Pens and Pages

In dreams we meet in warm conversations... Dreams are a weird way of our subconscious mind passing valuable information to us. Some of my dreams of late have been weird and crazily accurate. When I dabbled into Tarot reading or Access Consciousness, I was enjoying my time and life more than anticipating such things would happen. But they did. Last year, I gave a job interview that went fairly well. That company usually takes 2 weeks to finalize their decisions and revert to the candidates. Within the next 2 days I had a dream that I did not get the job offer. When I woke up it felt like just a lie because the interview had went great. The next day I got a call from the consultant that the company decided to give the role to someone internally and that it was unusually fast. I was surprised how my dream was so accurate while my conscious mind couldn't comprehend this uncertainty at all while giving the interview. I was expecting an offer but my dream warned me otherwise and to keep

" The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving." - Elizabeth Gilbert (Liz) I always have a tough time letting go. It's either that or just this that I see things differently. I don't let go of things because I often look inward and wonder if I can change something in me to make things "okay". Everybody else seems to be pretty fine with how things are. How could I be a special case to ask for something different, something beautiful?  You see, I would rather blame myself and change myself than to simply state that I deserve something better. When Liz wrote this quote in the Eat, Pray, Love she wrote it for a marriage that was difficult to stay in and so much harder to let go of. It's always tough to let people go, especially people who care for you yet in their own ways which are more harmful than beneficial. I have had my share of toxic relationships like this when I would recall this q

It was a cold December of 2019 and I had just arrived in Delhi for some work-related meeting from Bangalore.  Having hopped a lot of cities in life for work, I was a newbie in Bangalore too, having shifted there just a couple of months back. My nomadic heart belonged to absolutely no city in particular. Any person who lived for two years in Gurgaon would feel like Delhi was home for them when they'd arrive from the Southern Capital of India, but for me, having lived in Gurgaon but not really roamed a lot, Delhi was still as alien as Bangalore - another new place where I was completely alone despite the crowds all around. I had arrived in the late evening, having boarded the flight after work-hours at around 7pm. Delhi air was chillier and foggier than I had thought, and I thanked my charts for having picked a long pink sweater to wear that evening on top of my regular white t-shirt and a pair of jeans. I wrapped my hands around myself as much as I could to avoid feeling so cold. I

I just had a beautiful body massage in my Bangalore home booked via Urban Clap and it brought back memories of a dirty yet thoughtful experience I had in 2019. I should have written this in 2019 but I was only a girl then, afraid what would people say when they read it. These days, I guess I have stopped giving a damn (well, almost).  I did talk about it with a few acquaintances (because I have no friends) and kind of worried I'd come across as naïve (read: stupid). But it is what it is. So it was a cold December of 2019 and I had just arrived in Delhi then for some work-related meeting. Our travel desk booked me a hotel near the airport because the preferred hotels near Gurgaon (where my office was) were unavailable. I was supposed to go attend a friend's wedding near Ghaziabad that night but a recent news of rape in the outskirts of NCR ticked me off. I decided to spend the rest of the evening in the hotel itself.  In the evening I decided to just walk around, exploring the n

“I am so unambitious,” my senior from MDI Gurgaon, whom I have known from the past 5 years said this to me last night over a phone-call. She is one of the smartest women I know, someone who has navigated through multiple job roles to land a senior brand manager role- something she really enjoyed doing. In short, I know people from the same college who would kill to take a role like that. But she is not happy doing what she is doing, and I understand the same being the reason behind her usage of the word unambitious for herself. This is not the first time I have heard women use this word. My senior colleague at the workplace would often say the same thing for her. And then the same words did come from another senior I know, and then from a friend, and finally from my own mouth. These are women from colleges like IMT Ghaziabad, IIM B, IIM C. The names of the colleges are important because it is no mean feat to traverse the journey to reach such colleges – study for CAT, appear for CA

There's a thing about firsts. Your first friend at school, your first job, your first kiss, your first relationship, your first heartbreak, every first matters in life, except when it comes to writing. I was some 6 years old when I wrote my first script for a movie and submitted it to Dad, asking him to make a movie out of it (Dad was working on an Assamese film at that time), only to be utterly dejected to find out I was just a child with a far-from-perfect film script demanding that it be produced. I was upset for days and forgot about it soon until I wrote my next short-story at the age of 7 and gifted it to him, in the hope that he would get the hint that I wanted a film out of this one too. None of the works ever got converted to movies (well, of course), but I learned over time that our first work of writing, no matter how special they are to us, would always be horribly imperfect. My first poem was fine though. It was an assignment for the class to write a poem in Hindi wher