A Bowl of Elusive

It all started for me a few days ago when I added Raw Pressery’s Sugarcane juice to my shopping cart on Big Basket. It was slightly expensive than all the juices out there, but that didn’t matter to me as it was an impulsive buy. I like to sample new products every now and then. Well, the tall bottle of juice was chilled and sweating when it arrived. That’s usually a good thing with juices. You see if a brand it making an effort to transport a juice in a refrigerated environment, it usually means their product does not have preservatives. Well, I tried it and it was really good. It was a flavor of juice which isn’t commonly bottled by companies. And having it at the roadside thelewala , while refreshing can be a health hazard at times. And the bottle was new and well designed. The cylindrical thick ribbed bottle stood out from the rest. All in all, it left a good impression. So the next time I was surfing Big Basket, I searched for Raw Pressery. I found that they were selling a...

This is a sequel to my earlier post, "Jay & Sunayana: A Love Story". For all those who haven't read part that, here's the link  for you. It's a small article and won't take up a lot of your time. And it will give you some context here. Many might relate to my protagonist here. So read on, once you're all caught up with the first part. Jay and Sunayana had broken up a year after high school and it wasn't pretty. They had a whole falling out, what with her avoiding him for a while and then confessing to seeing someone else. He wasn't perfect either, he'd charmed a few girls too in the time when Sunayana had been giving him the cold shoulder, nothing serious though. Anyway, so when Sunayana told him they were done, his first reaction was denial and anger. He could totally understand why she had blocked him from all social media sites. Smart move, as anyone who knew Jay would tell you that he could be really unpredictable at times. An...

I have always found it difficult to make friends. Normal day to day interactions make me nervous. And yet, I’m often perceived as very confident and outgoing. Welcome to my world where opposites co-exist. I laugh & I smile. And I find it tedious. You see, I grew up in an unconventional setup; no parents; no siblings; raised by grandparents. And at one point of my life, I was an abuse victim. Mix all that up and you have a recipe for either a socially awkward guy or a psychopath. Thank God I am the former. (Still haven’t ruled out the latter.) For a large part of my life, I have been perceived as “weird”. When I was in school, I was widely unpopular for no apparent reason. I was most nice to people but they’d ridicule me or not talk to me at all. I kept trying to get into people’s good books for a while, but when that didn’t work, I gave up. I started getting into little tiffs with people who wouldn’t accept me. But I haven’t been the violent or disruptive type so my tiffs w...

Women are definitely a complex species, there's no denying that. But men and their complexities don't even get acknowledged. I mean, look around you. You have programs, support groups, support fan pages and what not for everything related to women. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with the necessity of all that. I'm just saying, men are humans too. And to be honest, men need more support than women. Irrespective of what the patriarchal society believes, women are definitely the stronger sex. And the sooner we accept that, the better. Because once we do, we can start developing a decent support system for men. I think the biggest issue with men is the fact that we don't like to admit that we need help. But to be completely fair, it is due to our upbringing. Right from our childhood, we are conditioned to shun expressions of weakness. We are trained to cloak our vulnerability. We are taught to be stoic. And while I do understand the merit of this con...

Hiya, folks! It's 2:22 am, 27th Jan, 2017 and I am am officially 27 years and a day old now. And that got me thinking about time. Time flies and there's nothing new or note-worthy about that. The real important thing about time is it's timing. The 'right time', my friends, is what drives the whole world. I'll tell you how I get around to thinking about this topic. I was actually watching this movie "Morning Glory" just now and I couldn't help thinking that I was actually enjoying it because I was watching it now. It might have bored me earlier. It's timing was in perfect sync with my age, my mood and my situation. You know, I've been with my current employer for more than five years now. And I have never been more at ease with my job than I am at the moment. So, you can call me a loyal employee. Yet many of my colleagues keep advising me to look for growth, to make a jump. And their reasoning isn't illogical at all. Personal...

I have often heard people saying that what really sets humans apart from animals is their rationality, that human beings aren't driven by their instincts like animals are, and that humans have the ability to be more than what their instincts make them. I think that is a whole lot of crap. Just yesterday, at an office party, my boss asked each one of the team members to say something something about themselves that nobody else knew. I kept it short and simple. I told them what I aspire for. There was so much more about myself that I could have said, but the fact is, I don't think anybody cares enough for me to go to the trouble of expressing who I really am. (I do see the irony here. Here I am writing a new article about myself. Ha ha. But at least I am not boring you at an office party by revealing mundane facts about myself which have no real bearings on your life and dreams what-so-ever.) So, moving on, even though I kept it short, I gave it a bit of thoug...

Often, what you really think is not the wisest thing to say out loud. So we end up internalizing a lot of shit. It happens to all of us. It harms us psychologically. But hey, who cares about psychology in a country where the run for basic needs is an all-consuming affair. I have no statistical data here, but I think it is safe to assume that the number of messed up psyches that we have in India is way higher than any place else. With that note, let me tell you what this article is going to be about. I am going to reveal what I really think about things, because frankly, I think keeping them inside is unhealthy. And it is gonna be fun because I have a really active mind with a whole lot of opinions which do not line up with the conventional way of thought. And I am going to be very systematic about it. I will break my opinions up into sections by topic and relevance. So here goes… POLITICS I grew up with the belief that this country was a secular one. I identify with tha...