Pens and Pages

“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...

A ll these quotes are from the book Illusions : Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. They all speak about changing your mindset, your perception and hence, your reality and life. The truth is that we can choose to suffer or to thrive. Like they say, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. What would you choose? 1. If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem. 2. Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. 3. You will wonder why some people are unhappy. They are unhappy because they have chosen to be unhappy, and, Richard, that is all right! 4. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we're hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we're victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck. 5. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just ...

People I usually meet in person first, often come back to me with this statement later – Oh, I didn’t know you write. Some acquaintances have often declared that I don’t look like someone who would write. I don’t ponder upon such words much but I am slightly bothered by the one I heard last week – “Why did you stop writing?” I was taken aback. I never stopped writing. Who said I had? So I went back and looked at the source she was referring to- My blog. The last date said October 2017. It’s indeed been 5 months; maybe I did stop writing after all. The last time I wrote something I was in Rourkela, a peaceful city in Western Odisha where life was as slow as it could get. I moved to the capital, Bhubaneswar in late November where every morning I would wake up late but still manage to write a short poem while rushing on my way to work. Within two months I found myself loaded with responsibilities that made my shoulders bend. I would wake up as early as 6 in the morning, I would...