A Great Loss

For the reading public

Quick plugs for the homies:

Local sports fanatic and media maven Christiana Cromer has launched a new venture called Good Sport NYC covering women’s sports in New York. Tap in or you’ll regret it!!!

Ritam (one of the authors of this very newsletter) is hosting a stupid show on 5/13 where a number of NYC’s top comedians will do improv based off of smells that are pumped into the audience, slowly asphyxiating everyone. Link for tickets here.

---

Something I do every morning is wake up and pray that somewhere, somehow, an Indian guy is having a kickass day. That’s the kind of generosity I lead with (despite what you all might think from reading this every week). And it can be whatever, too. It can be something as small as enjoying a tangy bowl of skyr, or something as mind-blowing as getting your shit rocked by a lovely lady. And I hope for this every day.

Somewhere, a monkey’s paw curled.

Last week, when I opened Substack’s proprietary CMS to see what Ritam had vomited out for our weekly irony slop (something about a caveman?), I was shocked to see that he had avoided the elephant in the room. Not really, of course—who is Ritam but one to shy away from big moments, to crumble when the lights are brightest? I guess the task falls to me now.

It makes me sad for you guys, though. I had actually spent the last couple of weeks finalizing the architecture of a massive, blistering essay, which I was set to have done for today. It was a probing, deeply incisive work of cultural commentary—a piece of writing that, somehow, was able to attend to every hot-button issue and ideology, and even prescribed solutions to modern American ills. I don’t know how I had pulled it off, but really, it was astonishing. It would’ve blown the hinges off Substack’s puny ceiling of discourse; you all would’ve learned something. For once.

And yet, now, I need to write about this fucking guy, all because Ritam chose not to. I need to go line by line through the lawsuit and the woman’s alleged advances, to decide whether or not the lady’s “cannons” and the guy’s supposed “Asian fish head wife” are indicative of some broader point about Indian masculinity.

I’ll need to address the guy claiming she said, “I own you, Brownie,” and “Birthday BJ for the brown boy? My little brown boy,” and decide if that’s something I would even get off to, which obviously I wouldn’t, because that’s so gross honestly, and it’s crazy someone would say that to another person, it’s so dehumanizing and disgusting, and it’s not something I would ever even think about doing (or even hearing, in the context of, like, it happening to someone like me), because it’s just so, so disrespectful, and once I decide if it is or not, I’ll get back to you guys.

And of course, because of Ritam, Low Lift Ask will need to take a serious, 6-month-long hiatus to fully metabolize the severity of this guy’s racial sex slave fantasy, in order to return with fleshed-out ideas about the painfully public, enduring humiliation ritual that is being Indian in America in 2026. All because Ritam didn’t have his finger on the pulse last week and we could’ve just gotten in and gotten out.

I’ve just gotten word that the guy might be Nepali.

It seems the guy might be Nepali.

And guys? It turns out the guy might be Nepali. Which means we don’t have to address. We can ignore. Nepali different vibe. Whole other thing going on. Not me, not us. I’m from Kerala, brother. Not my circus, not—maybe different analogy. Not my beach, not my sand castle. He’s got his own shit to deal with. Can’t even get into it. Lfg.

Ritam’ Footnote

I like being Indian! It’s one of my many facets. Not my whole identity. #healthyrelationship #withmyself