Arathi Aravind

It's the year 3045. Humans have finally succeeded in finding a cure for the epidemic named 'sadness'...

"The struggle ends, when the gratitude begins" - Neale Donald Walsch

She was a Gemini. That’s merely an observation. She was a lot of things. But the thing that stood out to him as he watched the burial was that she was a Gemini. And he wondered why he’d remember her sun sign of all the things in the world. Some people take sun signs too literally. If you’re a Scorpio you’re vengeful, if you’re a Cancerian you’re a sentimental fool and a Gemini, well a Gemini was supposed to be someone of dual nature. She was a Gemini. Always conflicted. Always divided.

Let me start by saying that, I am and I will always be an ad woman at heart. Although I’m no longer a part of this dynamic industry, I have realised that advertising has taught me some wonderful things both in life and in my professional life. Advertising is like that teenage crush that you have. It seems so cool, so glamorous and you’re so sure that it is the one for you and you sneak out of your regular life and start seeing it every day. Your friends think that you’re living the good life be

Bali is the stuff dreams are made of. You see it listed in 'the most romantic destinations' in travel magazines, you look wistfully at images that your friends put up of themselves at the Karma beach, and then you add it to the list of places that you'll probably never get to see. But things sometimes have a way of working out beautifully and you find yourself walking the Campuhan Ridge at Ubud, Bali.

I don't watch award shows (anymore). So the Golden Globes this year were no exception. But then I read about how all the people who attended the awards wore black in protest against the sexual harassment wave that's been plaguing the film industry lately and I was intrigued. I was also proud that women were starting to stand up and speak out against issues that were previously considered 'normal'. Harassment does not just constitute rape and many people have trouble in grasping this concept, but I was also happy to read that this was starting to change slowly but surely.

Why do we travel? Or change jobs? Or even move to a different country? Some might say that they need a change of pace, or they have more practical reasons like family or kids and so on. Someone once asked me a long time ago about why I love to travel to new places. This was around 4 or 5 years ago when I was feeling a little lost personally and struggling to find out what I really wanted to do career-wise. So my first instinct was to say, “I travel so I can get away from it all”. So the next...

You will be unappreciated, you will be sabotaged, you will not meet all of your expectations and you will experience soul-crushing failures. I don't mean to sound all "the end is nigh!", but these are just the things that happen in life, especially in a work environment...

You said, 'Be complex, be interesting, and be new.' And when I asked you what you meant by it, all you said was, 'The life of an editor is awesome.'...

"Write a story. A sentence. A paragraph. A word. Anything" - That’s your brain telling you that you can do it. Your mind reels at the effort of putting words down on the page which by now, seems to be mocking your inability to produce a decent string of words....

A whole life, stuffed into a tiny plastic bag. That's what your whole life amounts to in the end. A transparent, zip locked, plastic bag that smells like antiseptics. A nurse jiggles the bag in front of his face and calls him again, “Please sign here,” and she thrusts a clipboard under his nose. He signs blindly, takes the bag from her and sees through unseeing eyes, the paan stained walls, the attendants who milled around the nurses' station hungry for gossip, the cries of pain all around him and then, the feel of cold plastic in his hand. He wanted to shout and ask them, “Why are you looking at me?”, “Have you not seen death before?”

Recently, someone I had interviewed with and then discussed the potential salary with, emailed me back saying 'I'm sorry we're not taking this forward. You seem to be overqualified for this job'. I read that email 5 times trying to figure how in the world I'm overqualified for the job that specifically demanded that the candidate needed 3-4 years of writing experience. And then it hit me like a speeding truck!