What Drains a Day?
What Drains a Day
It began, oddly enough, with Holi powder and wet hair.
On the screen from Bengaluru, Ritesh was explaining that what he and his wife had used was not really color in the watery sense. Not the sort of thing mixed in water and thrown around in buckets the way many childhood Holis are remembered. This was powder. Dry Holi. No pool, no splashing, no watery chaos. They had gone out at about one in the afternoon and stayed until four, and when the Mayor joked that Ritesh’s wife did not look especially pleased in one of the photos, Ritesh corrected him at once. No, no, no, it was not like that. She was not unhappy. She had simply had to wash her hair twice that day.
That was how the conversation opened: with a small misunderstanding, gently corrected, and a festival still clinging to the week.
Holi had been the previous Wednesday. Monday had arrived with its own less festive colors: tiredness, bureaucracy, meetings, digital overload, domestic negotiation, and the slow invisible leak of energy that seems to define modern life in very different corners of the world.
The Mayor, hosting as usual from Europe, moved the conversation forward in his half-wry, half-reflective way. He admitted that he had barely slept the night before from Saturday to Sunday and had felt pretty rough the next day. He slipped in a brief advertisement for a side project called Doodle Horse, developed with Yanita as a kind of coping system for busy mothers trying to hold together children, husbands, careers, households, and everything else at once. He said he had been testing it himself, not that he was a mother, and was finding it invigorating. It was exactly the sort of slightly absurd, entirely sincere introduction he often brings to these calls.
Then he turned to Ritesh.
It was around 6:45 in the evening in Bengaluru. A full working day already done. The Mayor, trying again to coax Ritesh’s wife onto the screen, was told she was shy. “Indian shyness,” he called it, and Ritesh accepted that description with a kind of amused resignation.
The line between teasing and truth stayed present throughout the exchange. So did the line between exhaustion and choice.
When the Mayor asked how he was feeling, Ritesh’s answer was immediate and revealing. He was not feeling drained, he said, because this call was not like office work. It was not something he had to do. It was not the kind of meeting where one feels trapped simply because attendance is expected. This was different. This was enjoyment. This was pleasure. This was his own choice.
That distinction mattered more than it first appeared to.
For Ritesh, energy is not only about the body. It is also about consent. An hour spent in obligation drains one way. An hour spent in chosen conversation fills quite another.
Across the world in Campo Grande, Ismar joined from the beginning of his day. He had begun, even before the formal topic took shape, with what he regarded as good political news: his party had a candidate for governor in his state. If the man won and governed well, Ismar said, it would be good not just for him but for two million people. The current governor was not bad, but not as good as they needed. He gave the example at once, in his practical, grounded way: most of the roads he had used in the last three years were in bad condition.
That was very much Ismar’s style. He does not speak in broad abstractions for long without fastening them to something concrete. Roads. Documents. Noise. Distances. A blender at eleven at night. Mangoes falling from a tree. He thinks by way of details, and in that way his realism never feels performative. It simply feels lived.
When the Mayor asked what his Monday would look like, Ismar laid it out with patient clarity. After the call, he would help his mother prepare lunch. Then he would go to the health department to solve some issues. At four in the afternoon he had Pilates. Around six he would go home. There he would study, because he was preparing some documents. Then a snack. Then bed.
The Mayor, hearing this, began informally ranking the day by likely emotional impact. Lunch with his mother: positive. Pilates: positive. Going home: neutral to positive. The health department: clearly draining. Ismar agreed at once. The problem was bureaucracy. He needed a request from a civil doctor and then authorization for his mother’s blood work and other exams. There was a WhatsApp number one could theoretically use, but he had tried many times and it had not worked for him. So he had to go in person. Five kilometers there. Five kilometers back.
That was the first clear shape of energy-drain in the conversation: not catastrophe, not tragedy, just administrative friction. The kind that consumes a morning or an afternoon while offering very little back.
The Mayor then asked Ritesh to tell his own day in reverse, as if returning home and answering a spouse’s question: what have you done all day?
Again, Ritesh did not summarize. He narrated.
He and his wife had woken at seven. They got ready and went to a nearby park, only about a five-minute walk away. They walked there until eight. By 8:15 or 8:20 they were back home. He bathed, and by nine he was ready. On Mondays, he often logged in from home first to check email and see whether anything urgent needed to be prioritized. Then around 9:15 or 9:30 he left for the metro and made his way to the office.
Along the way came one of those small marital details that says more than a larger statement might have done: when he gets off the metro, the first thing he does is call his wife and tell her he has arrived. He keeps talking to her while walking toward the office and ends the call only when he reaches the lift.
Then office life took over.
He had to be there by 10:30 because there was a stand-up call at 10:45. He said, with a kind of corporate deadpan, that he did not really do anything in that stand-up. He did not even usually give updates. He mostly listened, watched progress, and asked the occasional question. Then came an hour block reserved for focused work, though some days that was swallowed by iteration planning. If the block stayed intact, he worked on whatever was most important. During that time, he said, people started pinging him. On Teams they could not call him during focus time, but they could certainly message. And so the day filled with the modern office’s familiar rhythm of interruptions: planned concentration, interrupted concentration, reactive work, low-grade vigilance.
This went on until around 4:30.
Then he left office early on Mondays so he could be home by 5:30 for another call, and from 6:30 onward, this conversation began. If he was ever late for it by five minutes, he explained, it meant something had happened in that earlier meeting and he could not escape in time.
After the call, dinner would be ready. On Mondays he usually ate late because of the timing. Then he and his wife went for a walk. When they returned, she would begin reminding him, with increasing force, that he was using the phone too much and should go to sleep. He would endure this until 10:30 or 11, then finally go to bed.
That, he said, was the actual cycle.
The detail gave the whole conversation a steadier pulse. It was no longer just “work drains me.” It was this specific chain of events: walk, bath, metro, stand-up, pings, calls, commute, dinner, another walk, phone, wife’s frustration, sleep.
The Mayor then asked whether he was a morning person or a night person.
Ritesh said he was trying to become a morning person. The phrasing mattered: trying, not claiming. He then looked backward and opened a window into an earlier life. For three years, he said, he and the other bachelors he lived with had gone to sleep at one or two in the morning. There had been strict office timing then. No working from home. One had to swipe a card physically. They lived crowded together, six people in a shared apartment, sometimes in a 2BHK. Morning was a rush to the bathroom, almost like a queue at a railway platform. There was no proper breakfast, no grace to it, no gentle beginning to the day. One practically threw water on oneself and ran.
Now, over the last six months, especially since his wife had come to live with him, that rhythm had changed. They were becoming morning people. Morning, he said, gave energy. It made him feel fresh. But he added the condition immediately, because he is not sentimental about discipline: only if one has slept enough. That is the key.
Ismar’s answer to the same question was delightfully unromantic. He said he was an early bird, but not really in a stable way. He could be sleepy at any time. After lunch, especially, was terrible. To sit still after lunch, to watch a lecture, to do something that did not involve moving the body — that was the worst.
The Mayor laughed and confessed to his own half-accidental siesta earlier in the day.
Then came one of the oddly intimate practical questions that run beneath all long-distance friendships: time zones. Europe’s daylight saving time would begin at the end of March, and suddenly the current schedule might no longer fit. The Mayor began doing arithmetic across continents. He worried aloud that pushing the call later in Bengaluru might not be ideal for domestic harmony. Should Ismar start earlier? Could the slot shift?
Ismar, with characteristic ease, said any time worked for him. Eight was fine. Ritesh, though, said he thought he had convinced his wife that the Monday call was fine. It was only one day. She knew who he was talking to and what the topic was. The issue for her, he suggested, was not the existence of the call in itself but the social context: once she knew the shape of it, it was acceptable.
That answer offered a small but important truth about how trust works in ordinary marriages. Very often it is not time alone that matters. It is meaning.
The conversation then moved out from schedules and into neighborhoods.
The Mayor was almost jealous that Ritesh, living in a city of millions, could still go for a one-hour walk in a park. Ritesh said it had been difficult at first. For a couple of weeks he had not been habituated to waking early and going out. He felt sleepy. Forced. But now the walk relaxed him. More than that, he had begun running. First he counted laps. Now he counted minutes. That morning he had run for about twelve or thirteen minutes. Their routine was four thousand steps first; then he ran while his wife continued walking; then they returned home.
What had once cost energy now gave it.
That led him naturally into describing the part of Bengaluru where he lived. He said he had benefited from taking a flat near a place where the municipality had a good habit of cleaning the roads every day and collecting garbage regularly. He and others put the garbage outside the building, and it was collected. There were good parks. There were libraries nearby, two or three of them. For him, it was a good place to live.
And then, again, the second side: such places help only if people use them. His friends often say they will join him for a walk, tell him to call in the morning, then fail to come. In six months, he said, they had joined him perhaps twice.
The Mayor, amused, observed that men often wait for a serious health problem before realizing that they should have started taking care of themselves thirty or forty years earlier.
Ismar was then asked about his own neighborhood. Here the emotional weather changed. In his condo, he said, there was no good sound insulation. That drained his energy because so much depended on the behavior of one’s neighbors. In Brazil there is a law against certain noise between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., but some people do not respect it. Sometimes someone uses a blender at eleven at night. Sometimes they wash clothes late. It is terrible, he said. But the truly frustrating part is not being able to tell exactly which apartment the sound is coming from. If he knew, he could complain to the administrator. Since he does not know, the irritation has nowhere to go.
Outside, though, the neighborhood was more neutral. There were streets, homes, a square to walk in, and some outdoor gym equipment. From some windows he could see old mango trees, and in December many mangoes fell into the condo’s open space. He had never managed to catch any. He never knew exactly when they had fallen. From another window he could see a small place that sold wood for construction. That, he said plainly, was not a good visual.
The Mayor asked what floor he lived on. Four-storey building, first floor above the ground.
Then he asked Ritesh the same question: what do you see from your window?
Ritesh described a street and, next to it, a school — Nita English School. Not a language school, he clarified, just one of the many schools in India with “English” in the name. From his window he could see classrooms. During the daytime, the children’s voices blended into that familiar schoolyard resonance that can sound like shouting from a distance. There was an old tree beside the building, though he did not know what kind. His flat was on the second floor. The whole area, he said, was full of trees. Not exactly jungle, but tree-filled enough that the roads felt lined with life.
Still, there was also noise. His building was on a road, not a main road, but in such a densely populated place even that brought morning and evening sound. If the window was open, it could become an energy drainer. If the window was closed and one did not focus on it, it was bearable.
So both men, in different ways, lived in neighborhoods that were neither ideal nor hopeless. One had trees and school voices and municipal cleaning. The other had mango trees and thin walls and uncertain nighttime noise. Neither gave a simple answer when asked whether place nourished or depleted them. The answer was always mixed.
Technology, unsurprisingly, pushed the conversation toward sharper discomfort.
The Mayor admitted that too much time on laptop and phone physically hurt him. He spent long hours in front of screens, and it burned his eyes and compressed his head. He had two phones: one older device still useful for internet access when away from the desk, and the regular one.
Ritesh answered with real force. Technology had started affecting him physically too. He used to be almost proud of how many videos and debates he watched, but now his finger hurt from holding the phone. His device heated up. He had tried several things to reduce screen time, but he did not feel he had reached any point of freedom from it. Anything he wanted to do could be done on laptop, yes, but the problem was that he used both laptop and phone all day.
Then came another very vivid marital detail. The first thing he does in the morning is reach for the phone, and this is a daily source of argument with his wife. They have even begun keeping their phones far from the bed, yet still he reaches for it.
He said it quite starkly: he had become addicted to phones.
But he also explained why it was not so easy to stop. After work, he still felt he had not done “his own thing.” His own thing meant reading, watching videos, listening to debates, checking X or Twitter. So even once office obligations ended, the digital world continued to claim him under the name of leisure.
He had tried app limits. He had tried phone sleep mode after ten, when the screen turned gray and only a few apps were accessible. He had disabled these controls when the feeling arose that he might be missing something.
It was a modern confession in its pure form: I know this drains me, but I also experience it as one of the only remaining places that feels mine.
Ismar’s position was almost the inverse. Some days, if he had no class and no meeting, he could pass most of the day without using phone or computer much at all. When asked whether he had any advice for the others, he was calm and unsentimental: their work required technology. Unless they changed career, there was not much solution.
Ritesh agreed. Even people outside classic office jobs are now surrounded by devices. Manufacturing, machines, paperwork, verification, communication — all of it is computerized. What one can perhaps cut is personal phone use after work. But that, as he had just admitted, is exactly where the emotional dependence begins.
The Mayor described his own attempt to go slightly back toward the analog world. He kept a paper notebook. He wrote down his day by hand, hour by hour. He used large sheets of paper on the wall with Post-it notes as a task board. It was a way of getting away from the screen and seeing work in a different form. But he recognized, and Ritesh pointed out even more directly, that this was a privilege of working from home. Ritesh could not do that. His work environment ran through Jira and other systems where every task moved visibly from to-do to in progress to done, sometimes across multiple teams and multiple applications.
In other words, one man was trying to step away from the machine. The other was describing life inside it.
Artificial intelligence complicated the picture further.
Ismar said he had first really started learning about AI from the Mayor at the end of 2022. Now he used it almost daily, especially to check English or French writing, ask about specific books or characters, and gather information. But he added a warning in the practical way he often does: one cannot trust the answers one hundred percent. Sometimes one must ask twice, or ask another intelligence.
The Mayor said he was now a heavy AI user. The Pineapple issue he had sent out had taken only a few minutes to assemble as a PDF because he had written Python code and built a process around it. Soon, he said, the HTML version would reduce the work further.
Ritesh then spoke about AI at work. Microsoft Copilot was now embedded in the tools around him. The company had recently upgraded to a premium version. It automatically summarized meetings and tracked discussion points. He said that one and a half or two years earlier, he had been very afraid that his role might become obsolete. He was still there, and the fear had eased somewhat, but the threat remained imaginable. He often asked GPT and other tools what he should learn and how he could progress. The advice, he said, was often quite good.
Then, just as he was explaining how AI could replace certain kinds of routine work, he disappeared from the call. His laptop battery had died.
When he returned, he explained what had happened. The charger had not been plugged in properly. His wife, trying to help earlier, had switched something off instead of on. The Mayor joked that perhaps she was sending him a signal. Ritesh denied it, laughing.
From there, the discussion widened toward the social atmosphere surrounding each man.
The Mayor asked Ritesh what it is like to live in a country with such a huge population, especially in a city like Bengaluru. Ritesh said it was not really a question of coping anymore; people become habituated to it. Even so, for him personally, these big places still felt crowded. He said very clearly that he did not see this form of population concentration as an advantage for India. It was a disadvantage because people kept migrating toward the cities, and the cities could not handle them properly. The infrastructure — metro, rail, roads — was under constant pressure. Rural areas were not being developed enough. Work and opportunity were concentrated in urban centers, which drew still more migration, which then justified still more urban concentration. It had become a cycle.
He even added that the budget for Bengaluru consumed an enormous share of the wider state’s resources, leading people in other regions to feel neglected.
That answer was striking because it came not from resentment but from fairness. Ritesh tends to think in those terms. It is not only what helps me, but what is happening to others because of the way systems are arranged.
The Mayor then flipped the question and asked Ismar what it would be like for him to live in a tiny French village of 750 inhabitants, with little infrastructure and little going on. Ismar said, for a short time, he thought he would appreciate it. He does not live like a typical big-city man anyway, he said. He is not interested in discos, bars, or that kind of outward entertainment. It would not be much of a problem, he supposed.
That answer carried within it something of his deeper solitude: he did not need spectacle in order to endure life. He already knew how to live quietly.
Then came one of the most intimate questions of the whole call: how do you know that your energy is sinking? What happens to you?
Ritesh answered with more precision than many people manage even in private. The first thing to go is focus, he said. It does not feel possible to work. Meetings are the biggest energy drainer in the office because even if they are only marginally relevant, one must pay attention; someone may call on you, ask something, expect input. When his energy is low, he stops wanting to pay attention at all. His response time becomes slower. Even replying out of politeness or professionalism feels forced.
At home, the signs become even clearer. His tone changes. If someone is trying to be sweet with him, or romantic, or simply talk, he does not want to respond. He wants sleep. Peace. Silence. He does not want to talk. Even listening feels like giving away energy.
The Mayor recognized the pattern instantly. He said he knew the same problem in marriage: after a day spent talking to other people, he often has nothing left when his wife wants to tell him what has happened, what needs doing, what has been missed. Friday evenings, he admitted, are often particularly bad.
When he asked Ismar whether bureaucracy at the health department would visibly alter his mood, Ismar answered with the quiet resignation of someone who has grown accustomed to disappointment. Probably not much, he said. He hoped not. He was used to it. One good thing about becoming old, he suggested, is that one complains less than when one is young.
The Mayor laughed and said that Ismar was ahead of him because he still complained quite a lot.
At this point, Ritesh offered one of the most interesting cultural observations of the day. In India, he said, people often feel the opposite: the older people get, the more they complain. Younger generations experience elders as attached to older ways and forever pointing out what is wrong. For him, this was so normal that the Mayor, by comparison, seemed almost ideal.
And then came the broad final question: what is the greatest energy drainer for people nowadays, even if they do not say it openly?
Ismar answered first. He said many people seem to believe that happiness exists in money. Of course money is necessary, he said. One needs it to live. But he did not think it was the most important thing. Many people work, chase money, complain all the time, and remain unhappy. He mentioned that one of his sisters often tells him he is a happy man because he has a reasonable salary and no financial worries.
Ritesh’s answer for Bengaluru was different and, in a way, harsher. He said it was the race. Everyone comparing themselves with everyone else. Everyone looking sideways. Everyone worried. On the metro in the morning, he said, very few people wear smiles. They look anxious. One fears losing a job. Another fears the office. Another fears something else entirely. He did not claim to know each person’s story, but he said he could see it on their faces: fear and insecurity are draining them.
The Mayor then brought in a story about a man from New Zealand who had told him that money gave him energy. The Mayor had pushed back and said that wealth comes from many places, including friendship, and that someone with good friends may be richer than a man with vast power and money but no one reliable around him.
It was a slightly philosophical turn, perhaps inevitably. But by then the call had earned it.
Because what had the three men really done for that hour? They had not solved fatigue. They had not fixed bureaucracy. They had not escaped screens. They had not stopped cities from swelling or workplaces from tracking every movement. They had simply described, with unusual honesty, the thousand ordinary ways energy is spent before a person even notices it has gone.
A wife washing Holi powder from her hair twice in one day.
A husband calling from the metro before entering the office.
A stand-up meeting where almost nothing is said and yet attention must still be paid.
A five-kilometer trip to a health department because the WhatsApp number does not work.
A condo wall too thin to block a blender at eleven at night.
Four thousand morning steps in a city of millions.
A school visible from a window.
Garbage collected regularly by a municipality that is doing at least one thing right.
A phone reached for before sunrise despite every intention not to.
A hand aching from holding the device that promises relief.
A mother waiting for help with lunch.
A man who can pass a day almost without technology.
Another man who cannot imagine such a day.
And a host, somewhere in between, trying to turn exhaustion into conversation before it hardens into silence.
Energy is not lost only in labor. It is lost in vigilance, in comparison, in being reachable.
The call began with Holi, but what it revealed was Monday. Not Monday as symbol, but Monday as lived structure: routines, interruptions, small loyalties, frictions, private compromises, shared laughter, bodily tiredness, and the quiet recognition that energy is not lost only in labor. It is lost in vigilance. In comparison. In being reachable. In bureaucracy. In traffic. In tone. In noise. In the effort of staying decent when one has already been overused by the day.
And yet there was one other truth visible by the end.
For that hour, none of them sounded more depleted than when they began. If anything, they sounded steadier. The call itself had not drained them. It had returned something. Perhaps because, in a world of pings and tasks and obligations, it is still possible for conversation to do the opposite of extraction.
Sometimes the thing that saves a day is not rest.
Sometimes it is being heard.
