The Rebelle blog

All my life, I've been terrified of water. Even on treks with waterfalls, while being under one I would feel that I would drown in that gushing water. After I moved to Delhi, one of the things that I steadfastly did was exercise daily in the mornings. One day I found myself wanting to explore swimming lessons and promptly located one quite near my locality. Yesterday was my first day at a swimming pool early in the morning at 5:45 and I was quite surprised to see lots of children at that hour. Quite nervous but with vigour I entered the pool and found myself struggling to float when the coach directed me to loosen my body and shake off my fear. With trepidation, I repeated what he asked me to do and in a couple of minutes was floating on water. That moment felt like the greatest conquest of my life. He then asked me to hold my breath under water which is what I have always been quite nervous about. I took a deep breath and went down the water and for a few microseconds, my life fel...

We fear Life. We fear Death. We fear Comfort. We fear Uncertainty. Why does fear form such an inherent part of our lives? We teach children to fear certain forces if they misbehave. We teach them to fear the dark. We teach them to fear ferocity. We end up teaching each other fear for the unknown. I fear failure. I fear to live in obscurity. I fear loss. Hard as much as I try, I am unsuccessful in controlling and confronting my fears. My imagination runs wild in conjuring the worst of situations and possible outcomes for things not in place, not yet existing. I fear my dreams too. They are ferocious and brutal sometimes, killing my spirits. I fear the time to come. I fear not being able to acknowledge my potential and capability to its fullest. And, I fear the sheer helplessness that makes me moan my anguish here.  Are we born this way? Is there a genetic factor that determines our fear scales? Why is it that nothing seems to be born out of fearlessness? We must ...

Snakes! I dreamt of snakes last night. One of the many incoherent dreams I have had recently. My hatred for gliding reptiles goes way back to my childhood when I remember seeing one of my Dad's relatives have a fit after being chased by a snake through cotton fields. He had almost died from the shock and poor man lived with mental imbalance for a few years. My Dad's mother used to jump and be afraid of Discovery TV channel each time us kids tuned in for watching shows like Deadliest Catch or Survivor man. She couldn't bear looking at snakes, tigers, lions- the fierce species. It didn't help that she had spent all her life in a farm house surrounded by tall crop fields. She was even wary of light. Darkness had been part of her most adult life. She found that change difficult to embrace. As a child, I remember seeing small field snakes during monsoons around the quiet bungalow we lived in, surrounded by a large plot of uncut wild grass and trees. The terrace provide...

My exams begin in about thirty days and this wait is terrifying. As the day approaches closer, my heart starts beating faster in anticipation of my performance. It should be better than the last. All this studying and reading and almost breaking my back over late night writing has to yield good results. My confidence wobbles on some days not because I am afraid but because I am terribly nervous of myself. Even as I am writing this, I feel butterflies in my stomach. A good friend once told me that a little nervousness is good. It ensures that we remain alert and not be too confident of everything. Not sure if it's a good thing to be both nervous and confident at the same time, I would rather be confident. This newness is scary. There are new feelings every time I begin something new and different, oblivious of what it shall lead to. I suppose it happens with everyone. We are all cut from the same cloth. I keep telling myself that every new challenge is to be accepted with a knight...

I don't know what made me come up with this title but there's something that's going on in the back of my mind that I haven't given enough thought. I read about being two people at once in our brain while we are really struggling to emote ourselves into the world to other people and perhaps, to ourselves too. I have been visiting a place that has a lot of full-length floor-to-ceiling mirrors and I think they are making me very conscious of the images that keep relayed on all walls because everywhere I look, I see myself looking back with different eyes. It's very creepy to feel my own eyes on myself through these mirrors. I don't know how and when mirrors became an integral part of our human existence since I cannot recollect what our ancestors did without mirrors back then. But then we forget that the standards of beauty were yet to be defined back then. This post is not about body images/ beauty/ physical perfection or the likes but more about delving into t...

क्या हुआ जो युग हमारे आगमन पर मौन? सूर्य की पहली किरण पहचानता है कौन? अर्थ कल लेंगे हमारे आज के संकेत।  #दुष्यन्तकुमार आज मुझे खामोशी की आवाज़ सुननी थी। मगर कही सुनाई नहीं दी। रोजमर्रा की जिंदगी में इतने सारे हादसे होते रहते है की उनका महत्व कम हो गया है। उन्हें बार बार दोहराने का कोई फायदा ही नहीं। पहले किसी दोस्त को मन की दुविधा कितनी आसानी से बता दिया करती थी मैं, आज उसी दोस्त को मेरी बातों का बोझ न लगे इसी विवंचना के कारण मैं खामोश हो जाती हूँ। कितनी अजीब बात है की हम में से कई लोगों को एहसास तक नहीं होता जिंदगी की इस टेढ़ी-मेढ़ी झंझटों का और यदि एहसास हो भी जायें तो उसमें से बाहर कैसे निकले ये एक नयी पहेली सामने आ खड़ी उठती है। कुछ साल पहले तक मुझे खुदसे बहुत शिकायत होती थी की मेरी जिंदगी किसी और की तरह क्यों नहीं है। जैसे मैं किसी और को अपने नजर से देखती थी तो उनकी जिंदगी मुझे बड़ी परिपूर्ण लगती थी और खुदकी बहुत कष्टप्राय। यह एहसास श्री. मुन्शी प्रेमचंदजी की कहानियाँ पढ़कर द्विगुणित हो जाता था। फिर धीरे- धीरे बात ऐसी समझ आयीं की ना ही किसी और के सुख से हमें अपने दुखों का क...

I wrote a short story and shared it with a friend for his reviews. Now, I am unable to improve upon on the suggested changes. I am stuck. I now understand what a writer's bloc is. It feels like I can't progress beyond what I had originally penned down. Sometimes, it becomes so important to change the course of things in our own way. My friend's suggestions are excellent and all are completely relevant, I still, however can't come to terms with an alternate solution for replacing situations in the story. Partly because, I was the character who lived through every word and moment of the story.  Suddenly it feels like I am being thwarted from my seat by a force that wants me to be more angry and powerful than I am in the story. My emotions need to be more raw and hard than I let them to be. It is difficult for me to transgress into an unknown territory of emotional upheavals particularly when I lived through the characters' persona. Nevertheless, I keep reminding...

During my childhood, exams didn't seem to make much of a difference. Now they do. Now each exam is a survival point. Firstly, the pressure of getting past through preliminary exams, then the main exams and the last interview part. I admit, I haven't dreaded exams as much as I did during Architecture school. It was horrible back then. April and May felt like the longest months. The juries were terrible. All of them. Always. Now, one reason could be because I deterred the evaluation system and the other was, the jurors never seemed to like the designs. No matter how good the concept or the rendering or the technical details like including ramps throughout the building spaces. I used to be really miffed with the jury members because it seemed pointless that they would only always appreciate great scale models and not the design. Of course, there are exceptions. I really admire my first year Architecture Design teacher who looked beyond presentation and into the actual designing d...