Neha's Notebook

HARD WORK, SMART WORK AND BEING EASY ON YOURSELF Look at the artists. How meticulously they doodle each flower and each dot to create beautiful, enchanted and picturesque worlds. Look at the Bollywood superstars. How they dedicate themselves to immersing into their characters by working day and night. Talk about programmers, who spend night after night coding everything from awesome video games to the mechanisms of our microwaves. Look at writers, who rework and rework their pieces until they read perfect. There, literally, is no substitute for hard work. On the flip side, when we think about smart work, smart work is actually a mutual of hard work, and not an alternative. Smartness is a skill we can use to provide boundary to our hard work. Smart work is something that is required in managing daily to-dos and juggling multiple projects. But it is not exclusive or a substitute of hard work. Smart work doesn’t mean going lazy on the details of our work. Smart work is required in the...

Birds flitting through the sky like thoughts through the mind. The texture of the bark of a tree. The variety of people walking all around like different voices of the heart. What can be more creative than this? Sometimes it happens that we look for big ideas and complex insights that we forget to pay attention to the little things that make life beautiful. We often look at these little things when we are in the phase of life where everything is going low, when everything seems to be going against us. Herein, these little things are our sole comfort. But even otherwise also, creativity is in the small moments, in little things. Kurt Vonnegut says, “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things.” There are electric bhoots dangling in our mind stream like glittery disco balls. They make us feel happy, excited, worried or ecstatic. These are our emotionally-charged thoughts. These thoughts drive us into momentum t...

There is a glitch in our soul. Accept it or not, but it is there. The glitch is about something which equates to nothing. We can’t really figure out what this clinging glitch is all about, but we can’t either deny that it is there. No matter how settled we seem to be in our life, this glitch doesn’t leave us, it clutches at our throat and makes us ask ourselves, “Where I am really going?” Irrespective of how many puzzles we might have solved in our life, we are still as lost as a lone wanderer in an endless forest. We come from nowhere and we are going nowhere. We are all boats to nowhere. But only those who are lost can ever find their way. If you think you are not lost, that you’ve never been lost, then you can’t really find your way in life. And perhaps, then you don’t even need to find a way. But when we are on this journey, in this journey, the mind is a mysterious radio that keeps playing for us songs, news and stories all the time. It is our sole companion. Interestingly, in...

Monuments, laughters, colors & tides There are great things in the world outside But nothing can ever fulfill the agonies of our heart except for the love & acceptance that stems from inside.