Profound Musings

Nikita Aggarwal's Life Happens is a deeply introspective collection of short stories themed around love, resilience, heartbreak, and self-discovery, offering wisdom far beyond the writer's age and urging readers to embrace life's uncertainties with courage and conviction

- Sanjeev Chopra

Life Happens is a collection of forty-five short reflections, odes, and illustrations on a wide range of subjects that affect young people—from loneliness and despair to happiness and gratitude, from heartbreaks to adjustments and carrying on, from boundaries to balanced battles, ego and self-respect to the conflict between karma and empathy—by the twenty-seven-year-old Nikita, who has been a volunteer with VoW for the last four years.

The wisdom she brings to Life Happens far exceeds her age, and if her brief picture and pen portrait were not given on the back cover of the book, one would certainly think the author had several decades of experience to pen these thoughts.

Having read this short 111-page book cover to cover, let me begin by sharing the reflections that have left a lasting impression on my mind. The most powerful is also the first entry, 'She was a cyclone forced into an eggshell,' which states that most women carry within them a storm of strength, ambition, and passion, and like a cyclone, they have the power to create change, challenge the status quo, and move through life with force and energy.

Nikita writes that "they rebel in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, pushing against their constraints, even if they cannot break free immediately. They find themselves trapped in an eggshell—a fragile, confining structure made up of expectations about how they should behave, what they should want, and how much space they are allowed to occupy!"