Let me tell you a story… Many years ago, at a time when the Maruti 800 was considered THE car to have, when all of Bangalore could be reached in 20 minutes or less, and the idea of ‘breweries’ wasn’t even around, at that time, my family had a house in what is now called […]
Last year, if it were a Sunday, you would have found me running 20 or 30 km. You would have then found me here, telling you about that experience. The crisp morning air, the air beneath my feet, the air in my lungs. Breath like air. Life like air. The feeling that for once, just […]
It’s early Sunday morning. One of our clients wants to “talk.” I am nervous. We had a bit of an uncomfortable discussion around payment on Friday. I call them. She picks up. “I want to say that we are truly sorry. We allowed our biases to creep in. We talk so much about biases, but […]
A few years ago, I had a book soulmate. I connected with this person in a way I never had with anyone else over books. Words. We wrote long emails over books. Read together. Mused over words. Fell in love with melancholy. The person wasn’t to stay in my life, however. She didn’t just carry […]
“How are you feeling today?” This is probably the most difficult question you can ask me. When I first started therapy about 1.5 years ago, my therapist would ask me this question first, and I would freeze. I didn’t know the ‘correct’ answer. Do you actually respond with what you feel? Because we have been […]
“I just want to be heard!” This is me during most of my therapy sessions. All my life, I have craved this feeling of being held in silence and understanding. My closest friend in life, Travelling Birdy, and I have a long friendship of almost 20 years. Like any other relationship, we have grown and […]
Many years ago, in 2016, I went on a solo trip to Japan. The country was everything I had imagined it to be – a bustle of contradictions and sweeping contrasts. It was also, expectedly, expensive. And being a vegetarian in Japan was even more expensive. There were two ways I could get vegetarian food […]
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? These last few days have been a cloud, a dank, damp, and heavy cloud. On such days, my workouts help. A fast run or a furious boxing workout. Reading can be a hit-and-miss – when your mind is saturated, it’s more challenging to focus on words and […]
I first heard of Ruth Ozeki’s masterpiece, ‘A Tale For The Time Being,’ a few years ago. It lay on my mind’s shelf, and although I had heard of it, I never came around to reading it. Until a few weeks ago, I was traversing books hungrily, flipping from one to another in a frenzy […]