MindVerse: nurturing souls through words

  Me overthinking, probably. Or… could this actually be our truth someday? Recently, I came across an AI-generated reel on social media. It showed a young woman leaving Earth to go and live on Mars. Permanently. In the reel, she knew she would never return. What stayed with me, though, was something she said about the children who would eventually be born there. Mars would be their normal. They would never know what it felt like to live on Earth. Of course, the whole thing was fictional. AI-generated. Someone's imagination turned into a reel. But it made me strangely fearful. Imagine being born into a world where you had never felt rain. Never walked barefoot on grass. Never stood under a tree. Never seen an ocean except in old photographs and videos. Earth would be something your parents told you stories about. And perhaps it affected me because I have always been fascinated by the universe. As a child, I had an animated movie called Galaxy Express 999 , where the protagonist trav...

My Chachu’s death has shaken me to the core. It has made me question something we spend much of our lives trying to understand: What is the purpose of life? We are born, and one day we die, at any age, for any reason, sometimes peacefully and sometimes after immense suffering. Life can change without warning, leaving us with plans that will never be completed, words that will never be spoken, and a future that suddenly no longer exists. So what is everything in between? A few years after we are gone, most people will stop talking about us. A few generations later, even our names may be forgotten. Our homes will belong to someone else. The possessions we carefully collected will disappear or lose their meaning. Unless we do something extraordinary, or something terrible, history may never remember that we were here. But should that matter? Perhaps no grand purpose is waiting to be discovered. Perhaps life is not a problem we are supposed to solve or a legacy we must build. Perhaps the p...

Have you ever read a book at exactly the right time? A book when you read, the words somehow landed differently? The Comfort Book by Matt Haig was that book for me. I happened to pick it up during one of the most difficult phases of my life, the untimely loss of one of my closest uncles. And suddenly I was thinking about things I don't normally spend my days thinking about. Life. Death. Time. The ridiculous amount of energy we spend worrying about things that may eventually mean very little. The people we assume will always be around. The plans we make as though life has signed some contract promising us a certain number of years. Grief has a strange way of rearranging your priorities. And yet, strangely enough, this wasn't a time when I wanted to read something profound about grief. I didn't want answers. I didn't want someone telling me to be strong. I definitely didn't want to hear that everything happens for a reason. I just wanted something that wou...

Dear Raju Chachu, This birthday feels different. Incomplete. Maybe because birthdays have a way of taking us back to all the birthdays that came before. And when I look back at mine, you seem to be woven into so many of them. Having been born and raised in a joint family, I have infinite memories of you etched in my mind. You weren't someone I met only at occasional family gatherings; you were simply part of everyday life. From my birth to my childhood, teenage years, adulthood, my wedding, and everything that came after, you were there. And perhaps that's why it feels impossible to think of my life story without finding you somewhere in its pages. The Chachu of My Childhood You were seventeen when I was born. I was the first child of the next generation of our family, and you were the last of the previous one. It's as if you were more of an elder brother to me than my uncle. Mom tells me that as a baby, I was almost always in your lap. Apparently, I preferred y...

Today, I am grieving. My chachu passed away after a short and difficult battle with cancer. And yesterday morning, while I was still trying to process the reality of his absence myself, I had another difficult task, I had to tell my nine-year-old daughter, Nishka. She cried. It was a natural reaction. Just six months ago, she had met him hale and hearty. How does a nine-year-old comprehend that someone she saw laughing, talking and living his normal life only a few months ago is suddenly no longer here? Then again, I am an adult, and I am struggling to comprehend it too. But somewhere in that conversation, something happened that I wasn't expecting. I thought I was going to teach my daughter about grief. Instead, she taught me. The Safety Pin of Love After crying for a while, Nishka said something that initially left me completely confused. She placed two coins on the table and connected them by resting a safety pin across them. Then she slowly removed the safety pin and said: “Tod...

  Some sentences stay with you long after the person who said them is gone. Some words sink so deep into your heart that they quietly guide you through every stage of your life. One of those sentences came from my late grandfather. When I was a teenager, I had this quiet, precious dream of writing my own poetry book, a little collection of my emotions and observations, shaped into lines and metaphors. I would fill pages with words, and then suddenly stop. Every time I got close to believing I could be a poet, a voice inside me whispered: “Who will read it? Are my poems even good enough?” That self-doubt would take over before the ink dried. I would close my notebook and walk away, convincing myself that maybe there was no point in creating something if there weren’t enough people waiting to admire it. My grandfather must have sensed that hesitation in me, even though I never said it aloud. And he carried that concern with him through the years. When I went to medical school, a phas...