Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

If you've been following my blog for a while - since the end of 2015-beginning of 2016 - you'll probably remember a post I did last year about the Thousand Smiling Faces project (I also wrote another post about it immediately after). For those of you who are too lazy to click through those links, the Thousand Smiling Faces project was a bunch of us teenagers getting McDonald's Happy Meals for 1000 kids in orphanages. I was planning to this again on New Year's Day 2017, but couldn't get it to work out. However, Independence Day is coming up, and we're going to do it again, but this time, we've gone a little crazy - instead of working with 1000 kids, we're aiming to deliver 5000 meals! That's roughly   ₹ 5,00,000's worth of Happy Meals, a lot of burgers by anyone's standards. We've also got another twist to the thing this year. Seeing as we're doing it on the 15th of August, which is India's Independence Day, and seeing a...

Note: This post was actually my essay for my English exam this morning. All credit for the topic (How my generation socializes differently from my parents') and the title of this post go to my teacher, Mrs. Shobha K. Millennial introduction: Hello, fellow millennial! How is your suffering? Baby boomer introduction: Greetings, O almighty reader! I know, sounds weird, right? Not least because people don't actually greet each other that way. They never have. It does, however, highlight something that I really want to talk about: that millennials and baby boomers socialize in very different ways. Myself, I'm a millennial. For those of you that don't know, that means that I invest poorly and can't buy property because I spend all my money on avocado toast. At least, that's what the Gen X millionaires would have you believe. A lot of Gen X-ers would also have you believe that Gen Y does not know how to socialize, does not know how to converse. I'd like t...

I like to think I've had a moderately non-sheltered upbringing. I may not know how to get to anywhere that's more than, say, 2km from my house, but that's mainly because I rely on Google Maps rather than putting in the effort to figure out my city. I've seen people sleeping at bus stations, I've travailed on second-class non-AC trains, I've dealt firsthand with goat droppings. Until my last NCC camp, though, I had never been to a Bangalorean mandi. This post is one I've been meaning to write for a while, so needless to say, I haven't even tried until nearly a month after. Needless to say, I now find myself unable to recall the precise details of the outing. What I do remember, though, is being roused from my slumber at 4:00am, a full half-hour before the NCC usually expects cadets to wake up, and being told to go downstairs because we had to go to the market. I got dressed and went downstairs to wait in the chilly darkness with nine other cadets for an...

Forgive me if this blog post seems a little disjointed, I didn't get too much sleep last night on account of the stray dogs yelling outside. We've all been there, particularly in Bangalore, haven't we? Bunch of strays fighting and barking, denying us our precious sleep... Not my idea of fun at all. They even take all the fun out of walking, too. Fifteen stray dogs coming at you at a rate of mph with a shared goal of finding out the taste of your tender, tender flesh really ruins the walking experience for me, somehow. Our house is in an absolutely awful position because we have some neighbours, a delightful elderly couple who leave food out for the dogs at night. They dump the food on street corners and leave the dogs to tear into each other to actually get at it. The dogs come out to eat, and the two packs that rule our area get into a fight. By 12am, the fight reaches its cacophonous peak, and everyone wakes up and wishes they could load up a shotgun and blow the do...