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The Shark in my Tank: Finding the balance between challenging myself and caring for my mental health

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A couple of days ago, I was scrolling through LinkedIn (yes, I am that sort of a person). I came across this story written very much in the format of a WhatsApp forward – it ended with “loved this story, couldn’t resist sharing it ahead” or some variation of that sentence. Here is my paraphrased version of the story: the people of a certain country had a preference for fresh fish, but the water near their country had hardly any fish. To feed their population, the fishing boats went further into the sea and returned with the fish they found.  However, by that time, the fish were long dead and the meal was no longer fresh. This brought down the price of fish in the markets. To overcome this challenge, the fishing companies installed freezers on the boats. The new fishing boats went out into the sea and returned with the frozen fish.  This, too, was not to the mark for the people – it was better than the dead, unrefrigerated fish, but it still wasn’t fresh. People stopped buying fish in
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Adding the heck, no! in techno: Is technology moving too fast?

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Let’s go back in time: I am in 5 th grade; I have just changed schools – cities, in fact. My class enters the computer room for our weekly lesson on PowerPoint. Each student picks a computer from the three rows of computer stations. I choose one next to my friend. I look around and notice that everyone is switching their computers on. I’m nervous; I don’t know which button is the power-on one. I look at my friend pressing the largest round button on her CPU, and it turns green. I immediately press the largest button on my CPU, afraid that I might miss something if I don’t follow her step-for-step. She then presses the square button on the monitor and I follow her lead. Hers switches on, with that quintessential 2006 Windows ding . I look at my screen. My screen is white with two thin-lined rectangles on it. This is my second earliest memory of having a panic attack. I know if I can't get the computer to start in time, nobody is going to wait for me. The teacher will start th
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Book Review | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

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This book had me annotating like a crazy person. I think if Stephen King saw the number of post-it notes I have on my copy, he would mighty disapprove. What’s clear from his book is that he is a strong believer in going with the flow – a sentiment that rings true in my writer-heart but I am incapable of doing with this anxious brain. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft  is part biography and part collection of tips for an aspiring writer in fiction. The book is like a step-by-step writing guide that is structured in a very intuitive way. King starts off with the simplest thing:  where  to write. He then takes the reader through  when  to write,  what  to write about,  how  to write and  how  to edit your own manuscript. He looks at the significance of symbolism and theme. He gives ample examples to illustrate each point and he hit most of the questions I had when I started writing. Let me be honest: I have read only one Stephen King novel and it’s not even one of the famous ones. I rea
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“A Storm of Flyshit”: How writers speak about punctuation

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I recently read an article on Literary Hub called The Punctuation Marks Loved (and Hated) by Famous Writers . I was curious to see if any writers I know or like were on the list. I wasn’t expecting much more from the article. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be surprised by how these writers speak about punctuation. They talk about punctuation as if it is a living, breathing thing – a neighbour perhaps, a friend, and in some cases, an arch nemesis. This is what Garielle Lutz had to say about her love for hyphens back in 3 rd grade: “I started putting hyphens between all of the words in my sentences. I thought that was a way to keep things from falling apart, but the teacher made me stop. (…) The hyphen, though, is the sweetest of punctuation marks, because it unites words into couples (and sometimes threesomes and foursomes). It’s an embracer.”  Have you ever heard anyone call a punctuation mark an embracer? It is such a strange thing if you think about it. When you si
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How I maintain a reading habit

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A few posts ago, I spoke about how I was a reader at some point, but now can’t read as fast or as much as I used to. I also compared myself to a ceiling fan because I am very poetic like that. I want to subject you to a Freudian deep-dive into why I struggle to read like I used to, but I’ll save that for another post. Today, I’ll just talk about how I am getting back to reading. My focus is not on how to read more books or how to read faster. I am focusing on how to read – how to develop a habit of reading and stick to it. I started with compiling different techniques from different sources. Some worked for me and some didn’t; I’ll go through both below. And in case these techniques do help me read faster or more , I’ll let you know. Set aside time I sit to read at the same time every day – 6:15pm. Initially, I started reading for 15 minutes a day. I would set a reminder on my phone and make sure to keep reading till the alarm goes off. Now, I easily read for 45 minutes, wi
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Movies I liked, but I describe the plot badly

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In case you thought that every post was going to be coherent and insightful, you had an other thing coming, folks. That's not how my brain works. These are ten movies I liked/found decent enough, but I purposely do a terrible job at describing the plot. Also,  Spoiler Alert. I am not sure how far  my 3 am, anxiety-induced descriptions are going to spoil the entire movie for you, but here is an alert, just in case.    1) Ancient man gets mad that his necklace is stolen, so he refrigerates 5 men . (Demonte Colony) 2) Store your brooms in your basement. (The Babadook) 3) Woman goes in search of Singing Man-Child who throws a fit when she calls him sweet and eats chillies. (Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam) 4) Father  needs to poop while his child falls in love. (Piku) 5) End of Season sale for Televisions. Keep an eye on the sky for never-before-seen offers. (Super Deluxe) 6) The one where the woman tries to kill herself with the butter knife. (Dil Dhadakne Do) 7) Woman whose molars have been
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Taking the Slow-Coach to Book-Nerd Land

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You know those ceiling fans that only work when they are wound up to level 5 on the regulator? The levels 2, 3, and 4 are basically the same on these fans –blowing air out of your mouth would cool the room faster. If you turn it to 1, the fan stops altogether. So then, you think to yourself, ‘you know what? I’m just going to turn it to 5.’ Now your entire house flies out, there are papers everywhere like a post-apocalyptic movie scene, your hair is messed up. That’s me as a reader. I too (approximately) have 5 reading settings. Setting 5 – My fellow English Literature students know what this is like. This is for when I have to read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and that excerpt from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; all in the same semester. 120 pages and 1 hour in, my brain has stopped absorbing anything, but my eyes are absolutely flying across the lines. You want me to critically analyse George an
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