As tears flowed down silently down my cheeks, I held my father tight, as he rode the scooter to my school. I couldn’t bear to see people turning around and staring at me, pointing at me. I just wanted to vanish into thin air. I prayed that my father did not stop the scooter at any point. Please God, let this nightmare be over.

I was dressed in rags, an old saree( traditional attire of Indian women) deliberately torn at places. An artificial filthy wig of more white than black stuck to my head. …

When I was a kid, I had to participate in a fancy dress competition. Like my other girlfriends, I too wanted a fairy tale princess attire for myself. But as luck would have it, by the time we reached the shop, all the costumes were sold out. The shop-owner held a mucky wig in his hand saying that is what is left. And my father, who is never to call it quits, took it and I participated in the event as a sweeper!

I hated all the princesses from that day on.

And all the protagonists of the many fairy…

Becoming a mother comes with a sudden realization that you are responsible for another being. A human being. Someone who will grow up to become their own self. Not a simple task at hand.

Motherhood is a crazy concoction of doubt, fear, and amazement. Doubt that you may do things wrong, fear that you might end up as a complete failure, and amazement at such little things. …

There has always been so much talk about headlines and how they hold the key to the door of a story. A lot of thought and contemplation go into deciding the headline of an article. And that is true because, unlike a painting, which tells all in one glance, writing does not. The headline is the limited conversation you can have to convince your reader to see your entire work.

But along with the headline is another great opportunity that writers have to breadcrumb the reader into their creation — the subtitle.

The headlines have garnered the maximum chunk of…

Since time immemorial, Zen stories have taught the world how to live a meaningful and peaceful life. The beauty of the stories lies in the fact that they still hold the same meaning even after ages of change and evolution. In fact, they have strengthened in their purpose, while the world around them is losing its own.

My journey as a writer has seen its own share of ebbs and heights, each bringing along its own influx of emotions. …

A woman invented the ice cream maker. Yet, we say it is man-made. Inappropriate, right?

I am not a staunch feminist, but yes, it irks me when a person refers to a generic gender as a man by default. The innocent explanation is that though it mentions a man, it means man and woman both.

Unless you really mean a man, refrain from using the predominant masculine gender to specify generic human being(s). But as a writer, we always come across a situation where we need to take sides. Naturally, women tend to go with ‘she/her’ and men, with ‘he/his’.

…

I was just out of a failed business. All consumed by it for the last three years, I decided I needed time to unwind. I put my feet up for a while. Before I knew it, ‘a while’ soon transformed into long hours.

Right after the morning rush was over, I would be on my couch with my mobile. A brief break would easily become a long one. Though I would think of stopping and doing something else, I would end up in the elusive cycle of one-more-episode. And in some days I would finish a whole series.

But somewhere…

I have been advocating for a decent amount of time now about why submitting to smaller publications is actually a better bet than submitting to big publications. I would not go into that detail today.

But lately, something strange happened.

I had submitted a story on writing with gender neutrality to a small but budding publication. Usually, the story gets published in a day or two, max. But strangely, this time, the piece was still sitting in my ‘Stories’ tab for almost 4 days.

I have been actively submitting to fast-growing publications and am used to the very short turnaround…