decided to find out using A4'th that I'm using.

Really strange. It always was strange.

I never thought I'd be telling you the story I'm about to tell you.

But here goes.

In the spring of 2016, which is when this story begins, I was the New York Times bureau chief in Delhi, and I was spending a lot of my time trying to solve problems that were not strictly journalistic.

For one thing, our power blinked on and off at two minute intervals for much of the day.

This seemed to be related to the troop of monkeys, Reese's McCawks, that lived on the roof of the building, and had been chewing through the rubber insulation on the wiring.

During the monsoon, water had seeped into the walls of the office, which had begun to ripple and smelled like damp cardboard.

We solved these problems the way we solved all our problems, with makeshift solutions.

There's a word for this in Hindi, to God.

It served to preserve some kind of complex equilibrium that kept everything running.

This approach could seem like negligence, or, on occasion, like kindness.

Our retired office manager, who was in his 80s, had been disappointed at the news that he had to retire, so we let him come in and spend every day at his old desk.

A few feet away from the woman who had replaced him.

Our landlord insisted on being paid six months rent in advance, in cash, so we would have to take the money over to her in rolling suitcases, as if we were hitmen.

When I did get a chance to focus on journalism, the bigness of it all could be paralyzing.

My beak contained 1.6 billion people, one eighth of the world population.

We were writing about budget reports.

Biggest, at fiercest cyclones.

There were landslides, mudslides, floods, droughts, stampedes, avalanches, outbreaks of Chikongunya and Encephalitis.

But there was another kind of story that rarely made it into the newspapers.

These were the dramas that captivated people in their everyday lives.

...