A Bowl of Elusive

I had a debate with a netizen over Instagram chats. It took a lot of mental strength to get through, so I thought I should share it with the world. I was fed up of people arguing over a simple comment on this post about the status of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where I had commented, “ This is why India has to be better and make a safe space for it’s minorities. We have to be better than those we criticize. We can’t use such people’s bad work to justify doing the same thing.”  Needless to say, my comment irked a lot of people. So, I shared it in a story for my followers to see…   This is when a netizen called Nikhil Agarwal replied to my story. He had been commenting on some other post where I had expressed some opinion. I vaguely remembered what he had said at this point. But his message against my story made his stance clear. Him: Look at the peaceful community Census. And if you are really researcher. Then read history India has been heavenly place for minoritie...

The first time I met my uncle was when I was nine years old. I mean, I had certainly met him before that – when I was less than two years old – but I didn’t remember that time. My father and his younger brother had not been on talking terms for over a decade and I’m still not sure why. I never asked either of them about it. But in 1999, when my uncle called my grandfather from Mumbai asking him if he could come over to Mumbai where my uncle was to undergo surgery, my father was present in the room and unceremoniously took over the phone call. It didn’t matter that they had not spoken to each other in years. My father asked him what was going on – my uncle revealed that he had recently been having epileptic fits, indicating that he had some neurological problem. On tests like MRI and EEG, it had been revealed that he had a frontal lobe tumor that needed to be removed surgically. My father told him he would come to Mumbai, and he left soon after. I remember this time vividly because I wa...

Hi guys, it was recently pointed out to me that a lot of the chain stories that are present in my blog have not been marked that they belong to a particular series. This makes navigating through them difficult. SO let me try to solve that by including a short summary of each group of stories/articles and provide the links here. I will pin this post at the top so that you can go read the stories in the sequence you want to. 1. Eric & Angela : This is a love story for people who do not particularly believe in love. Here are the links: Part 1 - Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire Part 2 - Cupcake! Part 3 - That Awkward Third Date! Part 4 - Those Melting Moments!!! Part 5 - Testing the Mettle of Love! (This is an incomplete series & more stories will be posted soon.) 2. Ishika & Siddhant : A story of intense romanti c entanglement that is mostly one-sided. "Mostly" is the operative word here. Here are the links: Part 1 - Instant Connecti...

I am an atheist from a Hindu Brahmin family. I do not like the BJP and their Hindutva agenda. I do not like Islam. I do not like Christianity. I do not like any religion. But I grew up learning about Hinduism – I thought the spiritual lessons of karma and doing good deeds were good lessons and worth following. I was not raised in a household that pushed any religion onto me – I was taught that all religions essentially teach the same thing – be good, do good. My earliest understanding of religion was that it was a practice in moral science aimed at keeping people kind and honest. “Who is the main God?” I once asked my folks, since my grandma’s pooja place had pictures of several gods. My grandfather explained it to me like this: “They are all the same. It is the human imagination that is unable to comprehend the concept of a creator and hence we choose to visualize them as Brahma, Vishnu & Maheshwar – with each entity handling a different task in the Universe. We have assigned name...