A Bowl of Elusive

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...

I spent a year in Bhubaneswar nine years ago. I was fresh out of high school and had just enrolled into this vocational course. The course didn’t take much of my time. So, I spent the year participating in events to kill time and earn some dough. My other pastime: a tall and ambitious girl named Jyoti. Pay attention to the adjectives I use. We met each other during the first day of the course. I noticed her because she was smarter than the usual Odia girl, spoke well and carried herself with grace and gravity. She noticed me because I was “exactly the kind of spoilt, bratty and privileged asshole that she despised”. Well, that was how she perceived me. I was an extrovert at that point of time, overzealous and outspoken and you would also have judged me wrong had you met me then. I asked her if I could sit in the seat next to her and she said NO. What seventeen year old doesn’t love a challenge. I didn’t know why this girl was averse to me but I instantly knew I had to charm...

Recently, I have been wondering at the lack of wonder in my life. I too was young once, I too looked at life with incredulous eyes. Things excited me. I had dreams and fantasies. But all that has become a thing of the past. Of late, I find myself confined to the monotony of my little life. The high point of my day is sometimes a gourmet dinner, a good word from my superior or the laughs generated from a FRIENDS episode re-run. I look around and I see small lives just like my own. People with their petty ambitions and irrelevant agendas. This was not the dream I grew up with. I am half the man I once wanted to be. There's nothing wrong in the pursuit of worldly possessions. After all, that is how people grow, but it's just that I wanted to be so much more than this. Like most kids, I too was raised with the burden of expectations, expectations of greatness. The parameters of greatness used to be defined at that point of time. You must be a doctor, an engineer, a sc...