A Bowl of Elusive

I remember all of us sitting in the dining hall at our place in Sambalpur. I wasn’t more than five years old at the time. My grandfather was seated in his usual wooden recliner, with my grandmother by his side in a matching chair, while my father sat at the dining table peeling mangoes for everyone to eat. I was on the floor fiddling with some toy of some kind while my father was entertaining his parents with anecdotes from his time in the armed forces. After a while, the conversation shifted to me and how I was such a big responsibility, especially since my father was raising me alone. My father looked at me with pride and announced that I’d become “a doctor or an engineer” when I grow up.  My father’s plan was to be hands-on with my upbringing and to a large extent he was. But it was short-lived, as just five years later, he died of kidney failure and I came under my grandparents’ care. They were good people and their style of parenting involved giving me a wider berth to grow creati

Ever since I was a little kid, I faced a lot of hostility at the hands of a lot of people, be it my own mother, the bullies at school, my abusers, bullies at college or several other nameless individuals. But I rarely retaliated. I internalized the whole experience and made myself impervious to hurtful things. And I did that with the help of defense mechanisms. Now these defense mechanisms vary in size, shape and nature. Let me dive into a few of them today, to give you a beginners' tour into the dark twisted alleys of my mind. A colleague recently told me that my boss was taunting me about something during an official con-call. And I had completely missed it. You see, that's not me being naive, it's my mind filtering out negativity. This started out when I was younger. After my parents went through a pretty long and scandalous divorce, being from a small town in a relatively backward state in the country, my folks and I had a lot of people randomly saying derogatory

Those three days were the toughest three days of Ray's life. Laurie had gone out of town to meet her folks and Ray had made things awkward before she left. He had always been a bit of a mess around her, maybe because he liked her so much and her hot/cold reaction towards him made him insecure about the whole thing. They'd been seeing each other for a few months but Laurie still wasn't very sure about Ray. Ray did understand Laurie's apprehensions and he was adamant about making those apprehension's go away. He wasn't a quitter. But he wasn't very cool either. Laurie and Ray weren't similar people but they'd clicked well ever since that first date. Laurie was this carefree, whirlwind of a person, who'd had a tough childhood, was unapologetic and spoke her mind. Whereas Ray was a tame teetotaler trying to be tantalizing and of course failing at it. Their first date was stuff of the legends, smooth, effortless and just right. Even though it h