Glimpses

Portugal’s Journey in UEFA Euro Cup 2016 The Portugal national football team in UEFA Euro Cup 2016 When Portugal was sitting in the bottom half of the group standings after playing two consecutive draws with Iceland and Austria, things weren’t looking exactly hopeful for them. Getting into the round of 16 wasn’t an easy task as their next encounter was with Hungary who was the group topper. Their hopes of reaching the round of 16 depended on the parallel match between Iceland and Austria. Portugal had to win to strengthen their chances of progressing further in the tournament but all they could manage was a grueling 3-3 draw. Iceland defeated Austria 2-1 in the parallel match which left Portugal at the third place in its group with a 64%chance of entering the round of 16. Portugal barely managed to go ahead but given how it had performed in the group stages, with more number of goal attempts than any other team and yet managing a draw every time, not to mentio...

The Standard Arrangement  It was his first project of school. He was in fifth standard and they were given the task of collecting pictures of things having national importance and paste in their scrap books. It was also the first time he was working in a scrap book. So he was very excited and wanted his work to turn out as good as possible. He managed to find four pictures. When he was sticking them, he placed each picture on one corner of the page so that all four corners were occupied, and looked at the arrangement for some time. It looked too…ordinary. Everyone did it that way, as if it was the socially accepted, standard arrangement of four pictures on a page. No, let’s make some changes, he thought. He moved the picture that was on the lower right corner to the center of the page. There, this is not ordinary anymore. From a distance, the pictures appeared to make a ‘7’. He quickly glued them, wrote their descriptions on the adjacent page and stuffed it in...

Rain, Rain, Go Away Droplets on a glass window Captured by Avnish Bansal The light in his room was still on. It was 3 a.m. He had been studying for his exam the next day, and was so anxious that sleep would not come no matter what he did to convince it to change its plans. He listened to chillout remixes (they were known to be of a sleep-inducing nature), closed his eyes, lay straight with hands crossed and gently rested over his stomach and pretended to float in mid-air and even imagined looking at himself sleeping through the eyes of someone perched on the ceiling of his room. Nothing worked. So, he had no choice but to remain awake and proceed to take another exam with a sleepless night behind it. He couldn’t wait for it to be over. These exams had been going on for too long now and the first one, Mathematics, had been postponed so they would stretch even longer now. That meant preparing for it again. Once was burden enough; having to do it twice was unthink...

I wrote this poem almost an year ago to highlight the passive and apathetic nature of us humans towards others. I say this because there are very few people who genuinely feel and take interest in others' problems. Most of us just act like they are interested. The very same situation is accurately portrayed in the bollywood movie Tamasha (2015) directed by Imtiaz Ali. There is a scene in the movie in which  *mild spoiler alert* someone asks the character of Ranbir Kapoor how he is. it's a pretty general question which we ask countless times to people around us every day; but when Ranbir's character begins telling the other person every acute detail of what is going on with his life, this other person gets paranoid and orders Ranbir to go away to which Ranbir's character replies, "Jab jaanana nahi hai to poochte kyon ho?!" (Why do you ask me how I am when you don't actually want to know?!) Another characteristic of people nowadays which can be thought ...

  Just Like A Marketplace Commodity "You still hide your true feelings, don't you?" she asked. "Yes. I have to. It's not like I've got a choice," he replied. "Why? What problems do you have? Why don't you share them with anyone?" "Others have problems of their own." That was not the answer he wanted to give, but something about her didn't let him share his true feelings. "From now on, you can share everything with me," she said. "Okay, if you say so."  He thought he had found someone who would listen to him, take out time for him. Things had seemed really hopeful then. She said it so convincingly; or perhaps it was just the effect girls had on him. Whatever it may have been, eventually, he had learnt the lesson he tended to forget over time. It turned out she didn't have time for him. Her words may have indicated the opposite, but her actions didn't. Replies fro...