The Other Side of Life

I am not one for swallowing words. So, I will say this quite proudly before I start. I am a hypocrite and as Oscar Wilde would put it, "My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite." I am a hypocrite because I love tech and all the convenience that comes out of tech, and yet, I am once again going to ramble about how tech might be missing out an important human insight.  In the 1950s, post-war economy, men who were back from the war were rejoining the industrial workforce to replace women who had taken up these temporary roles while they were gone for the war. The women suddenly found themselves back in the kitchen. But gender equations had been altered irrevocably and women often struggled to prove their worth as a domestic goddess. Apparently, the real test to pass was to prove they knew how to bake a cake and an apple pie. At this confusing time, Marschalk, General Mills and a few more companies launched the first cake mix in the...

You can tell a lot about a city by how it deals with rain. I grew up in Delhi. Delhi has a spattering of monsoon showers. Touch and go. It will be sweltering hot. That in-between period when the cooler is no longer effective and the possibly huge AC bill lingers on your head. You will be cursing the weather gods. News about rains from other parts of the country will become anathema. All conversations will start and end with talks about rains. And then, finally, it happens. An extremely hot afternoon will suddenly give way to dark intense clouds and a heavy downpour. Just like that.  And just like that, people stop working. There'll be plans for pakaude and chai. People will rush home early.  And just as suddenly as it started, it stops raining and work resumes.  I cannot count the number of times I missed school because, rain.  Maybe it's meant to be like that by design. Rain makes people in Delhi wait for it. We are at the flag end of monsoons. After the whol...

The good news is, I still come to my blog when I have to vent. So, basically, the blog has a space in my life. Yay. Now that we have established that, let's move on to the venting.  My piano. My beautiful keyboard. Stopped working. 😟 I am not a great piano player. I was a horrible piano student, when I tried learning professionally a couple of years back.  But I do know this. I love playing the piano.  I don't learn all the typical songs. I am not good at reading notes. I am not a speed player. I cannot play in front of people (other than family).  But I love figuring out notes and chords of random songs I love and then keep playing them again and again and again, till I can hear the notes in my sleep.  That's my MO. And I can't do that now. And I am feeling so bad about that, I am sitting here in office fuming, silently wiping away my tears because I just learnt it can't be fixed. My keyboard was a good companion. When I moved to Singapore, Sher...

Ok, so now is when I conclude my blogathon.  Because of some logistical challenges of posting on LinkedIn too, I ended up falling short of a few posts. But, now I am actually done with all posts, so yay! For all those who read or commented, heartfelt thank you. I hope I entertained you in some way. So, what are my thoughts at the end of 33 days of writing? Writing everyday is so hard. But, it also gives a weird high. When I finish a new post and hit publish at 12 in the night, I felt like I accomplished something and I felt nice. I hope to continue my run in this month too. I am now a  poet! I have never written a poem in my life. I have blogged for 10 years, written more than 250 articles, but never a poem. It started as a joke on the second night when I didn't have time to write something long. And somewhere around the 5th day, subconsciously, I decided I am writing a poem everyday. And just like that, I am now 24 poems old. This one is hard to write but...

When I was young, 2020 was far away. A distant future that will arrive some day. What amuses me is that 2020 is almost here, With none of the futuristic things expected of this year. I was expecting to travel in flying cars everyday. Zipping and zooming through a clear airway. And yet here I am stuck in traffic as I write this. Weaving between potholes, that resemble an abyss. I imagined we would be no longer eating solid food. We would be swallowing only food substitute pills for good. I was thinking about this while gorging on a huge dinner, The pills better come soon, so we can all be thinner. I remember we thought some of us would stay on Mars, And we could visit each other in space cars. I know Elon Musk says it will happen soon, But for now we're stuck fighting with earthly real estate goons. Science fiction books did predict one of the trends, They said we'll have more robots and less human friends, This one they got partly right, we must ...