A Bowl of Elusive

"Why are you on T****r?" Mirza asked himself. The dating/hookup app had brought him nothing but pain and heartbreak in the past and he had sworn off it. Yet, reading one of those sarcastic answers on Quora to the question, "What was your experience with T****r in India?", Mirza felt this need to explore the app one last time. He was visiting a small town for a project and by installing the app, he was scratching an itch more than anything else. Like always, he didn't expect to match with anyone, especially since the nearest girl showing up on the app was from forty kilometers away, which meant from the neighboring more prosperous district. Yet, like millions of men before him, he swiped away till he ran out of profiles to swipe on. The app suggested that he should relax the parameters he had set for potential matches - Age: 28 to 37 & Range: Within 40 km. "Why not!" Mirza exclaimed to himself and dragged the bars to make the age range - 18 to 99 an...

Any action an individual undertakes is usually the result of a series of decisions – a decision tree if you will. It has always fascinated me, this process. I have often analyzed how I come to any decision so as to write my characters better. But what’s really intriguing is how two individuals’ decision trees intersect for them to cross paths, the intricacy of it all – two people making decisions after decisions that bring them to the same place at the same time and interact. The butterfly effect suggests that the smallest of variance in any of these individual’s decisions would send them in two different directions, thus making the intertwining of their fates almost impossible. Let’s take the example of two absolute strangers who met at Cyber Hub one winter evening. They dined at Mamagotos two tables away from where I sat and discussed their association so far. Being alone, having stood up by a date, I had nothing interesting to do. So I decided to eavesdrop. As I listened to the two,...

Preface: Mirza is a fictionalized and combined version of the several fascinating people I've met in my 28 odd years on this strange planet. I will be recounting various stories like this one, some weirder than others and I'm gonna call it the Mirza chronicles. Mirza was, for the lack of a better expression, “a regular Joe”. The only distinguishing feature about him was his height and build. But he kind of cancelled those features out with his meek demeanor, if you know what I mean. At that time, Mirza was staying with his friends at Indira Niwas, which was at a walking distance from Vista Do Rio, the hotel where he was carrying out his summer internship. Indira Niwas is a legendary house and this is one of the many stories associated with the place. Mirza was a teetotaler, striking a stark contrast to his housemates who were habitual drinkers and dopers. But they got along well and that’s all that mattered. In the winter of ’09, Mirza was working night shift at...

I remember having quite an imaginative mind as a child. I used to day-dream a lot, often about having powers, super powers, about flying, about aliens. (Sometimes, I still do.) And I used to write about my fantasies. So my characters were inspired from books I used to read, movies I watched or the crazy collection of comic books which my pocket money went into buying. I remember a story I wrote in middle school. It was about an Indian archaeologist excavating a dinosaur fossil in Costa Rica and dreaming about the extinction of dinosaurs. It was called “The Jurassic Dreams“. (I will try to post it here sometime.) I chose my uncle to be the first reader for my story. After all, he was the one who had inspired me to read books. Alas! It was a stupid decision. This is what he said: ” Its a nicely written story, but Ian, you must start writing about things you have experienced, places you have been to, otherwise your stories will never be authentic.” No offense to my uncle, may G...