A Bowl of Elusive

The first time I met my uncle was when I was nine years old. I mean, I had certainly met him before that – when I was less than two years old – but I didn’t remember that time. My father and his younger brother had not been on talking terms for over a decade and I’m still not sure why. I never asked either of them about it. But in 1999, when my uncle called my grandfather from Mumbai asking him if he could come over to Mumbai where my uncle was to undergo surgery, my father was present in the room and unceremoniously took over the phone call. It didn’t matter that they had not spoken to each other in years. My father asked him what was going on – my uncle revealed that he had recently been having epileptic fits, indicating that he had some neurological problem. On tests like MRI and EEG, it had been revealed that he had a frontal lobe tumor that needed to be removed surgically. My father told him he would come to Mumbai, and he left soon after. I remember this time vividly because I wa

I have been writing a book. It will be published in a few weeks, hopefully. It is about a guy who pretends to be other people. Won’t give away more than that - spoilers can’t be good for business. You must read it when it comes out - I will share the details in this space. Anyway, as I was writing it, I had several crises of faith - Will it be a good read? Would anyone buy this? This is boring. Am I writing this character right? And in all this, I looked closely at myself, to draw inspiration for the imposter I was writing about. For as long as I can remember, I have had trouble understanding myself as a person. Often I have felt like an empty vessel, driven by the faces I wear.  Let me clarify - my life hasn’t been a very happy one so far. There were several deaths, abandonment, and separations that marred my journey, and not being the bravest person I know, I used denial to cope with these situations. If I didn’t believe these things were real, they wouldn’t affect me, right? I think

When I passed out of school in March’ 2007, I was not sure about what I wanted to do with my life. I had decided to join hotel management but I had missed the national entrance exam for the same, so I had a year free. While many of my classmates were preparing for IIT or Medical entrance tests, I was positive that those career options were not suitable for me. I did eventually join hotel management and by the time I passed out of college, I did not want to join the hotel industry. This article is not about that. You can read my article ‘ Why I Didn't Pursue a Career in Hotels... ’ to know about that story. This article is about that one year I spent in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of my home state Odisha.  Sometime during the period between the board exams and the announcement of results, one of my uncle’s acquaintances suggested that I could be a pilot. I had the height for it, standing at 185 centimeters at that point in time and great eyesight. Moreover, when I explored the req

A friend of mine just forwarded a video of the song “Radha Kaise Na Jale” from the movie ’Lagaan’ and as I was listening to it, I was transported back in time when I had first heard this song. I remember they used to run the trailer of the movie between programs on the Zee Channel and I loved it. It was one of the first movies that I had been really excited about and I remember this because my grandfather had commented on my excitement. Ah, songs and the memories they bring with it. As of today, memories are all I have left of my family members. For each one of them, there are memories associated with certain songs. And I thought, why not write about the various songs that hold significance in my life in the form of memories they evoke, be it about my family members or certain moments in my life. My father was the OG music aficionado in the family. He had a Philips 2-in-1 music system and he would buy cassette tapes of his favorite albums. Kumar Sanu, Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle & U

Have you ever wondered what is the point to all this? I am talking about life. Why do we live? What do we live for? Someone who had met me a decade ago would be surprised at my asking these questions. I believed in indulgent excesses and living for the decadent pleasures of life. By that, I mean food mostly. I had a small family, including my grandparents and uncle and I never gave death a thought. Then in the last decade, I lost all of them. I made some serious mistakes in life, hurt people in the process and here I am, at thirty years old, alone, regretful and as per the latest reports, diabetic. So, I am asking myself, what am I living for? All these years, I had something to look forward to, but now it is all gone. I have these feelings that I feel like sharing with people, but when I call them, words fail me. You see I am unable to express the extent of the loneliness I feel or the all-consuming pointlessness of life in general. Lately, I have been doing a little bit of cost-benef

Have you ever wondered how no creatures in nature, save humans, are capable of cruelty? The most violent animals in nature hunt and kill for food, they don’t do it out of cruelty. Humans are the only species that hunts for “game”, “fun”, “recreation”. And the cruelty isn’t restricted to hunting and poaching only. People in general are cruel and mean, something you don’t see in the animal kingdom. Take the example of those guys who threw a stray dog off the roof. Or the woman who buried a dog’s litter alive. And I’m yet to mention the cruelty that man imparts on other fellow humans, be it in the name of war, religion or politics. Take the lynching incidents that are so rampant in the recent years or the riots and bombings of the past years. Human beings and their affinity for cruelty never stops astounding me. And then there’s the cruelty and torture at personal level which often goes unnoticed due to its intimate nature. Between the ages of six to nine, I was undergoing syst

Every time I tell people that I have a degree in Hotel Management, they inevitably ask me why I'm working in retail and not in hotels. It's been eight long years since I made that switch and now the narrative has boiled down to simple facts like work-life balance being shitty in Indian hotels and hotels being bad paymasters. But the actual reasons, while including the aforementioned points, go beyond that. In this post, I'm gonna delve deeper into the several reasons I had not to continue in the hotel industry. To do that, I'll need to take you back to my college days and outline what the course is all about and what kind of job prospects the candidates have after passing out from a hotel management college. This might be a dreary subject for some of my readers, but I think a lot of my college peeps will actually relate to this post. So many people have this misconception that hotel management is all about the kitchen and food production. That's a rather laym

Eclairs - The Pavilion, ITC Maurya, New Delhi The mere fact that I'm writing about this should tell you how passionate I am about my food. I order in a lot. Like a lot. And I've been doing that for the last 11 years. So my relationship with food delivery is a long standing one and of course, I have a type when it comes to food delivery places. Now, what I look for in my meals and subsequently in my food delivery experience may differ from occasion to occasion , from day to day, depending on the following things - how hungry I am, what I'm craving for and what time of the month it is. You see, I'm a big guy, like literally, I am around 6' 2" tall and I weigh nearly 100 kilograms. So naturally, I have a really healthy appetite. So quantity is a big factor for me. Most of my disappointments with food delivery joints arises from the fact that they have a pathetic portion size. I don't mind paying more than average if the serving size and the quality of

Most people go about their lives with a certain clarity which I have noticed that mine doesn't have. I tend to find myself facing one problem after another, many of them resulting from my own actions in some way or the other. So I often find myself wondering if there's something wrong with my nature. A certain school of psychology dictates that a person's nature can be directly attributed to their childhood and upbringing. Personally, I think that's just blame-assignment. I mean, yeah, I had a difficult childhood, yeah, I faced abuse in various forms between the ages of 6 to 10, but can I blame that for the problems I am going through now? No, not directly at least. However, all those things did make me who I am today. And in a way, whatever new soup I find myself in today is due to the person I am. So I kinda went ahead and crossed my own point there. See what I did? Self-sabotage. Some of the biggest decisions of my life have been starkly contradictory to

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 had t