Tangled in Thoughts

"I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale. Shattered is the word to describe how I feel right now", I texted my best friends.  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a novel that was on my to-read list for ages. In between, I watched three seasons of the new TV Series adaption of the novel and the 1990 movie based on the novel. The series, like many articles on the internet opined, was at times too emotionally draining to be binge-watched. After all, it is a dystopian story premised on the sexual subjugation of women. Therefore, I was fully aware of what was in store for me when I finally opened the book. I knew the entire story and how depressing the plot was. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming feeling of emptiness that the book left me with. For this is the tale of how "Offred", the protagonist and other women like her got stripped of all things deemed valuable by humans one by one; rights to own property, to work, and to earn money,...

മാതൃഭാഷ  മറന്നിരിക്കുന്നു  ഞാൻ.  പേച്ചിപ്പോഴും അതിലെങ്കിലും  എഴുത്തധികവും  ആംഗലേയത്തിലാണിന്ന്.  കണ്ടും കേട്ടും വായിച്ചും ഞാൻ പ്രണയിച്ചൊരെൻ  ആംഗലേയഭാഷക്കു മുന്നിൽ   ഇന്നെന്റെ മലയാളം ഇല്ലാതാവുന്നവല്ലോ?  എന്നോ നിലച്ചുപോയ  മലയാളപഠനത്തെയോർത്ത്   വിലപിച്ചിട്ടില്ല ഞാനൊരിക്കലും. എങ്കിലുമിപ്പോൾ ദുഖത്തോടെ   മനസിലാക്കുന്നു ഞാൻ  പലതും മറന്നിരിക്കുന്നുവെന്നു.  വെറുമൊരു സംസാരമാധ്യമം  മാത്രമായിരിക്കുന്നു എന്നിലെ മലയാളം ഇന്ന്   തെല്ലുമെഴുതാതെ മാതൃഭാഷയെ  ഞാനൊരു മധുരമാം ഓർമ്മയാക്കി.  വല്ലപ്പോഴും ഓർത്തു സന്തോഷിക്കാനും  കൊട്ടിഘോഷിക്കാനുമുള്ളൊരു  ഭാഷാമൂർത്തിയാക്കി.  ജനിച്ചു വീണനാൾ മുതൽ  പറഞ്ഞുശീലിച്ച എന്റെ ഭാഷയെ  ഞാനന്യമാക്കിത്തീർത്തിരിക്കുന്നു!  ഞാനോ യഥാർത്ഥ മലയാളി?

Covid-19 finally visited my family and me on around 1st May. After incessantly trying to keep the virus at bay for over a year, the virus eventually won the game. Thankfully, the rona decided to be friendly to us and only presented its mild avatar.  Like most others, we also spent all of April struggling to get our vaccination slots on the cowin website. My family consisting of my Dad, Mum, Grandma and me was mostly staying indoors. Except for a visit to the hospital where Dad and Grandma were supposed to get their second dose (which they unfortunately did not receive due to the vaccine unavailability despite having booked slots) and the occasional expedition to the super market/ medical store etc. which are a stone's throw away from our house, there was no unnecessary venturing out on part of any of us. So how did we catch the rona? I wish I knew.  The rona first manifested as a cold in my Dad. He promptly took a wikoryl pill which did not seem to have any effect on the cold....

  23 rd Sept 2018 Sundays are inevitably reserved for nostalgia. Sundays are for staying in bed till late, lying down on the sofa while sipping tea, and catching up on the glorious memes and funnies that I had missed out on. Sundays are for reminiscing the days that are long gone. Sundays are for long-distance phone calls that remind me that I may not after all be that far away from the ones I love. Sundays are for thinking and clearing my head out on all the things I had been keeping aside throughout the week. Sundays are for living. As I did my thinking and cherished my nostalgia this Sunday, I stumbled upon the same thought that occurs to me frequently these days, about how drastically different my life was when I was in college. Only when one is deprived of something does one realize the significant change its presence once made. Perhaps the thing I took for granted the most while in college was the time at my disposal to do as I pleased. Oh, all those glorious uncountable...

This is an attempt to publish some of the things I wrote not so long ago, possibly to gain clarity of thoughts or get myself back on my feet when I was feeling down.  Occasionally, when I take a break from the constant and mindless social media surfing that I find myself doing a lot these days, I contemplate the progressing ruin of the budding writer that I once used to be. It is fun to read as an adult the poems, stories, and diary notes that I wrote when I was a child. Sometimes, I also feel a warm affection towards my child self, which I imagine I would feel for a much younger sister if I had one. It saddens me to think that somewhere in the vicissitudes of adulthood, I lost that artistic child in me.  I started becoming conscious of the growing distance between the young adult that I was and the writer that I used to be towards the later years in college. However, in hindsight, it was only when I graduated and started working in Mumbai that I completely lost touch with the...