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Sahil Sareen

@batmankafan

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I drink and I know things. Branding | Coffee |Cocktails | Cigars | Squash| Heritage | Birds @retrobycakewaali @jalandharheritagewalk @pickleproject.in

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Wrote this a while back, now using ai I have put the write up in a carousel. Love how ai can make the boring write-up come alive. #jalandhar # taken in Jalandhar / ਜਲੰਧਰ by @batmankafan

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6 months ago

Look, I run a café. I live, practically breathe, and possibly sweat coffee. Kinda married to coffee. The sound of the burr grinder is my mating call. It rings some crazy bells rather Beethoven like symphony in my system. But sadly, coffee in India is that hot, brown liquid masquerading as an actual beverage, typically served in a cup that looks fancy, contains nothing but sheer disappointment. If there’s one thing that unites fine dining restaurants, luxury hotels, food joints, it’s the absolute mediocrity of coffee. Because, let’s just face it, in this colonial hungover, culinary-rich country, coffee is merely an obligation. Coffee is on the menu the way Parsley on your plate, garnish, not glory. A sad checkbox between “mineral water” and “soft drinks.”

Talk about 5 Star Hotels? Oh man, bless their hearts. They will roll out the red carpet, welcome you with a drink that tastes like a mojito got a PhD, and bring you napkins folded into origami peacocks. But when it comes to coffee, they approach it with an enthusiasm of a Govt office processing paperwork. They serve you a watery brew that tastes like the beans were ground when Modi became the PM for the first time, stored next to dirty socks and cardboard.

Meanwhile, these cafes with exposed bricks, edison bulbs, “minimalistic vibe” Spotify playlists titled “Cozy Cafe Vibes,” You got the drift, right. You might see some fancy furnitures, intimidatingly expensive art pieces thrown around the place, guess where they cut corners? Coffee. That shiny espresso machine? Yeah, it’s just for show. The barista? Great jawline,nice tattoos, but tragic tamping skills. Beans, cheapest available I’ve seen espresso shots come out so fast it could beat Usain Bolt 100mts record. ***To be continued in comments by @batmankafan

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a year ago

A montage of Forgotten Jalandhar series. #oldjalandhar #punjab #mypunjab #oldwprld #architecture #heritage #history #oldpunjab #westpunjab #instagram by @batmankafan

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6 years ago

Somewhere between the dusty entry gates of Jalandhar and the fancy chaos of Model Town a silent coup has taken place. The city has been conquered by an unstoppable army of passport-size photographs wearing sunglasses.
You drive in. You think you’re entering a city. You are wrong. You are entering a giant, poorly designed WhatsApp status plastered on a billboard, electricity pole, e-rickshaws, walls and anything that can stick a bill. Happy This. Happy That. Happy “I just became President of some association and now the entire neighbourhood must know.” Happy “We organised a jagrata and here are 23 uncles who contributed ₹500 each, please admire our collective spiritual achievement while you wait at the red light.”
The aesthetic to be honest is consistent: tacky gradients as if they are designed in MS Paint, fonts that scream comic sans and rows upon rows of the same stern faces in dark glasses. Why the sunglasses though?
We get it. People are happy. People want to wish. People want to announce that Sushil uncle is now the president of the Market Association and therefore deserves public applause. Fine. Celebrate. But must the celebration look like a low-budget election campaign crossed with a an exhibition announcement notice printed at the cheapest press in town?

There is something deeply darkly comic about the whole spectacle. You are stuck in traffic. A board the size of a freaking football field is staring back at you with 20 passport photos arranged like a police lineup. Below them, in shimmering yellow gold, red Comic Sans, the words “Congratulations on Becoming Member.” Member of what? The Illuminati? The local gym? The secret society of men who believe outdoor media is free and should look like your ID photo enlarged 400 times? We will never know. *To be continued in comments* by @batmankafan

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13 days ago

Awaara Hoon !!! #solotrip taken in Norway by @batmankafan

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a month ago

Booked, cancelled, plan changed, booked again. Boys trip, bars and bad decisions. #eurotrip taken in Spain by @batmankafan

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a month ago

You may be right, I may be crazy ( :) by @batmankafan

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3 months ago

I will not try to Fix me… Crawl Walk Run by @batmankafan

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3 months ago

Punjab today resembles a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino. Everybody has a backstory. Everybody has some bone to pick with the other. And everybody appears to have access to a firearm. The state that once exported soldiers in the world war now exports reels. The state that once measured status through land now measures it through followers. And somewhere along the way, notoriety became confused with achievement.

Blame it on the music videos, lyrics or even Insta reels, it is not merely a law-and-order problem. It is a cultural problem wearing a police uniform. When a gangster’s Instagram page attracts more fascination than an article or a research paper, the issue is no longer policing. It is aspiration.

I kinda think the old Punjabi dream was simple. A chunk of land. A larger tractor. A son abroad. A daughter educated. A respectable family name. And a fat wedding. The new dream appears increasingly algorithmic. Fast money. Fast fame. Fast cars. And preferably all before the age of twenty-five. The smartphone did not create this hunger. It merely gave it a stage.

Gangsters understand something politicians do not. Modern attention is currency. The ability to terrify is now marketed exactly the same way companies market toothpaste. Branding. Visibility. Repetition. Recognition. The underworld has discovered social media. And social media, unfortunately, discovered the underworld.

Punjab’s political clout continues discussing roads, sacrilege, subsidies and power cuts. The youth are consuming entirely different content. One side is talking governance. The other side is watching mythology. Not some religious mythology. Gangster mythology. The mythology of the outlaw. The mythology of iovernight fame and a million + views.
The sad part is every other day there are threat calls to businessmen, singers, doctors, shopkeepers even college going political activists. To be continued in comments *** taken in Jalandhar / ਜਲੰਧਰ by @batmankafan

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3 months ago

Every political party eventually becomes a whisky bottle. Some age gracefully into something complex and flavourful like a Bourbon but some are better as blended scotch, and others evaporate, leaving only the label and next morning regret. Punjab’s politics right now feels like the back bar of an old club everyone arguing over soda/ water pegs while the younger crowd has already moved on to craft cocktails.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was once the operating system of Punjab. Long before consultants and Chanakyas discovered voter segmentation and before television anchors discovered nationalism thru heated debates, the Akalis had mastered a remarkable balancing act. They could be religious without appearing orthodox, regional without appearing separatist, and traditional without appearing irrelevant. It balanced faith and modernity. Then history arrived with smartphones, the BJP evolved, AAP surged, Congress got sidetracked and the Akalis started looking like a retired maharaja still issuing orders to staff who’d long since moved to Canada/UK.

Political extinction rarely comes from dramatic defeat. It comes from irrelevance, ask the dinosaurs, 2000 ka note or Orkut. The state contains everything political analysists dream about. Religion. Identity. Migration. Agriculture. Diaspora money. Border geopolitics. Drug wars. Youth unemployment. Gang Land. Water disputes.Yet the conversation keeps circling old ghosts. Imagine explaining modern Punjab to Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

“Your Highness, the young men are leaving for Canada, the old men are forwarding WhatsApp messages, the politicians are fighting each other, the singers need security, the gangsters have fan following on social media, and a man sitting somewhere abroad is demanding money from a businessman in Moga through an encrypted app.

The Maharaja would probably ask for another drink, I am pretty sure it’ll be a Patiala Peg. To be continued in comments… by @batmankafan

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4 months ago

Open the substack link to read the full article….Maybe it’s A Flock of Gods…Let me tell you something, it’s not a discovery or something but if you come to think of it the words are free. Yes, you read it right. Nobody owns them. Right now, someone is writing a suicide note and someone else is writing a wish list and someone is writing a love letter, and someone is breaking up on a message. The same 26 alphabets. Doing entirely different things. Nobody says the alphabet belongs to the sad people or the hungry people or the lovesick people or the writers. They are just there in abundance, so cheap that anyone can use it.
Gods, in my opinion are exactly like this. But, nobody wants to hear that. That is essentially the definition of blasphemy. I will get to blasphemy later. I was born Hindu. Technically. Father Hindu, mother Hindu, certificate of existence(Janam Patri)issued by Pandit Ji. That is where the paperwork ends and the actual life begins. The house I grew up in had a small niche that supposedly had Peer’s existence inside it. Not next door. Inside. The previous owner(Muslim) had prayed all his life there, so nobody removed it and so every Thursday there were Diya/Candle inside our home for a faith that was, technically, not ours. Except it was. It just was. Thursday the entire family would light their own candle in silence and pray. There is a durga and she lives in a small alcove near the kitchen.
Then there was a church in Cantt, Jalandhar, every Sunday my father and I would go on a scooter, light a candle. I remember being mesmerized with the shadow play the sun would make the coloured glasses reflection fall on the pews. I can still feel the catacomb silence somewhere in my heart. That was my Thursday metaphorically.
In my teens my Thursday was doing seva after school in a nearby Gurudwara. I also had a sikh wedding. Kirtan moving through the room like weather. Wasn’t that any less than a Thursday. I didn’t convert into any religion just accumulated a lot of it.
Tell me which Thursday was the wrong one. I would genuinely like to know. *to be continued in comments** by @batmankafan

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4 months ago

Behind the capital I…Nobody told me the “I” was a rental.

Not a purchase. Not a heirloom. Not even a timeshare model. It’s a rental. Month-to-month. No security refund. And the landlord, turns out, is also you. Or some version of you that woke up one random Tuesday with new opinions about how to live life.

I have been alive, by current count, for several decades, and in that time I have been a minimum of twelve different people. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. Like a marathon. All athletes running at once, the faster one wins.

The self is not a lighthouse. It is a lighthouse keeper who has been drinking throughout and is not entirely sure this is his own lighthouse.

Here is what I know about the mind: it is a committee. And like all committees, it was formed with good intentions, it runs vastly over schedule, and at least three members are there because they were never explicitly told they could leave.

There is the one member who worries. He arrived sometime around age nine, during a particularly bad school day bullied by classmates, and has not taken a day off since. He has contingency plans for the contingency plans. He has rehearsed multiple scenarios in his head sometimes a hero, sometimes a victim.

There is the one who is still angry about something that happened in 2013. He does not bring it up often. But when he does, he brings it up fully.

There is the one who believes, with the conviction of a man who has just discovered a very good podcast, that this time he has finally understood the shape of things. That the jigsaw is clicking. That the multitudes in his personality is okay to have. That the fog is lifting. He believes this approximately every two months, with no memory of having believed it the last time. ***To be continued in comments *** by @batmankafan

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4 months ago