Neha's Notebook

Upon capturing a billion years of crazy experience in my notebooks, I am writing this sweet love note to you. I have not written it before because I have been wondering if you would even read it. It’d be useless to me if you wouldn’t ever read this note. I am writing this only and only for you after all. But at last I gathered enough insanity to express my heart out, and in case you too feel the same in your heart, you’ll surely like reading my thoughts. So let me begin by telling you how I have been feeling lately. Lately, I have been feeling that I am living in a video game, as if I am a character in some video game. I am constantly chasing some goal or milestone. But sometimes I also allow myself to relax, destress and just enjoy my life. For instance, by having a cup of hot coffee, by eating a chocolate, by taking a long walk in the park, by dancing and listening to music, by doing some fun activity that I used to do when I was not this old and grown up, activities like coloring, a

Birds flitting through the sky like thoughts through the mind. The texture of the bark of a tree. The variety of people walking all around like different voices of the heart. What can be more creative than this? Sometimes it happens that we look for big ideas and complex insights that we forget to pay attention to the little things that make life beautiful. We often look at these little things when we are in the phase of life where everything is going low, when everything seems to be going against us. Herein, these little things are our sole comfort. But even otherwise also, creativity is in the small moments, in little things. Kurt Vonnegut says, “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things.” There are electric bhoots dangling in our mind stream like glittery disco balls. They make us feel happy, excited, worried or ecstatic. These are our emotionally-charged thoughts. These thoughts drive us into momentum t

Life is only as meaningful as it is meaningless. We laugh, we cry. Storing our own potions of happiness in our hearts, Blinking only when a warm salty tear rolls down our cheeks to make us pause and reflect, What this is really all about? A game, a dream, a delusion But if it is an illusion, no one can deny that it is such a magnetic illusion This world, It gravitates our emotions towards itself Its glitz and glamour, Still, there is a glitch scurrying in this glitz The scent of which, Pours through our body and mind, Like glittery molecules of chemicals streaming and swirling around in our bloodstream, Making us feel happy, hungry, melancholic or puzzled. The glitch is our shadow. We live amongst shadows and walk among shadows. Shadows, who are squirreled in the deepest recesses of our mind and who sleepwalk their way through life,  Thinking "only if"... So prefer not be a shadow. Choose to be a sparkling ball of starlight. Choose to

Reading a b​ook is a multisensory experience. A book bombards our brain with sights, smells, sounds, voices and textures. We come across scenes we have never seen before and meet people we have never met before. Sometimes we collide into new concepts and previously unknown facts. We learn to deal with different circumstances and express a wide range of emotions. Whilst immersed in a book, we explore a brand-new world or find ourselves drifting in an old world of ours. We gaze at the party of ocean waves and at the clusters of stars from a distant point of view, witnessing the story happening. There is a plethora of details to grasp and learn from the reading of a book. Vocabulary, concepts, quotes, story ideas, references, scene images, characters and more. When organizing our brain after reading a book, eidetic memory helps. Cultivating an eidetic memory enables us to recall these details in the form of photographic screenshots. Storing our information in categories also helps. Si

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie As the detective Hercule Poirot boards the Orient Express to go on a holiday, the train seems unusually full of passengers at this time of the year. Nevertheless, he gets a compartment with the help of his director friend Bouc. The train travels through its usual route, but halts to a stop as a snowdrift comes in its way. The dining-car that evening reveals passengers from different countries, cultures and classes. The diversity of its passengers includes an English lady, a Swedish lady, an elderly American woman, an American business tycoon with his secretary and valet, an Italian, an Indian Colonel, an English man, a Hungarian couple, a princess and her maid, among others. The following morning, a search reveals that the American tycoon named Ratchett is dead in his compartment. What surprises the doctor the most is the way the man was murdered. The man’s body possessed not one, not two but nearly twelve stabs, whi

There is a glitch in our soul. Accept it or not, but it is there. The glitch is about something which equates to nothing. We can’t really figure out what this clinging glitch is all about, but we can’t either deny that it is there. No matter how settled we seem to be in our life, this glitch doesn’t leave us, it clutches at our throat and makes us ask ourselves, “Where I am really going?” Irrespective of how many puzzles we might have solved in our life, we are still as lost as a lone wanderer in an endless forest. We come from nowhere and we are going nowhere. We are all boats to nowhere. But only those who are lost can ever find their way. If you think you are not lost, that you’ve never been lost, then you can’t really find your way in life. And perhaps, then you don’t even need to find a way. But when we are on this journey, in this journey, the mind is a mysterious radio that keeps playing for us songs, news and stories all the time. It is our sole companion. Interestingly, in

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie A creepy island. A spooky mansion. Ten strangers. A psychopath. A nursery rhyme. And then there were none… This, I think, perfectly describes the story of one of the best-selling novels by Agatha Christie.   According to the plot of the book, once there was an island named the ‘Indian Island’, located off the coast of Devon, England. The island was rumoured to be owned by an American millionaire named Mr. Owen. No one had really seen what went or happened on the island, but it was generally reported to be an isolated locale. On one early autumn, unexpected invitations reach ten strangers in ten different locations; all are invited as weekend guests on the island. Stifled by their respective mortal coils, they accept the invitations and head towards the island. In an eerie sea-facing mansion where they were invited, the ten characters meet - a judge with an obsession with justice, a schoolmistress, a soldier, a doctor, a

Deception Point by Dan Brown Presidential elections were on the cards. There was a tension between the current US President and his opposition party candidate Senator Sexton. The main qualm between the two parties was regarding the space organization NASA. According to Senator Sexton, NASA was wasting billions of dollars of budget on space missions that were resulting in zero zippo zilch that is, in nothing at all. On the flip side, according to the current President Herney, the abolishment or privatization of NASA would result in powerful space secrets and talent going into the hands of private organizations who were driven by advertising. Senator Sexton brainwashed the public saying that the billions of dollars spent on NASA’s fruitless missions could be utilized on students’ education, corporations and jobs. Whereas, President Herney had no evidence to support his argument. It was evident that Senator Sexton would experience the win in the upcoming election and

Have you experienced your world suddenly turning pink at the thought of someone, and suddenly turning black at the thought of someone else? It could even be the thought of the same person, in two entirely different scenarios. Only a mere thought can shift the reality of our life from A to Z or from Z to A. Believe it or not, we live in our own universe. We may think otherwise, but we spend our entire lives in the confines of our head. There is a difference between thoughts and reality, yet our brain is the kind of electrochemical organ that cannot distinguish between the two. Whether you think negatively or encounter an actual negative situation, your brain takes both as just the same and generates corresponding negative emotion in both the cases. And not to say this, but our head is a terribly lunatic place. Thoughts are codswallops and flapdoodles rumbling in the space of our head, causing us to feel happy and sad. The thoughts running in our head make us flip characters, feel em

Falling in love. Getting awed by someone’s charm. On days like sparkling pink sapphires, gazing into the skies. Unquiet restlessnesses of the quiet amber afternoons. Dragonfly-sized microbots flying in the space. The crispness of breeze. The warmth of salty tears…. Life is a chocolate-box but the one full of fascination. There is tragedy but there is also comedy. The beauty is all around. Yet what makes this beauty so beautiful is something that resides already within the gleaming monument of our body with the crowning jewel of the brain glowing inside it. According to the primordial soup theory, this body-brain combo is a chemical soup. Billions of years ago, life arose from the primordial soup of chemicals. Amino acids linked together to form proteins and as a result, this sophisticatedly-designed human body came into evolution. Inside this chemical soup, electricity flurries in glittering pockets of dopamine molecules. This dopamine is responsible for all the things that feel

Video Highlights – Tools to enhance your Imagination: ·         Curiosity ·         Practice ·         Take pleasure in everyday things ·         Ask questions ·         Look for Mystery ·         Write Soliloquies ·         Anthropomorphism ·         To-do lists, wordboards and mindmaps ·         Concepts and facts Read full post below: Each one of us, when we are born, our mind is in the state of tabula rasa. Tabula rasa is a state of mind which is like a blank slate, free of all preconceived notions or beliefs. Our imagination is rich with rainbows, colours, magic, wonder and characters. Stream of emotions flow freely and playfulness is a natural state. But as we grow older, as we get educated, we gain knowledge and we learn things, then even though it wakes up our faculty of reasoning and observation, it also puts a gatekeeper at the dam of our emotions. The bony finger of our intellect points towards the spinner and wizard of our imagination, restricting it w