Aha to Ha Ha Moments in My Life

She buried her face into her cupped hands and cried uncontrollably. Her exam results were just out. She had failed in Math. Worse still, all her classmates had passed. Because of her failure, her school could not publish 100% results this year! "OMG, what will I do? How will I face my parents, my teachers and my friends?" Her inner voices grew stronger, the demons woke up inside her tender head…she ran out of the house.. Next morning, they fished out her lifeless body from the broken well. The dark waters had once again claimed another innocent victim. From a promising life ahead, she had become yet another faceless statistic. Buried deep inside the world of politics and glamour that had taken centre stage of the media these days. Her parents were inconsolable. “Where we went wrong?”, her parents wailed. They wondered why their only daughter had taken such an extreme step. They had given her everything that she had wanted. The latest mobile phone, her own laptop, i...

There is nothing more painful to hear in this world than the cry of a baby. The sound reached my soul above the commotion at the food distribution site in a remote village in South Sudan. My ears looked across the humanity milling around towards the direction of that incessant cry. My eyes captured the sound and the source of that cry. It emanated from a feeble baby lying on the lap of her mother. With mouth wide open near the exposed nipple of her mother’s breast, the tears had dried up on the black cheeks of the child. The cry became louder as the young mother frantically switched her baby to her other shrivelled breast. The helpless mother hugged her baby tightly to the now empty breast. Exhausted at the emptiness, the baby’s cry grew into a shrill scream.     The other women in the long queue waiting with their own babies to receive the ration of the day turned their heads away unable to watch anymore. As the cries turned into deep sighs of anguish, the dis...