On the eve of the Lunar New year, I walked down to the store down the street where I usually buy fruits and flowers. It had opened during the pandemic, not the best time for any new business. Yet it had not only managed to stay afloat but also expanded. The small nursery section now occupied most of the floor space, with the fruit shop nudged to the corner.

I passed the beautiful and seasonal kumquat trees at the entrance accompanied by rows of flowering pots. My quest was to find bamboo stems to replace the two that had died…

As I mark an important milestone in my scientific career, I notice that not much has changed since the time I joined the workforce making my goal of staying in the workforce sound like an achievement.

Recently I completed twenty-five years as a scientist. Not surprisingly, I remembered my first day at work, eager to reap the rewards of my hard earned education that had begun in India and culminated in the US with a Ph.D. …

A year and half or so ago, I came to Medium as a reader. Although not trained to be a writer, I had resumed writing with a passion that had been missing for almost two decades. My first foray into writing had been as a young mother. I tried to make sense of my life as I juggled work and home, always strapped for time, always finding myself falling short on my own expectations, if not on those of others.

I wrote at night, after my baby went to bed, and the house went quiet. Those stolen moments were like…

Win some, lose some, don’t understand most — that’s how my Medium publication history seems to be lately.

As a scientist, I am always looking to make sense of available data. Tables, graphs, scatter plots, pie charts — they are my friends. I can visualise trends, verify whether my hypothesis holds up, and prove (or disprove) my theories.

When I try to study my articles on Medium with the lens of distribution, nothing makes sense. Whether I sort by size of publication, date of publication or weather patterns in the USA, I am unable to correlate stories that are distributed…

As the new year is being welcomed with resolutions and goals, I have decided to take a contrary approach. Thanks to Covid-19 experiences, instead of adding to my always full to-do list, I have chosen to drop one item — colouring my hair.

Last year, I learnt that the same external stimulus can have different effects on people. During the lockdown phase when many baked bread, or whipped up coffee and envy in equal measure with their Instagram posts, I discovered an unexpected side effect to working from home. If I kept the camera off during Zoom meetings, I could…

A river flows through this book. The river is not a mythical river. Neither is it a metaphor for the ebb and flow of life. It is the woman who stands in the rising waters, holding a child in her arms, forced to make a choice between saving herself or her child who represents the crux of this mother-daughter story.

The story of the woman in the river is narrated by the author’s mother, an accomplished psychiatrist, in the prologue of What We Carry, a memoir by Maya Shanbhag Lang. When Maya first hears it, a few days after giving…

She chose the yellow sari. Not fuchsia, not turquoise, not purple. From the neatly arranged piles of saris made of silk, linen, and cotton, she picked the bright yellow one. Six yards of soft silk, plain and lustrous, like a ripe mango lit up with sunshine, its borders hand-painted in bold, primary colors, the sari beckoned to her.

I watched my 22-year-old daughter pick the yellow silk sari, just as my mother had watched me choose a sari 30 years ago. …

An unusual frame, 4 feet X 2 feet, hangs on one of the walls of my bedroom. It is not a painting, nor a photograph. It is unusual for two reasons, Firstly, because it is made of an embossed sheet of aluminum that depicts a man in a chariot drawn by five horses. And secondly, because it was made by me.

Like any piece of furniture or art that you see everyday, I hardly notice it. Except when it demands attention.

Last night a gust of wind swept the frame off the wall. It fell on the floor with a…