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Featured Posts of 2019

Amma: Celebrating an invincible spirit

 The past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. I've been navigating a demanding PhD program with an entire universe of ups and downs, watching my dad go through a stroke, sink into being paralyzed and bedridden, and then inhabit the universe of chronic pain and illness. Last year, my grandfather joined him in the chronically ill world, and I look back and see a blur of health scares, hospital admissions and grief. My parental home resembled a hospital, with sick people (two) outnumbering the healthy (one), and my Mom as the primary caregiver to both her husband and her father. We lost my grandfather a few months ago, and now my father seems to be teetering on the edge of sanity. I won't even get into all the other things that have been going on in the family. This alone is enough to shake and uproot a person and drive them insane. If I am here today, still continuing my PhD and holding on to my sanity and health, I have primarily one person to thank. My am

Rising from the ashes: Breathe in, breathe out

Over these past three years, anxiousness has been my almost constant but unacknowledged companion. It never felt too severe to hamper my functioning, and I always brushed it off. It's been a stressful week. Maybe I've had too much caffeine, it's just jitters. I have had too little sleep for a while now, my nervous system is shot. Given my schedule and life, all these are very plausible and likely explanations for how I felt. And so, I continued on, finding coping mechanisms to deal with the bad days - no caffeine, meditation and breathing exercises, long walks.  A few months back, in May, I was preparing to leave for a summer in Amherst. This would be my first time living alone abroad for a few months, and I was definitely nervous about it. My husband had to travel ahead of me, which meant that I also had the responsibility of cleaning and winding up the house before I left. Added to this, I had a paper deadline a few hours before I left, which meant I would get little to n

Rising from the ashes: One step forward, one step back

 Grief is a very non-linear journey, and I have known this for a very long time. Yet, each time I inhabit one of those black holes of loss, sorrow, worry and gloom, I forget this fact. Today is one such day, and I am writing this to remind myself and anyone else who may need this.  I woke up today, feeling an intense sorrow. It took me completely by surprise, because nothing had "happened". I'd gone to bed last night feeling pretty normal, and yet I woke up feeling utterly sad. I racked my brain. Did I eat too much sugar? Was I having a delayed reaction to something that happened a while ago? I couldn't find a logical reason for my sadness, except that everything that had been going on suddenly added up and descended upon me today. I sighed and sat down. I thought about my grandfather's death, my dad's continued illness for almost three years now, and so many other tragedies before that. The tears started rolling down.  This has been a very familiar experience

Thatha: In fond memory of a doting grandfather

 I am woken up at 4.25am by a phone call. Initially, I think that it is someone from India who is not aware that I'm in a different timezone. I groggily take a look at my phone. It is my husband. My heart skips a beat because I know too well what it likely means when a loved one calls you in the wee hours of the morning. He says Thatha is no more. I'm driving over to your parents' . I am numb, still waking up, and only shock registers. So many questions come to mind. When? How? Why? The answers reach me from a distance. He passed away in his sleep in the morning. Around 11am. And thus begins the horror of losing another loved one. The last grandparent I had. The one I knew the most. And the one I shared a house with for more than 20 years. And then the aftershocks hit me. I am continents away, and the logistical issues in traveling back home are too many. I will not go, and I will never get to see him again. I will never get to say goodbye. And so, I turn to writing, hopin

Miles and smiles: Musings on half a decade of married life

 This is a rather late post (my 5th wedding anniversary was on Feb 7), but better late than never, right? I write this as I reflect on the past five years and how my marriage has evolved over this period. There was so much that I could talk about, and I wasn't sure what to focus on. So I asked myself this: What is the most important and meaningful thing that marriage has given me? And to my surprise, the answer was this. Me. More precisely, a new and improved me. Before you conclude that I've lost my marbles, let me explain. 6 years ago, in 2018, I was just finishing my Masters and starting a new job. It was then that I met my to-be husband. In our very first meeting, I felt that he was a very cheerful, positive and grounding presence. As someone who was very influenced by the energy of people around me, I realized that it was very important to surround myself with uplifting people. And so, I went with my instincts and decided that he was exactly what I needed in a partner. Six

Home away from home: Feathered friends

 For more than 2.5 decades, I have been an animal lover. I find joy in being around animals and watching their behavior. Strangely, my interest never included birds, and I never wondered why. In 2020, my husband bought a camera with 100x zoom, and I felt like this new world of birds opened up to me. It was then that I came to this startling realization - I hadn't been interested in birds because I had never been able to see them clearly. Thanks to my short-sighted vision, I had always seen them as tiny dots in the sky. Other than a crow, pigeon and sparrow, I hadn't seen any birds at close quarters, clearly enough to see their features and identify them. But now, all that had changed. I saw colorful kingfishers, vibrant parrots, an alert owl and so much more.  My husband became an avid bird enthusiast, and I initially just tagged along as company, but later genuinely developed an interest in them. I became good at spotting birds, and the number of birds I could identify went up

Home away from home: Chasing the sun

Many of my friends who moved abroad have told me how much they missed the sun. I have empathized with them, but never fully understood what they meant. When I decided to go to Massachusetts for an internship, I said a prayer of thanks that it would be during summer. I love the sun and bright sunny days. What I did not know, and naively did not look into, was that summer came with abundant rain in Amherst. So I packed my summer clothes, leaving most of my rainy and winter clothes at home. The first day I came to Amherst was a cold, rainy afternoon. The skies were dark, and a cold wind threatened to freeze my limbs. My poor fragile umbrella struggled to hold up. It rained incessantly all afternoon and evening, and a feeling of gloom and foreboding set in. Was this how my summer was going to be!? The next day dawned bright and sunny though, and I once again felt cheered up and uplifted. The very next day, as I was walking to work, the skies suddenly opened up without warning, drenching me