Neha's Notebook

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis = a lung disease that is caused by the inhalation of silica or quartz dust Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia = fear of long words Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious = an expression of excitement, when you're too excited to say something Floccinaucinihilipilification = regarding something as worthless or unimportant Antidisestablishmentarianism = against the establishment of religion Honorificabilitudinitatibus = honourableness, the state of being able to achieve honours Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism = excessive amounts of calcium and phosphorus in the blood Incomprehensibilities = the things that are incapable of being understood Trichotillomania = an irresistible urge to pull out one's own hair, eyelashes and eyebrows Methylenedioxymethamphetamine   = a chemical that leads to ecstasy Subscribe:  Neha's Notebook  |  My Little library  |  Raindrop Stories

There is a wedding or special occasion in your family. You are thinking about buying some jewels. And suddenly when you go to the market, your attention catches all the jewellery stores in the market which earlier you didn’t even notice. Everywhere you seem to be seeing jewellery stores. These stores were there earlier too, but earlier you didn’t notice them, earlier your attention was somewhere else, like on the various food joints in the market. But at this moment, your attention is reflecting back to you mainly the jewellery stores. Another example. You are in a crowd of people who are all talking to each other loudly. There is too much noise in the crowd that you can’t hear anything properly. But somewhere in the crowd, someone calls your name. Immediately, your attention drops the noise and gets focused on the direction from which the call of your name is coming. This is a mystery about the phenomenon of attention. There is an enigma in the process of attention that can only b

Have you sometime found yourself getting distracted in periods while you’re reading a book? Somehow you seem to get stuck on a page, and while your eyes are in front of the page, your attention seems to be wandering somewhere else. Thoughts pull on your attention and don’t let you concentrate on the reading of the book. Similar to this, while we’re trying to create the best life for ourselves, distractions from the world hover over our head, making every possible attempt to distract us from our mission. These distractions are the leftovers of the voices of people who insulted or undermined us, the revengeful shrieks for those who always criticized us or tried to stop us from our goal, phantom characters of people who attempted every possible way to make us feel down. The distractions can also be the voices of our own fears, our self-limiting beliefs and our ‘can’t do’ attitudes. Another surprising distraction can be our greatest inspirations, role models and people we love and our

Once upon a time there was a gigantic black hole in the cosmic wild. The black hole knew the address of an aperture to another universe, a passageway to the Wonderland. But there was no one who the black hole could tell this address to, because whatever came near the black hole got ripped apart to particles and lost forever. The black hole could form no friendships, could not let anyone come near it. A star came near it, it got lost. A planet came near it, it got lost. Over time, the black hole became sad and embarrassed about its own gravitational power. As the sadness grew more and more, it caused stirrings in the heart of the black hole. The sadness started drawing portraits of anguish with black crayons, the wax of which was dripping with sorrow and grief, grief over an invisible feeling, a feeling of missing something, missing someone who could last forever till its lifetime. The black hole after all could hold on to nothing due to its endless deep dark abyss. The sadness of t

Life is full of animation. Both the life outside and the one in our imagination. Tables talk and flowers speak. Humans get possessed by ghosts and objects breathe. There are invisible eyes staring at us and there are spooky trees with treasure buried in their trunkholes. There are red elephants and blue horses. The animation is there all around us yet it expresses itself differently in different humans, like notes of music. The breath of life is the same in everyone yet it expresses differently through different individuals. Like a camera captures a moment and produces a photograph based on its features, a human being captures and absorbs the moment’s experiences and expresses them in their own unique expression. Polaroids, high-definition images, pixelated photographs and all. A painter paints a painting; a poet spins poetry; a mathematician solves problems, and likewise. Even different artists have their own different expression styles. Amidst all this animation, the one who ga

Once upon a time there was a priest. He received a fatty goat from one of the merchants in the town. He was quite happy having received a healthy goat. So he was returning home, carrying this goat on his shoulders. On the way three thieves spotted him, and decided to steal the goat from him. As the priest was walking by, one of the thieves appeared in front of him and asked why he was carrying an old dog. The priest was puzzled but he said that it was a goat not an old dog. In another few minutes, the second thief appeared on his way and said why was he carrying a mad dog. The priest, again puzzled, managed to say that it was a goat not a mad dog. He was walking, wondering whether the other two men were saying the truth. Doubt had already seeped into his mind. By then the third thief appeared in front of him and said why was he carrying a beaten dog. The priest became more puzzled than ever and began to believe that one men could be wrong, two could be but not all three of them. He beg

When I was a child, I had an ornamental wooden box in which I used to collect trinkets and knick-knacks of all kinds – broken hair clips, bracelet beads, scraps from newspaper and magazines, paper poems, jewel pieces, glitter ribbons and likewise. As I grew up, I started writing poetry and making lists and jotting down diary entries and creating art journals. We humans have a deep-rooted appetite to recording our thoughts and experiences. Just look at the famous collections of poetry, at the great monuments and at the things and inventions. Everything is someone’s way to record and capture their innermost thoughts and experiences. Everyone has their own way to capture their thoughts, feelings and experiences. And journaling is a writer’s way to do this. Many of the famous writers including Anne Frank, Susan Sontag, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ruskin Bond, CS Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Didion and others used to maintain their writer’s journals and diaries.

From Pokemon and Power Puff Girls pencil boxes and watching Popeye The Sailor Man to using sticky notes and planners, somewhere we grew up. From playing all day in the sun to doodling lists and jotting in brain dump journals, somewhere we grew up. As a child, we lived in our own make-believe world, and we believed that this world was real. We spoke to dolls, teddy bears and stuffed animals as if they were real characters in the movie of our life – a movie in which we were the hero. We talked with the night stars and the moon as if these interactions were real and someone was talking back to us. Stories were real. Monsters, fairies and dragons were real. There were gold coins at the end of the rainbow and there was treasure chest hidden somewhere in the grounds. Trees could talk to us and clouds made animal faces. All fiction was a reality. As the clock ticked, the boats of competition and comparison sent us drifting downstream into the endless turbulence of worthiness. Our make-b

You sit down at your typewriter (or computer).   You stare blankly at the screen. You roll your sleeves but soon enough you end up rolling your eyes like a mad animal. You think about all the bad things that have happened to you, all the people you like and dislike; what they said and what they didn’t say, all the foods that you must eat, all the shopping that must be done. You are still rolling your eyes. You think about what you wrote the last time you sat on the typewriter (or the computer). In another moment, you realize that you are going crazy, because there seems nothing to write about. The muse is the goddess that is not at all easy to please. And so you keep waiting for the muse to show up. You feel as if your inspiration is like a mimosa flower, the moment you try to feel inspired, it detects your lazy vibration and turns away from you. You think about the 86400 seconds in a day and how you seem to be wasting them, and you think about the 86400 billion neurons in yo

Miss Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird is one of my favourite books when it comes to creative writing. It is also one of the first books that I did read when I started getting interested in writing. While there are other books written by her as well, the one that focuses on creative writing is Bird by Bird. So, I have curated some of these snippets and lessons from this book.   Starting with,   1.    Blennies are boring. Write with Open Mind. Blenny is the type of an undersea fish that lives in the deepest areas of the sea, usually in rock bed. It keeps on sitting there in its tiny cave with its partner and kids. Most of the blennies, in their short life, don’t even rise to the surface of a sea let alone look above in the sky.   So, if I chose to write like a blenny, then most of my writing/poetry will be about one corner of a rocky seabed. Not very interesting.     Saying this, Miss Lamott writes,   “ Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outsi