Reflections of a restless eccentric

The people we trust in tough times are perhaps the ones who are closest to us. While we are very comfortable sharing our happy moments with a larger audience, the same cannot be said for difficult experiences. Being vulnerable with someone involves a great deal of trust and comfort. I'd always wondered how arranged marriage would be in this aspect. Somehow I'd imagined that we'd be comfortable around each other for the most part, but also that we'd be awkwardly hobbling around the boundaries of what we could share and what we couldn't, at least in the initial years of marriage. However, I was wrong, as I have been about many things regarding marriage—we instinctively trusted each other about almost everything, and that included sickness. This post is about a few pivotal experiences that revealed to me that my husband was not a fair weather person. The incidents that made me realise he would always be around for me, even in my tough times, in fact, especially for th...

Foreword: Human recall of episodic memories is seldom entirely accurate, in fact, it is anything but that. I've written about this previously, in my article The Tapestry of a Memory . Therefore, this is merely my recollection of past events rewoven by my brain to form what it thinks is reality, and my narrative will definitely be subject to positivity bias.That said, I will try to give a balanced picture. It's been a whole year since I got married! This post series is going to contain a selected set of memories from my married life, sampled from various points across 2018-2019. Instead of writing this up as one long article, I'm planning to write around half a dozen short drabbles each focusing on a set of incidents around a central theme, not necessarily chronological. When I was looking to get married, I was scared of love--more accurately, scared of being blinded by love. I wanted an arranged marriage because I wanted to make the decision to marry objectively and no...

I will take a couple of incidents from my life to start off this article. I got married last year, and all of the occasions involved wearing accessories, amidst which were chunky ethnic earrings. When I tried wearing these, I discovered that the stem of almost all of these earrings were thick, and the piercings on my earlobes were tiny in comparison. As a result, it was a struggle to wear them, one I hadn't anticipated or planned for. My ears would bleed every time I wore a earring, and not figuratively. The pain was really bad, and my ears were terribly bruised by the third consecutive day of this ordeal. But that's not the point. The point was how normal this was for everyone. The makeup people who were there to help clucked sympathetically that it would hurt, and then pressed the earring into my ear anyway.The memory of this just makes me shudder! Another one from the wedding-- the parlor. I found the waxing extremely painful, and really regretted having signed up for i...

This article and the next tread the fine line between the notions of beauty and normalization of pain for women. While they are essentially separate issues, recent incidents have made me want to write specifically about their intersection. This post primarily focuses on society's notions of beauty. The beauty industry has always baffled me-- it seems to thrive on people's insecurities and imperfections. A woman can relate very easily to this, but I will elaborate for the sake of anyone who is unfamiliar with the routine. Have you ever stepped into a store that sells cosmetics or beauty products? It feels like being in a battlefield  but bereft of your armor and shield. Many salespeople spare no effort in telling you all about how bad your skin or hair is in great detail, and how they have the perfect solution for it. They do this even if you're merely tagging along with someone else looking for something, as I've been many a time. I appreciate their eagerness to ma...

Obscure sorrows is by far the most challenging series for me as a writer, because the videos and lyrics are literally perfect. It is really hard for me to just retell this from a fresh perspective, let alone improve upon its content. But what is life without challenges?:) This article is dedicated to a very special friend, who I have been inviting as a guest writer on my blog for some time now. This person has a very powerful voice, one that the world needs to hear, and I hope I can soon get that to happen! :) Lutalica - The part of your identity that doesn't fit into categories Growing up, I wanted to invisible. I wanted to be nondescript. I would shy away from anything that brought attention on me-- photographs, public speaking and even just hanging out with a large group. All of this would make me feel vulnerable. It is also one of the reasons I have struggled with publishing my writing--I felt far too vulnerable speaking my mind to the world at large. For years, I kept my...

Sometimes I drift off into imaginary worlds. While I inhabit those, I breathe the air of books and drink the elixir of music. My brain might be one of an engineer, but my soul is that of an artist. I am a connoisseur of words, a patron of music. These are my first loves, and they will remain my last ones too. But weirdly enough, the two never converge - when I try to write about music, I fall short of words. I am loathe to give up though, and in this post I shall try to express a handful of the most powerful musical experiences in my life. (My previous post on music-  The colors of music ) The very beginning . As a toddler, I used to be very restless. I had a mercurial temper, and my parents would struggle to calm me down. They'd joke about my name : We named you serenity, but the opposite would be more appropriate. One time when I was angry, my mom turned on the tape recorder, and the first wave of quintessential Carnatic music hit me. My parents say that it tamed me. That I s...

I will attempt something different today, something I haven't done in a while-- a funny post drawn from my experiences. I do have several serious posts looming at the back of my mind, but I have been largely uninspired of late- maybe I need to break the monotony by writing something humorous for a change. A post that's less about good writing and more about the narration of an incident. I miss those days when I used to chronicle my hilarious college experiences. :)Remember these?  College drabbles   Just reading these makes me feel so nostalgic and ancient. Sigh. In February of 2019, I moved into an apartment which had 8 blocks of 19 floors each. I'd lived in a house all my life, and suddenly I found myself in this bewildering maze of concrete.(Remind me to tell you the story of the basement sometime, that's a funny one too!) I'd always had plants and trees around me, and I missed having something green around. I was also a little homesick. Balcony to the rescu...