THE WHOLE NINE YARDS

Have any of you ever nagged your parents to buy you something expensive and thrown tantrums when they disagreed? Well, I sure have. As a matter of fact, multiple times. We live in a time where peer pressure has taken over schools. Adolescents fall into the trap of peer pressure and thus start demanding unnecessary things from their families. I have been there too. I once asked my parents for branded boots and on their refusal, I threw a temper tantrum and said some unforgivable things to my parents. To cool off, I went and sat at a park bench when I saw something that changed my perspective of life forever. I saw a family of three walking the streets holding hands. The father’s clothes were in tatters and patched roughly at several places and he wore only one shoe. His uncovered foot was bleeding and covered in dirt. The mother had greasy grey tied in a messy bun and she too wore only one shoe. The child in the middle looked malnourished and wore clothes that were too small for him. Bu...

'A few drops of Ink’, a poetry workshop was a great way for me to zone out from the hustle and bustle of schoolwork and dive into the realm of creativity. You could say I’m a very lazy poet as I usually write a poem once a year for some school project and that too by making every line of the poem rhyme. Well, this is because I thought that ‘making it rhyme’ was the only thing I needed to know to start writing a poem. It turns out this workshop proved me wrong. I learned an astonishing thing - non-rhyming poems were just as beautiful or if not, more beautiful, as rhyming poems. I guess that makes sense now because looking back at my old poems I noticed that rhyming sometimes makes the poem lose its meaning and charm. My favourite activity in the workshop was the very first activity. We were instructed to write five alliterative phrases and make sentences with them. This was to teach us to write alliterative sentences. The fun part? The phrases or sentences need not make sense and s...

We had a poetry week workshop a while ago. What I was left with after the workshop was the fun my classmates had, the brainstorming we did, and the reflections that followed. During the sessions, I realized that even the simplest of things need a lot of concentration, devotion, and thinking. I was astonished and charmed by the hard work and feelings put in by all the poets and writers (also known as my classmates) The teachers' hard work, the time and effort they put in creating the slides, the thought process they put in so that we could enjoy and learn various things about poetry, and also get to know our hidden talents was indeed commendable. There were activities in which we had to write every stanza beginning with the same letter like; “Four feelingless frets felt feelingless forever.” The activity I liked the most was where we had to find different stanzas from different poems and collate them together to form another poem. I enjoyed this activity the most because it was com...