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Lets Pretend I Blogged Throughout the Year

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"You seem like the kind of person who writes New Year Resolutions" Seri's so right.  " should I be offended?" " nee ishtam" New Year's is a beautiful concept. I couldn't hate it more when I hear people say " it's just another day, what's the big deal? ". This is the friend that says they don't care about their birthday. How? Nihilism doesn't make you cool. Nothing has inherent meaning does it? We make our lives special by attaching meaning and caring about things.  Anyways, back to New Year's. It's a concept built around hope. Hope that a New Year will bring new things, better things. That somehow magically our lives will improve overnight and our shitty boss will get less shitty, our crappy love life will be saved by a knight in shining armour that our academic comeback will get streamlined. I don't think that's realistic. But New Year's does something more important. It renews faith in life, faith...

Cast-e Your Eye Over : Happy Ambedkar Jayanti

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This one has been a long time coming. I've hesitated to write this blog for years now. Every time I hear the word 'caste' I get an uneasy feeling. Before, that uneasy feeling used to be fear and embarrassment. Who discusses such things? Today, it's guilt. It's guilt for not expressing my position so far. It's guilt for letting every casteist remark slide. It's guilt for not having the courage to challenge the narrative of our upper-class friends. It's guilt for being quiet. It's guilt for being ashamed.  My first interaction with caste was with my civics textbook. I'd heard the infrequent comment at school. 'Nuvvu Reddy caste aa?' or a 'We are proud Brahmins' was not unheard of. But it felt like everyone knew the history of the caste system. It was something that existed ages ago. In today's society, caste didn't matter. As one of my teacher's put it, today, when you go to eat a meal in a restaurant, do you care what c...

Over the MUN

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I used to scoff at the "MUN kid" stereotype. Obnoxious, bratty, condescending. "You don't know that also aa?"  I was not that kid. I was the kid who aced the tests, who would write an opinionated essay but whose ears would block out when handed a microphone. The one that said 'phew' after getting off stage. Going from that to winning awards at Model United Nations conferences was a plot twist Abbas-Mustan couldn't have predicted. 2023 was just one new experience after the other and I forgot to sit back for a minute and reflect on how much I'd changed. It was when my first grade teacher Kamakshi Aunty commented on a profile photo of me addressing a gathering saying "I'm so glad you finally overcame your fear of public speaking" that I realised that a change had happened at all.  In kindergarten, I was given an important set of lines in a skit for Independence Day. I came to school lines in hand, stuffed into an uncomfortable Nehru co...