My Musings

It's 9:00 AM, and the laptop is cranking up. The emails are dripping in slowly but steadily into the inbox. I open the 20 slide presentation and start clicking away thoughtlessly. I get a series of stings from WhatsApp—Ting ting ting. Notification from Facebook nudges from the background and demands my finite attention. A LinkedIn post — '10 ways to get more done' picks my curiosity.   The CPU is cranking away in no time, assuming its boss is on steroids. A phone call from a colleague, " did you check my mail ?" a euphemism for, plant the phone on the valley between your neck and shoulder and give yourself nice spondylitis! Sure I say. As I do that, outlook asks me to lookout for an upcoming meeting as it warns me —5 minutes to go! That's me, the DJ, toggling away my daily chores, many tabs at a time, and my hands moving with swag as the jockey plays Billy Joel.   "don't  wait for answers just take your chances  don't ask me why ." Phew, that...

  Inspired beginnings and happy endings Everyone loves the grandiose of the big announcements and the innocent simplicity of happy endings. One vividly recalls the November 8th, 2016 address deliciously termed as demonetization. The dramatic 2011 late-night broadcast " we got him"  with an accomplished aura that informed us of the death of Osama Bin Laden. The August 15th radio broadcast that romantically suggested that we encountered our  "tryst with destiny."  Sexed-up visualizations of inspired beginnings and happy endings are but easy to draft. Hatch an idea, conceive a plan, concoct strategies, or trump up falsity (pun intended) that is right up the alley of a leadership playbook. The station of the Miserable Middle It is the  miserable middle  that eats our  ideas  for breakfast. The cumbersome and tedious middle is the dietary fiber that gives the wholesomeness to our breakfast. Columbus was caught in the middle of the ocean. Gandhi was ca...

There are too many naysayers around infecting the general populace with economic dismay and general hopelessness. The pandemic and a directionless government have caused a sore throat and severe body aches to what could have been a vibrant and vivacious economy. However, the symptoms don't point to a long time malaise, at least not yet.  A pandemic and an ensuing lockdown of this nature should have caused visible and irreversible damages to many sections of the economy. The lockdown logjam should have caused civil unrest. With constrained supplies, stagflation should have created an economic shock that would have sent the rupee reeling down and the consumer price index soaring up. Oddly though, Mayhem and despair are still limited to the elite commentators' editorials—their hubris notwithstanding.  The immobility of the mobile device   We seem to be oblivious to the fact that essential supplies are knocking at our doorsteps. Monies are exchanging hands with the tap of a f...

 I am sure you remember me, the rickety old inland letter. Scratch your memory stamp hard. You can’t be that old to have forgotten me. Sure, you neither gave me a fond farewell nor bothered to wave an arm! But I am part of your indelible memory of growing up. I served my purpose. I created memories. I delivered. It defies logic that you still relegated me to the ragtag of history. I regret this museumification. I understand that the rickety old donkey was condemned to history. I can fathom the departure of the good old pigeon. But I thought I was the message, not the medium. I could hard code love. When it comes from a pen to a paper, it conveyed a mood; it conveyed emotion; when you rejected my voice, you had to tear me apart, not delete me. That was a meaning in itself. I sure took time to reach, but I did. I sure was not a browse away, but I brought you the first college admission news. Boy, when I did, I came in style. Do you remember the anticipation while you cut me open with...

Arun @ 17 Dead end street of 1997 City of no hope State of Anxiety Pin Code – l05er Dear Arun, I hope you are doing well (needless formality knowing fully well that you are confused and suffocated).  With the benefit of my sharp hindsight, I declare that you lacked foresight. You were also shortsighted, literally so in this case.  You would be delighted to know you have done reasonably well for yourself in 2020. You have surpassed your low expectations. In the ensuing 23 years, your goal was to lead a normal, boring, and mundane life. Your decision landscape was driven by conformity rather than conviction. You would be pleased to know that you achieved the convenient bar you set of yourself! 1997 is the year you passed out of school. You almost passed out before you passed the exams. However, this was not a pass for the exciting journey that you were to embark upon. What should have essentially been an engaging journey of discovery and knowledge turned out to be a pothole ride...

Arun Ram, 75 years old, passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was survived by a wife and two children. How picture perfect! He was both an introvert and an extravert at different times in his life. It would often appear that worrying was his hobby. He found ingenious ways to fret about things that were outside his control. His early life was peppered with this trait. He was often known to be forgetful and lost. While it was clearly a lack of mindfulness, it gave him the intellectual heft of a person in deep thought! It was just a mirage. His bulletproof like glasses complemented this overall appeal. However, the blue jackal's color was stripped clean by the taint of the academic results. On the results day, Dr. Jekyll had nowhere to hide! At school, he genuinely attempted to be an average joe! He considered being lost in the crowd as a skillset that needed to be honed. Academics remained his Achilles' heel until he limped his way through the illustrious doors of London Busin...

Spare the fundamentals, snare the fundamentalist! Homo sapiens began their evolution chain as liberal foragers. Liberal instincts dominated our social precincts. With experience, home sapiens realized that they had a higher probability of getting killed by the recalcitrant fellow homo sapiens than by a ferocious feline! Their survival instincts caused them to sacrifice “individual liberties” to create a society with a set of shared values. They adorned uniforms, saluted a flag,  inherited occupation, paid extortion money called taxes with a hope that when apocalypse hits us, the guy who stays next door will come and stand in front of our door as we have shared set of values. A social and emotional insurance of sorts. In our many millennium of unchallenged domination of earth, we seem to have forgotten that we are dependent on our neighborhoods for our survival. This pandemic is a harsh reminder that we are a subset of a commune.  Community is helping us stay immune, while...

It was 1975, at the thick of the Vietnam war.   A US general was baiting Viet Cong guerrilla fighters to come out of their trenches. He was at the fag end of the war. All strategies to gouge them out failed. Days turned to nights and the sun sunk twice over. The four star general was restless to call victory. He pounded the land, rained bullets and pulverized the sky. Still the guerrillas were entrenched and holding the ground. The cat and mouse game went on at an immense cost for America. The NATO army had the best of the equipment, finest of the strategies, deepest of the resources and valorous of the men. The Guerilla’s had only one resource as they sneered at the general “ you may have the clock but we have the time!” . That alone determined Vietcong’s indomitable spirit. In war games often, the only winning move is not to play and time out your opponent. In a parallel world, venture  capitalist rushed in and out of PowerPoint meetings and invested scores of million...

This is a modern take from an old Chinese fable that is appropriate for our times. A young Indian graduate gets his MBA degree and lands a great job abroad. His college mates congratulate him. Professors say he has ‘arrived in life’. The graduate quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . There is a financial crisis in 2008 and the young man loses his job. His family is shocked at the abrupt turn of events and dismay sets in. The young man quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . He is forced to pack his bag and come home to his parents as an unemployed adult. He finds the love of his life back in his country. He eventually marries and has a lovely family of his own. His well wishers share his joy and congratulate him. The bridegroom quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . As he works through the vagaries of life, he slips down the career ladder as peers move up! “So sorry for the lost opportunity” says his concerned wife. ...

The COVID-19 Game-Changer By now it is pretty clear that Covid 19 is a black swan (Or a black bat!) moment. The only person to not recognize this global pandemic is your nitpicking spell checker! An ir-retractable line has been drawn in the annals of world history. We have clearly woken up to our own vulnerability. We will fondly reminisce the good old days of globalization. As long as Chen assembled your computer in Guangzhou and Vijay provided remote tech support from Bangalore, you cherished the global village. Globalization never had to contend to the fact that one’s eating habit in Asia would endanger another in Europe. As long as the virus remained in the omnipresent CPU, it was a technical problem. When it crawled out to our very being, it became an insidious pandemic that was more deadlier than a war and the world was never the same thereafter! The Seen and the unseen To be clear, Corona virus was not the first to have had pan-world impact and it won’t be the l...