Insight Stories

August 2013, when I started writing this blog, Insight Stories looked like...

Two books in a shelf with a ball beside them to indicate playfulness.



Stories evolve with time and I hope this blog did along with me.
Glad to present the new logo of Insight Stories.

When we start every work with a "श्री",why not stories?
Let's sit around our digital bonfires(laptops and mobile devices) and celebrate our stories.

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That day on the street corner, in that stinky garbage bin which we always avoid passing by, 3 dull, dry and dying flowers were talking with joy.

The first flower said, "I was at the Mohammad's Dargah. How peaceful were those moments!"
"I was at the cemetery beside an old man at his funeral. Poor chap!" said the second, shedding tears.
"Being Ram Janma, I was offered at the Lord's feet yesterday. What a grand celebration it was," said the third.

Up they went, being lifted into a garbage collection truck. Beside them was a crumpled newspaper with news of superstars speaking about intolerance in India.

The headline read “Trending Now:  #Intolerance”.

Note:
A Dargah is an Islamic shrine built over the grave of a revered religious figure, often a Sufi saint or dervish. 

Ram Janma is celebrate in India as the birth of Ram also known as Raghava, the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and king of Ayodhya.

Information Courtesy: Wikipedia

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Balkrishna Bhagvant Borkar (बा.भ.बोरकर) A poet handsome in every sense, inside out, just like he says आम्हीहोफुलांचेपराग! (Eng Trans: I’m like the flower pollen!)


नाहीपुण्याचीमोजणी is one of his poems which will guide us within every time we read or listen. The poem is so beautiful (didn’t know a single word to express the experience, let’s say beautiful for now!) that I wanted it to be shared with my friends who do not understand Marathi.

Translating a poem without diluting its essence is a challenge. Here’s a humble attempt. Would love to read your thoughts about it, don’t forget to comment.

(Original Poem in Marathi)

नाहीपुण्याचीमोजणी

नाहीपुण्याचीमोजणी

"It's raining in diwali!",
said the surprised wet shivering electric diwali lights to each other from the neighbouring windows.

‪#‎rainsinmumbai‬

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Recently I was at Social Media Week Mumbai 2015 | Day 6 held at Indian School of Design & Innovation.

Team Blogsters (from L to R: Kauro, Pooja, Deepa and Me)

The panel discussions, keynotes and talks were so diverse and powerful that it will be exhausting to read about it in a single post. Get the highlights of the day and more on SMW's channels: Twitter or Facebook page or my Twitter profile.

For me the key highlight on Day 6 was the workshop "Spinning Content - Writing for the Web" by Parineeta Mehra, Founder of Look Beyond.

Here are the 6 takeaways from the session.

#01 Write, write and write! Make new mistakes and learn from them.

#02 Keep the content precise. "Does it convey what you exactly wanted to express?"

#03 Original, authentic content is the king. It adds more value than anything else.

#04 There are no shortcuts to good content.

#05 Don't let your ideas fly away. Pin them down. A pocket diary, or few apps like Paper or Skitch can help.

#06 What …

Numbers, numbers, numbers! Like a mathematician numbers matters to a poet. Maybe more.

More than a deliberate attempt at crafting 3/5/7 line poems, there is something natural, existential, living about these which can be lost in explanation and reasoning. Just like Albert Einstein said, "...as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

Tercets are one such phenomenon. They are three lines of poetry that may make a complete poem or a stanza.

Few Tercets which I wrote even before I knew they existed.


1. Death

Lock the doors,
or keep guards.
The mocking death always plays swift.


2. Young
Young leaves dance, happy and content. Old ones fall down, never to meet again.

3. The Concert
The strings stopped strumming and the bow stopped moving. The concert began. 

Writers must not always be lost in their solitude. When time comes they must relentlessly write against the wrong. They are a part of the society.

Yes, I know this is not a story or a beautiful romantic poem. However saddening it may be, but we must speak about this today. NOW.
Since the Paris attacks happened I see a lot of "Praying for Paris victims" posts. Prayers are the first emotional response. Nothing against them. But we pray and forget.
Going beyond prayers and sympathy, India needs to learn from this incident and further push its efforts towards Zero Tolerance Against Terrorism.
Terrorist attacks are not a border security issue. Can happen anywhere right from your local malls to colleges and theatres. Let the government do its part. But are we vigilant enough as citizens?? 
When we don't care to switch off the fans when getting down from our 12/15/17 coach local trains which burn up loads of electricity, who cares to give a damn about an unidentified baggage? O…

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Rohan, being little grumpy that night and little tired after the cricket match his team had lost, was lying on the bed with his back towards the ceiling, listening to the sound of the old grumpy fan stirring waves of warm air.

His granny had given him a nice scolding for finishing off the last besan laddu she had kept reserved for his elder sister, who would be coming from the city in her diwali vacations.

The loving enmity between the brother sister pair obviously made Rohan the suspect in her eyes. Now she was sitting beside him trying to console him and wiping away her own tears, feeling guilty of the scolding act.

In the meanwhile, Manju the 2.5 year old cute cat, lying alone on the attic, was smacking away remnants of the last besan laddu off his whiskers.

Compared to what was a soothing, dreamy world of literature at the Tata Lit Live (did you miss the post?)  the Blog Now, Live Forever (BNLF ) was a fast paced exhilarating ride at The Lalit Mumbai.
Oops! I couldn’t make to Day 1 at BNLF, but from what I heard and read it was a super-exciting start of the most disruptive conference on blogging by Indiblogger.

I was lucky to immediately connect with two fellow Indibloggers, Geo and Nikhil, right from the first coffee break.  Geo, from Kerala, blogs on technology reviews. You can follow his blog here: http://www.geojolly.com
Nikhil, from Bangalore, blogs on a variety of technology related topics, being passionate about Cloud computing. You can follow his blog here: https://www.pnikhil.com
Christopher Trappe, IMA Internet Marketer of Year – 2015, is a content marketing strategist and consultant. 

Christoph’s 3 hour session on “Six steps to stop traditional marketing and start authentic blogging” interspersed Q&A, felt like only an hou…

Disclaimer: This account is my personal experience and the views expressed may differ from other attendees’ at the festival.

Day 1 | 29th October 2015

Having managed to keep myself from diving deep into literature or arts festivals for few years for silly reasons, I couldn’t resist myself from attending the Tata Lit Live 2015 at NCPA, the Sixth Mumbai International Literary Festival.

The first workshop I attended was Robert Sullivan’s “Crossing the threshold of a poem: Translating emotion into words.” Robert currently teaches a popular creative writing class at MIT's MSVA Campus. You can read more about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sullivan_(poet)


Robert was really a cool guy, great listener and really sensitive person. Of course how could he be a poet if not sensitive? When you observe a person doing mundane things like lifting a cup of tea with great care, I know it may seem nothing extraordinary, but the feeling of being at ease and warmth is rare to see these…