Stories i Carry

Narratives that echo beyond the page

Tag: Life

  • In Search of Purpose

    In Search of Purpose

    Do you ever reach a point in life where everything is going well – career, family, stability and yet a quiet question keeps returning “Is this all there is?”

    That morning I was sitting at my dining table with a cup of tea, looking out through the large glass window from where I had a view of the houses that were on the other side of the front road. My house is on a small hill. I could see the cars parked in driveways and some on the side road. The morning school run was over and there were not many people to be seen on the road. This was the time after 9am when people either were at their workplaces or the ones that stay at home as they are retired, or are stay at home parents or like me who work from home are back home after doing their morning chores.

    I was having my morning tea with no distractions as kids were at school and my husband had left for work. I did a couple of work meetings in my early morning with APAC teams as I work in a global firm and operate flexibly to align with various time zones. This is my quiet ‘me’ time before I need to prepare lunch for the family and start working again in my afternoon when the western world wakes up.

    I have various thoughts when I am on my own with nothing waiting to be done immediately. One of my thoughts that keeps coming back is the question I have regularly about the ‘purpose of life’.

    I am a structured and driven woman who always had a plan. Since childhood I always knew what I was to do next. I went through school life, then did a degree, got a job, moved to a different country, got married and had kids. I have a busy professional life, have 2 kids who need to be looked after and I have a house to run so there is a lot to keep me occupied but I keep coming back to this question about purpose of life.

    I want to understand after doing what society expects us to do – study, have a career, have a family – what next are we expected to do, what are we supposed to do. Once one is ‘settled’ in life and has had kids, what should they aim to do? Professional growth, raising children, running a house are the duties that will continue to go for a while but after doing these for a good number of years these become part of life and happen on almost auto mode. Have you ever asked yourself this question? What comes after we achieve the milestones society sets for us?

    Whenever I have had these thoughts I have gone and done something about it. When this question popped in my head for the first time my immediate thought was to ask my friends and colleagues. Many times I got half baked responses which made me think that quite a lot of them had not yet thought about life in that perspective. Some had more refined replies. One convincing answer I got was we are here to give birth and continue humankind, bring another human in this world and raise them to be a decent next generation citizen.

    My father has been a continuous motivation and guide in my life since childhood. I approached my father with this question. My father is more than 75 years old now but is quite active. He does voluntary work helping many, supports extended family members, goes on spiritual and health retreats regularly, does house chores. He is a deep thinker and reads books to learn about the spiritual side of life. Currently he is reading about life after death. My father had a very simple answer. For him the purpose of life is to live by his values every day, live life in a way where there are no regrets at the end. Remind yourself of your values each day and make sure when you sleep at night you don’t have any guilt.

    Some of my well wishers who were into more practical solutions told me I need to make friends outside of my regular group. I should try out new activities. Maybe this is the continuity of the same life that’s making me ask this question. I should try to explore new aspects of life which bring a new perspective. Driven by the thought, I tried out joining various hiking groups. I joined a hiking group of a younger set of people who were new to the country. They were all quite enthusiastic and always planning to do something new. I joined another group that were born and brought up in the country I lived in, so they were more settled and hiking was their way of meeting new friends, making new connections. I approached all these people and the activities with an open mind and a perspective of learning, understanding what I can pick up from them. This went on for almost a year. I enjoyed the walks but my overall take away from this experience was that many of them were in these groups for reasons that didn’t match my needs. Some were looking for partners, some had no kids so they were taking up these activities to spend their free time in a healthy way. This was a good distraction but the experiment didn’t answer my core question. Have you ever tried something new hoping it would answer a deeper question — only to realize it was just a diversion?

    I am born in a Hindu family but I am not religious. I don’t tie myself to one religion but I do believe in a supreme power God. While growing up I studied Indian philosophical texts Ramayana, Mahabharata and Geeta. I understand Hindu history and philosophy. I also have studied Buddhism. My curiosity to find the answer to purpose of life took me to study Jehovah (Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Christian religious group that believes using God’s personal name Jehovah is central to true worship. They emerged in the late 19th century in the United States). Jehovah witnesses used to knock at my door quite often. One day it struck to me that I have been shutting away an opportunity to learn because its not my ‘thing’ but what if it is. That ‘what if’ led me studying Jehovah for almost a year. The journey started with me asking many challenging questions to start to understand the thought process to what the ultimate messaging of Jehovah was. At the end after much assessment, and the effort of alignment to the Jehovah messaging, I decided that it was not my path.

    To try out something spiritual I started following a ‘spiritual guru’. He is not the traditional guru but someone who is more aligned to my belief system and is ‘modern’ in his thought process. My guru is a person who did an MBA, worked in the Corporate sector before pursuing his spiritual journey. He shares his teachings through joyshops, youth programs, corporate training and meditation retreats worldwide. I joined Nithya Shanti. I have attended many of Nithya’s sessions. I have read his book. Nithya addresses the topic of purpose of life in his book. His answer is the most elaborate answer I have found so far. Some of the ways Nithya recommends to follow are –

    • Ask yourself meaningful questions: Explore what matters most to you. Questions like “Who am I?”, “What do I value most?”, and “When do I feel fulfilled?” can provide clarity.
    • Identify your core values and passions: Pay attention to activities that bring you joy or skills that come naturally to you. Your gifts and abilities are often connected to the things that make you happy.
    • Practice self-awareness: Be kind and patient with yourself as you navigate these questions. The more honest you can be, the sooner you’ll gain insight.
    • Use meditation and mindfulness: Practices like meditation can help you quiet your mind, gain clarity, and connect with your inner wisdom.

    Maybe I have to keep trying through things until I see my calling. My quest will continue and I will find other ways of experimenting this thought during one of my chai sessions.

    In the meantime I am trying out writing and I am writing this piece as part of my new trial. Lets see if I discover this is my purpose?

    What I love about my journey is that I can gently lift a question like this out of the noise of everyday life and almost play with it. Life continues while somewhere in parallel, I’m quietly searching for an answer. And who knows may be the journey of looking is the purpose I’ve been trying to find all along!

    What has helped you discover meaning in your life? I would love to hear your thoughts.

    PS: I asked AI to analyse this post.  Listen to this here. The output exceeded my expectations!

  • Becoming Their Parent

    Becoming Their Parent

    18 Jan 2026 – I am in a split emotional state today. We celebrated the 8th birthday of my younger daughter. It was a day of celebration and seeing her so excited for every little thing made me feel more accomplished and fulfilled.  But today my older daughter left for the university after her long Xmas break. I feel sad, hurt, and a bit lonely.  

    This took my thoughts 20-25 years back when we would have thought of having a child and made me think what does having a child mean to us adults. It can be for various reasons. It could be due to social conditioning. While growing up we have seen that once you are married the next step is you have children.  We have subconsciously or consciously absorbed that when we are adults we  need to have children to carry forward our family name. Another reason is our natural instincts to be parents. Our parenthood kicks in and our biological clock tells us to have smaller human beings and raise them, look after them. A third reason could be our desire to contribute to society, raise responsible and caring individuals who will eventually be the next generation.

    It’s an exciting time when the first child comes into your life but also difficult and scary occasionally. In these modern times there are numerous resources to learn about parenting long before the child is born. The hospitals and doctors are well equipped guiding you what can be expected. You attend Antenatal classes. You read all kinds of internet articles, talk to friends. I still remember I had a list of items to buy for the baby which I had come up with through my online research and by talking to my friends who had kids at the time and that list was then passed onto my other friends who had kids after me. I am sure it’s still sitting in between one of my old diary pages. 

    My personal experience says however much you prepare, you never really know what lies ahead until you go through it yourself. No book can truly prepare you for the day you go into labor and the journey your body and mind take to bring a child into this world. It’s an experience that can only be felt firsthand. And honestly men are missing out big time!

    Slowly you get used to the new life in your life. You start getting used to their ways. You track their reactions, their moods, their needs. Things start coming to you naturally as after all at the core its a human need to breed and have off springs. With all said, there will still be times when you don’t know what to do. I am sure we all have faced those situations.  I remember one funny incident. I was changing my older one when she was a few months old. I suddenly realized she was covered in rashes. I panicked, called the doctor immediately and took a cab to get to the GP ASAP. The doctor checked and found nothing. The rashes were gone. Till today I don’t know what would have caused those rashes! So yeah they cause you a lot of anxiety at times and you go through many of these scary situations. Especially being first time parents you always doubt yourself and don’t want to leave anything to chance. Being a 2nd time parent is a breeze! I now think if I had the same with my 2nd one I would be like I know this one, let’s give it a couple of hrs.

    With your first child everything is first including the birthdays, outings, trips. You are extra enthusiastic, at times more than the child. You want to explore their world with them. You plan every picnic meticulously, you go to all possible theme parks, you plan their outfits for various activities and the special ones for the birthday parties. Talking about birthday parties, your social activities change. On weekends you are going to all possible places where kids can be entertained. Your pleasure is secondary now. Your weekends are dedicated to taking them to their extra curricular classes or birthday parties. 

    Then comes the fun times when you start planning what schools they go to, the daily drop offs and pick ups, what costume I need to look out for the next stage play, what school trip I am chaperone for next, what will be the theme of their next bday party,  how to console them when they don’t get enough votes to be the school monitor, eco club head or school head. On a daily basis you have to deal with a lot of emotion. The most required skill you need to have or develop over time is to keep patience for the longest of the periods while they go through the whole emotion cycle. This is the time when you discover you had all those negotiating skills you never knew you ever had!

    As your child gets to the next stages of life in secondary school you now worry about their grades, their performance in school, their resilience, their ability to decide what excites them and what they want to study on a longer term basis. It’s all not so straightforward.  We do have to make many tradeoffs. The way the school system is structured is not aligned to what we are preached in terms of letting the child decide what they want to do, let them be kids, let them shape their future. We can deny it all but the reality is that the world is structured to be competitive.  You need to put in your best and even slog at times to thrive.  Our school curriculum is not structured to let a child grow naturally.  After a particular stage they need to study something that doesn’t always come naturally to them. There will be parts of the curriculum that your child has to just do irrespective of if this makes sense to them or not, the extra hours they need to put in to get those grades that will decide where they will end up studying and then accordingly end up in their career. 

    I haven’t experienced life as a parent beyond this stage. I am sure there is so much more to journey through with them in the coming years. They will find their careers, life partners, and will have their own families. We will be the grand mum and grand dad. They will be reaching many more milestones in their lives and making us proud at every part of their life. We mostly say you never know what could happen next in life but at times i think life is not too unpredictable. Detach yourself from the details and see it from a 2000 ft height. Life shifts from a chaotic, detailed experience to an orderly, patterned, and, at times, silent landscape. From this height details of daily life turn into a grand, manageable and interconnected, slow-moving picture.

    After having 2 children, one in university now and the other in primary school, what have I learnt about myself and life in general? While growing up I never saw myself being that responsible adult who one day will be bringing up kids so thinking about it all now is a bit surreal.  I think parts of life just happen to us. I never planned what type of parent I will be. Lot of this comes to you naturally.  As a parent you always do your best. You make the best decisions for your children,  you stretch your limits to support your kids, you don’t care if it’s early morning or late night, you want to fulfill their needs, you are their protector till the end and you wish nothing but the best for them. 

    It’s such a blessed relationship where you never bring your ego in between. You are dedicated to your children. There is a continuous desire to give. Even on your deathbed if your child will say that they don’t want you to leave the world yet I am sure you would negotiate with Yumraj (the Hindu god of death) to stay in this world a little longer!

    Children are a blessing and parenthood is to be cherished! 

  • From Tiffin to Toasts

    From Tiffin to Toasts

    Let me set the scene

    It’s been on my mind for a while that I start writing a blog. I write a diary frequently but was not sure what the theme of my blog will be. I had thought of a few blog names. On 31st Dec we had an end of year party. It’s a ritual for us friends.  We meet up at someone’s house to bid farewell to the year that’s going and welcome the new year that’s coming. We have been doing this for almost 25 years now. 

    To keep us entertained till midnight we decided to play a game where we all were to write our resolutions and others were to guess them. One of my goals for 2026 I shared was to write a blog. One of the friends even joked that Ekta you can use today as the opportunity to start with your blog and that’s when I thought why not – a perfect date and a great topic to start blogging with. It took a few days to setup the site and get the domain name etc. but here I am with my first post!

    So today’s post is about friendship and what it means to me in general and what are my latest 2026 thoughts about friendship. I am sure a lot of you will relate to this topic. If you have any other new angles to add please share those by commenting on this post. I look forward to hearing from you.

    School Friendships

    I am someone who has always had a good number of friends. The earliest part of life when I can think of any friends’ memories is when I was in Class 5. We used to live in Bhatinda Punjab as my father was posted there. We used to live in a BSNL colony where families from multiple parts of India lived. They had similar financial and societal backgrounds as ours as our fathers worked in the same organization in similar positions. As we were recently transferred here my dad had admitted me to a local school and Punjabi was one of the mainstream languages in this school. I have clear memories of going to this house where couple of these kids will have a ‘parantha’ as breakfast in the morning and they had a specific style of drinking tea. They would have tea in a steel cup and will hold it with their thumb at the top.

    From these Punjabi kids who were my school buddies as well as my friends after school, I learnt a lot about Punjabi culture and the language. I don’t think I knew any Punjabi before we went to Bhatinda and that city is the one I can credit for me being a master of Punjabi in just one year! When I left from there I could speak, read and write Punjabi fluently. Today also I can understand Punjabi well and read some of it. For writing I will have to revise and practice a bit more 🙂 In the later years of life I had many Punjabi friends and I chose a Punjabi husband, may be its all threaded back to that one year of Bhatinda life somewhere!

    The next clear memories of me having friends that were part and parcel of my life in those years are of Gurgaon school. After Bhatinda my father was posted in Chandigarh for  a while and then we moved to Gurgaon. I was in that school from Class 6 to 12 meaning  many of the friendships I started there lasted for a long time. We used to share lunch tiffin and the movie stories during lunch break. Only a couple of us were from families that took their kids to cinema hall for Bollywood movies. One of our friends was one of those lucky ones (she would know if she reads this). That time Salman Khan was everyone’s crush. The film stories were told in so much detail that after almost 35 years I still remember some of the scenes which were told as part of that story telling. A lot of the credit goes to the story teller and some to the listener!

    I have tons of other memories from those times. We used to participate in almost every school event and the lengths of preparation we used to go through – be it a Hindi Poem recital, Mahabharata stage show or a debate. School teaches you formal academic skills but these friendships shape your personality, are your support in difficult times and are your whole world at that age.

    Friendships in College

    Post school I moved to Delhi for my Computer studies. This was an all girls college and I decided to stay in hostel to avoid the daily commute to Gurgaon. General perception is girls don’t make the best of the friends (may be its an outdated thought) but from what I have experienced in life this statement doesn’t hold much truth. In college we were this closed knit group of 6 girls who must be the most competitive but at the same time super supportive and a lot of fun! We were all super ambitious and super studious. It was tough at times but I must be like them hence I stuck around. We spent 3 years in the college and I am sure we went through the full cycle of most stressful situations in these years. You would think college times are fun times but more of my memories of college are of preparing for a test, or a viva or completing a project. I think that journey made me more resilient and till today I don’t shy away from hard work and instead of getting demotivated by competition it drives me and pushes me to do my best.

    This all didn’t mean we had no fun. Apart from the other fun things (which my friends who will for sure read this post and can later fill me in or comment on this post) one that I can never forget is skipping the class on all those days when an SRK movie came out. These were the times when you cant miss watching a Shahrukh movie first day first show! These were 1992/93 times when the entire Indian female population had one common heartthrob SRK and for most of us he continues to remain that boy who sold us the romantic tales. 

    Friends at Workplace

    After studies when you start working most of the people you meet are from your work place (including the husband in my case). I made some good friends in every place I have worked so far but some friendships have remained much stronger than the others. I am in touch with many of my India work friends and friends I made in UK after when I moved here in 2001. My overall mantra is keep personal life separate to professional but when I am looking back and counting my work friends I cant deny that you do make friends at workplace.

    By the time you are working you are quite mature and you know who are your kind of people. Who do you want to connect with. Who brings you most joy. I think my most friendships are based on my curiosity of learning from people, what do they know that I don’t know, what’s their thinking pattern. I have absorbed a lot in my life journey through all these special people. If we keep our ears open and mouth shut we can learn a lot from mostly everyone around us.

    Thanks to the WhatsApp world where we can still be in touch with mostly all of them through the WhatsApp groups and our generation’s social media platform Facebook (some of us are trying the slow migration to Insta as FB communities seem to be dying).

    Friends in a married life

    When you marry and have a spouse in life then there is one other source of friends and that is the friends of your partner and their spouses. The group of friends we socialize with now mostly is that group of friends. We all know each other for 10 to 20 to 25 years in some cases. It’s almost half the lifetime for many of us, meaning these friendships are as strong and as old as our families. We have been lucky that we found each other and we all are equally invested in making these friendships work.

    Friendship is the Ultimate Bio Hack

    Friends have always inspired me and have made me stronger. One other reason I am drawn to write about this topic is related to the inspiration drawn from Simon Sinek’s podcast that has been on my morning playlist for most of 2025 – A Bit of Optimism. Simon talks about many aspects of life and brings over guests from multiple facets of life on this podcast but he mentions almost in every episode about the power of friendship. We talk about all other relationships – Husband/Wife, Kids, Lover but friendship is never discussed as frequently and in the same way as these other relationships.

    Most of the times friendships are taken for granted. You will not cancel a work meeting for a friend but you can cancel meeting with a friend for a work meeting. That tells us something. There is a whole industry dedicated to tell you how to be a good leader, how to be a good parent, how to eat better but there exists almost nothing that tells us how to be better friends. I find so much power in his this line – Friendship is the ultimate bio hack. We don’t need longevity pills we need more meaningful friendships.

    Friendship works best in Plural

    For me friendship always has carried the same value as family and at times even more. My take on friendship is that friends are those esteemed humans who we choose. We usually don’t have a choice when its about being part of a family but friends definitely we tend to choose and decide to carry on being friends with.

    Some say usually there is a core set of 5 or 6 people who are your best friends. My take is the number may vary but you have a friend or a set of friends you know are your go to in a certain situation or for a certain advice. At times your oldest friend who understands you without even saying a word might not be the best person to advise when you want to discuss career . Like Sharukh says in  the movie ‘Dear Zindagi’ when Kaira (Alia Bhatt) asks Dr Jehangir (SRK) – tell me something, is there such thing as a perfect relationship like just one special rishta to which he replies – Kaira mujhe lagata hai why that one special rishta. Jindagi mein kayee special rishte hote hain. Alag alag aihsason ke liye alag alag rishte like special musical rishta with someone jo hamara musical taste share karata ho or that special coffee rishta perfect to have coffee with but not anything else and special gossip rishta jiske saath perfect ghus phus ghus phus,  or the special intellectual rishta for all that perfect kitabon vali discussion. There are so many different special rishtas, so many Kaira, aur ye romantic vala rishta inmein se sirf ek hai. Sab rishton ke aishaas kee jimmevaari ye bhoj is ek rishte pe dalana – a bit unfair you know.

    And same applies to friendships – to put the responsibility of realizing all the relationships on one or a few friendships – a bit unfair you know!

    So go make more friends if you still don’t have people with whom you can go watch theatre or talk about your life dreams or just randomly foolishly laugh at something and if you already have these legends then cherish them, hold them close and let them know they matter!