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Life Without Intermission

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This post somehow is an extension of my earlier blog, For Ol’ Times’ Sake , written after meeting former colleagues at a reunion. I found myself thinking about the curious role memory plays in our lives, and one thought led to another. It was slightly unsettling to find out that the memories we revived that evening were from twenty or thirty years old. Yet, if I were to look at the last 15 years of my life, or even recent months…the recollections seemed strangely thinner. It was not that nothing had happened. If anything, life has been busier than ever. Yet somehow the experiences did not feel as firmly lodged in memory. This made me think, are we creating fewer memories today, even though we are having more experiences? For example, let’s take music. I keep listening to Spotify or the local FM station in my daily commute. I tried remembering which was the most popular song that I would heard a number of times last year. Nothing stood out. Try this out for yourself, if you can recall… ...
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For Ol’ Times’ Sake

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Last week, I attended a get-together of former colleagues from the Times of India Hyderabad office. For me, and many of us, it had been more than two decades since we had last worked together. The day had all the ingredients of a good reunion—food, music, drinks, laughter, and the slightly awkward but warm ritual of rediscovering faces that had once been part of everyday life. The event had been wonderfully organised by a group of enthusiastic volunteers ( Murthy Vadapalli , Ranjana Rudra , Suresh Kochattil , Navneet Mathur Padmini Kashyap and many others) who had put in the effort to track people down, coordinate schedules, and make the day happen. And judging by the smiles, the hugs, and the decibel levels in the room, their effort had clearly paid off. A big shout out to all the amazing folks! As I wandered around the venue reconnecting with people from my past, it struck me that most of us were not there merely because an invitation had been sent. We were there because of somethi...
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The ABCD of Acronyms

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Sorry, I’ve been MIA for a few weeks. One of the enduring thing about working on projects for large MNC’s is that most of your day is occupied with RoB stuff. One thing that frightens me the most during these meetings and knowledge sharing sessions is CUA - Casual Use of Acronyms. Every company has its own alphabet soup, brewed carefully over decades. The same three letters can mean wildly different things depending on which corporate office you are working. One of the first thing I ask, when I start working for such companies is, do you have a glossary for the acronyms that you regularly use? Rarely is there one and you need to learn by asking. Sometimes I feel like a child picking up a new language. It isn’t that acronyms were not part of our daily lexicon. But, earlier, it was simpler and kinder. In school, PTO meant Please Turn Over. Teachers insisted on put a dot after each alphabet to remind the reader that something was being shortened….not replaced. So, Please Turn Over was wri...
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The Comfortable Distance of Caring

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Few days back I was at CIMAR Hospital, Thrissur where I saw a ‘regular’ scenario. Couple of grandparents hovering over a newborn grandchild. There was a softness in their voices, an indulgence in their smiles, a patience that seemed endless. Every yawn was celebrated, and a grasp of their extended finger making them laugh. The new parents’ faces were a mix of happiness, joy, anxiousness, etc.   We always say that the grandparents love their grandchildren more than they ever loved their own children. What made me think was, why does display of love skip a generation? Then it struck me that perhaps it is not because the love is deeper, but because it is lighter. Their own children came with timetables and school fees, fever charts and future anxieties. Grandchildren arrive free of such encumbrances. They can be adored without being managed, cuddled without consequence, returned safely to their parents when the crying starts. It is love, distilled—emotion without administration. I’m n...
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When Does Adulthood Actually Begin?

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These days, many serious thoughts begin not with books or conversations, but with a social media post glimpsed in passing. A Facebook post by someone in my network asked: Is 18 the right age for adulthood? No preachy stuff, no numbers or data sources, no opinionated copy to go along with it. Just the question. I might have moved on, except for one small detail. My own child will be approaching that milestone in a few years. Suddenly, this was no longer another ‘interesting’ post; this felt closer, personal and slightly unsettling. Eighteen has always been a curious number to carry so much weight. Nothing changes at midnight. I did not wake up wiser the next morning, when I turned Eighteen. And yet, by law and logic, you are expected to be an adult — capable of decisions with long shadows. Adulthood, never really arrives on birthdays. It creeps in through responsibility, through small moments when help don’t arrive on time. You don’t become an adult so much as realise, one day, that n...
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Life, Subscribed

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Every week, my phone reminds me of my new relationship with the world. An SMS or a WhatsApp notification for something I have, but never actually own. Access to Amazon Prime, Spotify, Kindle, Dropbox that stores the fragments of my life, books and files I might never read, in places I will never visit. There was a time not very long ago when the things we ‘wanted’ were the things we owned. Music came on tapes and CDs whose covers we gently straightened after use. Encyclopaedias lined shelves, heavy with authority. Books carried the thumbprints of those who read them before us. These objects announced themselves by occupying space. Today, so much of what we “have” never actually comes home. Music floats in the cyber space, movies wait in the cloud in queue, a verse of poetry arrives through a clean, content-approved notification. Even memories — once tucked into boxes or photo albums — now live on remote servers, rented back to us through storage plans. The world has shifted from posses...
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Two Weddings and a Funeral

There is something prophetic about the movie title “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” In real life, for most of us, it could be one, two, or three occasions. The number is not the import, the import is that’s roughly how often we meet people who once mattered to us. Old family friends, relations one generation up, neighbours from the homes we grew up in — all exist somewhere in our phones, remembered but unreached. We know their birthdays because Facebook reminds us, and we acknowledge them ‘enthusiastically'   with a cheerful emoji, a quick wish, a sense of obligation fulfilled. We even find ourselves in their cities sometimes — for work, for weddings, or for a holiday — but rarely do we think of meeting. “Next time,” we tell ourselves, comforted by the thought that their faces are just a click away. The photograph on our feed becomes proof that the relationship is still alive. Once upon a time, we didn’t need reasons to meet. People simply dropped in. Someone would be passing throug...
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