musingswhileunlearning

  Fasting is a trend now from a health point of view. You have the 16:8 fasting and different varieties depending on whom you follow. However, before making fasting scientific in the manner it is being made today, it was an age-old ritual followed in all traditional religions if I am not mistaken. Patterns may vary. Be it Lent before Easter, Ramzan/Ramadan before Eid or the number of fasts in the Hindu tradition especially in India, for every occasion and region for instance the two Navratris, Chhat pooja, the 41 days fast during the Sabarimala season and many more which we might touch upon as we progress. Actually, our forefathers were more aware and mindful of their bodies and hence these traditions were made as a maintenance practice for our systems. They added a religious connotation to it so that people would follow it. Faith can move mountains! In this blog, I shall cover my relationship with fasting. Now, why would I want to write a blog about that?? Well, I have an hour t...

                                               I get a frantic call early one morning. My mother! She never calls so early I thought and quickly sent up a prayer for all to be well. It was and it wasn’t. By God’s grace, Daddy and she were fine but she had witnessed poltergeist in real life! “My phone is making calls and sending voice messages on its own”, she blurts out hysterically. “X Aunty said that some gibberish via voice mail was posted on the society group from my number. I have also been told I’ve been calling people whom I never called.” I had just finished my meditation but the effects of it wore out instantly and I said, “You must have pressed something without realizing it” to which she snapped with a “Don’t teach me! I know how to handle a phone.” Apparently, the poltergeist had stopped fiddling with her old phone and started attacking her new one. “We’ll ...

  Read at your own risk!    Zombie taking over…         Why is Haryana pronounced Har-ya-na in every language but Kerala pronounced Ke- ral in Hindi? Why is the ‘a’ eaten? Makes no sense and bugs me to no end.          Why is that men graduate from Master to Mister at 18 and that has nothing to do with their marital status but for ladies Miss is unmarried and Mrs. is married and this vague Ms. is not understood by anyone?           Why do people you love and who supposedly love you back, go out of their way to cheer you up and get you to smile only to wipe it off your face moments later? It makes no sense and drives me nuts!          Why do we ask questions and not pay attention to answers if it isn’t what we wanted to hear? Isn’t it better to ask our own self the question and be satisfied with what we want to hear? External validation sucks!        ...

  “The innocence and imagination that appears in the hearts of young children. As the children grow older, they become more mature and gain more responsibilities. They lose their muchness.” I was sent this message by a dear friend and I don’t know who said/wrote this originally but the word has stayed with me since. Do dwell on that for a while. It is so important and just taken as a given. “That’s life” or “This is reality” should not let us accept it but we do, mostly without giving it a second thought. I believe that at the very least, once we are made aware of it, like you are now being made aware and like I was, a week ago, it is imperative that we look into it. It is slow death for creators of any kind and definitely a dementor (Harry Potter is in my blood) that sucks out happiness from everyone. I am facing it big time with most of my fiction work not progressing because it feels too “in the face” or “too straight from the movies” or “that just doesn’t happen in real life”...

  Altruistic or Codependent, what are you? Does the question seem vague or as though it is an odd choice between two options which aren’t necessarily related? Think again. It was an eye-opener for me as well. In fact, the past two years or more have been such a roller coaster ride for me, in terms of spiritual growth if you’d like to call it that. I would describe it as a process that has shaken a lot of my core concepts making the “musingswhileunlearning” blog title a prophecy of sorts! Altruism is when you have selfless concern for another’s well-being. Your act of kindness, be it to a stranger or someone you know rises out of the pureness of your generous heart with no vested interest, even remotely. This was a term taught to me when I was in grade seven, by my father. He believed and still does in opening his heart out to anyone that might need it with no agenda underlying it. Being naturally inclined to be of service, this piece of wisdom has stayed with me since, allowing m...

  Being a movie buff all my life, I’ve surprised myself over the past year and a half by hardly wanting to watch a film. Yes, I do love watching movies in a theatre but I have no qualms of watching it on TV or on the computer and with Netflix running all the latest movies it is really unlike me to not want to watch anything at all. And then it happened! I forced myself to be normal (read my old self) again. I was hoping for some company but none seemed interested so I picked out a movie called “Pagglait” after my husband’s review and affirmation that it didn’t have a sad ending. I just cannot stomach tragedies anymore. The movie begins on the day after the funeral of a young man who has just been married for five months. The setting is of his house, where his parents are visibly distraught with grief having lost their flesh and blood and then there are the others including the young widow (played to perfection by Sanya Malhotra) who is busy scrolling and making a mental note of t...

  A few years ago, while I was still a part of the Facebook phase, I came across an article or was it an animated video, I fail to remember, but I laughed when I saw/read it and I remember having told my daughter about it. It was a lesson for us but it is only now that the depth of that lesson has sunk in. The story might be a bit distorted since my memory isn’t that strong (after all I don’t even remember if it was an article or a video) but you will get the hang of it. A young girl was watching her mother fry fish in a skillet minus the head and tail after which she would fry the head. The girl asked her mother why she didn’t fry the whole fish to which her mother replied that this was how it was meant to be and that her mother did it the same way just as her mother did before that! The girl kept that in her mind and questioned her grandma at the first opportune moment. Her grandma said that she did what her mother did and it worked well. The girl was fortunate enough to have h...