Category: Society & Culture

  • 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…)

  • 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…)

  • Enough / Efficiency

    In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that advances in technology would increase productivity to a level that we would only need to work 15 hours a week. I wonder what he’d have to say about 996. It’s also ironic that despite  the amount of time that technology has helped us save  – Google Search, Facebook for easily connecting with an extended social network, Amazon Prime delivery and a host of other companies that deliver not just products but services as well – we still have a time deficit! I am generalising, if you have proven Keynes right, congratulations. But for the rest of us, what happened?

    A couple of reasons are obvious. One – the ease that technology brought into our lives has also made us spend more time on it, thereby negating the saving. Two – this time spend has also exposed us to more stimuli that makes us want more. The second reason, by extension, has gotten us hitched on to a never-ending ride – efficiency for its own sake.  (more…)

  • Regression planning

    During our reindeer sledding tour in Tromso last year, our guide, who was a Sámi, gave us a glimpse of their way of living. A semi-nomadic life, built around their reindeer herds, which involved them traveling for several days twice a year across hundreds of kilometres. She told us how the capture and nurture of reindeers, and the lifestyle itself, has changed from a means of livelihood to a tradition that only very few are interested in.

    In Fahadh’s movie Njan Prakashan, there is a hilarious, yet poignant moment, when he is asked to help the other workers plant rice seedlings in a field in Kerala. The workers immediately start off and are soon singing in gusto. Fahadh, who has never done any of this before, stands with his mouth agape, and then asks what the language is! His boss explains how most of the paddy field workers in Kerala now are Bengalis, and they’re singing their customary song. “We’ve forgotten our job, we’ve forgotten our song“, he says (roughly translated). (more…)