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Roundhouse Kick to Self-Deprecation

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Nearly a year ago, I did something that felt ridiculous at the time. I joined a kickboxing class. Picture this: an almost-forty, overweight, very-unprepared man, who could barely touch his toes, stepping into a room full of fit fighters. Not exactly an underdog story waiting to happen. I walked into the gym braced for impact. I expected the usual stuff. Stares. Smirks. That quick scan people do where they measure you from head to toe and file you away as not belonging there. I had already written the whole script in my mind before the class even began. A few minutes in, I heard a woman and the coach giggling. I turned and saw them looking in my direction. My stomach dropped. Heat rushed to my face. I was sure they were laughing at me, the new guy who clearly did not fit the part. I had not thrown a single punch, and I already felt like a joke. Thankfully, I spotted a few other brave souls who also looked old and out of shape. Allies. My people. A Warmup Where My Soul Tempor...
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Soaring Beyond Fear - A Life-Changing Leap

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Dharamshala - a quaint hill station nestled in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh. The moment I remember the place several glimpses of my visit flash in front of me rapidly. The crowded yet cosy town centre, the several small stores selling almost everything under the sun. The wonderful Norbulingka monastery and its exceptionally skilled artisans create "Thangkas", artworks that take extreme dedication and several months to complete. If there's a place  that I owe the most for making my life's journey so much more beautiful, it is Dharamshala.  A place where I jumped off a cliff and flew like a bird while experiencing true liberation from my fears. It was the second year of my marriage and except for the marriage, everything else was on a rocky path. My wife felt we both needed to unwind so she signed me up for a trip along with the entire clan of in-laws who were planning for this trip months in advance.  When we reached Dharamshala, my brother-in-law's eye caught...
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Beyond That Slope

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My friends always called me and my wife, Kunjal, an odd couple. There was nothing normal about the choices we made in life. The benchmark of normalcy is living a mundane, monotonous life without taking much risk and without any great ambitions. That was exactly the opposite of what we were. We were ambitious (we still are) and we are adventurous, sometimes bordering towards recklessness. But the one thing we take great pride in sharing as a common trait in us is that when we fall, we don't waste much time in that state. We learn and move ahead. However, there are a few lessons that have remained etched in our minds permanently. So, we were on a vacation at Mount Abu and since we were completely unaware of the place, we relied heavily on a tourist map. For days we roamed across the place visiting all the major tourist destinations listed on the map. Towards the end of our trip, Kunjal happened to notice the thin lines on the map that were passing through the area demarcated as for...
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How I Started To Love The Rains

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It was raining heavily when I saw her for the first time and even heavier the day when I saw her the last time....she had laughed or was it just the rain I do not know...but even today whenever it rains and I close my eyes listening to the sounds of rains I can hear her soft angelic laughter somewhere in the distance....... It was one of those years when we were supposed to think about studying and only studying. Any other thought that crossed our mind was considered an abominable sin. The incessant bombarding of physics, chemistry, math, and biology was at its full force. I still wonder how all of us survived it without getting our brains blown off. It was somewhere in the middle of all this struggle with my studies was when I saw her for the first time. She was always there but I seldom noticed her. The fact is she never did allow anyone to notice her as much. A little shorter than me, she was always covered from head to toe in a black robe, which they called "burkha...
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The Great Indian Parental Generosity

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We often come across satirical statements and messages on various social networking sites about how children in Indian societies are compared to their friends or neighbours in terms of their studies. All of us have had this experience throughout our childhood and have unwittingly hated the other kids with whom we were being compared with. I guess some of us are still searching for those “CHAAR LOG” (Four People) who are always interested in our lives and would say something dreadful if we try to do something that is not acceptable to widely accepted societal norms. It is rather obvious today that all parents are in some form of the rat race to get their kids to do post-graduation and get a well-paying MNC job. It doesn’t matter what the child desires or whether the child has an aptitude for higher learning. Recently I came across a video on Facebook summarizing HSBC's Value for Education Report 2016, which claimed that Indian parents are the most generous in the world. We rank...
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The Shy Giant

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Amit...I still remember how shy he was, it always amused me. Not that being shy was a very funny thing but given his size and look, I least expected him to look down at the floor and speak meekly when asked his name. And I thought I was the shy guy! But I wasn't aware that this shy giant would affect my life to such a great extent...... It was class 8 when I started to understand how important friends can be in your life. I had a bad fallout with a buddy the previous academic year because of some stupid reason and when I came back after my vacation thinking that he would like to patch up, it was all over. He had new friends who were better than me in studies and sports. They were the guys whom girls looked up to and I was the shy guy always pulling him back because I was afraid.....always afraid of something or the other. It was a bad start of the course, but I accepted my flaw and tried to have no bitter feelings against anyone (that never happened though). It was sometime du...
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Teaching to Shoot the Invisible Eye

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Recently during one of my bookish indulgences, I came across the cliched, used and abused anecdote from Mahabharata. Guru Drona, the teacher of all Pandavas and Kauravas, tested all his students by asking them individually to shoot a dummy bird’s eye and before shooting did so they were to describe what they saw. Obviously, what followed is known to all of us. We all have been fed with this story since childhood by our elders, teachers and even those storybooks and Tinkle comics. Even Mr Ramanand Sagar reiterated this in his televised creations. We were taught to be focused like Arjuna, who was the only student to reply that he only saw the eye and received adulation from his guru. The book in my hand however was not talking about it in the same manner as the aforementioned sources were. Here the author mentioned that Karna, the tragic hero of the epic, was studying in the same school as Pandavas and Kauravas, but was never acknowledged by Drona. He, therefore, embraced the Sun ...
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