‘Asthma is a clinical syndrome of chronic airway inflammation characterized by recurrent, reversible, airway obstruction’. This is the textbook definition. If I have to explain in a layman’s words.. asthma is something that makes the most easiest thing in the world, the most difficult. It makes it hard to breathe. It makes you gasp, struggle for every breath that you need. On your worst days, your throat feels like someone has choked it from the inside and all you can do is pop in the medicines, hoping that the clutched hold from within is released. What prompted me to write about this was that asthma affects 1 in every 13 individuals and yet in my experience, people know very little about it! A statutory warning though, this piece is NOT to gain sympathy and I would absolutely hate for any form of pity. I am just writing this because I don’t know how many of you are aware of this syndrome and perhaps tell you a little about it, from the patient’s perspective, instead of the clinical textbook. Hoping that it would help you understand a friend or a person you meet in the future who’s an asthmatic.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was 3 years old. I never knew what it meant at the time so I grew up, accepting it as a normal part of me. For the longest time, I used to think all my friends carried a huge spacer( a device in which an inhaler is attached, usually given to children) and an inhaler in their schoolbags, in case they suddenly felt that familiar choking hold on their throat and needed to use it to breathe normally again. It was only when I grew a bit older and saw my classmates staring at me when I needed to use my inhaler in between a class, that I realized that not everyone has asthma! After that episode, I hated using my inhaler in my class, in front of everyone. I slowly, started resorting to the girl’s washroom, locking myself inside a stall to use my inhaler whenever I needed to. For some reason, I felt ashamed of having asthma. It never occurred to me that people stared simply because they were curious. However, slowly as I got older I made it a point to deal with all of this a little better. Instead of returning their stares with ice cold looks, I would answer any questions my friends or classmates asked me, no matter how stupid or illogical they were (to me!). I began to understand what specific trigger points were to my asthma like drinking coke, or stress before the exams or pollen dust.. and if I avoided those, I barely needed my inhaler. I also started realizing, that the more sports I played, the less frequent my attacks became which led me to start learning how to play lawn tennis and loving it. I began swimming more and even took up football. And just like a classic example of a full cycle, I again started accepting asthma as a normal part of me yet again.

From what I can gather, asthmatics go through certain phases (at least I did). There’s a phase when they feel guilty of burdening their parents or friends, guilty for the midnight run for medicines or having them stay awake all night because of an asthma attack or a bad episode of wheezing. Then there is the phase of feeling self conscious while using their inhaler in public places. There is also a phase when you’re melodramatic but scared.. scared of dying, struggling for that last gasp of air. Sometimes there are phases of irritation when you realize you cannot risk stepping out of the house without an inhaler and feeling panic stricken if by chance you do. But the most peaceful phase is when you finally realize that you are not defined by your asthma. It is not your identity and it never will be. It will always be a part of you that you have to learn to live with.. gracefully. And frankly, there are people out there dealing with a lot worse! So you could either sulk about it, or be thankful for the life that you do have (sorry if that sounded corny, but it’s true). So I suppose this was my tiny bit in just trying to educate the people I know just a little bit more about this syndrome. Hope it helped. Thank you for reading it till the end!

Until the next one!

They say once you open a box of memories, you cannot stop at one picture or one letter.. I am no stranger to this quintessential saying. While taking a short(okay, maybe not that short) break from my studying, I randomly opened an old folder on my laptop which released to my eyes a thousand pictures, screenshots that I, like any other millennial I suppose, had buried away deep. Without realizing, I started flipping through them all, amused at how I used to look or how I used to do my hair or what clothes I thought were ‘cool’ or how I used to type texts.. some pictures made me cringe while others brought a huge smile to my face.. and then there were the pictures that reminded me of the countless battles that I had fought and won but had long forgotten about.

There is a point in all of our lives where the low points stack much higher than our high points. It is at times like these when you feel like giving up completely. When getting out of the bed in the morning feels difficult or when surrounding yourself with even that one person you love makes all the difference in the world. I too, had a similar phase, wherein I would have liked nothing more than to quit studying dentistry and go back to Delhi. Several factors had culminated into my brain and my heart giving up at that point, none of which I would bore you with right now but my point is, at that time I was lucky enough to have people who loved me and took care of my physical and mental health. I was lucky enough to have friends who were genuinely just a call away (if you’re reading this, you know who you are). And so slowly, I started tackling all of my low points, one after the next. Instead of looking at it as whole heap of lows, I just took each day as it came and somehow I slowly managed to untangle myself from the whole mess of it. I started paying more attention to all the things I was slowly flourishing at and strived to become better at them. I started looking at how far I had come since school and how I only wanted to go further and not stop.

If someone had honestly told my shy, bespectacled, frail, thin younger self in school, that in college I would start performing on the stage or anchor or eventually end up becoming the Cultural Secretary, I would have just laughed and pushed the mere thought away. You know they always say ‘don’t look at the road behind you, just focus on what’s ahead of you’ but I think that you should look at the road you’ve left behind. Because sometimes you need to remind yourself of how far you’ve come. So look back.. look back at that toxic relationship you once felt trapped in.. or the group of friends you lost and you thought you’d never find friends again.. or that professor that made you feel you couldn’t be good at your profession.. look back at all of it and applaud yourself at overcoming all of those obstacles and struggles.

So if you’re reading this and you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, I can promise you, it will pass. And if you’re not stuck in a rut but simply forgotten about all that you achieved till now, I hope this reminds you of it all.. everyone needs a little ‘pick me up’ some day or the other. So just take it one tiny battle at a time, before you realize, you would have won the war.

Dr. Sanjana Saxena (yes, I made it!)

Cheers!

Everybody writes about what their college life has been like, or what they learnt from it. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind as well. But what I’m writing about today is slightly on a different tangent. I am just talking about the immediate aftermath of leaving college.

If you studied away from home, you would understand the feeling you get when Diwali is near or the exams approach their end because it meant that you would get to go home. And the constant whining or cribbing of hostel students is way too prevalent when they are going through a particularly rough time and just need the comfort of their home. No one, however, prepares you for the change in scenario when you go back home for good. The reality starts to creep in about a month before your college is ending and you start to get anxious. And why wouldn’t you? You’re returning to a place five years later, as a completely different person. Unknowingly, college slowly taught me to live away from home, my parents, my comfort zone, so much so, that the city Vadodara which four years ago had made me feel alienated (changing the state entirely is no joke), now oddly became my comfort zone, it had become my second home without me realizing it.

The thing is, when you’re in college and you go home during holidays, you always know at the back of your mind that you’re there only for a couple of days and that you would eventually go back to college. So you cherish all the time you can spend at home and return to college woefully. And as ironic as human nature is, we don’t realise the value of a thing or a place or a person until we know it is going to end soon. I was no stranger to this nature. As my last month began in Gujarat, I started paying a little more attention to the roads I had walked on a thousand times before with a wistful expression, I started eating the local food a little more and amusingly enough, danced my heart out in the Navratri season (a thing which I had consciously avoided all these years because I did NOT like garba). I started lamenting to my friends about how I would miss the safety of Vadodara (because let’s face it, I can’t exactly roam in Delhi at 1 AM). I started worrying about how I would live with my parents again, because as much as I love them, I was no more used to having them keep an eye on me or have them around me every day! When the day finally came, and I sat in my flight, my heart felt heavier than I expected and tears escaped my eyes as it took off. There was an air hostess sitting right in front of me and upon looking at my face, glistening with tears, she asked me ‘Are you leaving home?’ and all I could do was nod with a smile.

But don’t worry it’s not all that tragic. I felt better when I sat in the cab with all my luggage and my heart started feeling light again as the cab inched closer to my home. The feeling I got knowing that I would be just fine was when I opened my door and Laila (my dog) came running towards me, in complete excitement wagging her tail. And I definitely felt happier when a plate of steaming chicken and rice was kept in front of me. I realised that I was actually truly lucky. Because now, I had two cities that I could call home!

But for those of you who are reading this, sitting in a hostel, away from home – take note. Cherish these times too. You will eventually go back, and when you do, it is going to be these moments, in this hostel, in this city that will make your heart all heavy and gooey! In the end, I hope you too, have another place that you can call home.

Au Revoir!

Mild apologies in advance if this piece might be a little less light or witty! However I had to write about this because this observation about this particular trait of mine was made by my best friend recently and I had a little issue coming to terms with it, as we often do when we are faced with a cold, brutal truth about ourselves. So in way, I suppose I thought writing about it would make it more real to me.

I was told very recently, that I have a pathological need inside of me to please people. Or in a single, simple term, that I am a doormat. When my best friend first told me this I was highly offended and angry at such an allegation because I didn’t want to be like this and out of all the personality characteristics I possess, this is one that I absolutely did not wish to acquire. However, this statement forced me to take a good, long look in the mirror, snuggle in my blanket, and introspect my life in terms of friendships and relationships that I had had and gotten hurt by. Much to my own disdain, it slowly dawned upon me that perhaps my friend was right and I was spending way too much time trying to please people around me instead of trying to please myself. The mere thought of saying ‘no’ to someone would squirm my insides and make me uncomfortable. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that for the better part of my college life, I had agreed to a countless number of things only because of the doormat nature inside of me, so that people would like me. And although, as I grew older I realised that it was okay if people did not like me, I apparently never shed the doormat inside of me and would have probably not even realised it until it was brought in front of me and I was forced to see it. It happened when I tried to do little things for the friends that were long lost from my life but still sought their validation in one way or another and then getting terribly hurt when they didn’t acknowledge it or appreciate it. Combine this with the passive aggressive nature of mine and you would get an extremely annoying combination. I always knew that I was passive aggressive because I have always had trouble confronting people, whether they are strangers or my loved ones but now I realised I couldn’t  even bring myself to refuse them of anything. And after that particular thought hit me, for the longest time I thought and fantasized about how I would love to perform a mental excision surgery on myself and remove this trait entirely. It took me a while to realise that no matter how much I disliked it, it was still a part of why I was how I was and all I could do was come to peace with it and in the future, take baby steps and just try to say ‘no’, every now and then.

I always thought adulting meant learning to live away from home, managing your groceries, expenses or the likes.. however adulting also means, accepting your own self and learning to either love it or correct it slowly and molding yourself in to the person you dream to be. So for now, here I am shaking off the years of dust off my doormat. Meet me in 10 years, maybe the dust would have settled down completely. 🙂

I like to believe I am a realist (or at least have turned into one now). A practical person. When it comes to romance and love and fairy tales, I like reading about them (not Mills and Boones though), or watching movies about them but when it comes to my own life, after a couple of failed, short term relationships, I refused to believe something like that could happen for me (like any single 23 year old probably). So naturally, as I sat down for my regular weekend routine of ‘Netflix and chill’, I randomly picked a movie called ‘Letters to Juliet’ which is about a woman holidaying in Verona, who spontaneously embarks on an adventure with an old woman and her son to find the woman’s true love whom she lost touch with 50 years ago. For those (rare) few of you who have seen this movie would know how simply underrated this movie is.

 I am not a clichéd fan of movies. I don’t wait endlessly for a movie or its trailer to come out or wake up early on a Sunday to catch a show that I know wouldn’t be expensive. And I definitely I don’t remember crying after any movie after ‘Dead Poets Society’. However this movie was something quite different that had my hands full of goose bumps, me smiling all throughout the movie and the corners of heart slowly curling into a gooey mush from the cold, iron scaffold it usually has. The usual love stories have me scoffing at the part where the boy and the girl promise to never leave each other or to love each other till the end of time, so I genuinely don’t know what exactly it was that was different in this particular movie. When we millennials begin dating and don’t end up finding what we were looking for, we start losing hope. We start thinking of the ‘what if’s’ (a phrase that tends to haunt us more often than not). We start questioning our choices about the people we chose, or treading near the road not taken, or whether we should have just not dated anybody. The lot of us who over think (me being one of them) start pondering upon these thoughts so much so that we forget we are only in our 20’s. There is no rule book in the world that says you should meet the love of your life before you turn 30 or that 25-27 year old is the perfect time to get married (for girls anyway). It is completely okay if you’re the only single person whilst your friends are dating or getting married. It is okay if you meet the love of your life at 30 or 45 or 70. Everyone has a different destiny and it’s not fair to ourselves that we compare our destinies with the people around us. Being a part of a generation that is too scared to get their hearts broken, time and again (again me being one of them), I can vouch for the fact that movies like these are a refreshing change that constantly remind us to have hope, and at the same time, remind us to be our own knights in shining armor. At the end of the day, we all need to remember that the fairy tales we grew up listening to? We never really read them in between the lines. Cinderella never asked for a prince, she just asked for a dress and a night off (a very popular caption for Instagram pictures). Or Snow White never asked for a prince either, all she wanted was to stay alive and ward off the step mother’s attempts to kill her.

Needless to say, as the movie ended and as I realized that I genuinely had tears glistening on my face, I was reminded of all these thoughts and facts and more. As of now I doubt I’ll be meeting any ‘knight on a white horse’ of my own, but after watching this movie tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised either if I do! Meanwhile keep trying out the ‘khursis’ out there (to get the reference, please log on to Netflix right now and watch Dear Zindagi). Ciao!

There are two types of kids in this world. Type one are the Monica’s of the children, while type two are kind of  like the hot  girl Ross dated before he saw her apartment. For those of you who haven’t seen F.R.I.E.N.D.S (…I’m not judging, I’m not judging…), I categorized the two based on cleanliness. I know these types exist because I’ve seen both the types.

When I was a child, much to my mom’s disgust (as she belonged to type one), I and my sister both were the type two kids. Our room used to be in her words, a pigsty because of all our clothes strewn across the room, or pieces of scrabble tiles clattered across the corner of the floor, or our bright colourful rubber bands thrown anywhere except their right place. While our dad blissfully ignored these ‘tiny’ flaws of ours and just avoided entering our room, our mom used to go berserk when she came home in the evening, especially if she had had a long, bad day at work. She would start comparing us to our dog and lament about how our dog was cleaner than us, because Laila (our dog)  had the sense to clean her corner of the bed before she settled down. And because we were just like the rest of the children our age, we never bothered much to clean our room except when the guests came over and we were threatened with dire consequences from our dad. Needless to say, my mom slowly started losing hope for her children, convinced there must have been some mix up at the hospital where she delivered as we possibly couldn’t be her babies sharing the same genes.

Then came the day I left home for college to a city pretty far away from home. For the first time I was going to live alone and I didn’t have to listen to anybody on how to keep my room or what to eat or when to sleep and I was excited beyond my imagination. However, when I first saw my room in the hostel, an odd sense of feeling settled inside of me. I saw the dusty cabinets and the cob webs on the windows which irked something in me. For the first time, I felt like rushing to get a cloth and clean the cabinets and remove the cob webs. I felt responsible for the entire room (I didn’t get a roommate) and that it was truly up to me to make it a nice space to live in. All these thoughts culminated in me sweeping the floor each day after college if the maids that our hostel provided didn’t turn up. My Sundays which earlier comprised of me sleeping in late and only waking up when dad switched off the fan and left  the room, now were of me keeping alarms for 8 am and waking up excitedly to clean the room thoroughly, removing the dust from behind the furniture and rearranging tiny things in my room. The prospect of seeing an entirely clean room, looking all pretty and homey, was too much for me to contain. I started putting up fairy lights around the pictures of my family, and purchasing tiny wall decors to design my room. My final test was when my mom visited after a year, saw my room and exclaimed, “So there was never a mix up at the hospital! You turned out to be my daughter after all.”

You know I’ve always heard the saying that at some point in your life you turn into your parents in some way or another. I think it’s safe to say I’ve reached and crossed that point. It’s been 5 years and I go back home for a good while in a month and I have a feeling this time my mom would be happier to have me in the house.

I’ll take a leave for now, because today is a Sunday and I think there’s one cob web that escaped my notice! Until next time!

Collioure, our second stop, was essentially a fishing village. The town which had once thrived on their business of fishing, especially anchovies, now generated it’s sole income by tourism. We took the TGV or the Train Grande Vitesse, which is one of the fastest trains and after five hours of enjoying the scenery outside, watching it change from the city to quaint countryside views we arrived in Perpignan from where we took a car to Collioure.

Stepping in Collioure felt as if I’d stepped inside of a painting. Never had I seen more beautiful colours and shades of blue and emerald green in the sea in the glittering sunlight. The buildings were bold and bright with punches of all the colours one could possibly imagine, yellow dominating them all. Collioure was the first place I had seen where the sea and the mountains were literally right opposite each other. I could be trekking through the vineyards in the hills and have the view of the sea right behind me. My host was a 47 year old woman, Cleo and her 11 year old son, Lou. To my surprise I got an entire apartment to myself as she lived in the one above. It was slightly different than Paris as I was the only Indian with her, and the rest had been grouped in pairs. The view from the balcony of my apartment was breathtaking. It was sea facing and I could see the beach and the palm trees lining it. I suddenly realised, with a skip in my heart, that all I needed to get to the beach was cross a road and I would literally be there. Just when I thought it possibly couldn’t get any better, I looked down and I saw that right next to my apartment building was a wine bar! The very first evening Cleo took me downstairs for a drink and suggested I try one of the specialities of Collioure, a wine called Banyuls. It was slightly sweeter than the usual wines and a bit more concentrated but I loved it. Slowly I started seeing why the wine in France was so famous. We spent two hours sitting there, with the sea in front of us and the sounds of the waves crashing the shore and talked about each other’s lives, our countries, our ambitions and the likes. She was one of those people you could talk to effortlessly and she would make you feel comfortable within a minute of conversing with her. She was a guide and an ardent art enthusiast and so spoke English brilliantly. The minute she got to know I spoke French a little, she started making me converse with the locals in French every time we had to go to the market to buy something or if we had to ask someone for directions.

Since out of our group of 18, only 6 of us were in South of France we usually ate all our meals together, each time in a different host’s house. One thing I noticed in every house was the appreciation of artwork, be it paintings or sculptures. One of our hosts was Monique who had five cats and couldn’t cook much beyond Mac n Cheese while another of our host was Jack who was so passionate about cooking that he served us gourmet meals every time we ate at his place. It was honestly a wonder how I didn’t put on weight when i came back!

Because Cleo was a guide, she told us all about how different artists from all over the world came to Collioure for inspiration and to work in peace. We learnt about the art about a particularly famous painter Matisse and saw his art hung on the streets of Collioure. Since she had busy days, showing tourists around she was usually not free during our day time itinerary and so reaching places alone, by walking was something different than I had experienced in Paris. Since Collioure was a small town, there was absolutely no public transport and people either walked or owned cars. Every morning I used to leave a half an hour early and walk slowly through all the nooks and crannies of the fishing village, the farmers market and reach my spot for the day. The mayor of the town and his wife, who were both doctors were warm and welcoming and accompanied us almost every day, opening up old forts for our sightseeing which were usually closed for tourists. The night it was our turn to cook dinner, we decided to have a picnic by the beach right across our apartment watching the sunset as we ate. That evening whilst eating we saw the sunset and the light it cast over the sea and the buildings and for the first time ever, the six of us were utterly silent because we were so busy gazing at the beautiful view. I could understand, in that moment why the artists chose Collioure and how easy it could be to get inspired there.

The rest of the days included visiting the only church in France which was under the sea level and a lot colder than usual. Our teeth were chattering while Cleo was explaining about the history. Also, for the first time ever, I tried oysters and anchovies and squids and my tongue buds, as confused as they had been since I entered France, enjoyed the taste nevertheless. We also went up high in the altitudes of Les Pyrenees (mountain range) and visiting a monastery Serra Bona, our guide for that visit was a friend of Jack, Alexander and he was a Latin professor at the university in Perpignan. One particularly special evening for me was when they had a special screening of an old classic French film called Jeux Interdits. It was the first time I saw a movie with subtitles and being a person who rarely cried during movies, I was surprised to find myself in tears as the movie ended..

Needless to say, the last day found me fighting back my tears yet again as it was time to leave Collioure. Cleo triggered the tears in me when she gifted me her copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a gorgeous Arabic dress that she owned and a beautiful pair of shoes of hers which I had fallen in love with. We made promises to never lose touch and always remember each other in our hearts. Lou, who like any other adolescent boy, hated any display of affection gave me a big hug and told me that he would miss me. In that moment I realised, that I had unintentionally found a younger brother that I never had in Lou.

Our new hosts arrived at Monique’s house to take us to Perpignan and we had one last Jack’s gourmet meal and left in the car, me waving goodbye to Cleo and Lou, with a choked throats as words failed me.

Well! There you go, this was all about my second week in an entirely new, small town. I hope I did justice to it. If any of you wondered, it’s been more than two months since I came back to motherland, and I spoke to Cleo day before yesterday. 🙂 The third and the last part will be up soon. Au revoir!

I was 11 years old, when I first opted for French as a third language in my school. It was then that I started to learn the language, about the beautiful country, it’s heritage, it’s food. And it was then that France became one of my dream destinations. It was 12 years later, that this dream of mine came true. I got selected in a cultural exchange program where I would be staying with French hosts in their houses for three weeks in three different cities in France. So after all the necessary obligations were completed, I found myself, with 17 other strangers who had gotten selected as well whom I’d never met, hopping on the plane in utter excitement. It was 15 hours later, that we found ourselves in Paris!

My hosts in Paris were Jacqueline and Gerard, who were 73 and 75 years. They were childhood sweethearts and had gotten married on the last day of the French Revolution. Living with them and watching them together redefined the meaning of true love for me. They had such a beautiful perspective towards life and were constantly so grateful and thankful for anything and everything they had. Along with me was another Indian from Pune, Kalpana. I used to call her Kalpana Tai (sister in Marathi language). On our first afternoon after picking us up they drove us around Paris, showing us their high school, their university, the place they had first met each other, the famous gardens and the likes. They then took us along the course of the river La Seine, and we got out of the car when I saw at a distance, a monument that I had literally, only read about in the books. It was the ever magnificent cathedral Notre Dame. It had been burnt in a fire recently so unfortunately we couldn’t get near it, but it still was a sight to behold. I couldn’t believe that a cathedral, which was only mentioned in my textbooks, was right there. In front of my eyes. We stood there for a while listening to the slightly gushing sound of the Seine and I was trying my best to capture the best mental image I possibly could. Jacqueline promised us to take us to the Eiffel Tower the next day as we had a day off before our itinerary began for the week. That evening Jacqueline made us soup and kept all the different breads on the table. I fell in love with baguette on my first bite. Gerard told me that I would love the other breads too, the following morning in breakfast.

When they showed us our rooms, my bed had two chocolates on it with a tiny note from them wishing me a beautiful stay in Paris. The next morning Jacqueline had laid the entire table with a traditional French breakfast which comprised of three different types of bread, baguettes, croissants, pain au chocolat (which roughly translates to chocolate bread in English) with coffee and milk. We spent the day strolling the streets of Paris, going to a massive farmer’s market which was bold, bright and bursting with colors all around. As dusk started to fall I started feeling more and more giddy because I knew soon that I would get my first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. We finished our dinner and quickly went upstairs to change and couple of minutes later we found ourselves in car, one could probably have heard me squealing like a cat out of excitement. Because we lived 5 kms outside of Paris, in the suburbs it took a while and suddenly Gerard said that we were almost there. We got out of the car and there it was, one of the seven wonders of the world, looking as beautiful and as majestic as it possibly could, it was lit up beautifully and almost automatically my brain started playing the tunes of “Yellow” in my head. As the clock struck 10, the Eiffel Tower suddenly started glittering with lights, as it was part of their hourly light show. If there has been any moment in my life that has taken my breath away, it was that one. I was speechless and Gerard was amused to see my expression because me and Kalpana tai both resembled a goldfish with their mouths half open and the eyes twinkling. If there is one moment of my week in Paris that I truly and genuinely miss, it is that moment.

From the next day started our itinerary wherein we went to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower, and breathed in all of Paris from that one point. We went for an hour long cruise on the Bateau Mouche (Bateau in French means a boat and Mouche translates to a house fly) and had our lunch sitting all around on the lush, soft, green grass..munching on our sandwiches, getting to know each other and with the sight of the Eiffel Tower right in front of us. Slowly, we got into the routine of traveling alone in the metro with maps to aid us, clumsily stumbling upon wrong stations sometimes but laughing and managing to reach to our destinations of the day. We went to the Louvre where I was completely blown away by the sculptures, especially those in the Greek section. Having read almost the entire Greek Mythology it was particularly exciting for me to see the Greek Gods that I had always imagined , in the form of sculptures and paintings. My favorite parts included The Iran Pieces and the Egyptian sculptures and getting lost in the huge museum. Sadly, we only had three hours and barely managed to cover 30% of it. I discovered that by the end of it all I could differentiate between the French, Greek, Italian, Iranian, Roman paintings predominantly because of the stark differences in their color palette. I couldn’t understand however, whether the Mona Lisa was overrated or whether we didn’t get enough time to appreciate her beauty because of the long line behind us. However, I did learn a lot about the history behind it’s popularity and part of it was that it became so famous because it was repeatedly stolen thrice by a man who was desperate to get the painting back to Italy!!

The following days took us to old palaces, Chateau Du Versailles (Chateau means Castle, in English), Luxembourg Gardens, a part of Paris called Montmatre where we roamed through the streets in form of a treasure hunt that our hosts had made for us. We saw the Moulin Rouge (which means a windmill) and learned about a famous singer, Delida who had died very young and very beautiful. We went to La Sacre Coeur Basilica, which was another beautiful church and lit candles with incense sticks (which is apparently a tradition there). Lunches everyday comprised of beautiful views everyday and sharing each other’s foods. We soon discovered that the pattisseries (dessert shops) would gladly give the tourists free samples of their best desserts and from then on I personally made it a point to stop at every pattisserie I possibly could! Our dinners would be at the house where Jacqueline would cook the most amazing of French dinners like Ratatouille, Bouillabaise and Gerard would make us drink the best of wines from his collection.

Our last evening in Paris was the Indian Evening. It was the tradition of the organizations that on the last evening the Indians would cook together and host a dinner for all their French hosts as a way of appreciating all that they had done for them. That night we cooked for them a simple, non spicy pulao, the ever famous chana jor garam, a moong dal halwa, and a raita. That evening we sang French songs, danced to the Bollywood tunes, taught the French garba and to put it simply, made memories for life. On our way back to the house I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing as I was leaving the next day for South of France and I realized with a tug in my heart that I would miss Jacqueline and Gerard terribly. That night I sketched a very famous French cartoon (and one of my personal favorite), Asterix and write a letter for them hoping that they would remember me. We left the next morning with the heaviest hearts as me and Kalpana Tai took one last look at the house that had made us feel like home in way we would’ve never imagined. I kissed Jacqueline goodbye after she made me promise to stay in touch with her and we left for Collioure.

That was my first week in the City of Love, the City of Lights and I tried to keep it as brief as I possibly could and doing justice to the city at the same time. The next two city blogs would be up soon! Cheers!

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.