Category: Flawsophy

  • Classes Apart

    Sometime back, during an evening out with friends of the ex-colleague kind, one of them remarked how, for the business analyst roles he was hiring for, he had asked his HR to only consider the IIT + IIM species. It’s an understandable heuristic, and one I have seen too often now to be vexed.

    In public, that is. It didn’t stop me from thinking of a subject that hasn’t appeared on the blog since 2016 – meritocracy. At a personal level, I have battled the systemic bias with whatever cognitive privilege I had, and made modest gains. There have been scars too – “the muscle memory of having to fight for every little thing“, and it’s only recently that I have been able to deal with it objectively, and heal. But increasingly, I have felt that education is the new caste.  (more…)

  • April flu!

    Covid19! As I watched people bang vessels, while washing mine, mopped the floor while waiting for the Sensex to please find one(!), and swept rooms while the lockdown enforced some sweeping changes, I also tried to step back and take a look – outwards and inwards – at what’s happening!  (more…)

  • Womankind

    Invisible Women, which I discovered thanks to D, is a book that I have been recommending to as many people as I can because of how enlightening it was. Though the extension of the book title is “exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, it actually goes well beyond that and brilliantly articulates the challenges that women face at the workplace, in public spaces, their everyday lives, and how the world works differently for them in the many, many things that men take for granted.

    In another powerful book that I read recently, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff eloquently explains how the latest form of capitalism has gone rogue and is now well on its way to influencing human behaviour and actions at industrial scale. By extension, this is a systematic assault on the concept of free will, all part of a relentless bid for more money, power and control. While industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism is doing the same to human nature. (more…)

  • Change Signalling

    The end of the year signals a time to reflect. The perfect opportunity presented itself recently, when a colleague was bidding adieu after 5 years. There seemed to be no better venue than Monkey Bar, which was itself in the last week of its operations. Our group was mixed – early and mid thirties to early forties – and we talked about life in Bangalore, kids or not, and where we planned to settle after work. When I said that I was considering Cochin, at least a couple of my colleagues wondered if I would be able to adapt. I explained that the biggest joys in my life, in addition to reading and travel, were Malayalam movies and porotta-beef, that I wear the mundu a lot at home, and nostalgia or not, my mind often wanders the roads of my hometown. (more…)

  • Traveling – in & out

    I borrowed the title of the post from a book I really loved – for exploring what travel could mean. Inward or outward, both of which I have experienced quite a bit this year.

    One step back. For the last few years, we have been taking two international vacations a year. That just fits our annual travel budget, and the leave calendar at work. But who doesn’t like to take vacays more frequently? So this year, we stretched to fit an additional vacation within India – to Mussoorie. This also came from a feeling that we were being unintentionally snooty by ignoring our own backyard these days. 🙂 (more…)