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Showing posts from 2015

Many strings attached…

The best things in life come free! Expensive, cheaper or free, as long as things are there, we wouldn’t ask for more. Humans are called social animals. Moreover, most of us go a step ahead and get attached to things. Things may come to such a pass that we become a clinging vine, not only to people but also to objects. Why point fingers at others when my own example perfectly puts across the point? The other day, I misplaced my keys. In spite of knowing that producing duplicate keys isn’t impossible, I longed for the original keyset just because I was used to it… And it got me thinking. Maybe, I was one among those living with things. Though looks small, according to me, it was an alarming enough to take a message from. Thankfully, I am taking corrective measures not to reduce myself to a clinging vine and it’s going to be a lifelong effort. Everyone has a favourite chair at a dining table, or a favourite pen, something we cannot do without. A housewife typically has a piece of jewe

The green grass on the other side…

There was a lady who considered herself to be the most unfortunate person. Like most of us, she thought all around her, family members, colleagues, bosses, and maids, all together made her life a living hell.   She happened to meet an Enlightened Man whom she prayed for some happiness and peace. He promised it to her on a condition. She should give him the sugar from the home which she thought would be the happiest one. She easily agreed. How does she find out the happiest home? To make her job easy, the Enlightened Man endowed her with a power to be present in anybody’s home invisibly. Oh, so she was going to be a remote witness to day-to-day happenings of people’s affairs without them being aware of her presence. She was thrilled with the new power. She decided to visit relatives’ and friends’ houses whose families appeared picture perfect on Facebook. She found nothing but arguments with happiness albeit missing everywhere. It was surprising for her as she had visited them jus

Taste of my own recipe…

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As fitness bug did bite me all of a sudden, of late I was happy following some self-imposed restrictions on my food intake. With a detailed diet plan from a nutritionist, my resolve received a shot in an arm. If I said food was out of my purview and I was saving a lot of time, I would be eating my own words. I was spending more time on the thing I had refrained from, not just cooking, but reading and maybe, thinking about it … There can be a lot more positivity about the thing you are trying to stay away from. Scientific and clinical information makes you more rational and intuitional. It may happen that giving up will not remain mere a resolve but it may come from within. To me, it was much more than food restriction. It was more about what to eat, when to eat and yes, how to it. There were so many essential aspects of food that I would not have paid heed to otherwise. I started reading extensively on right foods and so many things, which were associated with diet, were unfolded

All about me

I would like to speak something about myself today. A lot is often written on this platform about global trends, politics, economy and stuff. Why not use the platform to talk about me? My routine, my thinking, my viewpoints and opinions, my ambitions, my future plans and yes, some ‘me’ moments. Are you interested? Oh, most of you must be thinking I must not be having an Instagram account or a high quality mobile phone camera with a selfie application, so I need to ‘talk’ about it. I have neither of them. And there is no denying the fact that a selfie can speak thousand words than this long description. Selfies uploaded on several social networking sites keep our circle perfectly posted on what we are up to.  Selfie syndrome has taken the world by storm and at the same time, it’s also perceived as a dangerous trend, according to psychologists and socialists. To me, what looks dangerous isn’t a natural selfie but a deliberate attempt to display ‘all is well’. I would be lying t

An exam to remember

Exam days could have been testing times during academic life for many. Now that most of us have graduated, not necessarily always with flying colors, it shows we have managed to withstand the test of time. Nevertheless, an exam as an adult assesses how much we have grown beyond exams as grown-ups. I had one such opportunity and so was it for every batch mate of mine who had opted for a yoga course at a Bengaluru varsity. I don’t think anybody was concerned with an impressive scorecard or wanted to secure the first rank. Passing or reasonable marks could have topped the priority chart for a majority of candidates. It was distance education and people came from far off to appear for examination spending a lot of time, energy and yes, money as well. So, everybody kept no stone unturned to ensure things fell in place and everything moved swiftly. Given the ‘magnanimity’ of subjects and efforts everyone took to reach there, the exam-oriented approach was perfectly justified to an ext

Security, up in smoke!

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Calling it a dark Sunday morning wouldn’t be an overstatement. The fire broke out in our residential complex at the darkest hour of night, just before the dawn. A commotion woke me up. When I opened the main door, a cloud of smoke entered catching me unaware. Within a fraction of moments, our ceiling, walls and even our faces gathered thick black layers. Veils of smoke on staircases blocked our exit point and we had to be home-bound for a while, which at that time appeared like eternity. We learnt later that an unidentified man had torched around 90 two-wheelers and some cars in some housing societies and outside a pizza outlet, all within the stretch of five kms. My old bike was one of the victims.  Though a major tragedy was averted and there were no casualties, the extent of damage was huge. Those who were trapped indoors during the arson had breathing problems. No water, electricity and elevator, black layers of smoke all over the building, moving six floors up and down daily

Talk the talk

A longtime friend comes over…You see your spouse at the end of the hardworking day…Your child returns from the school…A relative drops in after a long gap…An ex-colleague bumps into you…Talk, we love to, with friends, families and near and dear ones (and perhaps, sometimes with foes too!!). Why just fights, even light talks and friendly banters can go on for hours. Not every time we can walk the talk still there is no denying the fact that talk we must. I don’t like it when the talk between the any two labelled as gossip (even if it is!). After a long phone-chat with friends or cousins, “Who were you talking about?” could be the question confronting us. I too have gone through this situation umpteen times. After a phone call with the best friend, my mother, all ears to our conversation, would ask, “Was it this and this friend you were talking with?” I don’t like every girl-talk being dismissed as ‘gossip’, which often is the case. Of course, gossip is a relative term. Family

My dear ocean...

Our association began ever since my birth and it grew thicker as almost three decades flew by. Though you mean much more than a childhood friend to me, I was never enchanted with your presence as I was in the recent past and especially today. Just being with you was so meditative and a complete experience. I was just wondering why I was mesmerised so much today and why not over so many years… Tracing the major milestones of our friendship, I think I am truly reconnecting to you today after a gap of several years.  Though you were at a motorable distance from my home, we would meet mostly on holidays. We would wait for days together for the sea bath. And ancestral home is situated at the banks of your backwaters! I just remember how hard we would try to explain the connection between the sea and the backwater to guests just to boast that we live by the seaside. But those were the years when I failed to fathom your vastness, depth and expanse… as a child, I was unmindful of your va

Art of doing nothing

Sitting at home on a working day was an unusual experience as I would barely plan my holidays without a ‘to-do’ list. Reading, study-material or writing would generally top my priority list followed by some house-cleaning or wardrobe arrangements in a descending order. My newborn daughter suddenly climbed up the top of the list for all valid reasons for a year. After a year, a stage gradually came where I could get back to my ‘to-do’ things minding her simultaneously. Yet, the last week it turned out to be an unusual holiday without such a list. What stopped me from making the ‘to-do’ list was the potential that my little daughter developed to throw all plans out of gear. I had taken similar experiences on weekends. I would allocate some works to myself during the time she would fall asleep and she would never sleep or get up earlier than expected. Oh, my ‘bitter’ memories of baby scattering all the unclear stuff and adding to my agonies were fresh. Hence last weekend, my ‘to-do’ l

Good things come…

Patience is the best virtue, they say. Huh, not always we can be patient enough to praise the value of patience. Moments come when want things spot on. But... Things will not always move the way we want them to! Each of us knows this. Hence, what’s the point in me telling you this, right? Well I don’t even tell it to myself, therefore the possibility of telling it to any of you is ruled out. Everyone must be reacting differently when it happens but waiting for opportune moment is easier said than done. Whatever happens happens for the good is another refrain that greets us every now and then and we really don’t want to entertain when we are really down. It could be observed in many walks of life right from planning an outing or taking key decisions like careers, business ventures, wedding or major purchases like house or car. Once in winter, I was tempted to have an ice-cream. I was already suffering from cold and my conscience knew ice-cream would have worsened the matter. Yet

That little leeway

Sometimes in life, there comes a point where going gets tough and we seem hemmed in by hurdles…Come on, let it be a plain talk without philosophical overtones! Forget life, but it’s a traffic situation on chaotic Indian roads and a little more often in Pune!! Traffic situations are so very precarious that ‘going gets tough’ could be an understatement. Traffic comes to a standstill. You are clueless whether the signals are functional or cops are manning traffic. In short, no relief in sight and no signs of reaching the destination… It’s tough to stay composed during such moments. Each of us is most likely to have encountered traffic snarls. But they are not always negative. My experience is positive at times… When the traffic is halted and there are no chances of it moving, there appears a small gap allowing your bike to pass through. The ‘small’ gap slowly but steadily takes you much farther than you could ever imagine and makes you cross the green signal! On noticing this, I

Best of the worst

“I am not such a bad person but don’t know what went wrong that particular moment…” Has that feeling ever hurt you? It happens with many of us many times. Leave aside what kind of a person we are; it goes without saying that others decide our goodness or badness!  What triggers at that particular moment decides our personality trait. Period. The other day, while reading a counsellor column in a newspaper, I stumbled upon a sentence of a ‘devastated’ girlfriend saying her boyfriend who abused her all the time and drove her to a frustrated state of mind. She admitted that she said a thing or two about him in a fit of rage. What hurt her the most was the feeling that ‘she was never such a bad person’. However, the counsellor pointed it out rightly that the abusive relationship brought the worst out of her. Though it’s up to us to react to situations and people irrespective of circumstances, the nature of a person we are dealing with has some bearing on it and vice versa. Inter-perso

An open book…

It was almost the gap of three years I saw my book on the stands at S-VYASA Yoga University in Bengaluru during my recent visit.  I saw an unknown person glancing through it…it was tough to believe I was an author of some book as the thought with which I had written it had taken a backseat owing to a number of reasons. It wasn’t just pregnancy and motherhood…like there was time I aggressively spoke about my book…there was time I didn’t talk about it at all because it was written at a particular time about things I felt appropriate at that stage. But the book on stands 1500 kilometers away not only triggered the memories about the energy and time I invested in writing it but also made me aware of the responsibility it had on me about living it. Yes, there was a plan when I had written it. Talking about mental fitness and a perspective towards life, the book was meticulously planned. It had a larger goal of reaching out to as many people as possible and a part of it was achieve