“Do you know how to multitask?”, is a question that I have been asked in a lot of job interviews. And I always went “who doesn’t?” Was I being cocky? Maybe. But seriously, aren’t we now living in the times when one has more than 3 completely unrelated tabs in their browser and 4 different apps on their phone open at any given time?

Or so I thought. Until I actually got to multitasking in the professional realm; which is not the same as browsing through Instagram while listening to music. This fleeting experience made me sit down and look at the definition of multitasking.

How many of you knew that true multitasking involves the active participation of the brain in all tasks?

We are not even going to indulge in the definition of beauty. The concept of beauty, most of us here agree, is subjective. What’s beautiful to someone may not be beautiful to someone else and that is okay. But as sad as it may sound, not everyone believes that. Popular culture has instilled in a majority of the population, strict ideals of beauty. We would like to believe that the smart ones here would know what we’re hinting at and so we would not indulge in pointing them out.

It was just among a discussion fired up by such beautiful idol being highlighted in a movie that we decided to ask our tribe what they thought beauty was. Some of us thought that it was going to be a useless exercise because most people would give the same answer but annoying optimists exist everywhere.

So, we asked the country’s youth to tell us what beauty meant to them. And we have to say, our faith in intelligent humans was restored.

Mom yelling at the top of her voice. Do you have any plans of getting up this morning? Shall I make you breakfast? Oh! Forget breakfast, half the day is over already, you better have lunch now.

Sleepless nights, imperfect mornings, and constant snubbing from my mom—this was my new lifestyle. I was numb towards everything happening around. The only thing I did was constantly calculate and analyse what went wrong? Where did I not give my best that pushed me to this day? All these questions used to hover around my mind every now and then. I was in a loop, a loop that made me question my self-worth, my confidence, and even my existence.

Small talk! A thing that can induce an instant anxiety in most people. An absolutely uncomfortable social norm which is slowly making its way into our lives. The more socially adept people do not have to worry about the tinge of nervousness this ritual can bring with itself. But for the socially awkward people, it can get pretty intimidating.

But like everything in life, there are hacks to making small talk with people.

We asked the TEDx Dharamshala tribe to tell us what their favourite small talk topic was and the suggestions here will sure help you get rid of some of the awkwardness.

Home. A place that has such inherent calm to it. Over the years, through movies and books and stories, we have been exposed to so many different ways of defining what home is. I don’t think anyone even looks up the definition of home anymore. And why would one? Home is different for everyone, isn’t it?

The TEDx Dharamshala team asked the tribe to tell us what home was for them and here are the different homes that we have come to know in the past week.

All of us humans have been bothered by this question at some point in our lives. What’s the meaning of life? Whether it was on a long rainy night or in the middle of the day, we have all invested our energy and time into answering that question. The TEDx Dharamshala team was amazed at the diversity of answers we got for that question in one room. So, we decided to ask people all over the world to tell us what they thought adds meaning to life.

Here we have, the 30 best responses we got.

In this day and age, it is not uncommon for us to find out everyone’s opinions. If I were to go through my Facebook feed, or my Twitter, or my Instagram stories, I know that I would, without a doubt, find several statuses and updates about how someone feels about something.

Although, as a millennial toeing some blurred lines, I’ve found it hard to have come to take a certain side and have a “for” or “against” standpoint on things. By “things”, I mean the “this and that” about the “who’s who” that eats through our media time. Most people my age, and younger, tend to have strong opinions on matters of politics, work ethics, gender equality, social stigmas…you get the gist. But I’ve always wondered why it was difficult for me to have the same opinion as majority or, sometimes, have an opinion at all.

Feeling /’fiːlɪŋ/
noun

an emotional state or reaction.

We humans go through life experiencing emotions. We feel, and therefore, we exist. Every human being in this earth has experienced the emotional state of happiness, bliss, gratitude, blessing, heartbreak, sadness, apathy, empathy, loathing, and possibly all the other emotions.

But if you had to choose the one best feeling that you have experienced, what would that be?

The TEDxDharamshala Team asked people around the country and well, here is what they had to say.

“Make the most of yourself…for that is all there is of you.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are living in a world where each of us, each day, is working to get better at what we do. We want to be better cooks, better drivers, better writers, better engineers, and so on. We’re thinking about improving the ways in which we work so that we can have feats to add to our definition. And that’s good. We are aiming at getting our minds better.

But what about our hearts? How many of us are focusing on getting them better?

More than 2 million fitness and health-related videos and posts are shared on social media every day. Add that with the increasing popularity of virtual gyms and yoga classes and you would think that staying fit would be among everyone’s top priorities.

But, it is not.

A pan-India survey conducted in 2018 revealed that 53% of Indians admitted that they are not disciplined enough to stay fit. That’s because out of the 10.6 million people who were interviewed, 53% lack the time to work out, 36% lack the motivation that is needed, and 14% are clueless as to where to begin the whole fitness regime.

Why are we so unkind to our body?