The Rebelle blog

It all began with a wedding. My friend was getting married in Kerala over a lavish 5-day ceremony last year in May. I had never been to Kerala and jumped the opportunity to attend the wedding. I bought a one-way ticket, to begin with. Little did I know that not only my stay at the wedding festivities make me fall in love with the places I was at but make me want to travel more. I met two friends of the groom who were from Poland and on their very first visit to Kerala. We decided to travel together on the train; I was going to Kochi, they were going to Allepey. We hit it off really well through the journey, talking about poetry and cities, movies, and music. Midway through the train travel when the Ticket Collector approached them, they decided to abandon their Allepey plan and join me in staying at Kochi and exploring the city. Thus, began the Kochi sojourn for three girls without a map, without an itinerary. We landed up at 3pm at Kochi and went for a stroll around 5. The evenin...

I am sitting by the window in this computer lab, at 10 in the morning. Certain things never change. We get enamored and distracted by life and its extravaganza. As I think about what to write here because I do have a lot of things to share, I am taken back to days of summer and winter holidays when the thoughts from my head would find an easy outlet here. I could hardly contain my typing speed as I juggled to put everything on this screen. Lately, especially more in this year I have begun feeling a sense of loss about a lot of things that I did casually with an ease, perhaps, it mirrors my anxiety of not doing things too well. It's a certain reminder that things happen for the best no matter how hard we try to keep things organized and sorted. I always look at things from a very wide perspective or so I believe, and yet today morning as I sit here, there's a feeling of dread which threatens to change me. Can we ever get ourselves to become what the images in our head keep proje...

A flute chimes an endless melody in the house as I open the door and step in, crossing the reflecting floor tiles with drapes around the window fluttering in a constant breeze on this summer day... And then I hear Doris Day's voice singing Que Sera Sera. Is this a wistful dream from stormy nights or my many thoughts that wrap themselves in music and summer light? The very first thoughts when I enter my house are of the light that streams through those windows next to our library. The books bathe in a shiny gleam of yellow and sombre tones warming my heart every moment I see them. There's a different emotion while penning thoughts about a heart song that lingers for a while, extending its stay for a long time far in the future. For a long time since acquiring a new phone, I did not have music in it. I would hum in my head while travelling with my head buried in books. And then one day, I heard a group of women sing some classics from my childhood in the train. It evoked nostal...

I watched a very insightful movie yesterday titled, People like us . While watching, it dawned upon me how we tend to run away from things when they seem to get a little complicated. Our best mechanism is holding still and then harbouring the hurt. What I most liked from the movie was never giving up this search for our true selves. If we think and believe in something that feels right to us morally, we should do it. And Family always accepts you, no matter what happens.  So there are these rules that an uncle tells his young nephew which were told to him by his now deceased father. I like the interpretation of them in the movie and definitely think they could help us cinema-goers too, outside the cinema house, in our lives. “The six rules of life. 1. Don't like something just because you think other people will like it, because they won't.  2. What you think is important isn't. What you think is unimportant is.  3. Lean into it.  4. Don't shit wh...

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...