Allow Ann to Babble, Please!

I still remember the night I was packing my bags to move to Chennai from my home like it was yesterday. I still remember how excited and scared I was over the change that would happen in my life. But I could almost swear that it was just two months ago. That's how fast time flew me by after I moved to Chennai. When I sat down and realised that tomorrow will be my last day of my first-year undergraduate (and yes, it might seem dramatic but), I just could not believe it. There is no way an entire academic year has gone by this soon. I feel like I skipped through a lot of parts of it all because.. how? Surely, I wasn't in some coma, right? Right? Right. For time is like that. It stretches on unendingly when you want it to end. But it washes over like a wave when you want it to stretch on forever. That is one clear fact I'm trying to wrap my head around for that is the ultimate truth of reality. Fool- that's what I am in the face of time. That's what we all are. And thi...

There was a news broadcast recently in which a 65-year-old man in Tamil Nadu's Perambular died because of a heart attack days after being brutally thrashed by his son. The accused son who had been living separately was enraged over his father's decision to not divide that family property. He went to his father's house and violently assaulted his father which was caught on CCTV video and then proceeded to go viral on social media. Seeing that video, my eyes stung and my chest hurt physically. I cannot imagine how a person can do that to his own father- who brought him up and provided him with everything till he was able to stand on his own two feet. The pure inhuman behaviour on the part of the son would've been too hard to believe if it wasn't caught on camera. Blinded by thirst for money and usage of drugs, alcohol and so on, that man was unable to even understand why his father had refused to divide the property in the first place. In a world where drug usage and ...

Virginia Woolf is considered to be one of the greatest writers in history. Her novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and Orlando, and feminist essays like A Room Of One's Own and Three Guineas, are critically acclaimed and renowned in today's world. After graduating from King's College, London, she fell into the world of literature and joined a circle of artisans and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group within which she met her husband, Leonard Woolf. It's her fourth novel- Mrs. Dalloway- that made her famous. She made her stand as a revolutionary writer but even though, her writings were crisp and clear, her mental state... not so much. She had attempted suicide many times. She has a history of suffering from sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers. The loss of her mother, her half-sister and her father further added to her trauma. She suffered from mania and hallucinations in her lifetime. Though she sought many psychiatric treatments, they were a...

"Feminism is a propaganda used to spread hate against men." "Feminism aims to bring highly reputable men down from their pedestal." "Feminism is a useless notion in today's society." "Feminism is a joke." You may say that women do not really need to fear men or fear you, or that it's not all men. Certainly not. But try telling that to Oksana Maker, Jyoti Singh Pandey, Elizabeth Pena, Jennifer Ertman, Junko Furuta, Anita Cobby and countless other women who have fallen victim to rape. Oh, wait.. you can't. Because they were raped and killed. You see, the concept of feminism may be a propaganda to you. A tool. A useless notion. A joke. But I remember my freedom and my happiness being cut short in my childhood (and even now for that matter in certain aspects) because my parents were afraid to send me out into a world filled with.. men. I remember feeling scared to my bones when I was alone in a narrow alleyway and a guy was approaching m...

I used to be someone who was at the top of her class. I've always had a rank above five till my ninth grade. It's not that I felt pressured to study that hard but people appreciated me best when I did. And I craved that appreciation and validation from my parents, teachers and relatives, even if it meant unending sleepless nights and constant stress. I wasn't particularly exceptional at any co-curricular activity or sports event. I was just in the middle of everything- not that poor but not that good either. Studying was the one thing that people accepted I was really good at. So I did everything to keep their beliefs intact. But in my tenth grade, academic burnout hit me and it hit me hard. I felt like I was literally draining myself too much. I lost the will to study. I barely passed my model exams. Tenth grade is believed to be a turning point in every single student's life- the phase where they're supposed to work the hardest. But I couldn't focus. I couldn...