A Bowl of Elusive

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,

For all the fans of romance out there, I am back with the fifth installment of the Angela & Eric saga. We go beyond the mushy and romantic in this one - into one of those testing moments that pave way for the time to come. For people who just landed on this page, here's the link to Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 & Part 4 . Go play catch up and come back to read this one. I know romance sells. I know that when you write romance, you write about the happy stuff, the relationship milestones, the first kiss, the first time they make love, the confession of undying love. Yet, in real life, the fights a couple has defines the mettle of their relationship. To reach the point in time that Eric and Angela are at, they had to navigate several serious fights which tested their intentions and eventually made them realize what they meant to each other. Angela and Eric loved to talk to each other. They could just sit there discussing this and that – their work lives, their life experiences, t

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother was barely the person I once knew. Years of suffering and pain, having lost her oldest son, followed by her husband and then her last son had left her a hollow shell of the person she was when I was five or six, when times were happier. So many things plagued her in the last of her days – she often asked herself why God had let her live for so long, while all her loved ones succumbed before her eyes. She not only had her own sorrow, but she had to live through the sorrows and pain of all her loved ones. Dementia started setting in towards the end and she barely recognized me the last time we met and maybe I was relieved. She deserved the much deserved detachment from her reality. You see when I look back at my folks and the people that they were, I often judge my grandmother  with the harshest set of ideals. She was deeply flawed, as compared to my grandfather or my father and uncle. She had a temper. The caste based biases were deeply ingrai

Some time back, I was hunting for slippers in UK size 12 in a north-eastern city. I searched through several shops in two to three markets but could not find sizes beyond UK 10. For the uninitiated, I should mention that most brands work on certain common sizes, be it footwear or apparels. These are the sizes that sell the most and most brands cater mainly to these sizes. But for someone like me, who has always been over-sized in clothes and footwear, this poses a problem. Finding shoes has been a challenge since ninth standard – that’s when my feet moved beyond UK size 9. Only high end brands like Nike or Skechers have my size, and even there it’s only available in select options and at select outlets. Being from Retail, I know the reason for it. Take for instance my slipper search – the north eastern population is generally smaller in size as compared to the rest of the country. So finding oversized anything is usually a problem there. When it comes to apparels, certain “plus size”

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

Ramit was one of those people who keep to themselves, go about their 9am to 5pm jobs and settle in their beds at 10pm but lay awake until an hour after midnight scrolling on their phones, coveting others’ lives on social media. His days were pretty much the same. He held a data-crunching job at one of the most prestigious companies in the world but he was paid peanuts and if you ask me, that’s what really matters. He had dreams, of course, dreams inspired by ideas of adventure and travel, but in his heart of hearts, Ramit was an indoors person. He did not have many friends, because it had already been rather hard for him to befriend people. He would sometimes go to these happening cafés around town and sit there looking at beautiful people, couples, gangs of friends, boisterous and happy in their conversations and jokes and Ramit envied them. He wished he had the comradery. At other times, a beautiful girl would catch his eye and he would start wondering about what her life was like. B

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