A collection of photographs made on days that weren't particularly good.
Getting through the afternoon without being unnecessarily cruel to yourself is an achievement nobody is going to acknowledge. There are days when everything feels a little heavier than it should, when the smallest task requires an unreasonable amount of negotiation with your own head, when you cancel plans, put things off, question decisions you made years ago and somehow still feel guilty about not doing enough.
The world, rather inconveniently, continues to be the world. People go to work, fall in love, miss their buses, buy groceries, make plans for next weekend, while you are trying to figure out why a perfectly ordinary Tuesday feels like something you need to recover from.
I think this is partly why I have always been drawn to colour, especially on days when I have very little of it in me. Not because it fixes anything or because a little beauty can suddenly make everything bearable, but because there is something comforting about being reminded that the world can still surprise you when you are not particularly available to it.
It is a strange thing to feel miserable and amused at the same time.
To have a terrible morning and then find yourself laughing at something stupid on the way home, to feel completely disconnected from your own life and still notice something that makes you want to take a closer look. Maybe we put too much pressure on the idea of feeling better, as though every difficult day must eventually lead to some meaningful revelation, a breakthrough, a lesson worth writing down.
Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day, and you are allowed to be a person having one without turning it into a personal development project. You don't have to find the silver lining, practise gratitude, become a better version of yourself or come out of it with a new understanding of the universe. Sometimes you just need something to interrupt the noise in your head for a minute. Something that reminds you that you are still here, still paying attention, still capable of being caught off guard by the world.
I suppose this is my little theory, if it can even be called one: that colour doesn't necessarily make a bad day good, but it can make a bad day feel less like the only thing happening. And sometimes, when you have spent most of the day inside your own head, that is enough.
Pune · September 2026
