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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Post Number 13 : Comprehending Cynicism

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?

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Post Number 12 : The Price of Immortality

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.

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Post Number 10 : We are all running. (But do we know why?)

I sit in front of my laptop screen on a fine Sunday evening, too lazy to study something with utmost concentration and too active to simply lie down and take a nap, hence, prone to one of my periodic bouts of overthinking. And with the backdrop of internship and placement season going on in the college campus, there is one overriding sentiment I am nursing currently. ‘Why isn’t the prospect of getting/not getting an internship not affecting me as much as it is affecting my peers?’

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Post Number 9 : The dynamics of online debating. (And why I hesitate to participate sometimes)

On the internet, I rarely engage in social/political/religious discussions. That’s not for a lack of opinion. On the contrary, I am constantly reading up on various issues plaguing the world. Recently, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in social and political developments, developments that have reverberated around the globe, affecting most of us via the ripple effect of globalization. Naturally, people want to discuss and deliberate over the nuances of what is going on. So far, so good. The trouble is, the nuances of the nuances are privy to only a handful.

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Post Number 7: A Beginner’s Guide to Wasting Holidays

The following program has been crafted and perfected by an experienced individual with an extensive knowledge of whiling away time and accomplishing little of actual relevance in daily life. If you are a homo-sapien predisposed towards utilizing every second out of the 86400 given in a day, then this program is not recommended at all. It may lead to bouts of restlessness and hopelessness, followed by pangs of guilt and a feeling of inadequacy and I at no point encourage such emotions in the process of whiling away time.

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Post Number 6: The 7 Commandments of Surviving Cricket World Cup Season in India

It’s tough being a cricket fan in India. There are so many talented players to keep track of. Obviously, there are a few that you aren’t so fond of. But dare you vocalize that sentiment! There will be ardent supporters of that person at your throat quicker than Hannibal Lector can say ‘Fava beans and Chianti’.

You know what’s tougher though? NOT being a cricket fan. AT ALL. Not even ‘walk past a TV, watch an over and leave’ type viewer. To all those out there, here are some words of wisdom from someone who has no credentials to offer advice. But when has that ever stopped anyone, right?

RULE 1: Thou must be mentally prepared.

You must brace yourself for the storm that’s about to hit you. Read More

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

At midnight, on 31st December, as the minute hand went past 12, indicating the onset of the year of the Monkey, my Facebook wall was inundated with an annoying amount of “New Year, New Me”  posts and people behaving as if the increment from 2015 to 2016 was nothing short of the New World Order with Inspirational quotes to an extent that would give even Oprah Winfrey a complex. And amidst all this chaos of creating an occasion out of something that should seem ordinary, the passing of time, the common theme in almost every declaration of attention seeking (a.k.a  XYZ is celebrating the new year with his/her profile friends, their pets, the entire city, Superman, Batman, E.T., the creatures from Avatar and 50 others) all of them mentioned one particular thing, Resolutions!

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AH! Resolutions. A wonderful yearly reminder to oneself of one’s uselessness and lack of ambition and dedication. How among everything else, we fail at pursuing the most mundane of things, that too decided by us only! Now, who doesn’t like that? To be nudged not-so gently periodically and be told “You know that thing you wanted to do and should have done WAY ago, yeah you should ‘try’ doing that again.”

I got off my laptop without posting ANY DAMN New Year nonsense (where’s my medal for courage in face of social expectations?) and scavenged through my unkempt bookshelf to find what I wanted to, my dust laden, slightly cobwebby (I should really clean more….maybe I could make that a resolution?….LOL who am I kidding?) ‘Resolution Diary’ . And as theatrically as I could manage, I blew off the dust and opened it with a dreamy nostalgic look on my face. Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I hadn’t managed to accomplish most of my resolutions- most of which involved physical exertion(SHOCKING!!). But there was a saving grace- I had managed to fulfill one task, that involved reading around 20+ books in the year. I was ecstatic. 2015 hadn’t been THAT useless after all. I did ultimately pull off one resolution, although the rest peered back at me like sad, neglected children that had been overlooked for their more loved sibling. Why couldn’t I manage to do any other task? If I had managed one, theoretically I could have managed the others as well? *emphasis on theoretically* Why wasn’t I as motivated for the rest of the resolutions ? Why didn’t I end up in better physical shape by the end of the year? Why hadn’t a reunion for F.R.I.E.N.D.S released exactly 10 years after the last episode? Why hadn’t ‘Fetch’ become a genuine English word? QUESTIONS! QUESTIONS!

New-Year-Resolution

As much as I wanted to analyze the psychology behind my actions and inaction, I had other urgently important stuff to do such as judging people by their social media antics and commenting witty one liners on their posts to hoard likes ,so I found myself a new pen and neatly scribbled 2016 RESOLUTIONS in fancy cursive writing and very cleverly extended arrows from the 2015 page to the 2016 page ( Genius I know!) . With a grin on my face, I kept the diary back on the bookshelf, slighlty hidden because I didn’t want anyone else to see it and have a good  chuckle on my account.

I was glad to have taken the initiative to resolve the unresolved resolutions. And so I have decided and I’ll let you all know, that in 2016, I will learn a new language, lose weight, start exercising, eat better yada yada ………….. starting next Monday!

regina

Post Number 3 : The Career Catastrophe

Post Number 3 : The Career Catastrophe

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“Girlfriend hai tumhari?” asked the aunty sitting in front of me, shoving the samosa in her mouth, giving me a sly grin, hoping I would say something that would give her gossip fodder for her evening chat with the rest of her clique. I sidestepped this trap by giving a well-structured “NO”. “Aage career ka kya socha hai?” she sputtered, both literally and  figuratively, as a pea popped out of her mouth. “I haven’t decided” I replied demurely, not willing to discuss my future with a random aunty and also because…..I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And as the aunty went into a monologue, explaining to me how an MBA will do me wonders, I activated my ‘Ignore-them-but-pretend-I’m-hearing’ mode just in time, inclusive of the periodic head nod and monotonic ‘Hmm..’
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Post Number 1 : The Whole Damn Bouquet

 

Post Number 1:The Whole Damn Bouquet

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The potpourri of human personalities is an eclectic mix. The bouquet of mankind is adorned with the motley crew of flowers. As wallflowers, we are gravitated towards more of an observant role. However this particular trait of ours enables us to expertly identify the rest of the ‘flowers’ we are surrounded by at all times. Elaborating, in no particular order-

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