A Bowl of Elusive

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother was barely the person I once knew. Years of suffering and pain, having lost her oldest son, followed by her husband and then her last son had left her a hollow shell of the person she was when I was five or six, when times were happier. So many things plagued her in the last of her days – she often asked herself why God had let her live for so long, while all her loved ones succumbed before her eyes. She not only had her own sorrow, but she had to live through the sorrows and pain of all her loved ones. Dementia started setting in towards the end and she barely recognized me the last time we met and maybe I was relieved. She deserved the much deserved detachment from her reality. You see when I look back at my folks and the people that they were, I often judge my grandmother  with the harshest set of ideals. She was deeply flawed, as compared to my grandfather or my father and uncle. She had a temper. The caste based biases were deeply ingrai

WARNING: Those who were bummed out by my depressing article "Just Another Day in Life" might find this article even more demure. That's because it is. But it is a topic I needed to write about. So here goes nothing. Being a child born in a country which is as densely populated as India just multiplies your chances of being sexually abused. In fact, I believe that as much as 95% of kids today face some form of sexual abuse or the other. Do you want to know why I am assuming such a huge percentage? That's because most of my peers who felt comfortable enough with me to share their woes, told me that it had happened to them. In some cases, it was just some neighbor "uncle" touching them inappropriately and in other cases, it was more horrid than that. A girl I knew had confessed to having been raped between the age of six to nine by five different men, most of whom were either related to her or were close family friends. I myself faced abuse at the h

Like I have mentioned earlier, I am an orphan and was raised by my grandparents. Sounds sweet to a lot of you out there, doesn't it? Indulgent grandparents is the usual image that pops into people’s minds. But its a little different in real life. You see when you are orphaned and come to live with your grandparents, they assume the role of parents and for all intents and purposes, they become your parents. And thats where the problem starts. Being raised by people who are 57 years older than you are poses challenges that you normal kids out there will not understand. And add to that the fact that I was born to a generation that saw the Technological Revolution happening, and you’ve got mayhem! The generation gap wouldn't have been such a pain had it not been for the Technology Gap. I mean I was a quiet kid, I was never really a rebel. But my grandparents’ aversion to new technology kept getting on my nerves. You see, a lot of my father’s peers have actually adopt