Category: Life Ordinary

  • Mutual favourites, ok?

    Dear N,

    It’s been a week. Thanks to you and your acha, I had a viral fever almost the entire week. You can keep your ayyo to yourself. 😠

    But I not really angry with you. It seems your amma told D that you used to say I was your favourite cousin. I don’t know if that is true. I do know that I don’t deserve it. But you were easily my favourite cousin, and I know that I gave you less than you deserved.

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  • Reflections on my OS – 3

    Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!

    The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.

    One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.

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  • The D&G way to Hindu Rashtra

    I think this angst really hit me at the beginning of the decade when a colleague F, in a sombre moment far removed from his otherwise jovial, chill nature, confessed that he was moving abroad because he feared staying here.

    Since that time, real life comments by friends and acquaintances referring to the ‘others’ have bothered me, and I have questioned them on that. More recently, when I read Anjum Hasan’s “History’s Angel”, I despaired what the life of a Muslim in India is.

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  • Cena, Character & Chips

    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.

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  • Thrifty shades of grey

    We’re nearing the day since the last time I stared at mortality – 3 years ago. And almost 5 years since I faced my own. To be honest, while I was going through it, I really didn’t think of it that way. From advising D on picking cabs from a certain direction (because of roadwork) to calming down the cab driver when he realised what was happening, to ‘checking in’ on Foursquare before the procedure, I still felt it wasn’t time. I think only idiocy or youth makes one capable of that, and given my age, it was clearly the former.

    Cut to today. As if the daily exercise regimen wasn’t reminder enough, the quarterly medical checks drive home the point of how much extra work one needs to do to live even a semblance of life as one wants it. It’s not much really – a little bit of red meat, a little bit of alcohol, dessert once in a while. It shouldn’t be this difficult before hitting 50!

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