Authors

Shyama Patil

I have dreamt of a blog of my own forever but being the expert procrastinator that I am, have always found excuses to put off the writing .  Being an obsessed foodie and an enthusiastic home cook, I was looking forward to becoming a food blogger with maybe housekeeping tips or even travelogues to the town of origin of the recipes but when I forwarded the viral video of a Sanskrit song sung by Gabriella Brunnel, "A Love Letter to Priyam Bharatam (Beloved India)", to many of my friends on Whatsapp, one of them could not understand the lyrics and Google failed to deliver any result where the lyrics were translated.  I promised to translate it for him and on a whim, decided to publish it on my blog  Now that I have finally started writing, I plan on taking my readers on a roller coaster ride of various topics and store away in cyber world the knowledge I have gathered over years before dementia sets in and washes the treasure away into the dark waters of memory loss.

During the course of the roller coaster ride, be prepared to live through stories from folklore of India while relishing different Indian recipes.  I might also give you glimpses of Hindu mythology while celebrating different festivals which are a frequent occurrence in the Hindu calendar. 

About myself, I am a Physics graduate who after two decades of teaching in high school, at a whimsical moment, decided to switch careers and take up medical transcription.  I have been happily married for three decades (not to mention it has been a roller coaster ride in itself) and have a loving family that includes my mother, mother-in-law, husband, son, daughter, two granddaughters, and five most pampered members of my family, my three Labradors and two cats. 

Sinchita Ganguly

I like to think of myself as a life traveler. Refusing to be constrained within singular definitions, I am a gypsy at heart, a study abroad consultant by profession, a homemaker and a mother, and an authorpreneur. After spending 15 years in very diverse roles across the ITES and education sectors, in 2015, I realized I had had enough. 

I left a full-time leadership career in search of that elusive balance between life and career, which often seems mutually exclusive in these times. Risky, but worth it!

Now, I do everything I love – at the pace I want to. I work with clients independently, write fiction, and tend to my family (I'm a Bengali married to a Kannadiga and have a 7-year-old daughter who speaks 5 languages :-)). I also travel a lot, read even more, meditate, spend time with myself and my friends, observe the world around me, and explore every opportunity to reinvent myself. This blog, developed in partnership with two of my fellow ‘travelers,’ is one of those opportunities. You can expect articles from me on anything and everything – because as I said, I refuse to be constrained.

Monica Saini

Starting out in my career as a teacher, I turned to medical transcription to meet ends.  An added silver lining was that it allowed me to work from home.  A target of a fixed number of lines per day was set and so I began proofreading medical reports from morning to midnight and sometimes beyond, every single day.  Every three months or so, my team leader would ask us to come to the company office for a review and there I would meet other ‘remote’ proofreaders like me, who worked from home.   At one such meeting, I happened to find myself sitting next to Shyama, (I did not even know her name then) and we had a rollicking time commenting on everything that was going on.  

It goes without saying that from that point onwards, I would wait eagerly for those dreaded reviews, while others loathed them.   Those days became red letter days in my calendar.  Sinchita worked on the same team as I did for a while and as she was already friends with Shyama, it was only a matter of time before we became a regular fixture at office meetings.  We were all based in Bangalore then, but somewhere along the way Sinch decided to leave the job and soon Shyama left too. But that didn’t alter anything -- we met and still meet, whenever we can (considering that we live in three different towns spread over two states").

This blog is one such chance that we have created………only now, instead of being limited to just the three of us, it’s going to include a much bigger circle of like-minded people, chahneywaale (those that love).  So here’s to hearing from all of you who are reading this blog.  Eventually after working at it for 10 looooong years, I resigned from my transcriptionist’s job too, and have gone back to teaching ….. just to get a feel of what it is like working for myself.   I am too old to land a job with any school or college (being all of 57 years old, though inside my head, I don’t feel a day over 30), so now I reinvent (borrowing Lakme and Sinch’s catchphrase) myself 24/7, according to who I teach.  I am a private tutor who teaches on a one-to-one basis. 

As a teacher, I like to make my children think, whether it’s some thorny issue in grammar or a project on freedom fighters or expressing themselves clearly and correctly.   I taught my son (who by the way, is almost 20 and in third-year of law school) and I like to think it worked for him.   He studied science until he was in +2 and then decided he wanted to make a career in law.  “Just think, I am going to get paid to argue,” he grinned when we asked him why. “And NO ONE is going say ‘Don’t Argue’….in fact my clients might say, “Is that all you are going to argue?”  Even if one of my students should be able to say that to their parents, and the parents share that confidence, I think I would have succeeded.

Otherwise, I love old Hindi film songs to madness, I love to waste time on Pinterest, and I am an avid watcher of Sony and Koffee with Karan.  How about you?  Looking forward to sharing our chahat (what one loves) though I wouldn’t mind sharing dislikes too.     

Hope you feel the same way too….