Damo Balagi

Author & photographer. Left a 19-yr fintech career in 2025 to keep a 2004 promise. Two Cups: The Fog Is the Canvas. Still can’t see the summit. That’s the point

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

The air shifted... Cashew feni, pork vindaloo, chicken xacuti. Kokum, then vinegar. We were near.

The border is marked by taste rather than a sign: the sour Konkan kokum giving way to Portuguese vinegar. It is an idea of place, known through the body before the map.

Then the loss: Not a single ferry remained on the river. Not a single Chetak on the bridge. The new railway, with its ninety tunnels and two thousand bridges, carries me over the world of my childhood, and that world is already gone.

Twenty-five years later in She Heard You the First Time, an immigration officer will tell me to photograph a Mandovi ferry while they’re still around. The book has been tracking ferries disappearing for a quarter century, and this chapter is where the reader first sees it.

Kokum, Then Vinegar. The chapter argues that youth is a question asked out loud, and the answers take the rest of a life.

Ten friends ride a coastal train toward Goa with three days of money, a running joke, and six months left together. They argue about choices they cannot all afford, make promises under a moon, and then, at 2 AM in April, three of them pull a metal duck off a gate that says Not for you.

The chapter ends by changing what the duck means: not a trophy, but a question that keeps moving through all their lives.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Every tree a different shape https://t.co/r5uViwTlCJ

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Does it matter which hill is the tallest, if it’s the one you’re on?

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Nineteen years in the Forge, I used to think of the Fog as an impediment.
One year into the leap, I learned that the Fog is the canvas.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

The three questions climb a ladder: activity, output, thought. I can answer the first two. The third stops me.

I run between meeting rooms looking sharp. Looking busy.

We are so busy we never actually live our days.

Think of the last time you were so busy that you forgot to live.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Meaning to Come Back. Each reader writes for a stranger who comes after, and reads the strangers who came before.
https://t.co/phpyEvLm1B

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Surrounded by other people’s finished stories, I was still trying to write mine.

What would your year look like if it didn’t have to become a story?

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

What are you not hearing because you’ve already finished the sentence?

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

For everyone who left the road for the water.

Where did your road run out at the water?

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

https://t.co/XQ7Wte9rTZ Available for kindle, paperback and hardcover.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

https://t.co/tk4VxAY7du Available on Amazon

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Two Cups is out today.

I picked the day on purpose.

In India, it's Vijayadashami, when children trace their first letters in rice.

In America, it's the National Day on Writing.

A day for first letters. These are mine.

#WhyIWrite

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

The first copy of my book didn't go on sale.

It went to India, on my father's birthday, stamped Not for Resale.

Tomorrow, the rest go out into the world.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Two Cups out Tuesday.

Preorders open.

https://t.co/FH6gWZVdiR

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

November 2004. A pizzeria in Knoxville. I made a promise I didn't fully understand.

Nineteen years into a career, I was still carrying it. In January 2025, I walked out to keep it.

Two Cups is what happened in between.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

https://t.co/FH6gWZVdiR
Two Cups out on October 20.

Preorder now.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

https://t.co/FH6gWZVdiR (US)

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

Twenty years ago I made a promise in a pizzeria.
Today it arrived in a box. 306 pages.
Heavier than I expected.
Not the paper. The proof.

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

https://t.co/FH6gWZVdiR

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

I sit still, hands in my lap, eyes on the screen. The sitting still is the hardest. For nineteen years I have been trained to move, and the screen is asking me to do nothing.

I hear claps. They are not for me.

#memoir #twocups

[Damo Balagi @damobalagi]

They captured the Grand Canyon. I kept it.