Life's Onward Journey...

  Yet again, sleep eluded me. Once I was done acknowledging the presence my daily visitors, the thoughts that come and go unabashedly, I remembered the walnut cake lying in the refrigerator.  The detachment that I faked when I left it unfinished must have crushed its hopes. Feeling guilty, I stepped into the kitchen to check on it. But something stopped me on the way. The bright yellowness of a streetlight not so far trickled through the condensate settled on the kitchen window.  "You will have to cry yourself to sleep tonight", I whispered to the walnut cake and crouched on the floor. The canvas of a moisture-laden curtain was ready to be scribbled upon.  A rose bud, a cup of steaming hot coffee, a spool of tangled up thread or just simple chaos... Staring at them fade and disappear, I nudged sleep, which had finally sneaked in and was sitting close to me.  "Shall we go now?"

It's been 17 years. Seventeen years since I walked out of the railway station and embraced you, Mumbai. From that cozy room in the hostel to a tiny house in a far corner of the city. From having just one friend in the city to building some mighty friendships over the years. From being surrounded by those friends, to bidding each one of them goodbye, one by one. While they all moved on, I stayed back. Not by choice, but probably by fate. Thrice I tried to leave you, uprooted myself from here, said my goodbyes, turned back and wept, believing that I would never see you again. "There's still some time before you move on", you seemed to say to me, every single time I stepped away. Like a clingy lover, you pulled me back, hugged me tight, and whispered in my ears, "Not letting you go." Oh Mumbai! I am tired of trying to move away from you. For now, I will just rest my head on your shoulders and doze off a bit. I know you are watching over me, like you have been f...

" Well, in our country ," said Alice, still panting a little, " you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing ." " A slow sort of country! " said the Queen. " Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! " -Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking-Glass One of the chapters of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of all Maladies begins with this very apt quote that describes the pursuit of hundreds of clinicians and researchers worldwide to know more about and overpower this deadly disease that we call cancer. Do we know of a time before cancer came to existence? Probably not. If we do not have proofs of its existence since the beginning of life, it is only because no records are available or we may not have come across (or understood) them. What we do know is that this monster...

Ek kamre ka woh kona Kuch kitaben, meri diary aur qalam Saamne ki khidki se andar aati kuch baarish ki boonden Hawa ke saath naachte huye parde Ek aadh pyaali chai Aur sukoon.

It's been a while, since the day it slowed down and halted. This train had been moving from one destination to another, year after year. It has never taken this long a pause before. Something must be seriously wrong this time. Waiting for the engine to roar back to life, I sit beside my window seat,  looking at the static scenery and feeling the occasional whiff of fresh air, missing the illusion of moving ahead and leaving the world behind.

She sat on the window ledge ready to take the plunge, and fly into the unknown. Her wings were eager to face the wind, and she wasn't worried about the clouds or the rain. She had painted her wings in the colour of the sky. An attempt to merge in it, the day she decides to fly.  The moment had arrived. She closed her eyes, spread her wings, and let go of everything that was holding her back. She flew. The wind held her hand and took her away. She flapped her wings, tumbled down, and glided through the narrow alley. She had flown far from where she had started. The rains were stronger here. Little droplets were replaced by giant splashes of water. Soon her wings started to ache and she gasped for air. She looked around for shelter and flew down. Perched on the stone pavement, she looked at her reflection in a tiny puddle. Her wings were torn. And the colours had run into each other. Whatever remained resembled muddy gray blotches with scanty streaks of blue and orange. Lost were the...

Like every Mumbaikar, I had been praying for the monsoons to hit the city and provide some respite from the heat that was on a mission to burn us all. Now that the clouds had finally decided to fly in for their annual visit, they seemed to be as angry as the sun. This has been happening every year, leaving us with only two choices, to either drown in our own sweat or to let the ruthless downpour do its job. As the metro approached Andheri station, people started lining up at the door. With the coach nearly empty, I shifted to the corner seat next to the door. I was just two stops and 4 min away from my destination but that didn't stop me from grabbing my favorite seat the minute it got empty. That's how we have become, always running after something better and not appreciating what we already have. It was almost 9 PM. I climbed down the stairs of D N Nagar metro station, clutching my umbrella and feeling tempted to use it to push away the crowd. It didn't take long for...

Do you remember the day you were born? I do. Or, at least I would like to believe that I do. My tiny arms pushed against the mother earth, cracking it open so that I could get the first glimpse of the new world that was going to be my home. I was expecting some kind of magic but reality seemed to be far less magical. It was cold and dark outside and I almost regretted being born. But I shrugged off that thought and decided to give the world one more chance. Tired and pale, I rested my head on the bosom of mother earth and fell asleep. Things looked a little brighter when I woke up. It wasn't dark anymore. Something far up in the sky shined brightly. It was the sun, I learned later. I felt stronger and noticed that I was not pale anymore. My arms were now turning green and a tiny leaf was about to unfurl, my first leaf. Many cold nights and sunny days went by and I grew taller, or may be I should say longer because I could never rise up and away from the earth. I was surrounded...

Have you heard of the inner circle-outer circle analysis? I remember being made to do this analysis in one of the moral education classes in school. First, you are asked to draw two concentric circles and write "ME" in the center. Then, in the inner circle you write the names of those who you are (or you feel) closest to and in the outer circle you put down the names of your second-level associations, which may include extended family members, cousins, friends, or whoever you think are more than just acquaintances but cannot be included in the inner circle. I can't recall what was the point of this exercise. May be we were being told to form close associations with only a bunch of people and have some restrictions before letting anyone enter our inner circle. I had a problem doing this exercise then and I am still unable to put names on an axis of zero to infinite emotional bonding. Something prompted me to rethink about this analysis and it has been clouding my tho...

"It is not the mountains we conquer but ourselves." -Edmund Hillary Two years back, when I had set out on my first trek in the Himalayas, I did not know what I was getting into. It began as a quest, a search for the place that I was dreaming about for the last few years. Valley of Flowers in Uttarakhand did turn out to be straight out of my dream and I still cannot believe it. I remember sitting on that large asymmetrical rock for more than an hour, looking at the snow-clad mountains and scribbling in my diary as the cool wind blew in my face and the sun tried its best to warm my fingers.  Less than a year later, I went back to the mountains and it was then that I realized that I was meant to go back, not once or twice or thrice, I just have to be there every once in a while. May be that recurring dream had a bigger purpose than calling me to the Valley of Flowers. May be someone up there knew that it was just a beginning. And now that it has started, it shall go o...

I was talking to this friend after a long time and the first two questions he asked me were, 'What movie did you watch last weekend?' and 'Where are you traveling to next?'. I refused to answer his questions till he first asked me how I was. We laughed and he said that he keeps seeing my updates on movies and travel and wonders when he will find time to do that. I have always loved to travel. I remember once my parents asked my brother and me to make a wishlist of things that we wanted. I had added 'Trip to Delhi' to that list. Then came a time when all the focus was on board exams and competitive exams, and the joy of traveling was forgotten because it mostly meant going to a new city to give some exam.  It all restarted once I came to Mumbai, 13 years back. Before I landed in this city I had turned into a shy, timid girl whose friends used to help her cross the road and get a rickshaw for her so that she doesn't have to talk to the rickshaw-wala. ...

We all have had our own bunch of girl friends at some point of our lives. They are the ones who we shared our notes and secrets with. In school, the frequently discussed topics used to be anything from 'who could fail in which subject' to 'who is getting what on their birthdays' to 'who has a teeny-weeny crush on which boy in the class'. In college, the points of discussion remained more or less the same except that some of our friends had a boy friend or a fiancé. That usually marked the beginning of an end of the precious girl gang as slowly each of us drifted apart. Some of us got married and had kids, while some others moved to a different city or country in search of a dream career. In my case, the latter holds true. On the other hand, most of my girl  friends got married over a span of ~10 years. Interestingly, I am almost the only one from my old girl gang who is still in the process of enjoying singledom and in return gets subjected to queries, fre...

The girl, who had expressed an urge to live despite what she had gone through, is dead. She must have been a strong-willed woman, wanting to live, face the world, restart her life, become a doctor, serve people, have a family, love and be loved. Not many of us would have that kind of strength. Being in that situation, wanting to die would not be considered insane. But she wanted to live...that is what pains me the most. It is only for this reason that out of immense hatred, I am compelled to support the appeal for capital punishment. Those men do not deserve to live, walk on the streets, lead a normal life. However, will a death sentence put an end to the ongoing epidemic of crime against women? I don't think so. Does that mean we shouldn't do anything for what has already happened? No, we should. But what? I don't have a clear answer to that but it would be something along the line of the famous welsh proverb, " If every man would sweep his own doorstep, the city w...

After a long time comes a movie that makes you laugh and cry at the same time. One cannot stay unmoved by the love and spirit of two people who suffer from hearing and speech impairment and autism. But it doesn't come in the way of identifying their individuality and their likes and dislikes. Neither does it prevent us from empathizing with their feelings. The story begins with an ailing Barfi (Ranbir Kapoor) and a bunch of people sharing their memories of him and reminiscing about the past. We are introduced to the prankster who knew no boundaries when it came to creating trouble. The local policeman (Saurabh Shukla) was one of the main targets of all the pranks whenever he went chasing him. Barfi was too smart to be caught for any of his crimes. Things change when Barfi gets involved in a kidnapping and a bank robbery. The story of Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra), who was kidnapped by Barfi, then unfolds. Barfi and Jhilmil go through a lot of ups and downs. The initi...

In the last 8 months, after I joined this new job, there have been many changes in my life. One of them is exposure to a completely different genre of writing which mainly includes books on corporate culture. I would not say that this shift was easy, but I have started to enjoy and also learn from them. I am sure I would have never chosen to read these books have I not entered this new world. I am glad I did. Good to Great is the product of a research conducted by Jim Collins and his team to identify the reasons behind the success of some companies over the others. The book begins with the statement—‘Good is the enemy of great’—which is one of the most important take-home messages. The author comes to this conclusion by monitoring the overall growth of 11 good-to-great companies, which were selected from a bigger set of 1,435 companies, and by comparing them with 11 other companies that were in the same industry, had same opportunities, and similar resources but failed to t...

I know it would be a cliche if I started this post by saying that I can't believe that the year is already coming to an end. At this point I would quote Geet from the movie Jab We Met,  "Please Baba ji, ab to hadd paar ho chuki hai. Ab is raat mein aur koi excitement mat dena. Boring bana do ji ab is raat ko, please!" If I replace the word " raat " with " saal ", it comes very close to my story! :) This is the year I will hopefully remember as the year I quit mainstream research, though reluctantly, for good. When I look back at each of the troubling episodes, I feel that if I had to relive the past, I would willingly go through all of that to reach the present, that is. The year began at an uncertain note. The tenure of the last job was about to get over and I didn't have an offer from anywhere else. I could extend my tenure by a couple of months, but I was adamant to leave the organization where I had already spent almost 8 years doin...

The strong smell of its absence is killing me. Or is it still around? Seems like it was just yesterday, that I had put an end to the beginning. Though the hateful love has slowly begun to stop growing, a light heaviness is sinisterly creeping. When my palm craves for the gleaming ray, My eyes are shut in dismay. I am losing my breath... waiting for it to dawn on me. Come, hold me, blind me...

In a land far, far away, there is this place where you can reach only after climbing up and down a couple of mountains. The valley with flowers down its slope. As the cool breeze caresses you, it brings with it a mixed scent of flowers and moist air. The best way to feel it is with your eyelids shut. You'll feel the warmth of the winter sun on your toes and hear the  sound of birds chirping somewhere, not too near yet not so far. With no hint of human civilization, this is the place I want to be. I have been thinking about what this dream could mean, since a long time. It is special because this is the first time I have had a recurring dream which has some kind of happiness and a pleasant feeling attached to it. Compared to constantly dreaming of failing in exams, missing a train or a flight, a fire or an earthquake, this current one is a welcome change. All the 5 or 6 times that I have dreamt about this place, there have been small variations. The first couple of times I w...