I recently watched John Cena’s Peacemaker S2. To my mind, DC’s best recent work, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker notwithstanding. It aired around the same time as John Cena’s WWE retirement tour, and I couldn’t help but notice the overlap of Cena’s WWE persona and the character – flawed, often clueless, but fundamentally good-hearted. Not everyone saw it that way though. A minority commented on his past politics in WWE, how he’d used his power to hold others back. Fair, I thought. But incomplete.
Krakow to Wroclaw is just over three hours by train. You must absolutely book your tickets in advance. You get about 5 minutes to find your wagon on the platform, but barring that little adventure, the ride was smooth, passing by white landscapes and small towns.
Where to stay in Wroclaw
The stay was at Radisson Blu again. This one was older than the one in Krakow, and the staff were a little less helpful. It is a 10 minute walk from the Main Square.
Compared to the last couple of years, I read fewer books in 2025, but I think the variety was higher. That probably explains the highest number of fiction books in a long time.
And so, once again, like 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 , and 2024, presenting #Bibliofiles 2025’s list of ten (plus the long list). From the 58 books I read this year…
I read something beautiful on a LinkedIn post sometime back. Yes, miracles do happen.
उन्हें कामयाबी में सुकून नजर आया तो वो दौड़ते गए,
हमें सुकून में कामयाबी दिखी तो हम ठहर गए !
Not that I had scaled some Himalayan peak of success, but the first line fits my 30s, and the second, my 40s. The underlying mindsets are different, and so are the journeys that give me joy. But it took the larger life journey and the choices of my past self to get here.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Some would say kids are spoilt these days. I’m not going there, but kids are definitely spoilt for choice when it comes to chasing their interests, academic pressures notwithstanding. But what’s a deep interest and what’s a fad? What’s a passion and what is a routine that has overstayed its welcome?
I thought it was an excellent reminder that not all childhood interests need to become lifelong pursuits. Maybe a reminder for adults too – both influencers suffering burnouts as well as us standard mortals. For those interests that are staying beyond their shelf lives, and for those that haven’t seen the light of day, because they are dictated by habit/self image/identity?
I wrote this on LinkedIn in the context of a Hyundai ad that ended with “Never give up on finding what you love. There’s joy in every journey.”
A recent event reminded me of a post about karma I had written half a dozen years ago. The idea of the post was thanks to Umair Haque, who had a definition of karma that was different from the garden variety ‘consequences of your actions’.
Karma isn’t what you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are….. Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.
Japan was always the plan, it was only a matter of when. 🙂 We planned well in advance, but even then, thanks to it being Sakura season, a lot of hotels were sold out. The visa took less than a week to get processed. Bangalore has a direct flight to Tokyo. So all you have to do is, to quote Amrita Rao, ‘JAL lijiye’. Interestingly, the pilot took off immediately after we landed, confusing all of us! We finally landed again after about 20 minutes. Tokyo was our first stop. We began, and ended, our 11-day Japan trip in Tokyo. This is our list of where to stay, what to see, and where and what to eat.
What’s a visit to Scotland without a trip to the Highlands! Thanks to the Rabbie’s Tours itinerary, we were able to cover a decent bit of ground in 3 days.
Stay
Our base technically was Portree, where we stayed for two nights at the Pier Hotel, run by a very homely Effie and family. The place is right next to the water, and less than 5 minutes walk from the town square. The building, Effie told us while making us breakfast, was more than 200 years old. But for a small stay, it’ll do just fine.
The one on the top left was our room. That meant a good view of the water.(more…)
It was a little over 4 years ago that I first brought up the increasingly transactional nature of our interactions and even existence in general. I was reminded of it while listening to Amit Varma’s podcast with Nirupama Rao. Interestingly, they brought up contexts similar to what I had used – mails and rails. I had used birthday greetings going from long mails/cards to a ‘Like’ on someone else wishing the person a birthday. Travel was the other context, and I liked Amit’s example of train journeys being a unique experience. In contrast to say, the flight from point A to B.
Last year, around the same time, I had framed it as An Efficient Existence, and used the example of Taylor Pearson’s 4 minute songs – the timeframe he had mentioned for songs in the context of certain rules that creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated. I had brought up an earlier era of Floyd, Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac etc whose songs didn’t follow that template. Demand or supply, what happened first, I asked. Does it have to do with the abundance of choice now, and the demands of instant gratification? While templated packages for all sorts of consumption are increasingly the norm, people also want to finish and move on to the next thing on their list. Transactions. (Generalising), there seems to be very less desire to have an immersive experience. Outside the screen, that is. As the Spotify ads show (unintentionally and literally) we’re usually in a bubble, oblivious to our surroundings.
D and I watched Crime Stories: India Detectives on Netflix a few days after it was released. The episode that saddened both of us was “Dying for Protection”, which was based on the murder of a sex worker. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the subject of discussion on a Saturday late evening, which these days are spent on the balcony, in the company of spirits, watching the sun and the world part ways. Yes, that is privilege.
The thought first occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I realised that thanks to outsourcing and automation, we would struggle today to do many things that were once life skills. We also lost a little more than that – learning.
Sometimes directly, and sometimes, through the interactions with the world, they facilitated a learning experience that taught one how to navigate the world and the different kinds of folks that made up its systems.
It was continued with a bit more specificity in a subsequent post.
Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition.
Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species?
An excellent coincidence that I finished reading James P Carse’ “Finite and Infinite Games” the same day I wrote this post. The book helped me frame thoughts to my satisfaction.
There was an age when accumulating possessions – from apparel brands to places visited to career designations to property ownership and anything that signals prosperity – was the game I played. Or games, because a milestone was a victory in that finite game, and I quickly moved on to another. Trophies that the world dictated. (more…)
To keep it 100, Christchurch was an afterthought, mostly thanks to the ticket prices arbitrage. That said, we did have a good time there, and it worked as a good landing for the holiday.
Where to stay in Christchurch
Hotel Give, formerly YMCA (we think) was a very well located place at a reasonable rate. Our little research showed a paucity of such placess in Christchurch.
Our perfectly planned itinerary’s spanner came in the form of Jetstar cancelling its flight from Auckland. This was their last flight for the day, and since we we had to reach Queenstown the same day for a tour, we had to book an Air New Zealand at a price high enough for my kidneys to fear separation. Small consolation – we reached earlier than planned.
Where to stay in Queenstown
And used a bus (instead of the planned Uber) to get to the Rendezvous Heritage Hotel, which practically had its own bus stop. With a Bee card, this did make our life easier.
The serious-looking receptionist didn’t exactly make us feel welcome, but the room made up for it…
New Zealand’s scenic magnificence is legendary and any trip to the left side is risky so long as Trump is around, ergo… We were only the second disaster to hit Auckland in a span of two days. We arrived a day after the cyclone Vaianu. Thankfully, barring the minor inconvenience of small shower spells, we were largely unaffected.
Stay in Auckland
We have aged. We know that because we now choose a Radisson/Accor/Marriott over any cutesy boutiques. Radisson in New Zealand is new. This was Red and we had perks, that helped. We had a decent view of the city, and we could comfortably watch it from that sofa. So, nice enough.
Stasiland had me hooked on Page 4, when Anna Funder nailed (in the GDR context) my fascination – why I keep reading about (and visiting) Eastern Europe. She calls it horror-romance. “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.“
After WW 2, when the victorious Allies were divvying up the spoils, Russia began directly controlling the Eastern part of Germany, and in 1949, GDR was established as a satellite state of the USSR. The rhetoric of Communist brotherhood was established, which had liberated East Germans from fascism. The idea was to project GDR as those who were the innocent of Nazism, and that all the Nazis had gone to West Germany! The GDR, in its 40 years of existence tried to create a Socialist German Man, different from Nazi German Man, and from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.
On a rainy Saturday in October, we somehow got Cahoots almost to ourselves! So we can only wonder how bustling a fully occupied version might be. With different seating areas, and a classy decor approach, we really liked the ambience.
