Sunday Posts

It took me a while. Several months, in fact.  Once this blog was my life, and I posted at least twice a week. But lately, this became a graveyard of new starts. Every time, I was starting afresh - there have been several new starts for me in an extraordinarily short period of time in the recent years - I made posts pledging myself to restart. And, then, I lost my way and became silent again.  I want to make it different this time. I am looking back and wondering why I start and stop. It is perhaps because I did not accept in the past that I failed, either completely or at least to make good of the pledge that I made to myself when I restarted. Therefore, I guess, instead of making statements of hope and looking into the future, as the American self-help books would have us do, these restarts should start with an acknowledgement of failure. That is exactly why these are restarts in the first place.  But, before that, I am questioning myself - why do this publicly? When an...

What enables Creativity? This has somewhat become the central question of my work. In a way, it was always there. I always sought opportunities where the boundaries between work and play fades - in other words, sought out work that I love - though this often meant a circuitous route to what other people may call Happiness. In fact, with time, happiness became something I do not seek, just the right opportunity to be creative! Happiness became, to me, a bottle, and the outside it, in the ephemerality of work and play, joy is to be found!  However, as Freud would have said in a different context, the economic life suppresses, rather than enables, such opportunities. The modern men (and women) is expected to play its part in the vast, global arrangement we have come to call civilisation, trading their very opportunities to be themselves, in return of happiness - or, what everyone calls happiness. In this sense, pursuit of happiness is the antithesis of a creative life, and y...

I wrote about a fresh start in 2016, but unlike all the grand plans of new beginnings I usually make around the year-end, this fresh start was not really that fresh. Rather, I am seeking to be boring, conventional, going back to a professional life etc. Was this about a burn-out, am I giving up, I was asked, and my answer that I am trying to be realistic did not have much weight. After all the years of attempting not to conform, this idea of settling in can only be seen as giving up, rather than a bidding time strategy. The point, of course, is that I am not giving up on my ambition, but seeking a different one. There are certain assumptions I made about my abilities and what I wanted to do, and to be sure, I tried them out. It did not work, or at least did not work the way I expected it. Like a good entrepreneur, I have learned and now, I am trying to pivot. Stepping back and getting back to professional life is not giving up entrepreneurship, but rather seeing my life as a con...

Can one be born at the wrong end of time? If it's a matter of opinion poll, it would certainly seem likely, because most of us will possibly want to be born at our parents' era, when things were more certain, opportunities were more forthcoming and in general, life seemed to be simpler. And, surely, some among us would want to be born in the future, when the advances in medicine are complete, and, as we hope, advances in digital communication would allow us to achieve perfect democracies. But, like other matters of reality, opinion polls can not tell us whether we are really at the wrong end of time. The omnipotent fact that we are all products of our own time, the past is our past and the future is our future, and such thinking only represents a denial of the present; may be a defeat. So, instead of being at the wrong end of time, we can indeed be misfits. This may be shameful, and that's why we flip it when we blame the time around us and retreat to a time we haven...

This is the 1001th post on this blog, done over almost six years. Not that I have written it all, some are videos and snippets, and a few are guest contributions. However, it is still a large number: I am amazed myself that I managed to find time to write all of that, amid everything else that happened in my life during the period (which, to sum up, amounts to five deaths, four marriages, two divorces, three births in my close family, alongside four job changes for me!). However, as I mentioned earlier, this is precisely the reason I write - for me, writing is somewhat therapeutic - a few minutes of space to indulge and dream, much needed amid all the chaos and confusion of everyday life. This writing was what some of the French philosophers will call my strategies of living, my window of sanity and escape from the framework of compliance, my moments of being myself rather than a cog on bigger wheels. But these 1000 posts lie in the past now: The sheer volume of the posts, and I am a...

My blog writing obscures the trouble I am having in my life, and that is precisely the point of it. With social commitments, a deadline to turn my dissertation in by 7th of September and an M&A situation at work, I have not had a free weekend since New Year, however, still I keep posting a few hundred words ever so often. Indeed, this makes me look non-busy, and creates arguments that I am ignoring the other tasks while I still find time to write. However, for me, writing is critical: It is therapeutic, it is what keeps me sane and able to do what I must do. I shall not make the claim that I am 'visionary' in any sense (a common description on Linkedin these days); I shall settle for the humble claim of being a dreamer. I keep talking about things that are not there. I live a rather strange life, half in what I do, but other half imagining and talking about things what I wish to do. However, this isn't any hallucination and most of the things I dreamt, I have at l...

I am asked, very often, why I write this blog. People wonder how I can find the time. Others conclude that I don't have much to do. Even my protestations that I usually get up at 5am to try writing the blog does not clarify the point: Surely I can find something more worthwhile to do even at that time, they would so. This blog, when I started writing this in October 2004, started as my 'morning pages'. I just read about the concept then. I used to write, and my aspirations during late school years (when I grew beyond the dreams of being a cricketer) was to become a journalist. I did do some fiction and poetry writing and published some of them in amateur magazines. Then, as I started working and traveling, I gradually lost the habit. I did give up and thought I couldn't write anymore. In October 2004, after having just come to England, life was tough. I did not have a proper job and was working in a Cash and Carry intermittently. It was a strange time to go back to writ...