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Freedom Looks Different

By Namrata Hegde on
How do I start? The last few days felt like a roller coaster of emotions. Not the fun amusement park one, but the kind where you scream a little and laugh a little and question your life choices somewhere in the middle. I felt like writing every single day in the past week. Extreme emotions have a strange side effect: they push you toward a pen. Or a keyboard. Or at least toward opening a notes app and staring at the blinking cursor like it owes you an explanation. It felt like the perfect time to resume writing a daily diary. I am a little insecure about using the word resume here. I should probably say I could have started again . Because truthfully, I have always failed at keeping up this habit. Every year on the 1st of January, I take up a brand-new diary with dramatic determination. The first page always smells like discipline and new beginnings. This year I didn’t even manage that on January 1st. But in the past, when I did start, I would last for a month or two. After that, the...
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Holi in the Town I Grew Up In

By Namrata Hegde on
I miss Ankola very much now. If you don't know, Ankola is a small town in Karnataka where I lived for seventeen long years. Seventeen years feels like a lifetime when I count it in school bags, friendship bands, and evening walks. I finished my entire schooling in a single institute, and I had (and still have) friends there. The kind of friends who know your house, your favorite bench, and your nature. I miss watching Holi. I miss the high school quarters we stayed in, with their familiar sit outs and predictable noises. I miss my childhood friends, whose laughter still echoes in some corner of my memory like an old ringtone you never delete. Watching Suggi was a delight back then. I absolutely love the culture of Suggi and the story behind it. Suggi is a regional folk dance art form, and is performed during the harvest and Holi season, mostly by the Halakki Vokkaliga and many other communities who follow and continue the tradition with utmost respect. The dancers dress in color...
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Excuse Me, Who Are You?

By Namrata Hegde on
You know that moment when someone casually asks, "Who are you?" or "Where do you belong?" and your brain suddenly forgets all its vocabulary? You stand there smiling, buying time with an "errr…" or "ahhh…," as if your identity is loading on slow internet. It sounds like a very simple question, yet answering it feels like a spider crawling on your skin. At least, it does for me. To begin with, I hate the idea of introducing oneself. Back in college, when seniors asked for introductions again and again and again, I felt like punching their faces. Though I am proud of where I come from and who I am, I don't enjoy explaining myself in neat little sentences. If you ask me, people should be known slowly through time, and with casual conversations rather than through a fixed set of questions that feel like forms waiting to be filled. I often prepare answers in my head when someone asks me, "Who are you?" On the surface, it sounds simple. B...
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Still Writing

By Namrata Hegde on
I have the exact same feeling as a teenager who didn't show up to college for months and is embarrassed to go back. It's difficult to search for a greeting while appearing again, and that’s why and how I started with a shy line instead of a loud Hello!! It has been more than two months since I wrote for my blog. That doesn't mean I was writing something else. I had just sat back. During the course of these two months, I completed a semester exam and I have a ring shining bright on my left hand. Two months isn't a big disappearance, but it feels so because I went through so much and that makes it feel like a year altogether. When life overwhelms you, you forget your life for a while. That "while" took me two months. Fair enough! Many times, I had a very strong urge to write and I did come here and type something. But they were all left unfinished, and I didn't want to continue them when I came back. At the present, those drafts didn't make sense to me ...
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Resolutions Re-written

By Namrata Hegde on
How's life? I'm sorry if this made you think for a while. Alright! December alreadyyy and 2025 is going to be in the chapters of history soon! If I look back, I feel 2025 was very long for me. I vaguely remember what I did all year. All I can recall is that I cried so much this year. (You'll know why, either here or in my next blogs.) The reasons feel silly now, but back then they were massive mountains to climb. And this year, again, I haven’t fulfilled my resolutions. Every December, I feel all my resolutions were silly anyway. And of course, this time I didn’t wait for the 31st to peel off the list. Ironically, my 2025 resolutions are already in the trash can. I think I slipped into lowkey philosophy toward the end of 2024, and it shows in my 2025 resolution list. I had 21 goals, out of which 14 made absolutely no sense for a twenty-four-year-old girl. Someone could easily (mis)understand that the list belonged to a sixty-five-year-old retired lady. Even though I wrote t...
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Focus Light

By Namrata Hegde on
Hello there! I missed writing in the past few days. And since I haven’t been reading anything either, writing now feels like giving a presentation without any preparation. A late realization: books were extracting my writing juices! A bizarre feeling to experience though. Lately, I’ve realized that my eyes are unknowingly filtering what they encounter amidst the chaos. I am seeing everything blue. Actually, let me correct that  "Something in Blue" is what my eyes are focusing on. You’ll know more about this in a bit. This isn’t a new trait. Ever since I can remember, I’ve filtered out the things I wanted to see. As a kid, I would get scolded for this habit, misunderstood as “absent-mindedness” by others. But observing everything all at once feels exhausting. Why should a poor three-pound-brain remember witless, unnecessary details? There was this viral reel once — a guy would walk up to people and ask them to check the time on their phone. And then he’d ask, “What’s your bat...
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Not My Cup of Self-Help

By Namrata Hegde on
I don’t read self-help books. Well, I don’t read anything other than fiction. Not even biographies or autobiographies. I haven’t read the famous  ' Wings of Fire' , ' The Story of My Experiments with Truth' , or ' Playing It My Way' . But I did read Anne Frank’s ' The Diary of a Young Girl' when I was in my teens. Though I don’t remember it clearly now, I loved reading her diary! Now, you can probably guess my reading choices. In the past few years, I’ve even bought some self-help books that were highly recommended, but I haven’t opened a single one till now. And to be honest, I’m planning to give them away to someone who’s a true self-help enthusiast. Why don’t I read them? As a kid or teenager, my reason would’ve been that they lack lead characters, emotions, sky descriptions, or mood changes. I still feel that way, but now I also have a valid reason: they make me depressed . I don’t even know how to read them! I can’t enthusiastically devour them, n...
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