Reflections of a restless eccentric

Sometime last month, I was going home from my lab late at night. I'd usually make a minute of small talk with whoever was at the security desk while I signed in or out everyday, and this happened that night as well. It was well past midnight, so the guard asked me how I'd go home at this hour. (With the current state of affairs in India, this seems like a reasonable question to ask a woman. Reasonable, but sad.) I reassured him that I stayed close by and that I'd be fine.  His next question took me by surprise. Do you have kids? I replied in the negative. His forehead crinkled, and his expression became gloomy. That's so sad. This is such a big sacrifice you're making to be here. Women always have it tough. He tutted in dismay. When I heard his response, my stream of thoughts went like this: Why is he sad that I don't have a kid? I am perfectly happy not having one. In fact, considering how much I have on my plate currently, I am extremely thankful that I don...

 I've had so many electrical issues in the past year that I've decided to give it its own series. These stories will be told from a strange mix of viewpoints--debugging and ranting. Take from it whatever you like. :) On Monday evening, I unlocked the door to my home with a feeling of trepidation. We'd gone away for the weekend, and I was going to be home alone this week. Added to that, given the history of snafus we've had, I didn't know what I'd be greeted by when I came home. My mind had conjured up all kinds of disasters, and I was bracing myself for the worst. But as I opened the door and stepped in, nothing seemed to be amiss. I wandered around all three rooms cautiously, looking for things gone awry. The light and fan in the bedroom were both on, and God knows how long they had been on. (For those uninitiated to my electrical woes- No, we had not left them on by mistake. This is an extremely sporadic and irreproducible bug in my house. Or maybe it's a ...

This has been lying in my drafts for a month now, and I decided to spruce it up and send it out into the world. Disclaimer: As I have said many times in the past, I am aware that I am quite privileged and that my problems are very first world ones. Yet, I choose to write about this for two reasons: Writing is my first and best coping mechanism, and it helps me deal with the several frustrations of adulthood that make me feel powerless. Second, it is a true and holistic picture of my life. To much of the outside world, my descriptors are superficial labels- student, wife, daughter. But to my Reader, I will be nothing but honest. I want you to know my eternal struggle to do justice to all of these roles, to see the constant juggling that sometimes leaves me drained. I want you to know that whatever you are going through, you're not alone. Close to midnight on a Sunday, you find me here, typing this out feverishly. What happened, you ask? I'm dying to tell you. Well, it started ou...

Warning: This is going to be a rant on several first world problems I'm grappling with. While I am aware of that, I feel overwhelmed and need to spout this out. It is a Sunday afternoon, and I feel frustrated. Frustrated because I haven't been able to get any work done all day, and now I'm listening to this annoyingly smug service person who has come to fix my washing machine. He tells me: No water should fall on these buttons, Ma'am. Obviously, if you let it get exposed to water, it'll stop working.   I feel like ripping my hair out in frustration: How is this a reasonable expectation for a washing machine? It's not like I poured a bucket of water on the panel. But when I'm taking wet clothes out, water drops are bound to fall on it. I try not to lose my temper as he patronizingly lectures me on rust and voltage fluctuations and other 'here-be-dragons' before he makes his pitch for buying AMC for the machine. He manages to contradict himself in eve...

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...

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on the said topics. However, my exposure, as limited as it is, has been sufficient to provoke my fury.  I have never been a very social person, and attending weddings was never on my list. That being said, it is that phase of life where every one of my friends seems to be getting married, and that has forced me to turn up to a multitude of such events. Most of the weddings I've attended have been South Indian, hence my chosen examples are from there too- however, I'm sure they are prevalent in other forms in other cultures across the country, and maybe even in some outside. Let's start with this ritual that's called Kashi Yatra. For the uninitiated, let me explain. Right before the wedding begins, the groom decides that he doesn't want to get married and would be better off going on a holy pilgrimage to Kashi and embracing sanyaas . He picks up an umbrella and other apparently necessary paraphernalia to commence this so calle...

Sometimes I think, I should have been that complacent ambitionless person who is content with everything life throws their way. Sadly or otherwise, I'm not that person. I have dreams-- giant dreams in vivid hue that fill my soul with fire every time I think of them. But I also bear the curse of many a millennial- procrastination. My dreams are always relegated to a mighty dusty shelf in time called "someday". I dream many dreams, and I know deep down that I can achieve them. I am good enough, strong enough and capable enough. At times, I even get to the stage of meticulous fine-grained planning that involves breaking down a top level goal into achievable smaller chunks. Till this point, I am perfection personified. And then comes the point where you actually pick up each one of those smaller chunks and execute them. Honest to God, till date, I have almost never done a decent job of that. I say almost because there have been some things I have completed, but never to ...

As always, I'm hoping to channel all that pent up frustration into some world-class humor and wit. Here goes:D  Since this is a personal account, I have to give the necessary background even if it be perfunctory.  I have never been a clotheshorse. My choice of clothing has always been decided primarily by comfort and secondarily by its ease of procurement(three cheers to online shopping!). Therefore, after those initial few skirmishes with tailors, I gave up on stitched clothes altogether. By the way, I'm not exaggerating when I say this. One of my first experiences goes thus:  There was a tailor to whom I gave a dress material and asked him to stitch a salwar. A chudidar/salwar is one of those Indian garments where you have a top half of clothing(kurta) and a bottom half(chudidar/salwar). S o the cloth for the top half had floral patterns, and the bottom half was entirely striped.  Now this bloke was extremely creative. So creative that I wouldn't be wron...

NB: I write this with the collective frustration of not days, not months, but proper integer years. Therefore, pardon me if the satire is a bit too much. I am only human! Today was one of those days where my journey was excruciatingly painful. I was initially planning on narrating that verbatim,but hey,who wants to hear me whining? Presumably no one, and therefore, I will choose a rather roundabout and hopefully humorous route of getting my point(and my frustration) across.:P Have you ever travelled by BMTC, Dear Reader? If not,consider this your formal initiation, and at that, by a veteran in the field. Let's get you started on a few basics first! Heard of Murphy? Back in the times when I was a pessimist, I used to treat his laws as my holy commandments. I suggest that you treat them the same way, at least for the period of your commute.Here we go: When you are waiting for a particular bus,you will see every other bus except that one. If you decide to travel to a differe...

NB: I apologize for the non-functional hyperlinks of articles over the weekend.I was tinkering with the code of some widget and foolishly tested just its functionality and not its impact on other previously working features. I believe the term for it is regression testing. Sorry about that:P This is the century of the internet, and the decade of social media. Sadly however, most people are still unable to function as sentient logical beings. They follow someone else's ideas; merely because the said someone already has a lot of "followers". Comfort in numbers as opposed to convictions. Whoever screams the loudest gets heard. Even if they don't make sense at all. In this day and age, one of the movements that is gaining increasing popularity and misguided momentum is that of feminism.I once used to call myself a feminist. But now, I shudder at all that the word has come to represent. Let's take a closer look. Every movement can be simplified into a policy and...