I realized that I had gotten self-love all wrong
The summer of my senior year kicked me right in the solar plexus. Walled up between sixteen-hour workdays, I found myself brewing the age-old recipe for disaster — pushing people away. The missed calls became dropped texts, and soon everything was replaced with the abysmal silence of a damp workstation. I just puckered up and kept going at it. Within six weeks, I had frustrated myself into an insomniac, coffee-drowned troll who had slowly begun to crumble from within. Thankfully, right before I hit rock bottom, someone threw in the rope. …
Odds are that you use these phrases every day
As a non-native English speaker, I hardly spend a day without being bumped by the language. I am all too familiar with the embarrassment of being called out for using a word that didn’t mean what I thought it meant. Most of the time it gnaws at my confidence at others I can’t help but laugh at the confusion conjured by just a syllable out of place. Over the years, I have come to realize that this malapropism is not just limited to language learners. In fact, with the near-maddening mutations in the language on the internet, native speakers are…
An 800-billion dollar industry struggles to escape the red
The aviation industry is the poster child of bad returns. What makes its situation even more interesting that on the surface it has everything an industry needs to succeed. The demand for flight tickets around the world is ever-increasing and technological developments are undercutting costs each year. To spruce up the situation, the industry commandeers enormous economies of scale under its $800 billion wings. And yet with the slightest spike in fuel prices or an isolated case of terrorism, not to mention an all-out pandemic, the entire industry is forced to fold its cards. Even in the years when nothing…
How some misnomers can tank your money
Sitting in a South Delhi restaurant, my ravenous eyes scoured the menu. They caught on to the Bombay Duck and promptly placed the order. As I sat there salivating to the savors of exotic poultry, the waiter plopped down a pile of putrescent fish on the table. Instantly, my appetite vanished and I locked a disgruntled gaze with my food-to-be. To make matters worse, the hefty bill soured the little pleasure I was trying to suck in from the ambiance. Feeling utterly powerless, I quietly puppied out of the room. Though denied food, I had been served with a meaty…
From losing millions of dollars to annexing miles of territory
Multilingual people will agree that translating is a tricky business. More often than not, perfectly immaculate sentences don’t convey the same meaning when replicated in another language. Oftentimes, leading to hilarious episodes. We only need to gloss over the humourous stories of people getting in trouble using, ‘Estoy Caliente’ when they were feeling hot. Or better still, the hilarious signboard outside a temple in Bangkok— “It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man” — to see the dilemma of translating. Unfortunately, sometimes consequences of awry translation are worse than a few guffaws and…
Decoding the subliminal call for Muggle-world equality in the modern-day epic
No one can deny that Harry Potter commands an unprecedented fanfare with its followers. Walk into any bookstore and you will find a voracious reader hungrily prodding through the stacked copies of Rowling’s finest. The Wizarding World’s charm only gets grander with a cinematic adaptation that further entranced millions. Such a massive fan-following begs the obvious question: what makes Harry Potter so special? When Potterheads were asked the reasons for their undying love for the franchise, a majority of them pointed towards the work’s stellar world-building. And that they feel drawn into an enchanting universe that just seems too real…
Why it’s troublesome to believe otherwise
Standing in clogged queues can lead to all sorts of epiphanies. And so it happened in one such serpentine line at the Delhi Airport where my phone succumbed to two hours of fervent texting. Looking up, my eyes reeled on to a cheerful family who had just managed to secure a spot at the customs counter. When inquired about their ethnicity by the gentlemanly officer the family gave a reply that left me totally fanboyed.
“I am full Asian and full Hispanic and my husband is Caucasian.” Seeing the officer’s forehead furrow up in confusion the father stepped in. “Our…
Things are much better than you like to believe
Whenever we think of the ‘developing world’ grim images like this one begin to dance before our eyes. Without even setting a foot in, we deride someone else’s home as a virulent dump. A land where scores of children would drop dead each minute, if not for the benefactors in the West. A place so back of beyond that even the crumbling embers of hope remain out of reach for a people hungering from birth. Over the years, many such collective misconceptions layer up so thick that we are simply unable to see a person for what they are. Perhaps…
Upwards of 20 million women uncertain of their future
Splash and splurge? Rinse and Repeat? Nah, if there’s one phrase that comes close to capturing the daily struggle of an Indian housemaid, it would be ‘Reaching Out’. They reach out for the lonely dust specks in wooden crevices. They reach out to snuggle with the aged cobweb behind the rusty ceiling fan. They reach out to make ends meet — to take that step out of the patriarchy-clogged-doorway to earn their daily bread.
For centuries, housemaids in India have been excavating treasures in their dustpans — morsels of dignity to trudge an inch away from the clutches of cyclical…
How human self-centeredness has distorted the reality of a nuclear catastrophe
For the better part of the last few decades, we have lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. For those who grew up in the Cold War era, this threat is even more real. The moment we think of nuclear extinction, dark images begin to swell up. Images of mushroom clouds ripping through a crumbling planet reduced to a smoldering sphere of lifelessness. In fact, a survey finds that about 47% of millennials feel that such a nuclear World War would scourge out humanity in their lifetime. However, it turns out that a lot of these fears are unfounded, if…
