Post Number 23 : Grief in the Digital Age

In the last few days, grief and loss were a recurring theme in most of the things I read. I read Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, ‘When Breath Becomes Air’. Paul was a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with a life-threatening lung tumour which unfortunately claimed his life in 2015. His memoir shares his desire to leave behind a legacy, in the form of this book. The book deals with man’s never-ending quest to find purpose in life, particularly when faced with mortality. His wife, Lucy, shares how she struggles to make sense of her and her daughter’s life after this tragic setback. It was a sombre read and one that makes you realize how our perspectives and wishes change as we realize that the years we once thought we had, are now mere months or weeks. You can find more about this book here.

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Post Number 22 : Handling Hypocrisy

I recently wrote an article condemning the spate of memes that targeted people of a certain colour, body shape and race in the name of humour. I was heartened to know that a lot of people shared my opinion. In the coming days, I got absorbed in other events and soon put this issue on the backburner. One fine day, I was enjoying an old video of one of my all-time favourite comedians – the Late Ms. Joan Rivers. For those of you who aren’t aware of her comedic credentials, she was the first female to ever host a late night network television talk show and was awarded an Emmy for another of her talk shows. Her standard style involved her razor-sharp and acerbic wit and her ‘take no prisoners’ approach to comedy was undoubtedly controversial. There was nothing that was off-limits as long as it was funny and she was equally harsh on herself, often poking fun at her numerous plastic surgeries and her relationship with her daughter, Melissa Rivers. For those who got her humour, she was the funniest woman. For those who didn’t, she was an insensitive and callous person with absolute disregard for others.

Joan

Credits : buzzfeed.com

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Post Number 20 : The Long and Short of Micro-Fiction

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.”

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Post Number 19 : Deconstructing Pooja’s Dhinchakness

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

Dhinchak Pooja in one of her videos

 

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Post Number 18 : Tag every Rahul/Ankit/Sameer you know. They need to read this

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.

 

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Post Number 17 : Girls and Boys

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.

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Post Number 16 : Letter to a Younger Self

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.

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Post Number 15: Of Intent And Indulgence

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.

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