2015 in Review

My dear blog readers,

I know I have been as irregular as the monsoon rains for the past year. Thanks for sticking around if you have followed my blog since the beginning of the year. For those of you who are new, welcome. You have arrived at my blog at a great time. 

You all must be familiar with the word 'yearnings'. Now we dream of so many things when we are small. One thing that I have always wanted to become is a writer. Yes, it is in present tense. I started this blog as a feeble attempt in that direction. But then, life happened and I have not been able to pursue this interest. The yearning is back now!

The past year has been monumental. I was able to travel around a lot, become a certified foodie and settle in the most awesome company that gave me enough time to pursue all my random wishes and helped me gain many new experiences. It is a shame if I let this year slide by without recording all the awesome things that happened. So I have decided that I will write down all my travelogues and memoirs of 2015 in the coming days. So stay tuned !

Until Next Post,

Gayathri

P.S.: This midnight inspiration comes from going through the pages of National Geographic Traveller India. I saw a couple of places that I have been to this year and relived the beautiful memories associated with them. So here I am. 

Stop Stereotyping, Humans !

The picture says it all. Humans need to take a break. Take a chill pill and relax before God/Aliens - whoever created us and watching over us decide to hit a reset button.

My Facebook feed has been overflowing with the comments on a school kid being arrested for bringing a home-made clock to school. While most of the posts were in support of the kid, there have been few votes for the other side too. Forget about religion, I think it is just a sad state of affair for humanity that a school kid can even be suspected of doing such a thing.

I have a thirty minute drive from my office daily and today's drive was usefully spent thinking about this. While my brain was making weird connections that started with the above mentioned incident to a hot discussion I had with my friends once, it finally came down to one thing. Stereotyping. The problem with us is stereotyping. We do it everywhere. We generalize everything. I think our brain is wired to generalize as a part of the evolutionary cycle. We live in a world where our brain processes tons and tons of data and to make sense out of it, it tends to categorize things and slap a label on top of it, thus successfully stereotyping it. That is just how our brain works. But like in every dataset, there are outliers. This concept, though a very important one in statistics, somehow seems to be missing in the human brain. So it is only fair that we make an exception ourselves and try to consciously make the change in our attitude. Stop stereotyping and be more inclusive of things that are different from the general conception.

I am a victim of stereotyping but then I have learnt to rise above it. Every time I hear something stereotypical, I calm myself down and try to determine if it is worth my time to explain the concept of outliers. If yes, I launch into a huge monologue of how everything in the world is wrong due to stereotyping and the need to look beyond it. If it is not worth it, I simply move on !

It is high time that we stop doing this !!

P.S.: I had a bit of an overdose of the incident today and the above rant is a result of it. 

Memories

She was scanning through the crowd, lost as usual when she noticed the stranger. He reminded her of him; the one that she had always wanted to forget. But try as hard as she may, the memories always came back. She had filled her empty heart with layers of memories above his. She had once called him 'her Sun' and now couldn't help wondering perhaps if that was the reason his memories seemed to flare through the layers with scorching heat.

P.S. This is in response to 'Lillie McFerrin Writes' five sentence fiction 'Scorching'. A little late I would say, but better late than never !

P.P.S. I know I have been away from blogging for a long while now. Hopefully the dry run has ended.