The Flanerie Blog

Chhate kya ho, batao mujhe. Jo gaane ki dunh or kitabon ki shabh bhi nahi dhooondh paye, kyu tum akele khojte ho? Shayad yeh akelapan hi teri jawaab hai. Agar poochh nahi sakte, toh samaadhan kaisa karpaonga? Agar tere nange peethnahi dekhoge, toh phank kaisa bawaonga? Iss anjaan khoj mein, shayad yeh akelapan hi teri jawaab hai.

It’s been a while since I turned 10 – well, maybe more than just a while . To my knowledge (and obviously faint memory) I spent my single-digited years as a naïve and active little bean whose only worry was memorizing his Social Studies textbook. Back then, I could not be bothered by how the Harappan Civilization would drain their city waste or about the climatic conditions of different forests around the globe. I was a kid and I wanted to play. In the pre-pandemic era, I spent those years at two places: outside and inside. For me, the “outside” meant spending time in my building play-area and the neighbourhood park without my neighbours (unfortunately, our nuisance forced our building managers to close the former permanently). Evenings five to seven were scheduled for football matches and weekend mornings were for cricket. We didn’t have fancy equipment either. Someone would have to sacrifice their shoes to make the goalpost, the football was torn at some places and never completely...

It was a little close to a couple of two weeks ago that I chose to do something I hadn’t done in a long time - Read the newspaper. My eyes skimmed through the headlines, till it stopped at one. It was at this point that my father asked me to read an article in the paper that was “ meant for me ”. Meant for me ? Considering the phrase came from my father, I concluded that the article he referred to here would be definitely related to social media. Lucky enough, the headline my eyes stopped at and the article my father was referring to, was the same. “ ‘Imagined Ugliness Syndrome’ affecting teens ”. Obviously, to begin with, I was in denial. Reading through the article didn’t change my mind either. However, my inquisitiveness led me to do some follow-up research did reveal what many people – young or old – would be going through. Chances are, you or someone you know would be going through the same. "What is this 'Syndrome' you speak about?" First terme...

Speech. Without a doubt, speech is one of the most powerful tools ever to be used in the world. History recounts numerous instances where one man’s word influenced a thousand minds – would it be Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler, or Former United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As said by the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “ Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel ”. From a tender age of eighteen months, humans find speech to be a convenient medium of self-expression. But what about those individuals who have the inability to speak? What about those who are deaf-mute? Centuries ago, sign language was invented by a being whose identity is debatable. However, in 1771, Abbe Charles Michel de L’Epee opened the first free public school for the deaf in Paris; where he invented a sign language to foster and communicate with deaf-mute children who attended his school from around the country. While he may not have invented the concept of sign lang...