Blog of an Odd against Crowd

I usually don't write product reviews because I have a strange set or parameters that never meets most people's needs. However, this time I am writing one for Audio Technica M50X studio monitor headphones, which I have been using from last one month.  I don't qualify as an audiophile, but I do have average understanding of music and sound. I don't create music myself, but I appreciate ones which have been created already. I can differentiate between good, bad and ugly sound and can find the breaking point of most sound systems easily.  The Hunt : In year 2013, I visited an audio zone in a mall where they had all kinds of headphones to experience. It was first time I saw something like that and was excited to gets a hands on. I tried almost all headphones and noted the ones I liked.  Among them, Audio Technica M50 ticked all boxes except the price point. It demanded a premium ₹24000 and made me wonder if I would be able to afford one ever.  Later in 2014, I bought

Let's talk today. About us. The tagged loners of the society. Ones who treat themselves to stay upbeat. Ones who no longer find being around people amusing. Ones who wander off alone and relax in unurthodox and disapproved ways. While we aren't lonely at all, it's something that people miss out, mostly because they never saw us the way we really are. We aren't the ones who would fit in their definitions and templates to prove everything is right with us. They have all rights to think that. Perhaps, we are at fault because we need ourselves more than their prejudice and forced obligation to stay in the limits of their mind. There is no certain way to encircle the mind of ours. It keeps on raising the bar for people we actually let in to know our innermost self. It's often the past that is put to blame. May be it's past which made us who we are. Or, it's people who made us feel that way. Somebody's betrayal, somebody's humiliation, somebody's b

Do you know who you are? Or what you are going to be? It's morning, you still struggling to wake up at 9 AM and promising yourself to sleep early tonight. You know you won’t be. You drag yourself out of bed, after repeated alarm refused to snooze anymore, and leave the blanket as is. You pick up your phone from under the pillow and remove earphones, some song is still playing, and you stop it and start reading dozens of notification one by one. In no time you feel the need of warm coffee. You enter kitchen and see if there is any water left in the carafe of your coffee machine. You refill it and turn it on. The mellow flavour of coffee kicks in and you wake a little more. You stand there, near the kitchen floor, looking at the clutter and relate it to your own life. This is the time when you feel if there was some music to calm you down. You find a playlist of Coldplay on YouTube and press play. The soothing acoustic helps you think over the things and calm you down to some exte

As soon as I saw August 15 on Monday and Raskhabandhan on August 18 on my organization’s internal portal for leave management, I felt a sudden rush, a different kind of joy that was waiting to be rekindled after my Leh-Ladakh bike trip got cancelled for this year. It gave me two days of weekend, Monday and Thursday of holiday. All I needed was to get my leaves approved for Tuesday and Wednesday. Being a senior resource in the team, I had to coordinate with my other senior teammate who was planning a leave from 19 th till Janmashtami. So in all I had time from night of 12 th to morning of 19 th August to make or break the much awaited trip. From my usual Bike Trip, this time I decided to take a backpacking trip by public transport. After giving much of a thought and weighing in locations of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, finally I made my mind to explore Utterakhand. In doubt I turned to India’s best and most friendly Travel Forum, BCMTouring to get inputs from experienced mem

Preview: What it takes to realize everything is fine around you? A solo trip to the mountains, where your soul dwells in the echoes of the winds that carry fragments of clouds with them. What it takes to realize world is going back to chaos and infinite hurry? End of the aforementioned road trip. What happens when you are working full time to a corporate and getting a paycheque at 1 st of every month, and ask your manager for a week’s worth of leaves for a vacation. You manager, at their polite best, would tell “Sorry, you can’t get a weeks’ leave just for some road trip. I would have approved if you were sick or there was some family emergency.” Certainly, you can’t get a leave unless you are dying. This struggle is real. While you have to work till your senses start to die only to pay the bills, there are short bursts of happiness when you get a day or two as “extended weekend” and you start making plans to take a trip to the places you always loved. But, you

"What it takes to realize everything is fine around you? A solo trip to the mountains where your soul dwells in the echoes of the winds that carry fragments of clouds with them. What it takes to realize world is going back to chaos and infinite hurry? End of the aforementioned road trip." What happens when you are working full time to a corporate and getting a paycheque at 1 st of every month, and ask your manager for a week’s worth of leaves for a vacation. You manager, at their polite best, would tell “Sorry, you can’t get a weeks’ leave just for some road trip. I would have approved if you were sick or there was some family emergency.” Certainly, you can’t get a leave unless you are dying. This struggle is real. While you have to work till your senses start to die only to pay the bills, there are short bursts of happiness when you get a day or two as “extended weekend” and you start making plans to take a trip to the places you always loved. But, you ofte