Neha's Notebook

A word is a door. Behind each word is a world, one beautiful than the other, full of magic, miracles, charm and wonder. As a word is uttered, it opens a door in the space of the mind, and this door leads to a land full of possibilities. Sometimes it leads to a painful moment of the past while sometimes, it opens into a wonderland of future. The human mind is a container of zillions of such words, each locked in their little-little caskets, jingling like crystals, and producing the music of assorted thoughts. When one of these little containers is stirred or triggered with our attention, it crackles open into another world, a new world is spun for us to witness, feel and experience. Sometimes a memory, sometimes a song, a book, a fantasy, a dream. Words are also malleable goldlike constellations shimmering in the galaxy of our minds, waiting to shapeshift into a new form. Words are treasure, each one similar to a gemstone, a bead, a pearl, a jewel. Like treasures and jewels, words...

Failure is a Pandora’s box. It makes you feel pathetic. It makes you feel like you are a nobody. But success too is equally a pandora’s box. Success is a complicated thing. Once you succeed, you get to think, “Phew, now I am somebody!” After all the effort and the work you put into something, you finally have that moment. But the moment you think you are somebody, the world hits on your chest with a hammer telling you that no, you are not a somebody. You are a nobody. Often, this hitting comes in the form of comparison. You get to see someone else who is doing far better than you. You thought that you have arrived somewhere but as you look outwards you feel that you are back to the drawing board. And then you begin again, in a race to reach the point when you will again get to feel that you are a somebody. From somebody to nobody, from nobody to somebody, we are always spinning in this circle of time. When we observe this circle of time occuring inside us, it becomes easier to step o...

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...

Life is only as meaningful as it is meaningless. We laugh, we cry. Storing our own potions of happiness in our hearts, Blinking only when a warm salty tear rolls down our cheeks to make us pause and reflect, What this is really all about? A game, a dream, a delusion But if it is an illusion, no one can deny that it is such a magnetic illusion This world, It gravitates our emotions towards itself Its glitz and glamour, Still, there is a glitch scurrying in this glitz The scent of which, Pours through our body and mind, Like glittery molecules of chemicals streaming and swirling around in our bloodstream, Making us feel happy, hungry, melancholic or puzzled. The glitch is our shadow. We live amongst shadows and walk among shadows. Shadows, who are squirreled in the deepest recesses of our mind and who sleepwalk their way through life,  Thinking "only if"... So prefer not be a shadow. Choose to be a sparkling ball of starlight. Choose to...

Reading a b​ook is a multisensory experience. A book bombards our brain with sights, smells, sounds, voices and textures. We come across scenes we have never seen before and meet people we have never met before. Sometimes we collide into new concepts and previously unknown facts. We learn to deal with different circumstances and express a wide range of emotions. Whilst immersed in a book, we explore a brand-new world or find ourselves drifting in an old world of ours. We gaze at the party of ocean waves and at the clusters of stars from a distant point of view, witnessing the story happening. There is a plethora of details to grasp and learn from the reading of a book. Vocabulary, concepts, quotes, story ideas, references, scene images, characters and more. When organizing our brain after reading a book, eidetic memory helps. Cultivating an eidetic memory enables us to recall these details in the form of photographic screenshots. Storing our information in categories also helps. Si...

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...

Have you experienced your world suddenly turning pink at the thought of someone, and suddenly turning black at the thought of someone else? It could even be the thought of the same person, in two entirely different scenarios. Only a mere thought can shift the reality of our life from A to Z or from Z to A. Believe it or not, we live in our own universe. We may think otherwise, but we spend our entire lives in the confines of our head. There is a difference between thoughts and reality, yet our brain is the kind of electrochemical organ that cannot distinguish between the two. Whether you think negatively or encounter an actual negative situation, your brain takes both as just the same and generates corresponding negative emotion in both the cases. And not to say this, but our head is a terribly lunatic place. Thoughts are codswallops and flapdoodles rumbling in the space of our head, causing us to feel happy and sad. The thoughts running in our head make us flip characters, feel em...

Falling in love. Getting awed by someone’s charm. On days like sparkling pink sapphires, gazing into the skies. Unquiet restlessnesses of the quiet amber afternoons. Dragonfly-sized microbots flying in the space. The crispness of breeze. The warmth of salty tears…. Life is a chocolate-box but the one full of fascination. There is tragedy but there is also comedy. The beauty is all around. Yet what makes this beauty so beautiful is something that resides already within the gleaming monument of our body with the crowning jewel of the brain glowing inside it. According to the primordial soup theory, this body-brain combo is a chemical soup. Billions of years ago, life arose from the primordial soup of chemicals. Amino acids linked together to form proteins and as a result, this sophisticatedly-designed human body came into evolution. Inside this chemical soup, electricity flurries in glittering pockets of dopamine molecules. This dopamine is responsible for all the things that feel ...

Video Highlights – Tools to enhance your Imagination: ·         Curiosity ·         Practice ·         Take pleasure in everyday things ·         Ask questions ·         Look for Mystery ·         Write Soliloquies ·         Anthropomorphism ·         To-do lists, wordboards and mindmaps ·         Concepts and facts Read full post below: Each one of us, when we are born, our mind is in the state of tabula rasa. Tabula rasa is a state of mind which is like a blank slate, free of all preconceived notions or beliefs. Our imagination is rich with rainbows, colours, magic, wonder and characters. Stream of emotions flow freely and playfulness is a natural state....

There is a wedding or special occasion in your family. You are thinking about buying some jewels. And suddenly when you go to the market, your attention catches all the jewellery stores in the market which earlier you didn’t even notice. Everywhere you seem to be seeing jewellery stores. These stores were there earlier too, but earlier you didn’t notice them, earlier your attention was somewhere else, like on the various food joints in the market. But at this moment, your attention is reflecting back to you mainly the jewellery stores. Another example. You are in a crowd of people who are all talking to each other loudly. There is too much noise in the crowd that you can’t hear anything properly. But somewhere in the crowd, someone calls your name. Immediately, your attention drops the noise and gets focused on the direction from which the call of your name is coming. This is a mystery about the phenomenon of attention. There is an enigma in the process of attention that can only b...

Have you sometime found yourself getting distracted in periods while you’re reading a book? Somehow you seem to get stuck on a page, and while your eyes are in front of the page, your attention seems to be wandering somewhere else. Thoughts pull on your attention and don’t let you concentrate on the reading of the book. Similar to this, while we’re trying to create the best life for ourselves, distractions from the world hover over our head, making every possible attempt to distract us from our mission. These distractions are the leftovers of the voices of people who insulted or undermined us, the revengeful shrieks for those who always criticized us or tried to stop us from our goal, phantom characters of people who attempted every possible way to make us feel down. The distractions can also be the voices of our own fears, our self-limiting beliefs and our ‘can’t do’ attitudes. Another surprising distraction can be our greatest inspirations, role models and people we love and our ...

Once upon a time there was a gigantic black hole in the cosmic wild. The black hole knew the address of an aperture to another universe, a passageway to the Wonderland. But there was no one who the black hole could tell this address to, because whatever came near the black hole got ripped apart to particles and lost forever. The black hole could form no friendships, could not let anyone come near it. A star came near it, it got lost. A planet came near it, it got lost. Over time, the black hole became sad and embarrassed about its own gravitational power. As the sadness grew more and more, it caused stirrings in the heart of the black hole. The sadness started drawing portraits of anguish with black crayons, the wax of which was dripping with sorrow and grief, grief over an invisible feeling, a feeling of missing something, missing someone who could last forever till its lifetime. The black hole after all could hold on to nothing due to its endless deep dark abyss. The sadness of t...