Tamrina Thinks

Growing up, I'd always heard, "People who talk to themselves are crazy." At that time, it somehow made sense but as I grew up, I realised we couldn't have been more wrong. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally familiar with the concepts of mental disorders causing delusions and hallucinations but that is not something that happens as frequently as you'd think. What I'm talking about is, really talking to yourself. Like arguing and giving justifications and the whole package. The fact is, no one, and I mean No One, knows you as well as you do. Be it your parents, your siblings or your best friends, they only know those parts of you which you have chosen to share with them. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we choose a very specific kind of information that we share with each important person in our life. There is always something that we do not allow ourselves to bring out in the open. We are always too aware of how the other person would perceive ...

The era of technology has made the world into a global village where everyone is constantly in contact with everyone irrespective of the time or distance differences. We are continuously sharing the events of day with our friends and loved ones across the world through social media apps, WhatsApp or snap chatting our every action. As a result, the idea of spending a day without our cell phones has become a nightmare for most of us. But what we are blindly ignoring is the fact that in our efforts to stay connected with those not around us, we are failing to acknowledge those who are. We have become so accustomed to capture our moments that we have actually stopped living them. And to top it off, we have stopped talking to each other. Now I know most of you would argue with this but just think about it. How many times in the past week have you been around the people you care about and who care about you and been able to talk about anything you felt like without the fear of being...

A dear friend introduced me to this term “Institutionalised” and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. Institutionalised, as he put it, is when we become so used to certain unnecessary and unrealistic elements of our environment we are in that we stop questioning anything and accept everything just as it is. We somehow give up on our own free thought and decide to follow the herd because it looks easy. We become so accustomed to being told what to do and what not to do that we forget to actually see the rationale behind our own actions. I’m sure this doesn’t sound like something you think you’ve been doing but think again. Over the past couple of months, I have come across such things as I always wished for but didn’t know were possible. I have met people and had conversations that have given me such perspective as I didn’t even realise I was lacking. And that is exactly what being ‘institutionalised’ is. It is our inability to realise to just what ext...