If you don’t know where you’re going, any road would lead you there. – Lewis Carroll
Courtesy – Martin Liebermann (c) martin-liebermann.de
Ironically, I just heard it from a girl in a movie where she devotes her everything to her ambition of becoming an Olympic long distance runner.
In my constant quest to discover new pages and reading material to follow online, I stumbled across the page of Akshay Dalvi. Akshay maintains a page on Facebook called ‘Words of Akshay’ which deals with micro-fiction. With over 96000 people following the page, I was certainly intrigued. I approached Akshay for his opinion on micro-fiction. He was kind enough to respond. Reflecting on his success, Akshay shared,”I tried writing micro-fiction 2-3 years back but I did not get the attention I wanted. Nevertheless, I carried on with my blogs, poetry and short stories. Upon my father’s passing, I started expressing my emotions via short stories. I started getting positive reactions. Within 3 months, my page went from 3000 followers to 96000+ followers.”
After the roaring success of her previous singles ‘Swag Wali Topi’ and ‘Daaru Daaru Daaru’ (sigh) ,Dhinchak Pooja has been kind enough to grace all ‘Dhinchakians’ ( a term that she has coined for her followers) with her latest artistic endeavour ‘Selfie Maine Leli Aaj’. The video on her YouTube channel, which has 70,000+ followers, has well over 11 million views. It doesn’t surprise me that the comment section has been disabled. I doubt it has anyone recommending her a good voice coach or lessons on songwriting. Nonetheless, 11 million views is no joke and it makes me wonder about two things – A. What’s so Dhinchak about Pooja? B. Why does everyone love to hate her?
Dhinchak Pooja in one of her videos
In what has become one of the most baffling trends to have taken over Facebook in recent times- the offensive, unfunny, insensitive and downright nasty memes asking people to tag Rahuls/Ankits/Sameers et al in posts carrying pictures of women who don’t fit the ideal image of perhaps a Photoshopped model on Vogue, has left not just myself, but many with a bitter taste. One cursory glance through the comment section of these posts is enough to make you question the value system of people who are actively engaging in these memes. What’s even worse is that many don’t even grasp why jokes like these are extremely deleterious.
I am walking to my class, when I hear someone shout from above, “Topi Wali! (The one with the cap) I love you!” It didn’t take me a second to recognise it as a man leering from inside the police custody bus, coming back from the Court nearby. It was quite unsettling, more so because of the uncomfortable proximity I was forced into with the bus. Standard, crowded Indian road conditions applied there. Mercifully, I was getting late for a class and it left me little time to think about anything else other than hurrying. And hurry I did, with as much false bravado as possible.
Dear Chaitanya circa 2014,
It’s 22 March today and you’ve just walked out of your Computer Science board examination. You know it pretty well that you aced it. Your friends share your expression of relief at having just written their last board exam. All this while, it was hyped up to be this Herculean task that only gladiators survived through, but now that you have experienced it for yourself, you realize it was more of a test of your temperament rather than your knowledge. Congratulations, this is one of the biggest Eureka moments you will have in the upcoming years. Henceforth, most of the tests you will encounter whether of an academic or of a personal nature will test more of your attitude and disposition rather than your factual ability to decompress it and deduce a solution.
For the third week running, I woke up at Wednesday at 10:30 AM, precisely 90 minutes late for college. With 2 lectures already missed (unintentionally, I may add), I forced myself to get out of bed in order to make it to the rest of them in time. After applying the relevant mathematical theorems and lemmas into the Equation of Attendance by factoring the constant of laziness and the proportionality of boredom of lectures, I decided to finally go…… back to bed.
Three days a week, I reluctantly lift my butt off to go for music classes. It doesn’t matter that I like attending the classes. It still doesn’t make it easy to change into some respectable clothes, brush my hair and exchange the comfy slippers for sneakers.
Recently, I was recommended a movie, ‘The Intern’ by my friends. Truth be told, the recommendation was given a long time ago, but I got around to watching it quite late. The Intern, if you haven’t seen, (SPOILER ALERT) is a heart-warming and easy going story centred around a widower retiree (played by Robert DeNiro) who joins a ‘Senior Citizens’ Internship’ at an up and coming fashion start-up run by Anne Hathaway. The movie focuses on the friendship that these unlikely characters end up forming. Starting skeptically, DeNiro eventually finds a place for himself within the organization by assisting Anne in various ways. Their bond strengthens and Anne ends up finding a confidant in DeNiro. With no major ups and downs and a simple narrative arc, the movie ends, leaving a smile on your face. What’s the trouble then?
In 1954, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to treat the ever increasing menace of Poliomyelitis. In 1955 the first human cells were successfully cloned. Within years, the discovery of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was linked to the occurrence of cervical cancer in women. On surface, these remarkable medical accomplishments seem totally unrelated. But as you may have guessed, there is indeed a correlation between them, and it is one that rarely gets the credit it deserves. All these accomplishments were a consequence of medical testing done on the tumour cells of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were the first ‘immortal’ line of cells.
Candid Wallflowers 