Happy Birthday!

Hi! It’s been a while, hasn’t it or have you forgotten me?

I won’t hold you to it since it has been a while, a few weeks more and it would have been a year.

But I couldn’t let that happen.

A year! That would be abhorrent!

Certainly, sad and definitely would hurt my writer ego!

Even though it is this writer-author ego that has got me in this soup in the first place.

You know the one that is extra critical, super cynical and definitely turns her nose at everything I write.

How dare you write this?

Is it really what you want to write?

Do you think you should write about this or that?

Who wants to read you opinion, why would you even write?

Just read and see how much better people are at writing than you!

But if I listen to my inner critic then my beloved muse is sulking, soppy and definitely unhappy!

How can I be a happy, logophile that I am if my darling muse is unhappy and yet she keeps nudging me to pen posts on my phone notes app, dictate on my phone during travel or scribble in tiny diaries on the go and even write in the middle of the night on bits and pieces.

Now coming to the story, get comfortable — this will take time. Let me tell you why it has been so long since I published anything Eloquent Articulation.

Today is a good day, it’s Teacher’s Day and as a mark of respect to my beloved English Teachers, I must tell you why I choose today.

That it happens to be my birthday is also a reason but the most important reason is that my mom said, “You must write today.”

Mothers are are first teachers and she is the biggest supporter of my work.

Mom along with my dad instilled the love of reading and books in us.

We are a book loving family and waiting for the books dad would bring for us was the highlight of his return.

She spoke these simple words with conviction, strength and depth of meaning plus I know how much she values my writing.

And that’s how the idea formed, an idea to celebrate my love for the written word!

Why and how Christmas Day led me to this Teachers Day.

This writing slump started on Christmas Day last year. Yes, on 25th December 2025!

That ordinary afternoon I turned and stumbled and fell, flat on my face but my arm took the brunt of the fall.

The chin and the knee survived but the arm, which arm you say?

The right arm, yes the very right one that I use to write and drive and eat and you get the idea…

For the whole evening I thought it was a bad fall and the arm seemed a bit swollen but okay so I should be fine but by night fall but the pain was telling me otherwise.

Wisely, I decided to go to the hospital in the late evening. I definitely needed a second opinion to my self-daignosis.

That I was unhappy to be right was putting it mildly.

The doctor proved me right about the pain means fracture and I couldn’t be unhappier!

Well, I got a cast and and the new year and the new month went in nursing my arm.

Writng forgotten, reading sporadically I was bummed.

Though I am smiling in this photo, it’s more for the optics.

Eventually as all things end so did these days of self-pity.

The next big thing was the kid’s exams.

You know March and how it bears down on us mothers with it’s tight schedules, high expectations and no error margins!

The days merged into weeks with prep and supervision even though I was not the one studying nor could I tutor my kid as I am an Arts student. Humanities, you say.

Well, the Humanities only made me worry endlessly, looking at the big, bulky books, endless lines of formulae and all the experiments with chemicals and biology of anatomy for places I didn’t know existed within my body!

Thankfully for us, the exams are sticklers for their schedules but we all know what comes after the exams… Holidays!

A vacation, not just any vacation but a well-earned vacation after the slogging of finals of a very senior class that preps the kids for higher education.

So the break had to be equally impressive and off I went to the dazzling greenery of Darjeeling and time flew over the tea gardens and foggy mountains and rain soaked days.

Soon it was back to reality for the penultimate school session and we got back to bigger books with mind-bending study material.

Let’s not to forget the Indian Copyeditors Forum’s fiction Anthology project we had started in August 2025 was gathering steam with the stories getting in to shape for the book.

The plan of geting stories from editors had caught the imagination of our ICF editors and we were inundated with stories – enough that we had the pick of stories for the book.

And before I knew it summer vacations arrived with their agenda of having fun like this is their first vacation ever.

This is life, juggling fun with responsibilities or being responsibly fun… still not sure.

The holiday was a working one for me, editing while enjoying the relaxed days.

All this action meant that it was all quiet on the blogging front.

No post, no book review or author interviews. Even the editor interview series was in a limbo.

But as life goes on, we yearn to return to the familiar. And so did I. Here I am!

Even though I have been posting on my Instagram and Linkedin, it’s not the same.

There is just not enough word count on the apps for my thoughts and mostly they are spur of the moment posts.

Not like my percolating thoughts here.

These blogposts simmer and bubble and then are peppered with photos to finally grace this space.

Eloquent Articulation is a labour of love, why else would I be here since the year 2012 talking about the power of youth, Gen Z.

The blog started with a post about the benefits of youth-led innovation in all spheres.

But before that was possible I attended and was the MC along with Divya Jyoti Munjal for the first Indian Editing and Publishtech Summit (IEP) in Delhi.

The summit was an excellent learning experience as it covered the imact of AI on writing and editing.

That we had started a project that would involve 24 editors and a whole lot of emails was another reason I was MIA here on the blog.

The cover of The Red Pen Anthology was released at the IEP summit.

I also return with good news of a book publsihed and another in the pipeline!

This endeavour was possible with the guidance and support of Vivek Kumar, founder of the ICF.

The book in question is The Red Pen Anthology and it released on 31st July 2026.

Blurb:

A woman’s skin remembers every touch it has ever known. A village weaver wields the power to save a single life on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. A mother finds her daughter waiting in the kitchen on her birthday. A tiger keeps vigil on a forest road for the poacher who killed its kin. The 24 stories in the first The Red Pen Anthology range from the everyday to the familiar to the mythic and the bizarre.

An official release by the Indian Copyeditors Forum, India’s preeminent body, this collection was born when shapers of other people’s stories shaped their own, when copyeditors whose red pens smatter other manuscripts with crosses and corrections decided to use them to write their own.

Curated by Cora Pereira Bhatia and Inderpreet Uppal, let this debut endeavour by editors-turned-authors surprise you and intrigue you.

And that’s what kept me busy and away from here but I am back.

The book reviews too but this year I’m reading what I wish. 2026 has been good for my reading, not too many books but not too few that I would need to rush.

Just a sweet balacne of a couple of books every month.

I am also Reading With Muffy and curating the ICF Book Club but more about that later.

DM or email me if you want to be featured on Author Answers or Editor Explains that are part of my #WritingResourcesByIndy series.

Did I miss anything? Yep!

Yes, I could not finish this post on 5th, mostly because I started writing it in the afternoon and it took time for me to remember the ideas and photos and sequence of events. But I could add the birthday photo and that makes me happy.

I also miss my fellow bloggers and I hope this keeps them writing as well. No matter the latest fad, blogging remains the my first choice.

Now I’m off to vist my blogger friends. Join me on my socials as I share what I read.

What did birthday reiterate for me?

Do what makes you happy. Do it kindly. Be gentle, be thoughful, be courtious but be you, the world will adjust. You are unique.