An IITian’s Guide to the Evil Eye

(Or: Why I am No Longer Allowed to Speak)

**WARNING: Reading this essay may cause the universe to notice you are having a good day. If you value your current state of bliss and non-catastrophe, please read this while wearing a protective layer of aluminum foil and a facial expression that suggests you have just received a large, unexpected tax bill.**

As a graduate of IIT Madras, my brain was programmed to believe that the entire universe is governed by the laws of Physics, the equations of Mathematics, and the absolute certainty that if you have enough data points and a sufficiently powerful calculator, you can predict everything from the trajectory of a proton to why the office coffee tastes like melted tires.

I spent decades as a “business guy,” a title that basically means I ran around pretending that “feelings” were just unquantified data artifacts that could be eliminated with a robust enough spreadsheet. In my world, if the system crashed, you didn’t perform a ritual dance. You found the bug, patched the code, and moved to the next sprint. I was a professional practitioner of “Brutal Logic,” a mindset very effective for corporate warfare but about as useful for managing relationships as a flamethrower for making an omelet. I was, in other words, a complete idiot.

I am now in my fifties. I have discovered that life’s most complex systems - like marriage, relationships, peace of mind and smoke detectors - do not, in fact, respond to a high-priority trouble ticket. I am starting to suspect that my mother and my wife, neither of whom has ever optimized a global supply chain, are actually much more sophisticated architects of reality than I am.

In Indian culture, we don’t just have bad weeks. We “go through Bad Times.” This is spoken of as if it were a sentient, malicious weather pattern involving the planet Saturn, a specific misalignment of the stars, and something to do with lentils. But the heavyweight champion of Indian cultural phenomena is “Nazar” - the dreaded Evil Eye.

Growing up, I watched my mother wave salt over my head to ward off envy with the intellectual superiority of a man who understands the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Her rituals were “charming legacy bugs” in our cultural software, or so I thought. I figured “bad times” was just a convenient excuse for people to justify being a jerk. ‘Why blame the poor universe if you just can’t get your act together, pal?’

I was wrong. It turns out the bug is actually the entire operating system.

About a year ago, in a moment of reckless, suicidal gratitude, I committed the ultimate blunder: I said things out loud. I looked at the sum total of my life - my wonderful wife, my brilliant daughters, my rock-solid siblings, my incredible in-laws and my amazing friends - and I told another human being, “I couldn’t have asked for better.”

In the old world of logic and business, that’s a mere observation. In the world my wife and mom inhabit, that’s like walking into a lion cage wearing a suit made of raw steaks. I might as well have sent a calendar invite to the Universe titled: PLEASE STRESS-TEST MY LIFE UNTIL I CRY COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TEARS.

Soon, the turbulence hit. Relationships I thought were “impregnable” - a word used only by people who have clearly never met a determined toddler or the Universe - suddenly began to show hairline fractures.

I, the guy who reads Vedanta and ponders Buddhist equanimity for fun, suddenly realized I was the problem. I was the source of the fractures. I was the one creating the “bad times.” As it turned out, I couldn’t even manage a civil conversation about where we should go for dinner without it turning into a three-act Greek tragedy. While I’ll readily admit that I have displayed the (im)maturity of a Republican POTUS, I’ll also put a equal part of the blame on Nazar, the Universe and the Bureau of Out-of-control Karma.

The most humbling part is watching my family. My wife, my daughters, my parents, and my in-laws all seem to practice the principles I struggle to internalize. My mom, in particular, navigates life with a natural grace that I can’t achieve even after three hours of staring at a wall and trying to be “present.” I may have the user manual for the Atman memorized in three languages, but they’re the ones actually running the code in production. Like I said, it has all been very humbling. Did I say humbling?

The fifties are an awkward age. We are at a point in our lives where we are not old enough to be old, the “Wise Elders” - the kind who sits on porch swings, dispenses profound life lessons, and is allowed to fall asleep in public without anyone calling 911.

On the flip side, we are also not young enough to be “Young.” We are at that stage of biological betrayal where we can no longer eat a slice of pizza after 8:00 PM without experiencing heartburn so intense it could heat a mid-sized home in San Jose.

We are essentially teenagers again, but with a few soul-destroying upgrades. We have the same crushing angst and the same terrifying feeling that we don’t know what we’re doing, except now we have significantly higher cholesterol, more money to spend on things we don’t need or understand, and a mountain of responsibilities that would make Atlas ask for a weekend off. It’s a “Second Adolescence” where the pimples have been replaced by mortgage payments, and instead of worrying if we’ll get a date, we worry about whether the “clunk” in the Audi is an invitation to buy a mechanic a new boat.

We are all silently taking stock, squinting at the massive delta between our youthful ambitions - where we were all going to be Nobel-prize-winning-physicist-astronaut-rockstars - and our current reality, which mostly involves trying to remember why we walked into the kitchen.

Luckily, I’ve been rescued by the voices of wisdom in my house: my wife and my daughters. They are my guardrails. They remind me that being “right” is not nearly as important as being “kind.” I feel a pang of terror even writing this. To speak of their wisdom is basically begging for a celestial piano to fall on my head from the top of a very high building.

I’m retiring the logical mindset. It served me well in the corporate trenches, but it’s time to part ways. I’m leaning into the “tools of the heart”: love, empathy, and a healthy dose of keeping my mouth shut. I’ve realized that the most precious parts of my life thrive best in the shade, away from the public eye.

If you see me today, I’ll tell you things are “fine.” I might even complain about the traffic or the fact that a cup of coffee costs as much as a small car. It’s not that I don’t feel lucky. I really do. It’s just that my wife is right. (I can see her laughing and saying “Duh, I know” from here). The universe is listening, and sometimes, the most logical thing a man can do is keep his mouth shut and his blessings hidden deep in his pocket.

–

A Formal Petition to the Universe (c/o The Bureau of Excessive Karma)

TO: The Universe (including, but not limited to: The Great Void, Saturn, The Evil Eye, and that specific subset of Fate that enjoys tripping people when they are inserting USB drives into laptops).

FROM: An IIT alum who should have known better.

SUBJECT: Please Ignore Me. I Am Not Even Here.

Dear Universe,

I am writing this because I recently wrote the above essay. In it, I mentioned several things that could be construed as “positive.” I used words like “blessed,” “wonderful,” and “impregnable.”

I would like to state, for the official record, that I was clearly hallucinating.

I want to be absolutely clear: My life is a disaster. A complete and utter train wreck. If you were looking at me and thinking, “Hey, that guy looks like he’s got his act together; let’s drop a metaphorical safe on his head,” please reconsider.

Let the record show:

My “wonderful” children are actually highly sophisticated intelligence agents designed to expose my ignorance of pronouns. My wife, “my source of wisdom,” is actually the person who spends her days marveling at how a man who ran large businesses can be defeated by a simple kitchen appliance. My “Vedantic wisdom” is mostly just me forgetting where I parked my car and pretending I’m contemplating the void. My “incredible” in-laws view me as a confusing science project they’ve agreed to tolerate mainly because they do not want their daughter to move back home. My siblings and I aren’t “rock-solid.” We are simply trapped in a lifelong Mexican Standoff. We only stay close because we have enough incriminating material on each other. My friends aren’t “solid support systems.” They are a group of immature middle-aged men who groan about lower back pain and discuss geopolitics on WhatsApp as a desperate diversion from the fact they no longer have hair or can read a menu without a high-powered flashlight and a team of ophthalmologists.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that I am currently in my fifties. As you know, this is the “Second Adolescence,” which means I am already being punished by a metabolic system that considers a single slice of pizza to be a declaration of war. I have a mysterious pain in my left knee that appears only when it rains, and I frequently forget why I walked into a room. I am basically an overgrown toddler with a mortgage.

So, if you’re looking for someone to “humble,” please keep moving. I am already very, very humble. I am the humblest guy you’ve ever met. In fact, I’m probably the world champion of humility, though I would never tell anyone because that would be bragging, which would attract Nazar, and we’ve already established that I’m not doing that.

Please direct all Evil Eyes, “Bad Times,” and Saturn-related malfunctions toward supercilious vegans, rude people, and Ted Cruz. I’m just a guy in San Jose playing Wordle on my phone.

Thank you for your lack of attention.

Sincerely,

I honestly don’t even know who I am.