From Deepa's Desk

  I walk outside my flat, taking in the lights displayed on the window of my home. Tomorrow they will be taken down. Tomorrow, life will resume its usual hustle-bustle after a brief festive respite. After three days of the sounds of firecrackers bursting, the sudden silence feels strange. The occasional firecracker bursts every now and then, a reminder that somewhere, someone is sending off Diwali in style. Diwali has always been my favorite festival. I love its grandeur and opulence. Most of all, I love it for the lights. Come October, and the days suddenly turn shorter, with the sun setting as early as 5.30 in the evening and dusk arriving by 6. While I love winter and the cozy comfort it brings in its wake, I dread the dark days. Light is essential for me. As someone who sleeps at night with the lights on in the room, the early and dark evenings of winter aren’t exactly welcome. To add to it, the apartment where I live is the last building on a street with a dead-end. ...

  I switch on my laptop and tap my fingers on the table impatiently. Every day, the laptop takes longer to get started. By the time it starts, it usually happens that I lose train of my thoughts, and I postpone my writing for another day. It gets frustrating, to be honest. With a heavy heart I finally accept that the time has come to start using the new laptop that my husband bought. I switch on the new one and before I can take a breath, the screen lights up asking for a password. It doesn’t wait for a second after I have entered the last letter of the password. Within minutes, the screen is ready, offering me a whole world of possibilities. My gaze falls upon my old laptop, and I gulp down the lump in my throat. Isn’t it funny how we get attached to everyday objects around us? For me, my old laptop isn’t just an object – it is the canvas of my life. On this laptop, I have spent countless hours writing and dreaming. I have spent hours planning for family vacations. During th...

  The house has been cleaned to the best possible extent. The lights to be strung outside the house are ready. New clothes have been purchased. The firecrackers are all set to light up the festival of lights. Oh, I forget… Diwali-special snacks are in the making. Rangoli will follow soon. It seems I have checked most of the requirements for Diwali. For me, this is a very special festival. Right from my childhood, I have been fascinated with Diwali and the glimmer and glitter it brings in its wake. The lights, the snacks, the firecrackers – they create such an aura of celebration that it is difficult to not to soak in the joy spreading around you. For some reason, it feels like Diwali celebration was grander during my childhood. To start with, we used to get a vacation from school – a vacation of three weeks. If nothing else, this itself made the festival special. We would come home from school on the last working day, brimming with excitement about the holidays. I...

The Indian Railways is one of the largest operating organisations in the world. Zillions of people travel through trains every day, including you and me. And yet how little we know about it! In her debut novel Platform Ticket, author Sangeetha Vallat has shared candid narratives of her life as an employee of the Indian Railways.  From working at platforms in unheard-of stations, to earning the title of The Express Lady for her speedy work in booking tickets, Sangeetha has been there and done it all. The book contains details of her tryst with the Indian Railways, a bond that began when she was just twenty years old. The experiences that she has had and the people she has met and befriended over the years – these form the crux of her narrative. The author has written in a manner that is casual, factual, witty and poignant all at once. The book transports you into another world – that of the Railways where it is not just the trains or passengers that form the essence, but the beggars...

  One of the things that I find most challenging is decluttering. It’s not about how tedious or boring the job is, it is more about the fact that I do not know what to get rid of. It is said that the clutter around you is a symbol of the clutter within you. My house is cluttered with relics and remnants of the past. Countless broken pencils, sharpeners, erasers – none of which are in use today because the kid now uses pens. There are those infinite toys that came with the package of Kinder Joy.   First birthday gifts, first rakhis, first test-papers in which the kid has written the alphabets in a handwriting so neat and so beautiful that it makes me want to cry. Today his handwriting has a large scope for improvement, to put it mildly. There are earrings, just one of a pair. The other one probably got lost somewhere. People say ladies find it difficult to part from their earrings, even if it is just one from the pair. For me, these are reminders of the time when the enthus...