Beating cancer and making the world a better place - one life jacket at a time

(I could only cover a few bits here as this has perhaps been a very triggering article for me as well, as I do have PTSD from those days. I’ll probably write the rest, as and when I can.) (Also, I’d like to dedicate this to my fellow warrior - Sonia! You helped me navigate this storm and have taught me so much and for that I’ll be enterally grateful. Wherever you are, I hope I am making you proud, and you are happy and full of life there! I am blessed to have met someone like you, my love. Till we meet again, love you and miss you loads. RIP my doll. <3) Oscar Wilde had once said ‘Experience is the hardest kind of a teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterwards’. To be honest, experience is a tough teacher, but the best one out there, because even if you don’t want to move ahead, mould and grow, you have no choice but to learn and nothing becomes real till its experienced. Six years ago, I was in a place where I did not know the head and tail of what to do when ...

  Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines heart break as “a crushing grief, anguish or distress”. So clearly this is something awful and can have a wide connotation which doesn’t only include romantic love. It can be on a death of a pet, a loss of a friend or any form of betrayal too, right? (In this article, we will look at it from the perspective of a person leaving, though you can suit your taste) and this form of agony, is supposed to be the best teacher as per some world renowned nobody, because it changed so many lives, it brought people to some ‘a-haa’ moment of enlightenment, taught things which apparently books don’t cover and became a multi-million dollar product to sell by self help writers. So yeah, it apparently does teach us something, but what really? In this moment of anguish, when all the ‘what ifs’ and exaggerated multicolour dream sequences of memories, go on a loop in your head, and at the same time you are in the constant self-doubt spiral, what is this ‘a-haa’ mo...

  December 2015. Close to New Year’s Eve, I found my throat swelling up again. A huge part of me froze in its tracks and I didn’t know what to comprehend anymore. Two months ago, I was given a green signal, right? No more cancer, I was assured. I was rushed to do an ultrasound of my neck, and to a different centre. My heart could pulse out of my chest and run away. A doctor comes, firm, a very no-nonsense guy. Asks me to lie down, stretch out my neck, and puts a cold jelly on it. It tingles on my skin and he pushes a medical probe hard on my throat. Very hard. I had to ask him to lighten the pressure. He does and keeps moving the probe around. I had no medical probes on my chest to count my heartbeat but I am sure if it were there, an auditorium could hear how loud my heart was thumping. I am sure he could also. He asked me to calm down, I did not listen. He affirmed it again, this time sternly and said “there is a huge lump I can find, only if you stop squiggling like this I can f...

Have you noticed, whenever you want to indulge in a guilty pleasure, how your mind would cook up all the reasons to justify why you should do it. I am not saying, that having a cheat day is wrong, but when you wish to have one day of gluttony, ever noticed, how your mind would literally give you all the possible scenarios of why whatever you are doing is right? Let’s take another example, whenever you wish to do anything, which might technically not be right, like lying to someone, at the time of the action, your mind would give you all the reasonings, to make it sound like it’s the right thing to go ahead and do, and later, maybe post the action you might realise, how you were actually wrong, and should not have done such a thing. The five minutes of extra sleep in the morning, the skipping your planned workout, the choosing to talk a little longer to your friends rather than go back to your studies, is what the mind tricks you into believing is right. The biggest enemy o...

If you are a regular reader here, you would probably know why I started this blog. If you aren’t, then welcome! I started this blog exactly 5 years ago to give my experiences of finding life jackets, which I believed were god sent answers to our difficult days and hoped that somewhere I could be the same too. Well, this post is going to be a bit different, as this one is dedicated to my best friend – Neha Munoth, one of my most unexpected, yet the most beautiful life jacket. Neha and I met in the most unusual of circumstances, when both of us were going through one of the toughest phases of our lives, something I wouldn’t like to divulge into more. The basic connection that bonded us was our mere ability to actually hear the other person out. The basic sense of humanity is not going and doing grand gestures, but rather small ones for someone, just to uplift them when they are down. Something we never noticed was just being a patient listener to the other person in pa...

Protagonist  noun   /prəˈtaɡ(ə)nɪst/ -  the leading character or one of the major characters in a play, film, novel, etc. Maya Angelou once said, "I got my own back". The word protagonist would literally translate to - a leading star in a movie or the major character. The reason I am writing about this today is because I have always looked at our lives like a ‘not-so-short’ but a rather meaningful movie, where we are the leading actors, with few or nil supporting actors, and funnily we are also the directors, producers, writers etc Its quite a common comparison that people bring about, but I have brought about the comparison here for different reasons. I am not an ardent follower of “Picture abhi baaki hai” or any kind of a happy ending which has been fed upon us from the beginning, but it’s just my way of bringing some perspective on how exactly we are the protagonists. So, in a few days my CA results will be out. Nope not the Finals, but rather a shitty ...