A Bowl of Elusive

Disclaimer - This is a work of fiction and can get pretty graphic and explicit at times. Read it with an open mind.  It was a humid evening in Kolkata. I could see the puddles created by the rain from this morning. Somehow I had managed to get off early from work. I was visiting the city for a meeting with the team. I wasn’t very fond of Kolkata as a city. It was crowded and loud and unorganized but it had Rashmita. I knew her from my brief stint at the Oberoi Hotel, Mumbai. She had been an Industrial Trainee then and I was a manager-on-training. Being an employee, we considered all interns “kids”. She was still in college after all. It didn’t matter that she was actually older than I was, by a year or so on account of having started the vocation a few years later than I had. So, I was a little stand-offish when she’d asked me if I was single. It had seemed unethical to get involved with a “junior”. But her internship ended after a few months and she left. I did notice her abs

Farhana had always been difficult. Mirza and Farhana had met through common friends, and since life isn't a fairy tale, they'd not instantly fallen in love. In fact, they'd been dating different people at that point. Months passed before they reconnected. Both of them were on "breaks", so they made the best of it. You'd be amazed at how many courtships start with a pretense of innocent friendship and flirting. Soon they were asking each other if they'd eaten or not. But since life isn't a fairy tale (reiterating here), both of them had a whole lot of baggage and life was gonna be difficult. Firstly, they'd started with the "I like you but not like that" routine. For some reason, people are too scared to give romance a chance to blossom. But romance is but natural, so it sneaks up on you. And before you know it, you're missing a person's voice, a person you barely know. Now, steering through life's garbage had never

While I sat there working on that 87 mb excel sheet, I couldn't for the life of me, figure out how to represent the data I had to. I had put in some tags and now I didn't remember why I'd put them. Even a simple copy paste function was taking several minutes. This problem was just not getting resolved. So I just closed the file, without saving it. I took a leak, drank some water and came back. Then I started fresh on the file. I put in new tags, named them so that I won't forget their purpose, jotted down my thought process and I was done with the file an hour later. This got me thinking about starting fresh. So many times in our lives we keep on persevering on things that aren't going well. We keep trying to find solutions while repeating the same mistakes. It's like if I kept on creating more pivot tables in the 87 mb file, bumping it by another 20-30 mb so that it would hang more and waste more of my time, instead of closing it and starting fresh.