The Unforgettable Desire

The first novel that I read was Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre . The first novel series that I read was Stephenie Meyer's  Twilight Saga . After that, I mostly read Nicholas Sparks and disliked Erich Segal. I read Ann Brashares’ Sisterhood series, Sarah Dessen’s The Truth About Forever , and Cecelia Ahern's books that made my teenage easy to bear. Harry Potter books happened to me only because I did not understand what happened in the movie - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince . I had read Harry Potter and the   Philosopher’s Stone as a kid. It was an utter pain to read such a thick book with tiny alphabets back then. Eventually, I was embarrassed of the books that marked the beginning of my reading habit. I was embarrassed only because people saw those books in a derogatory light. After a few years of public comments on my book choices, I did begin to ask people if they had read those books. The answer usually was, no. It was then that I stood up for ...

I woke up this fine Sunday morning — sleepy still, I went to get Rohi fish. As the seller aunty weighed it, and uncle cut it, I had quite an unsatisfactory feeling. It's not being cut right, I thought. I saw aunty weighing two snakehead murrels and dropping them near uncle. One of the murrels moved, and I hoped for it to not be alive. I ignored and went back to watching my Rohi being cut. Then, aunty picked up a murrel, and tried to kill it. It slipped. I did not like the sight of it because the fish moved like a snake. I was reminded of the time when I was a class V kid. I had often suggested my father to buy all the freshly-fished fishes and throw them back in the water, so that they can live. We can eat the already-dead ones, but not the ones who are suffering for the lack of water. I went vegetarian for next six years, because my Science teacher had asked my class to make a mass-promise to not eat non-veg. I take the words, "I promise", quite seriously. That...

I have been juggling many life choices in my mind. I took a month off from Hyderabad. I went home. Before I left, I was in an internship that changed my way of looking at things. I realized, either I am not willing to accept ‘reality’ or I am not meant for jobs. I cried many times in my office washroom. I was frustrated that I could not read and write in that period of time. When it was over, I went home - away from the environment I usually live in, away from the people I usually interact with. I went home to discover myself. In the one month I spent at home, I read five books. I did not write anything worth publishing on my blog. I ended up with a few drafts nonetheless. What I liked the most at home was, the way my parents looked at my reading. Every time my mother talked about my reading habits, I could sense pride in her voice. I challenged my father at reading books. I had a good time. Every other day, I used to tell them about a strength or weakness of mine that I discover...

I spent the entire day reading about the once-in-a-lifetime lunar eclipse.  Super Blue Blood moon.  ‘Can the name not be short?’, I thought just like I had thought about my cancer - Pre B Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, ten years ago. I saw people sharing the time of eclipse’s visibility in different places.  ‘Ahh, not in India.’ Cool things never happen in India,  sighed the multiple-times-disappointed-kid in me.  But, then. I saw someone share the time of visibility in the metro cities of India.  I googled immediately, ‘Lunar eclipse visibility in Hyderabad.’ I saw many articles describing the reasons behind this particular eclipse being unique. I gave it a thought, not much. I am not one of those moon-watchers, you see. The idea of moon’s beauty brought the idea of longing lovers.  I tried, I tried really hard, to bring together love, longing, and moon. It never happened. But, for a little while, somewhere in my...

The stories of already established mythological works from the point of view of an almost invisible character has given way to the contemporary genre of retellings and mythological fictions. Among these, a strong voice has been that of the women who were mere props in the metanarratives that were written with patriarchal ideals. Kavita Kané’s Karna’s Wife , Sita’s Sister , and Menaka’s Choice are newbies in mythological retellings and fictions. The three books are love stories of side tracked voiceless women in the grand narratives. What the books do is that, introduce the readers to characters that they might not have thought about, like that of Uruvi, Urmila, and Menaka respectively and yet hail them based on the favourite patriarchal feature associated with women, self-sacrifice. The three books have their women protagonists smitten in love and eventually subjugated by it. In these stories, the storytelling is quite contemporary as opposed to the characters who are eon ...

One January evening in a small mining town, Pralav decided to meet his old friend. His friend had returned to town after five years. They had known each other since their first day in an engineering college. For the most part of their job, they had been colleagues. At the age of 57, Pralav, feeling quite right in his head after a few months of dullness, wanted to visit his friend in his new house. Or, so he made it seem to his friend. Over the 32 years of his occupation, he had gotten used to whispers that surrounded him. “Mad, he is crazy.” “He is not in his right mind.” “Oh, what was he talking? Is he active these days?” “Just listen to him.” “Poor man.” “It’s a pity.” “His life isn’t even worth living.” PTSD has a strange way of unfolding. Two near death mining accidents later, Pralav was admitted for psyche consult which perhaps would have helped him had mental disorders been an open talk in the town. People assumed him to be a mad man because he needed the consult. The whisp...

Books, like babies, are adorable. The moment you hold either of them, you feel a kind of happiness you had never felt before. It’s satisfying but also scary. You are grateful for it, but at the same time, there is a constant nagging and fear in your head to take care of it, lest it is harmed. Books and babies have another thing in common apart from being bundles of joy. No one talks of how they come into existence. As far as babies are concerned, talking about their inception is a social taboo. And, even if the procedure that takes place after the inception is explained in details in Biology books of Class VII, Class X, and Class XII, the sterile words hardly make sense in the truest sense to a hopeless uninterested student like me. I am still unsure of what exactly happens once the egg is fertilized, zygotes probably formed, and something with fallopian tubes or maybe not. Like I mentioned, hopelessly uninterested. But, to save my soul, I now know that babies aren’t thrown down ...

I did not want to make this an issue about men and women. Although I do wonder if in many urban relationships, a woman usually wants to pursue her career before settling for marriage. My brother told me about a pair of his friends who were dating but weren’t 'settling'. I asked naively, “why?” He said, “one of them wants to get married, and the other wants to focus on career.” I asked again, “who wants to keep working?” He replied, “who do you think?” “Yeah, the girl”, I said.   That conversation has stayed with me for more than a year now. While career is no easy choice for anyone, is it more important to women? Does the traditional gender role make the urban women have the need to prove themselves outside home? And, because men are expected to work, does marriage becomes an easy choice once they have a job? In one year, I have heard a friend or a friend of friend, every now and then, excuse herself from marriage market because she wants to be someone before being w...

There comes a day when we have to stop using our past as an excuse for who we are in the present. Past is supposed to be accepted. Many a times, it does seem that we have accepted it. It does seem that we have made peace with who we have become because of our past. And, if it is bad we do hope to take charge of what we do now, because we do not want to blame our today for the things we do in future. True that. But the haunting question is, what do we do with our past where we weren’t the protagonists? What if, our past has been entertaining others with its limelight? We were not backstage and we had no role to play apart from being an audience. We laughed when the acts got funny and we cried when grief took over. And, every time we had the stage to ourselves, we thought about what the acts of others left us with. We didn’t have the brain to analyse it. We missed a few shows at times, perhaps, escaped the theatre because we didn’t know how to live just as a mute audience. It i...

Source: www.financialsamurai.com A couple of days after Diwali, a friend called me to talk about his life which included quitting his job and not knowing what to do next. He needed help. And I said, tell me one person who doesn’t these days! The thing is what used to be known as a mid-life crisis has turned into an early life crisis. You do not need to have a steady job you dislike, and that may or may not pay well to feel in your mid-thirties, what's the point of this? You do not need experience to ask yourself, what am I doing with my life, or where is this all going? You do not need to be a grown up thirty something to realise that life doesn’t make any sense and the struggle to go on is way more difficult than imagined. The thing with my generation, the 90’s kids, is that we are a generation of in-betweens. Not surprisingly, we are stuck between the generations that are divided between ‘do what you should do’ and ‘do whatever you want to do’. We are the generation tha...