Whispering Shadow

I finally struck of the most important of my to do list. It said "Make a comprehensive to-do list." I have always been a 'lists' person. I make lists both for work and personal life. My dependence on them has increased more as a teacher because there is always much to do and much more gets added every single day. If you want to make the most of everyday, I feel it is best you don't spend time drifting through the seconds, minutes and hours. I was struggling to cope up with the first few days of school as I was taking it one day at a time considering the flurry of changes in plans and classroom structure. I was also suffering from the hangover of a superb holiday. Three days of school and not surprisingly, the latter has disappeared. I have spent the whole of last evening on my action plan. Now that I have the to-do list, I suddenly find there is more mind space to focus on 'doing' rather than 'thinking about doing'. Not that all the tasks ar...

I have been travelling for the last 10 days in the lap of Himalayas – Uttarakhand. Time and again, during the travels I have had thoughts and afterthoughts which I have been waiting to pen down. Now that I have finally time to access my laptop, I am going to write a brief summary of everything. Thought #1: You are smaller than you think. I had seen the three pronged peak called Trishul many times during the course of my five hours journey to Kausani. This peak was a part of  the tallest mountainous terrain in the world, the Himalayas. What remained hidden behind the mountain, on which Kausani is perched, came into full view only when my car took a hairpin turn on a road in the city. Within a matter of minutes, a 300 kilometre long wall of the Himadri range presented itself to me. The peaks were numerous and covered in snow. At my eye level, they seemed to be only marginally taller than Kausani itself, but on further reading, I found out that the peaks on an average were...

Alisha, one of my ever-curious students, came up to me and asked me if I was a Muslim. I asked her how it mattered. Immediately came the next question, "Bhaiya, do you believe in God?" she asked.  Knowing Alisha, I knew she would remain relentless in her interrogation. In the spirit of maintaining transparency with my students, I honestly told her "I don't in most cases, I do in some." She continued her inquiry by asking me, "What do you believe in then?" I told her I believe in reason, logic or science in most cases. She asked me then, "When do you believe in God?"  I thought for a few seconds and then asked her "There are many questions to which science does not know the answer. For example, from where did the first things in our universe come from? When it comes to questions like this, I think there is God's magic at work somewhere." She finally stopped asking her questions. As is the case with all religious conversations my...