire structure of modern life to do it. I became a father at 31. To twins. And 31 is not old, obviously. But the first thing that hit me was the energy bill. Not the emotional one. The physical one. Feeding the preemies every 2 hours. The unstoppable colic. The tiny logistics of which baby has slept, which baby has eaten, which baby is making that face that means something is about to go wrong. at 4:30 AM. This takes far more patience and body-level energy than I had imagined. From both of us. In the boring daily way, not the cute Instagram day-in-the-life reels way. And it made me think: wait, this is what people were supposed to do with more youth, more grandparents, more siblings around, and fewer calendar invites or quick calls. The irony is that 25 is not even early by Indian history. NFHS-5 put the median age at first pregnancy at 21.2. It only sounds early inside the urban career ladder, where every life decision must first pass through promotions, rent, EMIs, picking a housing society around school admissions, and the vague idea of being "settled." Being around my hometown has made this whole thing feel possible in a way a metro or foreign city would not have. At any point, there is someone around. A grandparent. An aunt. An uncle. Someone who can hold one baby while the other is being fed. Someone who can step in for twenty minutes without making it feel like a transaction. Just people. More hands. More slack. My father ran a grocery store, so work and home were never separate planets. After school, I could hang around him. He was working, but present. I did not think much of it then, because children never think of the infrastructure that makes their life feel normal. But now I do. This is the funny bug in the modern Indian success story. You spend your twenties escaping the village. Bombay. Bangalore. Gurgaon. Singapore. Dubai. Bay Area. Better salaries, better jobs, better apartments, better coffee, better everything. Then you come home from the hospital and realise the village was the only childcare system that actually worked. Of course, the village was never magic. It was mostly women's time, treated as ambient infrastructure. India's 2024 Time Use Survey says women who did caregiving spent about 140 minutes a day on it, compared to 74 minutes for men. That one line should puncture any lazy nostalgia. But it still leaves the uncomfortable question. What replaced it? So we professionalise the village. Daycare. Nanny. Night nurse. Meal subscription. Baby camera. WhatsApp group with other parents. Many of these are useful. Some are necessary. I am not sneering at them. But financial capital can buy labour. It cannot buy care. It cannot buy your child's grandmother sensing something is off before you do. It cannot buy an aunt taking the baby before you even ask. It cannot buy the quiet confidence that if you collapse for twenty minutes, the system will not collapse with you. This is why the "make money first, figure family later" line makes me suspicious now. It sounds sensible. Get stable. Build a career. Earn well. Then have kids when life is sorted. But what if the sorting itself moves you away from the infrastructure that would have made family easier? By the time the salary is right, the grandparents are older. The siblings are scattered. The career is harder to pause. The body has less slack. And then we call delayed parenthood a personal choice. Sometimes it is. Often, I think, it is a design failure dressed up as individual ambition. We did not lose the village. We outgrew it when it was inconvenient, then started missing it when it became useful. Maybe the question is not whether people should have kids at 25. Maybe the question is why success has made wanting kids young feel so impractical.

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. @playboicurrryy

5 days ago

why do baby clothes have pockets they have no money or goals

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akankshark @mishradidi

a week ago

biggest loss of third spaces is the death of spontaneous "building ke niche" sports culture. we used to grab a bat or a racket at 10pm and just play. now, if it isn’t ₹2,500/hr on an app, adults refuse to show up. we forgot how to have unmonetized fun!!

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@

a week ago

oh to be a 4 years old beekeeper distracted by a roly poly instead of a wage slave under late stage capitalism

@

57 years ago

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

a week ago

good bad shayri is genuinely difficult to write

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

a week ago

gond/xanthum gum does wonders for mouth ulcers, who knew

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ℏεsam @Hesamation

a week ago

Vibe coding essentials.

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

a week ago

indore im in you

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

a week ago

indian marriages are so chaotic

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

3 weeks ago

hi team, I'll be out of office because it's ma budday

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cshell 🐚 @cshelljn

3 weeks ago

lol just realised my last order from zomato was in jan swiggy in sept last year?????

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shreshth mohan @shreshthmohan

3 weeks ago

i’ve documented 30-odd spots within 2 hours or 80 km from bangalore blrhikes.com/trails

Aarchi Gandhi @FafdaJalebie

4 weeks ago

In bangalore there are no places for outing except cafe, malls or gardens. All best places are either 100Km far or in other city

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Zainab 🇵🇰 🇵🇸 @ZainabagainDope

3 weeks ago

Desis be like yeh humara guest room hai aur aap humaray guest hain so aap humaray bedroom main soyen gay aur hum guest room main.

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Mahesh Shantaram @thecontrarian

3 weeks ago

Good morning Bangalore! But that's only if your WFH. If you're heading to office anywhere in the IT corridor, you couldn't have picked a worse day. Every one of those peaks is a Tuesday. And last Tuesday particularly was THE WORST. Source: co.thecontrarian.in

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Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov

4 weeks ago

Much respect to melons for keeping their seeds in one neat pile, unlike watermelons.

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aleee @alecrlm

4 weeks ago

meu grupo de amigos tem a tradição de sempre que um vai viajar ele marca todos os outros nos storys pra parecer que todo mundo foi junto estamos na italia nesse momento