Tag: writing

Categories
Stories

The Eternal Smile

One of the stone lions at the entrance to Gurjari Mahal, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India.

We walked past the stony gaze of the lions guarding the giant entrance. Fresh monsoon grass peered from beneath the sandstone tiles. The wings of the Fort kept a keen watch from above. The ninth Queen of Raja Maan Singh surely must have been special to get this much attention.

We walked on what was the front porch of the Gurjari Mahal and trekked up a steep path leading to the Palace. To our right was a well-manicured lawn. And to the left, a steep rocky path that seemed to lead nowhere.

The Palace had a short and narrow flight of stairs that led to a beautiful courtyard. Intricately carved stone statues of God and Goddesses here, pieces of floral patterned pillars and walls there.

The word museum was, perhaps, not very appealing to most tourists. Even those who strolled in didn’t stay long. The cool breeze only enhanced the peaceful ambiance of the courtyard.

“Do you have a ticket for your camera?” A portly man asked as we began freezing moments for our album.

We showed our ticket.

“Well, then please use only one—either your phone or the camera. Please!” Beneath his small smile, the request was firm.

I put away my phone and smiled sheepishly. Half expecting the man to run back into his administrative chamber after we had complied with his request, we turned to continue our exploration.

“Oh but first you must come and see the Salabhanjika!”

The Salabhanjika is the museum’s prized possession—a miniature statue that epitomizes femininity. We had read about the sculpture being guarded closely and were under the impression that we’d need special permissions to see her. So when the gentleman invited us to take a look, we happily accepted.

We followed him to his office. A small dark room furnished with a simple desk and a few plastic chairs. The medieval walls were covered with yellowing photographs and newspaper clippings about the sculpture. Behind the desk was a cell. Deep inside behind steel bars, stood the small, smiling Salabhanjika.

“She’s called the Indian Monalisa!” His voice was filled with pride at being the guardian of a rare sculpture. Like many of the exquisite sculptures that we’ve now become accustomed to seeing, Salabhanjika was breathtaking.

“When she was first found, she looked like this,” he said, pointing towards a grainy print stuck on the wall. “Her head was found later and was fully intact, so we could piece her together. We were lucky.”

“Look at her carefully. The more you look at her, the more she’ll smile back at you! Look at her from any direction and she’ll look towards you.”

We looked again. And she did, indeed, appear to be smiling more than before.

“Please take a picture. Go on, go closer. Make sure you switch off the flash!”

We leaned in, the lens of our camera wedged between the steel bars. Click!

“She’s been insured for five crores!” our host could hardly contain his excitement.

Five crore rupees. The Monalisa is insured for a hundred million dollars.

Salabhanjika’s smile grew wider.

I wondered, if she had been discovered before the Monalisa, would Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting be called the Italian Salabhanjika?

She stood there silently. Still smiling, and letting the question remain unanswered.

Salabhanjika is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘breaking a branch of a sala tree’. There are many intricate sculptures of Salabhanjika in Hoysala and Bednur. But the one in Gwalior is reportedly the only one that smiles.

This story is part of my digital book, The Speaking Rock.

Originally written in 2017, the ebook was published on the Juggernaut platform. 

For those who aren’t aware, Juggernaut was a publishing platform that claimed to democratise publishing. It’s slogan, “You don’t need to know anyone to get published.” It provided writers access to publishing tools and a marketplace where readers could connect with writers directly. The Speaking Rock was one of three ebooks I had published with them. My story Free Bird also won a short story contest and was featured in their anthology collection.

I loved that platform, even from a design perspective. I even wrote a glowing review on Design Tuesdays.

Unfortunately, the platform soon introduced a paywall and put my stories behind a paywall (without offering any royalties). And thereafter, the platform disappeared altogether, taking my work with it, leaving me hanging high and dry. I felt betrayed. I felt bitter. I kicked myself for being naive. Of course, their business model wouldn’t pay their bills.

For a good three years, the site just showed an ugly “under construction” message. No way to get in touch with them. No way to retrieve my work. I had made peace with the fact that I’d lost my stories—until a few days ago, when I found a draft on Google Docs that had one of the stories. And when I saw the draft of the Eternal Smile sitting right under my nose on WordPress, I almost cried.

Funnily, when I opened Juggernaut’s website today, I found that it was no longer under construction. (The internet archive’s Wayback Machine reveals that the site was still down as recently as 5 days ago!)

There is no mention of a writer’s platform, and no way for any one to log in and retrieve their work. Today, the website is just like another publishing site that displays influencers and popular media icons who’ve published with them. So much for democratising publishing!

As for me, I’m happy that I can finally share Salabhanjika’s smile with you. I’m still looking for that photograph we took. I’m sure it’s there somewhere in our virtual closet.

Categories
Musings

One More Thing…

In our quest to capture virtual memories, we've built physical spaces to be Instagrammable.

How do you do it?

How do you manage to read all those tweets, post comments on YouTube, react to Instagram stories, finish the long reads on Medium and WordPress and catch up with emails? All while having a day job, socialising with friends, managing a decent workout and being up to date with current affairs and pop-culture.

I know I can’t.

I was a very, very late adopter of social media, primarily because I felt it was meant for lesser mortals, those who indulged in gossip. The narcissist that I am, I didn’t quite care about what other people did around me. I only wanted to write and share my thoughts to as wide an audience as I could.

I sceptically joined Facebook in mid 2013. And it wasn’t till 2017 that I joined Instagram. These occasions were so significant, that I wrote blog posts to confess about these mis-adventures. The only reason I have a Twitter account (I don’t care what they call it now, but I refuse to call it by any other name) is because my employer demanded I create one. Without that coercion, I would probably not have created it in 2014.

Then there’s LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, Behance… the list is far, far too long.

Over the years, I have tried to keep up with these services in patches and failed. I wonder how other people do it. And it bothers me that I am so digitally incompetent. I am everywhere, and yet, nowhere. At any given point of time, I can keep up with only one service. Everyone else is active everywhere.

When I think about all the different services that aim to ‘connect’ us in the world, all I see is this relentless barrage of information, and how miserable it makes me feel.

One More Thing

In 2019, I tried an experiment. I called it, the “Reverse Social Media.” I wanted to stop using social media, and instead focus on creating a community. I’d send out emails to people so that we could start one-on-one conversations. Needless to say, that experiment failed. I had ended up creating yet another digital footprint that I couldn’t manage. If you’re interested, you can find the archives of this experiment on Design Tuesdays.

In these first two decades of the twenty-first century, a certain Mr. Jobs made a catchphrase his own. “One more thing…” he’d say, at the end of his keynote, and announce something new. Steve Jobs’ characteristic style of delivering keynotes even has a name: Stevenote!

A side note: To me, those words will always belong to Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures. The series aired during a time when information wasn’t as free-flowing as it is today, and when tech was only for geeks. What use was a business presentation to a teenager? So please allow me to indulge myself with TV memories from the early 2000s.

Source: Imgur

With the newsletters, I had created Uncle’s one more thing. More recently, that one more thing is Threads, from Meta. Sure, I’ve ‘created’ the ghost account, but it holds no meaning for me. To me, it’s just another username that’s gathering virtual dust.

The Digital Cobwebs

Remember the old days when we had hard disks and had backups of folders and backups of backups? Ah, those were simpler times. Those hard disks are gathering dust in a shelf somewhere.

Our digital clutter, on the other hand, is invisible, but several times worse. This digital clutter that we’ve chosen to create haunts me. Over the past few years, I’ve lost very close loved ones. But their profiles show up in recommendation feeds on social media. I don’t want to tell these behemoth companies that those are my dead relatives. The large tech companies have no business knowing this private information. But, at the same time, I don’t want their click-hungry algorithms to be so insensitive.

In my curiosity to explore the internet, I wonder how far my own footprint has landed. Who has my email address? Which database has a username attached to me?

Entrance to a cafe with yellow-coloured walls and black and white murals showing a coffee table and bar stools.
In our quest to share virtual memories, we’ve built physical spaces to be Instagrammable. How many people would have half-squatted to “sit” on the painted chairs on this pretty yellow wall? Guilty as charged. Location: Puducherry, India

Worse still are the chains I’ve tied around myself. Those accounts that I do know about, I find it hard to let go. It was easy to delete my Facebook (now Meta) account over three years ago. But Twitter is giving me a hard time. Not because I use it. I don’t. But because once I delete the account, my username will be available for use by someone else. And I shudder to think someone else will take on my identity. So much for me championing reuse and recycle.

There’s so much digital waste we’ve generated. All that waste is sitting on some server. Consuming electricity. Generating heat. And consuming more electricity to cool down. Every little piece of digital information I leave unattended reeks of a hypocritical sustainability advocate.

The Way Forward

I don’t have an easy answer to this mess. In this virtual chaos we’ve created, it’s a daily struggle to decide what to keep and what to discard. Which memories to hold on to, and which to let go.

A couple of months ago, out of sheer frustration, I embarked on a virtual housekeeping project. The task looked insurmountable, but I had to begin somewhere.

So, I looked for low-hanging fruits. I located those physical hard disks. I thought to myself, if I haven’t needed it in the last ten years, I won’t need it again. First, I transferred them to my Dropbox folder, so that everything was in one place, and then I began reviewing them.

So many duplicate photographs. Old portfolio files that I was once proud of, but now find ghastly. And those legacy file formats that I can neither open, nor have had the need to edit. I began hitting the delete key.

As Dropbox later informed me, I had deleted about 15000 files in the span of a week. It was a statistic I didn’t know I needed to hear. And it was so cathartic.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. There are several more files and photographs to go through. I’ve hit pause on that activity because, as I’ve now learned, I can’t focus on one thing constantly. Plus, frustration and adrenaline can fuel such binge-deleting sprees for only so long. But I hope to pick it up in patches.

My current project is to clear up the cobwebs of my blog drafts. Several of my last few posts have indeed been 3 – 4 year old drafts (this one included!) I’m still only 10% in, but seeing some virtual dust being cleaned up is helping me mentally.

I don’t know how far I’ll get. But I’m going to try. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And the only way to tackle it is to take it one thing at a time.

On an unrelated note, how would you like me to narrate these stories via a podcast?

Categories
Musings

The Regular Crowd

Yellow leaf on a wet stone pavement

As I was clearing up some old shelves, I discovered some notebooks with hand-written stories and amusing self-pep talks. Among those abandoned drafts was this unfinished parody of Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.” Enjoy!

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday,
The regular crowd shuffles in.
There’s a young man sitting next to me
Swiping up, his face making a grin.

He says, “Alexa, can you play me a melody?”
I’m not really sure how it goes.
But it sounded sweet and I knew it complete,
When I wore a baby’s clothes.

Sing us a ding, you’re the smart device.
Sing us a ring tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a notification,
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright.

I thought I’d complete it, adapting the rest of the song words, but as I read the lyrics of the rest of the song, it seemed eerily appropriate. It seems like Billy Joel’s bar is similar to any social media app. What do you think?

Here’s the rest of the song, with only the slightest modifications:

Now John on the app is a friend of mine
He gets me my likes for free
And he’s quick with a joke or to share your post
But there’s some place that he’d rather be
He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me”
As the smile ran away from his face
“Well, I’m sure that I could be a movie star
If I could get out of this place”

Now Paul is a real estate novelist
Who never had time for a life
And he’s talkin’ with Davy, who’s still in the story
And probably will be for life
And the comedian is practicing politics
As the marketers slowly get drowned
Yes, they’re sharing a reel they call loneliness
But it’s better than scrollin’ alone

It’s a pretty good crowd for a Saturday
And the Faang* gives me a smile
‘Cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been comin’ to see
To forget about life for a while
And the app, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit on the app and put bread in my cap
And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?”

* FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google

Categories
Musings

The Reckoning


In mid-2020, while the world was going through an upheaval, I got the opportunity of a lifetime: to turn my passion for writing into a profession. It was a dream come true: combining my love for writing and teaching with my experience in UX design. At the Interaction Design Foundation, I met and worked with some of the most brilliant minds from across the globe. I had opportunities to travel and grow professionally, eventually leading the editorial team.

In three and a half years I grew and changed as an individual. It was the most fulfilling role I’ve had in my life and for that, I will forever be grateful. But it came with a cost.

Some people say that we must not mix passion with profession. We might lose both! Others say that we must be in love with our work so that we don’t actually “work”. I realized that there was another angle to this debate. In my case, I was so much in love with my job, that I lost myself in it. I spent such a long time doing what I love for someone else, that I was too exhausted to work on the stories I wanted to write for myself. I adopted the brand’s voice and lost my own.

Before I knew it, my body started to hurt.

Fortunately, or rather, unfortunately, I could see where I was heading. It had been close to eight years, but memories started haunting me. It was a different time, a different company, but the pain was eerily similar.

I used to struggle with lower back pain. Most days it would be okay. And then every now and then it would flare up. And when it did, it made my life a living nightmare. I couldn’t sit, stand, walk, or even lie down without jolting.

I went to several doctors and popped all kinds of pills. Everything seemed to work for a while. And then, everything stopped working. I continued soldiering through the pain.

I was practically second in command in the company. I couldn’t take too many days off.

My family pleaded with me to leave my job. Angry and in tears, I fought with them. I stood my ground. To them, I was stubborn. In reality, I was scared.

Our society places a premium on being employed. Our worth and the respect we command are based on what we do in life. The last thing I wanted to be was a housewife. Housewife: that word is so demeaning that we now use different synonyms to make it sound like we appreciate that role: a homemaker, family manager, home engineer. But call it what you will, it is subtly associated with someone who doesn’t earn money or have status in public life. Since my childhood, I was conditioned to believe that choosing not to work was synonymous with being useless. The ultimate humiliation.

I needed to work, not for the money, but for my self-esteem.

Meanwhile, my attacks were getting more frequent. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed. I began missing important meetings. It got to a point where I felt I might be fired. So, I finally took the most difficult decision of my life. I told myself to quit.

Quitting a job without another in hand and with no financial safety net isn’t easy. I had no choice. I needed to fix myself.

Understanding my predicament, my employer suggested that I take a break, and use this opportunity to start a freelance career. “Take a month off. We can work out a part-time contract. We’ll be your first clients.”

Perhaps it was that reassurance that I’d still have something to come back to, that helped me relax a little. I tied as many loose ends as I could, handed over my work and signed the offboarding documents. I still remember that metro ride home. My body writhed in agony every time the train stopped. My colleagues pitied my plight.

The first few days of my unemployment, however, had a profound impact. To my surprise, I felt like a big weight was off my shoulders. More importantly, I realized that being employed wasn’t the sole purpose of life. Contrary to what I expected, I even enjoyed being at home. “You look happy,” my uncle remarked when he saw me shortly after my newfound freedom.

I also learned that patriarchy—that thing that I always complained about—was helping me. When I met an ex-colleague a month later, he remarked, “You can afford to quit because you’re a woman. No one would say anything to you. I wish I could also quit my job.”

I am not going to defend patriarchy. But I can better explain feminism. It is not about men being subservient to women as revenge for centuries of oppression. It’s about men and women both being allowed to live their lives the way they’d like to, without having to live up to certain expectations from society or being judged for their life choices and circumstances.

Workplace dynamics aren’t built for everyone. And I realized that the work environment I was in, wasn’t built for me. I didn’t form any meaningful friendships at work. The office was in a basement, devoid of sunlight. While I learned a lot and did meaningful work, at the end of the day, it didn’t pay as well as a corporate job would’ve paid me. I wished I had quit sooner.

If I hadn’t quit, I wouldn’t have become a freelancer. I began working remotely much before the world discovered it. Money wasn’t regular, but that didn’t matter. I was a master of my time and priorities. I regained my health and felt physically and mentally fit.

I had the capacity to work on side projects that mattered to me—like online workshops in storytelling and composting! I vowed to not work full-time again.

That vow, however, didn’t last long. Three years later, I randomly applied for the role of writer at the Interaction Design Foundation and turned out to be a perfect fit.

Fast forward three more years. My backaches were coming back, and this time, they were bringing more mysterious friends with them. My body was showing signs of unrest. I had to act fast before it turned out to be an all-out revolution like my last full-time gig.

I’d quit once before. It should’ve been easy to take that plunge again. But like the last time, I fought with my family and lingered on. This time, for very different reasons. I loved my job, the people, and well, the paycheck. This was the organization that made me realize my worth. Money sometimes acts like a golden noose. The string is always in our hand, and money makes us pull it tighter around our neck.

I debated hard with myself for several months. Eventually, I decided to pull the plug again. And like last time, it was only after I left that I realised why it was important for me to have done that. I had sacrificed my voice for someone else, and it would take several months for me to regain the courage to write again.

Related Posts

When life kicks you in the back

Categories
Musings

Unsolicited Wisdom


Sometimes it seems the universe sends us messages. Perhaps more likely, we’re looking for help and our subconscious mind shows us the way.

I’ve come to believe that we often don’t communicate well enough with ourselves. We usually have the answers to many of our problems. We just don’t hear it well. So when we see something that seems to be the answer to our problems, it’s indeed our mind pointing us in the right direction—we are actively seeking the answer in our environment.

There are times when I can’t decide between two alternatives, and I try to let a coin toss make the decision for me. If we are truly indifferent to the choices, a coin toss wouldn’t matter. But if we favour one outcome over the other, the coin toss will reveal the one we actually want. I’ve often ended up ignoring the coin toss because I immediately felt disappointed with the way the coin landed!

The TV series Big Bang Theory turns this idea into a gag in an episode where Sheldon decides to leave all trivial life decisions to a roll of the dice. During lunch, his dice tells him to eat corn succotash. When his friend asks him what he’s thinking about, he promptly answers hamburger!

Over the past few months, I’ve stumbled upon a few unsolicited pieces of advice—things that I didn’t know I needed to hear. Here are two that stuck with me:

The most powerful word you can say to yourself is “yet.”

I saw this advice in The Medium’s Newsletter’s issue #172.

At the beginning of the year, I set myself a few unwritten goals—unwritten because I’m superstitious. I didn’t achieve them, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try or make any progress on them. Adding the word “yet” to those goals reminds me that just because the year is coming to an end doesn’t mean I’m not closer to them.

Replace “What if” questions with “Even if” Statements

This advice on how to talk to ourselves was in issue #184.

It helps to change the narrative. As much as online content pushes us to think the world is ending or that we’re not moving along as fast as every other person is, our lives aren’t the same as others. We cannot be held ransom to timelines and expectations, even if we set them ourselves. Most of us are bad estimators. Life is unpredictable. And humans are highly adaptable. There’s always another way out.

There’s a common theme behind these bits of unsolicited wisdom. I’ve been very hard on myself. Perhaps you have too? Being constantly surrounded by data, news and updates about what others are doing can make one feel inadequate. These messages seem to be telling me to forgive myself.

  • I may not have that tangible thing to share, yet. I may not be able to share them by 31st December, and that’s okay.
  • What if I don’t complete that project I started? Even if I don’t complete that project, I can take a few more days to finish it. Or if it isn’t working, I can hand it over to someone more capable of completing it.

What pieces of unsolicited useful advice have you stumbled upon?

Categories
Musings

Finding priorities


Everyday, while performing mundane tasks, such as doing the dishes, I open the YouTube App on my phone, and allow it it show me videos that it has learned to curate for me. For the most part, the app gets it right — US-based late-night political comedies and TED talks.

Today, this talk popped up in my feed: “How to gain control of your free time.” I had watched this video before, but because my hands were engaged (and because this is a great talk), I allowed the smartphone to remind me of how wasteful I have been of my time.

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam says that when people say they don’t have time for something, what they mean is, that it’s not their priority.

When something is a priority for us, we make time for it, no matter how busy our lives are.

I have experienced this first hand, several times. Including, as recently as, last month, when I got around to digitise my mother’s art, in time for her 60th birthday. My previous attempt was way back in 2015. And after four years, with enough motivation to drive me, I finally opened shop on Society6 (This announcement should, and will be, a separate post) .

Under virtual dust

At the end of last year, one of my regrets was not having maintained this blog much. Two posts in a year was a dismal number, considering that the previous year saw me celebrate my 300th post during the NaBloPoMo.

I have several unfinished drafts and ideas — some that are many years old, and some only in want of a ‘featured image’ to go live.

As this video reminds me, somewhat harshly, blogging isn’t my priority anymore. And that is an unhappy thought. Why did I stop doing that which I absolutely loved?

The answer: The decline in my writing on the blog has coincided with my use of Instagram.

Most of my blog posts go through multiple iterations, with me reading, and re-reading them, to make sure it is something worth reading. There is this burden of responsibility, to do justice to the reader’s time. On Instagram, however, there is lesser pressure to write.

I do realise that this pressure about ‘quality of writing’ is pretentious. Clearly, I blog for very selfish reasons.

Another reason, is the decline in community participation — or more appropriately, the narcissism factor. Back when WordPress had ‘featured posts’ on its homepage, and ran Weekly Photo Challenges, there seemed to be a greater incentive to post (read, greater likelihood of ‘likes’). Blogging was chance to discover, and be discovered. (The Discover tab on WordPress now is rather uninspiring)

I found Instagram to be more engaging. Words are less appealing than pictures. Those who couldn’t be bothered to read, are happy seeing pictures (and that includes me). Today, Instagram is what WordPress used to be — fun.

And so, since that NaBloPoMo in 2017, when I gingerly opened my Instagram account, writing has moved to another platform.

Finding a way back

Over the past two years there have been so many exciting things I should have written about here — in my safe space — but didn’t get around to. (I published on four different platforms, travelled to new places, let go of toxic relationships and put myself on a path to heal myself).

Most nights, I lay awake simply because there are so many ideas jumping in my head, waiting to explode (here’s why).

This, rather impulsive post, is my attempt at making a comeback to blogging. Will it succeed? Only time will tell.

Categories
Miscellaneous

Thank you :)


Today is a special day. I hear it’s the Thanksgiving weekend around most places in the world. And while I have very little knowledge of this holiday, as it’s not something my family celebrates, I find it a lucky coincidence that it is today, that I am reaching a milestone.

This post, is number 300 in the lifetime of this blog.

Yes, it’s a small number compared to so many other bloggers around the world, but if you had told me a few months ago, that I’d be here, today, writing my three hundredth post, as part of a month-long blogging challenge, I would have probably called you insensitive.

Over the past twenty three days, I have been at the receiving end of much love, and a very dedicated readership. Many of you have told me how much you have enjoyed reading, and especially loved the pictures I have posted here. And it fills me with joy.

Knowing that someone out there, cares for the stories I have to tell, matters a lot to me. And so, I want to say, thank you.

thank-you

This is post #23 in this year’s NaBloPoMo, or as Ra calls it Nano Poblano

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month = Thirty straight days of blogging

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Categories
Poetry

What’s your story?


You can lie all you want.
You can hide behind your mask.
You don’t need to tell me,
And I will not ask.

You may deny it,
And say all is fine.
But it’s written on your forehead,
Across every single line.

You must be patient,
Soldier on.
Let go of your worries,
It’s time to move on.
Explore the world,
Save your memories.
Be brave, be bold,
Tell the world
All your stories.

nanopoblano2015lightThis is post #4 in this year’s NaBloPoMo, or as Ra calls it Nano Poblano

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month = Thirty straight days of blogging

Thanks a bunch to all the cheering peppers who have been tweeting and liking posts across WordPress 🙂

Categories
Stories

Ink-Stained Fingers


‘Hey you! Come over here,’ The teacher smiled and called the chubby girl to the front of the class. Addressing the other students, she pointed at her face and said, ‘Look at her! Doesn’t she look funny!’ The class of forty students began laughing. The girl stood there, clueless about what the joke was. The teacher told the girl to go and take a look in the mirror.

Confused and embarrassed, she made her way to the girls’ bathroom and stared at the mirror. A small blue patch of ink had made its way to her face. She turned around a bit, acting out the scenario from a few moments ago, curious to know how she would have looked in front of the class.

The class was the fifth standard. The little girl was me. The patch of blue on my face had come from my ink-smeared fingers.

That teacher taught us Hindi. She was a good teacher, and probably the sole reason I actually know the Hindi alphabet better than most of my Hindi speaking peers. But for reasons I am still not sure of, she constantly picked on me. My Hindi was terrible. My handwriting even worse. Every page of my notebook bore scars from her red pen. Strangely, her remarks in my notebook were all written in English. I can vaguely recall one such remark, ‘Instead of improving, your handwriting is getting worse with every class!’

I was terrible with pens. We were only allowed to use fountain pens. Ball pens were a complete no. ‘It’s bad for your handwriting,’ that’s what they said. I had to change my pen frequently. I broke nibs. The refilling compartment would leak as I wrote — leaving blue fingerprints on my notebooks. I took it as a sign of achievement — proof of a great writer, or at least one that writes a lot. I could make the best pens leak. I began using different kinds of pens, and they leaked too. I even managed to break the nib of roller-ball pens.

For over three years, I have attempted to narrate this little incident from my childhood. And every time it ended up with me breaking down. I always imagined that I would write about having forgiven her and sound magnanimous. But I cannot bring myself to say that. Her insult was a personal one — one which no child should be subjected to, and most definitely not by a teacher.

One might say that hatred is another side of love, and that deep down inside I probably want her to like me and be nice to me. That may be true. And by not letting go of that incident and allowing it to torment me, I am more likely to harm myself more than anyone else.

But today, as I prepared to write this — my 200th post — I wanted to put to rest the whole issue. Having ink-smeared fingers is no crime, and my inability to take care of a pen has nothing to do with my ability to write.

This morning, I took out my fountain pen and washed the dust off it. I cleaned the nib and watched my fingers get soaked in ink. Then I sat down to type.

Now that I have written this, I realise why that incident refuses to leave me. As angry as her behaviour makes me today, my own reaction to it at that time never ceases to amaze me. For some reason it never hurt me. The little girl I saw in the mirror didn’t react – at all. She was different. She was indifferent.

Did she notice that? Was the teacher trying to get under my skin and make me feel something — love or hatred — towards her? I’ll probably never know. But it sure feels good to think about it!

nanopoblano2015lightThis is post #1 in this year’s NaBloPoMo, or as Ra calls it Nano Poblano

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month = Thirty straight days of blogging

Thanks a bunch to all the cheering peppers who have been tweeting and liking posts across WordPress 🙂

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Musings

Why Blog?

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Power Of Words - Antonio Litterio CC-BY-SA-3.0

Some time back, I stumbled upon a video. And I liked it so much, I watched it again, and now I’m sharing it with you (for those who’re impatient, its at the bottom of the post!)

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘Eat Pray Love’, talks about creativity as an external ‘genie’, and how creativity comes to an artist, instead of creativity coming from within an artist.

This video made me realise how many times an idea or thought came to me. My genie came in the form of little bursts of inspiration. And when she came, she gave me sleepless nights. At times I’ve woken up at unearthly hours* , unable to sleep, till I have written down something. And even afterwards, I have felt uneasy at not having published it. Sometimes I’m just too tired to listen to her, and I tell her to come another time. And of course she doesn’t.

This creati-genie has inspired quite a few posts on this blog. And clearly, right now, my genie is on vacation. Or perhaps I’m the one who isn’t sensing her.

Maybe she’s somewhere around me, reading this post. Maybe she’s screaming something, desperately trying to grab my attention. Or maybe she’s just smirking, enjoying the fact that I miss her.

Off late, as I haven’t been blogging, I’ve felt frustrated. Or perhaps my frustration is making me lose connection with my genie.

I’ve had to work hard on this post. It doesn’t help that I actually drove my genie away. But I shall try to answer the question The Daily Post asked bloggers.

Why do I blog?

There may not be just one single answer. And it is most likely a combination of several answers.

Perhaps it is the want of attention, the emotional high of being heard.

Perhaps it is to share our world with others.

Perhaps it is a journal, a memory bank, should we need to refresh our own memories.

Perhaps it is to vent out the frustration within.

Perhaps it is to discover a few things about our own selves.

Or perhaps it is to allow the genies sitting on the window-sill next to us, to take the spotlight for a while.

And maybe, just maybe, it is to sleep more peacefully at night.

I’d hoped to celebrate my 100th post with my genie. But, I suppose she deserves a little break!

I hope you like this TED Talk as much as I did. Is your genie with you? How has your genie helped/troubled you? Let me know in comments…

* unearthly hours here refers to what I term as unearthly – which is not necessarily beyond midnight, but likely at the hour when you are busy relishing your dinner!

And now I wonder… Why does WordPress Blog??