Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

Every day, when I sit down to study, I close my door. Not because I don't want anyone to see me studying, but because I wouldn't be able to study if it were open. Mainly, this is because my grandmother is having a shouting match with one or all of the servants. Now, I don't know how it is in other houses, but in our house, we have three people who come in to work - one person who cooks, one person who cleans and a third who deals with the garden and walks the dog and does all the other little odd jobs around the house. It sounds like a perfect solution, right? We don't have any work to do! The problem is, though, every person we find for any of the above posts turns out to be argumentative and noisy. Until last year, our house functioned quite smoothly. We had a cook, a driver, a gardener and a cleaner, all of whom had been working in the house for at least three years. However, over the course of a few months that year, all of them left or were fired for varying reas...

A few weeks ago, one of my friends who reads my blog (and doesn't comment, just like so many of you) asked my why the vocabulary I use in my blogs isn't all fancy and flowery. Largely, this is because my classmates think of me as a walking, talking dictionary of sorts. You see, a few years ago, I used to be a big spelling bee freak, and I used to keep winning those, and my classmates got wind of them and my nickname became, much to my consternation, "Dictionary". Not that there's anything wrong with dictionaries - I'm sure they're all perfectly wonderful books. My problem is with being called "Dictionary" when I have a perfectly wonderful name like "Ritvik". The thing is, I generally make it a point not to use big words. Not because I think my audience is dumb - you yourself, for instance, are a prime example of the crème de la crème of intellectual society. No, really, I can see that from here. I write with diminutive vocabulary to a...

Don't ask me what a Depresser or Depressee is, because I have no idea whatsoever. It just sounded like a good, snappy title. However, today we're going to talk about something that'll probably get me a bunch of hateful comments calling me all sorts of rude things: depression among teenagers. Definition (I seem to use this a lot these days...):  feelings of severe despondency and dejection. Now, according to all the depressed people the universe - or at least, the ones who make posts about depression - it's far more than that. According to them, when you're depressed, you can't feel anything. It feels like everyone hates you. You don't want to live anymore. Now personally, I've  never been depressed (at least, not that I know of - although considering I've never really checked, that may not count for much. OHMYGOD, am I depressed???), so I can't tell you for sure whether or not that's true. What I can tell you, though, is that every time yo...

Our school's annual day (which, ironically enough, only occurs once every three years) is this evening. It's a play about the Mahabharata, which is a strange choice of play, because the whole idea of the annual day (at least, according to my school) is to get each and every kid to play some part in it, no matter how menial said part may be. The Mahabharata doesn't have a lot of female roles, and that's led my school to come up with several extra roles just so that everyone can have a part in the play. They have, for instance, "human props" who don't really seem to have an awful lot to do. This post, however, is not about the many similar little technical hiccups in my annual day - though no doubt that would fill an entire blog post all on its own. No, this post is about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and why I prefer one over the other. I'll be honest with you: I've always preferred the Mahabharata. I never was a big fan of Rama, because I alwa...