your baggage is your responsibility, emotional or otherwise!
I let out an internal scream so loud, that the glass panes of the airport facade shattered to a thousand pieces. I imagined it to all accumulate and form one big hammer, which I wielded against just everyone who I could think of: the back-stabbing colleague who had made my day hell; the lost uber driver; the airline staff; the person sitting next to me playing bhajans from YouTube on loudspeaker - I hit them all. Hard. Over and over again.
Shortly, in a matter of few days, the cacti which looked healthy to me started to look bloated and swollen up. Some even got discoloured, turning yellow. The other few showed signs of rotting. I was devastated. I had watered them well, trowelled them at regular intervals and had even fed them fertilizers. Surely it was some pest that had attacked. I turned to the master farmer for advice. He just smiled. I smiled back perplexed.
It was the most wretched day of my entire life, while for him, it was just the beginning of wretchedness... A cute little boy, his dusky face was soaked in tears. His eyes were the saddest, most beautiful thing i had ever seen. He sat beside the corpses of his parents, too young to undergo the pain that had befallen him.
Everyone goes through a phase of denial as they gain weight. For me it ranged from “I love myself the way I am” to “eat it all, for you live only once”, followed by excuses that I had a sitting job, I had previously failed at all my new year resolutions and wasted gym money – not once, but twice.
As the lift opened, and I walked out to the rooftop, I could feel happiness seeping back into the day. The view was simply stunning with the Mehrangarh Fort as the backdrop, the Gulab Sagar by the right hand side, and the well-lit clock tower in plain sight!
It was like walking through a fairytale land. Engulfed by mist, the trail we were following was hardly visible. The ground was slippery, owing to the creeks, but we had tiny crabs as our companions, moving along with us, although laterally. Our shoes were soaked, and soon we were drenched in clouds, teeth clattering to the sudden coldness around. After walking, slipping, falling, skidding, and a few ouches and a few ooiis later, we finally reached the edge of the cliff!
Yes, right, plastics. Lots of them. Stuck in mud, running through the rivers, being chewed by cows! Earlier you could find kids playing around cattle dung piles, but now they ran around what looked like plastic towers.
There is a lot of online gyaan on personal finance management, but as with all the other online gyaans, there is way too much content on this as well, which often leaves you bewildered, on where to start from. And that is when this book by Monika Halan caught my attention while thrifting through an airport book shop.
I have a copy of William Henry’s “Invictus” pinned to my board on my office workstation. As a kid, my dad would often cite this poem, asking me to learn it by heart. Being his pet, I could go da da da on it, reciting it without a second thought. But somewhere between growing up, with no battles to be fought and no demons to be tamed, the poem lost its place to Taylor Swift’s and Avril’s songs.
