Hmmm...

It has been more than a decade that Priya is married to Rajesh, but still, the mention of her mother in laws name brings in a mix feeling Happy, scared, anxious, angry, nervous, irritated and any other feeling you can think about. Srinivas and Lakshmi had an elder daughter Sreeja and a son Rajesh, Sreeja was married to a doctor and had migrated to the USA long back, she would visit them once in three years, stay in her in-law's house, visit them for a week and would leave, Her interference in the family was minimal. She would call her parents once in a week and speak to all of them. Rajesh was a software Engineer, Priya also has finished her MS. but was on a sabbatical after marriage, she wanted to get used to the new life before moving on to a professional career, which she had discussed with Rajesh before marriage and moreover she had moved from a different city to Hyderabad. Initially, Lakshmi is happy to see her son married. But after a while, insecurity creeps in. She is...

Rebeca was considered to be a tough lady, never seen as a usual lady next door; She was a single mother from a small town. As usual as a single mother, she went through a lot of difficult situations. As long as her parents were around, she had some moral support, but after she lost them it was a lonely struggle. The first and probably the most difficult part of being a single mom was that people judged her without even trying to figure out, how She got into this situation. She found out too late that She could have fallen for a frog, who pretended to be prince charming and hence decided to go separate ways with her husband. Aside from the fact that she was the one working to bring food to the table, she also has to do all the house chores after work, because all her lazy husband ever did was eat and sleep all day, besides physical abuse and alcoholism. Personally, for her, the most difficult part was to explain it to her children when they asked “why other kids’ dads are with the...

Few days before lockdown, I was having a strong intuition that this lockdown will not hold good to a few days, but  might extend to months, of a long stay at home, and the idea of being confined to a small compound in Hyderabad with soaring temperatures as the days progressed was not going well.  So I decided to drive down to my farm, It was a long journey of 1000+Kms from Hyderabad to Wayanad with my family and Dogs and with a list of instructions to travel from parents. One of the instructions were not to eat your meal from any of the restaurants, so we had to make arrangements of food not only for us but for our three pets traveling with us. What an experience it was, I was so used to these long drives, stopping every now and then, experiencing local flavor at a new restaurant on the way, but sitting under the tree to have our meals and walking the pets on the highway, couldn’t have even thought about it at a normal time. Tired after the long travel, I woke up to ...

One of those days when I was not really busy at work, just sitting in the office, going through my phone and laptop, reading one or the other article and browsing through all my accounts of social media. Sanju called me from the other end of the bay and asked me to come for a cup of coffee, I don’t know what happened to me, I told him, “ I am busy, you go ahead”, I was surprised by myself, why did I have to make an excuse, I was not busy, I could have been for a cup of coffee. This caught me thinking, why is that I had to do? Is it that I was more keen on knowing what is happening in another corner of the world, rather than spending some time with my good friend? I immediately got up my seat and walked down to the cafeteria, where three of my other colleagues were also having their coffee… I took my cup of coffee and stood next to them, they all looked at me and smiled and their eyes went back to the mobile, all of us were having our chai together but other than an occas...