Conscientious Reflections

  There was a time when I was an extremely enthusiastic reader. I would read anything and everything; from books and newspapers to even pamphlets and cutouts of papers used by roadside stalls to pack and serve food. I developed the habit of reading while obtaining my BMM degree. I distinctly remember our professors advising us to cultivate the habit not just to widen one’s knowledge and perspective but to find new stories around. It was around this time that I started reading and began my slow descent into a world of magic. There is something about words. They can either drown you or uplift you, then appease you and give you hope. Words can betray and words can heal. And if a couple of words hold this amount of power, imagine what a book can do. Books take you to places you cannot physically go; into fairylands and zombie worlds, into the past and the future. A book is a treasure house, not only of information but stories and experiences. They are like angels that hold your hand ...

I don’t know if I was born ambitious or expectations led me to. But ever since my early school days, my constant success with studies fuelled people’s expectations from me. With my soaring ranks in the eminently competitive world, everyone around me thought I was born to achieve big things in life. But as fate would have it, three years after shunning the world of science and embracing Arts, I became a writer. To be honest, I never wanted to become a writer. Yeah, I loved writing but it was only a hobby and a form of expression to me. Never would I have thought of writing for a living but here I am doing exactly that! After my graduation in BMM Journalism, the reality of the media world shocked me. Here I was dreaming of becoming an investigative journalist, but there was never a single job opening for a journalist in any of the channels or publications. The only jobs I could find matching my profile were for content writing. Since it was time to step out into the real world and make...

When I was in school, fast approaching my 10 th standard boards, the discussion about choosing the right stream in college had already seeped into everyday conversations at home. I would hear stories about my cousins, seniors and friends of friends competing to get a seat in the best college as the competition was insane. I knew the names of almost every engineering and medical college in the city because that’s what everyone was talking about. All the stories I had heard about career and competition narrowed down to two streams, engineering and medicine. Naturally, I was not aware of any other stream that could be considered for a career. Even if I did, I was hardly aware of its scope, so I assumed it was imperative that my ambition be to become either an engineer or a doctor. But atypical as I am, I did not particularly have an interest in either of the fields. Nevertheless, I chose ‘Science’ in junior college because I did not know what I wanted to do. My sister was studying engi...