A recent visit by an old girlfriend brought up a strange wave of nostalgia, so much so that I wanted to write a blog post on it, as well as on grief and remorse. Nostalgia is a feeling of loss, be it a lost home, or a paradise lost. Losses take place in time, such as the lost college days when we were young and happy. But what is lost is not really the college or the days, nor even the home or the paradise. They all still exist, but for other people. What is lost and what we miss are ourselves in those days and at those places. What we miss is the way we were. It may be our youth, our carefree mirth, our innocent dreams and hopes at that time. But these things—youth, mirth, dreams, etc.—don’t stand on their own. They are all reflected back to us in our friends and loved ones. When these mirrors that show us the best versions of ourselves are gone, we mourn their loss. We grieve them. In what way is this grief different from nostalgia, the longing for a reality that no longer can be?
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Category Archives: Work and Life
My thoughts on corporate life, work-life balance or the lack thereof and so on.
Blogger’s Block
It has been a long time since I published anything on my blog. Allow me to list the reasons (all of which can collectively be called writer’s block) here, in this back-to-the-blog post.
The first reason is that the relevance of the blogging format itself has transformed over the last decade. People are not as into blogs anymore. Their media consumption patterns have changed over time. They listen to podcasts, binge on streaming services, and skim through microblogs on social media. My long-form blog posts, therefore, seemed a bit pointless. To be honest, though, this first reason is just an excuse: the blogger’s block came first.
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How to Beat Terrorism
A recent conversation thread in one of my WhatsApp groups made me think about this topic once more. What is the right response to terrorism? Of course, this topic is much larger than the thought processes of a lonesome blogger, but I do have my views – as usual.
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My Little Girl
My little speech when my little girl turned 21, and my little video, archiving on my blog. Apparently, these little things make most parents cry. Here’s hoping that some children also might find them touching. And give their parents a call, perhaps?
If I have learned one thing in the last 25 years or so, it is this: Never go right after or right before Kavita when it comes to public speaking. The comparison is never going to be good for me. 🙂
Mud and Me
Life and death has been a recurring theme on my blog. Confronted with our mortality, a common stance we assume is one of anger. Hearing of such a stance recently, I thought I would expand on my notion of gratitude in this writeup, liberally paraphrased from Shelly Kagan’s lectures on this subject.
Gratitude is best described in mystical terms, where we have a generous, benevolent giver (namely God) and a receiver (such as ourselves). A mystic poem that Kagan quoted goes like this (paraphrasing again, of course): God was a bit bored, so he created the universe and all the beauty in it, like the sun and the stars, beaches and mountains, forests and lakes, snow and waterfalls, and so on. At the end of this creation, God wanted an audience. So he looked at some mud on the ground and said, “Sit up and see all this beauty that I have created.” And I sat up and looked. Then I saw. I saw the beauty, not only in love and life and pleasure and happiness and everything nice and great, but also in loss and grief and misery and struggles, in all things bad and mean as well.
Binding Books
When I was about 15, oh so long ago now, I had this crazy hobby of book binding, which is like the process of turning a paperback into a hardcover, or adding a hardcover to an exercise book. With the mild OCD that I have, I do get a bit carried away with such things, and no books around me or in my dad’s collection were spared. I collaborated with a local printing press to access their cutting machine and local stationery stores to research on various techniques and acquire supplies. My crowning moment was when I did a “full-calico” binding on a rather useless book that my dad had recently purchased.
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Life and Chess: Who’s playing?
All chess games have three stages: the opening, the mid-game and the endgame. And a chess game is a reasonably good metaphor for life.
Pointlessness
When my mother gave birth to me, it was a touch-and-go sitiuation. I was created with an abnormally huge head, which I would like to insist is filled with a brain the size of a small planet. Whether because of the head or some other medical reason, my mother had to undergo an emergency c-section. Remember, this was more than half a century ago in a remote hill station near Munnar in Kerala.
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Childhood Friend
When I was a child, I had a friend in the neighborhood. A smart (and slightly nerdy) kid, not unlike myself. We used to hang out, play badminton and do physics experiments. By the time we were teenagers, we kind of drifted apart, as our paths diverged. Later on, I went the IIT-USA, global-citizen-route and ended up in Singapore. He, of more modest ambitions, stayed back at home, and got a job roughly similar to what my father used to do. I kept hearing of him, although I never really ran into him. He got married, probably had a couple of kids, and everything must have been going smoothly, even a bit dully. But a couple of years ago he suddenly died of leukemia.
American School Shooting
Another day, another American school shooting. The predictable aftermath will be “thoughts and prayers” (although people use different words now because of the current climate of skepticism), another pointless debate over gun laws, and a few “never agains” and “never forgets”. Instead of those exercises in futility, I thought I would write about some other curious aspects of America’s deadly romance with guns.