Agony

Once I loved you

Now I don't;

Once I believed you

Now, I won't.

There were days when

I always dreamt of you,

I don't dream now:

My sleeping hours are few

My life is fickle,

Only death is sure.

Your eyes were clear;

Your soul was pure.

On the beach 

Near the sea

You had said that

You'll be with me

I was the one

Who lived in your heart

Even God wouldn't

put us apart

That smile of yours

that made my day

Is no where to be seen

For you are far away

I just hate you

Why did you lie?

'We won't separate', you said

Then why did you die?

10 simple ways to get more out of your life

So you want more out of your life? And you are struggling to live life to the fullest? Fear not, here's a tried and tested list of how to live life to the fullest by simple means.

Maintain a Routine

1. Maintain a routine: Maintain a fixed routine. A proper wake up time, fixed meal times, and regular bed time. Trust me you won’t get anything done if you don’t follow a proper routine. If you wake up at 4:00am on one day and at 10:00am on another, your work, lifestyle, productivity and most importantly your health will suffer. If you want max out of your day. Follow. A. Routine.

Break the routine

2. Break that routine sometimes: Yes it is very important to follow the routine that you’ve set if you want a balanced and healthy life, but don’t be stuck up in it that the routine starts to take away your life. The routine should help you manage your life and your daily hours to do your best without turning you into a machine. Deviate from it once in a while.

Acquire a Hobby

3. Acquire a hobby: The one that can raise your mood, hold your interest, and help you through rough patches in life. A man without a hobby is a dead man. Develop interest in some art form or other activity and maintain and develop if all life long. The hobby will see you through your life when nothing else will.

Move on

4. Move on: Failed terribly in an attempt? Move on. Won that most coveted item? Move on. Fought with your parents/siblings/friends? Move on. Were just awarded ‘Employee of the Year’? Move on. Don’t rest on past laurels, don’t ponder on past mistakes. Just move on.

Be Yourself

5. Be yourself: I know you get that a lot. Especially on the internet. But that is because it is cent percent true. Be yourself. However stupid, lame, unpopular, idiotic, loser you may be considering yourself to be, just be yourself. Let the detrimental comments of others not affect you. Which does no mean you shouldn’t improve. It means be the best of you, but be yourself.

Expect Less

6. Expect Less: The more you expect something from someone the less likely you are to do it yourself and the more time you will waste in waiting for it to be done by the one you expect to do it. (Read again slowly.)

Smile

7. Smile: The single most important task of the day. Smile at the people you meet. It will brighten your own day too.

Don't Take Yourself too Seriously

8. Don't take yourself too seriously: Sometimes we tend to be too hard on ourselves. Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself a break. And enjoy life at its best.

9. Add life to each day: Whether it is making someone smile, or enjoying the rains or having a pillow fight, do something that doesn't make you feel like you wasted a day.

Do the best with what you have

10. Do the best with what you have: You may not have everything, every luxury or every facility in your life, but do the best with whatever you have. Be creative, be industrious and make the best with the given.

3 blogging mistakes that make you look dumb

So, you have a blog and you want to promote it and want a loyal readership, but do you may have no idea you are looking dumb to your prospective readers by doing some mistakes you weren't even aware of. Follow what is written below and you won't be a dumb blogger anymore!

1. Too many images spoil the blog: Unless you have a photography blog, having more images than the write up, is really not acceptable. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but you must use it sparingly and appropriately. An image should be used to aid you post, to enhance the point you are trying to make, to add weight to what you are saying. It should however never distract your visitors from what you’ve written. A general rule to follow would be to have one image per 3-4 medium sized paragraphs if its a descriptive or creative post, one image per list item if its a list post.

2. Don’t litter your post with punctuations: Punctuations are important to convey breaks, ends, quotes in the written language. But overuse it and you have a dumb post. Ending your every line with ellipsis (…) or adding every third word within the quotation marks, misusing apostrophes, and using bold, italics and CAPS ON too often suffocates the blog post. Add ellipsis, use italics, but only and only when it is absolutely necessary and required to convey something and which adds to the meaning of what you want to say.

3. Don’t publish before thinking: So you went through a stupid situation and simply must vent out by writing down about it, or you were a part of some hilarious event that happened the other day and you want to share it with the world. So you write it down in one single sitting, quickly scan for misspellings and other bloopers and hit publish. And after 3 days, you wish you hadn’t! Think. Think every time before you publish any single post. Is this post going to cause me embarrassment in the future? Am I going to delete it/hide it/deny it five years down the line? If you answer yes to such questions, please do yourself a favor. Don’t publish it. Let it remain in your drafts. 

This isn’t an exhaustive list, there are many other ways you may look dumb on your blog, but in most cases follow the above 3 and you are safe (unless of course you have a great knack of cooking something dumb up in spite of all the precautions!).

Happy Blogging!

Use. Misuse. Reuse.

To all those Eco-activists, sorry to disappoint you, this is not a post on recycling.

Humans have changed. Humanity has changed. In today’s world, we all have great networks to remain in touch with our obscure relative who lives at the opposite end of the earth. We have become smart, our communications have become smarter. And we have learnt the art of “instant gratification”.

We use people around us to meet our ends. We misuse the kindness of someone to our own advantage. We are not shy to reuse a poor soul which has already been used and dumped by someone else.

What happened to the great virtues, like kindness, friendship, love and most important of all HUMANITY.

When I was a child, I saw great men and women around me, I saw them forge great relationships, a friendship was never for ones own advantage, a neighbor was never an enemy, the kind bus conductor didn’t think of his own discomfort to let a lady sit on his seat. Where are they now?

Why are we using people, why is a ‘friend’ just a ladder to success or a link to another powerful person, why is a ‘lover’ just there to satisfy ones sexual needs, why we do not bother to get into a brawl where an innocent is being beaten up, why don’t we help our neighbors anymore?

I have met some who only talk to me when they need something, at those times I feel like an ATM, to be only interacted with when they need to withdraw some benefits.

Humans are not things, they are not there for your advantage. Love them, hate them, but don’t use them.

Captured Evening

There is something soothing, something calming about evenings, specially the ones spent near water bodies. Here are few of my clicks, of a pleasant evening spent at Bandstand, even the pics are calming. 

Evenings always tell us, that the day that you had is coming to an end, the bad day or the good day, the boring day, or the super exciting day, its ending. And it is time for you to end today's worries, and relax and unwind to renew yourself for another day that will dawn after the evening sets and the night passes.

Enjoy the pictures!

Okay this one isn't of Bandstand, its a river which I clicked on my way to some place in the evening... But water bodies in all forms do calm me.

Pentecost is not the “Happy Birthday” of the Holy Spirit…

…it’s the “Happy Birthday” of our spirituality…

Catholic Church celebrates Pentecost as a solemnity, a day to commemorate the descend of the Holy Spirit upon Mother Mary and the apostles

The upper room wasn’t exactly a nice place to hangout before the Resurrection! No. It was a refugee room for those who were afraid, lost, didn’t believe, lacked courage, who were hiding from the Roman centurions. It was a dark and dead place.

 And then, Jesus appeared to them in the same upper room! What joy it must have been for the apostles and the women and most of all for Mother Mary! The upper room was now a place of prayer, worship and deep fellowship.

This was what I call the ‘Jesus-encounter’ of the apostles. Do you remember your own ‘Jesus-encounter’?

For the next forty days Jesus stayed with them, teaching them, encouraging them, guiding them, and making them understand the mysteries of the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). On the day of Ascension, he commanded the disciples to wait, for the promised Gift of the Father, which would empower them to bear witness to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:4-8). And whoosh! He was taken up to heaven.

So what did the disciples do? They waited. And they prayed in one accord till the day came for them to receive the Holy Spirit. On the glorious day of Pentecost the Spirit of God descended upon them like great tongues of fire, they began speaking in strange tongues (some even thought that they were drunk!), and Peter stood up before all those people (3000 actually) and spoke boldly, bravely of Jesus and what a speech he made (yes that fisherman dude), people actually heard him and asked him what should they do! He asked them to repent and to get baptized. And guess what, all those 3000 people sold their property, turned from their sin and really did get baptized (now that’s what I call mass conversion!) and took Jesus as their Saviour.

So why didn’t this feat happen at the Resurrection? Or at the Ascension? Why didn’t Jesus directly ‘convert’ these Jews? And why didn’t Peter begin his ministry right after he saw the resurrected Lord?

Because, Jesus wanted the disciples to carry on his work, and the disciples needed the Gift to carry out the work!

You need a ‘Jesus-encounter’ to believe, the belief turns into faith with more such encounters and learning and deepening the faith, your faith becomes your spirituality, and your spirituality is incomplete without being a witness to the faith. To complete that spirituality you need the Gift.

So, it’s a day when your spirituality was complete! Happy Birthday! :)

I got a tiff with the IPL

IPL, you’ve got it all. The cricketers, the movie stars, the high profile business men and you-can-love-them-you-can-hate-them-but-you-cannot-ignore-them cheerleaders (another excuse for men to keep them glued to their TV set, cricket plus scantily clad women! BONUS!), then there are the merchandise (that people would kill each other to lay their hands on) and I don’t even want to go near the controversies. It’s a powerful magnate, charged with entertainment that has every one captivated, from a 10 year old kid to 60 year old man, and women too have found out through IPL that all cricket matches are not boring. So you now have IPL, its matches and its catches, its star power and its controversies, being discussed by everyone in the offices, on the road side, by the vegetable vendors, at the kitty parties, by house maids. IPL is the talk of the town.

And why wouldn’t it be the talk of the town! IPL offers gossiping material for everyone. You can discuss the performance of your favorite team, you can share views over whether the latest change in some team’s uniform is favorable or not. You have individual team anthems to choose from and also the new avatars of their cheer leaders. Speaking of cheerleading, it has its own fan following, some shout out against the cheerleading squads for corrupting our culture, others ogle and drool over them, some carry around a smug face that they don’t care a thing about these pom-poms carrying girls while secretly grabbing every opportunity to see them dance and twirl. Then there are the appearances and disappearances, reactions and lack of it of the movie star/business tycoon team owners to look forward to.

Throw into this a few controversies and you have a circus!

 Now don’t get me wrong I really got nothing against the IPL. I have watched some of the matches too and enjoyed them. I just want IPL to know that it has everything.

So, IPL, you are cool, you got it all, so will you please let my brother go? He didn’t even look at his dinner while the match was on. 

Hey... whats the score????