Quotidian Tales

Body-shaming is the weapon of the weak….Shun it to emerge stronger and beautiful. T he video above has gone viral in social media. Vidya Balan (Bollywood superstar well known for her iconic presentations) has poured her heart out. She is dealing with a topic that screams for attention from society. Provokes it to think and feel. Perhaps not for the first time. It is a collaborative effort with radio station 92.7 Big FM. It is streaming across the internet with the catchy hashtag #DhunBadalKeTohDekho. It is about body-shaming. No...not just that. Something that goes way deeper and diffuses through the untouched. An individual, even if a child, is never spared. Every breathing moment of her life, she is judged for her looks. She is ridiculed and rebuffed for something she has no control over. And who does that? The society. That uncountable mass that has the power to not let the ‘she’ admire her reflection. But look forward to external approval. "Don’t your parents

Teachers and parents have their work cut out to shape our kids for an AI world. C hildren are the future. Shaping them, along with their parents, are their teachers. But when Sophia, the world’s first humanoid, grabbed headlines three years back, it threw a challenge to the teachers of today. Among the various areas where Sophia could be of use, forecast by creator Hanson Tech, education was one. Artificial intelligence (AI), of which Sophia is one of the finest examples, is permeating every sphere in our lives. Its expanding reach is shrinking the scope for human employment, through automation. Teachers could soon find themselves replaced by AI. IBM’s AI tech, Watson, is famed for being able to beat human intelligence. AI’s appeal lies in being super-fast with 100 per cent accuracy, an enormous memory and malfunctioning that is logically deducible, unlike a capricious human temper. People will have to come up with new ways to add value to their profession to stay on th

Reward yourself as a parent. Happiness begins with you. I t was an unusually busy day. Working on a gruelling assignment, I was engrossed in the editing process of the photographs. It had to be furnished to the client the following day. A rather pesky nudge distracted me. I turned around to notice my 7-year-old (but threatening to pose as a grown-up) daughter standing right next to me. She was beaming as she broke out the headlines of her day, “I have something for you.” Seconds seemed an eternity to the little one as she struggled with time to divulge the surprise she had in store for me. Hurriedly, she took out a notebook from her school bag. Deftly flipping through a few pages, she halted only when she arrived at the one, the one that was meant for me. It was not a school exercise or some graded sheet. It did not boast of her exceptional performance or clamoured for my attention and appreciation. It was just a few words, randomly chosen by her to express an emotion that

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