by Manju Gupta
That’s not how this story will end…” I said, my eyes tearing up. “There are three possibilities. Pray for the one you prefer. “ replied my brother with resignation. The options were as depressing as the situation itself, incurring hefty fines and heftier administration charges! “I don’t know how God will manage this but there will be a better outcome.” I said with unjustified confidence. Unjustified because I am not…
The project has always been a hit or miss for me. And now just when I thought I had aced it, it was proving to be a mini disaster. I was making vegetables cutlets, taking all the precautions I had picked up over the years. I was diligently regulating the oil temperature, using ample bread crumbs to bind and adding salt in batches. The first few cutlets were perfect, crunchy…
It was the stuff that social influencers dream of . Except that I don’t have enough following to call myself one and a stuffed inbox is not what I dream about. It seemed that due to some technical glitch or a wily hacker’s trick I had stayed up all night asking my Facebook friends an innocuous question, “ Is that you in this video?” The question was followed by a…
It was a simple task. One of the many I had put on my son’s to do list. He was home for a month and I felt entitled to make him do some chores around the house. ‘Men stuff’ as it is called, some fixing and tinkering, repairing and replacing. The task in question was to check if the spare wheel of my car had deflated and needed fixing. He…
When they were little, one of the biggest grudges my kids held against me, was that I never allowed them to skip school. On the rare occasions that they had to stay home on account of illness I would ensure that they didn’t have fun. Keeping them in a state of ‘complete rest’ with the television out of bounds. It was easy to condemn children to boredom then, the Internet…
The scene had the signs of a Steven Spielberg movie. Sleepy eyed, I stood in my balcony and noticed pristine, white circles outside the gate of my hospital. Intrigued, I cast my eyes further and saw the same carefully drawn circles outside the neighbouring commercial establishments too. Relieved that I wasn’t the only one being targeted, I went down to investigate the matter. It turned out to be the state’s…
Mere sare khilone kahan hain ?“ ( Where are all my toys ? ) exclaimed my son . “I can’t see any of mine either,” shrieked my daughter who had followed him into the room. I had been spring cleaning in autumn, giving away stuff, story books, building blocks, board games, stuffed toys. The things that, it now seemed, I had wrongly assumed they had outgrown. My kids were home…
“ What is there to celebrate?” my colleague asked with despair when I mentioned that Doctor’s Day was around the corner. Clearly, he had not yet got over the ill considered comments of an acquaintance. The latter had begged my friend to arrange an ICU bed for his father whose oxygen had dipped dangerously after contracting Covid. My friend had made great efforts to get him admitted in a private…
It innocuously popped up on my Facebook homepage, an year old post about the tragedy of a lockdown. Instead of the intended aim to reminisce and rejoice, reading it filled me with remorse. To my own ears the concerns sounded frivolous, my complaints so annoyingly inane. I seemed naive, almost clueless. And although I keep saying that I won’t add these two ‘unused’ years to my age, it’s indisputable that…
This is my favourite story and it never fails to impress. It’s an account of the day I put words in the mouth of Potus, the President of The United States! The year was 2003, and news of the Columbia space shuttle crash was trickling in. In those heady days of newly discovered 24×7 hrs news, the channels were going berserk, trying to outdo each other. Their single minded agenda…