Most of us today are hard pressed to remember the surnames of the families we’re living next to. Gone are the days when you’d walk into the neighbour’s house to borrow some cheeni, or ask them to babysit your little one while you ran an errand. For a country that prizes the idea of community, how did we get to this point?

We are a nation of self-proclaimed medical geniuses: From acne to cancer, we always have a concoction or a home remedy or a pill that someone we know took sometime for a similar problem. What makes Indians who can afford healthcare so averse to seeking appropriate medical help?

Not only do Indians have an astonishing lack of civic sense, we can also counter it with classic whataboutery. India will continue to top lists of dirtiest cities in the world, until we teach the next generation to pick up after themselves, instead of posing with brooms on social media.

For a country with a rich history of celebrated male classical dancers, which worships Nataraj, we have a great deal of contempt for men who dance. How did we go from appreciating Kathak to ridiculing KJo? How did dancing, especially, the classical forms, become a stigma for men?

Our clothes now hardly last us for a year, and yet each piece of machine-made denim sold takes about a hundred litres of water to make. Once the denim loses its grip, it finds a way into our landfills. And that polyester in your jacket takes about 200 years to decompose.

We are living in a culture that worships the young, the bright, the fresh. Don’t believe me. Believe the $250-billion-dollar anti-ageing industry, and the world of movies and advertising today. As a result, we fear nothing like we fear getting old.

Consider Earth to be a sinking ship, the immersion of which is accelerated by more and more people jumping on board. What do we seek by reproducing? Why don’t we address the elephant in the room: Procreation?

All around me, I see otherwise bright millennials – functioning adults with an education – turning to pages like the “Zodiac Mind” and “Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone.” They slyly check their horoscopes every morning and can quote Bejan Daruwalla in their sleep.

If we need women to break out of the exhausting idea of selflessness, then pressuring them to “be a good girl” is exactly the sort of thing that needs to stop. What we need is a culture that sees dissent and opinion as signs of progress, beyond the myopic view of parental disobedience.

People like me sweat the small stuff, while my investment banker friends worry about how to make an epic weekend. Your Saturday-Sundays then become the equivalent of a Bhansali film. You look forward to having a great time but end up feeling massively ripped off and questioning your life choices.

So what if the world will have no drinking water in like 20 to 30 years? From where I see it, this whole situation is no more serious than the plot of the movie Rango.

We were born in the ’80s; and we’re millennials too. But we’re also the last generation to have actually known what life without internet and mobile phones looked like.

If you live in a typical housing society, you are bound to encounter the Committee of Misogynistic Members, men who think it’s funny that you do yoga and are still overweight, and the Khar-dashians, women who carry Gucci bags to a society function.

Animals make for better lovers than us. Manakins do the moonwalk to woo their partners, bonobos are the gods of sex. Ditch the romcoms and switch to Animal Planet instead.

Reading nihilist posts began as a joke, but soon they became an escape. I started believing that it did not matter if I stopped existing. But how the hell did I get here?

As Arun Jaitley takes to the podium for his budget speech, the future of one segment of the population will change forever. Amid all the amendments and changes in tax slabs, the Chartered Accountancy student will be left to sift through the wreckage.