AnythingUnderTheSun

Dear Brain,  This is the very first time we're having this formal conversation. I am bad at understanding abstract concepts, and a letter from the heart to the brain sounds like the mothership of abstractness. Am I writing to you or is it you tricking me into thinking that I have the controls? Whatever it is, you are pretty awesome. ( Now that should clearly give an indication of who's in control) I don't remember having too many major conflicts with you, that probably is also you're doing. Who knows what you've locked behind those shut doors. Now that I concentrate enough I can remember a few. But I also know that you have my best interests. Maybe we should do this more often and then we'll have more to talk. Love Heart PS: This activity was part of the expressive writing workshop.

A picture can be a photo on your desk, a painting on your wall or maybe a movie to watch with friends. It can also be an image or an impression drawn with inks in our head. A picture can evoke emotions or stir memories, remind you of ones you longer know. It can be a time capsule of an era bygone or just a few moments ago. A picture my dear friends speaks a thousand words and still some more. This otherwise nondescript wall seems to convey the world of opposites as we know them - the dilapidated and the new! Photo: Streets of Udaipur #latergram #udaipur #Rajasthan #streetsofindia #_soi #travelgram #instatravel #travel #india #indiatravel #incredibleindia #streets #old #new #igers_india #ig_India #ig_indiashots #igers #igersrajasthan #travelstoke #travelling #nikon #nikonp610 #nikonphotography #HaveFeetWillTravel A photo posted by Elita (@nomadicthunker) on Sep 13, 2015 at 10:32am PDT At the Expressive Writing workshop, we were each handed out a pic and were ask

A week ago, a friend asked me if I wanted to attend a workshop on writing and I agreed. Yeap, I am that adventurous; no details required, just sign me up! The way I look at it is, at least I get to meet some new people. Win win for me as I also get to wear some nice clothes (something apart from my usual all day bedtime clothing). Soon details started trickling in. The 1st shocker was it's not creative writing! What the fish, that's the only type I have heard of. But then the name expressive writing sounded so promising and intense. Isn't most of what we write an expression of us in that moment, even if it's in the form of OMGs or the dancing ladies. Normally I would have googled the hell out of this, but not this week. I'm happy that I didn't. Sometimes it's good to go in all blind. Without expectations it's easier not to be disappointed. After all the workshop was on a Saturday afternoon for 6hours! I would be lying if I said the 6 hours flew by

Great news people, US Elections 2016 is finally over. In not so great news Trump won and if you happen to have friends and family in US, I say good luck to you. If you haven't encountered the "scary times" narrative, you indeed have a set of very brave friends and family, or maybe just realistic people. I am a woman, hence most of my friends tend to belong to the same gender. And some of these friends seem to be echoing the same thought that Hillary lost because she was a woman. In their words, if Hillary were a man, her mistakes (Email Scam & Benghazi) wouldn't have mattered that much. When questioned on corruption (mishandling of funds, shady primary win), I get a very cool response all politicians are corrupt and a women needs to be even more cut throat. And at that very moment my world starts spinning around me, and I want to start breathing out fire. As you can see I am not a fire breathing dragon, I resort to punching keys vigorously. Since this angry s

The French have now taken it upon themselves to free Muslim women in France of the oppressive, regressive burqa, in all it's forms. Yay, for France, hope that doesn't blow up in their faces (quite literally). On a scale of 1 to 10, burqa for me ranks at a -100. More than anything else, the colour just baffles me. Islam has it's roots in one of the hottest regions on this world. Who in their right mind made a clothing decision like this in the desert? I understand ladies black is flattering and all. But seriously, black? It's a stupid colour for the desert for two reasons. The first and very obvious one, it would just make the woman hotter, and second, the dark colour against sand would make it look dirty all the time. Look at the men in their breezy white dishdashas. Now that my ladies, is desert/ sun appropriate. Freedom is all about having a choice. Let's start with the bikini first. Can, I not shave/wax my legs,arms, underarms, bikini lines and still wear a bikin

Everytime I log onto Social Media, a Taylor Swift's song, where she rightly says "haters gonna hate hate hate", starts playing in my head. Going by the way people interact with each other over these platforms, I wonder how we haven't ripped off each other's heads yet. Every nook and corner of SM/ Internet is filled with these hateful exchanges. The cause varies but the abuse remains constant. It could be Republicans vs Democrats, INC/AAP vs BJP, Taylor vs Katy or SRK vs Salman, even something as silly as Gulab Jamun vs Rasgulla (Not that the other reasons are any better). Eventually it boils down to hurling obscenities. Contrary to popular belief, I think, everyone is targeted equally, men/women, old/young, white/black/brown alike. It might seem like celebrities are targeted more, but then their visibility and reach is also much higher. Are we born haters? Or is it that this smaller chunk of the population makes the loudest noise? Or the anonymity of this platform

I created my Facebook account more than 10 yrs back. It was exciting as hell! I could connect with my old classmates. Snoop around. Later, it would even suggest if I knew this person with whom I shared common friends. Eventually, the family would join in and it was great at first to poke them, share old pics and in general just stay in touch. Now, one could tag friends in a pic instead of sharing a boring Picasa/Yahoo link. Just like the internet, Facebook was soon taken over by cat & dog videos. If FarmVille requests didn't annoy you, CandyCrush was waiting right around the corner. Then came the checking into places, posting food pics. Soon people started posting about their runs/cycles/marathon achievements. Like that just wasn't enough, people started dishing out pics in exotic locations with their perfect love/family in their ever so perfect life. Never ending eulogies for loved ones (the one's still alive and kicking) is all the rage now. I thought this would be

Pick up any packaged good, chances are there's a warning label printed on it. Some might warn you not to wash another fellow human in the washing machine, while some might warn you not to pull that plastic wrap over your head. Warnings are all around us. There's a warning message played right before a movie is screened. We have debates over if cigarette makers warn their users sufficiently. We want our food to be labelled for any GMOs. Heck we are even warned about wet floors. Inspite of our love for disclaimers and warnings, we have none for the heavily photoshopped images we are subjected to in our daily lives. I'm not going to rant about how women are subjected to unrealistic beauty standards. Looks like men are also catching up on this fad. I don't mind the mindless photoshopping.  I do love pretty pictures just as much as I love disney princesses. What I would really want is for them to release the untouched image as a testament to their talent. As readers

Another day, another shooting in US. This time it wasn't a crazy white man. This time it was a second generation immigrant from Afghanistan. He also happened to have pledged allegiance to ISIS right before the attack. Politically correct people are calling him self radicalised. Sounds similar to spontaneous combustion. It is believed he attacked the club because it was a LGBT club.  Religious fanatics term homosexuality as unnatural. The only thing unnatural about the lives of the people who died in that club, was not their sexual orientation, but that their parents will have to bury/cremate them. No parent should have to face that. A mad man, religion and gun - The UnHoly Trinity.   Was it the man that killed these people, or the religion that made him hate this community or the easily obtainable gun that ripped through the living in a flash. A Mad Man & Religion Who can say if the religion fed the madness or the mad man found the crazy in the religion. One thing is

One upon a time, not long long ago, being average was not a crime. In fact, it was encouraged. Once in a blue moon you would be exposed to how exceptionally well X's son/daughter was doing. It was just about OK to get decent grades, do decently well in college, get a comfortable job, get married and the inevitable have kids. Such a blissful world, the only world that you could see was till how far you could actually see. Your gaze might have ordinarily stopped at the toys your neighbour had and that probably was the only source of your envy. It's 2016, and now you can see as far/long as you are willing to search the internet. Youtube is crowded with these kids(?I guess I can call them that) running successful youtube channels. Some of them well they are just talking/logging their mundane life! The internet is bubbling with people doing exceptional, unorthodox things. They don't make movies about the girl next door, unless she also happens to have over a million followers

Like clockwork, FOE comes back in news every 2-3 months. It's not surprising it comes up this often in this age, where every second person is a blogger (ahem) expressing their views freely to be intercepted by hopefully one or 2 people if he/she is lucky or has any friends. Jokes apart, with millions of people active on social networks it is hard to say something stupid and get away with it. Internet always remembers, but tends to have a short attention span also. A few days back, Tanmay Bhat from AIB made a snapchat video swapping Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin's face. The kind of thing 2 year olds find funny. But then apparently he said some uncool stuff. I haven't watched the video, neither do I intend to. Don't enjoy his kind of humour. Coming back to the video, people were obviously offended about the mockery of their idols. I hate Twitter on such days, everyone is outraging over the same thing (for or against). Just no escaping it. I understand FOE comes bundled w

When I was 6/7, I was gifted a baby green (yes that's what I think it should be called) coloured hair clip, It was beautiful and had a pearl or two. It was a prized possession. It was beautiful, but that's not what made it so special. My neighbour aunty had got it for me from her foreign trip and hence my love for it. The behaviour continued with Taiwan returned water colour pencils, a T from US. That was the 90s (oops did I just give away my age), when Steadler pencils were sort of a novelty in India. It's 2016 and we do get a lot more products in India. Yeap, unfortunately that also means one can't just gift those Snickers, Mars pack from their US trip anymore. (Remember the Akai TV ad) That doesn't mean our fascination with all things phoren has ended. I don't get to watch a lot of TV ads since I prefer to waste my time binge watching recorded shows. But every now and then you see these ads of Indian products targeted for Indian junta but with white men/w

Have you ever come across articles/blogs with convenient generalisations? They annoy me and bug me. How can whatever you have to say broadly apply to I don't know over hundreds of thousands of people? Even polls aren't reliable, how can what you say is? Our sample space, is so limited by our reach that it is impossible to generalise.  Take for example, a friend of mine tells me that her help back home is voting for Modi (true story back in 2014, when Indian elections were a hot topic). Now do you think it is right for me to extrapolate the hell out of this and say well people of all strata want to vote for Modi. That is because, I ( middle strata), another rich friend of min (supposedly higher strata) and a friend's maid(lower strata) supports him? It did turn out to be correct, a stopped clock also tells you the right time twice in a day! Recently a guy wrote an article about Indian urban elite (sorry not linking it here). The gist of the article was, we (urban

कर्म करते चलो, फल की चिंता मत करो। I am pretty certain most of us would have heard this quote from Geeta. Lord Krishna advises us to keep working without focusing on the fruits of labour in terms of success or failure. Our governments over the years have lived by this mantra. The mantra is only applicable to the foolish working class. Keep working, keep paying taxes & don't expect any kind of social security, welfare, healthcare in return. Heck don't even expect good roads. For good roads aka national/state highways we'll add a toll tax . We also collect road tax when you buy a vehicle, but roads & parking is none of our business. Also, please pay a professional tax for the municipality separately. When you're done with that, we'll need you to pay an education cess , and no you're kids will never benefit from this. But yeah sure, we are building fantastic government schools with state of the art non existent toilets for girls with this cess. Also,

Needless to say we all love the internet. Smartphones, super fast download speeds, they have all made us & internet inseparable lovers. We need to see each other as soon as we open our eyes, glancing wantingly throughout the day at work, can't wait to get our hands on it once home. Internet has freed us in ways we cannot even count or comprehend. It gives anonymity to those who want it and fame to those who can get it. Its miracles are abundant. Naturally, such a wonderful  tool  platform deserves to be free & open for all. There's plenty been written about Net Neutrality, I find myself standing on the other side of the line. Obviously I wouldn't want my ISPs to censor/throttle any websites, but on the other hand I think it would be nice if I could pick & pay a few extra bucks for Netflix. Don't we all pay for specific TV channels already? HBO should be made free I say. The obvious downfall could be I, in all likelihood, would be throttling my po

One might not have heard of a temple called Shani Shingnapur before a group of women activist decided they wanted to enter the temple. There isn't really a ban on the entry of women in the temple (unlike Sabrimala), the ban/prohibition is for touching or offering oil to the deity. This hardly should be news. There might be 100s of temples where women are prohibited to enter where the idol is or to touch it. So my very first reaction to this was, a big SO WHAT? This is what years and years of conditioning does to you. As a woman/girl, you so often hear these words:"You can't do this", that I have probably become immune to the ones that seem frivolous to me. Yes I'm not a big worshipper. So what is the big deal here? Hinduism is really big on idol worship, if you hadn't noticed. An idol to us is a form of God, and hence the need to keep it "pure". Temple which have these bans, cite menstruation as the cause. Women are considered impure during their