I WAS SUNK DEEP IN THE DUMPS WHEN A friend suggested I download the first season of Mad Men. The show had premiered in July 2007—the very month a psychiatrist had handed me my sentence: “You suffer from what we call bipolar disorder. There is no cure, but you can learn how to manage it.” By then, I already knew a thing or two about what it meant to be a mad man.
As I oscillated between the paralysis of depression and the embarrassments of mania, Mad Men became both my shelter and my raft. Don Draper, the show’s obviously dishy protagonist, was everything I wanted to be: stoic, inscrutable, confident, independent, suave. Depression told me I was a loser, a failure. Don, meanwhile, offered me an escape from that nagging self-flagellation. If only I could be more like him, I thought, perhaps I too could shrug off defeat and become a hero. I binge-watched my way into believing being was passé; life was instead all about becoming.
An advertising executive in 1960s New York, Don Draper strides through the city as if he owns Manhattan. Mad Men opens with Don asking questions I, as a chain-smoker myself, had often rehearsed in my head: Why do we smoke? Why pledge fealty to just one brand? As Creative Director of a prestigious firm, it falls on Don to dazzle the owners of Lucky Strike. He throws into the wastebin ideas his colleagues suggest. When he walks into the meeting room, he has nothing to show. The clients are already halfway out the door when he conjures, seemingly out of thin air, a tagline that would become iconic: “Lucky Strike—it’s toasted.” Watching him, I didn’t just admire his wit; I was also surrendering, unknowingly, to the seductive myth of individual genius.
I remember teetering on the brink of another manic breakdown when I barged into my editor’s room and declared, “I want to be the Don Draper of journalism!” A magazine or newspaper is, of course, a collective effort, the sum of many hands and minds, but Mad Men had convinced me I was singlehandedly carrying forward a legacy of excellence and brilliance. Each time I landed a clever headline or slipped a new turn of phrase into print, I repeated to myself Don’s maxim: “Success comes from standing out, not fitting in.” My cockiness, I see now, was unabashedly male. Both masculinity and madness granted me the same indulgence: a license to misbehave.
With the possible exception of his debonair boss, Roger Sterling, Don has no friends. Each time the chemical imbalance in my brain has flared, I have accused those dearest to me of imagined betrayals. In such moments, I too believed I could endure as a lone wolf. The gift of hotel coffee shops is their endlessness. Like pharmacies, they stay open around the clock. When mania steals my sleep, I drift from one luxury hotel to the next. I sit alone, ordering shots of espresso and tequila, scribbling aphorisms in my diary the way Don sketched mood boards on paper napkins.
Insomnia tricks me into believing that, like Don, I have irresistible charm. I forcibly lock eyes with women across the room, offer them cigarettes, start conversations in the hope they will whisper to me what Don’s lovers tell him in bed: “I want you to pull my hair, ravish me, leave me for dead.” No one ever does. For Don, serial infidelity turns women into items on a to-do list he diligently checks off. Taking a page from his book, I declare love to those who show me the barest flicker of attention. I forget that unlike slick TV shows, life does not come with a script.
DON DRAPER IS THE ARCHETYPAL self-made man. He doesn’t just make something of himself; he makes himself up. Born to a sex worker who dies in childbirth, he is raised as Dick Whitman in Depression-era Pennsylvania. He grows up under the shadow of an overbearing father who is killed, almost mythically, by the startled kick of a horse. His strict Christian stepmother is more gaoler than guardian, and escape seems impossible until the Korean War offers him a door. There, in the chaos of battle, Whitman seizes a chance at reinvention: when his commanding officer, Donald Draper, is killed, he switches their dog tags and steals his identity. Don Draper is a fiction, and that’s the point. His masculinity is a performance we put on when trying to be men.
Back when I was still trying to pass off wish-fulfilment as literature, I gave my protagonist the name “Advaita Goswami”. He and Don shared more than a passing resemblance. Orphaned as a boy, Advaita grew up to be a con artist, a trickster who could become any man you wanted him to be. His gift, he liked to believe, was transformation; “deception”, he felt, was too dirty, too harsh a word. Ironically, the only real truth that Advaita and Don ever handed down to me was this: lies behave like Matryoshka dolls—open one, and there is always another nested inside.
Several summers ago, I was too busy ricocheting off the walls to notice I had again lost the will to sleep. A glutton for stimulation, I had turned my life into a tempest. I left my parents’ home in Kolkata with nothing but a bag of books, ended a long-distance relationship on a whim, and took to calling unsuspecting friends in the dead of night. In Delhi, I tore pages from Virginia Woolf’s novels, leaving them in cabs and autorickshaws for strangers to find. In Chandigarh, I waded into a pond to pluck white lotuses; in Mumbai, I squatted outside the domestic terminal, thinking a pillar was my Bodhi tree. I mistook a string of epiphanies for some grand awakening.
It didn’t take long for two of my best friends to intervene. The psychiatrist they brought me to had an examination room that felt comfortingly plush. There I found myself sitting across from a woman in her late twenties, bent over some customary forms. I interrupted her: “What do they have you in for?” Taking her mumble for attention, I introduced myself as Advaita Goswami.
“Advaita? Isn’t that a girl’s name?” she asked.
I launched into etymology. I explained that in Vedanta, advaita meant non-duality. “And if everything that is two is actually one, then there is no gender, is there?” Her laugh made me think that like Advaita, I, too, must be a smooth operator. I told her that after my parents died, I hadn’t known what to do with my inheritance or my freedom. I was parroting lines I had once written, pretending, in that moment, to be a pretender. When I asked if she’d like to meet for a drink, she said yes, but the slip of paper with her name and number was one I never found again.
The desire to be someone else is often just hatred for who you already are. When mania ebbs, depression makes me confront that self-loathing head on. The delusions that once inflated me now collapse into shame, leaving me unable to rise from bed for days. With Lithium and anti-psychotics numbing my senses, neither truth nor language retains its elasticity. The ordinariness of Shreevatsa has none of the grandeur Advaita promised. In depression, I am everything I refuse to be when manic—overweight, sluggish, dull, ugly. Don Draper, for all his effort, is still haunted by Dick Whitman.
I might be a Don when I am mad, but I am only a Dick when I am sad.
I N ONE OF MAD MEN’S EARLY EPISODES, Betty, Don’s wife, tells their dinner guests with a practiced smile, “Don doesn’t like to talk about himself. I know better than to ask.” Later that night, once the house is still, she feels it safer to persevere. She presses Don gently about his childhood. His face hardens; his irritation mounts. “Jesus, Betty! What difference does it make?” he snaps. Instead of talking, they make love. Don falls asleep, but Betty does not. She lies awake, cigarette glowing in the dark, her face lit with worry. She lies down next to Don, and rests her hand on his back. Then, almost to herself, she whispers, “Who’s in there?” I have always feared that question. If someone were to ask it of me, I worry they would uncover someone unspeakably monstrous.
When I was eight and he was 18, S seduced me into a world I was far too young to understand. For four years, he used pornography as a kind of manual to instruct me on how best to please a man. In S’s imagination, I was only ever of any use if he could think of me as a woman. I practised hard the coquettishness of centrefold models and submissiveness of adult film stars, but what I found hard to comprehend were the ritual humiliations. S berated me for crying like a girl, and publicly yelled at me for having man boobs. His moods were mercurial. My heart would pound each time he picked me up in his car. He’d drive at over a hundred kilometres an hour, instilling in me a fear that ensured both my silence and compliance. I had grown used to a see-saw of feeling—being the centre of his attention when we were in together, and being dropped like a hot potato when we were not. I felt betrayed when he got married. By then, I was a boy in love.
The internet came to my rescue in adolescence. On chatropolis.com, I stumbled upon the illicit, carnal and redemptive joys of cybersex. The site allowed you to choose any username under the sun; the images you uploaded as display pictures were, fittingly, called “avatars.” In rooms like “The Hospital,” “Office Seduction,” and “Home Alone,” I acted out fantasies that my earlier diet of softcore porn had taught me to internalise. Soon, however, I discovered I took no pleasure in being a domineering doctor or boss. What thrilled me instead was slipping into “Ladies Only Lounge” or “Sappho’s Retreat,” where I paraded as Mallika, an insatiable lesbian from Bombay.
I dressed Mallika in detail. She was twenty-two, had two tattoos—one on her left shoulder, the other on the small of her back—and nursed a greed for new lingerie. She wanted only women, because “men,” in her experience, “were beasts.” Not all her encounters were free of hierarchy. “I don’t have a single Domme bone in my body,” she would tell mistresses eager to school her in latex and leather. What she longed for instead were relationships where women treated her with understanding, care and respect. Some of those partners became lovers. Mallika met Luscious Latina at work. Their office affair was stormy. Once, LL pushed her against the photocopier, slipped a ring on her finger, and whispered, “You’re mine.” I had never felt more loved in my life.
I had grown addicted to the kindness of women. When girlfriends swore they would slap or even kill S if they ever saw him, I felt safe from all harm. What I didn’t see was that S had left me perennially anxious. I clung to every word my partners spoke, their moods became referendums on my worth. If the women I loved were upset—or even mildly peeved—by something I had done or said, my whole world crumbled. I was once more an eight-year-old in the passenger seat of a car, praying for his life, hoping that a simple apology might make everything right again. What I longed for was an idyll where relationships were defined only by warmth and desire, untouched by anger or even everyday rancour. What I longed for was to live in Chatropolis.
It was easy to step out of virtual relationships. If an online romance soured, all you had to do was change your username, swap your avatar. Becoming someone else in real life was trickier. For me, it took the force of my mental illness to make confrontation an inevitability. Mania made me the abrasive, aggressive man I most despised. I could sit across from women who had once cured my despair with tenderness and wound them with words I had chiselled into whiplash. Wanting to be independent again, to be some mythical Don Draper, I’ve shouted until my throat ached, even shown partners the door. I have survived only because their hearts were large enough to forgive my indignations, to forget my inconsistencies. Mad Men should have taught me better: trauma, left unresolved, is never yours alone—it spreads, infecting those you love most.
Over time, I have been healed by people who see me as a person, not a patient. By entrusting me with the details of their lives—their small anxieties and their big passions—my parents, friends and lovers have helped me make peace with the past and inhabit the present. Once, I believed love meant rescuing everyone in my orbit from sorrow and worry. Belatedly, I learnt that love is less about playing saviour than bearing witness. My support system has taught me to embrace the ordinary: that fun need not equal the vertigo of a theme park, that joy can be found in an out-of-turn joke or the late-night sharing of whisky and ice cream. I have almost hit middle age. Love has stopped keeping me up at night. It helps me sleep the seven hours my doctor prescribes.
BY THE TIME I WAS IN MY 30S, THE ONLY way to meet someone new was on a dating app. In those lucid intervals—the blessed stretches of months between mania and depression—I would sign up for Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. I never mentioned bipolar disorder on my profile. That secret I saved for later, disclosing it only when casual flirtation deepened into something resembling intimacy. The confession often made women feel I trusted them enough to make them confidantes. Their responses became a sieve through which I filtered my Rolodex of options, a revolving door of names and numbers that seemingly kept turning. Some were empathetic, others only curious. I grew used to answering questions that veered between fear and affection: Are there symptoms I should watch for? Is there someone I can call? Have you taken your meds?
Sometimes, women answered my disclosure with revelations of their own. G and I had been on only a couple of dates when she told me she suffered from borderline personality disorder. At first, I was compassionate, but soon I found myself worn out by her mood swings, her constant demands on my attention. I ended our three-week romance with the line: “There’s too much mental illness in this room.” Things unravelled even faster with M, who came to visit me from out of town. My one-bedroom apartment in Mumbai began to feel suffocating as desire gave way to frustration. Feeling trapped, I staged a manic episode in my kitchen—blaring music, singing at the top of my voice, pounding the furniture—before giving her 12 hours to leave my home.
I atone for my sins through penance, not reformation. Afraid of repeating old mistakes, I avoid dating apps altogether. Scared I will again use social media to broadcast every stray thought, I rarely tweet or post on Instagram. Worried I will overstay my welcome, I no longer reach out to those I once alienated. I wait for them to call me. Mania and depression both leave me spent in their wake, a tumult of feeling that hollows me out. My response to the threat of relapse is to strip emotion from consciousness. I keep anger and despair at bay by pruning my mind as carefully as I manicure my nails, as diligently as I order my room. My inner life mirrors my outer one: Nothing is out of place. My moods, like my books, are stacked neatly. I never make a mess.
To help me cope with upheaval, I have, at times, turned to Stoicism, that school of thought which urges you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps in times of despondency, to keep calm and carry on in the face of adversity. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, put it bluntly: “If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.” Epictetus, a former slave, once wrote, “A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.” Their words offer me practical lessons—on honouring commitments, confronting fear, mastering rage, accepting limits and exercising control over my behaviour. At times their advice can seem obvious, but it is often also precise, almost bracing, in its timeliness.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), it is said, borrowed its central injunction from Stoicism: focus on what you can control, stop worrying about what you cannot. Psychologists, however, are hardly the only ones prescribing Stoicism as a way of life. Their competition comes from Silicon Valley tech bros and macho military types who insist men must remain unaffected and unemotive, dominant and driven, stubborn and unfazed. In the back alleys of the internet, men copy-paste the words of ancient philosophers to signal their masculinity. The ideal man, after all, is indifferent to pleasure and pain. He does not wait for luck. He manufactures his own fortune.
At times when I tire of therapy, when I say there is nothing more left to confess, I think of Don Draper’s pithy adage: “Change is neither good nor bad; it simply is.” His stoicism, however, couldn’t save him from the downward spiral that carries him to Esalen, the Californian retreat where hippie values of love, acceptance, and connection are preached. In Mad Men’s finale, Don lies on the floor, having uttered a string of ominous goodbyes. A woman approaches, escorts him to a group therapy session. There he listens to a man named Leonard speak of loneliness and invisibility. Don kneels beside him. The two men embrace and sob together. That is the Don I try to remember when I see him on my phone’s wallpaper. The lesson of Mad Men is not aloofness but vulnerability. It is better to be a bridge than an island; better to be a Shreevatsa than a Don.
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