All posts by Beyond The Box

Standing Still, Yet Changing

The day I turned thirteen, I didn’t wake up feeling different. No magical transformation, no sudden clarity. Just the same messy room, the same anxiety about an upcoming exam, and the same feeling of being stuck between wanting independence and needing help. That’s the thing about being a teenager: you’re expected to have it all figured out, but most days, you’re just trying to figure out who you are between one breath and the next.

Fire, chaos, angst, happiness, anger: a teen’s got it all swirling inside at once. But more than anyone else, a teenager often doesn’t know how to handle it.

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Book Review – Kanmani And Co.: Five Friends (And A Cat) Tackle The World

Title: Kanmani and Co.
Author: Lalitha Ramanathan
Illustrations: Rahil Mohsin
Genre: Children’s Fiction 
Age Recommendation: 7–13 years

So, which city do you usually imagine when I say the name Tamil Nadu? Chennai, right? Well, beyond the bustling city of Chennai, there are many small yet wondrous villages where people help one another and live joyful lives.

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Book Review – Kuhu Learns To Deal With Life

Kuhu Learns to Deal with Life is a fun and relatable story to read. I liked how the book shows that even younger children face many struggles in life, such as joining a new school, getting bullied, feeling left out because of siblings, and even dealing with an evil PE teacher. The story is about Kuhu experiencing all these situations and learning and growing from them.

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Two to Tango by Pooja & Aarthi – Winners

At Beyond the Box, we are constantly thinking of ideas to give something unique, refreshing as well as challenging to our community of writers. Two to Tango is one such endeavour to encourage the participants to work along with another writer as a team and bring about a creative synergy. 40+ teams participated in Season 5 of this one-of-its-kind contest and the winners were chosen based on the quality of writing and the dual perspective cohesion. Below prompt was given to the writers and they were asked to narrate the same story from two different points of view. 

Prompt – Write a fictional story that begins with a Swiggy order getting swapped — two people receive each other’s deliveries by mistake. How you take it from there is entirely up to you. Maybe it’s a comedy of errors, a fateful coincidence, a strange mystery, or a moment of unexpected connection. Feel free to interpret this in any tone, style, or genre, as long as the swapped order becomes the turning point that sets your story in motion.

The winners in the Adults’ category were Pooja Kabra & Aarthi V Karanam (Team 39). Enjoy their story!

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The Weirdest Writing Rituals of Famous Authors – Unusual Habits Writers Swear By for Creativity

Creativity — it’s such a tumultuous concept, right? It morphs into numerous forms and shines through artworks, novels, music, dance, and so much more. It’s all around us, and yet no one truly knows its source. It seems to originate from the depths of a marvellous mind, almost like a superpower of the subconscious. It often begins with a single idea, one that slowly plants a seed and grows into a pulchritudinous field of flowers.

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Book Review – The Gopi Diaries

Cover Image Source & Credit: HerStory

Today, I was going through an interesting book by Sudha Murthy. The book’s name was ‘The Gopi Diaries’. It is actually a series that comes as a box set, and in all the books, Gopi the dog is the main protagonist. The story I read was about how a dog came into a stranger’s house and how they treated him.

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Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara: In Depth

“Insaan ko dibbe mein sirf tab hona chahiye jab woh mar chuka ho.”
When Imran says this, he isn’t talking about coffins. He’s talking about how we shrink our lives into routines and fears. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara asks us: Are we truly alive, or just… boxed in?

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