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Once I saw this movie called ‘Listen Amaya’ starring Deepti Naval, FarroqShaiekh and SwaraBhaskar. I found the movie refreshing and interesting. What attracted me most in the movie was the café called ‘Book a coffee’ that was run by Deepti Naval. ‘Book a coffee’ is shown to be a library café and l found its look and feel so interesting that I too started nurturing this dream of opening something like that of my own someday.

Sometime later, I thought why not make a virtual library café on the lines of the one in question?  So, that idea combined with the non-availability of required amount of funds and an interest for blogging has led to the metamorphosis of the original ‘Book a Coffee – a library café’ to ‘Guftagoo – a virtual library of thoughts.’

This blog is my experiment. It might succeed, it might fail, but it’ll give me satisfaction that at least, I dared to follow my heart.

I am someone who has taken the idiom “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken,” a bit too seriously.  Specially, when I read this quote after I once heard Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam saying while addressing some students “…Every youth wants to be unique, i.e. you but the world around you is doing its best to make you just everybody else. Now the question is whether you want to be you or everybody else? “And in this blog of mine, I want to preserve this singularity of all of us. Each one of us has so much to share to this world, sometimes that is unique enough to intrigue and sometimes that is similar enough to connect. But in both the cases it is cherishing.

It took me more than 15 years to realise what I love to do most and that is to connect with people. I like to know more and more people and love to listen to their stories in the forms of anecdotes, travel experiences, memories, pranks, or observations etc. It could be experiences that we had in childhood, adulthood or the ones we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Those could be the ones that bring out tears in our eyes or smiles on our lips, those could be the ones that made us lose faith in our relatives but reinstate our faith in strangers and in turn humanity, those could be the ones that diminished our confidence once just to make us rise with elan for the rest of our life. All of us remember our kindergarten friend who shifted somewhere else because her father got posted in a faraway town, we remember that young guest teacher of ours who taught us only for a month but remained in our memories because as a teenager we kind of had a crush on her, still afresh in our minds is that fear that we experienced before speaking on the stage for the first time. You know, I still have goose bumps when that scene comes before my eyes of how a child ran loose of the clench of his parents and went on the other side of the railway track and within those couple of moments that I took to react, the train came and I was unsure if the child reached the platform safely. Anyways, he was safe. A kind gentleman had held his hand and took him to the platform.

Such and many more experiences not only leave a mark on our memory but are in somewhere or the other responsible for shaping us the way we are.

There’s a forwarded message that was widely circulated and I am sure most of us shared that. It was the one where baby sparrows once questioned mama sparrow as to how big was the world outside their nest. To this, mama sparrow answered that it wasn’t bigger than her wings beneath which her kids could cuddle up cosily and could sleep safely. Exactly this is the kind of knowledge and experience about the world we have for our children and loved ones. We know that the world out of the shell that we’ve created for our children is cold, indifferent and to an extent cruel and try our level best to prepare our children for that.

Through this blog, I like to give just another angle to look at things. Plenty are the channels and platforms through which we could have the factual sight of this society. Through ‘Guftagoo – a virtual library of thoughts’, I try to bring out the emotional self of the society. Probably, that cold ‘khadus aunty’ of yours has a story or an experience quite similar to yours. Probably, that ‘Dabang-Singham’ type uncle who lives on the ground floor of your building is afraid of cockroaches, same as you are. And sharing each other’s stories and accounts could be the best way to respect each other’s sensibilities.

Thoughts don’t have any genre therefore this virtual cafe called ‘Guftagoo.in’ opens up itself to almost all types of writings be it personal experiences, travel experiences, book reviews, movie reviews, hotel reviews, parenting articles, emotional stories, ordeals of life or anything under the sun that has a social relevance.

Guftagoo.in invites all of you out their who like writing and reading to be a part of it. 🙂

Neha Sharma (NaSa)