Hi, {{ subscriber.first_name }} And what was supposed to be around 8 hours of driving one way somehow became 12+ hours. I was born here, so I have basically watched this city grow from what it was 20 years ago to what it is today. And it has changed a lot. Shillong has never been one of the major cities of India. Nothing here is really the “best” at anything. But it has pretty much everything you normally need for a good life. Good hospitals. Good schools. Markets. Restaurants. Cafes. Internet. Amazon deliveries. Civilisation, basically. I have spent most of this year in Bangalore and came back home to visit family. And somehow, despite living in what is essentially one of the most developed cities India can offer, the biggest thing I realised I had become dependent on was… Blinkit. The ability to randomly realise at 11:47 PM that you want Diet Coke and have another human being appear outside your house with it 10 minutes later has probably permanently damaged my expectations from society. Anyway. As our drive continued, we started moving away from Shillong and deeper towards the Garo Hills. The towns became smaller. Then the restaurants started disappearing. Then even the small shops became occasional. And after a while, tiny villages would just appear every few kilometres along the highway before disappearing again. I already knew the place we were going to, a beautiful canyon called Wari Chora, was remote. I just didn’t realise how remote. At one point, even Google Maps basically gave up on us. Which is partly how an 8-hour drive became a 12-hour one. Good roads slowly disappeared too. There were stretches where both of us genuinely questioned why we had decided to come here. More than once, we discussed turning back. But we had already come this far, so we just kept going. A lot of off-roading, wrong turns, asking random people for directions and multiple detours later, we finally reached the village where we were supposed to spend the night. A guy greeted us there who looked mildly surprised that two idiots had decided to show up during this time of the year. Apparently, we were completely off-season. Still, he took us into his home, where we would be staying for the night, and offered us dal chawal for dinner. At that point, he could have served me boiled leaves and I probably would’ve eaten them. We were dead. So the moment we touched the beds, we immediately passed out. The mattresses were approximately as soft as granite and there were insects of all shapes and sizes around us acting as our personal security guards. And weirdly enough, that was probably the first moment during this trip when something properly clicked in my head. My normal life is ridiculously comfortable. The next morning made that feeling even stronger. We started going deeper into the jungle towards Wari Chora, and along the way there were houses with people living in places where I genuinely couldn’t imagine living myself. And my extremely city-person brain kept producing the dumbest questions. “What if they suddenly want to buy new clothes?” “What happens if something breaks?” And obviously… “Do they even know Blinkit exists?” Very first-world problems to be thinking about while somebody else is casually living their life perfectly fine. There were kids running around freely. Mothers sitting around their homes and gardens. People working, talking, moving around and doing everything humans normally do. Just with completely different infrastructure around them. And I realised something important. It is very easy from inside a city to start treating the city version of life as the default version of human life. It isn’t. It’s just the version we’ve become used to. I probably couldn’t live the life I was observing there. But that’s exactly what made me start thinking about something else. Not that the people there are somehow living like ancient humans. They have phones, electricity, vehicles and modern tools just like the rest of us. But seeing how helpless I became the moment roads, shops, mobile networks and Google Maps started disappearing made me wonder: How the hell did humans survive when none of this existed at all? No hospitals. No GPS. No electricity. No packaged food. No emergency services. No weather app telling you that a storm is coming. And depending on when in human history we’re talking about, sometimes not even the sophisticated weapons, shelters or technology we would later develop. So I started reading. And the first answer is not very inspiring: A lot of them simply didn’t survive. Mortality in traditional hunter-gatherer populations was brutally high by modern standards, especially during childhood. One major analysis of several such populations estimated that only around 57% of people survived to age 15. But there’s an important detail here. This doesn’t mean everyone somehow dropped dead at 30. If you survived childhood, reaching your 60s or even 70s was absolutely possible. The terrible average life expectancy numbers we associate with ancient populations are dragged down heavily by infant and childhood deaths. But the more interesting answer was this: Humans weren’t surviving these environments because every individual was some insanely strong caveman who could fight a leopard with his bare hands. We survived because we had each other. Humans became ridiculously good at cooperation. Hunter-gatherer communities shared food far beyond just parents feeding their own children. People hunted together. They cared for children who weren’t their own. Knowledge was passed from adults to younger members of the group. Skills were learned through years of watching, playing, participating and eventually being taught. And when one person’s hunt failed, someone else’s food could keep them alive. When someone got injured, other people could compensate. When a child needed attention, there were more people around than just the mother. The group absorbed risk. Which is kind of insane when you think about it. Because maybe the first piece of human technology wasn’t a spear. Maybe it was another human. Then obviously, actual technology kept getting better too. There is strong evidence of controlled hearths going back at least around 790,000 years, and wooden spears used for hunting hundreds of thousands of years ago. Fire didn’t just give humans warmth. It helped cook food, made some foods safer and easier to digest, provided light and likely helped make camps safer from predators. And even the picture of everyone going completely unconscious the moment the sun went down isn’t really accurate. Research on modern Hadza hunter-gatherers found that different members of a group naturally woke and slept at different times through the night. Across the observations, someone was awake during almost the entire night, almost like the group accidentally created a rotating security system just by having different sleep patterns. So humans didn’t survive because we were fearless. We survived because we slowly built systems around our fear. Fire. Weapons. Shelter. Food sharing. Knowledge. Friends. Family. Communities. And eventually roads, hospitals, supermarkets, electricity, mobile networks… …and yes, Blinkit. The scale has changed completely. But maybe the fundamental thing hasn’t. We are still extremely vulnerable individual animals who became absurdly powerful because we figured out how to build systems around each other. Which made me think differently about the people I had seen during this trip too. Their lives aren’t some “simpler” version of ours. They come with difficulties I probably don’t understand and conveniences I take for granted that aren’t always available there. But they have also built their own systems around the place they live. They know the roads that Google doesn’t. They know the jungle I would get lost inside. They know the people around them. They know how life there works. Drop me there alone and I would be useless. Drop them into Bangalore and maybe Blinkit would blow their mind for approximately two days before it became normal too. Humans are funny like that. Give us almost any environment for long enough and we’ll figure out how to turn it into home. And somehow, from groups of humans sitting around fires trying not to get eaten, we eventually built cities where I can press a button on a glowing rectangle and have ice cream arrive at my door. That’s a pretty ridiculous journey for one species. And trips like this make me appreciate it a little more. Behind the VideosContent has been going out as usual. Performance recently has been a bit of a roller coaster. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the actual production process from my end has now become pretty streamlined. Output isn’t really the bottleneck anymore. The harder part is constantly analysing what is working, understanding what isn’t, iterating on it and still maintaining the quality I have tried to keep since the start. And then there’s long-form. It has been sitting in my head for months. I really want to do it. But I still haven’t been able to fully commit. The amount of time and effort required to make even one long-form video at the quality I have promised myself feels massive. And I think I’ve built that expectation so high in my own head that simply starting has become the hardest part. I’m still not dropping the idea. Maybe I just need to start smaller. Which is kind of what happened with the livestream I did last Friday. It was so unbelievably unplanned that at one point I completely lost track of the game I was supposed to be playing and spent the next one and a half hours doing increasingly random things. But somehow… I loved it. More importantly, actually doing it once massively reduced the mental barrier I had built around doing it. Now I’m excited to do another one. And then another one slightly better than that. Which I guess is how most things in life actually happen. You rarely become ready and then start. You start. You suck a little. You learn. You do it again. And eventually you look backwards and realise the thing that once felt extremely difficult has somehow become normal. Maybe that’s also the story of humans in general. Just millions of years of: “Well, that nearly killed us. Let’s try something different next time.” And somehow we ended up here. If you’ve made it this far, firstly, thank you for spending this much of your time with me. And secondly, reply to this email and tell me about the most recent trip you genuinely enjoyed. It doesn’t have to be something crazy. I would genuinely love to read about it. Thanks for spending your time with me, and I’ll see you all lovelies next week! |
← Back to all letters12 Hours Away From Blinkit
Last weekend, I went on a mini road trip with a buddy of mine.
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