Avni Singh
Podar World School Sama, Vadodara

My dad’s ever-changing job made us live almost everywhere except in India, our home country. We visited our extended family in India during the holidays, especially Varanasi, my hometown; they took us to the great river, the Ganges. The very first time when I travelled to the ghats (the steps leading to the river), I was excited to behold a spectacular sight of the river that takes away our sins with it. The Ganges, thronged by people from all corners of the subcontinent, serve as a water source for hundreds of villages and cities. I had heard several stories of the holy river from my grandparents. My cousins often bathed in it like a pool in our backyard.

I was utterly stunned and saddened to see the sight of the river. It was bursting with plastic bottles, flowers, polythene packets, and things I possibly could not describe. We returned without touching the water. Distraught with the thought of how a river considered holy, to be in such a state? I imagined that no one had tried to clean it up. Researching on it I found that Ganga Action Plan (GAP), launched in 1986, had tried cleaning it but did not achieve its high goals of preventing industries and sewage lines from polluting the river. So, during our visits in the later years, we just visited the Ganga as a ritual. I learned from my parents that the government had launched the Namami Gange program in 2014 to clean the river, and I hoped it would succeed.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought us back to India in 2020. Our relatives said that the Ganges looked cleaner as most industries were closed during the lockdown. There was a buzz in town that though COVID-19 made us suffer, it cleaned the river naturally. The river certainly looked clean from the outside. However, I had my doubts. So, I surfed online and came across reports of NGOs that work for cleaning the Ganges. They conduct water quality tests often and the recent results were shocking. The main reason for the pollution is untreated sewage water disposal into the river. The industrial wastes, leftovers due to religious activities, and land pollution runoff into the river add to the low water quality. Thus the river is not wholly cleaned. I am not proud of having a pool in my backyard but ashamed of not making any efforts to clean the great river that gives lives to millions of living beings.

Well, logically, after reading about the faecal material in the water, I had no intention of going into it. However, when we made a trip to the ghat this time, everyone except me was inside the water. As I watched, a man got in the knee-deep water and spit out a huge mouthful of well-chewed tobacco. My family watched this and rushed out of the water, not minding the cold at all. Then, he brushed his teeth and gargled in the same water. Finally, he bathed in it and worshipped the same river, which he polluted a few minutes earlier. We should all join hands and contribute to cleaning the river and the minds of the people who worship it but do not respect its sanctity. 

( Photo by Shiv Prasad on Unsplash)

Sayanee Mukherjee
Handique Girls College, Guwahati, Assam

A cold morning with rains dripping and the birds chirping sweetly, what a beautiful start to the day.

My son and daughter were playing, so I decided to get a coffee and start my day. I switched on the portable music player and hoped to hear some melodies when suddenly I heard a blast of words. I heard my son, who is in 8th standard, teaching my daughter English alphabets and words. He said “A for Apple but pronounced it as Apl,” and then he went on for B, C, D, and all. I rushed towards him and scolded him for teaching wrong, but he was innocent. He said to me, “Mom, my teacher said nowadays nobody uses long forms so we can write our answers in short forms, so from childhood if she learns short forms, then it will be easy for her in future.” I was shocked; I asked him to show me his copy. All written in a short form, “Great” transformed to”GR8”, “Learn to LRN” barely a word was in its complete form. I asked him to rewrite everything in long form. The full answer, which was supposed to be completed in two and a half pages, was completed just in a single page.

I was shocked; though I didn’t keep a regular check on my son’s school works, his teachers said he was doing well. Suppose this was the condition; I am afraid that he is not in the right school. I immediately called the school officials and enquired about the teacher. I was not surprised to know that she is a substitute for some time and is very young. She is completing her master’s along with the teaching job. I understood that as she is also studying, she needs to complete classes soon, and hence she is telling everyone to use short forms. I requested the school officials to take proper action, which will create a major impact on the future generation. The school officials even promised to take care of the matter.  I grabbed my coffee cup and pondered that, strangely, what the teacher was teaching in the school will become the habit of everyone tomorrow. The world is changing very fast, and one generation is ending; the millennials and Gen Z are snowballing. Even in our daily life, the number of calls we make reduced significantly, we sometimes make a phone call to our old elders or for some busy office work and what more surprising is these changes are not because of high recharge rates of mobile networks. The reason behind this behaviour is unique, essentially, we can categorize it into two types. Firstly, our beloved habit of laziness, and the second one is our fake standards, as calling is referred to as backdated, and chatting has become the age trend. People prefer texting or sometimes sending voice messages over the phone calls. Texting is no doubt fast and efficient, but it misses the personal touch of a phone call. Middle-aged people are succumbing to this world of texting. While writing, people don’t have time to read paras and paras, so using short forms. Though it sometimes may feel like using abbreviations are fancy, but everything has a proper age. To begin with, if teenagers or kids started speaking and writing everything in short forms, it will create a massive massacre in the future. 

When using short forms, people aged 30 and above are aware of the actual words. However, if the younger generation starts using the short forms now, they will soon forget the lengthy forms and even teach someone short forms only. To that particular generation to whom they will introduce will never know the long forms.

Abbreviations are helpful when the work needs to be completed in a brief period. For example, while texting people, we can use short forms if we are in a hurry. But nowadays using short forms has turned out to be the new fashion. For example, people for birthday wishes write ‘HBD’ (Happy Birthday), ‘GWS’ for ‘Get well soon and the most famous one is ASAP. A long letter can be written but at last, writing ASAP is compulsory, that time writing ‘As soon as possible’ in long-form becomes tiresome for some people, the full form becomes much more prominent.

In today’s world, the titles of the films also changed, like ‘Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gum’ turned out to be ‘K3G’. Some names, after being shortened, are hard to recognize, like ‘SKTKS’ (Sonu Ke Titu ki Sweety). If you do not know the actual name of the film, you have to search the short form and then understand it. Some short forms have gained so much popularity that people have already forgotten their full forms like ‘Internet’, ‘Yahoo’, ‘Virus’ that affects ‘Computers’ and much more. Some are also shocked to know that even words like ‘Police’, ‘PIN’, ‘Smart’ are acronyms; people believe that these words are full forms as they are used, they never knew that these were abbreviated. Similarly, if the teenagers do not know the new words which are getting abbreviated, the generation after them will never know about the existence of the full form.

 Shorts forms have reached the heights of infinity that even the calling style of names also changed ‘Siddhartha’ to ‘Sid’, ‘Aditya’ to ‘Adi’, ‘Amitabh’ to ‘Amit’, and the list goes on. The names have changed so much that it is hard to find whether they are a boy or a girl. If the trend continues with this super velocity like travelling, people will soon start conversing verbally using short forms. Doctors will begin prescribing medicines written in short forms, the food on the menu card will be written in short form, addresses will be shortened whatnot. If this situation occurs, then definitely there will be utter confusion among every human being. Using short forms may be taken lightly now, but the future results may be brain-wrenching.

Short-form is not bad, but people must never forget that it should be used only when necessary, overusing for fun or just for the sake of trends. It will be converted into a habit causing severe issues.

If we start using short forms in daily life, then definitely in the near future, our ‘Brain’ will get shortened up and become ‘BRN’.

Sananshi Pidyar
Convent of Jesus and Mary, Ambala, Haryana

We all have a legion of fears constantly throwing us off our Game called Life: the fear of being an utter failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of the unknown, and the fear of dying alone. 

Deep down these fears perpetually haunt us, and living in denial is an attractive alternative, because avoiding negative thoughts is easier than acknowledging them, which are at times excruciating to think about. And before we know it, we stop feeling anything, numbness and indifference dawn over us like thick impenetrable fog, obscuring these emotions from view, but strong gales of nightmares and pelting of Life’s famous lemons bring them to the surface in plain sight. 

Being face-to-face with them triggers our defence mechanism, our guards rise and we try to push them away, keeping them locked and chained down a chasm. But they creep out with amplified impact, like cancer cells after a failed chemotherapy. 

We all know by now that the Universe is not our best friend and will go to any lengths to make Life miserable, pressing where it hurts most and bombarding us with its challenges, almost knocking us to a breaking point, only to provide momentary breaths of respite from time to time that keeps us going. 

Life is programmed in such a way that its “ideal version” is just a hologram, fathomed by our deepest desires, its existence purely theoretical and imaginary, realising our goals simply makes the hologram more vivid and vibrant, but ultimately it can never be materialised. We might get close to this quintessential existence but never enough to reach it.

Life only throws at us what the Universe believes we can overcome. So instead of failing in our attempts to sail through it, we must accept the inevitable stumbles and setbacks, not let fear dominate our lives and appreciate the seemingly trivial moments of joy.