A Bowl of Elusive

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...

Ever since I was a little kid, I faced a lot of hostility at the hands of a lot of people, be it my own mother, the bullies at school, my abusers, bullies at college or several other nameless individuals. But I rarely retaliated. I internalized the whole experience and made myself impervious to hurtful things. And I did that with the help of defense mechanisms. Now these defense mechanisms vary in size, shape and nature. Let me dive into a few of them today, to give you a beginners' tour into the dark twisted alleys of my mind. A colleague recently told me that my boss was taunting me about something during an official con-call. And I had completely missed it. You see, that's not me being naive, it's my mind filtering out negativity. This started out when I was younger. After my parents went through a pretty long and scandalous divorce, being from a small town in a relatively backward state in the country, my folks and I had a lot of people randomly saying derogatory...

My dear readers, this is the final chapter of the Siddhant-Ishika story. Here are the links to the earlier episodes:  Part 1  |  Part 2  |  Part 3  |  Part 4  |  Part 5 | Part 6 . I would suggest that you go back, read the earlier chapters, if you haven’t already done it and then come back to find out what happened at the end . In his endless pursuit of love with Ishika, Siddhant had laughed and he'd cried. And Ishika had been there with him, merely in spirit. Because it was clear that her heart wasn't available for love. But Siddhant persevered with an indomitable resilience, which was kind of pathetic actually. Siddhant was hungry for affection like so many of us are and in his hunger, he couldn't see that what he perceived as affection was just Ishika's 'altruism', for the lack of a better word. This was a house of cards and it was destined to tumble down. This is that story. Ishika had been in his arms and in his soul and yet,...

Akriti shivered a little as a gust of Ryan's warm breath hit the back of her neck. She had no clothes on. And neither did he. The room was cold and every touch was magnified in impact as Ryan's inquisitive hands explored Akriti's  delicate curves. He alternated between his fingers and his palm, moving them in a symphony of sorts over her naked and thirsty skin. And as he did so he buried his face into her luscious bunch of hair and sniffed in the perfume in it. His heartbeat rushed as he felt her back touching his bare body. He placed a light kiss on her head, and then another one. Even in the lust of that moment, there was a certain wide eyed honesty in Ryan's movements that was making Akriti go weak in her knees. And that was so unlike her. You see Akriti wasn't born yesterday. She'd seen her share of broken relationships and lying men to trust someone so easily, and yet, here she was, hours after meeting this guy, in his arms, feeling vulnerable an...