Category: Flawsophy

  • Habits and home

    It’s been happening on enough recent Cochin trips to be given the status of a habit – visiting The Grand hotel for lunch. The food is predictably good, though they take liberties with what can be called ‘meals’. But there’s more to it. The Grand has been around for as long as I can remember, and in the otherwise rapidly changing landscape of my hometown, it offers a solidity and anchorage that is rare and appealing. This time, we had this guy seated right behind us. 🙂

    Another habit, which is even older, is shopping from Malabar Chips – for friends, colleagues, and us. Some of the people working there have been around for decades, and I told D how I’d watched them change over the years. “..all the faces that made up my childhood“, as Rana Dasgupta phrases it in Solo. It made me think how we probably notice changes in others more than they themselves do. By the same token, we don’t notice ourselves change. (more…)

  • The Man in the Mirror

    In Ennu Ninte Moideen, (a Malayalam movie based on a true story) the Muslim-Hindu lead pair is forced to stay apart because their families refuse to give their blessing. Even as years pass, they continue to wait for each other, or rather, their families. A song in the film is used to track this passage of time and as it began playing, I envisioned a scene. Apparently so did D, and it played out exactly the way we imagined. During what seems like a routine look-in-the-mirror moment, Prithviraj (the protagonist) notices his first grey hair. (3:40 -3:55 in the video) A poignant few seconds follow as he fully grasps the significance of the moment.  (more…)

  • Acts on Purpose

    A day last week began very badly. My cab driver, despite instructions to stick to his own half of the road, didn’t do so, and bumped into a two wheeler. To be precise, our car hit the ankle of the lady who was riding pillion. It obviously hurt her, she was sobbing. The driver was absolutely unapologetic and when I got down to check on her and apologise, he asked me to get back in! The traffic was piling up and the clock was ticking for a meeting I had at 11. I got in, and have felt miserable since then.

    It also has to do with the fact that a decade back, we (or D, rather) were at the receiving end of exactly this. That night, it was the kindness of a family in Koramangala that helped us get some semblance of control over the situation. Their connection with the event was just that it happened in front of their house. The driver of the car which hit us (his family was with him) gave us the slip on the way to the hospital. Meanwhile, with D’s leg in a cast, it was a harrowing month for both of us. All of this was playing in my head, and I felt feel very guilty for not cancelling the ride and doing what I could to help. (more…)

  • Give & Take

    Amitav Ghosh is a favourite author, and I find it difficult to answer in my own head which of his works is my favourite. I hadn’t expected The Glass Palace to be equalled, but The Shadow Lines, which I read recently, is quite the competition.

    One of the characters in the book is the narrator’s grandmother, a strong-willed person with her own sets of ideals and ideas. A description of hers that has stuck with me long after the book had been finished is “her fear of accepting anything from anyone that she could not return in exact measure.” I can completely relate to that! Sadly so, I’d add. The corollary to that is expectations from others when one is the giver.  It wouldn’t be right to label it as a transactional approach, because the expectation is not in terms of quantity, but more in terms of thought, consideration, acknowledgement and so on. Yet, the expectation exists. And thus a vicious cycle is born. In many ways, it is a subset of the ‘judgment’ theme.  (more…)

  • The Future of Work : Complex & Chaotic

    A couple of weeks ago, I discovered the writings of Taylor Pearson. I first came across “The Retirement Catch-22: Why Those Who Want to Retire Most, Can’t” and through that “The Commoditization of Credentialism: Why MBAs and JDs Can’t Get Jobs“. The reason it resonated with me is that it provided the larger context of what I had written about in The Entrepreneur & The Professional and Re: Skill.

    The first (Pearson) post notes how the industrialisation of education makes us take a finite game approach to career, but how, in the entrepreneurial economy, approaching your career as an infinite game is not only more fun, but safer and more profitable. In his other post, he introduced me to the Cynefin model, (image via) as he applied it to one’s career. I thought it made for a fantastic framework of the future of work.   (more…)