Quotidian Tales

Engrossed in our gadgets, we now find it intimidating to have a real chat. W ords, words and more words. Not just feed, I feast on them. But communication today is being threatened and usurped by addictive, numbing and readily-available audio and visual entertainment. We just have got to do something about it. Conversation is crucial. Be it a coming-back-from-school story session between a child and a parent, a sweet (and yet-to-become-bitter) têt-à-tête between lovers, a storytelling stretch between an indulgent grandparent and a little one or even an unabashed venting-out bout between friends, such exchanges are the lifeblood maintaining the essence and integrity of relationships. It was only last weekend when I had gone for brunch, a hybrid meal meant for leisurely days, that I distinctly noticed one thing - people were hardly talking! They were immersed in their gadgets. Shockingly, even children (at least one in all but a few tables) were using a virtual portal to

The painful path of forgiving is what frees us from further pain. H e was the master. I was the slave. The stench suffocated me. My soul was decomposing. Till the day I decided to exercise my will. I took the leap of faith. I pried open the cage. Today I am divorced. With a child. The decision of changing my status, however, was anything but an easy one. And the life after was far from that. The day I crossed the threshold of my previous life, it had felt like cutting off my right hand. A hand that had gangrened, so I had to stop the spread. But that act meant much more than just the pain of severing. It meant learning to live without my dominant hand. And making the most with the other. I accepted my reality and devised two specific strategies to deal with it. First, I would never compare myself to an individual with two hands. The comparison itself was lame and lost. Second, I put my less dominant hand through a spartan schooling till it would emerge as the dominant one.

A blog was born to share the quotidian tales of life. Tales of your lives and ours. R andomness struck us as we bonded, not on the first day of the primary, junior or even senior school for that matter, but in the 11th grade with only a mere one and a half years left to step out of our second homes. Two shabby, squeaking benches, one behind the other, was the space that metamorphosed our experiences from the general to the distinctive. From sharing lunchboxes to sharing lives, all extempores coagulated to form that envious rainbow, which, sadly enough, disappeared once the conducive conditions were lost. Hardly did we realise how time raced us through its course as we shifted from pulling each other’s legs, mimicking teachers, enjoying moments of unadulterated fun to writing absurdities and absolutes in our precious slam books. Sparks produced sparkles, and once in a while, we paused, pondered and decided to proceed….We ventured to discuss and disclose the quotidian tale