Life is easy kya karein

I wrote the above captioned post and posted it. Within a few minutes of it being uploaded and liked, it disappeared from twitter, Facebook and my blog. I tried to figure out through Google where did the post go and tried to retrieve it, but Nada. No success at all. I had not deleted it from anywhere on the laptop. Technology: A boon or bane? This used to be a topic of many a college debates. When I was in school, there was not much in terms of technology which could hamper our school studies. I am trying to rewrite the post. Am a bit angry about loosing it after posting it. On Twitter, so many people I found using my pic as their display picture. It is a weird world out there or rather a good world with some weird people out there. When I joined the hostel in Mumbai, the only English songs I knew were the hymns we sang in school and some songs from Abba which were also taught in the school choir. We had Sr. Emma who taught us a song " I had a dream, a song to sing". The...

The new leaves have come on the trees. They are light green in colour just like my Camlin colour pencil, by that name. Later the colour of the leaves will turn to bottle green or dark green. For me colours are still from my first set of colour pencils I had. When I was growing up, I did not see much of crayons anywhere.  The trees are full of leaves. Chopping has not happened by BMC in recent times. They are  laying the near perfect pavements of our area again with new paver tiles. What can I do getting upset about it? Our tax money being wasted and some contractor making money along with a corrupt officer. They are putting a concrete boundary around some trees and then someone is filling the gap with more concrete instead of mud. By the time this pavement work gets done, the by lanes will be ruined. After all the fancy road repair work last year, the roads in Taikalwadi already have potholes. Shivaji Park has become a food hub since last one year. I remember it not havi...

Did my summer internship at Uniatlantic Travels. Some of my friends got very good Travel Agencies to intern with from college. SOTC was our dream travel agency. We all loved our college professor Darryl who worked with SOTC. He was the best teacher of the bunch who taught us at Sophia Polytechnic. The faculty was really sad for the Travel and Tourism course. For me the comfort of staying in the college campus was great. But Sophia Polytechnic in essence lacked the goodness of Sophia main college.  We were protected and looked after in the Sophia main college hostel. It had a very healthy mix of all kinds of people. I would go ahead and say more of good and rare of bad. Hostel surely kept a strict vigil on the girls and it really worked well for all of us. Though at that time it seemed rather strict.  Sophia Polytechnic was a different ball game completely. The staff was catty to the core and so were the girls. There were a few exceptions. Joe from the canteen was a true gentl...

I want to start swimming again after gap of more than a year. I need to get a doctor's certificate which states that I am physically fit and do not have any skin disease. I go the doctor. He is a busy man. By the time my turn comes, he has only one prescription paper left. He says that there are more people in the queue after me and if he has to prescribe antibiotics, it has to be written on the paper where his name, address and details of his degrees are printed. I am asked to come back the next morning  when he will get his stock of the  prescription note pads. I put the reminder in my Digical on the mobile phone. These are important things of my life like getting Atta from the chakki i.e. flour from the flour mill, buying coriander leaves or 'Dhaniya patta' aka 'Kothmir' from the Bhaji wallah  (vegetable vendor). As I wait at the Doctor's clinic on a lazy Saturday morning, my cook Masi passes by. She is shocked to see me here, in spite of knowing that I was ...

My friend once told me " Parul, for you, whatever choices you have made in life are the correct ones. Other people's choices always fall short". I feel this is true for me in a lot of instances. Even my posts take such an arrogant moralistic stand that I wonder is this what I do when  my "life is easy kya karein". Since the onslaught of mobile phones in our lives, I want to stay connected. I want to appear intelligent. I want to be cool. Was this need there even before the onset of social media in my life? May be.  The people living in our Mumbai chawls, so many have Smartphones. They are watching live TV, downloading movies on their Smartphones. I thought the word 'Smartphone' was a slang. I just figured it is a word in our dictionary and also in Wikipedia, which is like what the Encylopedia was in my times. In the upper middle class households, all the young children want an iPhone. It is definitely a status symbol for them. The students are into ...

After fiddling on my Whatsapp, I realised that the battery won't last till I get home. Promptly, I got talking to the lady next to me. She was laden with diamonds and had a very pleasant personality. I noticed the huge rocks on her ears and craved for the Patti bangles she was wearing. Really liked her choice in jewellery.. basic and top notch. She was planning to get her son married. He was 27 years old. She was getting great marriage offers for her son. She started showing me the girls on her iPhone whose proposals had come. They were like today's youth. I kept wondering why these young educated girls want to get married so soon. I even saw their Facebook profiles on her phone. Most of them made sure all pics were with a group of girls and they looked decent. No pics with guys their age or at a pub or a party. All were daytime pics or at someone's house. Found it a little strange considering they were rich modern girls in their early twenties. The lady was clear, she do...

What is the "Freedom of Expression" ruckus all about? Does it mean to talk ill about individuals? Does it mean make fun of everyone's beliefs? What is humour? Does humour have categories? What is satire? Why are we all taking up for AIB and not for Shireen Dalvi, the only woman editor of an Urdu daily? Artist M.F. Hussain painted Hindu Gods and Goddesses as nude figures and made cartoons of all our national leaders and national emblem. That was art, right? That is Freedom of Expression in India. If you ever get offended by anyone's humour , you are Right wing. I thought wing was a part of a theatre, where performers had to wait before going on stage. Its only now everything 'not okay' and 'not liberal enough' is termed as 'Right wing'. Leela Samson removing all Ganesha idols from Kalakshetra is artistic but any removal of a Cross or a Majar from the road side by the city corporation is seen as Right Wing. I read film reviews which actually ...