Walk the talk

When was the last time you took a leap of faith and surrendered yourselves to the universe conspiring to navigate you? Those of you who have dived in oceans might know that there is always terror of abyss, a point wherein the light stops penetrating and its just dark inside, we have the fear of unknown. We don't know what to expect and yet we do fear; fear of massive sea creatures, about losing our way or just the unfathomable things (thanks hollywood). The fact that the horror resides mostly in the mind and it has no relevance to the actual level of threat should speak volumes on how our mind is always in a precarious state of being sold off to the devil. Fear shapes up our decisions early on in life and builds resistance to try anything new "Hey but what if it ends up bad?". They say never settle in your 20s, perhaps the most dynamic phase of your life, many things start shaping up at this age, may it be academically, professionally or personally. Yet I see many of...

Do you remember the last time you went out with your group of friends or colleagues, shared a laugh, hugged them and made plans for an outing? Did you ever think maybe this is the last time before a  long, uncertain pause follows up. Also, the last time you enjoyed going out to gorge on the street food and thought maybe I'll come back tomorrow to try the other dishes which look tempting. A simple joy ride, a stroll or drive through the town, everything of it looks far fetched right now. Well, the joy of small things is almost never noticed and this lock-down is an irrefutable evidence of the same! This fall-out was absolutely inevitable and as they say revenge is a dish best served cold, our karma was dished out hot out of the pan. The innumerable, horrendous scarring of the planet we did in the last few decades is unfathomable. If nature decided to be vitriolic with its bashing, we ourselves are  to be blamed. A species which shares the planet with several other million a...

To quote Dalai Lama “Once a year, go some place you’ve never been before” and I live by it. Luckily, I was born in a family who are travel buffs and practice this rule of travelling to another state for a week at least every alternate year. Although the travel bug or “wanderlust” might have bitten a lot of people of this generation since it’s also THE thing to do, I was nurtured by this value of travelling to varied places, understanding the culture and adapting to the food and lifestyle of that place right from the time I was a toddler. As I grew up, I realised that travelling and exploring was something I had always been a part of due to the family pact and it didn’t come to me as a breakthrough or some fantastic intervention of travel gods that happen to the teenagers these days once they enter college. Unknowingly, I was always making travel plans with friends or family and was travelling however short a trip it might be. The fact that I was obeying the Dalai Lama rule of be...

DECEMBER! Wow! That was so quick. 2017 is almost about to end. What a year it has been so far. Some very significant changes occurred over the last 12 months. Also, that is how it’s supposed to be. Early 20’s is all about being dynamic and bustling with life, constant change before you get all sorted and settled. So how was it for you? Got into a relationship? Got out of one? Got your dream job? Got a raise? Left a job? Travelled to a new place? Shifted out of city? Met with an accident? Got jailed? Okay that was a drag. I sincerely hope the last one wasn’t true for anyone of you. This early stage of adulthood is interesting because we’re not completely dependent on our parents for the most minuscule thing and also at the same time not completely independent of it either. Get the catch? Like having a temporary job and not having to remember to pay your insurance, bills etc. is relatively okay. Unable to fend oneself from relatives and ill health is also okay. Not knowing...

I knew of a guy named Jon from the mainland. He had moved to the western world for pursuing his graduate studies. He was quite wary of being in untested waters but braced the idea with grit. He was doing just fine at the start of the academic career, as is the case with everyone, it takes time to get acclimatised. I happened to call him few weeks back thinking he would have settled down and this is what I found out. He was lately feeling super elated. His morale and self-confidence had got a high boost due to his positive thoughts and way of thinking which led to building up of constructive ideas amongst his peers. For every workshop, group discussion he seemed to know the way to go about the solution. He realised that everyone in his class had a way of representing the solution differently. The approaches differed but everyone conveyed quite the same, real gist of what the prof was looking for. At the end of the day, wherein they all had been graded and everyone had scored decen...

We’re surrounded by an array of diverse mind blowing geography and life forms. Yet what we see is just a little speck of this ‘phenomenal’ ecosystem, because we’re so used to seeing the land as the only source of exploration.  Our daily life has made us so glued to looking horizontally, that we’ve forgotten the flexible functionality of our neck.  We haven’t even dived deep into the ocean. There is a far bigger universe inside that sunken treasure than the whole of our land can accommodate. With mountains bigger than Everest, Corals fascinating than man-made marvels and marine life complex and gorgeous than bird life, there is just so much that we’re unaware about. Although, magnanimous in size, explorations over several hundred years can make us fairly understand the mysteries of oceans, if not completely. But there is also an infinite world out there, of which the Earth is just a tiny minuscule part. We’re just a very small part of the solar system, and again the s...