“Amma, it feels like you have put on the AC. Air has grown cold”, said my 7-year-old lifting up her beady eyes from her maths homework. A cheery hurray followed. I shook the clothes firmly and filed them neatly on the cloth stand. Yes, indeed. There was a light nip in the air. Not due to AC. And, certainly no change in the temperature. It was still a blazing 38 degrees outside. I smiled and was whisked off to my childhood days. To my nondescript haven that would have looked more picturesque in a child’s sketchbook than in reality. A chawl which housed 14 flats adjacent to each other, spaced out at an arm’s length. A place where people were knitted closely together regardless of what social standing they were in. A place where we children had not one but many houses at our perusal to watch television, eat lunch, sleep under the warm covers and take refuge from the angry monsoon spells. A place where aimless wanderings were honoured but not bothered by ruthless meanderings of the rou...
You cannot run from positive affirmations even if you think you have run out of them. They will come, looking for you. All you have to do is keep your eyes wide open and graciously receive them with warmth and care. They can come to you at any moment and from any quarter perhaps, while running errands like when the momentum has picked up in you to array the disarray in your child’s wardrobe. When that happens, you treat them as a little note, an epiphany or a sacred sign from the universe and insert them as a key that locks itself into your mind with an audible click, only to unlock a change in you and get reflected in every journey you embark. When your little one’s Tees mouth affirmations, you cannot just run away without glancing at it. Start small, dream big, repeat – Starting small and repeating them with consistency is so underrated these days. So much of today’s world is rooted in instant gratifications and making it big in a wink of time. Small, incremental progr...