Home. A word that can feel both familiar and elusive at the same time. A shelter and a longing. A necessity and a dream.
Where is home? It’s a question I’ve asked myself at different points in my life. Is it the place where I grew up? Is it the place that gave me wings to fly high? Or is it in the mountains, where I feel strangely calm?
Tag: personal essay
Darjeeling, This Is Not How I Wanted to Visit You
As we stepped out of Bagdogra airport, the cold breeze reminded me that the mountains were close by. This would usually excite me, but this time there was a strange knot lurking in my chest. I had decided to be here, but suddenly I was unsure about this decision.
This was my first visit to Darjeeling, but this was not how I wanted it to be.
The Curious Case of the Single Woman Traveller
Travelling alone as a single woman in India still sparks an odd kind of curiosity—whether I’m in a taxi, at work, or halfway up a mountain in Japan. From being asked what I “do about food” by surprising fellow travellers to why I like travelling alone, every solo travel journey remains both empowering and quietly revealing.
Music and Me
‘Do you have a connection to music?’ he asked. ‘Yes’, I replied with a slight smile appearing on my face. He was part of an online writers’ group that I had enrolled in. We would write short stories on a specific theme every week and submit it for peer review. I had joined it so that I could get honest, unbiased feedback from strangers who were writers and readers themselves, from people who knew nothing about me. I wanted to know what my writing revealed about me and how deep I could go.
A writer’s fear
The fear of not being able to write is a deep-seated fear inside every writer. It pops up on those days when you have not written a word for days. It’s not that you don’t want to write, words are constantly creating havoc in your head, but you keep postponing it for another day. It happens one morning when you realize that you haven’t written a single long piece in a very long time.
Red is my colour
Today as I sipped my morning tea and read the newspaper, the article that drew my attention was an article about a politician making a racist remark about the colour of the skin of people in the southern part of India. Why the colour of the skin must be a matter of discussion I have…
Do you see what I see?
Do you see what I see?… was the caption that came instantly to me, when I saw these three young student monks busy looking at the view through the binoculars. This was in Mandalay, where I had gone on top of a hill to get a panoramic view of the city. It was interesting to watch them…