PARINAAMA

A few days ago, I had a dream. One in which I was not in the usual rollercoaster of books, professors or food.  This time, unusually, I was on the banks of a river. It was eerily silent & uncannily rippling. When I tried to go closer to peek beyond the bank's edge, I found it difficult to move. My hand was gripping the handles of a very heavy bag & my feet were shackled to it. Surprised, I tried to free myself from the burden, thumping around my legs on the banks, extricating my grip from the bag's handle. Just when I managed to loosen myself, I heard a small crack - the rockmass in front of me was breaking apart. Startled, I remained still - the crack disappeared. "Oh give me a break! ", I sighed in frustration. Having spent the previous weeks breaking my head over case studies, projects and assignments, the least I had wished for was deep sleep, if not a pleasant dream. I opened that bag with my other hand. It contained a life jacket, a few packets of maggi

Hello dear readers! Long time no see - clearly. Well, as always, I'm here to tell you about my recent escapades with anything and everything that fascinated and piqued me. I have a whole lot of things to share, but let me start with the elephant in the room - CHAT GPT Chat GPT is apparently the saviour of students when it comes to completing their assignments, providing ideas and direction for their projects and basically is that good samaritan hated by teachers and loved by all. I was fascinated by its capabilities and had reviewed articles that sung its praises to the heavens. I decided to challenge GPT by asking from it the one thing I was confident it could not provide - Creativity. To start off, I wanted to understand how it worked, so I gave a very simple prompt. excuse my grammar - but hey it was smart enough to understand me The A.I model came up with 4 of the most popular short story prompts - and it made sense to me. These were the tried and tested models that convenientl

Hello all!  Thank you very much for your patient wait. Here comes part two.  (Part one in a nutshell: Two (apparently) thick friends, Ann Tah and Jin-Ah had a feud when the former ditched the latter for a guy. The latter felt that this friend is no different from people who stab others in the back casually. If you want to know more, feel free to read the first part here .) ..."And that's why I cut contact with you." said Ann Tah. Jin-Ah's mind snapped in an instant. All she could now feel was pain. Pain in her heart.  Pain in her head.  Pain in her what not. "Please give me time." was all Jin-Ah could tell. She had initially planned for some crazy time in the city with Ann Tah but ended crazy with her heart in pieces.  The next one hour was silent. Silence as of a funeral. Jin-Ah was never this silent of the days she had lived.   It was time to settle down to rectify either what went wrong in the relationship or to let go of the friendship.  Jin-Ah wanted to

Annyeonghaseyo! Konnichiwa! Nihao!  I am Niveditha (AKA Robot!), guest-writing for this month. I am an extroverted person but an introverted poet and a storyteller (And an insane graphic designer). Good friends are the grandest gifts time could ever offer.  I often tell my dad that I envy him for having friends who stood by him through thick and thin for decades and still do so. In life, the journey in your youth is in a way such that you grow and mature. When you grow old, you reminisce about your youth and laugh.  This made me think about the efforts him and his friends made for the long run. I wondered how a thick friendship is formed through trials and testing times, which led me to this tale.  Read my story*  *This story is purely fictional  The mornings of school days were chaotically aligned with the discipline staff asking students to queue up.  It was the first week of classes.  A short girl with curly hair and a sweet voice approached Jin-Ah.  "Hello! You're the clas

Hello Dear Readers!!!! It gives me immense pleasure in writing my first article in this Blog as the Editor, and I hope I can do at least half as much as what my Sister, the Author, has done over time through her articles in this Blog. So, let's begin!  In our childhood, one thing that literally everyone of us would've invariably done is to listen to stories. As kids, we were told many stories by various people, the purpose of telling the stories ranging from making us eat to try and lull us to sleep. And some other stories were told just for the sake of telling them, maybe in what we had as 'story time'. So, in this story time, we all would remember listening to 'Moral Stories'. These were short, enthralling stories that had a simple moral at the end, like "Honesty is the best policy". And yes, we can never deny the role of these moral stories in shaping the very very basic values in our hearts that we still hold close to us. However, are moral stories

This is the sixth and final part of this 6 part fictional story series. Everything in this story is purely imaginary with inspirations from real life. Any resemblance to any person or occasion in real life is completely coincidental. 6. New Beginnings With trembling fingers, she opened the message. It was a simple ' hey '. Visibly trembling all over, Miraa hesitantly replied, 'hi Vineeth 😅', hoping that the sweating emoji conveyed her anxiety. The response was immediate. 'Wanna call you to tell something. When can I call?' If Miraa could have run away from the face of the earth, she would have. Unfortunately not having that option, eager to respond yet fearful of what she might hear, she consoled herself by thinking that the worst thing Vineeth could probably say was that he never wanted to speak to her again and to keep things formal between them henceforth. Not being much comforted by this thought but finding no other way, Miraa replied 'Sure, you can cal

This is the fifth part in a 6 part fictional story series. Everything in this story is purely imaginary with inspirations from real life. Any resemblance to any person or occasion in real life is completely coincidental. 5. The Domino Effect It took a long time for Miraa to register that Vasuki had made contact with her, after everything she had done to block all further contact from him, after their last meeting, when the pandemic and lockdown had set in. Furthermore, it had been almost months since Miraa had even checked her own mail since she would usually get notified about assignments through her google classroom and would submit it through there and any other important information regarding classes would be passed through their groups. Why she chose today to open her email, she had no clue. All these thoughts raced in her mind as she stared at the mail blankly, frozen in shock, her heart thumping furiously in her chest, her palms and feet sweating profusely, her stomach tumbling