The Rebelle blog

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...

I have always given book recommendations to friends and cousins, even strangers I've met at bookstores or during train journeys who have approached me after seeing books in my hands. So, it's still always amazing when I hear my newly-acquainted-with-reading-and-loving-it friend to thank me and share her book buys via text messages. It gives me immense pleasure to go back into my memories and relive the happiness of our shared book reads.  Having spoken to a number of readers, mostly women, I have come to a conclusion that women tend to read more classics and go by reading lists recommended by book sharing websites than men do. It is slightly oddball that there is a category called Women's Fiction but none that is called Men's Fiction. I wonder why? Also, the fact that women tend to keep a track of other books mentioned in novels or generally note down a list of books in fiction and memoirs gives a perspective on the reading patterns of men and women. A few years a...

I was going through my diary entries from last year and found the following lines written on one of the pages. 'Summer days I remember The Sultry melanch' I don't quite recall now why I have left that word incomplete and where do these lines belong. I have never left anything unfinished and this is really a mystery to me. The first two entries on the diary page are lines from Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. It's quite strange to be honest. I have googled a very many combinations of these incomplete lines but nothing has turned up so far. I am not sure if this is a poem or a verse. Aah! I wish I could just go back to last year when i was writing it and finish the lines. I get quite restless if I can't decipher a puzzle. And this is nothing short of a mystery. I suppose its time hasn't come yet. Someday I will know what words come next to melancholy. Right now I feel what Virginia Woolf once felt. I wish it were possible. Things come to such a...

I am a crazy reader. Even while typing this sentence all that came to my mind were the book bags, book shelves and stacks perched on the sofa of the living room of my house. I am also a collector of antiquarian books. So I can't resist picking up two copies of the same book if they happen to be rare editions. Ever since I have known Ahalya, the librarian and bookstore owner of Trilogy I have been the happiest soul I was on the planet. This girl is exactly me. I saw myself in her. She is the mirror I must have been looking for. And, its no mean coincidence that our names take their form in an old Indian epic. That's particularly funny, even I think so. These days, Ahalya and me have started communicating through a messenger app and its such a boon. I continuously bombard Ahalya's phone with book cover jpegs and she enthusiastically responds over it. Initially I thought it would be an imposition on her. I lost that dreadful thought soon enough. Its an absolute bless...