Dear Rushi,
This letter comes to you from January, 2026. I know 2024 was rough, and you are wondering about what comes next. I can tell you. Some of it will help. Some won’t. But you should know.
On Parenting
Being a father will continue to be the hardest and the most rewarding project you take on. The highs will be high: the 5-year-old starting kindergarten, working on her reading, her delight in tales from the Indian Epics – again and again. The 3-year-old starting pre-k and developing an absolutely delightful (and maybe slightly unhinged?) sense of humor.
The lows will involve too many sleepless nights, epic meltdowns, and becoming adept at catching puke with your bare hands so you don’t have to change the sheets for the fourth time that night.
You will complain about how they insist on climbing into bed with you in the early hours.
But, when they don’t, you will wake with a start and tiptoe into their room to make sure they’re okay.
There will be dancing. K-POP. So much K-POP that you will find yourself humming it while walking the dog or waiting to join a Zoom call. Sometimes you will find yourself watching YouTube videos analysing songs from K-POP Demon Hunter and wondering if they will make a sequel. I don’t know yet.
(Image: Petite gare by Isaac Levitan. Wikimedia Commons)
On Grief
Another year will pass with your father gone. The pain will sometimes recede to a background hum and sometimes it will come roaring back.
Walking into your parents’ house will still be difficult. You’ll wait to hear him call out from his study to come look at something. Wait for the monosyllabic text asking if you’re coming for dinner that night.
Every time you look in the mirror you will see more of him reflected back. The tilt of the head. The slight pout. His impatience will show up when working with the 5-year-old on writing practice. His whimsy when making silly jokes with the 3-year-old.
The grief will settle like sediment at the bottom of a pond. Sometimes it will be disturbed: a photo that surfaces on your phone, a handwritten card found while tidying your office.
Let it stir and let it settle. It’s a part of you now.
On Love
2025 marks fifteen years of marriage. Adventure, adversity, and now domesticity.
Things will be difficult. Having a 3 and 5-year-old makes time together reliant on the kindness and generosity of loved ones. You will make the most of those moments: a short weekend away for a wedding, a few days spent eating out and making inappropriate jokes, the regrettably few nights watching TV under the covers.
One night up in the hills of West Virginia. Looking at the fire. Drinking bourbon. Feeling like twenty-somethings again. It was only one night, but enough to remind you of what it was and what it will be. One day.
There will be arguments, clenched jaws, silent shrugs. There will be reconciliation, often commiseration over what your little tyrants have put you through. Work stress, travel, adjusting schedules, waving at each other’s planes as you cross paths at Dulles.
You will finish the year strong if tired. Your wife more beautiful than ever. You a little more haggard.
On Meaning
You will spend many evenings in a dark room waiting for your children to fall asleep. Answering for the fifth time that morning time will be in ten hours. Fighting the sentimental inner parent who wants to hold his daughter’s hand every night until she drifts off.
Those dark hours are also when you think and wonder.
You will spend hours thinking about whether you will have a job in the new year and what that job will look like. You will fret about your responsibilities to your peers, your teams, your clients. Wrestle with the importance of process versus the value of output.
You will use the same technology that threatens to upend everything. The foundation models. You’ll use them to build tools and bring ideas to life.
Oscillating between dread, wonder, and the defiance of knowing that if you can think it, you can build it.
And underneath it all, the questions that don’t resolve: What does it mean to work when twenty years of hard-won knowledge can be summoned with a prompt? What world will your children inherit? Post-scarcity utopia or hyper-capitalist hellscape where all power and wealth accrues to capital and to compute?
You will wonder about your decision to raise your daughters in a country turning from kindness to cruelty, from embracing diversity to strident ethno-nationalism. You will wonder if they will embrace their Indian heritage or find it more expedient to lean into their ethnic ambivalence.
Those won’t be fun thoughts.
On Stillness
After all the hours spent working and reading and fretting, it will be the quiet moments that matter.
Long walks with your not-very-smart dog. Waiting for the coffee maker to stop bubbling before the first 6am call. Moments when the house is quiet, the mind is still and the body is calm.
Treat each moment like a piece of masonry, building a wall against the coming chaos.
Lean into those moments. Shelter against the storm.
You will need it.