A jeweller in Ayodhya, a stadium in my city, and the machinery between them Press enter or click to view image in full size Image created with AI assistance. For four weeks I have been writing a series on the Ramayana. This morning I published a chapter set in Ayodhya, the city where the eye had been trained to see. It is about a jeweler named Lekhraj. He walked to the palace with a necklace he had finished by lamplight, and the official who received it looked at it the way it deserved to be looked at, because the city had spent generations producing people who could. In the afternoon I learned that a stadium not far from where I live was filling for a three‑night K‑pop concert. People had flown in from other countries for it. What fills a stadium like that is not really the music. The music is the wrapper. This essay is about what is inside. * * * The Word for It The word is parasocial. It was coined in the 1950s by two sociologists watching how viewers related to television personalities.…