Neha's Notebook

Festive decorations were being carried out. Ornaments were being dangled on the walls. Rangolis were being designed. Fairy lights were being tangled into vine-like hangings. Diyas and candles were being lit. Among these candles, there was one candle.   Bright orange in colour and made of scented tangerine-coloured wax. This candle had an uneven surface and its base too was not flat, it was unsteady and the wax was unevenly sculpted. When all the other candles were being lit, this candle was left out because it couldn’t stand properly. Each time the candle was balanced in a standing position, it would tilt and fall down. So it was kept back in the candle box while the other candles were lit into bright flames.   The following day, after the sunset, suddenly tbe electricity power went off. There was pitch black darkness in the sky. There was no candle or diya left to light up. All the candles were reduced to dollops of molten wax. When there was no option left, the imperfect oran

Every day I sit at the typewriter. With the keys of the typewriter, I spin galaxies and labyrinths. I paint colours and create memory books.   I split into fragments, disappear and reappear in a new form. I carve castles and fortresses and loose myself in their dingy explorations. I evoke fairies and demons and dinosaurs from the pandora’s box, and pack them in my bag once they have uttered their spells.   With every piece I write, I delve into a journey of treasure hunt. Sometimes I end up discovering mines of gemstones while sometimes I have to make peace with a trunk full of crystal baubles.   As the typewriter scroll rolls and pulsates, I paint new landscapes with watercolours, I draw crayon portraits and sketch ink doodles.   With every description I write, I open the cupboard consisting of jewellery boxes of words, and like wearing an ornament, I decorate my pieces with the rhinestones and sequins and pearls of aesthetic words.   While other people have two ey

Each time I visit the optician, they put some eyedrops to dilute my eyes in order to check them. After the eyedrops, the world around me appears to me to be blurry. Shapes start melitng into each other. Everything appears fluidy and colours appear to be dissolving into one another.   I learned something from this…   From the time being we have been told by the people that the world is the way it is. That, it is a rigid or a fixed entity. But the truth is that the world that appears to us, is not a fixed or a rigid thing. Rather, it is a malleable thing. It can change itself according to what we want to see.   It appears to us based on the functioning of our body machine, our five sense organs and the sixth sense of our mind. You change the functioning of just one sense and the entire world appears to be altogether a different place. Just like in the example of eyedrops.   The world is a soup of molten gold. If you take a gold necklace, a gold bracelet and a gold earring

Have you ever wondered why in all those adventure and fantasy movies, the hero has to pass through a labyrinth or a maze-like structure to reach the heroine…? Why in all these movies and video games, one needs to solve certain puzzles?   Have you ever wondered why our intestines, guts and brain are shaped like labyrinthine noodles? Is there a connection between the two?   Just as a crumb of bread travels through the esophagus, reaching into the alimentary canal and further travelling through the noodle-shaped intestine, the hero in movies travel into mazes, labyrinths, mountains and deserts and seas to reach the heroine and fight for her.   Similar to all these metaphors, the human mind or the psychological world too is a noodle city where our point of attention travels through the labyrinth of our thoughts.   If you take a bowl of noodles and try to untangle one noodle from the other, it is quite possible that you may be able to do it. But when it comes to untangling a

Each of us human beings is a cookie palace. There are several cookies that we are made of.   One cookie is the food we eat. The food we eat becomes our body. Another cookie is thoughts we think and the beliefs we harness. Remember to cultivate self-empowering beliefs and remove the weeds of self-limiting ones.   The next cookie is the emotions we feel. If we feel happy and loved, it has an altogether different effect on our system than when we feel self-pity or bitterness. There are a whole lot of sciences dedicated to blossoming the positive scale emotions and minimizing the negative scale emotions. The positive scale emotions consist of love, joy, happiness, playfulness and wonder, while the negative scale emotions consist of jealousy, gossip, comparison, resentment, hatred and the like. Cookies are meant to be sweet after all, aren’t they? So do we humans are meant for, for being sweet and cute and wondrous…   Beyond our thoughts and emotions what matters the most is the

From jewellery bazaars slinging with festive ornaments to milk shops crowded with daily customers, from chaat-bhandaar stalls stirring with feasty people to school walls decorated with colourful paper decorations, from blue sky to green-green treetops, life, at all times, is bubbling with a panorama of colours.   These colours are not only in surface appearances but also in our thoughts and emotions. While some thoughts trigger us to feel the emotion of sorrow, some others cause us to feel the emotions like love, bliss, joy and ecstasy. Life sprouts with a magnanimous variety of bright-bright colours.   Words are colours. Food is colour. Everything has a colour attached to its appearance. In one moment, while I may feel yellow, you may feel green or blue or pink or purple. In one moment, life may turn out to be a pastel colour while in another moment it may appear like a scorching sizzling palette of hot colours.   Desire is colour. A wish is a colour. Positivity and inspir

Do you remember the fresh chemical smell of new set of books and notebooks we used to buy at the start of a new session in school? Or do you remember the summer vacation breakfasts while watching the series of Oswald, Noddy, Hatim and Bob The Builder? Do you remember playing with your neighbourhood friends or do you remember dancing at the tunes of Kisi Disco Mein Jaayein? Do you remember mom-dad returning from the grocery market and bringing a packet for you? Do you remember reading graphic story books while hiding them with school’s textbooks?   Those childhood days are long gone. All we are left with is a faint memory of these days. The moment arrived, we seized the moment, we lived it to the fullest, and then they were whoosh! gone.   Time and moments are just like this. If you spend too much time in thinking, the time is spent but the moments won’t come again. The time is also spent when you fully seize the moment, but this time, its memory causes us to bubble with bliss r

Nothing is more soothing than sipping a cup of hot coffee and crackling choco-chip cookies on an autumn morning.   A platter of potato chips is always a comfort food while watching a movie with your family or sibling…   A bowl of fruit salad is a must have, while a bar of silky chocolate can heal all your worries in an instant.   Pizza, burger, noodies, street food, fruits & veggies, nuts & berries, chocolates, biscuits and baked goodies, chips & crisps, buttery Indian delicacies, dosas, samosas, golgappas, mithais and breads and buns…or simply a dish of homecooked daal and chapatti…   When consumed rightly, food can turn out to be a medicine, a soothing ointment and at times, a wagon of pleasure. Food is that experience which connects all of the humanity. It is like sipping the molten sun or cherishing a wine-like moon. Like eating a star or drinking a galaxy. Like relishing syrupy honey-berries or snacking on streams of wildflowers.   As the telephone

Birds migrating to the south to taste some heat, bears and squirrels snoozing into hibernation, misty dewdrops settling longer on the droopy leaves and milky frost layering the space outside the window frames…winter has so much of melodious music embroidered into it.   Like musical dots or drops of music, winter sings a goldfuzzed song, the song of stillness, the song of silence, the song of ether.   Amidst this stillness, winter brings to light what was earlier hidden beneath the shadows of the darkness. This song of silence reveals a music that is sweeter than the music of rainbow and music of all colours. During winters, when everything is silent and still, one can listen to the song that has always been present but got buried under the noisy layers of thoughts.   But when the winter arrives, the thoughts, all of them like reptiles go into hibernation and this reveals the song of stillness, as if a glassy lake, a mirrory sunbeam, a crystal-like fireball, a starry raindro