Chilly Insights

Hello everyone… We are amid the most fatal pandemic of this century which has literally given us ‘ a month of Sundays '. The death toll indicates an affectionate inclination of the coronavirus towards old people. Yet with this lockdown extending to infinity and our patience dwindling to a trickle, I fear we youngsters are more prone to being hospitalized than our grandparents are. Some day soon, out of impatience and frustration, our brains might cease to work and some adorable cuss words will escape our lips. We’ll be bludgeoned by our parents inside our homes instead of the police outside. (“Mere muh se nikal gayi, meri zabaan tuut gayi, Pappa” won’t be able to save our ass😜) News update: 24k corona positives, 1000k ‘sooja pichhwada' positives in India! In spite of such life-threatening risks, the home feels like the safest place in the world (c’mon, stop imagining  Hogwarts and Berlin Bunker 😒) during a state of turmoil even when it may not be. Home is the perfect...

Emotions make humans very unique and distinct as a species in this world full of life forms. So let’s talk about emotions today. Which one comes to your mind? Love? Naah …... aren’t we too young and naïve for such an extensive topic? Anger? No …… too intense. Pride? …… too fragile. Excitement? Surprise? ….. too ostensible Fear? …… Haven’t we talked about it already? Contempt? Disgust? …… too hateful. We are already said to be an intolerant nation. No risks! Sadness? …… too TIK-TOK-Y. ❤️ What next then? Looks like I am drained out of ideas and you are now in a thought process. Good, I want that. I like build-up like every South-Indian actor's entry scene 😎😎 . Are you curious about the topic? Why not talk about curiosity then? Now, most of you will certainly Google whether curiosity is an emotion. No, it isn’t. All those poetic lines with a hell lot of question marks merely to 1. show-off my vocabulary and 2. give a dramatic effect to an average topic? Yes! 😜...

FEAR is one of the most basic, instinctive, driving human emotions. From infancy to childhood to teenage to adulthood to old age, we have always been scared of some things- ghosts, scoldings, insults, bankruptcy, loneliness, parents, boss, of upsetting our loved ones, of taking initiatives, … of death! Weeping is one of the most basic physical expressions of fear. As babies, we didn’t know we could manipulate and alter the mode of fear’s expression and could mask fear with anger, so we used to cry to express it. But as we grew up, we were taught that fear was a bad thing and that expressing fear was even worse. It meant we were weak and that this world had no place for the weak. Sharing our fears and phobias with others makes us feel far more vulnerable than fear itself. So we avoid fear or at least try not to let anyone know we have it. However, we don’t always get to escape. Sometimes your fear catches you and there is no place for you to run and hide in. Most of the time...

Having cleared JEE and gotten admitted and shifted to Pune’s Indian Institute of Information Technology would have been a smooth transition from coaching to college life if I did not have to wait at relatives’ home for a fortnight till the institute authorities alloted us rooms, and   to encounter a small incident on the very second day of my stay in the hostel that almost shattered the hopes of my next 4 years of B-Tech. After having suffered from Network issues for a day, did the aforementioned interesting incident take place. It forced me to question “Does an Indian college always need to make chaos?” Had it been a private college, I would still have convinced myself with an affirmation on this question, but I had really expected that national colleges would be different. You might expect similarly until you pay a visit to IIIT Pune. I will tell you why, but let me make two things clear beforehand: First, I am not trying to defame the institute. I am just trying t...

The rising heat and humidity from the warm, moist bodies of some 100 men rubbing against each exposed body part of yours and in a closed train compartment are a lovely enough combination to suffocate you to a nauseatic death. Although the taller men escape it, the little goblins always suffer. A middle-aged uncle beside me was having a great difficulty in breathing but he was kind of adapted to it. He just started playing with the hook of the door. I hypothesize that PEN FIGHTING must have been invented in a similar way when someone started playing with his pen to kill time. The human brain needs something to keep itself busy with, especially when the body is suffering and you can do nothing about it. It made me feel like sitting in my electronics exam waiting for someone to pass me a written or an oral answer.    The train was moving slower than my bicycle. We were just waiting for Karjat (a railway station) to come so that we could breathe a little. My friend, who al...

Hello everyone, it’s been a long break but now we are back and from now on there will be no break. So let’s get on a ride. The very first post of this blog was written during a train journey, now another post takes birth from another of my train journeys. I would have liked to call it an extraordinary journey on the basis of the lessons it taught me if I didn’t have to stand on one leg without any support all the time. However, don’t judge it too soon, it is not a sad story. Travelling in an overcrowded train is a plightful task but sometimes it happens to have all the components needed to make your journey awesome. It seemed as if I was surrounded by a horde of vegan zombies who had a slight tempering of human emotions in them. These types of journeys show us how our daily social conditioning suppresses our basic human instincts, but only rarely succeeds in killing them; that even our kindness is biased due to the social code of conduct we are supposed to follow as a part o...

I remember once sitting on a bench in the government hospital one morning, waiting for my turn for medical certification unaware that something very unspectacular would force me to think of the reasons people fear going to govt. hospitals. As any govt. hospital, this too was stinking with the smell of medicines. Echoing cries of infants suggested the nearness of the maternity ward. Two women sat beside me complaining incessantly to each other about the uncleanliness in govt. hospitals and the costliness of the private ones from the last 20 minutes. They had been exchanging their precious political insights, observations and conclusions with one another on ten or so other topics:- -how the new generations of daughters-in-law were inciting their men to rebel against his parents, - how sending girls to school was leading to an increase in the number of girls running away with boys (one of them had smartly dropped her daughter out of school already),  -how th...