Catharsis

May 2016 (Source: Zeal conference in January 2014 at Hyderabad) This is the transcript of the video @ Zeal held in January 2014 at Hyderabad, a workshop for students intending to pursue careers in Commerce. I was one of the panelists but I could not attend and hence had to prepare a video. I realized that giving a speech by being present at the venue (  Induction video  at  Aurora Degree college in 2010) h ad an obvious advantage of gauging the audience's reaction; as well as answering their questions. However, I did want to give a shot at making this video and here it goes  Zeal video .   Hello Everybody... When I first heard about this great initiative, I was so surprised that so many of you all had already started thinking about your career path, your future goals, and I must say this is wonderful. I can't tell you how privileged I feel to be among such bright students and wonderful panelists. My apologies that I am not physically present at the...

January  2015 (Source: Google)  I’ve always wanted a temple wedding – simple and austere so that the people I love enjoy my wedding rather than slogging - while everyone else on this planet enjoys themselves. This might be due to the fact that as my parents are the youngest among their siblings, I have attended lots of weddings in the last decade – and the effort, opulence, demands, distinction between moga pellivaru and aada pellivaru  was annoying. However, all these notions kind of went for a toss once the arranged marriage process started – my parents and I were bracing ourselves for a big fat Indian wedding and I’m also partly to blame. My grandparents believed in this notion that following traditions and customs is the proper way to do things and that created a huge impression on me. So from then on, I decided that I would follow the traditional rituals and customs – though I knew that everything had a remedy, for instance, though people from the same...

December 2014 Writing has always been my catharsis - there is something really therapeutic about re-living your own personal experiences through writing. In a day and age where innumerable morbid, negative and sensational stories are the staple diet of news, I know that my experiences at this stage would be considered ‘comically harrowing’ – hence the name CHAMP (comically harrowing arranged marriage process)! (Source: Google) To be honest, I never thought that finding a ‘suitable boy’ would be such a traumatic experience indeed. But given my life experience that I have never been handed stuff on a platter, I don’t know why I imagined otherwise – probably I was hoping God to play a role to ensure compensation for the six months agony I went through to find a job (another long story, parked for later). In some sense I am the black sheep of the family – a person who never wanted to find a...