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Calling a person ugly only hurts them. They lose their self-worth and start questioning themselves. Here's a beautiful story of healing with love.
Calling a person ugly only hurts them. They lose their self-worth and start questioning themselves. Here’s a beautiful story of healing with love.
Throughout my childhood, I encountered people – including my near and dear ones – who repeatedly mentioned how ugly I looked. Some times, openly but mostly between the lines. It wasn’t just their words but their actions that proved the same. During festivals, the least appealing clothes were given to me with a note, “What difference would it make?”
I felt bad, dejected and some times even betrayed by my own people, but I didn’t say a word. For I thought, time would heal it all.
Thankfully, through all this, my family continued to support me unconditionally, even when the world shunned me. However, they were quite worried and often sad.
I disliked being a part of get togethers, family functions and festivals where the topic of discussion inadvertently and some times, deliberately, centred around me and how I looked. There were discussions that I did not take after my mother who was extremely beautiful.
As I child, I couldn’t understand how I could be termed ugly, a term I had only heard in bed-time stories. However, these taunts just added to my self-esteem going lower. It went on to a point where I was unable to develop enough self-confidence. My self-worth was dwindling. I lacked the courage to befriend people.
There were times when men I secretly liked, chose other women. This left me shattered and broken but slowly it made sense that it is one’s disposition that is measured.
There was a time when I completely shut myself off from the beautiful feeling called love. Yet it made its way into my life quite surprisingly. While almost everyone thought I didn’t deserve a lot, he thought I deserved everything beautiful. He became the Midas to my aspirations. And quite magically, with immense love, he turned those 26 hateful years into a forgotten nightmare.
We completed nine years of knowing each other, of which we spent seven years being married and five as parents. With each passing day, we only see our love for each other grow.
I thank all those unpleasant past experiences as they actually helped me count my blessings every day.
Picture credits: Unsplash
A dire penchant for words, can summarize my life as “My pen bleeds my life”! read more...
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
Neena inhaled the aroma that emanated from the pan and took a deep breath. The aroma of cumin interspersed with butter transported her back to the modest kitchen in her native village. She could picture her father standing in the kitchen wearing his white crisp kurta as he made delectable concoctions for his only daughter.
Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
When she was sixteen, the catastrophic clutches of destiny snatched away her parents. They passed away in a road accident and Neena was devastated. Relatives thronged her now gloomy house and soon it was decided that she should be married off.
Being a writer, Nivedita Louis recognises the struggles of a first-time woman writer and helps many articulate their voice with development, content edits as a publisher.
“I usually write during night”, says author Nivedita Louis during our conversation. Chuckling she continues,” It’s easier then to focus solely on writing. Nivedita Louis is a writer, with varied interests and one of the founders of Her Stories, a feminist publishing house, based in Chennai.
In a candid conversation she shared her journey from small-town Tamil Nadu to becoming a history buff, an award-winning author and now a publisher.
Nivedita was born and raised in a small town in Tamil Nadu. It was for schooling that she first arrived in Chennai. Then known as Madras, she recalls being awed by the city. Her love-story with the city, its people and thus began which continues till date. She credits her perseverance and passion to make a difference to her days as a vocational student among the elite sections of Madras.
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