…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, […]
musings
97 posts
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 […]
The privilege of being able to help someone when they are in need is one of the greatest opportunities that life gives you from time to time… when you miss that chance to help you are, for a very long time, tormented by the pain of not knowing what happened and did things work out for the person in need… specially when it’s a stranger you could have helped. Earlier in the evening I dropped off Ria, my elder daughter for some engagement she had… I was supposed to pick her up in 90 minutes. Figured I would walk a […]
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 […]
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 […]
used to be Gods during the heights of the supposed green revolution have today become overnight villains for most right thinking people
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 […]
200 people are missing after a flash flood in Uttarakhand… the government of India today is busy promoting an app to counter twitter, Koo, apparently it’s a made in India clone of the twitter platform. If we keep going down this road I think the day is not far when each house will have it’s own closed SM application, each housing society with single representation from each house will have it’s own application and so on and so forth… to be fair there already is such a platform it’s that dreaded serial forwarder uncles realm called WhatsApp groups… then again […]
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” I finally understand what that means. 2020 is over, or will be over in a few hours for the parts of the world where it isn’t yet. Widely panned as the worst year ever I feel there is still some redemption possible for the poor sod. A few minutes back I witnessed the most unspectacular sunset of my life, the last of this year. It made me think “this wasn’t as strongly destructive an year as we all think it was”. In fact I believe it’s been one of those curve balls that […]
or if coffee isn’t your cup of tea then in that case you can use the good old “all that glitters is not gold”… Recently I noticed that we were running low on maal (those who know me know what I mean, those who don’t can read here). So instead of doing the decent thing I ended up visiting amazon on the phone. Sacrilege! I tell you but anyway there it was, my infidelity on display out in the open. I searched for filter coffee, selected tried and trusted Hatti coffee, then got distracted by a new Lavazza so that […]