Grammar Nazi no more! And a BIG Thank You!

I swear I was better at grammar and English in general. I even won a couple of spelling bee and essay writing competitions. (That was in high school before you think I'm boasting too much. It was not a big deal really, just saying I wasn't too bad.)

All the pictures in this post: from Google Images

And then came the obsession with the internet and later, my medical school work, having to read through piles of books trying to store all of it inside my whimpering brain, and the proportionately decreased time I spent on light (read happy) reading.
I did spend lots of time watching movies or videos on YouTube. And predictably online social networking and the meagre amount of socialising took a huge chunk of my 'free' time in those days.

Sometimes I find myself writing/typing a word and it just doesn't seem right. Maybe it's because I have seen the word misspelled in a dozen ways on the web already and now my mind is messing with me.

But it really is a downer, you know. And I feel like my vocabulary has crumbled down to half of what it was. So much for being an-almost-Grammar-Nazi only a few years earlier. (If there was anything that stopped me from being a total insufferable G-N, it was shyness and not a lack of self-righteousness!)

Anyway, on a happier note:


I've been thrilled to find a lot of great blogs ever since I've started reading blogs a while ago.
Every one of them, the witty posts, the poignant memoirs, the ambitious works of fiction or the inspiring art-y posts. They are like a breath of fresh air every time I find an interesting post to read or a beautiful photo/artwork to look at. And I'm always looking for more awesome blogs to dig into whenever I have the time.
I like to think that I can connect to the bloggers on a personal level, and it's always nice to know that someone else in the world shares my views, even though I don't know them in real life. I hope I can make a few blogger friends too to swap stories like penpals did till a decade or two earlier.


Heh! I think I'll put a stop to the blogger-love pouring out of me now.
And end with a toast!

To all the nice blogs I've found here and to all the times they've made me happy and excited and inspired! :)

Aerial Love

Every time I'm on a plane, I love to watch out the window and the view is always awesome, be it a night-time view of shimmering city lights or mounds of misty clouds.

Aerial view of an Indian city

My favourite is the coastline!
I love the way the tide keeps moving to and fro, and the frothy waves form a white oscillating border, like the edge of a blanket on a clothes-line swaying to a steady wind. Standing on the beach, the waves appear huge and as though coming from a long distance, but from a plane you can see how they form only a fringe of the ocean. And the vastness of the ocean is so overwhelming.

Next up is the view of city lights at night time.
With all the branching and intercrossing roads, the steamy streetlights, the tiny cars moving like in a video-game, still tinier windows, the occasional river/water body with its banks studded with lights as it passes through the city.

They remind me of an electric circuit like in the mother-board of a computer, as if the entire city is actually a part of one big supercomputer.

Or like it's a mirror of a starry sky (which is becoming a rare sight thanks to all the pollution) with lots of comets flashing across.

Then again I imagine sometimes that I'm an alien about to land on earth, looking down from my spaceship, trying to make sense of the maze below.  o_O

And the clouds!
Don't you feel like it would be heaven if you could just reach out and touch that fluffy white expanse or fall into its softness (not really fall! ) or flick the edge of the cloudy candy floss and eat it? ;)

Can never get enough of them!

Flying over mountains, wastelands, forests and fields isn't any less fun:

But as you can't usually see clearly what you are flying above for most of the flight, I keep praying for the pilot to fly low so that I can get more pretty sights to freeze in my memory. (Okay, I confess I've taken a few shots with my phone. But it was always on offline mode and without the air-hostess finding out that I was using my phone!)

I've taken to this 'hobby' somewhat recently, instead of snuggling up with a nice book as usual. And I find it really refreshing and fascinating. (Maybe it's because of my huge wish to try sky-diving one day.)

This is the only one of the lot that I clicked! :D

Does anyone else like aerial views from planes?

Regret and Revival

What do you do when things don't go as expected?

Do you accept that you must have messed up somewhere?

Do you try to ignore the repercussions and move on? 
Do you label it as a quirk of fate?

Do you try and convince people (and more importantly yourself) that you had given it the best you could (or would)?

Do you try to 'learn from your mistakes' and be a better person thereafter?

Do you make light of the situation and just act like nothing bad really happened even though you are thinking about it all the time?

You could choose to do any of the above, but after all whatever is done is done.

The important thing is to try not to get into such a situation again, as far as possible.

Taking life as it comes may not be that easy after all, especially when you know that you could have done something in the past, that would have made you happier in the present and the future.

Giving something your best doesn't hurt, though the idea that the end result may not be worth it and that all the sacrifices could be in vain, might scare you now.
At least not as much as the 'What If's.

So why not take that extra leap, launch yourself into the air, put on a great show like a star gymnast, and land gracefully back, the way you've always wanted to, to the cheers of your own spirit and the rest of the world that matters.

Hoping to make wiser decisions hereafter and to put a lot more into everything in life, and most importantly, not take all the wonderful things in life for granted.

Photo Credit: Me.

Of Obligatory Prunings and Optimistic Beginnings.

ORIGINAL! Really?

Is it even possible for anyone to be ORIGINAL these days??

I've been thinking over this for quite some time now, since I read about a Harvard student of Indian origin, who wrote a coming-of-age novel which had sentences very similar to ones from another famous young-adults-novel.
The young author had apparently read the original novel many times as it was one of her favourites. And she claimed that it was an unconscious action. (She lost a $500,000 worth publishing deal over it, nevertheless.)

We read books and then re-read the good ones, obsessing over the catchy passages and romantic descriptions of people, places and feelings. Inadvertently they get etched in our brains and sometimes even change our thinking patterns, for that's the power of a great author. They influence our imagination and re-arrange our perceptions.


So how would we know, when we express ourselves, if we are spewing out something that has got wired into our system, or if we are actually making that rare original statement? It's quite possible that such plagiarism happens subconsciously, without us comprehending the fact that we are in fact committing a crime.

It appears that almost every successful/critically acclaimed writer is always compared to earlier legends. We have Shakespearean-style sonnets, Keatsian-style poems, Kafkaesque fiction and so on, and this phenomenon exists in other fields as well, like music, dance and maybe even more prominently, in art.


Every new work these days is scrutinized and heedlessly categorized in the light of path-breaking masterpieces created by these legends. So does that mean that all of the stuff brewed by the seemingly innovative minds of today's world are Unoriginal Imitations of earlier works?


Plagiarism on the web, however, has become quite epidemic. People don't bother to cite the original references anymore, and admittedly, it's a little bothersome, though unlawful. I was surprised to find 'Plagiarism-checker' websites which allow you to cross-check yourself and see if the text matches with any of the already published works, available on the internet, of course.

Phew! Maybe, someday, if and when I publish something, I could take the help of these websites to keep myself Original! Imagine! I get a flash of inspiration (or so I think!), I write it all down, but there's that nagging feeling that makes me look up on the net if I'm being creative or committing 'literary theft' as Merriam-Webster so nicely calls it, and it turns out someone somewhere had already 'been there done that'.


Yeah, sad, indeed! :-|


[Disclaimer: All the images above have been directly stolen, er, downloaded from Google Images, and I don't own any of them. XD ]

Pride and Prejudice!!!

This is one of my all-time favorite novels!

I don't know what I like most about it:

Elizabeth Bennett, in whom every reader seems to find a piece of them, and who is somehow perfect even with all her flaws,

Mr. Darcy- in the beginning, the handsome and regal but haughty gentleman, and later revealed to be just as charming, kindhearted and sensitive,

or the characters, intricate and lively, who could be a lot like our own acquaintances,

or the plot and the content itself, contemporary and still relevant to today's society,

or the language, which is beautiful and expressive, not so 'Old-English' to be archaic, but with an antique charm and a certain edge to it that keeps you rooted in the scene and the scenery, as much when Mrs.Bennett laments to her family about her 'poor nerves' as when Mr.Darcy confesses his love to Elizabeth.



Oh! This is one book that I can read over and over again (as I have already done, innumerable times).

However, I find that the movie versions of the book don't seem to justify the characters and the story itself, though it must be conceded that it is a difficult job to condense such a profound tale into a 120-min script.
Not to offend movie-lovers, of course!


Yes, I've read many other books, by many different writers, each of their styles varying a lot, but somehow, I find that this one book is very dear to me. It reminds me in bad times that I'm no worse than the next person. And it has been a pleasant companion on many lazy afternoons and tired nights.

Or maybe I'm just an obsessed fangirl. :)