Goodbye 2025!

It’s the last day of 2025, and this is what it feels like. If you’re expecting another pretty article with a cheerful tone, you can stop reading. This is my brutally honest, pour out all the emotions ‘just as they are’ article. So read at your own risk, I wouldn’t want to bring down your New Year spirits.

I have been doing a mind numbingly boring job that has added little to no value to my intellect or skill. And the changes it has made are aplenty. I am far away from home, and for what? My sunshine beaming positive attitude to life just took less than 2 years to become dull, like the people I see all around me. I can hear my brain cells dying while I am clicking away at my desk.

I am constantly torn between different life paths, unable to make a decision as I am too afraid to let go of either. It’s like being in an escalator and ascending while still being confused about which floor I wanted to be on. In other pursuits, I failed again and again and again. And kept running away from the overwhelming emotions failure comes with. Because the 10-7 pm office rut didn’t even let me come face to face with my feelings.

This is also the year I gave up on my biggest dream. At 30, the future doesn’t look full of possibilities, it looks predictable. I can chart out my next 30 years based on my current trajectory, and I barely like what I see. But neither do I have the courage to change it, as stability wins over spark. The closing window of opportunity makes sure that I keep sacrificing all the little joys in life just to make sure that I am intently looking out the window when it closes shut on my face.

Nothing new or interesting happened around me for the entire year, and even if it did, I didn’t have the luxury to participate. Not a single academic talk, or creative event or anything intellectually stimulating. As you can already tell, I stopped being thankful this year. I was so frustrated for the most part of the year that I just could not be thankful. I reached out to God in times of despair to climb back up to give it one last fighting shot, just to fall back down.

Despite being passionate about creating a positive change in society, I didn’t help a single person this year. Proving that I am just a selfish person engrossed in my daily struggles. I even stopped caring about the events across the globe, be it atrocities towards minorities, political upheavals or even wars. Nothing moved me this year.

This was also the year where I lost all my friends. I had two friends. That’s all. And I lost them in a single stupid instant. After a decade of being misunderstood, put down and judged. It was a relief to let go of these “friends”. But not a single person was added to my friend list. No one to catch up with, no one to relate to. Just comparing my real life to the insta-life of my peers.

I used to be a person who could get genuinely happy for others, but 2025 has made me a person who is constantly comparing myself to others and falling short. Be it my siblings or friends. No matter what someone else does, I feel that I could have or should have chosen that path instead. All the while being afraid to leave where I am.

The only good thing that happened this year was that I got married to the love of my life. It was a beautiful fairy tale wedding, near perfect. But the months that led up to the wedding, I left my partner doing everything on his own as I was stuck in the rut of my work life far away from home. And after my wedding, I barely had time to spend with family before returning to my job. My first Diwali, Christmas, New Year, Birthday, Anniversary all spent alone. Weddings we were to attend as a newly married couple were also missed. My warped life choices stripped my old and new family of my presence at every single important milestone after my wedding.

I yearned to be with my husband, but unfortunately we didn’t even get a good 30 days of quality time together this year. Even when he took out time and visited me, I was preoccupied with commitments. All those precious moments that we spent apart, never to come back. What’s more, I think you would agree that with my current mental state, I wouldn’t be the ideal partner to be around during the holiday season.

Not every year needs to be perfect, but 2025 has topped it all. Leaving me with a gloom that would most likely spill into the next year. Usually I am so excited for the new year, new beginnings, but this year I am sorry, I just can’t say, ‘Happy New Year’.

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When a humanities student stumbled into a math class!

Recently, I accidentally went to a math lecture that I thought had some relevance in Political Science. As someone with varied interests and average intelligence, I optimistically thought that I would be able to understand roughly 15% of the subject matter and was looking forward to how ‘Lie Groups’ find application in politics. In came a young, modest-looking guy with a big smile on his face and it made me even more at ease to sit through. In humanities, we usually start a talk with a brief introduction to the topic, and the research question and then, delve deeper into the subject matter. So, when this ‘talk’ started right from the blackboard, I realized that I had charted into deeper waters. From start to finish I kept nodding in oblivion, as I witnessed that huge blackboard being subjected to mathematical symbols, expressions, functions, and whatnot. Far away from the numbers, we grew up thinking as Math! He spoke in a language that was unknown to me, it was maybe like attending a humanities lecture in Portuguese but that warm smile that made it look like this is just child’s play made me nod along. I might have been the only person nodding and smiling as all others I noticed were having a staring competition with the blackboard! They would often stop the speaker to clarify some doubt to make sure they are on the same page, while I was drifting to a far-off wonderland, thinking how puny my intellect is in front of these great minds!

An hour of understanding absolutely nothing can still teach you so much. The tall assumptions I held about myself fell flat and I was humbled by the vastness of knowledge. As soon as the talk finished, I sneaked out hoping to remain unnoticed. On my way back to the dorm, I mustered up the courage to ask one of the less intimidating professors if he could attempt to explain the topic at a layman’s level. Delving deep inside his brain he came up with a very simple definition of ‘Lie Groups’ which I could follow along with. He said, imagine a smooth continuous surface of 3D space, we attempt to operate on two points on the surface to get the third point. Just like 3 + 5 = 8, ‘+’ is the operation and ‘3’ and ‘5’ are the two points that give the third point as ‘8’. That sounds simple enough right, trust me it’s not! I confessed to him that I used to think I am smart enough to understand any concept, to which he upliftingly said, you can definitely understand any concept but some concepts require a longer time frame, say 10 years! Just like a vocalist could not play the piano without proper training despite her musical inclination.

The next day the same professor very warmly invited me for dinner with his colleagues and the guest speaker. I was obliged but nervous because after seeing them in their ‘natural habitat’ (the classroom) it was hard for me to think of them as ‘normal’ people. What would I even talk about with a group whose IQ would be multitudes of mine, I thought. But I was amazed at their humility and really appreciated the effort each one of them took to make me feel at ease. I had the most amazing time chatting about my chaotic world and interests to their patient ears. Who knows when I was chatting about baking and traveling, they would have drifted to a far-off math land! The speaker collated Math with fiction in a beautiful way. He said, in Math, we start off with some minimal assumptions and the soundness of the model lies in how far one can go without violating these assumptions. To some extent, it sounded similar to an economics model. I hope in the years to come, I get opportunities to peek into the beautiful world of Math and appreciate it as an art. Till then, I believe this was the most fortunate accident of my life, rendering a new self-awareness and friends to cherish for life.

Hello from the Future -2060

It took the human race another couple of decades of failed negotiations, blame games over climate change, wars over water, mass extinctions, and millions of climate migrants to finally realize that we are all in this together- for better or for worse! Governments caved in for an international pooling of resources and collective decision-making for the ‘common good.’ Our grandkids hardly understand what ‘nations’ were and what exactly borders guard. They often ask, were men and women enslaved by their ‘national leaders?’ If not, then how could 7 billion ‘free’ individuals ignore nature’s cry for help? I sometimes ward off these questions by saying, ‘You kids won’t understand our times’ but then I am left alone to ponder, why did we push the snooze button on all the wake-up calls?

Oxygen and Water are still our primary concerns, those humble cotton masks you wear will soon be replaced by portable oxygen masks. Turns out you can put a price on every single breath. Food and Nutrition have been redefined. We now consume tablets and potions tailor-made for our bodily requirements. Humanity (and its evil offspring, capitalism) could no longer be trusted with gluttony. Each ‘Citizen of the Earth’ is scanned at birth for all potential genetic and environmental diseases. Ze has to adhere to a strict protocol derived by AI to maximize life expectancy. (Yes, we finally ended the age-old gender debate, He/She was replaced by a singular pronoun, Ze)

As you might have guessed, we deconstructed our society into a ‘gender-neutral’ world. We are free from all gender conditioning and social roles. Individuals are valued purely for their talent and intellect. I sometimes miss the hustle but it’s all for the best. We, as humans finally took a stand to leave nature alone, to restore itself, and if possible, rectify our mistakes. But trust me, your actions today will leave the Earth in a state of agony and revenge. We are still repaying our dues.

The only crimes we hear now are cyber in nature. Since our entire life is online from health to education to investment to relationships to identity. Owing to cryptography, Privacy is not a myth anymore, it is the most valued right of the citizens of Earth. Honey, could you please get over your fear of technology and national laws; and invest in Bitcoin. We all knew in our guts that governments have lost significance since the 2020s itself when the world watched its national leaders fail the Earth. But the last nail in the coffin was none other than ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ zeself.

The revolution in Education was the most exciting to witness. Without governments, people realized that we need to train our young to lead and not merely follow. As information was aplenty, we redirected to focus on emotional intelligence with the environment at the heart of every subject. Young lads today don’t know what rote learning is, but their unleashed potential surprised us all. The ones who excel start with uncovering every crime we committed against nature and then move on to finding solutions to restore and forge ahead.

The placebo of the masses is no longer necessary. With a highly controlled population of just one million, each individual is expected to rise to save the Earth rather than just waiting around for a savior.

We eat less grow more

Talk less ponder more

read less think more

live less and die more!

Sometimes I feel like one of the devices that surround me. The stories and ideas that made us human are no longer sold in the marketplace of souls. Love, Hate, Sadness, and Joy is alien to us. I think we underestimated how important the idea of ‘God’ was to our social fabric. It brought down with it the institutional pillars of marriage, and humanity and crippled the zeal that came with belongingness to a region/faith/nation. In a sense, life is much simpler now but I really miss the theatricals!

Living up to a 100 is the norm not the exception anymore. Our shrinking gene pool and heaping vulnerabilities did not stop us from beating the odds! Well, it’s anyways all about utilizing scarce human resources to the maximum. We chose quality over quantity. I am going strong at 65, with a quarter-century more to go before retirement age. Who knows if we keep at it, I would live to see the Earth restored again by 2100! I hope future generations will remember us not just for our pitfalls but also for our sacrifices. With the advancements in geo-tracking, we can’t even hope to fabricate our environmental history Digi-books!

Signing off

Abhilasha ShibuP.S. give UPSC CSE another shot for me 😊

Playground of Eden

Every morning I feel the lightness in my step, an exhilarating realization, I am not restrained at this moment by anything in the world. I could go to class and learn something new or catch a train and find myself indulged in another culture in another State. Finish an entire season of my favourite show or open the textbook for the first time one day before the exam. Or I could just sit in my room all day and do absolutely nothing. The sweet guilt of oversleeping! Only as a student can you get out of deadlines in a second and ask for as many retries as you want. This is not a mere coincidence. It’s a well-thought design to provide a space to nurture the young in a society so that when they step into the real world, they have the ability and the resources to change norms and push the human race forward. Any university space thus is a collection of the freest minds in the world and inside these walls, we can together create utopia. How exciting it is to look around and find nothing stopping you from being yourself; discovering yourself!

Completely unconstrained and immune to the forces of society. Within these walls, no power on earth can stop me from challenging the status quo. Each one of us abounds such infinite potential which might be limited and persuaded by the societal forces of power and money coupled with the sweet sorrow of responsibility in the real world. But the playground knows no such rules!

We can make this playground free of power play, discrimination, and the evils of the world outside. Where people are valued by the opinions they hold, not judged by caste or income brackets. Where one does not feel powerless and inclined to hide under flags of different symbols and colours. Where we are powerful alone and unstoppable together! “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” need I say more?

It breaks my heart to find myself surrounded by people who are oblivious of their spirit. Who are numb to groundbreaking ideas and have boxed their imagination. It’s sad that we have learned to blame the worldly and unworldly for our failures. Because the truth is- No administrator, teacher, political leader, or even God can stand in the way of your limitless thought, and if you feel constrained to dream, to think, believe, speak up or act then the only reason is You!

Open letter to CM Delhi, Incentives work better than Enforcement @ILBS

Dear Chief Minister Sir,
I have a confession to make and a story to share. I volunteered to donate plasma at the Delhi Plasma Bank, ILBS. Eventhough the staff is cordial, I found out that they are not extending the benefits promised to donors in your website. As an unemployed youth, I found it hard to arrange for my travel and other expenses. I humbly requested the staff to offer the promised travel compensation of 1500 rupees, so that I can continue to donate, but I was blatantly refused and demeaned. The staff claimed that ‘delhifightscorona’ website is fake. I came back home disheartened and frustrated. When I got an acceptance call, I shared my grevience, but the staff rudely told me to not come if I have a problem, and hung up. My mental peace was disturbed, but I didn’t want the complacency of the ILBS staff to damage someone’s chances of recovery. I decided to be a replacement donor instead. After donating plasma, the patient’s family thanked me and voluntarily offered to cover my travel expenses and extended 2000 rupees for the same, which I took. Coming back home I read up articles about the black market of plasma and how despite government regulations, donors are earning good money in exchange of their plasma. This is where greed tried to eat into the compassion in my heart. I thought to myself, why should I risk my life and choose to spend my own money and time to donate to an institution which does not even value my contribution. Just for a couple of Marie biscuits and Frooti?
I know the Delhi government is trying to cope with this pandemic, and our State Health Minister has warned police action against black market donors. But my kind suggestion to you is to incentivize citizens to do the right thing and pledge to keep your promises. Reimburse travel, offer food coupons for a sumptuous meal (the food court can be used for the same) and make volunteers feel respected and valued. The certificate is surely a nice touch, and I will always treasure it.
I am sorry for trying to take the wrong path, and I can promise to donate to ILBS till I have antibodies, if you pledge to abide by your promises.

IHM in Hunger Pandemic

The unending pandemic has understandably brought the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) to a jolting stop. But it is time to wake up and lead the fight against Corona from the front. At a time where the nation is assembling every resource at its disposal, let us not forget the key role IHM can play in the hunger pandemic. With state-of-the-art infrastructure and an unmatched organizational scheme, the 46 IHMs in the country today find themselves in a rare position to alleviate the distress of the hungry poor. I humbly propose the following ideas for your speedy implementation;

IHM-Langar, a volunteer-based program to efficiently utilize the resources in these colleges like industrial-sized utensils, ovens, gas burners, to prepare simple food and distribute through bake shops outside the college at a nominal cost.
The government could start a Hunger Helpline and Hunger Ambulance to reach out to helpless people with lifesaving food.
With its rich contacts in the hotel industry the IHM faculties can host a BAKESALE to raise funds toward PM CARES or similar government aid.
The students of IHM can be enrolled in all the above on a voluntary basis to utilize their skills and contribute towards the Nation.
Tie up with NGOs providing food to Covid effected families and assist in logistics and guidance utilizing the rich experience of faculties.
The above can be started on a pilot basis and then expanded to include all residential hostels and even mid day meal facilities in schools can be put to good use.

There are certain moments in our life that define us as a society, let us take this opportunity to share responsibility and brave the situation ahead. Let not another life be lost while we continue to trudge through administrative bottlenecks and static thinking. I hope these suggestions help to move the needle and result in a positive response from you. Let not a single day go by when we do not do everything we can because;

‘A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable,

but also more useful than a life spent doing nothing.’