Stand Together

Hi! I have entered a Novel Suite competition. Unfortunately I came to know of it today and it’s the last day of voting (5 October 2015). I would be delighted if you could vote for me. Many thanks! Read and Vote here:  https://novelsuite.us.launchpad6.com/contest/1/entry/78 Cheers, Smriti

Not every story in the world depresses me but the cost of dying in India does and the heartlessness of hospital managements and doctors only add to it. A baby’s death and a hospital’s refusal to hand over his final remains to his grieving parents does not shake anyone . But I say it should! It should shake us up from our lethargy, lack of consciousness, the mute agreement to make payments before any treatment is given and most importantly it should shake the government and revolutionise India’s healthcare. I don’t know where the basis of ‘money first, treatment later’ principle lies but I have only come across it in India. In most other “big economies” it is treatment first, payment later, as it should be. In May 2012 I was very sick and was admitted in a private hospital in Johannesburg. I had my medical aid card on me and was swiftly admitted with no questions asked. They didn’t want to know anything from me except what ails me. And yes, there was absolutely no mention of m...

I find calm in living my life at my own pace as against to the pace of the world. Honestly, I cannot keep up and it is absolutely OKAY. Social media is a mirror to what is happening around us and how fast the world is changing. There is something new every day that tells us how our lives do not measure up to the lives of others. Every single post on social media makes you want to compare your lives with the lives of your peers. Sometimes even a picture of a new born baby makes you cringe and you realise that ‘you’re not there yet'. With everything that is going on, including the Indian National Rupee falling so low, do we need the extra stress of cringing at our own lives? We blame the Kardashians for ushering in an abominable era of reality TV into our living rooms but we do not realise that we are in a rat race called ‘keeping up with the world’ where every ‘full stop’ we type on social media matters. We are living in a world where we are striking things off our...

I haven’t travelled for the past few months but walking beside some of my fellow Indians reminded me of the harassment I face when I travel cross-continents by myself. There are a lot of Indians from India in Johannesburg and this I know because I recognise the languages they speak. Sometimes it is Gujarati, sometimes Telugu, sometimes Hindi or Bengali, hell I have even heard Oriya. But men are all the same, irrespective of language, culture or age; most Indian men are like each other. If their language does not give them away, what they talk about instantly does. Thanks to my linguistic intelligence, I can understand most of the major languages of India and today’s incident just re-confirms, after numerous confirmations, that Indian men can be such idiots. They are idiots all the way. I was remarked as ‘desi-masala’ at the up-market Lonehill Boulevard this afternoon.   It reminded me how I have been called the same thing in several other languages so many times and my on...

I get very excited when I hear Hindi or Telugu being spoken in the malls and entertainment centres of Johannesburg but I also get very sadly disappointed when I speak to my fellow Indians. I have met many people from Hyderabad and other parts of India but all they want to know is where I work and how much I earn before they know my name. I have now started giving them false information about where I live, work and how much I earn. Hey, this is Johannesburg after all, and crime rate is much higher than what is desirable. Better to be safe than sorry. I met a young Telugu family last weekend when I went to watch Inside Out at the cinemas. There was a wife, there was a husband and there were two little children and it warmed my heart to hear Telugu. Unfortunately my conversation with them lasted just a few minutes and once again I couldn’t make friends. Three years of not knowing any Indians in a foreign land does not irk me as much right now. Indian inquisitiveness has ...