Sometimes my hands itch for the piano I neglected when I was a teenager. It stood in my bedroom, atop a chest of drawers, mostly collecting dust and looking at me with resentment, or so I felt. I didn’t look straight at my piano often. I had attributed a soul…

Buckle up, readers, this is not a light and humorous one. There’s a problem I have with chats on social media apps. It seems that not that long ago, apps had focused purposes. Instagram was meant for sharing photographs, Facebook was where you wrote nonsense thoughts for your friends to…

Or what mere mortals call “resolutions”. Mind you, these are for the public eye, so they’ll be only about half-true. It won’t matter either way as I plan to spectacularly fail at it all. Trim the clothes pile. It is absurd for one body to need that many pieces of…

I hope the title is clickbaity enough for everyone of you readers on the internet. I learn very little from arbitrary years, let alone an exact number for serendipitous reasons. — Nevertheless, I am going to list random things down now, and there will be twenty-one bullet points, so I shall not have lied. I’m rubbish at household chores. This isn’t even indicative of my abilities to maintain habits of doing chores, this is about my skill level at them. I…

There’s a diary of mine that my mother has kept aside. In it, my six year old self wrote poetry on a plethora of topics that included a teddy bear that I don’t think I owned, the concept of birthdays, and the anticipation involved in opening presents on cold Christmas…

I read Loveliest of trees, the cherry now when I was a child. It was present in my battered copy of Wren and Martin, somewhere in the chapters on understanding and appreciating poetry, the chapters we never touched in school. I later learnt that newer editions of the grammar book…

Or the nth circle of hell you enter when you relocate from one country to another via surface travel. It’s not my fault – I tried booking for the aerial route. Twice. They kept getting cancelled and I kept running out of time. …

The city was grey and new, stuck in the past for the most, teeming with opportunity to a few. Years I spent there were suffocating, congested, marked with memories of smoke, noise and family. My parents are from the city, my grandparents were refugees within it. I had a happy…

I’ve been in lockdown the same as everyone else in the world—everyone who doesn’t work in essential services, that is. For the first time in my life, I have effectively been relegated to ambling around my mind-numbingly ordinary flat. I am not a person who particularly enjoys living in flats…