The Rebelle blog

While synchronising a book catalogue application with Goodreads today, I realised the huge number of unread books I possess in my collection. Why I never got around to reading them or why I left them unfinished will truly take a large share of my memory to remember! Some days I feel the fire burned & extinguished out of me, while some days it is so fierce that I feel a strong unstoppable force within me. These moments of introspection come not without their terrifying implications on my psyche. Even the festive season is not uplifting my mood. There is just so much going around us at the moment. I am at a cross section of journeys that I feel too stifled to endeavour upon. One would think ageing gives us enough power to confront our demons and demolish them. Not always happening. I am reading a lot of diverse material from Gender Studies to Polity and Social Structure of Economies but it leaves a gaping hole each time I dwell upon this utilitarian arrangement we are part of, ...

I just returned from a weekend trip to a city I've been frequently travelling to in this year. This trip was special. It was a grand get-together of my extended family for celebrating my Grandpa's 75th birthday. The moment I entered the venue, I was greeted with the warmest hugs and affectionate smiles by my grandmothers, aunts and cousins I typically meet only during Diwali due to our hectic schedules now. The party venue was an air-conditioned banquet hall and I started feeling cold in the very first few minutes of being there when my grandma embraced me in her super warm and cosy arms. I instantly got transported back to my childhood. She is one of the nicest persons who also possesses a calm aura around herself that she radiates with a brilliant abundance. I took my grandpa's cold hands in my own and wished him a happy 75th. He immediately remarked how grown up I looked. I had to tell him it was because of my hair, all messy and tangled from the travel when he let out...

Dylan Thomas wrote this and I am merely reiterating his words. How difficult it has become to be gentle! Or must I put it this way, how difficult is it to be gentle? I write here thinking about how cruelty often marks our hold on compassion. I feel too terrible about unleashing my fury on an innocent person, somebody I care for and would not like to put down with meanness. I wish I could just turn skip that moment in time and then behave calmly as I usually do. I cannot bear this guilt. How many times have I acted like this? The more I think of it, the more it kills me. I ought to reprimand myself. Everyone is trying their best. We cannot fight our battles with someone else just because we are not done with fighting with ourselves. It indeed is very exasperating to carry such a burden in our hearts when we could be doing so much more with a clean conscience. The more I write here, calm washes ashore all over me. This has been a lesson. Sometimes in my overstretched reverie, I see...

One of my quieter friends, while on a trip to a beach standing on the ferry showed me some seagulls flying above the muddy waters. He said, look above you and stretch your vision as far as you may so that you remember this moment and me. I was so overwhelmed with the surroundings and his words, considering I was very young then, that I kept my eyes focused on the flying seagulls for a long time until our other friends dragged us out of the ferry. Such a sweet, passing moment but one that still finds me in the grip of memories till date whenever I think of that trip. My friend reiterated how he found melancholy in the flight of the seagulls and because I was a tad too softhearted back then I saw myself searching for the sorrow and misery of their flight. It didn't help that we both spoke about the passage of time and our tirade through the bouncing college life that we were supposed to leave in another year or two for our graduation. I kept the conversation in my head for a long t...

All my resistance to buying monsoon footwear landed me in a soup a few times in September. I ended up sitting through an entire day in wet sports shoes that made my skin itch horribly not to mention red rashes that made me throw away the shoes for good. So last Sunday upon my Mother's umpteenth persuasion to buy new shoes I landed up at a local shoe store to buy some workable comfortable monsoon footwear. I thought I was clear when I told the salesman to show me comfortable non-slid grip sole shoes or sandals when he kept showing me all the fancy strapped slick sandals that all the women were wearing and are popular in the market. Finally to get rid of all the glitter and strap, I chose ballerina flat sole shoes that I thought would be comfortable for walking and some running too. Imagine my horror when I wore the shoes for some 8 hours straight and nearly killed my feet from swelling. These are the worst kind of shoes designed for women-kind, I wonder why women tend to harm ...