A letter to our children narrating the story of our Nepali arranged marriage
Dear Children,
While I sketch this letter, you are merely limited in our thoughts. Even though you are in our future planning, I decided to write you something. I hope this letter finds you well wherever you are. We pray that our Almighty will keep you safe for years to come.
While you grow up in the future, you may be astounded to see unusual wedding pictures of your parents. You might be curious about how we actually met? Under what conditions we got married? Let me tell you the story of our arranged marriage.
Yes, you read it correctly. …
Do your best and let angels do the rest
I thought Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but I was wrong. When I was a child, I recognized those faces in the church dressed in red with a hat and pretending to be Santa Claus. They would come during Christmas service to share chocolates, to make us happy. We would then whisper, “He is one of our church elders, not a Santa Claus.” As I grew, I thought Santa Claus is an illusion for happiness and nothing else.
“A child in the air still keeps smiling because of faith (full hope) that he will never fall”
A child in the air still keeps smiling because they believe that the person who threw them in the air will not let them fall. Clinical psychologists say that there are multiple benefits of letting a child play in the air. The reason behind the stressless moments must be hope. …
Smile again. Rise again.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — Dr Seuss
We smile, we cry
And we smile again.
Yes, not for the only reason.
We make promises;
we break them
and we make a few more.
Yes, not for the only reason.
If someone snatches your happiness,
Let them not win.
Life is not just about one smile.
My friend, it is not the end.
Do not be sad.
If someone breaks a commitment
Let them not win.
Life is not about one promise.
My friend, it is not the end.
Do not mourn.
You have many more to come
Believe in yourself
Believe in the plans of the creator.
Believe, good days are yet to come. …
And weekly prompt updates
Hey Family,
Thank you all for submitting your stories to our Christmas Prompt Writers. Christmas is all about Hope. And because of this hope, we have a belief for today and tomorrow till eternity.
It was so nice to read so many of your stories. Thank you once again. Thanks to all of our writers who have joined hands to write for us despite our low visibility. We promise that we shall continue to spread a message of hope in the coming days.
As promised earlier, Our Editor Gurpreet Dhariwal is gifting her book My Soul Rants: Poems of a Born Spectator. Gurpreet has fulfilled her dreams of being a published writer through this collection of poems. …
My recent experience while applying for an internship
I am actively applying for Data Science Internship. LinkedIn is one source where I get to know about different job opportunities. In my recent search for a Data Science internship, I clicked an internship offer on LinkedIn. It sent me to the external site. The site asked me to create an account.
While creating an account, I normally let Chrome or Mozilla suggest a strong password. On this site, Google had suggested none. I thought there must be some wrong. So, I generated a random password and finished creating an account.
I added my resume as I thought they are an authorized portal for the particular internship I was applying for. …
Fiction
Merry Christmas and Happy birthday, stranger
Aakriti is only a stranger to Rahul. He first saw her at Nepal literature festival in Kathmandu, Nepal. It wasn’t a proper meet because he hadn’t noticed her then. When the festival organizer posted his favorite poem on their Facebook page, he watched the video and read all comments.
One comment was, “Watching it for the ninth time. I loved it so, so much.” The girl who commented was Aakriti. He had seen her during the festival but they with no any physical or verbal interaction.
Rahul is an occasional writer, and whenever he imagined any stories, even if most of them had gone unwritten, he named his better-half, an imaginary character “Aakriti.” Those stories were often incomplete, they faded, but Aakriti continued to be his Juliet in his mind. He had found no such girl in real-life. Sometime he would be so restless to meet his character that he would mistake a random girl as his probable soulmate. He found some resembling few characters of an imaginary Aakriti, but they wouldn’t fit perfectly. He would share his written blog with his friends, but very few of them understood those stories. …
My experience with the 2020 Christmas church service
Online church service was the last thing a Christian would have imagined happening in a digitalization age, but it all happened in 2020. Our Church started an online service from the second week of March. While we met in Church for two months in September-October, we were partially online even then. This period of singing and listening to sermons from zoom has changed how I define church service, and I am sure it has changed yours too.
Despite almost a year of online church service, I wasn’t ready for the online Christmas celebration. Christmas is about meeting people, exchanging good wishes through hugs and eye contact, and a combined love feast. …
Thanks to our writers for 2020.
Disclaimer: This newsletter doesn’t contain any affiliate links
Dear Family,
Let us take this opportunity to thank God for 2020.
Thank you, God for everything
We, all editors of Dreams and Stories, would like to wish you Merry Christmas. and wish you Happy New Year 2022.
We started This Shall Be Our Story in 2019. We didn’t grow as much as expected in 2020, but we could publish some marvellous stories. We want to thank all our writers and editors for your faith in our publication. If you haven’t joined us as a writer yet, read our submission guidelines.
As a part of major change to our publication, we first changed our name to Dreams and Stories. We also started our newsletter The Story Box, and we have signed up in multiple platform to help your stories have wider reach. …
Christmas Prompt and Other Announcements
Dear Family,
I hope you know that we changed the name of our publication previously from “This Shall be Our Story” to “Dreams and Stories”. But Our theme hasn’t changed, and we shall continue to publish personal stories about life and dreams.
Our home URL hasn’t changed either, and it shall be https://medium.com/this-shall-be-our-story. If you haven’t joined us as a writer, click here to see our submission guidelines.
A place I live in France had the first snowfall of the season on 4th December. Coincidentally, it was a day where I had hosted a dinner for my friend. In the Northern hemisphere, snowfall brings not only extreme coldness but lots of good news too. …
TRAVEL | PHOTO STORY
Who doesn’t love snowfall?
I come from Nepal, which is famously known as the land of the Himalayans. The highest peak of the world, Sagarmatha (Mount Everest), is in Nepal, but Nepal has such a diversified climate that most of us would never see snowfall. Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, rarely sees snowfall. As an average Nepali who never traveled to the mountains, I hadn’t seen snowfall until I came to France in 2018. France had snowfall in January 2019. We also experienced an unexpected snowfall in April 2019, but the winter of 2019 had no major snowfall.
On 4th December 2020, we had snow in Grenoble, France. I take it as Nature’s birthday gift to me. Though it was a cold evening, we gathered the courage to experience snow rain. …
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