Category: Life Ordinary

  • Year trumpet

    Last year, almost to the day, I became a social professional – not just in terms of going back to work at an office after a year and a half of being home-based, but also in terms of my domain of specialisation. I wrote then that I chose to go with this opportunity because it gave me the maximum scope to implement the concepts I frequently write about on the blog. A year later, I can happily say that not only have we evolved a blueprint for Myntra on ‘social’, but have successfully begun implementing too.

    The last update from me was when we shipped the fashion blog. It isn’t as though nothing has happened since then, in fact, the reverse would be a better reason. So much has happened that I haven’t really found the time to document it here. Brand building on social networks, setting up and monitoring customer connect on platforms, product level integration – we’ve had fun. In fact, many of the things I spoke of during the India Social conference were based on experiences at Myntra.

    Last week, when I wrote that “Every day is a new and exciting adventure” in the ‘About‘ page at the brand new Myntra corporate blog, I meant it. The nature of social is changing everyday, new challenges arise, but more importantly, so do new opportunities. Ecommerce is probably THE red hot vertical in India right now, the organisation itself is well placed among competition and growing at a blazing speed, and I’ve been able to do meaningful work in a function I’m deeply interested in. Along the way, I’ve met some amazing people who have helped me learn. Touchwood.

    until next time, until next year 🙂

  • Naming exercise

    The alarm rang, as it did, usually. He snoozed, stretching his sleep time a bit. But he knew he would have to get up soon. He was already late for his other kind of stretching. That’s when he figured the alternate reason for the name of the new concept they had come up with – Yogalates!

    PS: Yes yes, pronunciation, I know!

  • Legacy, Mastery, Success

    At Brain Pickings, that treasure trove of awesomeness, I found this quote attributed to Ray Bradbury on legacy, through a character in Fahrenheit 451:

    Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

    The subject of legacy keeps popping up here, and my understanding, especially since the last post has been that it is not something that one works towards, but happens as a (side) result of doing something that you love to do. In that sense, I would read between the lines above and add that ‘doing what you love to do’ as a prequel to the quote.

    One of the best posts I have recently read was Hugh MacLeod’s ‘On Mastery‘. I immediately riffed on it over at the other blog. It articulated things that I know for certain were muddled up somewhere in me, wanting to be told but finding words missing. He starts with trying to define success “Suc­cess”. What does it take to be suc­cess­ful, pros­perous, happy, have a sense of pur­pose etc?, separates it from the by products like fame and money and arrives at “It’s something that truly belongs to you”. For the master (as someone commented on the post) it’s more about the process than the product. Low key, known by a few, but masters in their chosen domain. “It’s something that truly belongs to you, always.”

    In the ever hyper world of real time media, micro-celebrities and experts, fame and money are many times the definitions of ‘success’, and though I do know at least a few people who have bucked that trend, it was heartening to read posts that told me that such thoughts weren’t really alien.

    There is an interesting article I read on the subject on HBR titled “You Are Not a Failure” which had an intriguing classification of  types of creativity — “conceptual” (in which a young person has a clear vision and executes it early, a la Picasso or Zuckerberg) and “experimental” (think Cezanne or Virginia Woolf, practicing and refining their craft over time and winning late-in-life success).

    Thanks to the deluge of information and opinions, it is ridiculously easy to give up on yourself and lose confidence. As Godin writes in “Do we have to pander?“, it is also easy to compromise, and then defend.   I think this is not just for greatness (people or things), but also holds true for personal belief systems and mores. And probably, at the very end, the perseverance really doesn’t achieve anything other than the satisfaction of setting one’s own definition of success and spending time and energy on it. But I have a feeling it’s worth it. A legacy in itself.

    until next time, this happens to be post #1000 here 🙂

  • The Age of Reasoning…

    Lay in drafts for over 2.5 years, waiting for its time. Saw it, and decided there was a reason to post it now, though I couldn’t see it. 🙂

    An interesting discussion over coffee – of why I couldn’t blow away the Bangalore Metro bridge if I so desired. No, neither smoking, nor alcohol is allowed in that cafe. 🙂 We discussed how much we really wanted things to happen, our priorities, of visualising the end result, whether it happens whether or not we work for it and so on.

    And somewhere in between,  it struck me that I was being pulled in two directions, or rather two ways in which I approach situations –

    Everything happens for a reason.

    Everything happens for a reasoning.

    Ignoring the rationalising, I have always been doing the latter, though I have always been pulled towards the former. But I wonder, are they mutually exclusive? And then I remembered a post from years back –  “Keep Walking“. Can ‘searching’ and ‘finding’ find parallels in reason and reasoning, or in religion and science, or in faith and logic?

    The entire line of thought is perhaps a stepping stone to a more basic question of how much of what happens to me is in my control. All? None? Somewhere in between? 🙂 And while on that, I couldn’t help remember that great line SwB wrote in his new year post sometime back. “When you decide to take charge of your own destiny you better be damn sure you’re up to the job.” The answer, I think, is right there. 🙂

    until next time, …”and I guess that’s why they call him the Blues” 🙂

  • From the Kerala diary..

    An overcast sky met us at the Alwaye railway station on June 1st. As I sat inside the bus to Kothamangalam, I wondered where the rains would meet us. I saw school kids waiting for their bus, but not as many as I had expected. It has been a tradition in Kerala – on June 1st, when the kids begin their academic year, the rains are the first to welcome them. I remembered umbrellas, raincoats, pants hitched up, new wet notebooks…. But it seemed that things weren’t so anymore. I wasn’t the only one surprised – the Gandhi in Perumbavoor stood open jawed.  We reached our destination, dry. I learned later that most schools were opening on Jun 4th and the rains were scheduled on Jun 5th. On the way back to Cochin that night, starting from a near empty bus stand, I was able to relive the window seat. But I realised that just as the seer had changed, so had the scene.

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    There’s a wonderful quote that’s attributed to Bryan White – “We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.” So when one goes back to places which only hold childhood memories, maybe there’s a natural pull to rewind to a time without that learning, and just let loose. And just like in that age and time, many impulsive, harmless things then become capable of delivering an incredible amount of joy.

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    For a long time now, Nedumbassery had been my exit point from Kerala. And so I sat, after a wedding feast, on a journey from there to Palghat and beyond, watching a series of places I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Familiar landmarks and new sights, and the Western Ghats that stood solidly in the background. Hello, Kuthiran. Dad was surprised I could remember the name of the towns. How many ever roads a man walks down, his first roads remain etched….

    The occasion for which we had made the trip saw 3 generations – one that had been born and had spent all their childhood in that village, another (mine) in which the majority of the members had cities that they considered home but had spent many a wonderful vacation there, and a third which was probably making a few memories. There’s that favourite Garden State quote of mine – Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. In this version, ‘imaginary place’ is not a place that no longer exists physically, but one that exists in a certain state in  the memories of many people. I wondered when a place would cease to exist at all – is it when it disappears physically, is it when all the people who have memories of the place cease to exist, or is it when the place changes so much that even memories cannot bring it back. You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. When the seer and the scene let go of each other. And that was why this trip was special – memories had been added, and the disappearing had been delayed.

    until next time, seen there, done that 🙂