Ishani's Pen

How many times have we been told by our teachers or parents to speak correctly? And every time they remind us of this, have we really paid heed to it? It is actually a very important practice to speak “correctly” – to use the correct words/phrases to refer to anything in a sentence. It might appear a little confusing now, so let’s see a small example here to understand this concept for clearly. Back in my PhD days in IIT Guwahati, I asked one of my seniors, “Will you have a chocolate?” When she replied in affirmative, I handed her a “Pulse chocolate”. She looked at me, flabbergasted, and said, “This is not a chocolate! It’s a candy! I don’t want this. I thought you meant chocolate – I really needed one now.” And she walked away. I stood there in bewilderment – I did give her “chocolate”. Why didn’t she take it if she needed one? But it was that small incident that taught me the importance of using the “correct” word. A google search made me understand a fact that we probably always ign...

A very famous saying goes “A book is a gift that you can open again”. As a 90s kid, I used to read short stories, fairy tales, Aesop fables that I had been gifted by relatives or that I used to buy from our school on the day of Parent-Teacher Meet in August every year. But it was only in the year 2002 (age 11), when I was captivated by the idea of “reading” and that book was J.K Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone”. And that book opened many doors into the world of reading – from Harry Potter, to Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Hardy Boys – it was a reading marathon or spree. I started to eagerly wait for December every year for the Annual Book fair of Guwahati. I wished my sister to say that she needed something from Pan bazar so that I could tag along with my mother and cajole her for a little indulgence in “Western Book Depot”. Years rolled, different books from the mentioned titles got exchanged between friends as my reading genre remained limited within that...