The Rebelle blog

So much to write! After a very very long hiatus, I am writing here with an enthusiasm that I have forever felt for writing blogs. It's been over a week that I am unwell, down with cold and a bad coughing fit that seems to swell itself in my heart and then just drown me into an endless pool of misery. Even made me thought how I have aged in a week since being unwell. The reason why I took to writing today is quite simply this- the way we slog ourselves to death on the pretext of working, earning a living, precariously swivelling on a pendulum that compromises our health so that we earn monies, our bank accounts remain fat when we lose our health, mind and deteriorate mental peace. I, also, unfortunately fell prey to this vicious cycle and ended up losing control over my health, both mind and body.  Today, as I write this, while in my workplace where I am surrounded by colleagues who are laughing loudly, discussing a myriad affairs, I feel strangely comfortable in all of this. ...

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write. - Elie Wiesel. I read this and instantly my lack of writing here in February became clear to me. Incidentally, I lost a thought today and hard as much I try to remember it, I just can't. I am quite in a tumble over this. Where is it gone? Will I never be able to recall it again? One of the major culprits is this bad habit of thinking twenty different things that the mind conjures up at the most inopportune times. I am also amazed at the way systems function in our world. There are a hundred thoughts running through my head right now. I am at once thinking about work, people, life in a perspective and so many things I ought to do but I am not.  A few minutes ago, I was telling a young friend who will turn 25 in a few days about the vitality of our hearts and that old age grips those whose hearts become old. What does being old even mean anymore? It's just a time stamp on our existence. Pe...

I severely despise drama, melodrama, malaise of all kinds. And yet here I am spending an October Saturday in misery over the way people can't deal with their problems. Anger and Anxiety are going to be the death of this world. Just last night the news reported a survey of 31% officegoers suffering from office-related stress in my city. I actually feel that number is at least 91%! If only all of us learnt to live (and, lie alternately) in harmony and in unison, there would be no stress and participation in such grisly surveys. But, this is life and we are the saddest lot in it. Unfortunately, I am not in my very best spirits to write here, but in the hopes that writing shall cure me of my endless suffering, I unleash my fury at the world (and, myself!).  Just today morning, I told a friend that "all conditioned things are impermanent," and while it is true generally, today it doesn't feel so. Somehow, hatred and anger and vile things have become a permanence in o...

Doesn't that happen with all of us? At some point in our lives, there comes a moment when everything seems to dissipate into nothingness, without any meaning and further direction. There are these mocking days and then there are good ones! And sometimes there's a delightful feeling when one thing leads to another... Today evening, I immersed in one such serendipity. It started with Ezra Pound's poem that got me and an acquaintance talking for a long hour and then I got hooked further on Homer's Illiad, Garcia Lorca's verses, Blake's Songs of Innocence and the very surprisingly lyrical Anne Bronte. I have an utterly beautiful hardback copy of Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey, and I haven't read it yet. It sits on a low shelf in my drawing room surrounded by David Copperfield and The Yearling.  Anne Bronte truly took me by surprise. One of her poems, A Reminiscence tugged at my heartstrings. She died very young, aged 29. Somehow I feel a close bond with wri...

Some days the only text messages I receive on my phone are from the Zumba group I happily and dare say, religiously dance with five days a week. They are not even directed towards me, only some regular forwards, jokes, some promotional jewellery and meditation cum well-being workshop events. At times, I really detach myself from everything that goes around. DO we ever realise the information overload we are sending back into the universe every single minute, all of us 7 billion people? I may have expressed this thought here before and I am doing it yet again. A very random stranger who has become a familiar acquaintance on Instagram texted me the other day urging me to write a bestseller and that I am a genius. These words coming from someone who only knows me from some regular interaction virtually over books, photographs and rants, separated by a physical distance of thousands of miles and oceans between us, humbled me. Happiness comes unexpectedly. Her words made me happy, gave ...

Sometimes I’m afraid I’m happy, but because I expect it to be something else, I question the experience. So now, when in doubt, she shrugged with true bravado, I’ll assume I’m happy.     ― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge. Something happened and all the happiness and positive spirits I was feeling are drained now. Sometimes my mind scares me with the dire things it thinks. I cannot give up. I don't give up easily. I mustn't now too. It helps to ponder over things that trouble us over a span of couple of hours. A few hours earlier I felt extremely dejected at my failure of attaining something I was confident I had in my kitty. Then, I started talking to myself about the futility of unnecessary freaking over the unoccurred and voila! I feel fit as a fiddle, not drained emotionally nor depressed at all. This only makes my resolve to seek the higher transformative powers of creating change within myself and embracing it too more stronger than ever. It's true th...

पुस्तकांच्या आणि निसर्गाच्या साथीत जेवढा वेळ छान जातो आणि सार्थकी लागल्यासारखा वाटतो तितका खचितच कुठेतरी अन्यत्र वाटतो. नवीन वर्षात केलेल्या संकल्पांपैकी एक म्हणजे वाचलेल्या प्रत्येक पुस्तकावर स्वतःचं विवेचन लिहिणं. सुरुवात तर झाली आहे. साहित्य संमेलनाच्या निमित्ताने आणि वर्ष अखेरीच्या पार्श्वभूमीवर मुंबईतल्या बऱ्याच बुक स्टोर्सनी भर भक्कम डिसकाउंट जाहीर केला होता. मी देखील नाही नाही म्हणता लोभाला भुलून पार ATM मध्ये जाऊन पैसे काढून पुस्तकं खरेदी केलीत वर्षाच्या शेवटच्या दिवशी. टिव्ही वरच्या असंख्य कार्यक्रमांवर नजर फिरवल्यास असं चित्र दिसतं कि समाजाच्या नैतिक मूल्यांशी कार्यक्रम बनवणाऱ्यांच काहीच घेणं-देणं दिसत नाही. माणसांची पतच एवढी रसातळाला गेली आहे कि कपोलकल्पित आणि वास्तव जग यांची चांगलीच सरमिसळ आपण करून ठेवली आहे आणि त्यातून बाहेर पडण्याचे आपले काहीच मनसुबे वाटत नाही. आज सकाळी विचार करता करता माझ्या असं लक्षात आलं कि आपण किती उगाच खलबतं करतो, आपला दुरान्वये संबंध नसलेल्या गोष्टींबद्दल. काल रात्री जेवताना मी कुमार केतकरांचं "बदलते विश्व" हे साधारण दहा वर्षांपूर्व...

I have over a 1000 unread emails lying still since many months. Most of them are from various groups I've subscribed to on Design, World Affairs, Architecture and such. I don't feel like reading through all that information at all. I can't recollect when that started happening. Today, I miss doing the one thing I loved so ardently as a kid. I loved swimming. I would be stretched for hours in swimming pools. I don't remember when that passion dissolved too. Maybe it was after I left school. One of the fondest memories of my school picnics used to be swimming for hours when we visited Water Resorts. I clearly remember carrying two sets of spare clothes because I knew I could never get enough of water. I enjoyed the ache swimming caused in my arms and the sting on my skin post swim. It never deterred me from exploring speed and that cold rush I felt whenever I was in a pool.  I am reliving my swimming memories because suddenly I realised the unnatural fears I've ...

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...

Sometimes I feel like a lamb. Mostly, I try to be a lioness! This is so strange that we keep up pretences to convince ourselves and maybe, others too, that EVERYTHING IS ALRIGHT! But is it? What is it that makes us become these different individuals than who we really are? Because we are all searching ourselves in this big crowd of a world. A lot has happened in the past few weeks. I think I have just fallen in love with who I am as a person. Do I sound narcissistic? I mean, there are times when we don't like ourselves. I was probably dwelling on the same feelings. I no longer do. The events that changed this thinking are fairly normal, everything that happens with a regular person. I met new people because of work, got out of my shell, realised the love that lies outside in the world and here I am, all new and fresh as a dew! It's wonderful, like an elixir that's working on me right now. Good people always bring the best in us! I also saw a movie I had been told abou...

Something that I started a few days ago, well, actually more than a month ago, it no longer makes me happy. My interest has not totally subsided but I can't find the longing for it in the same intensity when I first started. And who can I put the blame for this? Me, of course, no one else. I don't feel like my former self any more. I don't wish to dwell in too much misery either but the drive to get things done and put my energies into it is increasingly missing. I feel like I am losing a substantial part of my persona which controls me and eggs me to do things. Not just do things, but be alive and active. That go-getter attitude is missing. And it is me alone who realises this, because for others my positive spirits are visible and even an inspiration but my inner me knows what is wrong. It's absurd at times when this realisation sets in that perhaps I am troubling myself unnecessarily, that it's all in my mind except it is not. What is happiness after all? I...

Does it ever happen that we completely run out of words to say or things to express? I have started thinking it has happened to me this month. April is Academia time and I've had hands full of academic work- exams, assignments, deadlines. My work got the better of my desire to write everyday or regularly at least. Now, April is ending and here I am looking towards the many possibilities and events that shaped the past few days. A very interesting conversation that came up between my parents and me last night was about living according to society's will and living on individual principles. While they said, that us humans must make compromises and settle so that we fit in the society we live, my mind was churning exactly different thoughts. One part of me was saying that we ought to mix in the society we live in and other said, we ought to also live on our terms & principles. Is that too much of a chaos to deal with? Why are we so tied with a society that doesn't be...

Four months into the year already. How quickly is time running by us! One moment it was the first day of a new year and the next, we are onto the beginning of summer. Each year, I go through the April anxiety I have lived for the past decade. It is a divider between my to-do things in year and the ones I've accomplished. Somehow, the first three months always are terrible. I go through a lot of disappointments till March. Probably it is because I am always unsure of what I am supposed to do and I cannot get out of the 'will fail' mindset. But then April arrives and everything turns over, takes a new leaf over my messed tree of thoughts. Something about time is so colloquially apt in our lives. Our race is not against time, but against ourselves. I don't hint to the past or the future but the present in which we struggle so hard to establish our existence on the timepiece. My Dad always said to me after I failed at something that there's always a next time . I ...

I am happy and I feel guilty about it. There's so much grief and sadness and tragedy taking place around us everyday and that makes me question if my happiness really deserves a mention here. Let me express it here though. I have exams coming up in the next ten days and I've been quite stressed over all the academic work. But I have found a great source to relieve all this stress. It's called Sketchbook Express. It is an Autodesk digital painting software. I have always been wary of using software. I love handmade stuff, designs, cards everything. I just took to using it and created something from my childhood. It's a very special dream sequence.  As a kid, I dreamt of oceans and undersea kingdoms a lot besides dreaming of aeroplanes and skies. So, here I was recreating my childhood fantasy world. I was a huge believer and admirer of Mermaids and Magic. Just the other day my younger sister asked me if I ever felt disappointed by the fact that magic was not real,...

I just came back from meeting a friend who is home on a holiday. I was excited about meeting her because she only flies down home once a year and her stay at home lasts exactly a week. So we met and got talking about life, hers and mine, and friends when I told her about my academic plans. Now I regret it. A casual interaction with her has left me feeling depressed about my choices in life. They might not have been as brilliant and bright like hers but they have been my own. I take full responsibility for my life's decisions and how I have handled different things to come so far. It hurt to feel so demeaned by someone I once looked up to. So, while walking back home I kept thinking of ways one could be happy or at least pretend to be to avoid some embarrassment in public or with friends and family. Since I am no Mr. Bean, this post does not display any humour and perhaps the seriousness might not get down well with everyone reading the post. I go ahead with these TEN WAYS ...