The Rebelle blog

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way. So wrote Seamus Heaney. This sweltering heat is making me go nuts. I have just come back home today after yet another two days of continuous travelling to a city I love with all my heart except the heat makes me want to slither into a cool cave and wait there until summer ends. I have also been strongly fighting against the urge of not being able to churn out words lately. Seems like my brain has melted all the thinking nerves. Right now, the news on TV is running a reel on water shortage and drought in villages not far from Mumbai's peripheral areas. Water from rivers and dams located in these villages was supplied via pipelines to the Greater Mumbai and Thane suburbs. Now, the residents there travel for miles and often into other villages in search of a pot of water. Borewells and groundwater reserves have long depleted and the only visible proof of an existence of a river are the remnants o...

My Dad misplaced some medical records in our house and we spent pretty much the entire day looking for them. Almost searched every nook and crany of our newly renovated house. It has been a taxing day more so for me because I had been travelling for two days straight in one of my  most uncomfortable & harrowing train travels ever prior to landing up in this search mission. Now, I've caught an allergic cold from all the dust and still no success in locating the records. So, it has been a very unexpected gift only because I was proudly boasting last week about my immune system and how healthy I am while my family fell ill with allergic cold and from the heat. Life has a way of getting back at us. Is it Karma? Who knows? I certainly don't believe in it. May be, a tiny part of my brain dwells on it but never with full faith. Another unexpected gift has been the surprising retrieval of two design manuals I'd misplaced and thought lost. One of them is an Accessibility Desig...

Penguin publishers first came up with a set of 80 books in 2015. Then, they published more and now the boxed set of poetry/prose/short stories has gone to 120. Today, on Instagram, while admiring another fellow reader's Little Black Books (LBB) collection, I lamented how in Indian currency the box set is still expensive. She gave me this wonderful idea to ship it from Book Depository and I promptly looked up the website. To my utter disappointment, Indian Currency transactions don't exist. There's Indonesian Rupiah but not Rupee. I got so excited at the prospect of seeing an entire boxed set for affordable prices, and would have bought the entire set but alas! These are just some disappointing moments and yet there are far greater trivial issues we need to address. One of my closest friends is miserable and battling depression. She texted me about symptoms and the likely causes she's experiencing this. I hope to be able to help her out of this self-imposed misery....