It is cuffing season again — Nature’s annual reminder that humans, like migratory birds and Delhi influencers, become deeply seasonal creatures. The temperature dips, the lighting gets forgiving, and suddenly everyone wants someone to sit beside them on a couch that otherwise feels aggressively large. Sensible people who have spent most of the year insisting they are “very happy alone” begin sprinting into temporary arrangements with the urgency of contestants on a dating show filmed entirely in December.

For the uninitiated, cuffing season is that winter-adjacent window when single people seek short-term companionship — warmth, routine, shared meals, someone to watch bad television with, without the long-term paperwork. It is meant to be a pit stop. What fascinates me isn’t the ritual itself, but how earnestly we misinterpret it.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the great Indian sub-genre of cuffing season: NRI and foreigner season. A friend in Jaipur once told me, with the calm logic of someone who has cracked the code, “I wait all year for winter. That’s when all the foreigners arrive. It’s perfect. You meet for coffee, go out for drinks, have great sex, enjoy the city, and then they........

© The Hindu