Pens and Pages

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 ...

“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...