A Bowl of Elusive

Aarav stared at his sweaty palms. Why the hell were his palms sweaty in December? He wiped his palms on the side of his denim, and adjusted the little overnight backpack over his shoulders and moved towards boarding gate number 51 at Terminal 3, IGI airport. The crisp morning breeze hit his face and ruffled his hair as he stepped out into the open airfield to board the long domestic flight. He loved the feel of cold air on his ears. Aarav was feeling nervous, for he was heading on to meet Avni. Avni was a girl Aarav knew back from his school days. They'd re-connected recently and he was now boarding a three hour long flight to the city she was in to meet her. It was a totally impromptu decision and he didn't know what to expect. Avni and Aarav always had a spark but had never managed to make it into a real flame. But in the last few months, things had changed. Things had escalated quickly when Aarav wrote about school days and mentioned Avni with nostalgia and Avni notic...

Not all relationships are meant to be great love stories, some are just destined to be flings. While love stories make it to the printed page, flings are often forgotten and flushed down the memory lane. This story would have had a similar fate, had this happened to anyone else. But if you meet a writer who's hit a block, and pour your heart out about that girl who just wouldn't call you back, be sure he'll write about it. That's exactly what Poorab (name changed) did. I will surely take some liberties with the story while narrating it for you but will try to capture the essence of what happened as well as possible. Poorab & Ruchi were set up by over-zealous common friends. They started texting each other first, something Poorab excelled at. Especially since he had just recently broken up with his high school sweetheart. Ruchi was the morose, self-deprecating and depressed kind of girl who often finds betrayal in love. Or that was what she made him believe. Poo...

Timing always seemed to be a problem for Jay and Sunayana. I left off the last part of this story ( link  here) with Jay having left Sunayana a mail inviting her to have a conversation. As luck would have it, Jay’s mail went straight to her Quarantined folder, as it was her work mail and her company had a rather strong filter for outside emails. Sunayana found the mail when she was reviewing the Quarantine folder a few months later. She didn’t know what to feel about it. Jay seemed to knock on her door at very strategic times. She had just broken up with a guy from work and finding this mail felt like a sign. She decided to call back. Her call couldn’t have come at a worse time. Jay was actually on a date when he got her call. It was an unknown number which he picked up, assuming it might be from a client. His heart stopped beating when he heard her voice, like literally. He gasped for breath and excused himself from his gorgeous Tinder date to go to the men’s room. He h...

We are a country with over a billion people living extraordinarily mediocre lives. Many of us don’t know where our next meals will come from. We have so many real things that we need to worry about. Yet we can’t stop obsessing over little things like a young couple kissing in public. Protests rise against moral policing and we get caught up in the symbolism. Are we dumb enough to think that these protests are aimed at just making kissing in public legal? (By the way, it's already legal.) Have we forgotten about how couples have been getting thrashed for so much as holding hands in public? I see so many self-righteous “respected” grown-ups publicly shunning the “Kiss of Love” Movement, labeling it as Western Culture corrupting and degrading the Indian culture. How is this an effect of the Western culture? It's like watching a goldfish with its 3-second memory cycle. If you were to believe these gentlemen, Indians didn’t know about kissing before meeting foreigners and al...