Manali Manan Desai's Blog, page 37

The Part I Left with You by Rahul Saini

Book blurb:

Does the meaning of love change over time? A young, starry-eyed Ratna finds herself at the doorstep of her favourite author, Ronit Sukhdev, and a little white lie lands her the opportunity to stay at his place for a few days. But Ronit, devastated by his break-up with Tasha, has stopped writing, even as Nitasha tries to move on from her past and is on a quest to make sense of her life choices. Funny and heartwarming, this is the captivating story of three very different yet similar people finding their way in life.

Genre: Fiction/Contemporary Romance

Pages: 236

Format: Kindle eBook/Paperback

Price:

Kindle eBook: 151.05 INR/$6.00Paperback: 159 INR/$12.50

My Rating: 4.5/5

Ratna, a student of journalism and literature, lands up at the doorstep of her favorite author, Ronit Sukhdev. After a whirlwind and over-the-top first meeting, Ronit reluctantly agrees to let her stay at his home and interview him as part of her assignment. As they get to know and interact with each other, Ronit unfolds his past, helping himself as well as Ratna understand him better. Though there are lingering feelings of love that Ronit has for his ex-girlfriend, Nitasha, does he seem to be falling for Ratna, who is obviously hero-worshipping him?

Book cover taken from Amazon

What I liked about the book:
-> Though the book runs around the axis of past and present, you can easily compare, go through, and understand these very easily. The transitions are not only smooth, and not at all confusing, but also interconnected with the previous chapter. This way of going forward and backward also helps us to know the character’s backstory and the stages as well as reasons behind their current situation.
-> The funny email addresses. I was guffawing out loud at these because they’re so quirky and witty.
-> The relationship between Ratna and her dad is well-depicted. I especially loved their conversation about why girls don’t need to look and behave a certain way just because boys will notice or like them.
-> The book highlights and aptly puts across the message that everyone has their perception of living life and you should not compare them.
-> The story deals with the lead characters’ perceptions of life and of love and though you might feel that’s a done and dusted formula, it’s the way of dealing with love that differentiates this book from most other Indian love stories. The story here deals with love as a feeling, love as a whole experience, and falling out of love altogether. More than that, it teaches us the importance of accepting, evolving, growing, and loving ourselves.
-> I absolutely loved Nitasha’s character and how sorted and matured she is. Her growth in the story stands out as the most vibrant one. Her calm demeanor and balanced attitude easily make her the most likable character in the story.

What I did not like about the book:
-> Though Ratna is the entertainer in this book and her interactions, especially with Ronit were funny and witty, after a certain point, they became repetitive. She becomes irritating too at times. It was difficult to understand whether she was being naïve or obsessive.
-> A lot of the details about the characters’ past and future are left to the imagination of the reader, which was a little confusing as well as upsetting.

Quotable quotes :
-> The perception of love changes with age. Ask yourself what love is after every ten years and you will get a different answer each time.
-> ‘There are no two words in the English language more harmful than “good job”’.
-> All her thoughts might not make sense, but she liked them. She felt comfortable with her thoughts and did not want them to stop.
-> What was it about human nature that made us cling to the past like this? Be it something as beautiful as this piece of art that she held in her hands or something as hateful and grotesque as war or a massacre, humans always cling to their past and carry it with them for as long as time permits. How can one define the past? Why is accepting it and moving on so hard? What is it about the past that is so anchoring?
-> You are all the people you have ever known. The world around you, the people, they make you. And that’s what I am. And that’s what you are.
-> And you will learn to figure out everything in life, you just have to keep at it.
-> All the people that you have met in your entire life, everyone that you have ever loved or hated or even been indifferent to, they are all a part of you. You can’t look at yourself as something that’s separate from them. You can’t turn away from your past, present or future. Attempt that and you will only end up tearing yourself apart. Your past and everyone you have ever met is what you are made of. Accept that. Try to erase any of that and you will only end up erasing your own self.
-> No man can stay away from helping a girl who faints in front of him. It’s almost his moral duty!
-> There is a strange kind of courage and confidence a failed relationship keeps feeding us long after it ends.
-> There is a strange kind of courage and confidence a failed relationship keeps feeding us long after it ends.
-> We don’t pay enough attention to the food we eat.
-> Don’t get burnt trying not to lie. The world is an ugly place anyway. Another lie, another liar won’t make it uglier.
-> What was the point of going out with someone if you didn’t get to know them?
-> Girls don’t need to be thin for others to like them. How much people love you has nothing to do with how thin or fat you are. It only depends on how nice you are as a person, how much you love and care about the people and everything around you. If you have a good heart, people will always love you no matter how you look.
-> Kids these days just don’t know how to work. They just want to “pass” their time. They have no knowledge or desire to know anything. They have almost lost the ability to read and understand text, so any kind of research is out of the question. And when it comes to working on anything, they think that it should show results in the blink of an eye, and when they see things are taking time, they give up and indulge in other, more pleasurable, things. They post their pictures pouting, resembling dying, wide-eyed fish, and feel ecstatic. The generation of students today has lost the understanding that one needs to work hard to reach the top.
-> Authors, artists for that matter, they are very sensitive people. You should not talk to them much. You never know what meaning they might suck out of your words. You never know what might hurt or upset them.
-> The only way to stay happy among humans is to stay away from them, never get attached to them, never connect with them.
-> What was it about relationships? What was this mystery that no one had ever been able to solve? It was the most talked about, most thought about and most deeply felt subject by humans since time immemorial, but most of us are still majorly clueless about it. Love is something that baffles us. Was it natural to fall in and out of love, to find the people you love unbearable and irritating with the passage of time?
-> Time changes things, but does it spoil love as well? Why do people fail to see the flaws in a person when they first fall in love with them? And why do they fail to see the goodness in them when they fall out of love? Falling out of love – wasn’t it a strange expression.
-> It’s funny, no? People you have been with never really leave your memory. That part which lives with us, that part which stays with them. The ghost?
-> We are all masks. We are all masks under masks under masks. And no matter how close we become with other people, how deep we peep into their hearts through their eyes, we can never see who they actually are. Because they are an incomprehensible mash-up of all the masks they wear.
-> We are different people at different times. Who I am now, I will not be all the same tomorrow. I will have different things running in my mind, feeling different and reacting and behaving differently. So if you want to know more about me, ask about the present. Don’t ask about the past or the future.
-> A writer writes because he wants people to read.
-> No one was ever spoilt by reading more books. People get smarter this way.
-> Education was not easy any more. It was not limited to books. One needed a laptop with internet. This had become a basic necessity.
-> The world is a tough place. One needs to understand that no matter how nice they are with people, they will still be mean to them. It’s an ugly world that we live in and one needs to learn how to deal with it. One needs to toughen up, otherwise the world will just eat them alive.
-> Teenage kids are generally stupid. And the world is filled with such stupid people. You can’t let them trouble you. Let them say what they want to say. It only shows how weak and shallow they are. They don’t have anything good to give to this world and that is why they behave the way they do. You don’t have to accept their insults. You must let them roll off your back. You need to learn to always wear a raincoat when you are around such people. Do not care about them, you will never be happy if you do. Don’t give them any power over you.
-> Artists are passionate in a different way.
-> Beautiful stories can come only from a broken heart.
-> Love doesn’t birth only out of lasting relationships and long compatibility. We as humans constantly desire a state of ease and comfort and we must not confuse that with the idea of love. Love is far more complex and, in many ways, superior.
-> True love is not “I find you perfect, I see no failure”. You fall in love when you discover an imperfection in that person and you say to yourself, “I love them despite their imperfections.
-> You don’t love someone because of their perfection. Love is true only when you love someone despite their imperfections. You know they are flawed but you can’t bear to stay away from them; you can’t stop loving them.
-> If you start understanding the world around you well, people start understanding you a little less. And that’s primarily because people don’t like understanding everything; they don’t like things to be explained to them. And most of all, they don’t like to be explained who they are and how they think.
-> These days people read an author’s book because they’re good-looking.
-> Everyone has been given the gift of life and that it’s okay to grow old, it’s okay to be middle-aged. It’s good, in fact. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a long life. It’s nothing to feel bad or ashamed of.
-> Everything, everyone changes. No one likes to stay the same and spend their whole life in one place. Even the sun changes its position to rise and set across seasons; we are merely human. Physically or situationally, no one wants to stay the same forever. Such an eventuality can only result in rot. Staying in one place forever – that’s the idea prisons are based on.
-> We develop, we grow, we transform out of who we were and grow into who we are and will be.
-> In today’s world, intellect is like having a fresh, throbbing pain, an open wound that never heals. There is so much around us that is wrong, and no one cares about it. You don’t want this scar; you don’t want to be an intellectual.
-> We all are the centre of our universe. And we constantly crave to find someone whom we can make the centre of our universe. This can never happen. In the beginning we might spend a few months of happiness and selfless love, not expecting anything from the other, loving the other just as they are. But soon our own personal needs and desires come in the way. The happiness eventually evaporates. You feel your partner does not understand you any more. And you want to find someone who will understand you, someone you can make the centre of your universe. But it’s impossible, it can never happen. All of us crave to find that someone around whom we can wrap our whole life, someone who will become the centre of our universe – who means everything to us and is our whole world, on whom we can shower all the love we have inside us. Someone whose happiness means the most to us, whose happiness makes us happy, whose smile makes our world a thousand times more beautiful. But we can never find that person. It’s a mirage, because whoever we might think we love, we always end up being driven away from them due to our own selfish needs, desires and expectations.
-> We don’t fall in love with people; we only fall in love with some of their characteristics. And there is a lot more to those people than just those characteristics. ‘There is something negative in every person, something that you will not like. Humans by nature are attracted more towards the negative, the wrong. That’s the reason kids learn all the bad stuff faster than any of the good stuff, and it’s the same with many teenagers and adults, unless their instincts are killed in the name of “conditioning” or “philosophies” or “religion”. This natural affinity for the negative subconsciously forces us to focus on all the negative things about the person we think we love. And soon the things we don’t like, the things we find irritating about them overpower what we like about them. We start disliking that person and finding them irritating. It’s simple and natural. You can’t help it – it is human nature.
-> ‘You mean no two people can even fall in love?’ I ask. ‘You can. And you do, actually. Life is only little more than meeting the person you fall hopelessly in love with and then letting that person destroy you. Destroy your life, your existence. But if you want, you can avoid this. You can avoid this shit called love.’
-> Love is a lot deeper. Love is when a person’s happiness matters to you more than that person’s physical presence around you.
-> Everything exists in a cycle. And this cycle of life and death, of being and not being, is inevitably characterized by infinity. Infinite, just like the stream of our thoughts, connecting one link to another, endlessly.
-> She was the artist and he was the writer – they were meant for each other.
-> Relationships. They say at times it’s not a person’s fault and the problem is with the relationship itself, which is just another way of saying that both people in the relationship are at fault.
-> Was life only as rough or as easy as we took it to be?
-> Smart is the new sexy.
-> There are no misunderstandings. There are only different ways, different points of view of looking at things.
-> Misunderstandings can be cleared but perspectives can’t really be altered.
-> People say they understand you, they know how you feel. But the truth is that no one can ever understand you. No one can ever feel the way you feel. It is a sad truth, but you never get what you want in the way you wish for it.
-> We are all infinite and a label amputates our infiniteness, our capabilities, and reduces us to only one of our finite characteristics.’
-> What lives do we live? We sacrifice our happy times together to ensure a good lifestyle, to earn more money. But is it really worth it? Will it make us any happier if our days and lives slip out of our hands?
-> Your work must always be the most important thing in your life, always. Because that is the only thing which will ever give you happiness. If you try to find happiness in other things and people, you will always be unhappy. You must find your happiness inside you. And the only thing that comes from within you is your work. You must always find happiness in your work, that’s the only way to be content in this world.
-> ‘Of course I am unhappy, almost every creative person is. They are always unsettled with the things around them. That is why they are pushed to create new things as an escape from or as a response to reality. If they were happy with the world around them, they would never feel the urge to create anything new.’
-> Stories are strange. They are very different from reality; they are always incomplete.
-> Stories are written, they are engineered to make you feel what the makers or writers want you to feel. And in the process of that engineering a lot of lies are thrown around, so never believe that life is what you see in movies and read
in books.
-> We fall in love multiple times but not all of them stay with us all our lives. Only those to whom we formally commit might stay. And after a while we stop loving them too. We only want them around because we grow accustomed to them, like a piece of furniture. They make our lives comfortable and secure, helping and assisting us in the things we do every day. The kind of love you think you believe in does not really exist. Love is the biggest hoax in the world.
-> In this age, ignorance has become a reason for celebration. Many people have no deep knowledge about anything but still feel they know everything. To learn an art is an act of meditation. It is a truth people have forgotten. You have to stay put, be calm and focus. You can’t keep jumping around, running all the time, trying a hundred things, understanding nothing and pretending that you are learning everything.
-> A reader must always read to evolve their mind. It should not matter what an author’s opinion on a subject is. A good reader should dig further within their own mind and find out what their own opinion is. That should be the purpose of reading – to understand oneself more. And that is what the aim of a good writer should always be – to help readers understand themselves more.
-> Not everyone is going to like you, no matter how nice, how good, how kind you are. And not everyone is going to hate you, no matter how bad, how evil you are. The world runs on this principle – all of us do. That’s why our feelings for people change – when the image we hold of them gets overpowered by their qualities that we don’t like.
-> Your thoughts are the realities you live in. It does not matter what I think of you. In your mind, in your world, what matters is what you think I think of you.
-> We meet people and we think we know them, but we only see a certain image of them which is a reflection of our own thoughts. And this does not only apply to the people we meet; it applies to everything around us – our whole world. This is how we create our own realities. We see and we feel everything around us according to our perceptions and impressions. We are the creators of the worlds we live in. We are our own gods.
-> Men behave strangely when they find out that their girlfriends are not really in love with them any more, when they find out that they like someone else more than they like them. Some even get violent; these acid attacks, even murders at times, happen due to this reason. Some destroy the relationship even when there is still a chance that it might survive. Men are weak that way. They never want to face the reality that the reason their partner is drifting away from them is simply that they were not able to keep her happy, that they didn’t really understand her, that she didn’t get what she wanted. It was their fault, not hers. No, they don’t understand that. They live in a huge bubble of denial and label her unfaithful.
-> When you truly, selflessly love someone, you value that person’s happiness more than your own.
-> True love makes you want to see the other person happy, with or without your presence.
-> If science has done a lot of good to humanity, it has also done much irreparable harm. Were the number of people killed in wars and terror attacks less than the number of people saved from serious diseases by medical science? Art holds a special place in every civilization but not everyone understands this.
-> It’s a hard world for thinkers, artists and philosophers.
-> We live in a world where people are blind to the importance of arts and humanities. It’s a tragedy. People have started looking down upon artists and intellectuals. You try to talk some sense and take a little turn towards an academic conversation and people instantly label you a pseudo-intellectual.
-> ‘I read a novel once. It had a strange take on what the apocalypse might look like. It said that first the world will kill the singers. Then it will kill the actors, writers, artists and philosophers. After that it will go for the sportsmen. And once all of them were dead, the world will be thrown into a mode of self-destruction where the industrialists and scientists will act as catalysts to finish life on earth.’
-> There is a difference in asking for suggestions and telling someone what to do.
-> ‘My books don’t need to go in many hands. They just need to go in the right hands. I don’t write to sell. I write with the hope to inspire, to satisfy. In fiction people generally crave what they lack in real life. I don’t write to fulfil such cravings. I only want the right people to read my books and understand them. I think only a handful of people will know what I am saying.’
-> If you talk nonsense, thousands of people will flock to listen to you, but if you talk sense, only a selected few will follow. Use the usual Instagram tricks of posting a selfie in a stupid pose with a dumb caption, and you will get hundreds of likes. But if you write something meaningful, something of significance, something that might actually be of help to someone, you will hardly get any attention.
-> The people who can think, the people who want to listen to sense and meaning are far fewer in number than the people who want brainless shit.

-> Back in the 80s and 90s, when things used to wear off or break – we used to repair them, not replace them. We valued things more. But now we live in an age of “replacement”, not “repair”. And this idea of replacement applies to everything – your TV is not working properly, get a new one; your phone is not working properly, throw it away and get a new one. And this also applies to relationships – your friend didn’t treat you well, get a new one. Your girlfriend behaving strangely? Fine, get a new one. “New” is the measure of good these days. Nothing you own is good if it is not new. The idea of durability has gone down the drain.
-> Things become more valuable as they age but most people don’t think like that any more.
-> Artists’ lives are just endless struggles and that struggle ends only with their last breaths.
-> ‘Artists are not like other people. They usually create something when they have something different, something new to say. But people these days write songs and make movies not because they have something to say but because they want to put themselves out there as exhibits. They just want their audience to place them on a pedestal and pay to look at them so that they can grow rich. There is a very strange kind of relationship between art and money and the rich. What is desired, what is commissioned and what is produced and promoted. How true is that “art”, even from a postmodern point of view? It is really hard to say.
-> At times, instead of being ashamed of not putting any effort into something, people say they are scared of it.
-> ‘Jorge Luis Borges said, “Reading is writing.” And over the past few years, I have come to understand that the reverse is also true. Writing is reading the world around you; writing is reading your own self. I think I have started to write just for myself. And I am satisfied with this small little circle in itself. Somehow I don’t feel the need to get my work published any more.’
-> You know who is a good teacher? It’s not someone with a lot of knowledge and information. That can be attained from books and documentaries and many other sources. A good teacher is one who inspires, someone who gives students direction and helps them reach heights that they themselves didn’t know they could.
-> Why should anyone be anyone’s hero? They should be their own heroes.
-> At times we do things without a reason.
-> There is a difference in having fun sometimes and having fun all the time.
-> Entertainment must make our hearts and minds grow.
-> You should never take decisions based on how much you love someone. You fall out of love and stop loving people just like you fall in love and start loving them. There are bigger things in life than love and romance. Two people living happily with each other for the rest of their lives is an impossibility and “happily ever after” is a myth sold to us by the media that we all buy in to so readily.
-> People find it difficult to understand the people who understand a lot about the world we live in.
-> We all are entitled to one true love in our lives. And at times we find it in the wrong person.
-> One’s profession and principles are the backbone of one’s life. But they can never be the heart of one’s life. To pump the warmth of life in a person, one needs something else.
-> Love can bloom on the hardest rocks. No matter how stony-hearted you think you are.
-> When two people spend a lot of time together, they lose themselves and gain each other. There is an exchange of habits, behaviour and ways of doing things.
-> If you are so troubled by this world, you should do something to change the things you don’t agree with. We are our own gods and we create our own world around us.
-> We come across people not by accident but because they are sent to teach us something, or to give us a direction when we are lost.
-> Truly passionate people are like good firewood. They catch fire slowly, but they burn for long.
-> Take the pieces of your broken heart and turn it into art.
-> Not everybody is destined to fall in love.
-> Not everyone you find interesting needs to be someone you need to get romantically involved with. We live in a world where most loving relationships outside the family are reduced to one or two categories. Not every relationship is romantic in nature. We all need to learn an important lesson in our lives – everything, all feelings, all relationships, have a life; we can’t really establish lifelong relationships with everyone.
-> Stars are only good if they are seen and loved from a great distance. If you come too close, you end up burning yourself. They are only great balls of fire.
-> When you find something you love to do, when you find what you are passionate about, you stop feeling the need for people’s love and relationships in your life. You stop feeling that void, that emptiness. Your work becomes all the love, all the relationships you’ve ever needed.
-> All comedy is born from tragedy.

Buying details:

Amazon IndiaAmazon.com

Author’s social media links:

WebsiteInstagramTwitterFacebook

Dealing With People (A Poem)

Some people change by the hour,

Treat them like the time gone by,

Once gone it’s at least not coming back.

Some people change like seasons,

Consider them your least favorite one,

Reminding yourself they’ll be gone in a few months.

Some people change like days of the week,

Think of them as your Mondays,

And don’t forget to add some motivations for tolerating them.

Not all people change though,

Some grow and become better.

Take these as your mentors and guides.

Learn from them, imbibe their qualities, emulate, and be inspired.

Try to change yourself a little too sometimes, maybe?

****

Thank you for reading.

How to contact me:Connect with me on LinkedIn.Subscribe to my YouTube channel.Follow me on Instagram and Facebook.Send me an email: arusticmind@gmail.com/manali1988@gmail.com

The Part I Left with You by Rahul Saini

Book blurb:

Does the meaning of love change over time? A young, starry-eyed Ratna finds herself at the doorstep of her favourite author, Ronit Sukhdev, and a little white lie lands her the opportunity to stay at his place for a few days. But Ronit, devastated by his break-up with Tasha, has stopped writing, even as Nitasha tries to move on from her past and is on a quest to make sense of her life choices. Funny and heartwarming, this is the captivating story of three very different yet similar people finding their way in life.

Genre: Fiction/Contemporary Romance

Pages: 236

Format: Kindle eBook/Paperback

Price:

Kindle eBook: 151.05 INR/$6.00Paperback: 159 INR/$12.50

My Rating: 4.5/5

Ratna, a student of journalism and literature, lands up at the doorstep of her favorite author, Ronit Sukhdev. After a whirlwind and over-the-top first meeting, Ronit reluctantly agrees to let her stay at his home and interview him as part of her assignment. As they get to know and interact with each other, Ronit unfolds his past, helping himself as well as Ratna understand him better. Though there are lingering feelings of love that Ronit has for his ex-girlfriend, Nitasha, does he seem to be falling for Ratna, who is obviously hero-worshipping him?

Book cover taken from Amazon

What I liked about the book:
-> Though the book runs around the axis of past and present, you can easily compare, go through, and understand these very easily. The transitions are not only smooth, and not at all confusing, but also interconnected with the previous chapter. This way of going forward and backward also helps us to know the character’s backstory and the stages as well as reasons behind their current situation.
-> The funny email addresses. I was guffawing out loud at these because they’re so quirky and witty.
-> The relationship between Ratna and her dad is well-depicted. I especially loved their conversation about why girls don’t need to look and behave a certain way just because boys will notice or like them.
-> The book highlights and aptly puts across the message that everyone has their perception of living life and you should not compare them.
-> The story deals with the lead characters’ perceptions of life and of love and though you might feel that’s a done and dusted formula, it’s the way of dealing with love that differentiates this book from most other Indian love stories. The story here deals with love as a feeling, love as a whole experience, and falling out of love altogether. More than that, it teaches us the importance of accepting, evolving, growing, and loving ourselves.
-> I absolutely loved Nitasha’s character and how sorted and matured she is. Her growth in the story stands out as the most vibrant one. Her calm demeanor and balanced attitude easily make her the most likable character in the story.

What I did not like about the book:
-> Though Ratna is the entertainer in this book and her interactions, especially with Ronit were funny and witty, after a certain point, they became repetitive. She becomes irritating too at times. It was difficult to understand whether she was being naïve or obsessive.
-> A lot of the details about the characters’ past and future are left to the imagination of the reader, which was a little confusing as well as upsetting.

Quotable quotes :
-> The perception of love changes with age. Ask yourself what love is after every ten years and you will get a different answer each time.
-> ‘There are no two words in the English language more harmful than “good job”’.
-> All her thoughts might not make sense, but she liked them. She felt comfortable with her thoughts and did not want them to stop.
-> What was it about human nature that made us cling to the past like this? Be it something as beautiful as this piece of art that she held in her hands or something as hateful and grotesque as war or a massacre, humans always cling to their past and carry it with them for as long as time permits. How can one define the past? Why is accepting it and moving on so hard? What is it about the past that is so anchoring?
-> You are all the people you have ever known. The world around you, the people, they make you. And that’s what I am. And that’s what you are.
-> And you will learn to figure out everything in life, you just have to keep at it.
-> All the people that you have met in your entire life, everyone that you have ever loved or hated or even been indifferent to, they are all a part of you. You can’t look at yourself as something that’s separate from them. You can’t turn away from your past, present or future. Attempt that and you will only end up tearing yourself apart. Your past and everyone you have ever met is what you are made of. Accept that. Try to erase any of that and you will only end up erasing your own self.
-> No man can stay away from helping a girl who faints in front of him. It’s almost his moral duty!
-> There is a strange kind of courage and confidence a failed relationship keeps feeding us long after it ends.
-> We don’t pay enough attention to the food we eat.
-> Don’t get burnt trying not to lie. The world is an ugly place anyway. Another lie, another liar won’t make it uglier.
-> What was the point of going out with someone if you didn’t get to know them?
-> Girls don’t need to be thin for others to like them. How much people love you has nothing to do with how thin or fat you are. It only depends on how nice you are as a person, how much you love and care about the people and everything around you. If you have a good heart, people will always love you no matter how you look.
-> Kids these days just don’t know how to work. They just want to “pass” their time. They have no knowledge or desire to know anything. They have almost lost the ability to read and understand text, so any kind of research is out of the question. And when it comes to working on anything, they think that it should show results in the blink of an eye, and when they see things are taking time, they give up and indulge in other, more pleasurable, things. They post their pictures pouting, resembling dying, wide-eyed fish, and feel ecstatic. The generation of students today has lost the understanding that one needs to work hard to reach the top.
-> Authors, artists for that matter, they are very sensitive people. You should not talk to them much. You never know what meaning they might suck out of your words. You never know what might hurt or upset them.
-> The only way to stay happy among humans is to stay away from them, never get attached to them, never connect with them.
-> What was it about relationships? What was this mystery that no one had ever been able to solve? It was the most talked about, most thought about and most deeply felt subject by humans since time immemorial, but most of us are still majorly clueless about it. Love is something that baffles us. Was it natural to fall in and out of love, to find the people you love unbearable and irritating with the passage of time?
-> Time changes things, but does it spoil love as well? Why do people fail to see the flaws in a person when they first fall in love with them? And why do they fail to see the goodness in them when they fall out of love? Falling out of love – wasn’t it a strange expression.
-> It’s funny, no? People you have been with never really leave your memory. That part which lives with us, that part which stays with them. The ghost?
-> We are all masks. We are all masks under masks under masks. And no matter how close we become with other people, how deep we peep into their hearts through their eyes, we can never see who they actually are. Because they are an incomprehensible mash-up of all the masks they wear.
-> We are different people at different times. Who I am now, I will not be all the same tomorrow. I will have different things running in my mind, feeling different and reacting and behaving differently. So if you want to know more about me, ask about the present. Don’t ask about the past or the future.
-> A writer writes because he wants people to read.
-> No one was ever spoilt by reading more books. People get smarter this way.
-> Education was not easy any more. It was not limited to books. One needed a laptop with internet. This had become a basic necessity.
-> The world is a tough place. One needs to understand that no matter how nice they are with people, they will still be mean to them. It’s an ugly world that we live in and one needs to learn how to deal with it. One needs to toughen up, otherwise the world will just eat them alive.
-> Teenage kids are generally stupid. And the world is filled with such stupid people. You can’t let them trouble you. Let them say what they want to say. It only shows how weak and shallow they are. They don’t have anything good to give to this world and that is why they behave the way they do. You don’t have to accept their insults. You must let them roll off your back. You need to learn to always wear a raincoat when you are around such people. Do not care about them, you will never be happy if you do. Don’t give them any power over you.
-> Artists are passionate in a different way.
-> Beautiful stories can come only from a broken heart.
-> Love doesn’t birth only out of lasting relationships and long compatibility. We as humans constantly desire a state of ease and comfort and we must not confuse that with the idea of love. Love is far more complex and, in many ways, superior.
-> True love is not “I find you perfect, I see no failure”. You fall in love when you discover an imperfection in that person and you say to yourself, “I love them despite their imperfections.
-> You don’t love someone because of their perfection. Love is true only when you love someone despite their imperfections. You know they are flawed but you can’t bear to stay away from them; you can’t stop loving them.
-> If you start understanding the world around you well, people start understanding you a little less. And that’s primarily because people don’t like understanding everything; they don’t like things to be explained to them. And most of all, they don’t like to be explained who they are and how they think.
-> These days people read an author’s book because they’re good-looking.
-> Everyone has been given the gift of life and that it’s okay to grow old, it’s okay to be middle-aged. It’s good, in fact. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a long life. It’s nothing to feel bad or ashamed of.
-> Everything, everyone changes. No one likes to stay the same and spend their whole life in one place. Even the sun changes its position to rise and set across seasons; we are merely human. Physically or situationally, no one wants to stay the same forever. Such an eventuality can only result in rot. Staying in one place forever – that’s the idea prisons are based on.
-> We develop, we grow, we transform out of who we were and grow into who we are and will be.
-> In today’s world, intellect is like having a fresh, throbbing pain, an open wound that never heals. There is so much around us that is wrong, and no one cares about it. You don’t want this scar; you don’t want to be an intellectual.
-> We all are the centre of our universe. And we constantly crave to find someone whom we can make the centre of our universe. This can never happen. In the beginning we might spend a few months of happiness and selfless love, not expecting anything from the other, loving the other just as they are. But soon our own personal needs and desires come in the way. The happiness eventually evaporates. You feel your partner does not understand you any more. And you want to find someone who will understand you, someone you can make the centre of your universe. But it’s impossible, it can never happen. All of us crave to find that someone around whom we can wrap our whole life, someone who will become the centre of our universe – who means everything to us and is our whole world, on whom we can shower all the love we have inside us. Someone whose happiness means the most to us, whose happiness makes us happy, whose smile makes our world a thousand times more beautiful. But we can never find that person. It’s a mirage, because whoever we might think we love, we always end up being driven away from them due to our own selfish needs, desires and expectations.
-> We don’t fall in love with people; we only fall in love with some of their characteristics. And there is a lot more to those people than just those characteristics. ‘There is something negative in every person, something that you will not like. Humans by nature are attracted more towards the negative, the wrong. That’s the reason kids learn all the bad stuff faster than any of the good stuff, and it’s the same with many teenagers and adults, unless their instincts are killed in the name of “conditioning” or “philosophies” or “religion”. This natural affinity for the negative subconsciously forces us to focus on all the negative things about the person we think we love. And soon the things we don’t like, the things we find irritating about them overpower what we like about them. We start disliking that person and finding them irritating. It’s simple and natural. You can’t help it – it is human nature.
-> ‘You mean no two people can even fall in love?’ I ask. ‘You can. And you do, actually. Life is only little more than meeting the person you fall hopelessly in love with and then letting that person destroy you. Destroy your life, your existence. But if you want, you can avoid this. You can avoid this shit called love.’
-> Love is a lot deeper. Love is when a person’s happiness matters to you more than that person’s physical presence around you.
-> Everything exists in a cycle. And this cycle of life and death, of being and not being, is inevitably characterized by infinity. Infinite, just like the stream of our thoughts, connecting one link to another, endlessly.
-> She was the artist and he was the writer – they were meant for each other.
-> Relationships. They say at times it’s not a person’s fault and the problem is with the relationship itself, which is just another way of saying that both people in the relationship are at fault.
-> Was life only as rough or as easy as we took it to be?
-> Smart is the new sexy.
-> There are no misunderstandings. There are only different ways, different points of view of looking at things.
-> Misunderstandings can be cleared but perspectives can’t really be altered.
-> People say they understand you, they know how you feel. But the truth is that no one can ever understand you. No one can ever feel the way you feel. It is a sad truth, but you never get what you want in the way you wish for it.
-> We are all infinite and a label amputates our infiniteness, our capabilities, and reduces us to only one of our finite characteristics.’
-> What lives do we live? We sacrifice our happy times together to ensure a good lifestyle, to earn more money. But is it really worth it? Will it make us any happier if our days and lives slip out of our hands?
-> Your work must always be the most important thing in your life, always. Because that is the only thing which will ever give you happiness. If you try to find happiness in other things and people, you will always be unhappy. You must find your happiness inside you. And the only thing that comes from within you is your work. You must always find happiness in your work, that’s the only way to be content in this world.
-> ‘Of course I am unhappy, almost every creative person is. They are always unsettled with the things around them. That is why they are pushed to create new things as an escape from or as a response to reality. If they were happy with the world around them, they would never feel the urge to create anything new.’
-> Stories are strange. They are very different from reality; they are always incomplete.
-> Stories are written, they are engineered to make you feel what the makers or writers want you to feel. And in the process of that engineering a lot of lies are thrown around, so never believe that life is what you see in movies and read
in books.
-> We fall in love multiple times but not all of them stay with us all our lives. Only those to whom we formally commit might stay. And after a while we stop loving them too. We only want them around because we grow accustomed to them, like a piece of furniture. They make our lives comfortable and secure, helping and assisting us in the things we do every day. The kind of love you think you believe in does not really exist. Love is the biggest hoax in the world.
-> In this age, ignorance has become a reason for celebration. Many people have no deep knowledge about anything but still feel they know everything. To learn an art is an act of meditation. It is a truth people have forgotten. You have to stay put, be calm and focus. You can’t keep jumping around, running all the time, trying a hundred things, understanding nothing and pretending that you are learning everything.
-> A reader must always read to evolve their mind. It should not matter what an author’s opinion on a subject is. A good reader should dig further within their own mind and find out what their own opinion is. That should be the purpose of reading – to understand oneself more. And that is what the aim of a good writer should always be – to help readers understand themselves more.
-> Not everyone is going to like you, no matter how nice, how good, how kind you are. And not everyone is going to hate you, no matter how bad, how evil you are. The world runs on this principle – all of us do. That’s why our feelings for people change – when the image we hold of them gets overpowered by their qualities that we don’t like.
-> Your thoughts are the realities you live in. It does not matter what I think of you. In your mind, in your world, what matters is what you think I think of you.
-> We meet people and we think we know them, but we only see a certain image of them which is a reflection of our own thoughts. And this does not only apply to the people we meet; it applies to everything around us – our whole world. This is how we create our own realities. We see and we feel everything around us according to our perceptions and impressions. We are the creators of the worlds we live in. We are our own gods.
-> Men behave strangely when they find out that their girlfriends are not really in love with them any more, when they find out that they like someone else more than they like them. Some even get violent; these acid attacks, even murders at times, happen due to this reason. Some destroy the relationship even when there is still a chance that it might survive. Men are weak that way. They never want to face the reality that the reason their partner is drifting away from them is simply that they were not able to keep her happy, that they didn’t really understand her, that she didn’t get what she wanted. It was their fault, not hers. No, they don’t understand that. They live in a huge bubble of denial and label her unfaithful.
-> When you truly, selflessly love someone, you value that person’s happiness more than your own.
-> True love makes you want to see the other person happy, with or without your presence.
-> If science has done a lot of good to humanity, it has also done much irreparable harm. Were the number of people killed in wars and terror attacks less than the number of people saved from serious diseases by medical science? Art holds a special place in every civilization but not everyone understands this.
-> It’s a hard world for thinkers, artists and philosophers.
-> We live in a world where people are blind to the importance of arts and humanities. It’s a tragedy. People have started looking down upon artists and intellectuals. You try to talk some sense and take a little turn towards an academic conversation and people instantly label you a pseudo-intellectual.
-> ‘I read a novel once. It had a strange take on what the apocalypse might look like. It said that first the world will kill the singers. Then it will kill the actors, writers, artists and philosophers. After that it will go for the sportsmen. And once all of them were dead, the world will be thrown into a mode of self-destruction where the industrialists and scientists will act as catalysts to finish life on earth.’
-> There is a difference in asking for suggestions and telling someone what to do.
-> ‘My books don’t need to go in many hands. They just need to go in the right hands. I don’t write to sell. I write with the hope to inspire, to satisfy. In fiction people generally crave what they lack in real life. I don’t write to fulfil such cravings. I only want the right people to read my books and understand them. I think only a handful of people will know what I am saying.’
-> If you talk nonsense, thousands of people will flock to listen to you, but if you talk sense, only a selected few will follow. Use the usual Instagram tricks of posting a selfie in a stupid pose with a dumb caption, and you will get hundreds of likes. But if you write something meaningful, something of significance, something that might actually be of help to someone, you will hardly get any attention.
-> The people who can think, the people who want to listen to sense and meaning are far fewer in number than the people who want brainless shit.

-> Back in the 80s and 90s, when things used to wear off or break – we used to repair them, not replace them. We valued things more. But now we live in an age of “replacement”, not “repair”. And this idea of replacement applies to everything – your TV is not working properly, get a new one; your phone is not working properly, throw it away and get a new one. And this also applies to relationships – your friend didn’t treat you well, get a new one. Your girlfriend behaving strangely? Fine, get a new one. “New” is the measure of good these days. Nothing you own is good if it is not new. The idea of durability has gone down the drain.
-> Things become more valuable as they age but most people don’t think like that any more.
-> Artists’ lives are just endless struggles and that struggle ends only with their last breaths.
-> ‘Artists are not like other people. They usually create something when they have something different, something new to say. But people these days write songs and make movies not because they have something to say but because they want to put themselves out there as exhibits. They just want their audience to place them on a pedestal and pay to look at them so that they can grow rich. There is a very strange kind of relationship between art and money and the rich. What is desired, what is commissioned and what is produced and promoted. How true is that “art”, even from a postmodern point of view? It is really hard to say.
-> At times, instead of being ashamed of not putting any effort into something, people say they are scared of it.
-> ‘Jorge Luis Borges said, “Reading is writing.” And over the past few years, I have come to understand that the reverse is also true. Writing is reading the world around you; writing is reading your own self. I think I have started to write just for myself. And I am satisfied with this small little circle in itself. Somehow I don’t feel the need to get my work published any more.’
-> You know who is a good teacher? It’s not someone with a lot of knowledge and information. That can be attained from books and documentaries and many other sources. A good teacher is one who inspires, someone who gives students direction and helps them reach heights that they themselves didn’t know they could.
-> Why should anyone be anyone’s hero? They should be their own heroes.
-> At times we do things without a reason.
-> There is a difference in having fun sometimes and having fun all the time.
-> Entertainment must make our hearts and minds grow.
-> You should never take decisions based on how much you love someone. You fall out of love and stop loving people just like you fall in love and start loving them. There are bigger things in life than love and romance. Two people living happily with each other for the rest of their lives is an impossibility and “happily ever after” is a myth sold to us by the media that we all buy in to so readily.
-> People find it difficult to understand the people who understand a lot about the world we live in.
-> We all are entitled to one true love in our lives. And at times we find it in the wrong person.
-> One’s profession and principles are the backbone of one’s life. But they can never be the heart of one’s life. To pump the warmth of life in a person, one needs something else.
-> Love can bloom on the hardest rocks. No matter how stony-hearted you think you are.
-> When two people spend a lot of time together, they lose themselves and gain each other. There is an exchange of habits, behaviour and ways of doing things.
-> If you are so troubled by this world, you should do something to change the things you don’t agree with. We are our own gods and we create our own world around us.
-> We come across people not by accident but because they are sent to teach us something, or to give us a direction when we are lost.
-> Truly passionate people are like good firewood. They catch fire slowly, but they burn for long.
-> Take the pieces of your broken heart and turn it into art.
-> Not everybody is destined to fall in love.
-> Not everyone you find interesting needs to be someone you need to get romantically involved with. We live in a world where most loving relationships outside the family are reduced to one or two categories. Not every relationship is romantic in nature. We all need to learn an important lesson in our lives – everything, all feelings, all relationships, have a life; we can’t really establish lifelong relationships with everyone.
-> Stars are only good if they are seen and loved from a great distance. If you come too close, you end up burning yourself. They are only great balls of fire.
-> When you find something you love to do, when you find what you are passionate about, you stop feeling the need for people’s love and relationships in your life. You stop feeling that void, that emptiness. Your work becomes all the love, all the relationships you’ve ever needed.
-> All comedy is born from tragedy.

Buying details:

Amazon IndiaAmazon.com

Author’s social media links:

WebsiteInstagramTwitterFacebook

Anxiety & Me (A Short Story)

Photo by boram kim on Unsplash

Nidhi, hoping and praying that she wouldn’t get late to the all-important meeting, drove at full speed, swerving between the rush traffic. She was anxious because of two reasons,

a) About being late for an all-important meeting and

b) Her anxiety screwing up the proceedings and outcomes of the meeting.

Taking a deep breath, she focused on the immediate problem, reaching on time.

One glance at her and anyone would’ve guessed she was a nervous wreck at that moment. Right now, her anxiety was understandable. However, if you asked her loved ones, they’d say she was almost always like that. Worried about something or the other.

There were times when Nidhi avoided looking anxious. But, deep down, the fears still rattled. She constantly remained anxious below the surface. Her subconscious mind was always twitchy, always hyper-vigilant. It was almost impossible for her to shift attention from perceived threats; threats that weren’t really there.

She constantly remained anxious below the surface. Her subconscious always twitchy, and mind hyper-vigilant.

Because of this anxiety, Nidhi found it difficult to talk herself out of the constant sense of foreboding and fear; that trapped in an endless loop of ‘what-if’ situations.

Nidhi understood that this anxiety was a kind of fear which had gone wild, a sense of dread about something about to happen which would be menacing. To others, it may not seem relevant and menacing at all (it might not even be there in reality) but for Nidhi, it was nothing less than a battle with her own mind.

Nidhi belonged to a group of people for whom; the smallest of incidences could trigger an anxiety attack.

Anxious people worry about their child being late. They think the siren around the corner is headed to their home, or that the ringing of the phone in the middle of the night is a sure sign of someone’s bad news.

So, what happens to Nidhi’s body and mind under such circumstances?

Reactive or hyper-reactive people are more likely to be the anxious types. Their temperaments persist but their behavior when under anxiety isn’t always persistent. Not every state of the brain sparks the same subjective experience. Different people can describe a hyper-aroused brain in different ways.

For example, Nidhi, when anxious about her performance at work, uses words like ‘alert’, whereas if she is worried about her niece, Naina being late from school, she uses the word ‘tense’. One has a positive ring to it, whereas the other one has a negative connotation. It is the outcome of such positive and negative reactions in the brain which matters when suffering from anxiety.

People like Nidhi, when anxious, sometimes repress the bad feelings and act normally, however on some occasions, she withdraws herself.

Nikhil, a friend of Nidhi’s once asked her,

‘Why are you always on the edge? What do you keep worrying about?”

To answer this, Nidhi thought long and hard, and said, “You know Nikhil, I actually don’t know.” She paused a little, smiled vaguely, shrugged, and then went on.

It was like a list of troubles had been waiting to be spilled out.

She said, “When I’m anxious I don’t really know what to do and it’s really frustrating. It makes me feel really uncomfortable, particularly when I realize that the other people around me know what they’re doing. My mind is always in a flurry of questions. Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way? I worry about things like getting projects done. Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? If I’m going to be in an enormous crowd, it makes me nervous about what I’m going to do and say, and what other people are going to do and say.”

Taking a little breather here, she went on, “The most I worry about is how to deal with the world. Or if I’m going to sort of do anything that really means anything.” Her voice trailed off. She wants to make a difference, she says, and worries about whether she will. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”

Nikhil went speechless and understandably so; because he had heard of anxiety and had read thousands of articles advising on how to deal with anxiety, how to avoid it, what leads to anxiety, etc. He was very well aware of how to tackle an anxious mind. But this, this was a first-hand experience, straight from the horse’s mouth. It was scary.

What an anxious person goes through remains a mystery for many.

Of course, not everyone who suffers from an anxiety disorder has the same problem Nidhi had. It varies from person to person.

Nidhi, over the years, has learned to live with the anxiety. And most times, she appears like any other person. While her behavior and subjective experience with her anxiety are under her conscious control, physiology is usually not what she can master.

Her anxious mind too controlled her actions most times. Even simple nausea and she would end up reading obsessively about the symptoms of cancer and AIDS and even get tested for it. Sometimes, she would just end up lying in bed for hours and days, trying to shut out the clamor of such thoughts and the terror of its outcomes with sleep.

Other times, she would drown herself in work, completely shutting off any other thought except work. This helped and even proved to be a better way out. It even improved her efficiency and productivity. But Nidhi didn’t always seek this way out.

Hence, her anxious mind is almost always in control of her actions and thoughts.

***

A poem to conclude:

She worries about things
big and small,
From being sick to
being under a maul;
Things that seem
irrelevant to others,
Bring for her
much worry and bother;
Her mind and actions
then do not stay in her control
On her physical and mental well-being,
it takes a toll.

Note: This story was originally published on The Naked Truth .

****

How to contact me:Connect with me on LinkedIn.Subscribe to my YouTube channel.Follow me on Instagram and Facebook.Send me an email: arusticmind@gmail.com/manali1988@gmail.com

In Conversation With Gautam Mayekar

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”—George Orwell

Reading books that send out a message, or talk satirically about the bitter truths of life is appealing for me. One such book I recently read was Stoned: The Untold Story of C0-WEED-20.

Read my detailed review of Stoned: The Untold Story of C0-WEED-20 here

After reading the book, I just knew I had to talk to the creator of Amar’s world. Luckily for me, when I reached out to the author, he agreed to be a part of the #AuthorCollaborative.

After reading my book Love (Try) Angle here’s what he had to say about it.

Read more here

Yesterday, Gautam and I discussed our contemporary styles of writing over an hour-long Instagram live session.

IG handle: @arusticmind_

Here’s what I picked his brains about.

Check out the answers here

Gautam too had his own set of questions for me.

Check out the answers here

Before ending the session we did a fun rapid fire round.

Check out the answers here

If you think those were quirky, look at Gautam’s questions for me in this round.

Check out the answers here

You can have a look/see at our entire session in the video below.

***

Check out the books discussed in today’s session via the below link:

Stoned: The Untold Story of C0-WEED-20 on Amazon IndiaStoned: The Untold Story of C0-WEED-20. on Amazon.com Love (Try) Angle

2021 Reading Challenge

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”― John Green

I’m an avid reader. My love for books is the prime reason I found my calling as a writer and author. Hence, book reviewing is something I do for giving back to the community that has given me so much to be grateful for.

Last year, I took up the Goodreads reading challenge because of two reasons:

I was losing touch with reading and wasn’t able to read as much as I wanted to (don’t we all have that complain?)Because of the lockdown and staying at home on most days, I had more free time than usual and thought, “Why not challenge myself to read more?”

I even started a Bookstagram account just to share my reviews on the books I read over the course of 2020.

Screenshot from my Bookstagram account: bookish_witch88

As it turned out, I surpassed by own bar. My target was to read a 100 books and I ended up reading 118 books!

Screenshot from my Goodreads account

So, this year I thought of continuing the trend (so to speak) and alongside the Goodreads challenge and I’m participating in the #TBRChallenge by Blogchatter.

Because, no amount of motivation can be enough for me; especially when it comes to reading.

Here’s to discovering amazing books and being able to recommend good ones to the bookish community.

***

My Soul Rants by Gurpreet Dhariwal

Book blurb:

My Soul Rants is my first poetry book emphasizing on how we deal with darkness in different phases of life to find the path of light again. Words are weapon and I use mine to uplift others with sheer grace and strength. May you find comfort in my words.

Genre: Fiction/Poetry

Pages: 127

Format: Kindle eBook

Price: 50 INR/$2.99

My Ratings: 4.3/5

This book is a collection of 60 poems (or sixty different rants gathered together as proses). The big and small poems touch upon love, birth, and death, darkness, enlightenment, and breakup. They share different perspectives of life taking us on a journey of emotions through the depiction of cruel incidences relating to heartbreaks & love.

Book cover taken from Amazon

What I liked about the book:

-> The poetess uses a simple yet effective way of portraying her thoughts, which is well expressed.
-> The book is written as a voice for all people who have gone through tough times or have faced some kind of heartbreak in life.
-> The poems teach us positive and needful things like overcoming our fears and taking on the world, and how we deal with darkness in life. They show the world we live in, which is not a good one at all times, and how to live in such a world.
-> The poems are bold but simple and straightforward, making them relatable and easy to grasp.

What I did not like about the book:
-> The book tends to get monotonous due to the length and theme of the poems.
-> The poems talk about hope, feminism, and self-evolution which have become a necessity in today’s time. However, these have also become somewhat clichéd in the literature world.
(This is totally a ‘me’ thing because lately, I have read many poetry books focused only on this theme)

Quotable quotes:

-> We all have a dark side that scowls at us when we are alone.
-> The road of life is beautiful despite its trials and tribulations.
->People are not saints by their wish,
They’re just forced by others,
To act either as a devil or a witch
->For all the years I tried to forgive,
For all the years I tried to believe,
I want to let you know,
Now I won’t
->Take one moment of sorrow
And show the world,
How hard you strike back at any cost.
->Last night
I discovered less of “me”
And more of “you”
Last night
You made me believe in stars
With your spark
->You were a loser,
You still are,
Because you never won.
->I better be your bed,
Where we can lay down with crossed legs,
I better be your rain,
Tie me with your heart,
Like a gold chain.
->No honey!
I don’t lie,
That’s who I am,
Some of your truth and my lies.
-> I am seeking your faith
With grace
I am seeking your fingers
Touching my face
I am seeking your soul
Touching my soul
->Time to remind myself,
That I’m not the one, who has seen the worst,
There’s a long queue in this world.
->You are in everything that I feel and see
That’s the beauty of your soul to me
->Light is on
Let it flow
Let yourself fly
Leave an imprint
Before you go
->Just get up from the chair
This is your time to shine
Let yourself be vulnerable
Let your weakness be your armor
You were born to shine.
-> Sometimes we shine
Sometimes we show the plight
Sometimes
We learn
We need to grow up
We need to unlearn
Sometimes
Could be your only last time
Have you ever wondered?
->Take a pledge,
Keep your hope high,
Just let it go,
The pain that hurts your soul,
The sigh of relief,
You are going to live it,
Be your own damn light.
->Distance only matters when feelings are not true.
->If I can make a human right from wrong,
If I can help to make someone strong,
If I can cheer somebody with a smile and a song,
Oh Lord, show me how?
If I can aid someone in distress,
If I can make their burden less,
If I can spread some happiness,
Oh Lord, show me how?
->Do not give attention to those
Who don’t believe in you
Believe in yourself and prove your words,
As they are real and true.
->I got to know…
The heart that bleeds…beats,
The hands that pray…forever stay,
The eyes that see the good when it’s dark,
Let it be your light,
Let it be your soul,
Let it be your voice,
Let it be your pride.
-> The whole fucking world is after you,
Some want to change your way of thinking,
Some want to change your appearance,
Some want to change your identity.
->Days aren’t sad,
It’s just us going through a bad phase.
Days aren’t good,
It’s just us lifting ourselves up.
Days aren’t tired,
It’s our soul giving up.
Days aren’t dead,
It’s our brain that needs the rest.
-> Be a mirror
Be a reflection of good thoughts
No bad memories
No harsh words
No hatred
Take an oath
Love yourself more.
->All your life you meet people to know your worth
For once
Just for your sake
Know yourself
Become your own friend
Trust me
You won’t need anyone anymore
-> We all have lost,
We all have been hurt,
We all have faced miseries,
We all fought our battles alone,
Yet we live
We walk
We breathe
and
We smile

Buying details:

Amazon IndiaAmazon.com

Author’s social media accounts:

InstagramTwitterFacebookMediumLinkedIn

Quotes by M

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

I’ve started a series called Quotes with M, wherein I share 7 quotes in each post, to help us (you and me) get through the week.

Because, we can never get enough motivation, right?

So, here’s this week’s dose. Hope these will help you give in your best.

1. Life GoalTaken from the author’s Instagram page2. Some people never changeTaken from the author’s Instagram page

Rough translation : Everything in the world has become almost worthless, but the thinking of some people is still ‘cheap’

3. A Good DayTaken from the author’s Instagram page4. Keep GoingTaken from the author’s Instagram page

Rough translation : It’s not a defeat when you stop or pause during tough times, but it’s definitely a victory of sorts if you continue moving ahead during such times.

5. Being EmotionalTaken from the author’s Instagram page

Rough translation : Is crying the only indication of being sentimental or caring?
Does this mean a person who doesn’t cry or cries less, cares less or doesn’t sympathise?

6. MemoriesTaken from the author’s Instagram page7. Stay WeirdTaken from the author’s Instagram page

Thank you for reading. 

****

How to contact me:Connect with me on LinkedIn.Subscribe to my YouTube channel.Follow me on Instagram and Facebook.Send me an email: arusticmind@gmail.com/manali1988@gmail.com

Love Has No Time Frame by Jasmeet Walia

Book blurb:

Hailing from a conservative family, life changed for the better for Amaira after her parents unexpectedly die in an accident. She sets off on a mission to fulfill her ambitions, which she couldn’t accomplish earlier.

However, life takes an unexpected turns and twists when she enters into the maze of infidelity. Conscious of her deeds, she leaves everything behind and lives her life in guilt.

Life is full of complexities, yet gives a fair chance too. Will Amaira get back what she has lost?

Set in the backdrop of Kolkata, this book unfolds the turmoils of the past, journey of perseverance, dreams of opportunities, and mirage of love.

Genre: Fiction/ Romantic Short Story

Pages: 44

Format: Kindle eBook

Price: 49 INR/$0.99

My Ratings: 3.9/5

Amaira’s world takes a 360 turn when she loses her parents in an accident. Because her life revolved around their caretaking, she lands upon newfound freedom. With a little support from her sister (Sarika) and her husband (Mihir), she finds her individuality enabling her to follow her ambitions. But, while doing so, she falters in her personal life by getting involved with someone she isn’t supposed to. Are the worst days of her life not over for Amaira yet?

[image error]Book cover taken from Amazon

What I liked about the book:
-> A simple story about family, love, tragedy, and loss.
-> The poems in the book are just superb.
-> Though the characters all have a grey shade, we actually feel for them rather than hating them.
-> The story very poignantly points out that when it comes to marriage/relationship going bad it’s a two-way street.
-> It sends out an underlying message that a loveless marriage/relationship doesn’t hold for long, and that sooner or later, one of the partners will turn to someone else of the opposite sex in search of love (and sex too)
-> The twist in the end. It leaves you admiring a character who might be your least favorite in the story so far.

What I did not like about the book:
-> The mixing up of tenses (‘has’ instead of ‘had’, ‘will’ instead of ‘would’, and so on)
-> The bog reveal that unfolds at the end felt a bit rushed in. It would have been better to transpire it in a different way.

Quotable quotes:
-> These birds were so lucky. They could choose to fly and rest without caring for anyone’s consent. There were no chains of societal pressure to restrain their movements nor any culture to clip off their wings from flying with uninterrupted liberty to fulfill their dreams.
-> The barbaric conclusion that once your daughter gets married, and you should not interfere in her family life, has always been adopted by Indian parents to dust off their hands from claiming responsibilities. And Indian daughters have involuntarily learned to disguise themselves into a persona that is expected of them.
-> Death has its own excuses to embrace someone without looking at the calendar.
->Poverty never follows a rule book of wisdom and dignity.
->People have multiple shades in them.
-> If your passion bores you, then it is no longer a part of you, but just your source of income. You inevitably dislike your work and waste half your life lamenting over wrong choices and in frustration.
-> Sometimes, when you are not happy in a relationship, you break all barriers in finding faults in your partner to prove that you are right.
-> What’s the purpose of your life if you coil a chain of restrictions around your soul? I agree that some things are sinful but some guilts have their charm.
-> I can’t understand how feelings and costumes are interconnected.
-> Life is full of complexities. If you have entered a room of hope which has no window of opportunities, immediately make an exit. It is high time for you to wear a robe of rejuvenation.
-> The heart is the only organ that sympathizes with you but will mock you too.
-> We cannot restore every rust with a lubricant. It becomes a scrap.
-> Some memories always pervade with raw texture.
-> Feelings are the unpronounced sensation of a heart that is sometimes sculptured with an invisible dent.
->Love follows no norms. It is a natural feeling which develops without caring for the time and relationship.
->Some mistakes are better dug in the graveyard of the past than letting others see your history in the open coffin.

Buying details:

Amazon IndiaAmazon.com

Author’s social media links:

InstagramTwitterFacebookYourQuoteLinkedIn

If I Hadn’t Met You by Shalini Ranjan

Book blurb:

“I wanted to ask you if you would go out with me.”
“Excuse me?” He looked at her as if she had cracked the joke of the century.

Charming and ruthless, business tycoon Rudra Singh Shekhawat is not the typical man anyone would want to cross paths with. Yet, when the beautiful and savvy Tisha Mathur entered his office and asked him out on a date, Rudra had no idea his life was about to change.

For, Tisha not only knows a lot of things about his dead mother but she also claims that she was murdered. As Rudra fights his growing love for Tisha, he realizes that he is not the only one with skeletons in his closet and that there might be a killer on the loose amidst his friends and family.

Genre: Fiction/ Romantic Mystery

Pages: 111

Format: Kindle eBook

Price: 99 INR/$2.99

My ratings: 4.2/5

Tisha and Rudra meet under bizarre circumstances on her 18th birthday. Though there’s an attraction brewing, Rudra can’t help but wonder about how Tisha knows so much about his long-dead mother. Is there more to Tisha than she’s letting on?

Book cover taken from Amazon

What I liked about the book:
-> The story begins with a bang; tragic deaths happen, leaving behind an eerie feeling of something sinister in the making.
-> The character of Tisha is adorable and independent. Whereas Rudra is sexy and appealing. The chemistry between the two is well narrated and gives goosebumps.
->The book is not just a love story. It is beyond that and a thrilling one in the end. Overall this is an interesting blend of mystery, romance, and thriller.
-> The story sends out important life learning lessons, like
a) One should not doubt or accuse their partner based on mere speculations.
b) Those who love us never truly leave us and always look out for us.
c) The truth can never stay hidden and that you will have to pay for your wrongdoings, sooner or later.

What I did not like about the book:
-> The book focuses on some supernatural elements and paranormal activities in the beginning chapter that geared me up, holding my breath to shrink in fear. However, these elements pale in comparison to romanticism. The dominance of romance with shredded mystery knocking once in a while was a little disappointing.
-> It felt that Tisha’s family could have been more elaborate. They are not given any spotlight.
Also, the maturity portrayed by Tisha was way more than an eighteen-year-old. It was kind of hard for me to digest that at such a young age, she is so independent as to not have her parents question her whereabouts, and to have a boyfriend whose family accepts her readily.

Quotable quotes:
-> Destiny sometimes works in mysterious ways.
-> Welcoming a new baby into their world is one of the most exciting things for a new parent.
-> Losing a loved one is sad. To lose two is devastating. While life goes on with every passing season, some people might find it hard to move on. And if by any twist of fate, they do appear to have moved on, they will still find a shred of wood to hang on to amidst the waves of life, refusing to let go of the pain and sufferings they consider themselves subjected to.
-> Turning eighteen is an exciting time for any girl. It is the period when you are prepared to bid goodbye to your teens and everyone starts taking you seriously.
-> Friends are a blessing in disguise.

Buying details:

Amazon IndiaAmazon.com

Author’s social media links:

InstagramFacebook