Love, Life and Happiness

Saturday steps in apologetically and finds me in a sore and spiteful mood. I am full of spite very often, so much so that it permanently sits on my face. Sometimes it struggles for space with occasional stray lines of happiness, and on extremely rare occasions hide inside, waiting for the next opportune moment to sneak back again. While I am spiteful to many things, a lot of spite is directed towards myself. I have been tought that to arrive at the right behaviour, one must put oneself in other person's shoes. It is not a pleasant experience, mostly for then I observe that the other person has acted totally contrary to the way propriety would have demanded him to. Anyways, of several things which particularly disfigure this spectacularly sun-less day like the persistent pain in the left knee, getting pushed over at work and re-discovering the fallacy in expecting loyalty in profession, one sore point witch stands out in its grand ugliness is the feeling I have towards a smal

I have been of late pretty particular about posting one post every week, if I could get enough time and enough emotions pushing me towards it. There are some weeks like this one which had multiple thoughts nudging against each other. There were some truly political thoughts, political events which were quite disturbing and distressing. Communal riots in a part of country and a reaction by the government of the state, lacking any conviction. This is the same government which had sacked an IAS officer merely for following Supreme Court guidelines (the latest input on the same is that the lady in question has been re-instated, ostensibly on rendering apology to the CM) on account of creating communal tension thereby. The space left vacant by the legit government of the day was duly occupied by forces which made the environment conducive for communal disharmony. Debates spread over the media and cacophonous  monologues, totally immune of the human loss spread across social media.  Th

While it is common to find blog interview of writers and bloggers, this one is of someone who doesn't write but provides a sanctuary for those who write. This is my second blog interview, after I did one for dear friend and a great writer, Marta Moran Bishop (  Marta's Interview  ). Julie Larson, born in 1960, put together a website called StoryStar.com which she has been running for last three years. The site has propagated over the years through word of mouth and gets close to 60000 returning visitor each month. It  isn't  an impersonal techie venture, but the site finds true involvement from the lady who has been running it all by her own. Julie’s venture set up to provide a venue to writers to showcase their short-stories on the internet for many people to read for free. Julie runs the website on her own, a one-woman army with the zeal and dedication of a missionary. She picks the stories, reads and approves them, interacts with the writer and encourages them to write

Who among us has not come across a difficult situation where morality is not a question of choice. We all take pride in being moral beings, even the most amoral of us. We have been raised to be a moral being and human race has survived through centuries in spite of inherent weaknesses as an animal, on account of Morality. It is morality which has preserved and nourished our species. This social conditioning makes us imagine an ideal image of ours in which we are the most moral being. I am very sure the case is no different for the men who are unarguably and demonstrably known to be immoral. There are various definition of morality which makes it even more confusing, ranging from unyielding religious sense of morality- which to my mind is a orthodoxy disguising as morality, to the Aristotle's and Buddha's middle path. Aristotle defines moral virtue as a disposition to behave in the right manner and as a mean between extremes of deficiency and excess.  Religious morality has