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Mahi Gupta - Inside The Life Of India's Most Secretive Celebrity

  Not much is known about the private life of Mahi Gupta, so I don’t know what to expect when I arrive at her villa in Mumbai on a bright Sunday afternoon. It is painted white, has a French balcony and is framed by a flourishing garden that teems with wildlife. Outside the tall gates, her security guards stand as rigid as poles- a startling reminder that Gupta is one of the biggest- and the most threatened- celebrities in the country. Gupta herself is dressed in a yellow summer dress speckled with white dots, showing off her slender legs. She ushers me through the front door into the tastefully decorated living room, where I am allowed to admire the paintings adorning her walls. One of them is a girl bending over backwards in a tutu; the other a man in the nude, his hand delicately covering his genitals while cornelia flowers bloom beneath him. What is even more bizarre, is how well these works blend in. “My choice in art is quite eccentric,” she laughs, waving at my quizzical look...

Kunjunni's music video

Over the past few months, Kunjunni and his friends have been shooting a music video! It was a long process of sweat, hard work and tears, but it’s finally here, and was launched by the esteemed actor Vinary Forrt through his Facebook and Instagram pages.  You can find the video here .. If you want to know more about the lead singer, just follow these links :) The mystery of the missing bicycle Rockstar Nara! 'Atomics' by Rock Star Nara His Highness Sheikh Mohammed and Dubai 1

If you’re reading this…

  ….congratulations! You made it! 2020 has felt like a test of patience, and although the upcoming year doesn’t look like it’s going to be sunshine and daisies right away, at least we’re moving on from the one that started it all. The coronavirus ended up being a dark horse of sorts, pushing past every other catastrophe to emerge as the victor. So many protests, marches and fires around the world and at home, but with the virus always looming in the background. During January, I was back in Riyadh, mourning a vacation I had made the most out of. The weeks had flown by too far for my liking, but the fun had to end at some point. And as I waved my parents goodbye and rolled my suitcase away past the gates at the airport, I’d consoled myself with the thought that I’d be back when the semester ended. A couple of months later, after we had our college fests and wrote a couple of exams, everything abruptly shut down. At the time, an unexpected break from college life was a small blessing...

To All The People Who Made 2020 Slightly Better

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This is probably the first time that everyone (and I really do mean everyone) can unanimously agree on how bad the year’s been. Unwelcome surprises, roller coasters that have gone more down than up, classes on Teams everyday while trying not to fall asleep. This New Year’s, instead of making a resolution I’ll never keep, I would like to give some shout-outs. For years, my blog has helped me record every detail I’ve wanted to be able to revisit, and this post will be dedicated for this very purpose. First of all, I would like to Taylor Swift for the Miss Americana documentary, the City of Lover concert, the music video for The Man, two new surprise albums, the Long Pond sessions. My ears have remained blessed throughout the year.  I would also like to thank my school friends for always being ready to trade gossip and nostalgia (also Sauda is an aunt now! Eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!) Now, moving on to college: Sreya and Sesha taught me a lot about K-pop musicians. They also adopted a cat (and...

200,000 pageviews!

  We’ve finally hit 200,000 pageviews! This is so incredibly exciting.  What’s really interesting is that it took seven years to reach 100,000, but only three to reach this new milestone. I don’t know how that happened, but I do know that I’m extremely grateful. It’s been ten years since we embarked on this journey, and everyone still keeping up with the posts has seen my writing grow with me. When I was little, I hated the fact that my talent was penning things on paper while everyone else could sing and dance on stage. Or that they could run and cross a finish line. That insecurity stuck for a long time, and I could never be proud or confident of anything I wrote. But now I have it in me a little bit of confidence to try and see what my words are worth. Even if it means that not everyone is going to like or appreciate them. Thank you once again.

Social media days

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“I just got added to a WhatsApp group,” Dad said during our video chat, “that has all my classmates from tenth grade.” Said group was blowing up with hundreds of messages and Dad spent hours on it, trying to identify the faces of the members. But attempting something like that thirty five years after he’d last seen them was challenging. Still, the fact that he’s not very great at identifying faces in general can’t be overlooked. But his experience still highlighted a major difference between the generations we belonged in. I haven’t been in his shoes yet because of one major factor- social media. When I joined Instagram in 2017, it was purely to reconnect with ex-classmates from school. My friends who were already on the app told me all about how easy it was to stay in touch and it piqued my interest.  Instagram opened a whole world for me. I got to text people I hadn’t seen in ten years. It led to new experiences and reviving old connections.  For Da...

A decade of blogging

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Today marks ten years of blog writing . It’s so crazy to think that this journey started when I was nine, but I can still remember penning my thoughts down into a little pink diary, and then reading it out for Dad as he typed into Microsoft Word. Eventually that diary got filled, and so did the next one. I still have both of them in my possession. We’ve moved houses several times, and a lot of belongings have gotten lost or misplaced, but these books are my own odd little pensieves that I can never let go of.  People say that it’s the little decisions we make that can alter our lives forever, and maybe that’s what happened when I stumbled across that book. Ten years of my life have been documented on this little corner of the internet, and there is a feeling of comfort knowing that these memories will stay safe and treasured for me to look back on. Whenever I go through the posts, I’m hit by nostalgia in the most magical, emotional way possible. The best part is when I reconnect wi...

A new normal

So now online classes have been eating up a lot of my time, but I am well aware of the fact that the number of posts I upload every year has dwindled. This blog was one of my biggest priorities when I first started it. But life and its exams took over and now the green display behind my posts looks like it has more weeds than grass. Yet, I find myself reaching back and digging deep, sifting through older memories and finding bits of myself abandoned and forgotten. Every time I read back, and land in Christmas of 2010, or the Bahrain trip of 2013, I’m reminded of the tiny details I had otherwise forgotten.  So it’s important to me that I document this period of my life, just like I’ve done for every other important event. Lockdown is currently ending on May 17th, and the future remains uncertain. We don’t know when we’ll return to college or write our exams. The number of cases in India are on the rise, but Kerala has managed to demolish the curve skillfully.  Catching up with ...