The big sleep, a Diwali eye-closer: For someone who thinks sleeping is for losers, a 24-hr Kumbhakarnian stretch can be a magnificent snooze-fest

Today, I plan to sleep the whole day and night. You may ask me how I plan to do that, considering it's Diwali. Let's just say I have the will and the skill, and above all the desire, to sleep the whole day and night.

Apart from disbelief, I can sense vapours of Narayana Murthyian disgust rising from many of you. 'How can you waste a festive day like this?' which actually hides your real horror: 'How can you sleep so much?' As if I shall personally be bringing down the country's GDP by 0.8675% by being utterly unproductive in body and spirit this Diwali.

Our modern relationship with sleep is delicate. Much care is taken to not just getting the right amount of sleep, but also the right quality. People forego partaking of the ultimate hot chocolate - reading long op-ed columns - but are wide-eyed about ketamine-induced glutamatergic mechanisms, Mann ki Baat episodes, herbal tea, sleeping apps that play sounds of crickets rubbing their legs next to a gurgling stream with a pashmina fluttering in a breeze that once touched Sri Devi...


I come from the 'sleeping is for losers' school of circadian rhythm. In an ideal world, we would not need to sleep - or go to the toilet. But then, we live in a world where body-clocking people love Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.

A 26-author May 2026 Nature study, 'Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life,' tells me that the optimal amount of sleep is 6.5-7.8 hrs for women and 6.4-7.7 hrs for men. Not counting Friday and Saturday nights, and days of high excitation, I usually clock 6 hours of sleep these days. But I desire to sleep more. Badly. Every day.

One of my heroes, Kumbhakarna, uncle to my namesake, has been, disgracefully, turned into an epitome of somnolence, lethargy, and uselessness. And yet, Kumbha-Chacha was a great warrior and formidable scholar, telling off his brother Ravana - certainly far more forcefully than JD Vance has told off Donald Trump about his war on Iran being cause for recent heartburn - of both the moral wrongness and political stupidness of kidnapping a fellow king's wife. ('Couldn't you have picked a peasant's?!')

This Kumbhakarna, according to Valmiki's Ramayan, was duped into cursing himself to sleep 9 years at a stretch each sleep cycle, after Saraswati (on Indra's instructions) tricked her Lankan devotee into seeking 'nidravatvam' (sleep), instead of 'nirdevatam' (annihilation of the gods). It's like Nitin Nabin - he's BJP president, just saying, not to be confused with the late actor Navin Nischol - asking for a Congress-mukt Bharat, and instead getting an angrez-mukt Bharat, which he already had anyway.

'Oversleep', like 'over-drink', retains that terrible reputation as a 'curse'. But like resisting the shower and then once in, not wanting to come out, sleep becomes gorgeous once you're asleep. Even a wake (as opposed to woke) person like me understands its gorgeousity. Oversleep, as opposed to sleep, needs to be de-vilified from its 'bad cholesterol' vibes.

There's a song tucked away in the Beatles' magnificent 1966 album, Revolver, 'I'm Only Sleeping.' John's voice, the song's pace, guitar strum, and Paul's dum-dee-dum tiptoeing bass together act like Kaa's hypno-disc eyes in Disney's 1967 animation film version of The Jungle Book. 'Please, don't wake me,/ No, don't shake me/ Leave me where I am,/ I'm only sleeping,' is John's genuine imploration.

But it's the bridge, with Paul joining in on harmony - 'Keeping an eye/ On the world going by my window/ Taking my time/ Lying there and staring at the ceiling/ Waiting for/ A sleepy feeling...'--followed by

George's backward lead guitar track that slips out and in like a smoke, which lulls the insomniac null and happy void.

The French have a name for orgasm: petite mort, or little death. I'd venture forth to call sleep, grande orgasme. Or as 19th c. poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in 'No Worst, There is None,' wrote with pebble perfection, '...all/ Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.'

Raise a pillow to Lord Kumbhakarna this Diwali. Off I go to sleep.