About Me

I am a Software professional and love being a mother of two loving daughters. I am an ardent practitioner of yoga and meditation, a veena player, and love nature. I have recently been writing on subjects related to happiness, knowing the Self, and well-being in general.

Books published

Flight to Eternal Happiness (Poetry)

River meets the Ocean (Poetry)

Git the Gita (Novelette)

Grok Your Life (Poetry)

Beyond Rhyme & Rhythm (Poetry)

First inspiration for coming to poetry

Until 2020, I have not been into writing or even reading poetry. In April 2020 was my elder daughter’s birthday and we were confined to the walls of our home due to the covid pandemic. To cheer her up I had arranged for a surprise balcony party at home and I wrote a few lines wishing her for her birthday and posted it on my facebook wall. She read it and she was in tears. Somehow it was a very emotional moment for both of us.

She encouraged me that I write well and that I should continue to write more poems. Ever since I have been writing almost every day. During my early morning walks is when inspiration dawns and I pen down my thoughts. Usually, I will carry my handphone and type it out on Notes in my phone.

I am a computer science student by education and a software professional. Coding and poetry share a lot in common and both can complement each other. Just like coding, poetry is a creative process that brings about efficient use of language constructs, that is concise and takes the creator through an emotional journey of hours to make something perfect. Both ‘Flight to eternal happiness’ and ‘River meets the Ocean’ have been an attempt to write and codify my thoughts in the form of short musings. In today’s hurried world not many have the luxury of time to read big fat novels, so I thought short verses will be easy to read and capture the reader’s mind more effectively.

First debut

‘Flight to Eternal Happiness’ is a collection of short reflections on what I have learnt over the years about the secrets of a joyful living. This is a great read for someone who wants to immerse in self-reflection and ponder about what resides within.

Be it the ‘Ocean’, ‘Moon’, or the ‘Bluebird’, nature has the perfect ways to explain some of the deep secrets of joyful living.

The reflections are arranged in three Chapters. Chapter One, Taxi, sets the context and prepares us for the flight. Chapter Two, Takeoff, where we make an effort to takeoff on the path to discovery. Chapter Three, Cruise, where we effortlessly remain in the state of Bliss and unleash our potential to do well in whatever pursuit that we desire.

Many times, the cause of our problems, is not the problem per se, but the person having the problem. So long as the mind believes the problem exists, everything around the problem starts to magnify and compound. But when the mind understands its true nature, we often realise there is no underlying problem as such. And all that remains is bliss!

Others

‘River meets the Ocean’ is a collection of short musings that I wrote as notes to myself during the Covid pandemic. As I was struggling to come to terms with the new normal, and every aspect of life was disrupted, these contemplative moments that I spent writing empowered me to swim through this period with more clarity and contentment.

The book has been written in free style in the form of short poems. As someone coming from a technology background, I could draw many parallels between poetry and programming. Just as how a code could accomplish much in a few lines, I hope to convey my thoughts and musings in short verses to allow even a busy person to read and enjoy these poems at leisure. Some of the poetic forms that I have experimented with are Dizain, Etheree, Triolets, Tricube and Villanelle.

A drop of water has its unique identity until it reaches the ocean. Once it reaches the ocean, its individuality dissolves and it takes a mightier form. The water all along had all the properties of the ocean but it did not know the full potential until it merges with the ocean. Likewise, humans too think of our limited existence as our true identity and mistakenly cage our limitless potential to thrive and flourish.

Git the Gita

I was inspired to write this book from the challenges that my friends and I had encountered in our lives, reflections about my life as a software professional and how the Bhagavad Gita, which I always regarded as my guide, mentor and elixir helped me to get over the problems with ease and efficiency. The characters in this story are fictitious but I have tried to weave some of the most common problems faced by working professionals in general, like work-life balance, long working hours, stress etc. and how one could apply lessons from the Gita to handle these situations better. I have also tried to, from my experience, gather information or situations where one could think of the bigger picture and grow exponentially in every aspect of an ideal living rather than getting stuck in the me-my-I world.

‘git’ is a software repository to maintain different versions of the project artifacts. This is quite like our minds and lives. We are a repository of experiences, good or bad, happy or sad, simple or complicated. Oftentimes, we start to debug life (troubleshoot as though there are problems to be solved) thinking it is a set of complex problems rather than understanding the underlying mystery by means of decoding (understand and crack the puzzle). This book shows various characters who constantly try to struggle through the problems of day-to-day living and how one can instead understand life to thrive. As you read through the book, do try and place yourself in the shoes of the characters and introspect how you could have dealt with the situations and try to figure out who are the debuggers and the decoders… in your life.

‘Grok your Life’ The dictionary meaning of ‘Grok’ is to understand profoundly by intuition. The informal verb grok was an invention of the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, whose 1961 novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ placed great importance on the concept of grokking. In the book, to grok is to empathize so deeply with others that you merge or blend with them.

But how do we do that? When we are thrown into a situation, we have thoughts about the facts of the situation. These facts may appear very real to the mind, and they trigger feelings. We tend to believe all that our mind tells us, and this leads us to taking actions based on these feelings. The more we ruminate on these thoughts the more intense are the feelings and hence they shape the way we act on them. The way we act can impact the situations either positively or negatively which in turn feeds more thoughts and this vicious cycle of thoughts — feelings — action continues.

We start to function in an automated mode where the thoughts completely grip our mind even without our knowledge. The key is to not become enslaved by our thoughts but to interrupt the thoughts and replace them with more constructive thoughts. The first-aid or band-aid solution is to replace the negative thoughts with more positive or constructive ones. This is what psychotherapy attempts to do. If we notice carefully, our negative thoughts are mostly about ourselves. At the root of these negative thoughts are conscious and unconscious evaluations we have made of ourselves, or those we have received from others as incompetent, unlovable, hyper-sensitive etc. One approach is to take a closer look at ourselves and discover our true nature. This cannot be done by the mind using reason. Creating a space where we can observe our thoughts non-judgmentally, calms down the mind and makes room for intuition to pour in.

Future plans

Would love to bring art and poetry into every aspect of my life.