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....

My first post in March after such a lull and it has me ranting. I'm an Architect with no experience in Residential Architecture. So when we decided to remodel our house, I knew my parents would be looking for my inputs. I started by searching Home Designing websites and some blogs written by practising architects with more than 20 years of field experience. I have to say that redoing involves a lot of stress and lot of fact crunching. I have been looking at samples of flooring and wall tiles, kitchen designs and bathroom fittings and fixtures. All the building services lectures come back flitting to me. I was almost tempted to retrieve the building services drawing sheets and go over details. It's no wonder that building construction is in so much demand everywhere. Interior designing is way too overrated and over-hyped. I have witnessed as a layman prior to my architecture education, the enormous amount of treachery that goes with unassuming people who are conned by contract...

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 am writing this in response to a very fetching interview I read in one of my email subscriptions today. Just a few days ago, I was moaning about unread emails and yet in the past few days, I've been reading quite a few articles from a mammoth sea of subscriptions I was sure I wanted to unsubscribe. Sometimes, reading too much makes us lose interest in the actual things we ought to read. Like last week, a new friend asked me if I had read Virginia Woolf and how did I find her writing style. To her, Virginia was morose, depressed, boring and confusing. She said she gave up reading her in college. Now, it's completely subjective but I do firmly believe that our reading evolves over time as we grow, particularly more so in phases that we seem to be struggling with educating ourselves, polishing our understanding of the world and stocking up on our views, basically that we have no clue when we would be spouting. So it happens that in trying to cross check our political views wit...

I am embarking on a new journey this year. One that takes me through herbs, spices, lots of vegetables and images that satiate my thirst for something I have never attempted wholeheartedly or given any consideration previously. I am going to try my hand at Cooking. I hope I stick to this idea. Never been a big fan of food or kitchen antics despite seeing this passion in my mother and younger sister. Both of them go balsamic(intended with a pun) at the thought of creating new recipes. I have forever been the person who dives her nose deep into books especially when the ladies are on a cooking expedition. Lately though, I feel my senses are stimulating themselves to smells and fragrances drifting from above our kitchen. My Dad recently gifted my Mom a big, heavy set Julia Child-ish book of Indian Recipes. True to her passionate self, we have been eating wonderfully creative dinners and Sunday lunches for the past few weeks. I knew some of my mother's passion must have rubbed off on...