RAYS OF SUNSHINE.

typography break while applying. lyrics from Weight of Living II by Bastille Self-reflection. It's something we as a people tend to save for later. Saved for the gaps in the rat race that is school and career. Saved for the comma in the sentence, the opportunity to breathe, granted once every few years. Saved for the pauses while we wait anxiously for life to press play again. As Cory mentioned, half-birthdays are a good point to reflect on the road you're on, as you keep on running, but what about those unintended stabs of self reflection we've all seen dozens of times? Those questions that probe on our common experiences as humans, but also make you think about your life journey and how you got to here. That's right, the friendly little password reminder! Since I am on the job hunt, I have been making account after account on different employer websites, and I am usually in such a hurry to just get on and submit the cover letter I spent the last hour perf...

You know that first-day-clean-slate-feeling every new school year as a kid? That feeling that no matter what is going to happen, you will have your friends, you will have lunch to look forward to, and new teachers and new adventures to be had during recess. The familiar routine, revived and renewed. I feel that when I see this empty page on my screen. Waiting for my thoughts. Waiting for my meandering views on whatever comes my way. I can't really explain the calm that envelopes me as I first dip my fingers in, checking the temperature of the water before diving deep. Deep into the terrifying abyss that sometimes is my mind. It feels so good to want to write again. These past few months, I had been feeling the absence of sense. That apathy is more crippling than anything. Instead of every sensory feeling translated into swarths of words, like birds that yearn for release, they beat against me like a rock-- I was unwavering, unrelenting. Paralyzed. Suddenly, I felt passive rath...

i love notebooks. too much. i love how they somehow whisper you can do better tomorrow. its a fresh new page. i love how you can rack em up to either tell a chronological story or an illogical one. the simultaneously represent all the tenses: have been, will be, am currently. i love straddling that line--telling stories that are not quite one way. i love melding my unique experiences and stories, marrying them with what could have been. where my expectations far surpassed my realities or where living in the moment far superseded anything in my wildest imaginings.  notebooks live in that moment before that moment. you buy them when you know you're going somewhere, starting something, making big plans. they encompass that crisp apple crunch on a fall day; that satisfying slurp of a milkshake while the sun bakes the back of your neck, sickly sweet, laughing next to the one of your dreams. they are the fulcrum of the balance between a spoon of maple walnut and that spicy chaider, ...

from my instagram, my first day working at widener library :)  So I am here again. The day before the first day of school. For me, this day is a lot more significant and heavy and loaded than the actual first day because of this thing called anticipation. I keep putting ideas in my head about how things are going to be. I keep envisioning scenarios, thinking through situations, always putting myself at the bottom so I know how far I need to climb. It's nice to know that in a lot of ways, the climb is over. I have "made it". I have been given the opportunity, the privilege to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But in a lot of ways, I'm still climbing. I have reached the end of one goal, just to find myself making 10 others. Goals which I may or may not ever reach. Goals that need to be reinvented to fit my life, not the other way around. I have finally learned that planning your life to fit a goal is not what a goal is meant for-- goals are sup...

An ode to home, real November, and the friends who don't need to know everything to know what I want and need: I miss it. I miss being more than these polite souls, who say hello in public, and are like sisters in shadows. I miss being in the cold air, crisp, with my voice puffing out laughs with the last of my breath in the freezing winter's night, running like our youth, our time together, out like a match. I miss the house I had lived in for fifteen "carefree" years, unaware of its fleeting glory, it's ineffable beauty of simplicity. I want nothing more than one more night on your moth-eaten, lumpy, comfy old sofa. With old movies and new, echoes of our childhood and our future playing alongside the soundtracks. I need one more silly spontaneous dessert date, if only to reaffirm that you will never waver, and will always be there. Even if you change your clothes, or your style, you'll be my homes. I wish for one day more: to make a change. To t...

Some of my updates on life, thoughts about the election, and all the neverending connections I keep making that exhaust, exhilarate, and motivate me:        So, I haven't blogged since 9/11, not because of a shortage of topics to blog about, but more because I was ill-equipped to deal with my life, and was thrust into multiple situations and confrontations and leadership scenarios that I had hardly anticipated. Within the months of September and October, I reframed and redefined my priorities in life as well as for this year, and my current involvement reflects those shifts.  Here's a quick list of the things I have done in September & October:  recruited 8 new dancers for USC Drishti practiced every week until near the end of October for different performances  performed at APASA Nightmarket done henna design work for 7 people worked faithfully for a social venture that I am really excited to be a part of networked with eve...

So, first there was Aurora. A small mountain town in the middle of Colorado. 12 people dead. The killer apprehended and under trial. A Phd student in Neuroscience who secured a National Institutes of Health grant-- a very prestigious opportunity. A lonely man, distraught about being alone in an isolating environment, heralded by the media as a " poor boy who lost his way". There is much more to this story than simply a boy who lost his way back to sanity and reality. The truth of the matter is that we track all Arab-Americans and South Asians in this country due to a xenophobic fear, but we cease to regulate those who seem harmless: i.e. white males. Our inability to seek them out as a threat, married with their penchant for feeling privilege and ownership over public spaces causes an epidemic of sad white male trigger-happy enemies. In Aurora, his personal become most political. The theatrics of his modes operandi only further isolated this incident. People began t...

When trying to figure out what to write about next, I thought about the current state of the world. I thought about how one can feel so happy yet so unhappy all at the same time. I thought about the neverending flux of time, and how in any moment, a person can be dying while another is being born. One person going through utter agony while the other shines in triumph. I thought about how my family could enjoy a meal and a road trip to Maine, while the 24 hour news cycle was bringing the nation live coverage of the unfolding massacre in Wisconsin. This dichotomy along with the continual broadcast of the 30th Olympic Games in London made me think about how little I appreciated this meme and how much this above graphic says about humanity.  Though these exact words do not exist in English, these experiences are universal. That bond the world over is seen day in and day out in the Olympics. Not only is the majority of the world competing in some form, but in that friendly compe...