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 cr...

Just when you think you know yourself, just when you feel like you’ve seen and felt it all, that nothing could surprise you, something comes up and it changes the whole dynamic. Describing Eric as a cynic would be the understatement of the century. He was a caustic, bitter, and sarcastic thirty-year-old going about his life like a clumsy fool, tripping on the various hurdles that life’s journey threw at him. In his three decades on this planet, Eric had seen various facets of the drama that life offered – death, grief, love, heartbreak; you name it, he had seen it. Eric was someone who had very rigid notions about the world, which he believed to be absolute truths because they were based on his real-life experiences. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, some things just change the game. Angela wasn’t a stranger. Eric had known her for over a year, having connected with her through a dating site. She was someone who’d fascinated our protagonist right from the beginning...

More than twenty years ago, there was a woman who would put me through a lot of torture, systematic and premeditated torture. It was physical and emotional abuse. When that era got over, my folks, especially my grandmother told me that the woman had taken everybody’s curse and would never live happily. Frankly, the whole idea seemed a little cuckoo to me. Therefore, I did not bear a grudge and moved on. Today the only reminder of that woman I have is a psychosomatic pain in my neck whenever any person in authority yells at me. (Long story – She had stepped on my neck once while beating me up.)  Anyway I grew up with a couple of septuagenarians after that who rarely ever tried to guide my behavior. Thus, I developed a sense of right and wrong all by myself, and every now and then take liberties with the same. That means that I am not always a very good person.  However, as I said, my idea of good and bad is uniquely my own and I do not always regret the things I do. I do things...

I started sobbing uncontrollably. I am usually pretty detached from things and don’t let them affect me but something had happened and I was in pain. The emotional kind. As warm drops of tears rolled down my cheeks, I wondered what this feeling meant. You see there had been moments like this before and I hadn’t so much as frowned, but this time around, something really hurt. I had hurt someone’s feelings and I was miserable. Then I took out my phone and opened the front camera and looked at my ugly crying face. And I didn’t feel pity at myself. I felt disdain. That is the relationship I share with myself. More than two decades ago, I had a really traumatic experience. I was abused. Which impacted my life in a big way. But childhood trauma is neither interesting nor uncommon. How I dealt with it, though, was peculiar and set the pace of a lot of things to come. I convinced myself that I was actually enjoying the trauma. I even convinced myself that I was in control, that I wanted it. An...

When I started this blog page, I was 24 years old, freshly disillusioned of my dream of becoming a teenage writing prodigy. Now, I am 30 and I still don't have a published book to my name. A couple of years back, I came across this book at a bookstore written by a 12 year old boy, a science fiction novel. Everyday I look at actors, content creators, stand up comedians younger than me, create a name for themselves, be heard and seen, and appreciated. And here, I keep refreshing my blog page to be welcomed by 45 to 50 odd views on the articles I write. I keep trying to convince myself that it's not about the readership or the views or the comments. I keep telling myself that it's about keeping the writer in me alive. But seeking validation is but natural, isn't it? I recently deactivated my social media profiles - Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. There's no specific reason for doing that, it's not like I was spending a lot of time on these platforms. B...

If you reach a certain address at the Greenfield School Lane in Sambalpur, Odisha, you’ll come across a big green walled house. That’s my house. My permanent residence. Even though I haven’t lived there for over twelve years now. The earliest memories I have of this house is from 1996 or 1997 when I would come here for the holidays. It was my grandparents’ place back then. And my father would get me here whenever he could. Of course, I’d been here before but that’s only as far as I can remember. I loved coming here because it was a break from my otherwise troublesome life.  And I remember the house being very different from how it is now. The architecture didn’t change but the house’s identity did. For example, when my grandfather was around, the central hall always had this smell of Colgate tooth powder that he used to clean his dentures with and even now, that smell invariably reminds me of him. And the kitchen used to be my grandmother’s kingdom. The kitchen, with wal...

A strange thought cropped up on my mind today. What if humans didn’t need sex? I know the whole purpose of sex is reproduction, but what if human beings didn’t need sex to reproduce. What if they just grew people in labs? Or what if people lost the urge to have sex one day? How would that change the world? What started as a random weird thought took the form of an anthropological debate inside my head. Would romance even exist if sex didn’t? There’s parental love, there’s love between siblings and friends, but would there ever be the romantic love between couples if sex wasn’t in the equation at the first place? For that matter, would couples exist if not for sex? People woo each other and court each other because there’s that sexual tension, that chemistry which comes from the potential of sexual congress. Wonder what would be the base of relationships if the sexual tension was eliminated completely. Would relationships even exist or would people just live alone in single pers...