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Monday, April 13, 2020

~~ And the prompts so far ~~

Originally written on April 17th 2019...
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Hey everyone…
As the weekly prompts completes 15 weeks as of last week – I thought, why not just put up a compilation of all the prompts that have been given out as part of weekly prompts this year from this space and let fellow bloggers help pick any they might have missed reading and thus writing  🙂 Most of these prompts are inspired by what I encounter in my day to day life or my own experiences in the week – so feel free to use your imagination to fictionalize it and present it as a chapter from a story or alternatively, and only if you are fine , write about your own experience around the prompt – totally your choice 🙂
Now, for the first time readers of this post,  the idea of starting this exercise of weekly prompts was to get people to dust their blog spaces and just write about any random topic.. anything that helps to give the wide audience of blogger community here in this space and their imaginations a kick start…  For starters, I was one such blogger who needed to dust my space too and this exercise sure did make me sit up and write quite a few number of posts this year, even if they were just giving out prompts (sometimes not on time :P)… So if you have been wanting to write from a long time and if you get a spark from any of the below mentioned prompts, I’d be very happy to have achieved that 🙂  If not, hey, there’s always the next prompt to look forward to 🙂 Not all prompts can interest everyone, right?
19.15
Imagine that you are leaving someone important behind and traveling half way across the world because of some commitment which cannot be avoided at any cost – Pen your thoughts during the travel
19.14:
Earth starts wobbling and you have no idea what’s going on. Amidst chaos, suddenly, you are made aware, that you are the only one, for some reason, who can figure out and rectify Earth’s rotation. Build a story around it.  As expected, this can be a funny take on the chaos and need not be driven by serious scientifically proven concepts.
19.13:
My daughter, all of 8 years, looked at me with her innocent eyes, brimming with tears, and asked me – Ma, when will I be 18  years old? Why is it taking so long? When can I free you from him? I don’t need him. Ma, please. Listen to me. Let’s leave.
19.12:
I woke up.. It seemed like a peaceful morning. .. I was not yet ready to get out of the bed.. I could hear the early morning noises, the birds chirping, the gurgling noises of the stream nearby, the temple bells ringing at a distance.. The aroma of filter coffee from the kitchen managed to further wake the lazy-me and I slowly turned to my left. That’s when I saw her, sleeping next to me, a sweet serene smile on her face… I smiled back mesmerized by the beauty, only to suddenly wake up completely and recoil in horror – who the hell was this sleeping beauty and what the hell was she doing here?
19.11, 19.10, 19.09 : These were not given by me but voluntarily given by Ramanujam when I went missing from this space 😛 Thank you again, Ramanujam 🙂 (Note: though I linked his prompts in Org space, not going to do so here as that requires me to ask him if he's ok with that and he has already left the organization)
19:08 :  Write a 55F  using the mother-daughter image as the theme. Refer the original post for the image
19.07:  Following must be the last lines of your story. “And there you are – my own happily ever after” Yep, happy endings please!
19.06:  I want you to write about anything that recently made you experience that kind of “peace” or “happiness”.  Basically, what makes you happy? Like, truly happy?  It can be as simple as feeling bliss as you sip hot filter coffee from that steel tumbler or as complicated as you want it to be. It can be a place, a safe memory, a comfort food, a conversation with a particular person, an activity, a hobby or multiple such things  put together.  If you are not comfortable elaborating on a single personal experience, you can also give us your own happiness – list, say, like 15 things (need not be exactly 15) that make you absolutely happy 🙂 Choice is yours 🙂
19.05: I want you to set a timer for 10 minutes and write.  Write every random thought that crosses your mind in those 10 minutes. Do not plan the post, no editing allowed (I cannot verify it, but I trust you :)) –  Just jot down the free flow of random thoughts and publish the post at the end of 10 minutes
19.04:  The prompt for you is to write a post/story using all of the following –
“The Hidden Sun”
“Afternoon on a hill”
“By the sea-side”
and if possible, a reference somewhere to the legendary story of “Rip Van Winkle” (Please google if you don’t know the story)
19:03:  The prompt for you this week is to write a story revolving around a family along the lines of – Theda hai but mera hai – as in “Crazy, Weird, Twisted but Mine”. Write about a family which is as weird, crazy, twisted, different as any other family, but at the end of the day, no one would want it away or any different. And oh, I will be super glad if you choose to write on your own one-of-a-kind family  (I am sure, each one of us has one such) instead of a fictionalized version. Go on, choose real or fiction and then write!!
19.02: Write about that kid that you were, with a different dream and a different passion and if you want, how you ended up here, good or bad? I know we can pursue dreams even with this job, and if that’s the case, write how you managed to do so. If it’s too personal, you can also fictionalize this prompt and weave a story around childhood dreams turning into passion or otherwise. You get to decide!
19.01: Considering this is the first post and the first prompt of the year  – I decided to have the most cliched topic at this time of the year , as a prompt,  yes, of course, the new year resolutions!! What are your this year’s resolutions? Go on, write about it and let’s then come back end of the year to check what we have accomplished from the list
Its been a while I actually “blogged” – If you get what I mean. Most of my recent posts are just centered around the weekly prompts – with a little background about how the prompt came into being.  And as I type this, I can’t help but sigh, and, yes, I have told this probably a hundred times already but I do miss the old humble and generous blogging community and of course, the comments that used to pour in as soon as we published a post – it was a positive community and at times the encouragement felt too much to handle too!  To be honest, I miss those rants and ramblings those few amazing bloggers used to write, and interestingly, as I look back, those were the ones that has made an impact than anything else, as I seem to still remember them 🙂 Probably because, they were super creative even if it were just rants/ramblings and it also helped the reader connect in a strange way – you just nod along the lines of the rants, that yep, been there, experienced that, you know?
I don’t know how many of you quite understand that blogging is not only about churning out fiction and stories all the time(of course it is for bloggers who create a blog with an intention, passion and interest to do only that), but it’s essentially at the end of the day, a weblog, a platform to write about anything under the sun, a platform each uses for a purpose of his/her own interests, some do it to hone their writing skills,  some do it make connections with people with similar interests, some do it because they are better at weaving words online than in person, some do it to ensure there’s a log of what interests them, some vent out stuff which they cannot anywhere else – why, there are blogs that churn out details about what happens next in the Ekta Kapoor daily soaps – so, a blog can document anything that you want it to depict – its about your personal interests and how you want your space to be when and if you decide writing 🙂   Having said that, every blogger thrives on comments, even if it is a critical feedback or a mere acknowledgement, a recognition that the post has been read does add colour to a bloggers life !
But hey, before I digress further, which I don’t know why I did in the first place, I guess, I just wanted any new to-be-blogger to not have any inhibitions that there’s only technical stuff that can be written on an organization blog (having said that, this is still an organization blogspace and we all need to be mindful of the content posted). So yeah, anyways,  am also planning to compile a list of posts that were written for these prompts soon to let you go find some awesome bloggers who have been writing awesome pieces for most of these prompts (Thanks a bunch :)) – Not all of them have provided the correct tags that I had requested for, but that’s ok, I will look up those posts.. so will take a while, but until then, may be you can pick a few from here and write too and thus stand a chance to feature in that next post 🙂
Keep writing 🙂
If you want to find the original posts of any of these prompts, I am yet to sync most of them here but the one's that are already synced can be found here.. 

Sunday, April 12, 2020

~~ [Weekly Prompts – 19.15]: All alone up in the sky ~~

Originally written in my other blogspace on April 15 2019...  I used to give weekly prompts then for the organization internal blogspace.
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Hola from the roo-land!
My blogging journey began when I was in USA and today after about a decade..I am writing again from a different country...
This is my first ever lone onsite trip to a country after being to US about a decade back and staying there for a couple of years...I was single then, had friends there when I reached. Things have changed now, very very much. I don’t exactly remember what I had been thinking the whole long lonely plane trip to USA back then, partly also because the plane was full of screaming babies  and you really cannot think in those circumstances. But this time, leaving a young kid behind, was a nightmare. As I sat all alone at that window seat on the airplane and watched the fluffy clouds pass beneath the plane, all I could think of was my little girl and how this was going to be a huge leap for me and her in our relationship – this separation, this staying apart. People who know us very well, know how protective I am of her and how much of a mommy's girl she is...We have never stayed apart and it was not going to be easy for both of us 🙁
But then,  when the situation and time demands, you need to adapt and learn. You just need to move forward.
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Anyways, as a part of the prompt for this past week, imagine that you are leaving someone important behind and traveling half way across the world because of some commitment - pen those thoughts that cross your mind as you travel...
Get going!

Monday, April 06, 2020

~~ Twenty for Twenty – February and March Journey ~~

Yes, I know am late in posting this!!

And its a long read – so brace yourselves!!

I always thought WFH would help me finally achieve a lot more things that I normally don’t get a chance to or time for – I always thought I’d gain those extra 4 hours that I always spend travelling to and fro office and I can productively use it to do so many things like read more, watch stuff on TV, write more, zentangle more, finish that draft of the novel, exercise more, walk more, take care of myself, help mom, spend more time with the daughter and etc etc… But what I had not expected was that, though not entirely, but most of those 4 hours, I’d still spend glued to the laptop trying to wrap up multiple more things at work.  Sometimes I even have my lunch glued to my laptop – I am not super proud about it. Hmm, it’s so true that grass is always greener on the other side, right? I do know that it’s all about setting those healthy boundaries for a better work-life balance wherever you are working from, home or office (it was also one of my goals this year), but at times like these, when everyone around is trying to cope up and enhance their applications to cater to COVID-19 restrictions, the work-pressure is no less.

Having said that, if given a choice and a chance in future, I’d like to still continue WFH when and if things return to normal.  I’d still opt for it just to avoid the travel. The constant back ache and body ache that I used to have due to the long travels are now missing (and of course, I don’t miss them at all) *Touchwood* . I felt different (good different of course) after a few days of WFH and it took me a while to realize that the difference was, in fact,  the absence of the constant aches in my body. 

Anyways, February and March have been quite interesting – isn’t it?  What with appraisals, bonus, the new facility movement(which sadly has added half hour extra both in the morning and evening to my travel travails from and to office), the Corona Virus scare, the scary numbers increasing day by day in India, the lockdown, the deaths, the sanitization necessities, the WFH, the “Am I audible?”,  “Are you able to see my screen?” and the sudden-cooker-whistling-in-the-background-during-a-call saga! Every year, we feel the that months just whizz by, and this year, it seems like the time has taken this concern seriously and has opted to move as slowly as possible so we can savor every single minute of the not-so-great-so-far year!

I know – that this might not be of interest in the light of current events – but I still wanted to go ahead and post about how I fared in the past two months…

20 for 20 – Career

Work life balance: Though I managed to keep the checking of emails/chats beyond working hours at bay most part of February, I couldn’t do it in March due to the WFH.

Get certified: There was progress (not huge) in February and I was able to complete an easy online certification. But no progress as such in March.

Appreciate often: Doing it as applicable 🙂

20 for 20 – Reading/Writing

Blog at least once a month (2/12): I did blog in February – but did not in March(blame the WFH :P)

One Blogathon per year (0/1):  Haven’t dared to start this yet.

Finish the draft of novel: Haven’t dared to start this yet.

Reading challenge(12/20): I know I know.. I wouldn’t say I completed 12 full fledged books or novels. Probably the actual count would just be 2 so far. The rest are short stories by Jeffrey Archer that I read back to back in February – they were just a couple of pages each, but goodreads shows them up as separate short stories, hence the skewed count.

Sync the external blog space with all the posts: Haven’t started this one yet.

20 for 20 – Others

Travel/Vacation :

Take a break per month to unwind – even if for a day (3/12) –  I did take a break as and when I thought I needed one both in February and March. This is something I am going to continue doing.

Explore local weekend getaways – try visiting at least 5 new places close by (0/5) – None in February and March. Just homebound and trying to stay safe 🙂

Plan proper vacations – Try to cover at least 2 from my bucket list (0/2) – Had finalized April/May to cover at-least one of the bucket list places. Now that is on hold. Probably is going to be on hold for a while, isn’t it?

Health :

Meditate: Thanks to the lockdown – everyday as soon as I wind up from office work, we all sit together and meditate for 5 minutes. Peaceful silent 5 mins of the entire day 😛
Walk at least for half hour every day – Again, thanks to the lockdown -I try to spend atleast half an hour walking every day – 24/366
Squeeze in 10 mins of yoga every day – Again, thanks to the lockdown – 7am to 8am or 7pm to 8pm has become the yoga hour of my day though I haven’t been able to do it diligently every single day – 18/366
Drink more water – This is something that I have been missing on since WFH. Need to consciously drink more water.
General:

Stay strictly offline after 10pm – Go to bed at a reasonable time  – 15/366 – I have not been doing this regularly 🙁
Declutter – Let go of unwanted stuff – I finally cleared one of my old bags with a lot of unwanted old receipts/documents. Many more such bags to go.
Watch a movie per week – 2/53 –  Movie – Flight
Go to a stand-up comedy show (0/1) – Nothing planned yet.
Resume dance classes – Restarted classes, however, the dance teacher went to her hometown before lockdown and hasn’t returned yet. There have been no classes since then 🙁


In addition to the above – I did strike something off my bucket list this year though I had not planned it to happen upfront. It happened by chance and made it all the more memorable 🙂

January – I always wanted to share stage with my daughter and dance with her. We both love dancing and we keep dancing together at home, but there was this teeny tiny wish to go on stage – Done 🙂

February –  I always have wanted to participate in a marathon – took part in a 3km fun run – with the Mr. and the daughter.

March – Work from home – Every mommy out there probably relates to the need of being able to work remotely – so she can just spend that few extra minutes with the family. I always was looking forward for an opportunity to WFH (though there are a lots of cons to it too).  Though it did not happen in the way I would have liked it to, I am trying to make the most of the time that I gain especially now where there’s no morning chaos, no rush to catch the bus to office, no rush to come back home, no travel and most of all, even if I feel tired at the end of the work-day – its still good-tired 🙂

As we have stepped into yet another month with quite a few uncertainities, let’s just bear in mind that “This too shall pass”.  Lets be positive about the current situation and move forward a day at a time!!

Before I wind up from this long boring post – can I ask for just one thing?

Please stay indoors and please stay safe!!