मनन
Manana Mayank Kapoor
मनन
Essays and photographs · Mayank Kapoor

Manana मनन / muh-nun /

श्रवण · मनन · निदिध्यासन

Hear · Reflect · Absorb

Most of what I believe, I borrowed from someone. This is where I find out what actually holds. I read. I walk. I write until a thought is mine and not just something I once heard. What survives that is here. Essays on dharma and how to live, on power and machines and the strange work of staying sane. Photographs from the same walks, each one marked by my hand.

पूर्णिमा · श्रवण नक्षत्र · Pūrṇimā, Śukla Pakṣa
Featured essay
Dharma & Inner Life 29 July 2026 · 7 min

What the Wanting Asks For

This summer I wanted a motorbike licence and a camera at the same time. Neither was a need. I stalled for three weeks on one and could not stop researching the other, and the difference between them turned out to be the only useful thing I have learned about desire in years.

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What the Wanting Asks For
मनन
From the notebook
Statecraft & Power

Middle Powers and the New Non-Alignment

India, the Gulf and ASEAN are not choosing sides. They are pricing both. Hedging has quietly become grand strategy, and the next two decades belong to whoever prices it best.

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Machines & Us

A Second Brain That Argues Back

A notes app stores what you said. The system worth building holds competing hypotheses about you, weighs the evidence and revises its beliefs. Memory as dialectic, not archive.

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Dharma & Inner Life

The Householder's Dharma

The renunciate gets all the press. The harder discipline belongs to the householder, who holds a career, a mortgage, two small sons and a mind that wants to build things, and must treat the whole arrangement as the path rather than the obstacle to it.

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Mind & Behaviour

The Psychology of the Long Game

Twenty year plans fail at year two because the self who writes the plan is never the self who must live it. Durable goals are the ones designed to survive their own author's revisions.

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Recent photographs
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A pupil on the desk
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Tower Bridge, raised
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Toward the Shard
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