Hammock Snapshots are short flash fiction pieces, accompanied by an original illustration that aim to capture a moment, a feeling or a fragment of something without the pressures of longform writing. The series began on Instagram and now also features on our site.

Why does almost every real estate advertisement talk about escape? New buildings are constantly under construction, in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, and they all promise ‘luxury in the clouds’, ‘serenity and exclusivity’, ‘your oasis’, a space above all the noise and chaos, a refuge away from it all. 

They have a pool and a garden and a squash court or a cinema, they’re named after Paris or Miami or given some fancy Italian or Spanish moniker, they start at ‘only’ a couple of crores, they are rendered in high definition by some agency or by AI. But they exist purely outside the realm of the public. 

Maybe they reflect some core aspiration that lies at the heart of the nation, the aspiration to be somewhere else, the delusion that you can be separate from the traffic or pollution or slums or potholes. The delusion that to succeed is to no longer be a part of all of this. Yet the oasis is always a mirage, one people must chase because there is no real alternative.