The Unforgettable Desire

"What's your name?" "Akankshya" "What's your caste?" "I'm sorry?" "You eat idli sambhar every day?" "No, why should i?" "You're a South Indian na?" "No, I am not." "Oh..ok, which state are you from then?" "Orissa" "It's in South." "No, it's not among the South Indian states!" "Ok" Jagriti Vihar(MCL, Sambalpur), a place where I have spent around 16 years of my life before coming to Delhi. In that place I have seen people from most of the regions, religions, caste and creed. I have seen the fairest of a face to the darkest. I have celebrated all kinds of festivals from Lohri to Teej to Pongal which we, as Odia people do not actually celebrate. The only reason why we did so was because we were in Jagriti Vihar. As far as I know, every child who has been in JV never wants to leave the place. When someone became my f...

When I look back into the past, I see myself praising the after effects of leukemia or describing how leukemia affected my life from a positive point of view. Every single word that I have ever told/written in the past is true. However there were times when I used to romanticize the past but that wasn't often. If you ask me how I felt during the cancer and it's treatment then I do not certainly know how to answer. I know what happened to me but now the memories are blurred. So I choose to talk about the effect it had on me and my life or how it changed my life. But there's this one thing I never talked about. I probably had known about it all the while but hadn't really realized that along with the positive part comes at least a bit of negativity. True, leukemia gave me a lot of things in life which I did not have 5 years ago. But there's this one thing that I lost within me... PASSION. Till my 14th revolution around the sun, I had a lot of passion to do someth...