A Bowl of Elusive

A new place can mean new challenges or new opportunities. Life is what you make of it. I moved to Hyderabad ten days ago. And life got busier than it had been in the last few years. Apartment hunting was a pain. But the place is fun. People speak a strange accented Hindi which is very hard to describe in English. And the city is an amazing swill of cultures and religions. And "I have been busy" would be an understatement. Believe me, I have been trying to write this article since Day 2 in the city. I have always been averse to public transport, but the bus scenario here looks quite easy to access, especially while traveling between the different towns in the state. I am yet to give the city buses a try. I am actually writing this article to let you guys know I am fine. The last few days have been quite harrowing actually but the last couple of days were productive, to say the least, and things started looking up. It's a good feeling to feel accomplished and ...

Before the utter anonymity of adulthood settled in, were those six wonderful years I spent at St. Joseph’s Convent Higher Secondary School, Sambalpur. The school that became a part of who I am today. The school that helped me discover myself. I joined SJC in 2001. Class 7C. It was a whole different world inside the school premises. The mediocrity of the town it is situated in has absolutely no effect on the culture & class of this school. I was overwhelmed for maybe a second, after which I knew this was where I belonged. I wasn't a great student, as far as grades were concerned, but I was sharp and an extrovert. I excelled in the subjects that I liked, English in particular. And that always kept me in teachers’ radar. And I was a major attention junkie. So, I soon found myself performing on stage on every possible occasion. And that, I feel is the greatest gift that SJC gave me. From a nervous self-doubting 11-year old to a confident optimistic 17-year old, ...

It has been ages since I last posted to this blog. I have been busy, but not as busy as to not be able to write even a simple piece. So what was the hold up then? Its what a lot of people call a “Writer’s Block“. In my case, these blocks don’t really stop my mind from creating, they just stop me from putting my thoughts into writing. Rather inconvenient, you know. I have been toying with a few ideas, but they were really good ideas. Things that could be put into a novel. I wouldn’t waste such gold on a free blog site, would I? And I mean no offence to whatever little readership this blog commands. The fact still remains that I wanna be published. I want to see my name on the cover page of a novel. And I have wanted this ever since the age of 14. I wished to be a teen sensation with a couple of bestsellers to my name before I hit college, but that didn’t happen. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t write. I could and I did. But there was always something that stopped...

Ted and I spent the summer of ’09 in a small cottage by the beach. The rent was reasonable, the cottage was cramped and we spent 14 to 16 hours a day slogging at the Marriott Resort nearby. Summer Internship a.k.a Industrial Training, since we were 2nd Year Hotel Management students. Ted and I had been friends since the eighth grade and we stuck together till college. We got along very well in spite of being quite different from each other. He was universally liked and I was universally despised. He drank & I was a teetotaler. And that kind of sums it up, ha ha. We started out with our internships, all excited to be there. Posh hotel, flashy uniforms, big presence in the industry, we thought it would be LEGEN- wait for it -Dary!!! But soon, we realized that none of these things matter to the people getting into the premises from the staff entrance. A reasonable shift for an employee at an Indian Hotel is 9 to 10 hours, which includes breaks. But India being India, labor...

We are a country with over a billion people living extraordinarily mediocre lives. Many of us don’t know where our next meals will come from. We have so many real things that we need to worry about. Yet we can’t stop obsessing over little things like a young couple kissing in public. Protests rise against moral policing and we get caught up in the symbolism. Are we dumb enough to think that these protests are aimed at just making kissing in public legal? (By the way, it's already legal.) Have we forgotten about how couples have been getting thrashed for so much as holding hands in public? I see so many self-righteous “respected” grown-ups publicly shunning the “Kiss of Love” Movement, labeling it as Western Culture corrupting and degrading the Indian culture. How is this an effect of the Western culture? It's like watching a goldfish with its 3-second memory cycle. If you were to believe these gentlemen, Indians didn’t know about kissing before meeting foreigners and al...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.                                                                -William Shakespeare (“Hamlet”, Act 1, Scene 5) Every now and then, we hear stories about ghosts, imps, angels, vampires and what not. Of course, we don’t believe any of those things exist. This is a time of great scientific advancement and our minds have no tolerance for the paranormal or the supernatural. And yet, there are people who swear they have seen, felt or experienced such elements in some way or the other. And quite expectedly, these people become the brunt of ridicule and laughter. Such people are called ignorant. And yet, with the tremendous advance in scientific research and discovery, we have learnt that there are n number of things in this world t...

Very few people realise how severely Sexual Abuse scars its victims. This is the last part of this article. I will be throwing some light on how deeply this heinous crime affects the lives of the children who go through it. Imagine a 7-year old boy being sodomized by a 30-year old man, bleeding and writhing in pain. If you think that is the worst thing a little boy could go through, you're mistaken. What's worse than the abuse itself is having to live with it. It changes people. And I am not talking just about the victims of violent sexual abuse like I described. Even milder forms of abuse leave their mark. We’re talking about little impressionable children here. Subjecting them to an intrusion of their privacy, coaxing them to cooperate with acts of perversion affects them in hundreds of little ways. It goes on to leave indelible dents on their personalities when they grown up. Don’t believe me? Read on. In the previous part of this article, I described...