The Unforgettable Desire

There was this professor by the name Dr GR Taneja. He did not teach me. He retired from my college, in Delhi University, a year before my admission. I met him once, in the beginning of the second year of my graduation. I was waiting outside the principal’s chamber with a friend to get the permission for conducting the auditions for our theatre group. I did not know Professor Taneja then. I had heard a lot about him from my seniors. On that uneventful day, he was just a man who cracked jokes about the principal we mutually disliked. It was an awkward, yet funny moment. The moment passed, so did years. Four years later, during the final semester of M.A., I came across his name. I was working on a project report on a couple of Salman Rushdie’s works. As my mind boggled with a hundred articles/newspaper reviews/literary papers and their bibliographies, I saw a book by the name – The Novels of Salman Rushdie . It had GR Taneja as one of its authors. It was an exciting moment. Among a...

Even though I long for changes, I am not very good at adapting to them. When I woke up this morning with my usual irate mood, I chose to listen to the songs of the theatre society of my former college. As the songs soothed my mind, I got a sinking realization that nobody around me is going to call me Cadbury here in Hyderabad. Happiness is… being called Cadbury. Sadness is… not having the people around who called me so.

In my first year, I was shocked by the attitude of the people in the ‘city of my dreams’. In my second year, I was shattered as my beautiful childhood seemed no more than a big lie. In my third year, I was devastated failing to accept the meaninglessness of life and the sorry state of the country I live in. If I am asked someday about my graduation, then I would speak the aforementioned lines to define it. These lines do not provide the beauty that Literature is assigned with; the beauty that can be seen and appreciated even by the non-literati. But here I am whining about the life literature gave me. More than often I have said to my friends that literature has the ability to ruin one’s life no matter how much s/he romanticizes it; the life in which one is happy obsessing about the self in the tiny bubble that s/he thinks to be the entire world. But am I really upset about it? After the result of my board examination was out, I went to my Dad and said that I wanted to pursu...

How many people have lectured you to shut your laptop/smart phone for a while and go out and have fun? How many videos have you seen in last couple of years showing what we lose when we indulge ourselves in the virtual world? How many times have you felt that your childhood was awesome when you played hide and seek instead of Candy Crush or Subway Surfer or Flappy Birds? How many times did you see your siblings play FIFA ’14 and wonder that they won’t know how it feels to play in the dirt? How many acquaintances/so-called friends have asked you that why internet is so important? Why can’t you just go out and hang out with people? I am sure that the people of my age group have certainly come across these questions so many times that like me they do not bother to keep the count. I am an active person in the social networking sites. In my real life, I am tagged as a strictly boring person who wouldn’t get out of her virtual world. Yes, I am one of those who lives two different lives...

Theatre! A childhood dream come true? An escape from misery? A must-do in college/Delhi University? Personality development? The only opportunity of an outstation trip? Passion? Love? Life? Wikepedia defines theatre as a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. Technically, the definition says it all. But when seen from my point of view, it says nothing. Having joined the theatre society HASRATEIN of Ram Lal Anand College, Delhi University, around 1.5 years ago, my definition of theatre has changed from a childhood dream to being my life. When I entered theatre for the first time, all I expected were scripts and actions. Now I know what a mind boggling job it is to make a play. From the moment an idea hits one’s brain till it reaches the final stage of being performed in front of an audience is a journey with ups and downs, hard work and dedication, team work and...

I seem to have a habit of getting to the extremity of my emotional self by missing people whom, with the course of time, I have come to like more than I thought I liked and then write a blog post. [;-) :-P] I hated the people of Delhi so badly during the initial months of my stay there, reasons were many! I kept wondering, why of all places I always wanted to be in Delhi? Was it because my paternal family has been residing there for decades now or was it because I couldn’t resist being somewhere else given the fact that my brother landed up in Delhi? Questions were many with a simple answer- It was just the curious mind of a little girl who visited her grandparents every summer in Delhi but never actually got to see and explore the city! Now having spent almost a year in Delhi, people at my hometown ask me how I like the place. And I find it hard to answer. Like I said I hated being in Delhi in the beginning and now I am longing to go back to that place. I say to them, after a ce...