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Revenge is Fatal

revenge

The Blue Frog and The Honey Bee

Once upon a time, a blue frog lived in a blue pond.

He liked eating flies. Whenever he saw a fly, he would stick out his tongue. The fly would get stuck to frog’s tongue. Then the frog would quickly withdraw his tongue inside and gulp the fly. He then bathed happily in the ink-blue water of the pond.

One day, a honey bee was flying with two house flies near the pond. While the bee settled on a red hibiscus growing near the pond, the flies flew down to the shore of the pond to sit near the cool water. The frog sucked-in both the flies one by one. The honey bee, who was watching the hunting game of the frog from the hibiscus grove, flew to the frog and bit him on his neck.

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What Travel Has Taught Me – About the World and Myself

a park in basavanagudi bangalore as feature image for lessons from traveling article

I’m not here to quote Robert Frost (even though I took the road less traveled) and suggest you to leave everything and travel. Here we want to understand why so many people wander around the world in search of something bigger than themselves.

Why do so many people change their careers and lifestyles to travel? Sometimes even indefinitely?

Do they travel to see new places and eat different food? Or to fill their passports with stamps? Or to be able to say at their deathbed that they have seen the world?

Could be. But it is more than that.

Let me take you through what travel has taught me.

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My First International Solo Trip (to Thailand) Sucked – Mistakes and Learnings

a sunrise to show learnings

Traveling Through Thailand

Thailand was my first solo trip.

I pre-landed in Bangkok at 5 AM. In the on-arrival visa line, a friendly attendant helped me skip the line and processed my visa faster. The airport was far out of the city and having decided that I would take public transport, I climbed into an about-to-crumble bus to go into the city.   

In the three-hour-long bus ride, as long as the flight from Bengaluru to Bangkok, a lady passenger helped to hold my bag and told me that I was beautiful as I managed to not-faint in the crowded aisle. The bus crawled a kilometer in almost an hour. Due to my skepticism of being able to explain the situation to the angry and rude lady ticket collector and the bus driver, I didn’t leave the bus to hop into a taxi. She kept buying dumplings for him from the street while I craved and my stomach growled. 

The bus ride wasn’t enough torture that I had to climb four levels of steep, dingy stairs with my suitcase to reach my just-enough, single, air-conditioned room.

Tired, hungry, and lonely, I went down for food and ate a mediocre Pad Thai. Having grabbed a few cold water bottles from the fridge downstairs, I climbed back up again. Sudden rudeness and a hint of racism coupled with sleep deprivation and loneliness made me sleep for almost 5 hours.

It wasn’t just that.

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Why is the Process of Learning More Important Than the Result

a pen sketching showing process of learning

When we wake up, how many of us think of what we want to do today? Almost all of us.

How many of us think of improving at what we do or focus on personal growth and development? Not many.

The presentation should be ready at 2. The code should get deployed. The author’s biography should come under every article. Let’s put in a hack. Grammarly shows that this pronoun doesn’t make any sense in the sentence. I don’t understand why but let’s get rid of it. Spaghetti over boiled again. But at least we have dinner.

As Josh Waitzkin, the chess and Tai Chi Push hands world champion, said in his book The Art of Learning, “We focus so much on the outcome that the intrinsic details of the learning process are lost on us.”

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How to Make a Daily Schedule For Yourself [That Works]

a man running to emphasize creating a routine

In the past eight years of my working life, I observed how you do the task at hand is not the only measure of productivity and satisfaction. Your living style, priorities, patience, and certain keystone habits such as discipline, healthy social behavior, hard work decide how good you perform, how well you live your life, and how stable your relationships are.

All these things — lifestyle, priorities, patience, perseverance — could be practiced as daily habits. As Charles Duhigg said in his book The Power of Habits, “More than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.”

Humans live by habits. Here we would focus on dissolving these crucial things into habits and routine to make a daily schedule that works for us.

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How to Work From Home Successfully: Master the Art

working from the balcony in mehli shimla

I have been working from home for ten months now. I have no boss. I write. I freelance. I blog — these three span my earnings, my passion, my work, and my routine. I design my schedule, discipline, deadlines, meetings and calls, and priorities.

I work hard. I have to. I need a lot of energy to write. To write well. I work long hours with intense concentration as I am still learning and my work involves a lot of thinking. 

As a writer, I find the solitude essential — I thread my thoughts into any pattern without being disturbed.   

A work-from-home routine sounds dreamy, but it doesn’t come easy.

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Courage

revenge

A little girl was walking to the fountain. She saw a lady in a white sari resting by the fountain. The little girl asked the lady, “Who are you?” The lady replied, “Courage”. The little girl twirled her braid and asked, “What is that? I have never heard of this name.” Courage replied, “If you …

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An Open Letter From a Privileged Indian Woman to India and The World

a colorful face of a woman

International Women’s day was ten days ago. I wanted to post this letter but decided that I did not have to wait for women’s day to say what I want to say. Why I didn’t write this letter before is a question that I don’t have an answer to.

In the world of Putin and the Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who said that women, above all, are mothers and they smile even amidst the chaos that their day put them up with and they are victims of their economic independence and Chinese malls offering discounts to good looking women after their faces have been scanned — I write an open letter to homo sapiens.

My letter is not-independent of geography, age, or culture. We fool ourselves when we say we are unbiased and independent of our circumstances and surroundings.

Shall we begin?

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Nature

revenge

The Brown Cuckoo and The Little Girl

Once upon a time, a little girl lived in a house which had an empty land in front of it. A brown cuckoo lived on a red-berry tree in that land. Every morning, before going to school, the girl used to stand on the balcony and listen to the songs of the cuckoo.

The cuckoo flew from one branch of the tree to another to eat the wild berries that decorated the tree like stars on a starry night. One day, when the little girl woke up, she saw that the tree had been cut down and the cuckoo was nowhere to be seen.

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An Open Letter to My Mind

woman-with-trees-and-roots.jpeg

To My Mind

Dear Mind, 

I am your human. 

How have you been lately?

We communicate — sorry, I listen to your orders — throughout the day. But I wanted to talk to you about a few things.

I want to start by thanking you.

You make me enjoy life. You have trained me to be alert, passionate, independent, healthy, and hard-working. You need me to be a good daughter and a loving sister and an understanding partner and a reliable friend. 

Now let’s come to the main point.

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How to Write Every Day – My Journey As a Writer

a single bird flying with focus

How to write every day? Many of us — aspiring bloggers, writers, freelancers — ask this question every day.

I am going to share with you my journey as a writer so far, how I developed a daily writing habit, and a few tips that have worked for me to minimize distraction. That is all. I cannot — no one can — tell you what to do precisely to write every day as everyone’s system is different. (Having said that, here are my practical and experiential 27 tips for beginner writers and 9 creative writing methods I use while writing about traveling.)

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How to Turn a Bad Day Around

sun coming out of clouds shown to emphasize positive change (1)

Experiential and Practical Tips on Making a Bad Day Better

Some days are harder than others. Everything seems to fall apart on these days.

I could not sleep last night. At 2:50 am, the hour of deepest sleep, I woke up when an intruding mosquito buzzed in my ear. I went to the bathroom, came back, drank some water, and lied down. I was drowsy and it hurt to keep my eyes open. But the first step to sleep was killing the mosquito. After many desperate attempts, I took its life away.

Meanwhile, the brain kept at its activity. The ideas of my mother about me (unmarried, jobless, etc) encroached me from all directions. If I think about me the way she does, I feel that my life is doomed. Then I judged the nooks and corners of my relationships.

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