As the final season of Suits airs today, I can’t process the fact that this will be the last time I will see Harvey Specter sit down in his office with the finest scotch in hand, surrounded by signed basketballs, and an enviable LP collection. To paraphrase one of his evergreen catchphrases, anyone can do his job, but no one can be him.

When my five-year-old niece confused India with South Africa while watching a World Cup match recently, I realised that none of us are born with a sense of nationalism. Instead, it is something that is taught to us, piece by piece, line by line, until it becomes a part of our identity.

Mothers are a separate species, the collective reason for a warm, comforting glow in the lives of so many of us. But after I lost my mother, I found pieces of her in other women in my life. Some of them look like her, some of them sound like her, and I realise that my mother continues to live and look after me through all these “maa-sis”.

Generations after the British packed up and left, we continue to swoon over a British accent, dream of watching a cricket match at Lord’s, and consider Colin Firth as a legit avatar of Mr Darcy. A fair bit of the English-speaking urban Indian population are embarrassingly obsessed with the United Kingdom and its royal family.

I struggle to understand people’s apprehension toward daughters performing the last rites of their parents. The act of seeing the last physical trace of your loved one be engulfed in the fire is essential to getting closure, to realising that we will never see them in the physical realm anymore.

The ambivalence toward exercising your franchise from younger voters baffles me. It’s almost as if they are afraid of the kind of commitment it requires to go to a polling booth and choose a candidate or NOTA, as if they do not want to be accountable for the vote they cast.