Viewing life with light-heartedness

I used to have a love-hate relationship with social media during my college days. While I enjoyed catching snippets of others’ lives, I felt inhibited sharing my own thoughts on public forums. I held a fear of others judging me for my opinions, because I did the same.

Somewhere during this phase, I discovered puns as a form of humour that I enjoyed enormously. While many people found them lame, puns occurred to me as intellectual and I was constantly amazed with them since connecting two unrelated things to form something coherent needs some deep thought! So along with some of my like-minded mates I started engaging in pun-jams on our messenger group during lectures. We picked up themes — for example, once we revised our knowledge of chemistry by ‘resonating’ with each pun as it came so ‘organically’ to us.

My roommate advised me to abandon my style of humour when I joined the workplace lest I would not be taken seriously by my colleagues. However, I could not refrain from what came naturally to me and was thankfully encouraged by my colleagues to share my jokes in public. As a result, I joined Instagram after a long hiatus and took a leap of faith by posting my original puns.

A few years ago, I would have been petrified at the thought of sharing my ‘lame’ jokes since the price was being perceived negatively by people, but I have come a long way from there. I may not have achieved anything else from it, except for creating a repository of my ‘intellectual’ thoughts for my own self, which at least I find funny. :) However, I have definitely overcome my fear of putting myself out there a little and not caring about followers or critics.

Incidentally, my first post was dedicated to ClearTax (my manager will definitely contradict it!) -

“Friend: How is your work-life at the new organization?

Me: Too TAXing”

(This blog was penned by Ayush Chaurasia from the new initiatives team at ClearTax.)