Two newspapers. One dining table. The FOMO and JOMO of a Saturday morning.
Rajasthan Patrika gives me JOMO. Economic Times gives me FOMO. Both are lying.
We have two newspapers at home right now.
The Economic Times - a habit my husband and I built through our MBA years and corporate jobs in the 2010s. The newspaper of ambition. Of people like us, or at least people we thought we were becoming.
And Rajasthan Patrika - one of the best Hindi newspapers available in South India, which found its way into our Bangalore home when my parents visited. A small act of love. Keep the parents comfortable.
I started reading both. And I haven’t stopped thinking about what happened next.
Rajasthan Patrika, on a typical morning:
“Naukrani ne zahar khilakar ghar loota.” [Maid poisoned employer and looted the house]
“Garbage truck mein patronus lagakar sone se driver ki hui maut.” [Driver had put a patronus lamp inside his garbage truck, got carbon-monoxide poisoning and died]
“Shanivar darshan karne aaye shradhdhalu mein bhagdad se teen jakhmi” [Religious ritual to seek blessing from temple idol led to stampede related injuries]
Crime. Ritual. Petty tragedy. The grinding, suffocating smallness of a world where the biggest news is the worst thing that happened in a 10km radius.
I grew up adjacent to this world. So did my husband. Our parents still live in it — not as victims, but as participants in a life that runs on entirely different rails than ours.
Reading it, I felt something I didn’t expect.
Not sadness. Not pity. Something quieter.
Oh. We left this. And we are better off.
That’s JOMO in its most honest form. Not a wellness trend. Not a digital detox. Just a clear-eyed moment of — I am grateful for the distance between that life and this one.
Then I picked up the ET.
“Another SaaS buyback - $100 million distributed, 50 new millionaires created.”
And I laughed. A slightly tired laugh.
Between my husband and me, we’ve been part of roughly 20 startups across our careers. As employees, as operators, as a founder. Twenty shots at the dream that ET sells every morning.
Not one of them made us millionaires.
And yet every single ET morning plants the quiet suggestion: you are behind. Someone is winning and it is not you. Why are you still here?
Pure FOMO. Delivered with headlines and a side of chai.
Here’s the thing I’ve been sitting with:
Both newspapers are doing the same thing. They’re giving me a reference point for my own life by showing me someone else’s.
Rajasthan Patrika says: look how far you’ve come. Economic Times says: look how far you still have to go.
Neither is lying. Both are incomplete.
The question is which one I reach for first - and why.
Some mornings I need the ET. The hunger is useful. The ambition is real. I’m not done building things and I know it.
But some mornings I need the Patrika. Not for the crime stories - but for the reminder. That the life I have, the city I live in, the problems I get to work on - none of this was guaranteed. I chose it. We built it. Quietly, over two decades of unglamorous work.
That’s not nothing. Even when the ET makes it feel like nothing.
The newspaper you reach for first is a choice about what story you want to tell yourself today.
Choose accordingly.