I wrote once that keeping a blog has kept me "grateful like clockwork", so perhaps I ought to begin with an explanation as to why this year, I am late. It is because I begin this list with the more fear than I ever have. I am unsure how to begin to enumerate everyone I love, how to summarize their impact on my life in a succinct way. Junior year has brought about the most love, joy, change, and freedom that I have ever known. I used to -- slightly enviously -- tell Jason that he was the happiest person I knew. These days, because of him and a million others, I am the happiest person I know. I'm happy staring at Las Meninas hung on the Prado Museum walls, happy playing Heads Up Poker in my bedroom on a hot summer night, happy every morning when I clock into a job I still can't quite believe I have. It has been the privilege of this lifetime to learn this -- that I can inject happiness into my life, that I can say cheers when a glass is placed in front of me, instead of worrying about what it's filled with.
So though I am scared of forgetting some names, I will begin with my grandmother, who recently passed. Everything I know, I know through you. I was recently told that I am secure in myself, and it is much too late that I realize it was she who gave me this security. Here lies a woman deeply comfortable with all that will come to pass, who tells me I cannot be upset when luck doesn't swing in my favor. Lying in bed next to her at six, I learned religion. Not in the ways that most children do, with ritual they don't understand and a feeling of obligation, but instead as a deep sense of place. Home is where Krishna is, and we have to get home because He cannot be alone. God is in this rice, and so we cannot let even one grain go to waste. I'm sure I don't always live up to her Godly ideals, but I hope to one day have the legacy to speak of that she does. To have children and a marriage as successful, to have touched so many lives and done as little evil. I hope her journey to the next life is beautiful and peaceful, and that I become a museum of her existence that she would be proud of.
To my sister, who would claim we have become too white if she read this. I'll keep it short to spare her the embarrassment, but with every year that passes I become more excited to grow old with her. Living in New York is enticing mostly because I want to live in her city, because I want to whine about work over wine on a Wednesday and raise our children like siblings. She is my ultimate protector, a rare person who will always carry the burden of loving me and always make it look easy.
To my best friend: you have kept me alive. I don't know how I existed before all of your joy, all of your ease, all of your freedom, crept its way into my world and imbued my life with light. It is almost embarrassing how much more fun I have here than with anyone else, how I will remember college almost entirely as our trips to Baby Loves Tacos and taking shots off your counter at the pregames.
To my other best friend: thank you for bringing girlhood back into my life. I fear I got so hardened, so apathetic, so chiseled by my sicknesses. I forgot how much simple pleasure there was in eating pastries and cereal in your apartment, in feeling your hand on my face as you did my makeup. Few people accept me so completely, or are as easy to talk to on a ten mile walk through the city highways. You are the documentarian and the narrative voice overlaying my life, and having lived without it this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much I love getting to relive our nights through your eyes the next morning.
And to every extension of this friend group that has taken me in this year -- Shukla, for tolerating our giggling and throwing his AirPods at me in Spain when the snoring got too loud. Kevin, for Ubering me home and spending the night on my apartment floor eating ice cream after I got too high and paranoid. Rohan, for sending gifts to my family in Chennai for my grandmother's funeral, and refusing to let me pay him back, like I knew he would. To James, for learning to love my cringe voice. To Gauri, for a friendship that feels like it's on its fifth lifetime, so familiar and yet so young. I'm so confident that I'm deeply boring and infinitely uncool, that I have never done as much for these people as they do every day for me, and so I'm not sure why I deserve such a loving and vast group of friends, but I will take it in with open arms and a full heart nonetheless. I hope it doesn't annoy you too much that I am so enamored by you all.
My father says I don't make friends easily; that it takes years, often, before I like a place or a person. It wasn't always like this -- I used to fall in love quickly and easily, but six years of mental illness made me forget who I was, I suppose. So I am grateful to Barcelona Wine Bar, which reminds me every time of the true expanse of wonder in my life. I wrote in my Beli review: "Coming here with friends is the surest way I know to feel gratitude. I laugh until I cry and eat until I'm stuffed and am made fun of until I wonder if I should be offended, but then we share potatoes and chocolate cake and it's the happiest I'll ever be. There's a Noah Kahan lyric that says, where do we go when we die? I wouldn't mind right here, no I wouldn't mind at all and that is how I feel about Barcelona Wine Bar." It is probably dramatic, but then again it isn't, because I cannot understate how much I love sitting around a dinner table and cycling through beaten to death inside jokes, making memories I will remember when I'm old and senile. Heaven is a wine bar in Pittsburgh, waiting for me.
To Carol, who reminds me so fiercely of why I want a daughter, and to Aaryan, who reminds me so fiercely of my father. To Avalon and Jiya, who tolerate my quirks and convince me into loving theirs. To Kathy and Cole and Anushka, my wine and dining supper club. To George and Ray, who keep me intellectual and engaged amidst all this drinking, and to Kailey, who never forces me to perform.
One night in Hong Kong, two drinks and three restaurants in, my intern friends and I begin unpacking our trauma. One of us wishes she knew how to be cooler in front of her boyfriend's mother, another wants to thank her parents for getting her out of Ukraine when the war started despite her protests. My grief is fresh, although I don't say anything for now. But I get the feeling that I got last year, around this time -- that I would love to work alongside these people forever, that I can see myself turning thirty surrounded by these brilliant, brilliant, brilliant women, and that they are perhaps the best this world has to offer. So to Natalia and Dexin and Olya, the three pillars without whom this summer would be impossible. I am grateful to be reminded so frequently that there are always new sources of love waiting for me, I just have to live long enough for those futures to become my present.
To Ananya, who I think has been on this list for as long as I've been writing it, who has secured her seat as my Maid of Honor at my decidedly not-Christian wedding, who I cannot do life without. You have transcended best friend status, and have simply just become my soulmate. Your beauty and grace and freedom has operated on my life like medicine, pulling me out of depressive cycles and self-destructive behaviors by just existing as a source of what could one day be. I want to sit next to you and make you walk around this city with me and turn twenty-one with you in my apartment. I feel like Dolly Alderton -- everything I know about love has come from my friendship with you. There is so little I do without you, even though we see each other so rarely, and for that I am grateful.
And to conclude, I thank my parents. This year, I have spent the least time with them of all the years in my life, instead opting for illegal, ten day vacations with friends and expensive restaurant excursions they wouldn't approve of. It is sad, to know them mostly these days through paranoid 10pm texts telling me to get home, to only speak with them to fight or catch up. I am unsure how to be an adult, I think, and I tell myself it is probably unnatural for any twenty year old girl trying to find herself to feel completely uncomplicated love towards her parents, but I hope that this upcoming year will bring me back towards the complete reverence and admiration I once had for them, regardless.
But even if it doesn't, what remains true is that every good thing about myself comes from the dedication and vigilance with which they raised me. My luck is their hard work. My father still drives ten hours to pick me up, my mother is still my first call when I find out that Shagun is engaged, because we have always agreed that she should fulfill her destiny as a shaker of industry before committing to a life with something as useless as a man. They are my scapegoats whenever I don't want to do something, and my guardrails whenever I do. My mother tells me that to know me is to love me, and she is perhaps the only person from whom hearing those words will ever mean anything.
I remember this year in flashes -- dinners, slutty fits, high chair conversations in Tepper, making plans we will never make good on. For the first time, there is no narrative arc, no grand lesson to take away from the past 365 days I have just completed except: spark joy. Chase love. Live as though the goal is to feel, not understand. My ever-rational heart took two decades too long to realize that things can only make sense looking backwards, and so we must trust our gut and pray that a greedy algorithm of locally maximizing choices turns out to be the global maximum, too. And in the meantime, we pray that the Academy will always treat me with this level of honor. There are more important prayers though, and if you'll join me, I'll end with two I used to recite every Sunday: may good flow through me to the world around me. And as my grandmother would say: Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om, which roughly translates to peace, peace, peace, peace, peace.
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