Matched in heaven, monetised on earth!

Marriage is an evergreen and one of the most profitable business in India. Be it the tasteless catering or tacky decorations, horny honeymoons or hoopla over photo shoots, money and booze simply keeps overflowing through the entire season of endless rituals.

Talk about arranged marriages and 'chachi ki friend ka beta USA mei engineer hai, baat chalaun?' is no more a way to get it fixed.

Even marriage bureaus and print media are a thing of past. Who after all has a time to read newspapers or maintain offline relations?!  

Unfortunately Facebook and twitter haven't taken up the job of serious match making seriously.They are still a platform for casual flings, leaching and after-retirement testosterone reactivity!

With over lakhs of profiles in all shades of compact powder, lipsticks and bows-ties, matrimonial sites are mushrooming on the world web as the newest and most trusted match making database today.

Dig a little deeper, you shall see thousands of fully covered yet curvy pics. An inch of cleavage with pouted lips garners a huge number of clicks. 

In case of wanting to be grooms, accidentally added number of zeros in the salary makes you a hero. And don't forget to mention on-call duties as on-site ones. 

Edited till they fit in the parent's dream of being the most eligible (read desperate) match in town, profiles are created with high hopes and honeymoon fantasies only to find that 

money is honey, my little sonny, a rich man's profiles is always visible for matrimony! 

In other words, the higher you pay a matrimonial site, higher goes your chances of getting hitched. So it is sensible to keep some bucks in your pocket rather than mentioning them all in your resume.

The cost of getting registered on any regular site ranges from 5,000 to 50,000 (Elite club) for 3 months. No wonder these sites are expected to earn a revenue of around 900 crore by the end of the year which would mean about a 33% increase in profits from last year. No prizes for guessing that the next year profit can be anywhere between 40 to even a whopping 50%!

The story doesn't end here, these matrimonial sites have given birth to a new  business. Some housewives and retirees realised that Majority of Indians are still technically challenged and with a radicular shift towards smaller nuclear families its virtually impossible for them to know the nuances of creating profiles and accounts on the net.

So they grabbed this opportunity and have thrown themselves as cement to bridge in the gap. These people technically-aid interested parents to look through the potential profiles, contact them and do the needful. This too comes at a price of course, ranging anywhere between 1,500 to 10,000 for 3 months.

To sum it up, all those involved in this business of alliance and selling marriages always have a win-win situation. If you can manage to hitch them up, your clientele notches up. If not, well, the search never ends.

Its quite interesting to see how intimately marriage and money are related. Perhaps, until and unless you club these soulmates its impossible to find your own!

A deeper look into our 'shadi' business makes me conclude that marriages are made in heaven but caste-sized, dramatised, hugely monetised before finally getting finalised in India!

Piku's poop is a real trouble.

Disclaimer : shitty post ahead! 

Shoojit Sircar must be experiencing constipation within or around him to direct a movie so close to our bowels and guts. And I will not restraint myself from
assuming that the credit for Piku being such a massive hit lies in the fact that somewhere we too
have our 'motions and emotions intimately linked'! 

Who can afterall disagree that a gut freed morning is indeed a good morning! 

Movies have the power to grab our sentiments and put forth a coloured reality of what we tend to ignore in everyday lives. Be it the plight of dyslexic kid in Taare zameen par or schizophrenic mathematician in A beautiful mind. This time its Piku. 
Kudos to the entire team for making us realise how much of a problem constipation has become in the world of today.

 www.wholeapproach.com has called constipation as a modern epidemic.

Roughly 12-19% population in United States, as many as 63 million people suffer from it another source says. 

India too is not far behind to make a way in the list of constipated countries. 

Last month I joined in a medical college as an intern and its surprising and alarming at the same time that 4 out of every 10 patients I see each day are not just constipated but suffering acutely because if it.

They come to me and have a similar plea to put forward 'please help us get rid of it, linking all their health issues directly or indirectly to it.' And believe me they are as much in distress as our beloved 'Bhashkor' in Piku. 

This problem of abnormal stool is equally common in both youngsters and elders.

Sparing no age of its occurrence.

While most of the people overlook it initially, they later are either shy or ashamed of accepting the gut tantrums. 

It is understandable given the fact that our shit is as intimate and personal as our sex lives. 

But is constipation slowly becoming a silent killer? The epidemiological stats of various countries certainly point towards a crumbling hard truth.

The funny part is, constipation is a relatively simple problem to deal with just like obesity and majority of the other lifestyle disorder we face today. Infact, simpler than all of them. 

A little tweak in our diet can not just improve our bowel health but also help us get rid of other health troubles like weight gain, bloating, high cholesterol levels and haemorrhoids etc. all of which are extremely closely and directly related to constipation. 

In my 4 years of medical studies I have realised that the so called lifestyle disorders are all so intimately related, almost like parasitic relation. If you can manage to root out even one, chances are you will weaken the others too.

Starting with constipation might be an easy way out of the vicious circle of health menace.Here's how to do it:

1) Water is the transporter of waste in our body.  So we need it in adequate amounts to keep the transportation going on. Drink at least 7-8 glasses of water everyday.

2) Leafy veggies and fruits, the coarser the better. Green makes our intestines active. So go ahead, throw up some work for your intestines. 

3)All processed foods and junks make you and your intestines sluggish and slow. So by dumping them you are saving yourself from the dumping syndrome. 

4)Make fibres your friends. Be it dalia or chana or chokar, they all have high amount of fibre which basically helps to increase the intestinal motility and bulk of our food. 

5) Our gut and mind are deeply connected. More than the mind and heart. That's why we feel 'butterflies in our stomach' when we fall in love and 'pangs of anxiety in the gut' when we are nervous or afraid.

So if you are stressed out, the stomach too gets upset causing you constipation.

Ok! Time to wind up the shitty talk. But make sure you keep a check on your bowel habits as goes Piku's tagline 'motion se hi emotion'!

Ours was another story.

Sometimes we get possessive of our dreams. At other times our dreams possess us.

Ours was another story. 

You have been a dream I wandered with in the night and then carried preciously in the innermost chambers of my heart each day.

Night after night I untangled you more, uncovered you sheet by sheet, held you bit by bit and as soon as the day fell, I just stealthily tucked you away in the most intimate part of my soul.

On a fateful moonlit night I had reached the verge of ecstasy and intimacy, grabbing you voraciously, certain of you being a reality when the day broke. This was unexpected. I couldn't decide if today was the day you should be revealed to the world.

So I lay in my sleep, still pondering, confused and dazed. Dawn was arriving at a lightening speed, my mind too was travelling a zillion rounds each second but I wasn't sure. 

Finally I decided to keep you safe and mine for a day more.I kept you within. Impulsively in the deepest shelf of my self this time. So deep that I had never tread that depth before.

The feeling of you residing there was indeed divine. I could feel your light all day. Making me passionately wait for the night to fall. 

And night did turn up, though a little late for my impatient wait. Moon and stars accompanying it as usual.It was my time to live with you, wander to the stars and back. I knew the search for today was deep. Too deep.

I closed my eyes and began to find you. Moments kept passing, stars incessantly flickering, waiting for us to possess them but Alas! I was not able to find you. Try after try, innumerable tries each moment but to no avail.

Could you be gone? No! No! This cant be. Then what? Were you lost?

Losing you would mean losing myself. So how can you be ever lost in me? This possibility was also rejected. Then where are you? A game of hide and seek is it? But lovers don't play such heart wrecking games.

I had known you too long, too deep and too much to not know where you should be in this part of the night. I was your breath and existence, you couldn't part away. I consoled myself.

The night was walking away fast, it didn't care of my plight. I had to find you before this night met the day or else you would be gone forever.

Oh God! This is a cruel game.

Without losing hope, I closed my eyes again and sleep took me in her arms. She was our mutual connection and her arrival was a positive sign.

As sleep cradled me in her arms for a long time, I felt someone fondling with me. Ah! The familiar touch on my skin. This scent of heavenly passion could make me kill.

She touched my eyes, then my lips, neck, chest in a familiar manner as I lay still. Finally, when the passion of separation reached its zenith I clutched her ever so tightly.

Where did you go? I shouted into her.

'To become your reality' she whispered.

 And the sun emerged.

99 word fiction- Death couldn't have tasted sweeter. #planyourdeath

It was a time when day met dusk and birds chirped testifying that to God belonged all glory. 

Amina had just finished her evening prayer and sat in sujood (prostration) longer than usual. 
She felt a sense of calm divinity enwrap her. 

Doctors had ensured that her chemo sessions would be over before her 22nd birthday.
Tomorrow she will turn 22. 

They had kept their promise. She thought and  kneeled to thank God again. 

Closing her eyes She felt free of sufferings, calamities, cancer and this worldly life. 

Death couldn't have been planned better or tasted sweeter.