I have always thought of self-help books, various philosophies of life, therapists and the like as full of crap and I was rather contemptuous towards regular people with regular problems who seek advice and solace from these. I absolutely hated The Alchemist, for instance and consider it one of the most overrated books of all time. Read more

There’s this place that I’ve been stuck in for many years now. It’s called the comfort zone.

‘The comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk’ - Alasdair AK White From Comfort Zone to Performance Management. Read more

A Tasneem by any other name will bite your head off.

Like most people, I hate it when others distort my name. Unfortunately, my name lends itself to distortion very easily. For instance, lying in front of me at this very moment, staring at me with utmost insolence is an envelope that states, ‘To Jasneem, Hindustan Times.’ Read more

A few days ago, I was witness to a conversation that reinforced my anti-arranged marriage stance.

Like all respectable Bohri families, my mom inducted me at a very early age (when I couldn’t protest), in what we call a ‘menij’ group. Read more

Over four days, I traveled to rural Maharashtra to cover stories of hope and change for our pre-election coverage. Read more

I’m going to make a sweeping statement here…. wait for it…ok here we go…I hate technology. Yes, yes go ahead, gasp, gawk and stare at me like I’m a relic from the pre-historic era, but think about it for a minute. Wouldn’t the world at large be a better place without it? On a macro-level, things like Weapons of Mass Destruction wouldn’t exist (well, they probably didn’t anyway) and George Bush wouldn’t find an excuse to bomb a country. Read more

Till I was 13 I was blissfully ignorant about it. At 17, I had no little or no semblance of it. 21 was when it was fashionable to shirk it. Now, at 24, I don’t know how to deal with it. I’m talking about that 14-letter word that fills every newly inducted adult with a sense of excruciating dread - responsibility. Read more

I tend to be cynical, pessimistic and fatalistic about most things. Including marriage. (NB: I dare say my blog will veer towards matrimonial issues on occasion, but there is this mass marriage movement taking place around me and everyone I know seems to be getting married, or talking about getting married. In any case, you have been warned.) Read more

So I thought I’d write a blog on my quarter life crisis because it sounded kind of depressingly cool to suffer from a quarter life crisis. Yes, I’m shallow like that. Besides, I didn’t have anything interesting to say about anything else. I first heard the term being used by my classmate in our second year of graduation. Read more