-
Continue reading →: This, Too, BelongsAn honest reflection on what it means to grow in different directions. This piece explores how a life can take shape over time, not through perfect clarity, but through curiosity, contradiction, and slow unfolding.
-
Continue reading →: In Honest Water: On Solitude and the Search for TruthSolitude as a workshop for truth—leaving borrowed shore‑calm for honest water, asking harder questions, and carrying one clear sentence back to the crowd.
-
Continue reading →: Ash, Mulberries, and the Ouroboros: On Memory, Residue, and the Endless Work of MourningA letter essay on grief as a returning circle. It moves through a kitchen ring, the three rinses you taught, and the body’s own housekeeping: autophagy, phosphatidylserine and efferocytosis, microglial pruning. Childhood shahtoot, the soft film of raakh and the practice of chhantna keep the orbit steady, while Qur’anic verses…
-
Continue reading →: Counterpoise: Field Notes on Holding Opposites Without Losing Your Shape
I keep a satchel by the door that never quite closes. The leather took its polish from years of early mornings, when coffee steamed against winter windows and the hallway light fell in a thin, faithful band. Inside the satchel, tools live beside their critics. A stethoscope curls around a…
-
Continue reading →: Self-Recognition as a Path to Knowledge of the Divine: A Shiʿi Theological Framing
Abstract: A well-known maxim in the Islamic tradition states that knowledge of the self conduces to knowledge of the Lord. This essay presents a Shiʿi metaphysical and epistemological account of that claim. First, it situates the maxim “man ʿarafa nafsahu faqad ʿarafa rabbahu” within the hadith record, noting issues of…
-
Continue reading →: The Inner Lives of Men Who Are Not Macho
Masculinity, Mourning, and the Emotional Inheritance of South Asian Men Fifth of Muharram. Some inherit wealth. Others inherit silence. Salam Across the emotional landscape of the South Asian subcontinent, silence is less an absence than a method. It is taught, rehearsed, and inherited. In its most intimate form, it arrives…
-
Continue reading →: On the Burden of Articulated Grace: Performing Stability
People often come to me with their questions. Not the grand, philosophical ones, but the smaller, harder ones: Why can’t I feel present anymore? What if I’m making the wrong choice and I won’t know until it’s too late? How do I keep pretending everything’s fine when it isn’t? And…
-
Continue reading →: Pain as Commentary, Stillness as Tafsir: On Ideas, Pain, and the Architecture of Presence
First of Muharram, from the house of ancestral echoes Salam Early this morning, while lying almost motionless from a flare of spondylitis that has rendered me nearly immobile, I watched a brief video by Mufti Abu Layth. The reflection was casual, but it carried within it a line I had…
-
Continue reading →: On Chronostatic Inversion: Temporal Disintegration in the Dying Mind
I do not fear death. Death, if anything, appears to me as a resolution. An ontological closure of the lived question. It is not the cessation of being that disturbs me, nor the impossibility of experience beyond it. What unsettles me, what returns in thought with a kind of recursive…
-
Continue reading →: The Anarchic Pulse of Desire: Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and the Mirage of Escape
The first time I saw Deleuze and Guattari’s work, I was twelve years old. Anti-Oedipus sat strangely prominent on my sister’s bedside table, who, at eighteen, was already absorbed in things I didn’t yet have the language to understand. I remember the cover, the strange title, the way the book…
Greetings,
Paimana is a space for critical thought and discourse in philosophy, physics, medicine, religion, literature, and perfumery.
Let’s connect
Join the newsletter!
Stay updated with our latest essays
Paimana 