nimda

After 45 years of living I seem to have come up with the explanation to that line. Every single time in every single endeavour… begin with the end in mind!. If you can see it with your minds eye you can achieve it. Case in point, actually I’ll give you two examples. 1. coffee earlier today — We were done with the awesome stuff from Great Value and it was time to move over to the beans from Trader Joes. Typically any new coffee tends to take a couple of mugs before it grows on you. Today though I approached […]

Since the day we are sentient we are conditioned to start the journey. The journey that ends only when we’re gone from this earth. The chase never ends for most of us. There will always be the next peak to summit. Blessed are those who find a purpose in life, strive towards that purpose day in and day out and achieve that purpose at some point in life. Nirvana awaits those that work their asses off trying to attain it. Well, for the ones who are not so focused in life, I have started to understand, Nirvana exists for those […]

Hiding in plain sight. We live in a world where globalization has meant that the work place is now the real melting pot while outside of the office any and all differences cause friction. Polarization based upon religious, cultural, advocacy or political differences gives rise to group-ism and ghetto-ization of our cities. Bringing this sort of fractured community into the office and trying to make these factions believe in a common corporate vision then work towards common organizational goals… just the sight of that steep trek makes one feel dead. An organization cannot afford to lose so much of time […]

Oh shit! Shit shit! Nooooo Ira wanted ice cream, Ria wanted to go out on a long drive. Sonali was tired from the walk we had just come back from and had thought of settling in with the foot massager for the next 15 minutes. I well I was as usual at their disposal, typical Friday night. We got out to get ice cream at around 10PM. As we were nearing the Wipro circle near home Ira stated that she did not want to go to Funnel Hill Creamery or any of the 24 hour drive in places. So I […]

…pack a small bag! For the vacation that came after a pretty long while we did Goa, our bit for revenge tourism so to speak, Goa like we’d never done it before… with an insiders perspective. Kapil is the hero of this story, Kapil has gone and done what many, nay all of us secretly live for. He has moved from the life of bean counters and pen pushers to live the dream life that awaits us all on the beaches of one of the vacation capitals of the world, Goa! Kapil was a mutual friend through a school mate, […]

This one is a true story from a little over a week back… Got lynched, almost. Passing through Gulbarga on our way to Goa we came upon this rowdy standing in the middle of the highway, SH 155, I figured it was pointless to honk or ask him to get out of the way as he was already arguing with another party. I carefully steered the left wheel off the tarmac and focused on avoiding his outstretched leg. Ira actually remarked “is he not worried that a car could run over his foot”. As the car drove past the guy […]

or Hyderabad for that matter… This isn’t exactly a business promotion, more like a recommendation for a couple of businesses we tried and found excellent over the past 3 months that we’ve been in Hyderabad. (not an exhaustive list just the few that come to mind right now) Harleys Fine Bakery (Owners have two flats in Krishe as well, yeah same place that we live in) — The founder runs a management training institute in Gachibowli and during the lock-down he listened to his better sense/half and started working on the bakery experiment. The stated objective is to make exclusive […]

Earlier in the evening I was coming back from a walk/run and the kids called asking me to pick up some stuff for making mojitos later in the evening… I walked into the store on our building premises and started picking up stuff, then I saw more stuff and I picked that up as well and then I reached the lemons and picked up 6 of those…. however now both hands were full and I really had no way of picking up a bag and dropping the lemons into it… rookie mistake, should’ve picked up the basket on the way […]

I am writing this sitting at my old work desk at the new house (in a new old city). It's 0036 on the clock and yet all I can think about is the people who have made this move so easy (to think I haven't even mentioned the amazingly efficient and professional movers and packers of Santa Fe Relocations).

“Omicron is mild” is more like a bhram a mirage if you will best to avoid this misconception… In fact in comparison Delta was not as contagious and people were not as callous at that time and yet we saw the sort of numbers that we did in India. Omicron is more contagious and the incubation time is much lower. What that means is that more, many more people will catch the infection. Most of the time these will be mild to asymptomatic infections. However the problem enters a different realm altogether when you introduce co-morbidity into the mix. People […]

To be born in a condition of want and struggle is not a crime… to stay in a state of need forever is unpardonable though…. What life gives you is not your choice what you make of it is entirely up to you. He was born in a time of relatively meagre resources, to put it mildly. His father was a constable in the UP police and from what little I do know of his life he was not corrupt, besides it was not exactly the time and place where extortion was a source for additional income. Anyway he was […]

Today of all days one remembers the child who was sacrificed so that God could live on...

how much is enough? In my opinion there is no such thing as enough when you start measuring. So many stories and examples recently of lifelong partnerships falling apart even when presumably the partners had more material success than anybody else possibly alive on earth today. What does it tell us about happiness and about contentment? Too much of anything, including what the common Joe understands to be success, is probably not a good thing?! And yet when you think about it, is too little of success guaranteed to make you feel content, satiated, gratified? In my line of work […]

Since the Covid situation has been so fabulously handled and the country has beaten every other nation on the planet on economic, financial, health and education fronts we as a collective have turned our attention to the invasion by the new East India Company, Twitter/Facebook/Google/Amazon social media. How it’s going to play out? Why clearly very excitingly, get the popcorn and grab a seat this promises to be more interesting than the Friends Reunion (and that was a fun nostalgic trip). It’s like a marriage playing out right in front of your eyes… the marriage between politicians and megaphones… minus […]

I was intrigued by the huge storm that this statement created on twitter yesterday. The english is not wrong and yet we have heavyweights in the ruling party making fun of a 74year old lady for having revealed that she had more than one husbands… as per their limited interpretation. Frankly, even if she did… but patriarchy related stupidity is not what we are dissecting here… Then it dawned on me why this gutter humour, this absolute potty humour is necessary today. Maldives has banned tourism from India in view of the rampant second wave. Essentially when people like Bagga […]

and sometimes it’s too late by the time we ask for help when we need it… Earlier today the doorbell rang. It was the lady who collects the trash from all houses in the building. She was crying and asked for Sonali. Seems that the guy who used to do the rounds with her has not been coming to do the rounds past few months. He is dying… from cancer. The doctors at Tata Memorial have given up and discharged him because he is no longer responding to medication. She is like an elder sister to him and in the […]