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Change is never easy, especially when you have to move out of your comfort zone. However, once you decide to take a new direction, you somehow begin to forge your path ahead.   You stumble, you fall, then get up and dust yourself, and walk on stronger than ever. I used to be a corporate executive working in the HR and Training departments of reputed companies. My story follows the trajectory of majority of qualified working women in India. Once I became a mother, I had to select my priorities , and I chose to give up full time employment to devote all my time to my child. First Step: Part-time Teaching  As my child grew up a little, I began to feel restless for resuming my professional life. I knew corporate jobs were out of bounds for me, as I couldn’t leave my kid with a hired help for the whole day.  Teaching and training had always been close to my heart. From childhood, I loved teaching and had wanted to become a teacher when I grew up. I had pursued...

I paused at the gates of the dreary building. The very thought of going in filled me with a strange kind of exhaustion, a lethargy I had never experienced before. I sighed. Let’s get the whole thing finished quickly. Dragging my feet, I stepped in and enquired about Baba. The anxious faces around me were awaiting their turn to meet their loved ones - those who had been banished to this rehabilitation home. Those unfortunate enough to be struck with a mental affliction in our country, deserved to rot in hell like this. In his heyday, Baba would have shuddered at such “rehab centres”. He was paranoid about social status and respectability. According to him, people like us did not suffer from mental problems….these things happened only to other “abnormal” people. I thought of the irony of it all. At the fag end of his life, Baba was a prisoner of his own demented mind, a dark shadow of his former self, in this rehab home. The geriatrician, the neurosurgeon, the psychiat...

Often bloggers and writers face this question: What to write? Should we write about personal tragedies and triumphs or should we wax eloquent on general topics? Focus on the intimate or the general? Create fictional set-ups or write about real issues? Daily, we go through this dilemma, sometimes facing the writer's block, that mother of all inertia. Yes, sometimes we are actually at a loss of ideas and words. Everything seems empty and meaningless. Words seem frivolous. This happens particularly when we are going through troubled times, during personal loss or depression. And then, one fine day, we decide to write after all! Collecting our thoughts and scattered words from memories and experiences, we start weaving yarns once again. Creating fiction, writing non-fiction, playing with words, all in the day's work for us. And so we write on, whether anyone reads us or not..... 

It isn't easy to opt out of the rat race. The daily grind, the commute to and back from office, the perks and pay cheque, and lastly, the comfort of monotony, all of these are too hard to give up for most people. But some of us do give up, and opt for a different way of life. A life, where we choose how much and what work we do. Where we can balance our homes and family life with the need to prove ourselves professionally. We opt to freelance or work-from-home or work part-time.   It is not easy, trust me, to say no to lucrative jobs that demand you to be in office from 9 to 6 or more. Where you are expected to regularly travel for work and report to office on weekends. You know you have to take a call. Do you want the fat pay cheque, the regular increments and promotions, the steady rise to the top on the corporate ladder? Or do you want to spend time savouring moments of togetherness with your loved ones? Do you wish to spend the best part of your your life attending busine...

Sometimes a mere moment's oversight or neglect can cause you to regret incessantly afterwards. It happened with me, when a preoccupied mind caused me to miss a step and slide down the stairs, eventually breaking my right foot bone. So now I am stuck with a heavy plaster cast starting from under the knee and stretching downwards to cover my entire foot. My orthopedic thinks it is the best guard against further damage to the injured foot. I think it is the worst load to be stuck with, and would gladly trade anything to get rid of it much before the stipulated 6 weeks time is over. But that is not to be. And so I go back again and again to the scene of the accident, and wish and wish that I had been more careful. Why was I not more alert, why did I not watch my step, what was I thinking, and so on and so forth. But one's regrets cannot bring back the lost moment, nor can one rewind and tweak life. So one has to live with unpleasant reality, however inconvenient it is. And o...