Paint a picture of my life?

I'm graduating soon with a Master's degree and it's in my last semester that I finally made a decent website completely by myself. This is funny because I'm a computer science student, and making a website by myself is something I should have done in fourth grade (both metaphorically and literally speaking). Web development is something that I've consistently run away from my entire undergraduate and graduate degree. It annoyed me, frustrated me, and I just didn't want to do it. Everyone around me was doing it, and perhaps I wanted to be different... but in that process, I missed out on being confident about a very basic skill, and probably lost out on opportunities as well. Turns out, I ended up wanting to spend a night being awake and making my website better because I was enjoying it. 

I realised that I had so much fun watching things come to life, and was surprised that it took me 5.5 years to remove the negativity that I had towards web development... so I decided to write about it. 

The same thing happened to me when the whole world was reading Harry Potter. I refused to give it a shot until grade ten and then read the whole series in a week. I was born in a time when J. K. Rowling was releasing each book. I had the chance to be a part of the anticipation and stand in lines and buy the books as they came out. But I missed it. Because of my own inability to get one stupid block out of my own head. 

Imagine all that I could have discovered and accelerated in my life if only I had been more open and had less barriers in my head stopping myself?! I've resolved to actively do this in my life.

I've been silent on my blog for a while now. I've been silent with my running and don't exercise regularly anymore. This reminds me of how I'd begun running regularly and kept at it for 3-4 months starting this time last year (and then covid happened). I started reading silently again after years of not picking up books just for fun, and noticed my palette had shifted from mainly fiction to multiple genres. I've not-so-silently resolved to be more open to things in life. And I'm so excited to see how all of these silent and loud change will impact us. 

Where all of us will be in the next 7 years and what will we be working on? 7 years because that's also how long the human body takes to refresh itself. What all thoughts would we have hit the refresh button on. What all would I have opened myself to? What kind of person will I be? What stuff will I care about?

I'll be the kind of person I think I will be. I'll be the kind of person I want to be. 

I want to paint a picture of myself and my life. See it and feel it. KV had once asked me why knowing what I want to do in life is so important to me. He was trying to understand why I can't just focus on the present and find joy in my current work - whatever it is that I do. I guess the answer to that is that until I don't know, I can't work towards getting there. 

This is how I look like most of the times currently

So I painted a picture of my current life. I was about to go ahead and paint one of the life I want. But then I decided that I'm not going to do it. 

It can be present in my head. I'll find middle ground in having a sense of direction to steer in without finalising the destination. I want to be open to everything else that can happen to me and see how it evolves into something unexpected yet delightful. 

Happy thinking and (mental or physical) painting. :-)

Kanksha

what is your gift

The prompt for today is to meditate and journal for a total of 15 min BEFORE you get on your phone in the morning. The journal topic is: what is your gift. 

How do you interpret that? Take a few moments to think about this before you read mine.

As kids, when a character of a book had a gift, that meant that something terrifying yet equally amazing was going to happen in their life. The minute they realised that they have a gift, their life would change, and multiple occasions of using their gift would come to light. They would have a gift because one of their parent was a greek god, or a dragon rider, or they just happened to have cool powers. Basically, I've grown up with the thought that gifts are magical. 

The first thing that came to my mind though, was to think of something that I can do that no one else can... I came up with nothing. So that was saddening. That was followed by an attempt of thinking of what I can do better than everyone else... I still could not think of anything. 

So I started thinking more in the direction of what I enjoy. I thought about what comes naturally to me. What is a mystery that I will never solve, but something I will continue to solve for the rest of my life with intrigue and joy? And for me, the answer was people. 

I think my gift would be the ability to care deeply and have the willingness to understand. I'm motivated. I try to make the most out of situations and strive to have a positive outlook in life. That's because my goal is to be at peace and happy. In its own way, I think this gift is magical too. 

I guarantee, so is yours. 

Much love.

Kanksha

P.S. This is Day 2 of Chelsea Yamase's 21 day positivity challenge. 

a list of 20 things that bring joy and add value to my life

Life isn't exactly how any of us had pictured it to be,

Some of us are away from friends and family.

Maybe you are looking for a job,

Maybe you are lucky and haven't been that affected at all.

Perhaps you are sad... or moody.

Perhaps this time alone at home has led to self discovery.

I don't know what you are feeling right now. I do know that I wanted to feel more energetic and like myself though. So I decided to do Chelsea Yamase's 21 day positivity challenge - I love each day's tasks. You can look for her on Instagram, and you can also follow me along as I do them everyday. :)

Day 1's challenge was to make a list of 20 things that bring joy and add value to my life.

I'd really encourage you to take a moment and do it yourself, before reading mine.

But here it is:

1. My family
2. Dost and friends
3. Music - both playing and listening
4. Cooking good food
5. Making dessert (and eating it :P)
6. Taking photos, capturing moments
7. Being in nature
8. Helping people
9. Grocery shopping - any shopping really
10. Playing games
11. Watching stars, the ocean, grass
12. Writing code that works
13. Looking pretty and trying new hairstyles
14. Vacationing and travelling
15. Working
16. Organising and cleaning
17. Decorating
18. Writing
19. Reading
20. Understanding people
21. Exercising
22. Clarity, knowing what I want

It's sweet when you realise that there are so many of those things - I wanted to keep going beyond 20 and I did. I know there are even more. <3

Love,

Kanksha

I hope you understand

I hope you understand that I love

My friends

My family

And all my people

Equally.

I hope you understand and that I do too

That you are just an addition to my life

And not my life.

I hope we can find

Things to do

Places to go

That both of us enjoy

It’ll be hard for me to not

Because I’m an excited soul

Transfer more to me 

As I send some to you

And envelope each other in the calm

Of happy times, sad times, angry times

But times without an end or full stop.

Is it so hard

To find someone like you

Am I being a hopeless romantic

Thinking of how it will be

To think of you with a smile on my face

With you next to me

And not in retrospect.

I hope you understand

I hope I understand too.

what quiet looks like

I hope all of you are doing well. I am sitting in the dark on my desk. My Bluetooth earphones just came in and I'm not the happiest with them because they get entangled in my curly hair. My roommate is sleeping - aka watching something under her comforter with mini explosions of giggles signalling something funny and her lack of being asleep, and my other flatmate is doing something in her own room. But like I said, I am sitting in the dark, for once in my life, on my desk (I study on my sofa, the bed... anywhere except my desk). Music is playing in the background, and I can feel the quiet. 

The definition of quiet is making little or no noise, but that isn't what quiet looks or feels like. So I began drawing, trying to figure out what quiet looked like. And I couldn't really wrap my head around it. Because they were either genuinely quiet, or in the middle of a mess or a lot of noise. Take a look:

Quiet can be like that scenery all of us drew as kids. It is comfort, the mountains, trees, and river colliding together. It's a house in the middle of nowhere, sometimes even a well next to it if you're from India. 

On the other hand, sometimes it's like the yellow on the bottom left corner. A little ray of sunshine in the middle of a mess, a moment of clarity if you may. For instance, imagine a cyclist in the middle of a busy city, minding their own business. I don't know why or how I can picture quiet in so much of noise. Can you?

And while drawing these sketches, I realised that what they have in common isn't some physical state, but your mental state. It's a tightrope wide enough to give you enough space, yet keep nothing unnecessary on it. I guess I should have replaced this girl on a tightrope with a brain on one. 

The mental model of quiet to me is a mix of balance and clarity, focus and peace. Similar to the tightrope, it's where you can shut everything else out except what you want to keep in your head. (That's also probably why silence can be deafening and doesn't imply quietness.)

What comes to your mind when you think of quiet? I'd love to know.

Stay at home, stay safe

Kanksha <3

Happy Birthday to me

Oh yes, don't worry, you haven't forgotten my birthday. It's just that my blog turned 7 years old today and I wanted it to be a super amazing post because a 7 year commitment is something, but I guess it is just going to be like any other regular post.

Everyone knows that the virus is taking the world by a storm in a not-at-all-great way. I know people are going from panic to denial to ignorance or fluctuating among those phases. It is a difficult time, for sure. But for all of us who are fortunate enough to not have someone we love battling for their life, I have a few things I want to say (because hopefully that won't change if we all isolate).

Stop looking at updates. Do not actively try to know more. Stop watching hundreds of videos, reading all kinds of messages and news. Because while it is important to be aware, it is important to be able to live your life as normally as possible too.

Stay at home as far as you can, because it is important to be a part of the solution than potentially aggravate the problem. (That includes staying at home when you are bored. And yes, I know people who still don't.)

And now that I've said the two things I most wanted to, I'd like the rest of my post to focus more on what I think we can do. How we can be in control in such circumstances is what we need to think about. The human race struggles dealing with uncertainty. We cannot make ourselves okay with not being in control of what is happening - it induces a feeling of helplessness.

And often in such times, a set of people resort to looking for a higher power, God, praying and hoping that if they believe enough in God's existence, then maybe that 'person' will fix things. Why? Because that makes us still feel in control. Maybe our doing something - a prayer, wishes, positive thinking - will trigger someone else fixing the problem for us. And if that works for you, that's great!

But I personally don't believe that there is a higher power controlling anything. So if you're like me and don't think anyone has control, how do you get your power back? Of course, first, there needs to be the acceptance and awareness of the situation for what it is. There need to be precautions that you are taking, precautions more than sufficient. And finally you need to keep living like you always were. Stay AWAY from social media. Do your best to create positive energy around you. I was told that Kathak dancers in India instead of banging the vessel for 10 minutes did tatkar because the sound of ghungroo creates positive energy.

Allow yourself to meditate in your own way - meditation can be anything that allows you to focus your thoughts on one thing! Like I am sure without even knowing you that you have at least one hobby in the arts side of the world. Explore it, and create. Learn how to cook. Spend time with family and friends virtually. Honestly if this happened 20 years ago, what people would most wish for would be a way to talk to someone 5 buildings away, to be able to see them - it wouldn't matter if it was just virtually seeing their face! We need to be ever so grateful for technology!

Give it a thought. You have so many resources to learn whichever skill you want. You have people supporting you and creating content - from dance routines, to workout challenges. The world has shut down, but the entire world is still open for you. You just need to look for what you want. However lonely it feels, or however scared you feel, you need to begin looking at this in the form of an opportunity to slow down, get healthier, learn, and grow.

This is a perfect time to form habits. It's the time to explore and experiment. Think of it as a period of transformation. That is how we stay in control. By not thinking of it as a restriction, but realising it is a choice, and one we can actually take a lot of advantage of.

You're the caterpillar waiting in a cocoon... You will soon fly.

Lots of love, strength, patience, and determination
Kanksha <3

What is religion to me?

My journey with religion has been a conflicted one. I've grown up being made to believe in a certain set of rules. Never one to disobey unless I could help it, I kept following them. Somewhere in the middle I began asking questions. Some answers made complete sense, some did not. I realised there are actual reasons behind things that I did - things that I thought were just rituals but actually mean something more.

If you look at religion only from a restrictive and ritualistic point of view, I can see why it would begin to seem like a burden. Any imposition begins to feel like a burden for that matter - human beings like choice, and freedom. But to me, the key is to begin looking beyond the rituals and rules and start unraveling the philosophy behind them.

With Jainism, for some reason, this is particularly hard to do. I don't fully understand it, and whatever is told to me in the texts, I feel like isn't proof enough. It's like knowing the solution to a minimisation problem, but not being able to solve it yourself. Reading a text to understand the math would definitely help, but spiritual texts without scientific experimentation done yet to prove it is correct is something I have trouble believing in.

On the other hand, there are selective rules. We eat dried turmeric and dried ginger. That's because they have strong medicinal properties. Why only dried? Because for some reason that changes its nature? Why not dried carrot or dried garlic powder? Because they aren't medicinal enough? No. Because replacement medication for them is available?

But hold on, the concept is to reduce attachment from food in the first place.

Idea 1 is saying that all plants and animals and everything in this world has life.
Idea 2 is saying that I want to minimise how much pain I cause to other things in this life.
Idea 3 says: look here, if you want to reduce pain, eat only because you have to. Not for the taste, but for survival.
Which takes you to the fourth concept of: now that you are eating only because you have to for survival, let's reduce the amount of things that we eat, and the amount of times that we eat, to harm the least amount of things we possibly can.
And mixed among all of this comes a classification where somehow you know that while all life is equal, some living beings are more conscious, and you'd rather eat the least conscious ones to cause lesser pain.

I found out today that you would rather cut an apple open and leave it for a while to let the consciousness go away and then eat it, than eat it by itself. I do not understand this. At the end of the day, I am eating an apple. But apparently thought matters here.

There are lots of things that I don't understand, but I can empathise with Idea 1, 2, 3, and 4. I wish there was scientific proof to back the classification and consciousness theory. It seems there is, but I haven't read it, and I would want to conduct experiments if possible to validate (or invalidate) the same. But I don't know if that is possible yet.

I just wish people taught Jainism with those principles. I have been taught the right way to some level, in the sense that I would never harm a living thing if I had a choice. I like letting things be. I have love for mosquitoes, even though they gave me malaria thrice, and feel that they have every right to live.

I feel like it is important to be a good human being. It is important to help others. You must be kind, generous, respect everyone, have control over yourself, and peace of mind.

And that is religion to me.

Kanksha

There is power in choosing something. And helplessness in not knowing what choice to make.
On another note, I hope you all choose to stay home.

To all my friends looking for a special someone

Recommend that you listen as you read along!!

There's a lot I always want to talk about. I want to talk about how pretty the sky looks like in the morning. I want to talk about the benefits of having something you do consistently every morning because it grounds you, and makes you feel less overwhelmed and more orderly in this (chaotic for me) life. The importance of knowing that it's hard to jump multiple steps on the ladder of success, and how going one step at a time slowly but patiently can eventually get you to the top.

I want to tell you how amazing it feels seeing your parents after four months of not seeing them face to face. The fun in sharing joy with your friends when you give them a surprise and fall back into routine with them on vacation. How good home smells and tastes. How much I miss the sea. The noise and traffic, the street shops and people. If there was a way I could transfer all that I have felt in the past few months, I would. 

I think that's one of my favourite things to do. I like making people feel. I like knowing how they feel, and giving them perspective on that, providing a nudge to make them them think differently. 

A lot of my friends are nearing the marriageable age. It's the next big thing everyone is looking forward to now that a lot of people have graduated and are working. Well, I wouldn't say looking forward to exactly. There is fear in how to figure out whether a person is the right person. There is skepticism in whether they ever will find any person. There's more excitement for the best friend's wedding, irrespective of whether there is a guy or not. And the one thing that you'll see all twenty-something year old kids (oops adults) discuss is why society expects you to get married in the first place.

Society has such a large influence on us, especially on what we expect, how we behave in relationships, and the timing of things we want in life. (I'm not just talking about romantic relationships, I'm talking about all kinds of relationships.) So does the media and entertainment industry. There's one definition of being close, of expressing love and care... and to be able to look beyond that, I feel, is getting harder. But beyond any external factors, our relationships and the people we pick to be a part of our lives are largely governed by our beliefs.

We have beliefs about education and money, about sports, music, and art. We have beliefs about religion and culture. And some about love, relationships, communication, and intimacy. What's interesting is that we tend to have these beliefs because we feel like they benefit us in certain ways.

More specifically in the context of marriage, and finding a significant other, these beliefs would sort of be a driving factor. Maybe you want someone from the same religion or cultural background because that gets approval from the family, maybe you haven't been open to dating because your belief that love is stupid helped you stay more focused when you needed to, maybe your belief that every next person may cheat on you helps you not get hurt again. Perhaps you pick someone who has a particular occupation because of how you feel about certain occupations, and money they bring.

Think about what beliefs you have. Like take a pen and paper, and write down what they are and how you think they are helping you. Are they really helping you? Do you want to work on a better belief? I don't know, but you will if you think hard enough :)

have a great day you guys.
Cheers to my first blog post of 2020. <3
Kanksha

Cute card I got this Valentine's day. If only someone actually stole my heart. Jk, I would die.

Sometimes it is really nice not knowing what is going to happen next. Just knowing that whatever is going to happen is something you will be able to look dead in the eye with a smile on your face is an incredibly empowering feeling. I'm not sure why I wrote this. I think I just feel happy I got to writing this blogpost. Okay bye!