Catharsis

  December 2024 After a couple of years of tracking the number of books I read/ movies & shows I watched (like everything in life this information is best plotted in an excel 😉🤣), I hit the target 🎯 of 200 this year ..drum roll 😎.  This practice of meticulously recording everything in an excel and setting the target 🎯 of 200 Books, Movies and Shows stemmed from the place of reclaiming  me-time  in this chaotic world of juggling multiple priorities.  (Source: Author's file photo) (Source: Google) I have always been a voracious reader, and there is something magical about being teleported (literally) to new worlds.  A few tips on how I consistently continued to read/ watch interesting stuff in pursuit of this milestone:                                                           ...

March 2022 If someone had asked me this question “What do you do to stay fit?”   a decade ago, my nonchalant answer would've been “cornflakes, coffee and potatoes 😉” .. Having fortunately been blessed with good metabolism, I always believed that eating good food in moderation would hold me in good stead for a healthy life (glorious twenties eh 😋😜).. I would still continue to dabble in sports activities during office events, especially throwball and Table Tennis , more for fun rather than with a lofty end goal of fitness in mind 😁😅💁🏻‍♀️. Fun times - beach throwball and late night table tennis practice 💁🏻‍♀️💃🏻👊🏻 While past couple of years have been extremely busy, going to office including taking local train ensured that there was a semblance of an active lifestyle. For someone like me who prefers curling up with Kindle 📖 during spare time, spending time on exercise was anathema 🙄🙄.  All that changed during last two years with working from home and longer working...

November 2017 (Source: Google)  The first time I read about relationship goals, my instant neuron parallel connection was its eerie similarity with project management - defining milestones, working together to achieve them and voila, mission accomplished! Jokes apart, relationship goals can never be generic or standardized, but as each year passes by, its amazing how life evolves and what we discover about oneself.   So that got me thinking about the relationship goal posts for millennial dinosaurs - millennials on account of being born in the early 1980's but also termed dinosaurs on account of a host of reasons, including a) never seen an episode of GoT (gotcha.. Game of Thrones) b) not having an instagram account in this era of  finstas (fake instagram accoounts) and rinstas  (real instagram accounts, distinct and separate from finstas I am told).   Though its not a yearly list, here's our list of the top relationship goals achieved in 20...

September 2016 (Source: Google)  I like this quote by Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux mentioned in Bartlett's popular 'Book of Familiar Quotations,' "Every age has its own pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways." And in the thrilling 30's, one might add, recruitment consultants and of course, discussions about parents 😉. These discussions are with my cousins and close friends - just like my sister and I, all of them share a close bond with their respective parents. We discuss about how they are aging, their health issues, their on & off finickiness and their little tantrums;) As I mentioned earlier, I believe in the nurturing power of sharing; and these conversations are not at all about cribbing, but about finding comfort and solace by talking about it. So on those off days when parents are freaking out or experiencing a morbidity bout or are just being stubborn, I think of the 'Kids to Kiddos graph': (Source: Google an...

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...