9 thought trip concepts that I've put up in my room

Okay, so here's some snapshots of the wall in my room
(Like Randy Pausch in the Last Lecture, I've been a big fan of scribbling things on my wall, even until the tender age of 26. And then my mom found out. I had to set up a canvas)

Read some interesting stuff that I've penned down (or pinned up) over the years :)

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Thoughts on the Sea

I need the sea because it teaches me,
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.
-Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was deeply in love with the sea. It is easily reflected in his poems, as well his lavish avant-garde homes that face the sea, are decked with wood and provide the ambiance of being on ship.

Who in the world does not love the sea(except those who get sea sick?)

But I want to delve further. What makes us love the sea?

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Sense makes food!

The Varq Restaurant at Taj Mansingh Hotel, Delhi may be defined as my own personal epicurean epicenter, for I crave to visit it any and every chance I'd get. Of course, this is not the only place which brings that epic epiphany relating to the existence of the the mastery in culinary arts, but still, it just served as a good example to start off with this blog post.

We are all aware (I hope) of the nasal role played in our food tasting experience. So, talking about the five senses, we may cross off the olfactory and gustatory ones. 
The tactile one is also of prime importance as can be heard in the phrase "Maa ke haath ka khana" (the food prepared by the mother). The conclusion arrived at from a related cocktail discussion was that there is some sort of an energy that is transferred from your finger tips to your food when you eat with your hands (now, don't blame me for going against table manners).

But I wanted to go beyond the somewhat obvious inferences. 
How far can our visual and auditory senses affect our eating experience?

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We're all addicts...

...and I'm not talking about smoking, drugs, alcohol, sex or porn. We're all addicts of a different substance.

Guess what I'm talking about?

100 points for correct guess below:


Read on to get what I mean, if you want that is. 😝
(Honestly, I did this drama to try out the google forms का quiz feature. Mea culpa )

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Journalism Ethics. Defamations and Fake News.

2.5 minutes. 

That's all I ask for before you spend another 5 minutes glancing through the post. (Tried to make the post easier with headers this time 😁)

Interesting / contextual?
Read on.

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Diaries and Disneylands

Casual talks at late night parties. Everyone loves talking about Elon. That's what leaders are. Topics of conversation. 

Here's a starter. Heard it at a similar party.
Walt Disney didn't live to see the Disney World.  He died 5 years before it opened. On the day the Florida park opened, someone commented to Mike, the creative director, "Isn't it too bad Walt Disney didn't live to see this?"
"He did see it" Vance replied, "That's why it's here".

text ref. What Leaders Do: A Leadership Primer (By Dave Browning)

Source: Pinterest; here

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What the Surya Namaskar means for my Quarter Life Crisis

 As we welcome International Yoga Day into its third year, I would like to thank the Surya Namaskar for helping me get along with my quarter life crisis with relative ease.

When I was 6 odd years old, some astrologer dude told me to look at the Sun daily and say "Om Surya Namaha" 12 times. Somehow the habit stuck. But it wasn't until recently that I looked up the actual names of the sun, and the meanings and the yoga postures associated with it.

But am I glad I did that during my early 20s. Yes, I know how you, me and we all feel at this age.

Doubtful about what we want, what we just did, and what we're going to do. Where is the impact we were supposed to create? Weren't we supposed to make a difference? Either stuck in a job where the growth seems impossibly harder than we thought or still figuring out what do with our underrated lives.
But the stories we used to read, and our parents, teachers, didn't they always say that we were special? (Heck, my parents even named me विशेष). We can't even compare to our over achiever parents when they were 25, let alone friends of our age!
Should we go for a debt-inviting MBA? Can we just quit and travel the world, hitchhiking? Or should we just go to the Himalayas and settle down as an ascetic? Or let's just take our non-paying passion full time! And passion, where is passion in our ever failing relationships?  Constant questioning if we really want to be with this person long-term — and maybe even debating whether it's too late to find someone else. Failed searches for the right one, failed attempts to sustain the right one.

Being a twenty something is indeed scary. The Depression Alliance estimates that a third of twenty somethings feel depressed.

"If, as we're constantly told, the world is our oyster, it's definitely a dodgy one. Unlike the midlife crisis, the quarter life crisis is not widely recognized. There are no 'experts' to help us. We have no support apart from each other."

Damian Barr, author of the book Get it Together: A Guide to Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis

 So here's my attempt at supporting a troubled fellow.

My perceptions and understandings about this wonderful meditative practice, called the Surya Namaskar; and why we should imbibe them.

And how it can save us.

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Consumers of content

So I get up and scroll through the feeds of news and updates. I listen to podcasts while I commute, and my eyes stay on the screen while I talk, because deep inside, I have this fear of time running out, and me missing out on any information. Which is kind paradoxical in my case, since the motive of me grasping more information is to have more meaningful conversations with people. 

It is pretty evident from our generation's behaviour, that we're all hedonistic consumers of content. 

But, more importantly, what is the ratio of the content you consume to that you create?

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Basics of basically

Sitting in the midst of my interim thesis viva presentation, I couldn't help but listen to the plethora of basicallies spewed into the air by everyone while speaking. Intrigued by this, and inspired by this fad of writing pretentious articles analyzing indicators of forever ensuing trends (even when you don't know shit about it) an arbitSpeculation had to arise out of the attic.

Follow this link if you're the kind of reader who does. http://bit.ly/Ak7Fle
If not, I won't basically define basically for you, but I will embed this oh-so-geeky graph of the usage of the word.

[insert random quote that sounds pretty impressive]
Orwell wrote: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

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The year in images: an arbit thought.

Consider this.

The Board of Governors (BoG) of the KVS headed by HRD Minister Smriti Irani decided that teaching of
German language as an option to Sanskrit will be discontinued herewith.

I will come back to this later, but I have to admit, the accompanying image did morph the first thoughts that would have come to my mind, rather, even aggrandize my negative vouch towards the decision.
Although the media's usage of a news image has been widely discussed and reiterating it would not add substance to the agreed upon notion, I would like to add that more than the authenticity or correct usage of an image, the selection also creates subtle biases in the reader's perceptions.

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